Even in the hardest of times the killer-priest helped to uphold the fear of God or devotion to the Lord, standing guard over Christian morals against all manner of hellish henchmen. Nobles in their manors, gentlemen officials in their spruced-up offices or serfs without a groat, lying on roadside haystacks under the stars, discussed this mystical hero of the land. With fear and reverence they picked over the killer-priest’s apparitions, wreathed in tales and legends. In the parishes the church hags whispered, quietly guessing whom his holy scythe would smite next. Like hens that have seen a hawk’s shadow on the ground, the godless would scatter in the town squares on seeing the dark silhouette of a hang glider skimming over the earth, bringing them heavenly punishment. This section presents some of the tales written down by ethnographers and published by SKEPTIKAS.org, as beheld by the most eminent researcher and chronicler of the killer-priest, Vajėzus.

Warning: Some of the stories in this section describe dark moments of humanity. If you are someone who, after watching a horror film or reading a Stephen King novel, goes out to kill people, or, after playing Grand Theft Auto, rushes out to crush people in the streets with cars, as millions of people around the world and Muslims rushed to do after playing too much of it, you had better skip this section.

Truly, there is no man on the Land of Mary (lt. ‘Marijos Žemė’: a pious name for Lithuania) who has not heard of the killer-priest, but terror holds the nation in fetters. Everyone is silent. And yet not so long ago there were daredevils who, true, only with the bishop’s blessing and from the churchyards of Lithuania’s foremost shrines, threatened in lofty voices and promised the killer-priest his end. And where are they now? Ask the first passer-by what he knows of the killer-priest – he will only bulge his eyes and drawl out: “Nothing, go away, madman...” And verily I say unto You – a shroud of terror, sown by the evil cleric, enfolds the land, and only when the sun has risen do the old folks’ faces clear, the businessmen crawl out to swagger in luxurious carriages, the beggars to cadge a penny, the young ones to run to one another. And everyone hurries – the day is short, after all, and HE watches the disobedient making merry, whets in his sleep his famous straightened scythe (the war scythe of Lithuanian peasant rebels), polishes the 32 kg kettlebell hung on the black hang glider with two white crosses on its wings... When it began no one remembers any more, and were it not for the manuscript on bat skin that I found while repairing a lopsided hut on a chicken leg, the truth would never come back from the other side...

Many years ago there lived in Skiemonys a citizen N. I., called Zelandijus by the people of the surrounding villages. He lived with his goodwife Ona and saw no want – he had a farm, livestock and other goods. Only, children were not granted to them, and whatever Zelandijus and Ona tried – they went to the doctors in the capital and gave to the parish – there were none, and that was that. They were already losing hope when the gazettes announced that H. E. the President of the Republic Smetona (Antanas Smetona, President of Lithuania 1926–1940) was promising to come to those parts. A spark flashed in their eyes, the barn burnt down, but who would bother about such trifles – His Excellency himself is coming, perhaps he will have mercy and let them know the joy of life.

And truly, on the 7th of August in the year of the Lord 1929, Smetona visited Skiemonys. A sea of people flowed in to see the guest, little soldiers dart about flashing their epaulettes, policemen with their Brownings polished stand to attention in cordons along the roadsides. The horns are playing, a Jew, dazed after a dressing-down from the district head, scrubs the windows of a cottage – in a word, a commotion beyond telling. And as soon as all fell silent, even the little grey birds on the roofs grew still – a light shone forth, a march blared out. Out of a foreign ottomobile stepped Himself, took a step – the fields turned green, looked at the old folk sitting along the walls – and they grew young again. And as Himself strode on, Zelandijus broke through the thicket of stewards and fell at his feet and, in the deathly silence that suddenly descended, shedding bitter tears, begged for mercy – to be granted a son. “Leave him,” cried His Excellency to the captain of dragoons, who had already raised his sabre to put a terrible end to the wretch. “And thou, little man, arise and go home and look not back – be it as thou wilt,” he said, and vanished, spinning, hissing and giving off clouds of sulphur smoke. Coming home, Zelandijus found his goodwife rocking a baby – the poor things rejoiced and named him Giedrius. And then the bright little sun went dark, thunder struck, the bog-holes opened and swallowed His Excellency’s whole retinue with its horses, soldiers, firearms and cannons too, leaving not a trace of the festivities that had been. And the little people understood that all this boded no good, rushed in and devoured the whole feast laid out – if this was the end of the world, at least they would end their days with full bellies. And they fell like leaves from gluttony and from eating unwashed vegetables, and there were not enough of the living to bury the perished, and in the end only Zelandijus and his household were left in the whole village. Thus the killer-priest, who was as yet neither priest nor killer and had no flesh of his own upon the earth, but only roamed about Skiemonys as a restless soul, first showed the world its future and his own glory to come.

