I seldom go to church, that is, to maintain a semblance of my nonexistent relationship with the Almighty. I don’t pray for salvation, nor do I confess my sins, because I know I am a man bound for hell. Either above or below, both options are equally torturous-sounding to me. I have no regrets either, so I have nothing to atone for. Whenever I go to church, it’s because the Old Man wants to hear people groveling before an absentee father. He finds that amusing and who am I to object to his whims? They are reasonable, mostly. After all, the Old Man saved my life. I owe him that much.
At that time, I didn’t go to church to listen. I went to church to have a conversation with the pastor. Father Gregory Luciano. I had a confession of sorts to make to him. Luckily, I didn’t have to go through the entire ritual as I had met him outside the church.
“Good morning, Father,” I called out to him as I approached from behind.
“Good morning…” he answered, looking over his shoulder at me. “Ugh, I don’t think we’re familiar,” he continued.
“Yeah, no, we’re not that familiar, but would you mind having a few words with me?” I questioned.
He turned, a pleasant man by nature, this much I’ve learned while studying him for years. A smile spread across his face as he turned to me.
“Yeah, of course.”
I thanked him foremost before approaching the subject at hand.
“Tell me, Father, how come I’ve seen a man of God such as you spend his free time at the place of worship of another false god?”
His smile faded. “What are you talking about?” his voice quivered as the words departed his mouth. “I would never…”
“The brothel, priest, the brothel,” I cut him short.
His face began turning red and his expression turned into one of anger mixed with fear and embarrassment.
“I have no clue what you’re talking about and if, and if you don’t let me be now, I’m calling the police,” he attempted to threaten me.
The temple of Passion of Samael was the name of the place I’m referring to. A whorehouse with a diner where worshipers of the angel of death came along to fuck and eat. Personally, I found it disrespectful to call that shithole a temple of anything. The Old Man, though. Oh, he was having none of that. The moment he found out about this insignificant hut; he dragged me there to obliterate it from the face of the earth.
Turns out it did not piss him off for no reason. A hairy goat fucker was running the brothel, and by hairy-goat fucker, I mean a literal one. A living, breathing, burning, fur-smelling Satyr with a massive member who lived off fucking people to death.
The Old Man has been dealing with all sorts of abominations and cretins for a long time but it seems like he can’t stand these types the most. He hates them more than child murderers and pedophiles.
Once we got to that temple in the middle of God-forsaken nowhere, it was obvious from the get-go that the place is a glorified whorehouse run by an infernal spec of semen and bile. The moment we passed through the doorway, I could smell the stench of sex and alcohol. We sat down at the diner at first. I felt like having a steak with a couple of shots of Jack. Seeing me drink the poison, the Old Man reprimanded me for eating things that’ll kill me.
I simply told him that with him around, I’ve nothing to worry about.
“True enough, boy,” he said before examining the alcohol, “Back in my glory days, the wine was less potent but definitely more poisonous”
“Sweetening your wine with lead is bound to do that,” I quipped, taking yet another bite of the steak, which was quite good, I must admit. My companion burst into laughter. Looking at him express any sort of emotion definitely reminded me of just how similar we both were in personality and looks. He looked like an older version of me, eerily so.
Terrible club music blasted all around us, making it almost hard to hear him as he spoke to me. “Can you smell that?”
The stench of burning fur laced with sweat and cum made its way into my nostrils, killing whatever remained of my partially sated appetite right away.
“Oh yeah, bloody hell,” I said as I threw the fork on the table.
“It’s here, somewhere.” The Old Man said. He always differentiates between these things and humans by referring to them as objects. That’s a lovely thing he does. Not that he cares for humans much more.
I had to ask, partially out of curiosity and partially because I wanted the stench to go away, “Will it stop reeking of this cocktail of piss and shit-stained fur sack once we deal with it?”
“No.”
He was quick to disappoint.
I got up and the Old Man signaled me to walk up a flight of stairs to an upper floor. That’s where all the action was happening. You could hear the moaning and groaning bleeding through the shitty music from time to time.
Walking up the stairs, some bald douche in a black suit tried stopping me and mumbled something about “The boss being busy there” or something. I shrugged him off and took another step forward. He grabbed me by arm and tried to throw me down the stairs. Instead, I clasped his arm before kicking him in the chest and letting him go tumbling downward. He tried getting up but made the mistake of showing his eyes. They weren’t right, the burning type.
I smirked, letting the old man do his thing, and in a matter of a few moments, the bald cunt was motionless on the floor, his head, a few feet bigger and wider and my hands covered in red. Others were about to swarm me, but one of them stopped the onslaught. It saw the scar on my face. They all fear it, a mortal fear. I don’t blame them. That scar is a bad omen. You fuck with me; you get fucked seven times worse.
The Old Man gave me that scar when he met me. That’s quite the story, really. Doctors diagnosed me with some aggressive type of bone cancer. It spread all over, affecting a few vital organs by the time of my diagnosis. Life was short and about to turn so much more painful. Filled with spite, I set out to drive away my frustration. The idea wasn’t to get myself killed or anything, just to make myself forget for a bit that I was a dead man walking. I got lost in thoughts and speeding above any limit when I noticed lights flying in my direction from the left.
Everything turned bright and then dark. When I regained consciousness, everything was pure, violent, and very palpable pain. Beams of fire swept through my head, firing repeated thrusts of pain increasingly in every organ and part of my body. A sensory overload my sensory receptors couldn’t handle. I was one with the pain. I had lost a sense of self, of the world. There was only agony as the impact frantically spilled my crimson liquid. I was bleeding life itself. Then a bright light shone in front of me, with a shadow slowly crawling out of it. At first, amorphous but slowly took the shape of a human.
