Halloween night. For once I had worn the right outfit to church: my orange and black choir robe. All the other choir people were in their robes and I had set my little surprises for the service. I felt a sharp glee about the evening festivities. Probably my favorite moment would be when Pastor Nate tried to get out of the coffin. A coffin I had slathered in super glue, right along the edges where the lid touched the bottom. He thought he was untouchable. He thought I couldn’t remove him from this church, but he had a surprise coming. No one crosses a vampire without paying for it.
We milled around behind the stage, waiting for our cue to enter. The audience talked to itself, creating a gentle roar. More people showed up than I expected. Pastor Nate was right about that, it was a full house. Gabe saw me and came over, wearing his standard white pants, white turtleneck and glittery wings with tinsel halo. He looked like a beautiful, cheap angel, like a Christmas tree topper from the dollar shop. My stomach rumbled just looking at him. I kept telling myself “He’s not a juicebox, he’s a human being,” but his shoulders were so square and he was so boxy looking, it was hard to remember.
Gabe said, “Are you ready for the big show, Lara?”
I punched him in the arm. “The real question is, are you ready? I have a few little surprises in store for Pastor Nate.”
A shadow flitted across his face. “Lara, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“He’s manipulating these people, Gabe. They don’t even know it. They come in here, and they think he’s better than them but the fact is he’s worse. Caroline is a better person than him. A hundred times better than him, but he’s a good speaker. So everyone fawns all over him. It makes me sick.”
“That’s not your business, Lara, it just isn’t.” Gabe shook his head. “If people choose to stay here, if we decide this is our church even though our stupid pastor says dumb things sometimes, that’s our business, isn’t it? You don’t need to come in as an outsider and rub our faces in it.”
I clenched my teeth. “What about people like Caroline? You think she’s ever going to grow spiritually while she’s here? She’s being spoon fed, and the longer she’s here the more likely that she will never grow up.” Gabe’s face fell and he started to speak, but I kept going. “She’s going to be a spiritual four-year-old for the rest of her life, and that’s Pastor Nate’s fault, because he tells her what to think instead of encouraging her to think herself. He tells her what the Bible says instead of showing her how to read the Bible. And do you know what? She’s learning to worship Pastor Nate instead of worshiping Jesus.”
“That’s not true,” Caroline said. Gabe had his hand over his face. I turned around, and she stood there in her orange and black robe, tears coming down her face, a bouquet of carnations in her hands. “Take that back, Lara.”
“I’m sorry, Caroline, I shouldn’t have said that.”
Her face was red and her voice trembled with anger. “I don’t worship Pastor Nate.” I put my hands up, trying to assure her that I knew. “He’s my pastor and I respect him. That’s not worship.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s not worship! I’m allowed to respect my pastor. We’re supposed to respect those in authority over us.”
“Caroline --”
She threw the flowers down at my feet. “How dare you say that I’m not worshiping Jesus.” I picked up the flowers, tried to put them in her hands, but she shoved them back at me. “I bought these for you, for tonight. Because I was glad you were becoming part of our church.” She stalked to the far corner and wouldn’t look at me. The overture started, and the little girl in the play was talking to her parents. It was almost time for The Bad Little Girl Who Disobeyed, our first song.
Gabe grabbed my shoulders. “You’re acting like our pastor is what defines our church. Yes, he’s hateful sometimes, and he says wrong things. I want him out as much as you do. He hates vampires and werewolves and zombies. He did a series about how much he hates werewolves. I spent three weeks cringing. But Lara, when you act like his issues make this a bad church, you’re saying that he is the church. You’re thinking like him. Nate thinks his name and this church are interchangeable, but he’s just the pastor. The church is bigger than him. Yes, I want him out. And I’m hoping that God, in his time, will remove him. I have faith that God has this under control.”
I tried to catch Caroline’s eye again. It was almost time for us to go on now. “I don’t even know what hope is anymore, Gabe.”
He turned my chin up so I could see his face. “Hope is just faith. Hope is faith projected into the future. It’s the certainty that the things God has promised will come… some day.”
I didn’t have time to respond, because it was time for the choir to file onto the stage while singing our opening line, “Silly little girl who disobeyed/instead of going to church she ran away/she prefers to Trick or Treat/she’s going to fill her pillowcase with trouble not with candy.” Et cetera.