Giedrius grew up nicely. He was perhaps something of a poor eater, somewhat pale, but lively and clever. Having learnt to run at two months, he chased the neighbours’ hens and, once he caught one, kept testing how this or that part was attached – torn-off heads and hooves lay about the yard not in tens but in hundreds. When he had grown a little he began to speak: “Hail, woman, who mayest thou be?” thus he first greeted the neighbours’ lass left to mind him, and to his mother he spoke these words: “Whithersoever thou goest, the shadow of him by whose design I came into this world, and who is my true father and inspirer, shall follow thee, and thou shalt see no peace, called the mother of the black cleric; whole generations shall curse thee, but be at peace, thou shalt be provided for.” And all around were so amazed at this that four grown men swallowed their tongues and choked to death.

So Giedrius reached the age of seven. That day Zelandijus went into the rowan grove to cut a fine fishing rod for the child. And a storm arose such as had not been upon Lithuania for seven years, a great rain came down, earth mingled with sky, hailstones the size of a hen’s egg beat down the rye, hens, sheep, tractors and beetroots all around. Zelandijus did not come back that day, nor in the morning. And when on the seventh day Ona, hoarse from wailing, was getting ready to go to church to buy a Mass, he came home in tatters, with strangely glittering eyes, holding in his hand a cross with sharp edges. And his look was exactly that of Smetona’s adjutants in the memorable year of 1929. Having hushed his wench, he grabbed a little keg of tar, went to the bathhouse, washed and, back home again, dozed off. And from then on he became very strange: he would not let his wench near him, and the lasses, whom he used to love to tickle and now and then even to tip over somewhere in the hay, he would not even glance at. He touched neither beer nor arielka (a Lithuanian dialect word for vodka), ate little and only vegetables – he changed in every way. But then he grew so close to his son that the old geezers began to suspect wicked things; but Giedrius, being very clever, said to them: “Ech, ye hundred-year-old elders, this is no business of yours, nor even of mine – it is the secret and the will of the dark lord; is it for us, poor little people, to resist him and call down the lord’s wrath with pitch and brimstone upon ourselves?” And all marvelled at these words.

But it did not last long – one day Giedrius vanished. And when a crowd of indignant villagers surrounded Zelandijus’s house, the master himself came out onto the porch and said: “The time has come to tell You, honourable gentlemen, that I have decided to send my son, Giedrius, to become a priest. And though he is young, with great toil and through the efforts of a kinsman who serves in a ministry in Kaunas, I have got him into the priests’ seminary. You will never again see him as he has been.” He sighed and went on: “And I am not the one You take me for. I was that one. But the time has come to tell You...” – and lightning struck, the sky went dark, the earth split open, a terrible silence fell. And suddenly out of the gaping crack, spinning and spitting fire, there emerged a creature resembling President Smetona; it plunged its long fingers with glass nails into Zelandijus’s chest and, tearing out his heart, laughed horribly: “I take this heart together with the black soul that was put into this body in the rowan grove of Skiemonys, and I put it into the body of a new cleric of darkness, which shall become its home and through which it shall spread terror throughout the land and its borders.” And then those gathered saw Giedrius standing nearby in black clothes and with bloody teeth, and around his neck hung his father’s cross. And Giedrius impatiently seized the heart and, before everyone’s eyes, swallowed it in one gulp, laughed hollowly and said: “Thus the black soul has found a black body, and a new black cleric is born, whom generations to come shall know as the killer-priest.” He swung the straightened scythe to the left, rolling off forty heads, swung it to the right – another forty rolled. Both evil ones howled and vanished as if they had never been; only the initials “KP”, written in blood in the sand, and the charred logs of Zelandijus’s house bore witness to the terrible event...

