This story turned out differently than I had first planned. Sister Ernestine had more to say than I thought! This piece takes place in Haunted, shortly after Jesse moves into the rectory.
Disclaimer--You know the drill.
You are frustrated. It has been a long and fruitless search. Tearing apart his room, his office, the vestibule, the entire church from top to bottom you find nothing but a few unopened packages of cigarettes, a filthy vice that he claims he gave up a few years ago. You think he is lying about it, but you have no proof.
The certainty that something is going on is slowly devouring you. He is hiding something, and you know it. And you are determined to find out what it is. At first, you thought perhaps he was becoming senile. He is still young, but you have watched friends and family members descend into the hell that is early onset dementia. But his actions are not consistent with what you have seen in the past. Mental illness perhaps? How else can the constant talking to himself be explained? He has always done this, for as long as he has been your boss, your confessor. Recently, it has become more and more noticeable. What bothers you most is not the talking to himself, but that he seems to be carrying on conversations with invisible counterparts. You have heard him in the courtyard, in his office, passing by the door to his room. There is no one with him, but he speaks and answers as though there is.
Ruling out dementia, reluctant to label mental illness, you began the search for answers. While some may look down on you methods, a mission from God knows no boundaries. You are here to protect the school, the children, trying to save those who refuse to be saved like the girls who insist on dressing like harlots or the boys who make jokes of the Blessed Virgin. These are the individuals most in need of saving. Father Dominic's downplaying of such individuals fuels your need to find his demons. He is doing the youth no favours by foregoing a heavy hand. Clearly this, coupled with his self-talk, renders him unfit to serve as principal to such a fine institution. You have a right to go through a man's personal belongings in the name of virtue.
Sadly, your search ends in vain, save for the afore mentioned cigarettes. There are no traces of narcotics, legal or illegal. No empty bottles in the recycling or hidden away to avoid detection. The sacramental wine was your last thread of hope. You were sure some of it would be missing, yet every bottle is accounted for. There is not a single cork opened. Neither alcohol nor drugs appear to be fuelling Father Dominic's conversations with himself or his lackadaisical approach to discipline.
Mindlessly, you swirl a bottle of wine around in your hand, watching small waves reach up to lap against the cork. The velvety red drink calls to you in the same way you imagine blood calls to vampires in those books you've been reading. When you purchased those books, you planned on highlighting every disgusting phrase, every strategically placed innuendo to show others that impressionable youth were being led down an errant path from reading such trash. You planned on having it banned from the school library like those filthy wizard books that were so popular not so long ago. That was your plan, however, ten chapters in, you realized you were highlighting all of the wrong parts. You were picking out every scene that made you feel young again, every snapshot that returned you to the time before you were called to serve a purpose greater than you wanted to serve. Something was set alight within you again.
You vividly remember feeling the same foolish love that compels the girl to idolize the vampire. But her descriptions of kissing and holding marble slams you back to the time when you spent hours with your lips, your head, and your body pressed against a smooth marble headstone, your young husband six feet beneath you, cradling your infant son safely in his arms. You wretched yourself away from the lure of joining your own love in death and pulled away from wanting to add your name to the headstone. You believe the girl is choosing the fate you wrestled with. You will her to choose life, to choose the wolf. You, yourself, wanted to run with wolves once. Throw off your clothes, your expectations, your great sorrows, the future your God was calling you to and simply run, run and call down the night.
Shaking off thoughts of wolves, of vampires and of blood, you tuck the bottle of wine into the folds of your robe, fishing a twenty-dollar bill out of your pocket. Throwing the twenty into a nearby donation box, you quell the guilt of theft washing through your belly. No commandments have been broken. You have not stolen; you have given more than the wine is worth.
Making your way back to your room, a full moon lights your path. Pausing for the space of three breaths, you close your eyes and turn your head toward the bright ball that hangs just over the tallest building in Carmel. It has always been there for you. You were born late at night, a half moon overhead. Slivered moons hid you during childhood games of hide and seek, while many full moons revealed the path through the woods to one boy's house. A new moon grieved with you, shrouding the sky with blackness on the eve your love and child were buried. The blackness calmed you because you knew the moon would return, piece by piece, the same way you knew you would one day return to the land of the living, piece by small piece.
It is everything you can do to pull yourself from this spot and make your way back to your room before you howl to the golden orb that has been your comfort for so many years. From beneath your bed, you pull out a well-worn copy of a book you would never admit to reading. Pouring yourself a glass of wine, you fish out Father Dominic's smokes and light yourself one. Feet up, leaning back into a threadbare couch, you thumb the pages until you get to your favourite part, the part where the girl realizes she loves the wolf. You take a large gulp of wine, a drag of a cigarette and you close your eyes, and, instantly, you are running with the wolves you left behind so very long ago.
A/N All right--for those who haven't read the Twilight Saga, I suggest you do. Those are the vampire and werewolf references. For those who haven't read them all, well I apologize if I have gone too far ahead. Don't be too harsh about my 'pro-wolf' stance. Please review anyway!