~ Saturday night, 1948 ~

He woke because of the scratching. No, it was really more of a tisk tisk tisk against his bedroom window, like a stubborn tree branch, blown by a midnight breeze. But it was not a branch.
 
Leonard was twelve. Old enough so that strange noises in the night didn’t send him into the arms of fear anymore. Well, mostly. Sometimes the nocturnal animal sounds gave him a chill that made his balls tingle. But, for the most part, he was over all of that garbage.
 
But what he saw perched outside his window made his whole body tingle, and sent an odd buzzing sensation to his face, almost numbing it. He tried to gasp in some air, but his throat was constricted and the air that did make it through whistled like an old tea kettle. His stomach felt like it was filled with a thousand gnats.
 
It was not human, although it looked enough like one that he knew it was not an animal. Just one look at the eyes, and you could tell that.
 
When he was about five years old, Leonard saw a man at the zoo, feeding the baby goats oats from an ice cream cone. The man had obviously been severely burned — and whatever had gotten him had gotten him good because he made Freddy Kruger look like Robert Redford. His face and arms were positively charred, and he had no hair save for a few haphazard patches that looked horribly out of place. He wore one of those aqua masks that surgeons wear over his mouth, and the strings were tied neatly on the back of his wrinkly purple head. Leonard had started to cry then — scream — to the embarrassment of his parents, and they had had to take him home because of the state he was in. The man had seemed not to notice (although Leonard had since felt terribly guilty because he had to have known), and had continued to feed the baby goats as if nothing was wrong. As if he didn’t know that he was subject to being a monster that scared little ones for the remainder of his days.
 
That was kind of what the thing outside of his window looked like. Without the mask. It was bald, and wrinkly, and hunched over. The eyes were intelligent — Einstein eyes — and the thing was smiling. Somehow, that was the worst part of all. And it wasn’t that it had sharp vampire teeth or anything. In fact, they were straight, white, and quite clean. It was just the fact of it. The creature was smiling. And that made it scary as hell.
 
And then Leonard thought about it. And the only reason that he opened the window was because of what it could be. Maybe it was a child — burned like the man at the zoo — out at night, lost. But why the smile? Well, kids always smiled at the wrong times. They didn’t care what was appropriate or rude. They let their emotions run wild. And now that he looked again, the thing did look a little scared.
 
Leonard’s fear was slowly being replaced with sympathy. Monster? Come on... he wasn’t five anymore. This was a child that needed help. Had to be.
 
He opened the window. It squawked on its way up, having almost been painted shut. But, with a burst of effort, it made it most of the way. A blast of cool night air rushed into the room, and Leonard shivered, reaching for the T-shirt that he had stripped off earlier. He pulled it over his head. And that’s when he heard the sound.
 
It was a gurgling, choking sound. Like an old man hawking up a wad of phlegm. And as he listened, words took shape in the gargle. What were they? No, it was one word over and over. Salad? Cabbage? No. And then the creature spat a sticky loogy that hit Leonard on the shoulder and began to drip. Sabbath. The word was undeniably “Sabbath”.
 
Leonard looked at the glob of gluck on his shirt and felt the sudden urge to vomit. Then he got control of his stomach and looked at the thing that was now crawling into his bedroom. It looked double-jointed or something — the motions were all wrong.
 
It scrabbled down onto his floor, still repeating: “Sabbath. Sabbath. Sabbath.” like a fricking broken record.
 
This was not good. Not right at all. It wasn’t a child. He could see that now. Letting it in had been a mistake. A bad mistake.
 
The thing grabbed Leonard’s ankle. Its hand was cold, clammy like wet noodles. Leonard fell backwards onto his bed. For an instant he wanted to get under the covers and pull them up to his chin for safety. But that was stupid. He was anything but safe now.
 
And then the thing was on top of him, crawling over him. Its spittle was dripping onto Leonard’s shirt, as it repeated its word mindlessly. Then it was pinning him by the wrists. If it had been a girl — Susan Francis from History class perhaps — he would have been in heaven. But now he was in quite the opposite.
 
The creature lifted one hand then, and placed it gently on Leonard’s forehead. Suddenly it wasn’t cold anymore. It was getting warm... and then hot. And then unbearable. He was about to claw at the damn thing’s eyes to get it to stop, but then it pulled its wrinkly hand away, and Leonard saw that it was glowing an ethereal green. And then the light faded away, and it was just a hand again. A scarred, deformed hand... but just a hand.
 
His forehead stung like hell. And could he hear it sizzling? Oh God, he could. Like a damn egg. Sunny side up.
 
“Sabbath,” it said again, matter of factly now. And then it slipped off him and onto the bedroom floor. It looked back one final time, and it looked almost sad now. The smile was gone. And then it scampered out of the window and ran off into the night. And it was incredibly quick. Moving at the clip of a fast horse, but with none of the grace.
 
And then it was gone.
 