The audience ate it up. People actually danced during Having Fun Means the Devil is Nearby, an irony that almost choked the lyrics out of my throat. If fun was some sort of proximity alarm for the devil, I guessed he was far away from me. I felt horrible about Caroline overhearing me. At the same time, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I heard her sniffling during Razor Blades in My Candy Bar, which probably looked appropriate to the audience but made me feel worse.
Then Gabe came onto the stage, the spotlight shining on him like the sun, the glitter on his wings and halo lighting up the auditorium like a disco ball. This was the moment where the little girl learned the true meaning of Halloween from the Halloween Angel. He was supposed to say something about respecting the believers who had come before you, and how you should listen to your parents and love Jesus and go to church.
But that’s not what Gabe said. He bent down next to her, and he looked into her eyes. He didn’t say anything for the longest time, and I thought he had lost his lines, but then he said, “Little girl, why don’t you want to go to church?”
He was off script, and the girl didn’t know what to say and it didn’t matter what she said because I couldn’t hear her over all the things I was yelling in my own head. I didn’t want to go to church because of the hatred from the pulpit. Toward me, toward others, with the occasional platitude about “hate the sin but love the sinner.” Because, as a single woman, I couldn’t stand to hear one more sermon about marriage, or to have one more person tell me to trust in Jesus and I’d get married, or maybe I was supposed to stay unmarried like Paul or if I would just do things a little differently a man would materialize in my life. I was tired of married people telling me that Jesus should be enough for me, when marriage plus Jesus didn’t seem to be enough for them. I didn’t want to go to church because when I asked questions people tried to modify my behavior instead of answering them. I didn’t want to go to church because there was nowhere else where I felt quite so alone as Sunday morning. I didn’t want to go to church because I couldn’t keep pretending that nothing was wrong every week. I couldn’t pretend to be deeply in love with God every time the music started. I couldn’t pull off pretending to be someone who I was not. I was not perfect, and it seemed to be a prerequisite for membership.
I don’t know what the little girl said, but the Halloween Angel leaned in close to her and said, barely more than a whisper, “Little girl, Halloween means Holy Night. It’s not about masks and threatening people for candy. Church should be a place where we go to experience God’s grace from his people. No masks. And sweet things come to us whether we deserve them or not.”
Then the little girl started singing Brushing My Teeth for a Meeting with Jesus, which was my cue to meet Gabe underneath the stage, where the hydraulic lifts would take us up on stage at the end of Pastor Nate’s sermon, so we could sing Monsters in Our Midst. I swirled through backstage and crouched down, making my way through the struts and metal underpinnings of the stage. There was a small opening wh
ere I could see the aisle where Pastor Nate would come down, carried in a coffin.
Gabe came in behind me and settled in next to me. I could smell his sweet ambrosia skin. “You were off script,” I said.
“I know.” The cue came for Pastor Nate to start down the aisle, and six men came, three on each side of the coffin. They were having trouble keeping hold of the handles, struggling and slipping and rearranging their hands. I giggled. Gabe crowded me so he could see also. His neck was only inches from my mouth. I licked my teeth. Gabe turned toward me. “What did you do?”
“I put vegetable oil on the coffin handles,” I said, and just then there was an enormous clanging as the coffin fell in the aisle. The men quickly picked it up, dropped it again, and there was muffled yelling from Pastor Nate inside. The coffin started bucking in their grip. I tried to muffle my laughter but it was already making a wave through the audience. They thought it was part of the show.
“What’s the plan here, Lara?”
I put my hand on Gabe’s face. My fangs were out, touching my lower lip. “Once he gets out of that coffin, I’m going to go up there and tell them the truth, Gabe. I’m going to tell them that he’s a mummy, and humiliate him in front of the entire congregation.”
Gabe put his hand over mine. “You can’t do that. That’s wrong, Lara.”
“What he’s doing isn’t wrong? He’s using this church.”
Gabe shook his head. “Yes, what he’s doing is wrong. But who made you the judge of our church? You’re not even a member here. Is it because you’re smarter? More spiritual? Better? Who put you in charge of Pastor Nate? Does he report to you?”
“Someone has to do something, Gabe, and you’re all sitting around letting him do whatever he wants.”
Gabe pushed my hand away. “No, we’re not. I pray every night that God will fix our church. Because God’s the one in charge, Lara, not me. I don’t have a way to remove him, not without doing something horrible myself.”
“Like what, Gabe? What would be so horrible?”
