Final week in July but inside the church a chill winters the air. Father Herlihy’s sermon always runs long on Sundays. Never less than four but sometimes five hours long. He would write all night of a Saturday, crafting righteous tracts of comical dimension, designed to forestall what it was that his congregation got up to after Mass. Herlihy delivers missives like hammer blows. The pulpit rocks as he scorns his congregation artfully, who respond by fidgeting guiltily with their rarely-used rosaries.
An old man with only a wisp of hair on him shivers, coughs. A woman, perhaps his wife, adjusts his scarf and gently shushes him. Hats cannot be worn during mass. Catholicism is not about lifetimes of piety, or hours served. It is about damning moments of weakness near the end. That old man survived the famine, eating jellyfish and stones and thistle’s milk. Death will be a while coaxing him into his trap.
“These hylic ways ye practice run contrary to gospel.” foams Herlihy. “At every fork ye take a wrong path until it is at a pitchfork’s point that ye arrive. Your souls are outlaw notes escaped from the sheet music.” Herlihy’s impeccable chasuble is foldless. He thunders. When he leans forward his cincture’s tassels drum against the wood. Those sitting nearest feel his force and the rain of his furious spittle. “Turn back now or face a reckoning!” Symbols of adorations picked out in gold on the hem of his alb. His stole adorned with the sacred heart encased in unearthly fire.
Maurice Kennedy is sitting up front. The dirty atheist does not bother to stifle his yawn. Herlihy scans, smolders, scans again. Sheila Graves. Rumors about her. Three buried up the way and two buried in the churchyard. Five living now, four here today, and three of them shaving age. His bulging eyes seek to fascinate. No one meets his gaze, that of Balor. He calls them to kneel. They kneel, yet their hearts hold shrines to Rimmon fat with prizes.
When death comes, these heathens want good Christian absolution. The church assures them of an afterlife among revered kin and forgiveness of sins, yet worship of the stone cannot be stamped out. The darker nature within man finds little succor on a pew. It has never been otherwise. Flannery’s grandfather Michael has it from his own grandfather that the stone, unlike any other stone in the area, was brought from afar by the recession of the great flood. The stone possesses no story and all stories. The stone receives with equal stoicism loons’ murderous confessions and false maidens’ pleas for restoration. Intensely pagan is the amorality of the stone, thinks Herlihy. Old evil. Wicked gods ancient man devised to vindicate his bleaker urges: Zeus’ boundless lust, Baal’s sacral appetite.
He cannot stall forever but it is still a sin to leave mass before the priest. The crowd parts as he sweeps down the aisle. He pushes the doors open, flooding the church with light. The congregation mutters thanks and files out. Men toss out their hats before placing them back on their heads. No longer his; in thrall to something older, ancient even unto Babylon. Father Herlihy watches them exit the gates, round the corner to the right, then escape from view. Sometimes, he would climb the church roof to a small foothold and there recline, palm against steeple, watching the antique vision of their unholy procession. Fine views of the land up there, boundaried and bulging. Today though, Herlihy is on business.
He cycles into town on a brakeless bike. The tongues of his stopping shoes flap madly. Ash and oak shadow fall pleasant in the lanes. Apian drones from every field. Town hall, typical Downshire pomp. Herlihy dismounts and props his bicycle against a pillar. Despite the heat he’s wearing full regalia, long black and sweeping like a crone’s hair. His tread stirs the portico dust. He shakes the clammy hands of waiting Magistrates Herne and Hoyne, who remain glued to the shade like vampires. Dispensing formalities they steal inside. They know their purpose and have only to decide its conduction. The stone cannot stay in the parish, that much is clear. Do they know a man who can put wind beneath it? They do, swear both. Strong and with a Christian heart, who can chin the stone and hoigh it into the sea. Patrick Donelon a giant Galwayman, hails from Levally. He can carry eighteen stone oatbags one-handed. Hoyne sends for him.
Here are the fallow fields and the barren fields, tossed out and poisoned by the big wind. It was as if lyme had been put to it, the land all bleached forevermore and no amount of seaweed, islanders called it the beard of Mannanan, could revive it. They follow the dirt trail past three-corner field where they bury unbaptised babies, into a ravine which according to legend formed when the old stone arrived violently at its fated abode. Two by two they process through its narrowest parts, ducking branches orange with wet mossy webs, coming out into a bowl shaped hollow. The holy come not to this place. The stone’s hollow, loud with the silence of its sermon. Thane of this land it is. Three hundredweight. Offerings litter its face: shards of pottery, an odd cornhusk homunculus. Worshippers, wishers and wisdom seekers alike ferry cupped offerings to a bore at the stone’s front. Into its stigmata they stuff blossoms, shiny junks.
Sheila as she was in Eden, leafless and incredible. Willendorf. Unlithe and wholesome indeed. She is wearing a mask, a crude wooden facsimile of a human face, but the men taking her against the stone do not hide their faces. The men do not remove their clothes. The loops of their loosed suspenders dance madly. When they are done they return home. It is not every Sunday that such an offering is demanded but the potency of the stone is enhanced when its antique countenance is glazed.
Enter mischief. They four conspirators meet. Donelon shifts the stone onto the log transport, his neck bulging. Once in place, Herne the scout does ropework that would puzzle a Gordian. Herlihy barks orders. Waves climbing, growing in power, always to be cast down again. Cold blow and rainy night.
