The Confession Booth at Dawn

Father Cormac Brennan had heard the sins of the town of Aldermere for nineteen years, and he had learned that the truly dangerous ones never came in the ordinary hours. They came at the dawn Mass, in the grey before the bell, when the church was empty but for the lone penitent and the cold, and a man could say a thing he had kept locked for a lifetime to a screen in the dark and pretend, almost, that he had said it to no one. It was at the dawn confession, on a Tuesday in the wet end of February, that a young man knelt on the other side of the grille and told Father Brennan that he was going to commit a murder.

He did not say it the way the troubled and the despairing said the things that frightened them. Father Brennan had heard a hundred confessions of black thoughts — men who had imagined killing a brother, a wife, a rival, and had come trembling to be told that the imagining was not the deed. This was not that. The voice through the grille was steady, and quiet, and terribly clear, the voice of a man who has already crossed the line in his own soul and come to the booth not for absolution, which he did not ask, but for some colder thing the priest could not at first name. "Bless me, Father, for I am going to sin," the young man said, and Father Brennan felt the old formula bend under the weight of the wrong tense, and knew, before another word was spoken, that he had come to the most dangerous hour of his nineteen years.

The young man's name — Father Brennan knew the voice, placed it after a moment with a lurch, for he had baptised this boy, had given him his first communion, had buried his mother three winters past — was Eli Sandoval. He was not yet twenty-five. And he had come to tell the priest, in the calm of a decision already made, that in three days' time, at the dawn of Friday, he was going to kill Vincent Roe.