Leonard sat up in his bed, sucking in great gulps of air. His heart beat so hard he could hear the blood rushing through his ears. And they were ringing too. Sweat poured down his face in tiny rivulets. He scooted over to the window and slammed it shut, and then he twisted the old metal lock until it was secure. Only then could he start to relax, and even then it was a tremendous effort. And, bloody hell, his forehead hurt!
 
He scooted to the edge of his bed, and checked himself out in the mirror above his dresser. There was a circle the circumference of a coffee cup in the middle of his forehead, and it was an angry shade of reddish-purple. God, what was he going to tell his parents? He couldn’t tell them the truth. They would never believe him. But it wasn’t only that. He also felt sort of... ashamed. It made him mad but it was true. But the anger that he felt was kind of nice because it was better than the fear.
 
So he ended up wetting a washcloth from the bathroom, and placing it on the burn. And somehow, he eventually fell asleep like that. And his dreams were disturbed and fragmented, and in them, he kept hearing that word repeated in that awful voice: Sabbath. Sabbath.
 
By morning it all seemed so unreal. But the burn was still there, and that was all the proof he needed. And so he had gone down to breakfast that day, and had endured the look of horror on his parent’s faces. And then he had calmly told them that his reading lamp had fallen from the shelf above his bed, and that the lit bulb had stuck to his forehead for twenty seconds or so until he could pry it off. It was a likely story, and he knew it sounded far fetched, but what could his parents do but believe him. And so they did.

~ Saturday night, 2007 ~

He still had the scar. And though he was sixty-one years old and wrinkled, the bold, red mark still showed brightly. It was shiny, the way that old scars get, and it was the first thing that everyone looked at when they first met him. Of course, he was used to that now. It meant nothing to him.
 
He ran the vacuum up and down, in between the pews, and up by the altar, sucking up the dirt, although there wasn’t much. There never was. Church service was not a messy affair... not unless it was muddy out.
 
He had been the church custodian for... gosh... had it really been thirty years now? It had. And he had gone about his business, cleaning, painting... doing what needed to be done, mostly by himself. And he didn’t mind it like that. The old church was a comforting place to be. It felt safe. It always felt safe.
 
But there was the other reason for taking the job too. Because of what happened to him on Saturday nights — what had happened to him every Saturday night — every Sabbath — at midnight since he was twelve years old. And because of the only cure that he had ever discovered in his fifty-some years of searching.
 
Leonard looked at his watch: 11:54pm. It would be happening again soon. He unplugged the vacuum and wrapped the cord around his arm. Then he looped the cord over the handle, and set the vacuum aside.
 
Then he took his place in front of the life-size wooden carving of the crucified Christ. 11:56pm now. He waited.
 
He felt the heat start on his forehead. If he were in front of a mirror he knew that he would see it starting to glow its eerie green color. He had seen it a million times (although not in years now — he didn’t bother to look anymore). And, as if on cue, he began to feel the incredible hunger. The ravenous hunger that had led him to kill and eat so many animals in those first few years of Saturdays. Deer, cats, dogs, and birds. If he didn’t eat them, the hunger would be worse than hell itself. And the worst part was what he really wanted to eat. Because he craved humans. He wanted to rip them to shreds and feast on their meat. But his soul had always been strong, and even when he was the beast, he held fast to his soul. He knew that if he ever gave in to that particular temptation, he would be damned for sure. So, somehow, he had held on. And he had never feasted on his own kind. And he had never killed his own dog, Lilly. Oh, he had wanted to a hundred times. Wanted to tear her open and drink her blood, but he had resisted — every time. And he always woke to her nuzzling his neck. And he always thanked God that she was still breathing. Lilly had died in 1965, but not by his hand. Cancer had taken the old pup, naturally.
 
His digital watch read: 11:59pm. And then it changed to midnight.
 
Sabbath... Sabbath... Sabbath... The creature’s words rang in his head as they always did, and the hunger reached its maximum. He wanted to go hunt, but he knew the sensation would not last much longer. For he had his cure!
 
He stared at the eyes of the wooden Jesus, and waited for the miracle. And then, as always, it happened. The eyes opened, and the blinding white light — the ever so pure light — came streaming out in two perfect rays. They converged into one immense ray, and bore directly onto — into — the scar on Leonard’s forehead. And as it sunk into his skin, the blessed relief came. It was like a magical salve as it permeated his very being. He could feel the truth and the life of Jesus melting away the appetite — as it always did. And, gradually, he didn’t want to hunt anymore. He wasn’t hungry for raw meat or blood. The light was filling him. Filling him with everything that the creature had taken from him back when he was twelve. Filling him with the love that the thing had stolen. And it was good.
 
And then, like always, at 12:01am, the eyes closed, and the light disappeared. And the heat on Leonard’s forehead began to ebb, and then fade away completely. The hunger had passed for another week.
 
Leonard took in a deep breath and then let it out. It was over. He walked over to his toolbox and got out the lemon Pledge and the dust cloth and began to spray down the lectern.
 
He had been safe for thirty years now, and it was almost routine by now — just another Saturday night — but he still said his prayers of thanks, as he always did as he dusted down the podium afterward. He would never stop doing that. He would never stop giving thanks.