The Final Lesson

The children had been restless all morning. Perhaps the brightly burning mid-morning sunlight, unusual for this time of year, was to blame. Mrs Donnelly moved to each of the three tall narrow windows in the external wall and drew down its blind as far as it would go. "How's that?" she asked the newly dimmed classroom at her back, and the children, a reasonably well behaved assortment of 24 10-year-olds clad in regulation patterns of navy blue and brown, murmured in mostly unanimous approval.

Another unusual detail: Father Grey was running late this Monday morning. When he finally arrived at 12:20 on the large institutional clock above the blackboard, Mrs Donnelly felt a flicker of apprehension. Despite his familiar garb of dark grey tweed jacket worn over immaculately pressed black shirt and trousers, the priest today appeared an alarmingly changed man. Gaunt, unshaven, pallid of complexion, his typically bright beaming blue eyes now sunken quite gruesomely under lowering black brows, his dark brown hair heavily flecked with white, this strangely altered figure passed quietly into the room clutching a worn black leather carry bag in his bony left hand and paused to shut the door behind him, then without so much as a word of greeting to either the teacher or the class, crossed the room and set his bag down on a clear front corner of Mrs Donnelly's desk.

A light scattering of laughter broke out among a small group in the back of the class and quickly subsided.

"Good morning, Father Grey," Mrs Donnelly said throwing an emphatic glance over the children, who echoed her greeting in obedient chorus. The thin figure of the priest took no notice as he stepped lifelessly to the center of the room, stopping in front of a bright green "Reading Is Lit!" poster on which a monocled teddy bear was pictured engrossed in a hardbound yellow book. For an uncomfortably prolonged moment he stood with his back to the teacher and her pupils, as if lost in deep contemplation of the possibility that Reading was, in fact, Lit. When he turned to face the classroom, his haunted gaze slipped slowly over their faces and then rose and seemed to fix on a point in the distance beyond the classroom walls, his expression unreadable. Seconds elapsed in uneasy stillness to be cast away forever with each reverberent tick of the clock above the blackboard.

Something in that gaze had chilled Mrs Donnelly's blood. Her follow-up jibe at the priest's uncharacteristic lateness ("...too bad the morning ended half an hour ago, then, isn't it?") lay frozen on her tongue. Sirens were going off in her head—but no, she realized she was really hearing them, emergency sirens, police, ambulances, wailing faintly along some distant street; had been hearing them for several minutes now.

When the priest spoke, his voice was no less disconcerting than his appearance. Hoarse, sickly, yet unnaturally deep and gravelly, it was the voice of something that had just spent a week digging out of a mass grave. Nothing like the jovial man whose musical voice had her kids enthusiastically learning hymns and laughing at jokes about Noah and his animals most Mondays.

"It's all done," intoned this horrible new Father Grey, in his horrible new voice. "As He commanded." He clasped his hands upon his chest in a prayerlike fashion and his horrible gaze lowered and drifted across the faces of the children seated before him. One by one they sank down in their seats and turned their faces away. Even the bold and defiant little crew of wannabe playground bullies in the back right corner were reduced to pale tremulousness by the weight of the priest's dead eyes.

"First, my dear Katherine," continued the awful voice, and here something like horror seemed to infect the priest's stony features. "The Light revealed her, this morning, as she was making coffee, preparing breakfast for the baby, making lunch for our little boy. I saw Them moving under her skin and knew the battle had been lost. Little Dee was crying in her chair and the light touched her too. Then Tommy came in to make his cereal, and I saw it, I saw it all. The masks growing behind their faces. The Worms of Night building their abysmal nests." He shuddered and made a hurried sign with his right hand that Mrs. Donnelly did not recognize. "So I did what had to be done. I went into my cupboard and got the knives..."

"Father Grey," Mrs. Donnelly interrupted and moved to stand by the priest, placing a gently urging hand behind his right shoulder. "Would you please come outside for a minute?" She glanced reluctantly back at her pupils, rows of blank pale faces that nervously returned her look. At least one of her more sensitive girls appeared on the verge of tears. She knew that whatever happened she would not leave her students alone with this man.

"It's all right, Mrs. Donnelly," Father Grey said, turning his cadaverous gaze on her, and when his face twisted into something like an unholy mockery of a grin she felt her breath catch in her throat. "It's all over now. All over. And soon I can go home."

"Please, Father," insisted Mrs. Donnelly, doubling her pressure on the priest's back, trying not to think about anything right now but getting this man out of her room and getting some help the minute he was. "Come along and let's see what we can do for you."

"You see, there are Angels that walk amongst us, my dear Mrs. Donnelly." The priest smiled his ghastly smile at the teacher, the students, and stepped over to Mrs. Donnelly's desk, easily evading her attempts to manoeuvre him out the door. "We bring the Light that burns through the falsehoods of the Abyss to illuminate Eternity. But our work will never be done. It can never be done." He reached for the bag on the corner and opened it with a quick flourish of latches and zippers, then reached one hand inside.

Mrs. Donnelly shook her head. A lone tear crept down her face. "Father—"

Low moans of fear rose from some of the assembled children.

A blinding light burning forever.