Sin Eater
Hannah Birss
Hannah Birss is a writer and aspiring magpie based out of Ontario, Canada. She lives with her partner, children, and multiple animals. She can usually be found in a nest constructed of books, writing journals, and shiny trinkets. Follow her on instagram @hannahbirsswrites or at hannahbirsswrites.carrd.co for news on upcoming and current publications, with 35 and counting for 2024.
Eddie Peters left his wife sleeping comfortably in their marital bed as he slipped out from underneath the paisley-patterned comforter and put on the pair of dark grey sweatpants he’d left tucked under his bedside table. Julie continued lightly snoring as he crept out of their dark room and passed where his young son was sleeping as he made his way to the stairs. He took them carefully so as not to make them creak, skipping the noisiest of them entirely.
He slipped into the patent leather front seat of his sports car and inserted the key, wincing as he turned it. When the car started up, he kept an eye on the uppermost right window and waited for Julie to realize that he was no longer tucked in beside her. The window remained dark, and he pulled out and began making his way out of the cul-de-sac. He was headed to midnight confession.
Eddie had first heard about it following the second church service on Easter Sunday, in the first floor men’s room as he emptied his bladder of weak church coffee into the third stall. He had sat there for a few minutes after he had finished, enjoying the solitude; he knew Julie was wrangling a sugar-high Eric during the Easter luncheon, and he didn’t want to be roped into helping.
Two men had come into the bathroom and headed to the wall of urinals. It had been Mike Weiners and Gary Bush. Eddie didn’t know them too well - Julie and Gary’s wife had an old bake-sale rivalry, and he’d played a charity golf tournament once with Mike, but their acquaintanceship had never progressed past that point.
“I’m telling you, it’s called midnight confession, and it’s here in the city,” Mike said. “You go to some secret church in the middle of the night, tell some specialty priest your biggest sins, and then they absolve you of them. It’s very hush-hush.”
“We’re not Catholic, though.” Gary said. “Would we even be allowed to do it?”
Eddie could picture Mike’s one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t see why not. A Christian is a Christian. I think they do exorcisms on non-Catholics, so why wouldn’t they do it? The point is that you can get the worst of the worst off your chest, and they won’t tell on you even if it goes way beyond priest-patient confidentiality or whatever. They’ll just absolve you. Blank slate.”
“What would you even confess?” Gary’s voice held a touch of a smirk.
“Heheh, my liaison with that pretty little thing from the drink cart. And the one from the movie theatre. And that divorcee in Pittsburgh.” There was a chuckle and a pause. “Not that I’d be able to go. Catherine would be even more suspicious if I left in the middle of the night.”
Mike chuckled, and the two of them finished washing their hands and left, leaving Eddie leaning forward on the slightly-askew toilet seat and wondering if he could find this church and confess without asking them for an address.
When Eddie prayed, it was genuine enough. He was born and raised a Christian. He knew the scriptures and tithed a generous amount. He was a pillar of the community, and had been ingrained with a deep need to please God and to be the upstanding man his church thought him to be. He was good.
However, Eddie had tastes. Not for the very young, but definitely far too young for him. He wanted them unblemished, unmarked, nubile. He was ashamed of his thoughts and horrified by his own actions, but that didn’t stop him from lingering after-hours on the high-school campuses around the city with a hopeful condom in his wallet and zip-ties in his pocket.
Of course, he did feel a deep amount of shame around his own actions, but he didn’t think he could stop, not on his own. Pastor Bruce always said that God would forgive you if you asked with your whole heart. Yet no matter how many times Eddie prayed, at home alone or in the plush seats of the church stadium surrounded by other believers, he still felt that darkness in his heart that left a black mark on his soul and red in his ledger.
Perhaps overhearing this conversation was itself divine intervention, a lifeline thrown to him by God himself in the bathroom of a megachurch. He would confess his sins to someone much higher up in the religious hierarchy than Pastor Bruce and do the penance assigned. He could be absolved of his past indiscretions. God would forgive him if he only knew where to go. If it only worked for a time and he fell back into his cheerleader hobby - well, he could always go back to confession and start fresh again. He could do that for as long as it took.