Using thick ship ropes, Donelon hauls the transport the short distance to the cliff’s edge then looses its bonds. Overhead, warring gulls circle like barbarous ice skaters. Amorous pillars of stone jut out from the sea at the cliff base, shedding cumlike foam as the waves breach upon their shafts. Donelon’s battering ram shoulder shunts the stone four times. An immovable thing is made to move. A profane act. The stone tumbles over the cliff edge. They watch it plunge unceremoniously into the ebon depths. Great waves hound the coast and the stone’s impact does not register an audible sound, nor can they ascertain the splash of its collision among the greater toil of the ever enfolding tide. The stone sinks deep, eventually encountering chainlink creatures glowing like dangerous gems, beings which would evolve eventually into befinned fluxlings. The stone does not know the sea, for there had been no sea such in its day. Only great reservoirs below the world, lakes which spanned continents. But it knows the water and its old power. Back East, perhaps.
Once the stone is gone, Donelon wastes no time extracting his fee. He extends a nephilimous hand and Hoyne forks over a triple of brandy. Two Donelon pockets but the third he opens. He forces the bottle to Hoyne’s lips and tips it back, forcing the magistrate to slurp in sight of a church father. Donelon leaves with Hoyne and Herne, bound for a fixer in Hennessey’s. Herlihy stands alone on the cliffside, awaiting augury. He rolls a smoke then lights it. He never smokes in a parishioner’s presence. The dirty oven door night is impervious to his Will, starless and moonless and mute.
He thinks the night is young. Too young yet to retire. He wants to visit the glade where the stone spent those long centuries. In going to a newly sanctified place, he will be restored by the rarified air of arriving holiness. However, when he arrives there and spies the sad hollow filled with offerings that Donelon had swept from the stone, he feels nothing of holy God. It is darker here than on the coast. Naturally, the canopy contributes but a priest evinces more than is materially sensed. An older darkness prevails. He finishes his roll up and crushes it under heel, pressing a lunula into the muck. He kicks leaves and mulch over it, leaving no evidence of his vice; his addiction some damning and unspiritual admission of material reliance.
Though Herlihy spends the week awaiting callers, primed for quarrel, nobody approaches him to inquire about the Stone’s whereabouts. He relishes the idea of aspersions being cast in his direction. Some part of him, some desperate heathen part of him, wonders if it is not guilt that he feels. Misplaced guilt.
He longs to be challenged so that he can recount fully his sentence and the justifications thereof. To whom is it justified, me or thee? He writes until blades of fox orange dawn light make a shadow ladder of his countenance. Roosters howl like demons to frighten the darkness.
The following Sunday, Herlihy’s congregation are solemn and he absorbs that energy gleefully. Mass attendees note and comment on a sprightliness about their priest, striding the altar like a jaguar. When mass ends, Herlihy watches them all filing out. This time they turn left at the gates, heading toward home. Herlihy barely stifles a smile, fighting to maintain his dour, officious image. He kicks leaves from the light flooded narthex then heads back inside. He tips his head back ever so slightly, nose tracing the air like a shark fan. He strides up the nape, taking it all in. He is in awe, as he is every time he sees it. He studies the altar, the vaulted ceilings, the impossible murals high up above him, the holy agonies of the stained glasses.
A neglected transept, a wing reserved for larger congregations from bygone days, shelters a curious bare-breasted Madonna statue. The icon resides inside a lacquered wooden box, against whose wet looking wood candlelight plays, smudging the hard edges. Her pouting lips are sultry and unknowable. That woman’s womb is a paradox; her son is implicitly her father’s son and she her son’s daughter. At her side, amidst folding aquamarine, long slender fingers curl around a lamb’s belly. White paint has long flaked off both, stripping it down to the dark wood. No longer towers of ivory. Nonetheless, the icon’s face is a mold of timeless beauty. Worn by successive generations of world’s most beautiful women: Euronyme, Aphrodite, Isis, Bríd, Frig. At the north transept’s most northern point he stands before the female image, which senses his slight regard. He shivers at a sudden temperature drop. Three blubbed clinks in response, blue glass vertebrae sinking down the tube of his Galilean thermometer. He studies the soft face’s expression. Free from crudities such as straight lines, the icon displays the alarming realism of nature. The archetypal image burns with elemental potency, a flameborne phosphene from the world’s boiling birth.
Herlihy loves pouring over dusty parish records. Loves the spidery calligraphy of his revered forebears. In his esteem, access to the ancient library is his job’s main perk. Through long research, Herlihy has ascertained that the statue is of profound antiquity, such that it could not possibly portray the holy virgin mother. Antiquaries suggest the statue’s construction precedes the church, both building and institution. A relic stood here since ancient times, when the faraway word of Rome was a prophecy still. As if to stymie excess of admiration, he reminds himself of the icon’s assured pre-christian origins. He thinks. Can I in good conscience, knowing what I know, allow this heathen image to reside in God’s house? He examines the image again, this time not admiringly but with an eye to its weight. Wonders whether he might shoulder it alone. Do the deed here and now.
Herlihy feels bold. He rules the roost now. He has cowed his unruly congregation and brought them to heel. Having watched Donelon dispatch the pagan stone with mythic ease, Herlihy feels some morsel of that strength is now being granted him. He shuffles forward, twice testing the friction of his brogues against the cold flags. His breath plumes as he steels. He nudges the icon’s naked feet and braces, planning to gently transfer its standing weight to a manageable horizontal weight along his shoulders. Instead, the disturbed base causes the statue to spin madly on its plinth before coming crashing down onto the bending priest. A fatal thud follows: blunt, sharp, clean. The statue does not break when it hits the ground. Though it is clear its impact with the priest deadened the fall and slowed its descent, something holy is evinced in the statue’s consequent pristineness. The breath which proves his last hangs in the air after the moment of his death, like the ghost of dandelion seed.
Lately, tales are heard of strange statue cults in the rural places.
Alchemisland 
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