He shook his head and his tinsel halo shook with it. “Like outing him as a mummy. That’s not ours to do. If it isn’t obvious to people, it’s not our place to point it out. If he’s not honest with people, it’s not our job to tell them.”
“I disagree. I’m going to tell the whole congregation.” There was a gigantic crash. Pastor Nate punched his way out of the coffin and splinters flew everywhere. The audience clapped and Pastor Nate crawled out of the wreckage, his suit in tatters, the bandages obvious to anyone who cared to look, his eyes burning. “Being a mummy, that’s a sin, Gabe. And this church needs to know that their leader is a sinner.”
Gabe slumped back. “And you don’t see anything wrong with that?”
“No.”
Gabe moved away from me and took a deep breath. “Are you going to tell them about me, too?”
“What?” I couldn’t see him clearly in the shadows. “Tell them what?”
“Are you going to tell them that I’m a werewolf?”
Pastor Nate was preaching now. Gabe’s eyes never left my face, but I looked away, grabbed onto one of the struts under the stage and tried to think of something to say. “I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do. There’s nothing people at this church hate more than that. I guarantee you they hate werewolves more than mummies. Are you going to go up there and tell everyone?”
“Of course not. How do you… how can you stay in this church?”
“Just because I’m a werewolf doesn’t mean that I don’t love Jesus.” He cleared his throat. “You understand that, right?”
I heard Pastor Nate building toward our cue. Gabe got on his lift, and I got on mine. I couldn’t say anything to him. He didn’t seem to expect it. Our cue was maybe thirty seconds away when he said, “You’d be surprised how many people here I’ve told. Some of them were complete jerks about it. But less than you would think.” And then our platforms were rising and we came up onto the stage with Pastor Nate, and our music was starting underneath Nate’s sermon.
Nate slammed the podium and shouted, “There are monsters among us! They mean us harm. Vampires and werewolves and zombies and killer robots and sasquatch.” Sasquatch? That was a new one.
Gabe started singing, quietly. “So it’s come to this/There are monsters in our midst/On this year’s Halloween/How will we be seen?” I couldn’t believe he was going through with the song, especially now that I knew that he was one of them. One of us, I mean. Lumped in with the vampires and the werewolves.
There was no way I could sing my lines. I started to sing, but my voice cracked and I couldn’t. Gabe picked up my lines, but he didn’t sing them right. “Do monsters mean me harm?/Is there cause for alarm/Would I feel so scared/if I’m protected by God’s strong arm?”
I managed to sing with him on “So what are we to do/humans like me and you?”
Pastor Nate caught the change in the song, but it didn’t slow him down. He reached into the podium and pulled out a wooden stake and held it high for the whole congregation to see. “There are monsters even here, in this congregation, hidden among us,” he shouted. “There’s only one thing for us to do!” Every eye in the place was fastened onto him, and he told them to reach under their chairs. Thousands of stakes came up in their hands. I turned, and Gabe had one in his hands, too. I couldn’t believe it. He crossed the stage and grabbed hold of me.
He sang, “Should we take our stakes and pound them into the vampire’s chests?” Pastor Nate turned back to look at me, his eyes shining. Gabe let the stake fall from his hand and sang, “No! We love God because he loved us first and best.”
He turned to the audience and spoke over the music, his voice vibrating with the authority of the Halloween Angel, “If we love him because he first loved us, that means he loved us long before we were perfect. While we were monsters of one sort of another, he loved us. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
He closed his eyes and sang, “Because we are the church/let’s not leave society in the lurch/let’s love the monsters in our midst/So that they might come to Jesus.”
And then, as if they were all controlled by one mind, the congregation lifted up their stakes and threw them on the ground, just like Gabe had done, and they started to applaud. Pastor Nate stood with his back to the audience, so they couldn’t see the fury on his face, or how he gripped the stake in his hands. But he knew the crowd, he could feel the energy there, and he whirled around toward them, held the stake over his head and threw it with great fanfare onto the ground in front of the stage, and the crowd surged forward, cheering.
The music started for the last song, and the whole choir, buoyed by the shouts of the audience, got ready to sing something amazing. But I ran to the front of the stage and held out my hands and shouted for quiet.
“Enough!” I shouted. The people in the back couldn’t hear me and started telling everyone to be quiet and eventually they all stood there, silently. So far as they knew this was part of the show. “Someone here has a secret,” I said.
Gabe said, “Lara, don’t!”
