three days it was becoming harder and harder to stay inside. Since everything she owned belonged to the Church, and since the Church currently didn’t know what to do with her, and since they had taken her out of the monastery without even giving her a chance to pack, she had nothing with her. She was bored and depressed.
Sister Mary did not watch TV, and she did not listen to secular music. She did not read for pleasure, nor did she partake of frivolous activities such as crosswords or Sudoku. So all day, every day, she sat in a chair by the window, dressed in the habit she had been wearing the day of her ultrasound, and she read from the Gideon Bible that she had found in the drawer of the bedside table. And she prayed, very hard, for her ordeal to end.
She had started reading with the curtains open, but so many children had pressed their faces up against he window, pointing and staring, that eventually she pulled them shut. This meant that she had to have the lights on all day in order to read, and she hated wasting electricity. Even more, she hated feeling like some kind of fallen woman, trapped behind glass in a zoo of iniquity, a cautionary exhibit for the saved souls who passed by.
And then, on Tuesday, her prayers were answered and her ordeal ended in the worst way possible.
She had just started the Bible over again and was on her least favorite book (Leviticus) when someone knocked on the door. Sister Mary stood up, her heart in her throat. They were here to tell her something bad. To throw her out. To excommunicate her. She would no longer be a nun. She would be nothing. She would be alone. It was all over. Sister Mary left the door on the chain and opened it a crack.
“Yes?” she said to the man on the other side.
“Mary Renfro?” he asked.
Instantly, she recognized him: it was the man from the airport of horrors. This was he. He had finally come for her. She slammed the door in his face, and backed away. A million conflicting thoughts raced through her head. Most involved running away, but they all insisted on running in different directions and so the end result was that she short circuited and stood in the middle of the room making a sound like, “Err, err, err...”
Satan took the passkey he’d lifted and swiped it through the magnetic lock. CHUNK. He pushed the door open but it stopped at the chain.
“Are you really going to be like this?” he asked.
Mary stared at the face of evil, pressed into the gap in the door and she started to hyperventilate.
“Fine,” Satan said, taking her panic as an answer.
Grabbing his right wrist with his left hand, he braced himself and began to pull as hard as he could. His face turned red with exertion. He gritted his teeth. Reset his grip. And slowly, horribly he stretched his arm. The bones in his right arm made a soft pop, and then a muffled cracking as his right arm slowly, painfully stretched another inch. Agony flared in his shoulder. His skin was on fire. But still he pulled, and groaned and ripped, and finally his right arm was six inches longer than his left.
He slid his newly-stretched arm through the gap in the door and unhooked the chain. Then he pushed it open and he was standing right in front of Sister Mary.
“I hate doing that,” he said. “It really – ”
But the horror of his transformation had had a galvanizing effect on Sister Mary and she kicked him in the crotch. She’d learned this maneuver in high school during a self-defense class their gym teacher had claimed was a requirement. It was the only move she remembered and she was taken off guard by how effective it was. Satan doubled over and dropped to his knees. She lost a few valuable seconds gawping at her handiwork, but then she recovered her senses and fled to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
The bathroom door was flimsy, like a big piece of construction paper with a cheap, plastic knob. She took the heavy porcelain lid off the back of the toilet tank and held it over one shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to let this drug dealer, this reality perverter, this metaphysical criminal know that he’d tangled with the wrong Poor Clare. This time, Satan didn’t bother