But if the Devil wanted to mock him in this way, he would return the favor. That night, if he couldn't uproot the plant, he would crush every fruit, every seed.
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Info
Title: Ut Adversarium Extirpam
Author:Heck_Tech
⚠️ Content warning: This article contains gore elements.Ciao, here's my Summer of Doom tale! Check the Hub!
The prompt I chose is "Your youth pastor has warned you about the local metal band, claiming they work with The Devil. If he only knew what they actually worship…"
"God damn you all!" the man shouted, slamming the window shutters shut so hard the salt spray crusted on them cracked. Despite the closed window, the music filtered in through every crack, every crevice. The priest began to tremble, putting his hands to his ears.
He couldn't take it anymore, it was all too much. That music. Those damned kids.
And panting with the deep anger that shook his bones, Father Onofrio Esterelli's mind wandered to memories of when all this began.
He was in the middle of his sermon, educating his flock with the same diligence and attention he had devoted for the past 35 years to guiding the small coastal village of Porto Jacopo in the path of the Lord.
"Well, dear brothers, today's Word teaches us that—"
And then that diabolical sound from the other side of town.
"The Word teaches us, the Word teaches us that—" he continued to stammer, confused, overcome by the violence of that sound. His parishioners stared at him with equal confusion and dismay, and Father Esterelli had no choice but to continue the service, shouting over the cacophony and suppressing his anger at the insult. Who would ever dedicate himself to such blasphemous music on the Lord's Day?
After entrusting the care of the vestments to his sacristan, he ran furiously to vent his anger at the sinner who had defiled the Holy Mass, heading in the direction from which the sound was coming.
"By concession of the Municipality of Porto Jacopo, the "J. S. Bach" Theater is entrusted to the De Ventidi-Raini family for for public entertainment events." So it was reported in the notice affixed on the poster board next to the door.
"What? Are you kidding?" he muttered angrily, and he began knocking furiously.
At a certain point, the music stopped, and after a few minutes, the heavy door opened, giving way to a sneer.
"Happy Sunday, Father. Can I do something for you?" the young man said jovially.
"You? Are you the one organizing all this?" He couldn't believe it.
Nineteen-year-old Luca De Ventidi-Raini, still smiling, gestured with his hands as if to say, "Of course, priest, did you enjoy the show?"
"It doesn't matter who you are or who your father is! It's inconceivable to play this damned mess during Sunday Mass," the priest barked. "Who do you think you are to disturb the peace and the solemnity of the Holy Mass?"
"You said it, my father's son. Now excuse me, but we still have to finish rehearsals," the young man replied indifferently, closing the door in the priest's face.
"May God strike you all down!" Father Esterelli bellowed and spat on the door. Furious beyond belief, he stormed away from there and walked briskly to the rectory.
That was just the beginning of the end.
First with temporal power and then with the small factory that employed the residents of the county, the noble De Ventidi-Raini family had dominated Porto Jacopo and the surrounding lands. And now Luca, the scion of that dynasty, had begun to attract more and more young people to his concerts with the support of his father Ernesto, the town's mayor.
Father Esterelli felt his blood boil as he saw them in the streets, wearing those profane black leather robes and, above all, deserting his masses to go listen to that accursed Satanist, the future heir to degeneration and ruin. He was certain that the young man's passion for that blasphemous music was nothing but a consequence of his father's illicit dealings, which had occurred around the same time. The old sacristan, Settimino, who had served in the town church for as long as he could remember, after a few glasses of wine at Sunday lunch in the rectory, had begun to relate to him some of the stories circulating among the parishioners, as if on a fateful Sunday.
"Didn't you hear, Father? They say Don Ernesto sold the old factory to new owners, rich, very rich people. But they left him in charge on their own." the sacristan murmured, pouring himself a drink.
"Do you know who? Are they local or from outside?" Father Esterelli asked, pouring himself a drink.
"Well, no one knows for sure, but they're certainly strange people: have you noticed, Father? The smoke coming out of the old chimneys isn't the same as it used to be," he murmured.
The priest was confused. "In what sense is it no longer the same?"
"Even when a storm comes in from the coast, the smoke that comes out doesn't move, but rises toward the sky like one of the columns of the portico," the man replied. "And you know what? I think people are changing too," he concluded, draining his glass in one gulp.
And indeed, something was changing. If at first it was only the young people who had begun to avoid his church, led astray by that boy, then it was the turn of the adults - their parents, the parishioners, and the townspeople in general - in the service of the De Ventidi-Raini factory, to start increasingly distancing themselves. Fewer and fewer attended Mass, and even fewer allowed the priest into their homes for the usual periodic blessings, an old town tradition, or even to comfort the sick.
And finally, Father Esterelli found himself with no one left to listen to his sermons.
Yes, something sinister had descended upon the town, and it would be its downfall. But what was to be done?