The little people tried to tell the police, the chemist and the parish priest, but they all just laughed and chased the cranks away, and needlessly so. With the years it was all forgotten, the old folk died out, the young ones mocked. And so it went on until it began...

In those days, when I was still studying at the priests’ seminary in Kaunas, I had occasion to know Giedrius from Skiemonys, now known by the name of the killer-priest. He was such a simple, scrawny little seminarian, so we picked him a simple, Lithuanian name too. We used to call him Brother Aurigarijus. Aurigarijus would come into the chapel and say: Let’s go, you and me, and have a fight with prayer books! And at once such chaos would break out!

And the prayer book he had was no ordinary one. With metal fittings, a chain and a lock, so that no curious parishioner would stick his nose into god’s affairs. And fighting with that prayer book he always won, as if a demon were helping him.

But one day he came and said: Let’s go and deprave children today! We even sat down. Maybe, we said, we’d rather have a fight, or say a rosary or something? And up he swung that terrible prayer book of his!

We lined up and, singing “A Hundred Catholic Priests”, set off we ourselves knew not where. Through forests, through fields. And so all the way to kindergarten No. 14. That is where Aurigarijus began to manifest himself:

– What’s your name, Petriukas? – he asks some kid.

– Petriukas – the kid mumbles, eyeing Aurigarijus askance.

– Do you want some chocolate crosses, child?

– I do!

At this Brother Aurigarijus gives him such a whack across the backside with his rosary! Then, like a father, he wipes away the child’s tears and says with a serious face:

– The devil, child, has built himself a nest in your body. Only by flogging and prayers can you save yourself from his power – and he tells him something more about the horrors of hell.

At those words the child would even stop bawling, would greedily kiss Aurigarijus’s feet and promise to come to him every day.

And so the children took to visiting Brother Aurigarijus in his cell. One at a time, two at a time... The spiritual father tried to forbid it, but Aurigarijus said: Why trouble ye them? For theirs is the kingdom of god.

No one knew what to answer him to that, and so all with one voice glorified his wisdom.

True, his rosary began to wear out quickly, but in everyone’s opinion this bore witness to Brother Aurigarijus’s extraordinary piety. And when at last the rosary snapped, Aurigarijus proclaimed to the whole of Kaunas that the time was not far off when the devil would be driven out of the children. And, having appointed a day for it, he zealously urged all who could hold a cross and a nunchaku in their hand to help and to pray for the unsullied souls of the children. And from all over Lithuania pilgrims flocked in, spreading the fame of Brother Aurigarijus throughout the world.

And so the appointed day came. Participants gathered without number – two bishops, an army chaplain, the motorised church hag division and the men of the Gediminas regiment, and besides them beggars, Jewish pedlars and Gypsies with bears. The wind died down, clouds covered the sun. Standing in the middle, Aurigarijus called the children to him. And taking each one, he led him to a bath of holy water; he would undress him himself, soap him lavishly with holy soap and bathe him. And the devil would run out through the mouth, and such a child would become an ateitininkas (a member of Ateitis, the Lithuanian Catholic youth movement). That is why they have bred in such numbers in Lithuania.

But he bathed the last child, and the devil in him did not so much as stir. In vain the bishops threatened him with the rosary, in vain the church hags beat him with umbrellas – he kept silent and did not stir, like Saint George.

Aurigarijus came near and asked him: What is thy name? And the devil answered, saying: My name is Legion, for we are many here! And he said moreover: What is thy business, killer-priest? Why dost thou torment me?

And the devils besought him much that he would not drive them clean out of that country; therefore Aurigarijus said unto them: Come out, thou evil spirit, and crawl into yonder church hags.

Forthwith the devils possessed the little church hags. Some danced striptease and chatted up the priests, others set their sights on the little seminarians, and others still flew away as ravens and ran away as werewolves.

Recovering from our horror, we rushed to the culprit to ask his advice – and lo, he is gone. On the ground lie the cassock, the breviary and the priest’s other terrible implements, but Brother Aurigarijus is nowhere to be seen. And none of us saw him again from that day. For ever and ever, amen.