Pastor Nate put his hand on Gabe’s chest. “Let her do her worst,” he said, and a strange smile turned up one side of his lips. Under his breath he said, “They’ll only hate you for tarnishing their idol.”
“Someone here has a secret,” I repeated. “A mask. The Halloween Angel, he said that for Christians, Halloween isn’t about masks. We wear these costumes and we think nothing good can come to us if we’re just ourselves. We say, ‘His grace is enough’ and then hide our sins, hide when we mess up. We point our fingers at other people, we point out how they’ve failed. Because we’re so perfect. As if grace was only for the people who have it all together.”
“Get on with it,” Pastor Nate growled. “If you’re going to say it, say it.”
I nodded to him. “Okay, Pastor. Grace, by definition, comes only to those who are broken and messed up. Sinners. Forgiveness can only
come to people who have done damage. Paul wrote, ‘be strong in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ How can we be strong in his grace if we’re pretending that we’re strong ourselves? To be strong in his grace requires us to be honest about who we are. We’re weak. We’re broken.
“I came to this church because I wanted to use it. I wanted things from it. From all of you. I didn’t want to give you anything. I wanted to take. So now, I’m going to give you the only thing I have. It’s a piece of information. I hope you’ll know what to do after I say this.” Pastor Nate tensed, and I let my fangs sharpen and grow. “I’m a vampire.” No response from the crowd. I took off my choir robe, revealing the beat up Army jacket and the tattered jeans and boots. “Halloween is about putting on a mask and demanding what you want from others. Give me what I want or I’ll punish you. But that’s not what it should be for us. It’s about taking our masks off. Telling each other, this is who I really am, no matter how unattractive you might find me. And I’m not demanding anything from you, I’m not threatening you, I’m just asking: please don’t send me away.”
The words seemed to echo out into the dark hall. A low murmuring started, which grew to a buzz. Some people toward the back picked up their stakes. A man in the middle of the crowd clapped his hand over his son’s eyes. A few families left with their kids. At just that moment the little girl jumped up on stage and shouted, “I love church! Isn’t this the greatest?” There was a half second of silence, and then she hugged me, she hugged me so tight that the air went out of my lungs. The crowd went wild, cheering and shouting and whistling. The music to Church is Sweeter Than All The Candy from All the Strangers in All the World started up, and the little girl started singing and dancing with the choir, while I walked backstage in a daze. I hung my robe in the choir closet.
I heard a step behind me. It was Pastor Nate. He stared at me for a long moment, but he didn’t say anything. I stared back, not sure what to say, either. At last he said, “What you did tonight. I can respect that.” Then he turned and walked away. As he re-entered the stage he began to sing and dance with the choir. He clapped his hands over his head, and the choir responded, dancing around him, and the audience chanted and sang and cheered. I could see his bandages flapping around him, but no one seemed to notice, no one seemed to care in the midst of their joyous dance.
I picked up my purse and started out to my car, the crisp night air filling my lungs. I could hear the music and the raucous sound of clapping and stomping from inside the church.
Caroline was waiting for me at my car. “I thought you might try to sneak off,” she said.
“Caroline, I’m --”
“No, let me talk first, Lara. I like you. I think that’s been clear since you first got here. I really do. You say cruel things sometimes, and you’re really skeptical, which is hard for me. You’re so smart and I know you mean well, but when you questioned whether I was worshiping Jesus, Lara, that hurt so bad.”
“I know.” I set my purse on the car and crossed my arms. “It was wrong of me to say that. I know that’s not true about you.”
She touched my arm. “But the thing is, some of that other stuff you said. That was true. I realized there are some ways, some really important ways where I am following Pastor Nate and not Jesus.” She laughed. “When you said that first Sunday that you followed Jesus and not Pastor Nate, I thought that was a joke.” She squeezed my arm. “I want to follow Jesus, too.” She shivered, and we watched the cars on the street, their headlights washing over the church. “I’m leaving Big Box. You were right, I’m not growing here. I’ve been afraid to go because I love it here so much, but it’s the right thing for me to leave. I can’t get what I need here, and I want so badly to grow up.”
“What are you saying?”
She laughed and walked toward her own car. In fact, she was almost skipping. “I’m saying that I’ve outgrown Big Box Mega Church.” She laughed again, her voice rising and echoing through the parking lot, hitting against the walls of the church and coming back to us, full of joy and that same naïve energy I had seen in her since the moment I met her. “It’s time to move on. And that’s a choice I made all by myself.” She waved her cell phone at me. “I didn’t even text Pastor Nate to ask his opinion.” And then she was in her car, and she honked when she drove away, her hand waving happily out the window.