He had written to the bishop asking for authorization to exorcise the town from the shadow that had permeated its bricks and bodies, but with each letter he sent, filled with his fear and anger at those supposedly responsible, he received a response increasingly concerned about his mental health, until the last one, in which he was ordered to pack his bags to move to another town on the other side of the country, "in order to restore his spirits."
But he knew it was another will that had signed with the bishop's seal. They had learned of his crusade against their evil and had sent him away to reign undisturbed. And that small concert led by those youngsters the night before his departure was the final mockery of his defeat.
But if the Devil wanted to mock him in this way, he would return the favor. That night, if he couldn't uproot the plant, he would crush every fruit, every seed.
It was past midnight, and outside of the theater and the priest's room, the village was already dozing under the oppressive August heat. No one would see him leave the rectory, no one would see him walk along the main street toward the old theater, and, even more importantly, no one would see him with the shears from the parish garden in his hand.
As he had expected, Father Estarelli reached the foul-smelling alley leading to the secondary entrance, secured only by a rusty padlock. Using the shears as a crude lever, the lock came loose without much effort, taking fragments of wood with it; a splinter hit him in the hand, but he didn't even notice. He was getting closer and closer.
Entering, he realized he was in a long, dark corridor, dimly lit by old light bulbs on the ceiling. The music made the old walls reverberate in thin clouds of dust but apart from it, the place was completely deserted. Clutching the shears in his right hand, he moved with a cautious calm, completely confident and in control of his mission. If divine mercy could not shine on Earth for the hands of men and Satan, freed from their mortal coils, nothing would prevent those boys from finding comfort in God's light.
Following the crescendo of that diabolical howl, he finally reached the steps of the main entrance. Like the corridor, the large entrance hall was also empty, but the music was now so deafening that the heavy wooden door barely contained most of the din. As strong as his thirst for justice and mercy was, he knew it wouldn't be wise to enter that way, but from behind the stage he could easily reach Luca De Ventidi-Raini and his followers: the other poor boys would be freed from that curse immediately afterward.
As if by a sign from heaven, he saw the sign high up on the wall indicating the direction of the backstage area, and smiling, he headed down that path.
The corridor leading to the wings was as narrow as the others he had walked, but before reaching his destination, he noticed a small table leaning against one side, the only decoration he had seen so far in that abandoned place. He approached it, curious, and noticed some ceramic figurines on top: they were rather crude, but he could make out the figure of a winged woman in those features.
"A demon?" he thought, but try as he might, he couldn't recall anything from his studies of an entity remotely similar to that figure. So he turned away from there and continued his advance, approaching his fateful destination. And finally, the access to the back of the stage appeared before his eyes.
The music was so loud that he almost felt tempted to tear part of the drapery of the old, abandoned curtain to cover his ears, but he wanted to be completely alert, especially now. He approached one of the openings to the stage so he could see them all and prepare for his next act, but he was dismayed: besides the young dauphin and his henchmen playing that cursed music, the teens in the audience were kneeling on the old, worn seats, holding the figurines and muttering something.
His body began to seize up. He was ready to act, he was ready for his holy mission, yet something was stifling his thirst for justice, something was replacing the excitement that had moved his limbs and his heart. There was a pressure pushing on his insides that he couldn't name. What he knew was that he had to get out of there.
The music suddenly stopped, and everyone in the audience turned to stare at him. The priest felt a bizarre sense of alienation at that coordinated movement, and as he watched them, he almost thought he was dreaming. He expected anger, derision even at the sight of him, but neither the band nor the audience had a single expression on their faces other than that of eerie trance.
"What's happening?" Father Esterelli stammered, drained of the fury that had driven him to that point.
"You interrupted our prayer, Father," Luca replied placidly, placing his guitar on the floor.
"P-prayer?" the parish priest continued to stammer. "You were surely praying to the devil, you fools!" he shouted, feeling some of the old anger rising again.
"Devil?" asked the young man, slowly approaching him.
Father Esterelli quickly raised the shears toward him. "Stop, you slimy devil-worshipping, damned heretic!"
The young man stopped, but raised his right hand high. "Take him!" he shouted and snapped his fingers.
Like a pack of wolves, all those present in the theater began to crowd together, running toward the priest. Father Onofrio began screaming and running toward the exit, dropping his shears to the ground. All of them began to slip into the nearest corridors, while Luca remained watching the crowd rush past him, a grin beginning to form on his lips.
"God, god, god, god," Father Esterelli muttered in terror. It shouldn't have happened this way; he shouldn't have been the victim tonight. They should have been afraid, they should have been ready to be purified, but he had underestimated the diabolical forces at work. Luckily, he still had the distance and knowledge of the route he had taken to give him a head start on his escape. He retraced his steps through the corridors and headed toward the main entrance hall: by exiting onto the main street, anyone would hear the screaming crowd chasing him and come to his aid.
