Free Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) by Graham Masterton Page B

screeching in pain.
    ‘I’ll confess!’ he cried out. ‘I’ll confess! Please! Holy Mary, Mother of God, I’ll confess!’
    ‘Well, now, that’s a start,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. ‘Why don’t you mull it over a little longer, an hour or so maybe, just to make absolutely sure, then I’ll come back and let you down.’
    ‘Please,’ Father Quinlan begged him. ‘Please let me down now. I’ll confess.’
    But the Grey Mullet Man ignored him, and walked out of the bathroom, closing the door very quietly behind him. Father Quinlan spun slowly on his rope, both of his arms now dislocated from their sockets, humming rather than moaning, with a string of bloody dribble dangling from his lips.
    The choir sang,
    Ye watchers and ye holy ones,
    bright seraphs, cherubim, and thrones,
    raise the glad strain, Alleluia!
    Cry out, dominions, princedoms, powers,
    virtues, archangels, angels’ choirs: Alleluia!
    Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

13
    It was dark before the Grey Mullet Man came back, and the only illumination in the bathroom was the orange sodium light from the street lamps outside.
    Father Quinlan had been fading in and out of consciousness, and he had been hallucinating, too. He had thought that he was walking along the seashore, taking a break from a weekend retreat at Myross Wood, near Leap in West Cork. It was a warm August afternoon with only a few horse’s-tail clouds, but a stiff breeze was blowing off the ocean and making his soutane billow as he clambered up the rocks.
    He was thinking deeply about the discussion he had attended that morning: about ‘shepherding’ and ‘discipleship’, in which new converts to Christianity were supposed to submit themselves completely to more mature members of their church, and obey them as blindly as a dog chasing a stick. ‘The dog doesn’t know why he’s chasing the stick. He doesn’t realize that the exercise is doing him good. But then he doesn’t have to. His obedience is all that’s important.’
    Panting, his black boots sliding in the shale, Father Quinlan struggled up the side of a rough granite outcrop so that he could get a better view of the bay. As he approached the top, however, he saw a girl’s red hair, blowing in the wind; and when he climbed up two or three more steps, the girl herself came into view.
    She was kneeling in the grass, pale-skinned and pretty and completely naked. She stared at him as he appeared, but she didn’t seem to be at all abashed. She had small breasts with pink nipples that were stiffened by the wind, and vase-like hips, and a small flame of red hair between her thighs. She was grasping in her left hand the erect penis of a skinny young man, who was lying on his back with his head behind the rocks, obscured from Father Quinlan’s view. His pubic hair was ginger, too, and the girl had just pulled his foreskin down, so that his lavender-coloured glans was exposed. Her lips were wide open in an ‘O’, as if Father Quinlan had caught her just as she was about to take it into her mouth.
    For five long seconds, Father Quinlan and the girl remained frozen in a tableau. The wind blew Father Quinlan’s soutane, so that it flapped and snapped, and it blew the girl’s hair in long art-nouveau skeins. The ocean gnashed at the rocks below them, and the gulls circled around them, screaming, but for all of that time, neither of them moved.
    Father Quinlan suddenly jerked up his right hand, as if to give the girl a blessing, or an apology, or to wave goodbye. Then he turned and stumbled down the side of the outcrop, half jumping and half falling, until he reached the pathway that would take him back to the road.
    He felt hot, as he walked, but not from embarrassment. He felt as if he had inadvertently opened up a furnace door and been scorched by the red-hot fires of temptation. For the first time in his life, he had seen with absolute clarity what kind of man he was, and what it was that he really lusted after, but