His mind was made up before he even finished zipping up his pants, and when he returned to the lobby to see a harried-looking Julie and an overexcited Eric, he kissed her soundly and threw his delighted son up in the air.
He didn’t want to tell anyone why he needed it, so he didn’t ask further about it. Instead, he took to the internet.
It took him a while to find any mention of midnight confession online. It was only through the archived messages of an abandoned Christian chatboard that he found any mention of midnight confession. It was a rumor, an urban myth, the rest of the members said, but the poster insisted that he had an address. When Eddie went to the poster’s profile page, there was only a local address in the ‘about me’.
It wasn’t an address he recognized, which was odd, since he was a realtor and thought he knew every part of their city. When he plugged it into his GPS, it sent him a long list of directions and he resolved to go. It was worth an honest try, that had to count for something when it came to his salvation.
When he had almost arrived, Eddie pulled into an empty strip-mall and parked in front of a ratty-looking nail salon next to an overflowing dumpster. He hadn’t wanted his car to be recognized outside of the church and resolved to walk the rest of the way.
After ten minutes of walking, he turned onto a street that was lined with clearly abandoned houses. Their windows held nothing but jagged teeth made of broken glass, and all the doors had been kicked in. Between the darkened doors and the gaping windows it looked as if the houses were screaming at him. As he passed, Eddie felt the first prickles of unease. His phone chimed his arrival, and he looked up at the building he had come to a stop in front of.
It was an old abandoned church, with tall towers of dark stone encrusted with years of dirt and grime. From the rafters, half-crumbled gargoyles leered at him. The front lawn was overgrown with dead grass, the bushes lining the walls were nothing but gnarled branches, dry and brittle bones that reminded him of skeletons beckoning him closer, and he couldn’t help but shudder.
Above the door, a massive stained-glass window that was still intact glowed a bright red, lit from within by whatever waited for him beyond the massive wooden door. As he climbed the front entrance stairs that were sinking into the ground and listing to one side, he found that the door was already slightly cracked open. After only a moment’s hesitation he steeled himself and slipped quietly into the church.
The inside of the church was in a similar state as the outside. Thick wooden pews lined an aisle that led to a collapsed altar that sat in front of a rusted organ. Almost everything was coated with a layer of filth, and the air smelled of must and mold. Shadows congregated in the corners, driven there by the lights of hundreds of thick white candles that dripped wax onto every surface. There was a recently mopped path that led up to the left of the altar, where two ornately carved confessional booths waited. He could hear rustling inside one of the booths, the curtain that covered the door rippling with movement from within.
“The lord is my shepherd,” Eddie muttered to himself as he started towards it.
“I shall not want,” a low voice continued from the booth, startling him. Eddie paused midway up the aisle.
“Do not fear,” the voice said again with a slight lisp and a tinge of amusement colouring it. “Welcome, and join me with a penitent heart.”
Eddie did, walking into the booth and pulling the curtain closed behind him. The inside of the booth was painted black and flaking in several areas. There was a small, hard wooden bench, and Eddie wedged himself onto it. The image of Eddie trapped in a coffin flashed through his mind, and he immediately felt claustrophobic.
“What can I do for you, child of God?” the priest asked.
“I’ve never done this before,” Eddie admitted. “But I need help.”
“You want forgiveness,” the voice said.
“Yes,” Eddie said. “I’ve done some things. Horrible things.”
“In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace. Ephesians 1:7.” The priest told him.
Eddie was quiet for a moment. “I want to be redeemed. I want to go to heaven. I want a clean slate. I need a clean slate.”
“You’re afraid of hell,” the priest said in a soothing tone.
Eddie thought back to his childhood preacher thundering from the pulpit, spittle spraying from his mouth as he ranted about hellfire and Eddie’s mother nodded emphatically beside him. Eddie felt a lance of cold fear strike deep through his heart. His mouth dried up, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth.