Gabe waved to her, too, as he crossed the parking lot. He didn’t say anything, just leaned against the car next to me, his stupid angel costume smacking me with its wings, his halo askew, sparkles getting all over my jacket. I rested beside him and listened to the singing from the church, watching the warm yellow light fill it up from inside and spill out into the darkness.
I felt a deep sense of peace. Peace. Like a raging storm inside of me had been tamed, had been calmed, and the last drops of rain had spread out in concentric circles, leaving only placid stillness and a surface smooth and silent as glass. And something else, something I never expected in this place. Hope. I took hold of Gabe’s hand and for once, maybe just for this moment, I didn’t want to suck his blood or use him, I just wanted to stand next to him and look at the ridiculous warehouse with the cross on the top, and before I knew it I was praying and I said, “Dear Jesus, bless the people of Big Box Mega Church. Open Pastor Nate’s eyes to you so he can lead your people into your presence.” Tears welled up in my eyes, and, embarrassed, I wiped them away with my sleeve.
“Amen,” Gabe said. “Amen.”
Crowds of masked children wandered past the church on the sidewalk and for the first time in several years I had nothing to hide. I let my teeth sharpen. I relaxed. No need to hide that I was a vampire anymore, at least not here. Everyone already knew. Gabe didn’t pull away when my teeth sharpened, didn’t even mention it.
“Gabe,” I said. “There’s nothing here for me.”
“I know,” he said.
I thought about my next words carefully. I didn’t want to speak them lightly. If I said them I wanted to live by them. “When’s the next membership class?”
He pulled away and looked me in the eyes, and then he laughed and hugged me. “Thank God,” he said.
And that’s exactly what we did.
The End
Want to get to know Lara better? Her first appearance was in Night of the Living Dead Christian. Learn how she became a vampire, why she became a Christian, and see her in action against Borut, the vampire hunter.
Night of the Living Dead Christian is the story of Luther, a werewolf on the run, whose inner beast has driven him dangerously close to losing everything that matters. Desperate to conquer his dark side, Luther joins forces with his neighbor to find someone who can help. Yet their time is running out. A powerful and mysterious man is on their trail, determined to destroy the wolf at all costs….
By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Night of the Living Dead Christian is a spiritual allegory that boldly explores the monstrous underpinnings of our nature and tackles head-on the question of how we can every hope to be truly transformed.
Other books by Matt Mikalatos:
Validus Smith has three goals. Stay alive. Save the world. Finish her homework.
For centuries the paladins protected the Earth from a creeping darkness known as the Blight. That all changed when a new enemy destroyed the paladins, plunging the free worlds into danger. Validus Smith—an ordinary girl in an ordinary town—is next in line to become the paladin. Untrained, unsure of her destiny, and hunted by monstrous forces, she must recover the fabled Sword of Six Worlds, the only weapon capable of defeating the Blight. The Sword, however, is not on Earth, but in a strange fantasy world connected to her own. In an unfamiliar world of monsters, talking animals and living rocks, can an ordinary girl like Validus survive?
The Sword of Six Worlds is the first in a series of entertaining, world-hopping fantasy novels.
Matt Mikalatos liked Jesus a lot. In fact, he couldn’t believe how much they
had in common. They shared the same likes, dislikes, beliefs, and opinions. (Though Jesus did have better hair.) So imagine Matt’s astonishment when he finds out that the guy he knows as Jesus . . . isn’t. He’s an Imaginary Jesus: a comfortable, convenient imitation Matt has created in his own image. The real Jesus is still out there somewhere . . . and Matt is determined to find him.
In this hilarious, fast-paced, sort-of-true story hailed as “Monty Python meets C. S. Lewis,” Matt embarks on an incredible chase to find the real Jesus and ask him the one question that his Imaginary Jesus has never been able to answer. It’s a wild spiritual adventure like nothing you’ve ever read before . . . and it might bring you face-to-face with an imposter in your own life. This new edition now contains a discussion guide, an interview with the author, and other bonus features! (Previously published as Imaginary Jesus.)
Interact with the author:
Matt’s blog: https://www.mikalatos.com
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For more information about his books, see https://matt.mikalatos.com/books
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