It was the hot June of 1939. The master craftsman of the village of Žvairiškės (‘Cross-eyed-ville’), the hundred-handed Bronius Šernasmaugis (‘Boarstrangler’), in his little bathhouse – his jolly little workshop – was intently carving a Pensive Christ. The practised hands glided smoothly over the aspen stump, revealing with every movement the beauty of the work to come. Swish – an eye appears, swish – a nose, sparse teeth. “Oooooo,” moans the god-maker, “Uuuuu,” answers an eagle owl from a tree.

Suddenly the hand trembles and the sharp tool falls onto the earthen floor. Silence, ringing silence. A glance. A groan. The chirpers and the wired radio go quiet; struck dumb, Bronius’s wooden leg creaks no more. The master senses a stench growing ever stronger, ever thickening smoke begins to gnaw at his wide-open, gummy eyes, a demonic drone presses on his ears. At last the master, gathering all his strength, opens the door. A shadow, a black shadow smothering everything, a black figure. In the swirl of smoke a luxurious moped takes shape, the rider’s foot beats a frenzied rhythm. The stranger takes off his helmet, the stench becomes unbearable and the master loses consciousness; only in his subconscious does a thought race at insane speed: a priest, the killer-priest.

The master comes to, and the killer-priest slowly begins to speak, whirling mahogany nunchaku above his head. Accompanied by foam and sparks, a ghastly, trembling voice rings out: “Wings, make me, you donkey, wings!”

Seeing the priest’s toothless mouth and undulating lewd tongue, the master loses consciousness again. But the priest stands beside him, and there is no time for the god-maker to faint: ever more menacingly the nunchaku whistles, ever more fiercely the priest’s gaze burns. The god-maker takes up his implements and, crossing himself, sets to work.

At last, after 6 nights of sleeplessness and gruelling work, the hellish killing machine gleams in the moonlight – the killer-priest’s hang glider. Bareheaded, in nothing but his shirt, fettered by fear, Master Bronius awaits the hour of his requital.

There comes the sound of a mug being torn apart, a skull crunches under the priest’s cowboy boots. A moment later the denim wings of the hang glider flutter. Slashing the sky, filling the broad horizon with stench, the killer-priest shoots sharply upwards. Only the mute, phlegmatic squirrel, the witness of this event, slowly raises her head, following the killer-priest with a dull gaze.

The killer-priest was first spotted with the hang glider in the Ignalina district. On that occasion a resident of the village of Matiliokai, 74-year-old Zosė Klimavičienė, did not come home on time. A punitive expedition organised by her son-in-law found the old woman’s defiled corpse in the forest. The whole family rejoiced greatly at this, but it never even shot into anyone’s head who that unknown benefactor could have been.

After a while children began to tell of having seen some priest flying a hang glider over the forest. No one believed their tales except the local curate, who at once sat down to write the bestseller “How to Defend Yourself against the Killer-Priest”. Now the only copy of this book left is in the Babtai library, because in that region the killer-priest killed off all the literate villagers and even the blind librarian.

Once some curious tourists photographed him sitting in a tree and reading his breviary. Laid out beside him were his favourite killing implements: an axe, a knife, a razor and a potato sack.

It was just then, at Easter, that the incident in the church took place which aroused universal interest in the killer-priest. And it went like this...

From early morning the crowd had been pressing into the Ignalina church, but the priest still did not appear. A rumour spread that the good dear parish priest had gone on a drinking binge. When people were already about to disperse, the church suddenly filled with smoke. The women began to shriek, darkness fell, and when it had all passed, we beheld in the pulpit the killer-priest, who had appeared there no one knew how. Behind his back hung the famous hang glider, its wings spattered with the blood of yet another granny.

Forthwith all prayed, saying: A great prophet is risen up among us!

Ethnographers who have visited the Ignalina district relate that the village wenches never go to the well alone in the evening – always together, in a bigger group. Those fools hope that the killer-priest’s hand will not rise to kill so many people at once. A superstitious public.

Once the gallant hunters from the rural district of Paketuriai tried to shoot that monster, but he managed to vanish from them in the dark of night, and ghastly laughter echoed from the forest for a long time after. The buckshot only tore off a little edge of his cassock, which, after long debates in the Seimas, is now exhibited in the Birkoniai Museum of Ethnography under Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture.