“You are full of sin,” the priest said. “But God heals all. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all His benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. Psalm 103:2-5. He can heal you. I can heal you, Eddie. I understand your torment, and we can relieve it.”
Eddie went to open his mouth, his heart full of gratitude, but then stopped and frowned. “How…how did you know my name?”
“I know everything about you, Eddie,” the priest said with a low laugh that sent the small hairs along the back of Eddie’s neck rising. “I know all about how you like it when they cry, how much you enjoy their smooth and unmarked thighs, that you’re just as terrified as those poor girls you stalk in the middle of the night. I know that you aren’t actually repentant, Eddie. You are rotten to the core, but I can fix that. I can take that rotten core right out of you.”
“What the fuck is this,” Eddie said with a snarl, bursting out from the confessional booth. “Who are you? How do you know that?”
The thing that emerged from behind the purple velvet curtain wasn’t human, though it was vaguely humanoid. Large hands gripped the sides of the confessional, splintering the wood underneath it. The priest pulled itself out of the booth and unfolded itself to a great height, like a giant spider creeping out of a small hole. Its black skin shone like a puddle of oil, sickening rainbows glistening and swirling. It made Eddie dizzy if he looked at it for too long.
The priest smiled down at him, its large pupils dilating, and reached for him with muscular arms. Eddie stumbled back, face paling.
“Where do you think you’re going?” it said as it stalked towards him, a heavily jutting jaw opening to reveal a forest of shark teeth. Behind it, it dragged two broken and blackened wings that looked as if they had been blasted by a furnace, leaving charred feathers littered behind it.
“I haven’t absolved you yet,” it said as it leaned down. Foul breath stinking of rot and sulfur blasted into Eddie’s face. “You just need to stay still.”
Eddie started screaming. The priest roared in return and as it did there was a great wind that blew through the church like a tempest, and the candles guttered out, plunging the interior into darkness. Eddie instinctively ducked and rolled when the lights went out, and the priest crashed into the ground where he had been standing.
Eddie crouched in the darkness, his heart thundering in his chest. He could hear the excited breathing of the priest as it began to move in a slow pursuit.
“You want forgiveness? You want the sin taken out of you? Come to me, Eddie,” the priest said as stalked him through the pews, its broken wings dragging against the wooden floorboards with a slow swishing sound. Eddie began to crawl, silent tears streaming down his chiseled cheeks.
“I can hear their screams, Eddie,” it continued with a sibilant hiss, the words echoing up into the rafters. “I can hear them all screaming inside of you. Don’t you want me to silence those screams? I can take the sin from you. I can take it and I can eat it and you will be put to pasture with all of the other sickened sheep, under the loving watch of your shepherd. You just need to give in, Eddie, and surrender all of yourself to God.”
Eddie could imagine a long, black serpentine tongue flashing in and out and licking those bloated lips as it spoke to him, and he could not repress a violent shudder. His shoulder knocked against the overturned pew that he was crouched up against. A candle fell over, the hot wax dripping down onto his ear, and burning it.
An oversized hand snatched at his skull then, and he found himself being lifted into the air, his feet dangling, his spine cracking and his neck stretching in agonizing pain. Blood trickled down his face as the thing dug its claws into his scalp, piercing him like a crown of thorns.
“Demon,” Eddie gasped out.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12,” the priest said. It held him up so that they were face to face. Its eyes sparked with flame, and in them Eddie could see all the denizens of hell moving in a dark and fevered dance.
“You are bursting with sin,” it hissed to him. “You are dripping with it. I can feel it rushing through your veins, each pump of that heart of yours sending it flooding through your limbs. That’s where it comes from, Eddie. It comes from your heart. I’m going to take that heart, and I’m going to crush it like a piece of overripe fruit and I am going to squeeze every drop of sin from it, lick up every naughty thought that ever crossed your mind. Then, and only then, will you walk with God again.”