The old glass door was illuminated by the streetlights from the nearby street, and to the fleeing priest's eyes it seemed the most sublime of stained glass windows, the very gates of the Empyrean. He headed for the worn brass handles, anticipating freedom from that satanic temple: as he grasped them, he pushed with all his strength.
But the door did not budge.
He began pulling and pushing frantically, but evidently someone had locked the exit. Father Esterelli turned, intending to head for the side exit he had entered from before, but it was too late. They had surrounded him.
Panting, the man saw dozens of faces coming closer, until they were upon him, knocking him to the ground and easily pinning him down, overwhelmed by their sheer numbers. Terror and rage mingled with his helplessness, and this increased as he saw the crowd part to let the De Ventidi-Raini scion pass.
"She doesn't like being called that, you know?" he said casually, approaching the priest. "She's a goddess, she deserves our respect."
"Goddess? What are you talking about?" Father Esterelli growled angrily.
"The Lady of the Swamps, the Mother of Fever," he whispered. "The divine Febris."
Upon hearing that name, all the young people bowed their heads.
Father Esterelli was confused. Was this perhaps the command of a demon unknown to him? The invention of those mad youths?
"They came months ago to buy the factory from my father, and when they showed him the power of the Great Goddess, he immediately bowed to Her, as we all did. And while our parents work to spread Her Name with every package shipped from the village, we sing Her praises, strengthening ourselves in our devotion."
With that, he took a plastic bottle from his pants pocket and, unscrewing it, dropped an emerald-green pill into the palm of his hand.
"We have seen great things, and witnessed terrible ones. But in Her Name we now live and breathe, consecrating ourselves to Her will. For ours is the evil, ours is the salvation."
He bowed before the still-wriggling priest and grabbed his hair, raising his screaming face.
"Now you too will see Her Power."
And then he tossed the pill between the pain-torn lips.
The man's convulsions stopped as soon as the medicine licked the inside of his mouth, and his entire body relaxed as if lifeless. The teens holding him rose and joined their companions, knowing what was about to happen.
The man's body instantly twisted into an arc of flesh and pain.
Father Onofrio's scalp was pulled back, as were his ankles, and between them he could feel only a devastating fire he had never felt before. His bones were cracking inside him, crushed by his treacherous muscles.
In the grip of such pain, the man's senses were completely obliterated: he no longer saw those boys and the theater where he was agonizing, he perceived nothing but his own tortured body.
However, the darkness of his torment began to lift, and a figure began to manifest before his face. Two deep green eyes and a smile of pure evil.
"Onofrio."
As the entity whispered his name, the pain ceased, leaving him immobile in that unholy position. Suddenly, a female hand rested on his chest, slowly digging in her nails. Even as he felt the pressure between his ribs, he could feel nails digging into his temples and his wrists, searching for something.
Something inside him was being stirred and torn and stirred again, sifting through his innermost being.
"Disappointing, you have nothing of use. I would not know what to do with your empty and twisted faith."
The hand left his chest, and the pain returned to fill the priest's limbs with tenfold intensity, just as the darkness settled once again on his eyelids.
"The Goddess rejected him. What do we do with him, Luca?" a voice murmured.
"We'll add him to the chorus of prayer, for what it's worth. Who got the shears? Oh, here they are. Help me prepare him."
And that was the last thing he heard that evening.
Morning came slowly over the village, but the sun nevertheless began to generously spread its warmth from its first rays. As the village began to liven up and the people began to pour out into the streets, already sweaty and weary, a small crowd gathered in the small square in front of the church.
Beside a pair of shears whose blades had turned from brown rust to ruby red, Father Estarelli knelt in prayer.
His hands, clasped together, embraced an old statuette.
His face was the mask of bliss of one blessed with the supreme reward, of one who has seen and believed. His eyes drooped from their sockets, drying against his cheekbones. The jaw had also lost its function, with every tissue from the cheeks having been severed: the elderly prelate's mouth was now obscenely gaping in a cavity of putrefaction, his chin halfway to meet every trickle of blood that had flowed relentlessly, was abandoned against his swollen neck.
The crows had gathered on the lampposts surrounding the square, but none had yet approached to feed on that mangled flesh. Experts in life and death, they had recognized the magic slowly fading from the blood.
A police officer approached the priest and leaned down to his face. A tiny gasp escaped from his naked throat, his last link to the material world where he had writhed for 57 years like an insect turned upside down on the ground.
The officer shook his head: he hoped he would just have to throw the body into the sea, as ordered by the mayor. It was too hot for anything else.
The truncheon rose high to kiss the sun that illuminated it, and when it descended to betray the star with the priest's skull, Father Onofrio Estarelli finally abandoned the town of Porto Jacopo.