It grew larger and larger until I could see it; him, standing fully overlooking my wreckage. An elderly man, with long gray hair and a gray beard. A giant scar carved into the left side of his face concealed by his ashen mane. All of it felt so surreal at the moment, his voice, his presence, me even being alive. It felt otherworldly meeting the Old Man for the first time.
“Would you like to live, boy?” the Old Man asked me, as he crouched over my broken form.
I tried answering positively, but I think something was wrong with my throat as only choked coughs came out. He repeated his question, and this time, while attempting to answer, I could only cough up blood. Knives and pins tore through my skin as he asked once again. The fear of being unable to answer, of dying, of losing everything. It was crushing, suffocating. A sensation akin to a tidal wave descending upon me, filling my lungs and crushing my heart, collapsed onto me.
Rasping out that “Yes” was one of the most painful things I had to go through. Every cell in my body ached as I muttered or wheezed that word out. The Old Man smirked before telling me I’d have to help him now that he was helping me.
I would gladly help him at that moment. As a matter of a fact, I still am. I have no objections to our arrangement. I do, in fact, quite enjoy it.
The Old Man said, “This might sting a bit,” and then shoved his fingers into my face. Whatever he did felt like molten iron being poured onto my face, burning through it and leaking into my skull. The sensation is probably comparable to falling into the sun headfirst. It was so bad I thought my mind would shatter before everything turned black and cold again.
When I came to, I was lying near my wrecked car. It was morning and the Old Man’s voice spoke to me from above, telling me not to look ahead. I didn’t listen, looking at the remains of the guy with whom I collided spilled on the asphalt. The collision crashed half of him into bits and pieces. Guts and bone matter ended up spilling all over along with a part of his peeled-off face and his brain lay somewhere ahead.
What a way to wake up after almost dying. I realized I was fine, save for my face, which was burning with hellfire. That stuck for a few days, but now it’s fine. The Old Man was there. He’s always there and I’ve grown accustomed to his presence by now. Since that day, we’ve been together. Doing what we do best, causing mayhem in so-called satanic brothels.
I’ve gotten to a point when I often forget other people can’t see the Old Man, which makes me something of an awkward conversationalist.
In any case, I was on the second floor of this joke of a temple, looking for the loudest room. That’s where my guy, my goat, would be. It took me a couple of seconds to figure out from which room the dying screams interlaced with ecstatic moaning bled out. I made my way to the end of the hall, trying my hardest not to let the stench of sex and sweat get to me.
Standing in front of the room I was looking for; I pressed on the handle and pushed the door slightly. Surprisingly, it opened. I guess Samael’s Passion includes exhibitionism. I don’t judge. Pushing the door ajar. I saw a naked woman on the floor, in a pool of her own blood, mounted by the source of the stench that haunted me. A fucking goat man covered in blood, semen, and lumps of shit.
What a nasty fucker. He was clearly too big for her. The poor thing was turning blue under him, pointlessly holding onto him as if she was holding onto life while he just kept going like there was no tomorrow.
I whistled to get his attention, but he didn’t hear me. She did. Her glazing eyes turned to me and she screamed. A shrill sound tore through the space. The goat roared as she desperately pointed to me, his head turned to me.
Pure rage and lust burned in those empty eyes. I almost felt myself getting aroused looking into those eyes. The goat finished and slowly pulled himself out of the woman as she spasmed on the floor.
Turning to me, the goat man brandished his meat sword at me, covered in blood, bits of uterine matter, and other liquids. It screamed something about my ass and charged like a while bull seeing movement.
Not feeling like being raped to death by a demonic gigolo, I was lucky enough to have my trusty knife on me. As the beast came onto me, I sidestepped it, stabbing it at the tip of its member and dragging it along the shaft before the monster raced beside me and into the wall.
Realizing what I had done, it let out an awful sound made up of a shriek and bleat. It charged again and this time, the Old Man did his thing, flinging the beast across the room. It landed straight on top of its joystick and, with a sickening crunch; he broke it. Screaming, bleating, and yelping all at once. I walked over to it while it wept, attempting to intimidate me.
Once I stood with my foot on its throat, a fear, a primal fear shone in its eyes. It begged for mercy, making promises and swearing to serve and whatnot. He must’ve seen the scar on my face. The Old Man doesn’t grant any. He commanded the beast to die, and I lowered my foot onto the ground. Impossible sounds came out of the beast’s mouth as fires came bursting forth through its chest and nose. Burning until the beast was nothing but soot. It wouldn’t stop making these sounds until the head turned to ash.
The others must’ve heard the commotion and got the fuck out, reasonably so. I blended into the crowd of fleeing sinners and made my way out of the whorehouse.
Upon the completion of my story, the priest looked at me, wild-eyed and terrified.
“You-you are a madman. I’m, I’m calling the police!” he quaked.
“Father, I might be a madman, but I know I’ve seen you in that whorehouse. Running naked as the day you were born, holding the hand of a woman with fiery eyes.”
He lost all color and stared at me as if he had seen a ghost. At a complete loss for words. Using this opportunity, I offered him an absolution, which felt kind of strange as he was the priest between the two of us. Pulling my hair back, I have prayed for the first time since childhood.
“Forgive me, Father, for what I have done, for you have punished me to wander and tremble for my sins. Forgive this man, Father, for you have turned a blind eye while your servant had dealt your brutal justice upon this man through the sight of the unholy corpse of his lover nailed to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the abyss that is death at your feet. “
He kept standing there as if becoming a statue as I concluded my prayer and walked away. I stopped for a moment, to look at him, his eyes drowned in horror, pure, divine, life-consuming horror.