“No, please,” Eddie gasped, eyes widening. “I’ll do any-”
Long claws dug into Eddie’s chest, slicing through the lean muscle there and down through the ribs to where Eddie’s beating heart lay. Black hands curled around it, squeezing it as Eddie howled in agony. Right there in front of the altar, the priest pulled out Eddie’s heart and the screaming stopped. All that was left was the thick, wet sound of a well-enjoyed meal.
He slipped into the patent leather front seat of his sports car and inserted the key, wincing as he turned it. When the car started up, he kept an eye on the uppermost right window and waited for Julie to realize that he was no longer tucked in beside her. The window remained dark, and he pulled out and began making his way out of the cul-de-sac. He was headed to midnight confession.
Eddie had first heard about it following the second church service on Easter Sunday, in the first floor men’s room as he emptied his bladder of weak church coffee into the third stall. He had sat there for a few minutes after he had finished, enjoying the solitude; he knew Julie was wrangling a sugar-high Eric during the Easter luncheon, and he didn’t want to be roped into helping.
Two men had come into the bathroom and headed to the wall of urinals. It had been Mike Weiners and Gary Bush. Eddie didn’t know them too well - Julie and Gary’s wife had an old bake-sale rivalry, and he’d played a charity golf tournament once with Mike, but their acquaintanceship had never progressed past that point.
“I’m telling you, it’s called midnight confession, and it’s here in the city,” Mike said. “You go to some secret church in the middle of the night, tell some specialty priest your biggest sins, and then they absolve you of them. It’s very hush-hush.”
“We’re not Catholic, though.” Gary said. “Would we even be allowed to do it?”
Eddie could picture Mike’s one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t see why not. A Christian is a Christian. I think they do exorcisms on non-Catholics, so why wouldn’t they do it? The point is that you can get the worst of the worst off your chest, and they won’t tell on you even if it goes way beyond priest-patient confidentiality or whatever. They’ll just absolve you. Blank slate.”
“What would you even confess?” Gary’s voice held a touch of a smirk.
“Heheh, my liaison with that pretty little thing from the drink cart. And the one from the movie theatre. And that divorcee in Pittsburgh.” There was a chuckle and a pause. “Not that I’d be able to go. Catherine would be even more suspicious if I left in the middle of the night.”
Mike chuckled, and the two of them finished washing their hands and left, leaving Eddie leaning forward on the slightly-askew toilet seat and wondering if he could find this church and confess without asking them for an address.
When Eddie prayed, it was genuine enough. He was born and raised a Christian. He knew the scriptures and tithed a generous amount. He was a pillar of the community, and had been ingrained with a deep need to please God and to be the upstanding man his church thought him to be. He was good.
However, Eddie had tastes. Not for the very young, but definitely far too young for him. He wanted them unblemished, unmarked, nubile. He was ashamed of his thoughts and horrified by his own actions, but that didn’t stop him from lingering after-hours on the high-school campuses around the city with a hopeful condom in his wallet and zip-ties in his pocket.
Of course, he did feel a deep amount of shame around his own actions, but he didn’t think he could stop, not on his own. Pastor Bruce always said that God would forgive you if you asked with your whole heart. Yet no matter how many times Eddie prayed, at home alone or in the plush seats of the church stadium surrounded by other believers, he still felt that darkness in his heart that left a black mark on his soul and red in his ledger.
Perhaps overhearing this conversation was itself divine intervention, a lifeline thrown to him by God himself in the bathroom of a megachurch. He would confess his sins to someone much higher up in the religious hierarchy than Pastor Bruce and do the penance assigned. He could be absolved of his past indiscretions. God would forgive him if he only knew where to go. If it only worked for a time and he fell back into his cheerleader hobby - well, he could always go back to confession and start fresh again. He could do that for as long as it took.
His mind was made up before he even finished zipping up his pants, and when he returned to the lobby to see a harried-looking Julie and an overexcited Eric, he kissed her soundly and threw his delighted son up in the air.
He didn’t want to tell anyone why he needed it, so he didn’t ask further about it. Instead, he took to the internet.
It took him a while to find any mention of midnight confession online. It was only through the archived messages of an abandoned Christian chatboard that he found any mention of midnight confession. It was a rumor, an urban myth, the rest of the members said, but the poster insisted that he had an address. When Eddie went to the poster’s profile page, there was only a local address in the ‘about me’.
It wasn’t an address he recognized, which was odd, since he was a realtor and thought he knew every part of their city. When he plugged it into his GPS, it sent him a long list of directions and he resolved to go. It was worth an honest try, that had to count for something when it came to his salvation.
When he had almost arrived, Eddie pulled into an empty strip-mall and parked in front of a ratty-looking nail salon next to an overflowing dumpster. He hadn’t wanted his car to be recognized outside of the church and resolved to walk the rest of the way.
After ten minutes of walking, he turned onto a street that was lined with clearly abandoned houses. Their windows held nothing but jagged teeth made of broken glass, and all the doors had been kicked in. Between the darkened doors and the gaping windows it looked as if the houses were screaming at him. As he passed, Eddie felt the first prickles of unease. His phone chimed his arrival, and he looked up at the building he had come to a stop in front of.
It was an old abandoned church, with tall towers of dark stone encrusted with years of dirt and grime. From the rafters, half-crumbled gargoyles leered at him. The front lawn was overgrown with dead grass, the bushes lining the walls were nothing but gnarled branches, dry and brittle bones that reminded him of skeletons beckoning him closer, and he couldn’t help but shudder.
Above the door, a massive stained-glass window that was still intact glowed a bright red, lit from within by whatever waited for him beyond the massive wooden door. As he climbed the front entrance stairs that were sinking into the ground and listing to one side, he found that the door was already slightly cracked open. After only a moment’s hesitation he steeled himself and slipped quietly into the church.
The inside of the church was in a similar state as the outside. Thick wooden pews lined an aisle that led to a collapsed altar that sat in front of a rusted organ. Almost everything was coated with a layer of filth, and the air smelled of must and mold. Shadows congregated in the corners, driven there by the lights of hundreds of thick white candles that dripped wax onto every surface. There was a recently mopped path that led up to the left of the altar, where two ornately carved confessional booths waited. He could hear rustling inside one of the booths, the curtain that covered the door rippling with movement from within.
“The lord is my shepherd,” Eddie muttered to himself as he started towards it.
“I shall not want,” a low voice continued from the booth, startling him. Eddie paused midway up the aisle.
“Do not fear,” the voice said again with a slight lisp and a tinge of amusement colouring it. “Welcome, and join me with a penitent heart.”
Eddie did, walking into the booth and pulling the curtain closed behind him. The inside of the booth was painted black and flaking in several areas. There was a small, hard wooden bench, and Eddie wedged himself onto it. The image of Eddie trapped in a coffin flashed through his mind, and he immediately felt claustrophobic.
“What can I do for you, child of God?” the priest asked.
“I’ve never done this before,” Eddie admitted. “But I need help.”
“You want forgiveness,” the voice said.
“Yes,” Eddie said. “I’ve done some things. Horrible things.”
“In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace. Ephesians 1:7.” The priest told him.
Eddie was quiet for a moment. “I want to be redeemed. I want to go to heaven. I want a clean slate. I need a clean slate.”
“You’re afraid of hell,” the priest said in a soothing tone.
Eddie thought back to his childhood preacher thundering from the pulpit, spittle spraying from his mouth as he ranted about hellfire and Eddie’s mother nodded emphatically beside him. Eddie felt a lance of cold fear strike deep through his heart. His mouth dried up, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth.
“You are full of sin,” the priest said. “But God heals all. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all His benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. Psalm 103:2-5. He can heal you. I can heal you, Eddie. I understand your torment, and we can relieve it.”
Eddie went to open his mouth, his heart full of gratitude, but then stopped and frowned. “How…how did you know my name?”
“I know everything about you, Eddie,” the priest said with a low laugh that sent the small hairs along the back of Eddie’s neck rising. “I know all about how you like it when they cry, how much you enjoy their smooth and unmarked thighs, that you’re just as terrified as those poor girls you stalk in the middle of the night. I know that you aren’t actually repentant, Eddie. You are rotten to the core, but I can fix that. I can take that rotten core right out of you.”
“What the fuck is this,” Eddie said with a snarl, bursting out from the confessional booth. “Who are you? How do you know that?”
The thing that emerged from behind the purple velvet curtain wasn’t human, though it was vaguely humanoid. Large hands gripped the sides of the confessional, splintering the wood underneath it. The priest pulled itself out of the booth and unfolded itself to a great height, like a giant spider creeping out of a small hole. Its black skin shone like a puddle of oil, sickening rainbows glistening and swirling. It made Eddie dizzy if he looked at it for too long.
The priest smiled down at him, its large pupils dilating, and reached for him with muscular arms. Eddie stumbled back, face paling.
“Where do you think you’re going?” it said as it stalked towards him, a heavily jutting jaw opening to reveal a forest of shark teeth. Behind it, it dragged two broken and blackened wings that looked as if they had been blasted by a furnace, leaving charred feathers littered behind it.
“I haven’t absolved you yet,” it said as it leaned down. Foul breath stinking of rot and sulfur blasted into Eddie’s face. “You just need to stay still.”
Eddie started screaming. The priest roared in return and as it did there was a great wind that blew through the church like a tempest, and the candles guttered out, plunging the interior into darkness. Eddie instinctively ducked and rolled when the lights went out, and the priest crashed into the ground where he had been standing.
Eddie crouched in the darkness, his heart thundering in his chest. He could hear the excited breathing of the priest as it began to move in a slow pursuit.
“You want forgiveness? You want the sin taken out of you? Come to me, Eddie,” the priest said as stalked him through the pews, its broken wings dragging against the wooden floorboards with a slow swishing sound. Eddie began to crawl, silent tears streaming down his chiseled cheeks.
“I can hear their screams, Eddie,” it continued with a sibilant hiss, the words echoing up into the rafters. “I can hear them all screaming inside of you. Don’t you want me to silence those screams? I can take the sin from you. I can take it and I can eat it and you will be put to pasture with all of the other sickened sheep, under the loving watch of your shepherd. You just need to give in, Eddie, and surrender all of yourself to God.”
Eddie could imagine a long, black serpentine tongue flashing in and out and licking those bloated lips as it spoke to him, and he could not repress a violent shudder. His shoulder knocked against the overturned pew that he was crouched up against. A candle fell over, the hot wax dripping down onto his ear, and burning it.
An oversized hand snatched at his skull then, and he found himself being lifted into the air, his feet dangling, his spine cracking and his neck stretching in agonizing pain. Blood trickled down his face as the thing dug its claws into his scalp, piercing him like a crown of thorns.
“Demon,” Eddie gasped out.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12,” the priest said. It held him up so that they were face to face. Its eyes sparked with flame, and in them Eddie could see all the denizens of hell moving in a dark and fevered dance.
“You are bursting with sin,” it hissed to him. “You are dripping with it. I can feel it rushing through your veins, each pump of that heart of yours sending it flooding through your limbs. That’s where it comes from, Eddie. It comes from your heart. I’m going to take that heart, and I’m going to crush it like a piece of overripe fruit and I am going to squeeze every drop of sin from it, lick up every naughty thought that ever crossed your mind. Then, and only then, will you walk with God again.”
“No, please,” Eddie gasped, eyes widening. “I’ll do any-”
Long claws dug into Eddie’s chest, slicing through the lean muscle there and down through the ribs to where Eddie’s beating heart lay. Black hands curled around it, squeezing it as Eddie howled in agony. Right there in front of the altar, the priest pulled out Eddie’s heart and the screaming stopped. All that was left was the thick, wet sound of a well-enjoyed meal.