Long ago, not far from the village of Skiemonys, where the killer-priest, still young then and called Giedrius, spent his childhood blowing up frogs with his grandfather’s bicycle pump, there was another small village – Kušiakų Tarpakynė. The primates caked with dirt who lived in it, in whom the lice could have beaten any city in Japan for density, would have dragged on for many an age yet. But after Giedrius turned into the killer-priest, everything came to a hairless end.

Like every normal person or the leftover of a stinking muzhik’s abortion, Giedrius attended to his natural needs in the privy of his homestead (i.e. he shat and pissed there, farting all the while). But the stench he left behind, or the sulphur fumes, were so acrid and mighty that they gnawed out, as if scooping them out with a spoon, the peepers of the people of all the nearby homesteads. So much so that they went blind, and more than one, having gone out at night for a piss, tripped over a dungy bucket, fell down and, in the mud of his own pond, met Veronika’s fate (Veronika, the heroine of Antanas Vienuolis’s classic story ‘Paskenduolė’, ‘The Drowned Girl’, drowns herself). Everyone got fed up with that stench rising from the local arse-opening, and the villagers decided to fill in that stinking pit of hell. Long they waited for their chance, until the killer-priest left his farmstead and moved to live among the tussocky bogs of the surrounding forests. All that remained was to agree the liquidation project with the killer-priest’s grandfather. But soon even the blind old man, who had chased everyone away from that cloaca with an axe, while fishing out one night a fallen scrap of the “Peasants’ Newspaper” meant for wiping his arse, tumbled into it himself and drowned. Then all the livestock farms of the Kušiakai collective farm (Lithuania’s farmers were forced into Soviet kolkhozes after the Second World War) laid their slurry channels into that privy and, pouring their waste in there, hoped that chloride of lime mixed into the pig and cow dung would damp down the reek of excrement spreading from the cursed opening. But it did not help. People began to say that at night devils and other monsters of hell showed themselves there, having made through that privy hole a gate from hell to the earth, through which they dragged in the souls of dead sinners. Once, having stuffed herself with pig compound feed and unable to hold it in, the milkmaid Jadvyga was tempted to have a crap there. A minute later she shot out howling, waving the lardy folds of her bare arse, and out of her arse wriggled a cloacal roundworm some 12 metres long and half a metre thick. Another minute later that snake, together with the shit from her arse, sucked out the milkmaid’s brains and crawled back into the pit in the little shed. Unable to bear such a loss, the chairman of the “Golden Ear” collective farm sent 10 of his strongest men there with sandbags, but neither that evening nor the next morning did they come back. No one ever saw them again.

In the autumn of the same year, near the village of Kušiakai, in the Kalabibiškiai (‘Hammer-a-Dick-ville’, a godforsaken village) house of culture, there was being held a grandiose IT event and a frigging amazing exhibition, “InfoBliat” (‘Info-Fuck’, after Infobalt, Lithuania’s IT fair). Aldona from the Bybalai (‘Dicks-ville’) homestead (her house is right behind Alius Grabauskas’s barn) brought wooden, finely carved abacuses with angels on every little bagel, and the agrotechnician Zenonas presented a five-hole milking machine (the most sophisticated models of the time had only 4 holes). All its advantages, right down to being sucked dry, were demonstrated to the exhibition’s visitors by the five sons of Endrius Žvingilas, who had the biggest dicks in the village. The village men jostled in the queue in earnest, so that they could try out that invention of the learned men for themselves. The vet Mykolas Brazna, bigger than a bull, nicknamed “Pig Inseminator”, wanting to put it on himself as fast as possible and tearing the machine off the 86-year-old Aloyzas Susnelė (‘Starveling’), ripped out the whole contents of the old man’s crotch, roots and all, like a beet out of fallow ground. But the highlight of that year’s whole exhibition, the one that gave the most joy and hope, was the new crawler model e-StalinecTR-666 with a monstrous stainless-steel bucket and an installed “Matarola” Internet-666 mountable browser. On its bonnet preened a gilded cross with silver engravings, studded with sapphires and other precious little stones, and on its roof, welded on, stood a 20-tonne barrel for filling with holy water, with an autonomous system for spraying ghouls. From early morning the village men, gathered round it, discussed such a wondrous miracle of machinery, for they liked to measure their strength against one another with tractors in the fields. More than once they had tried to beat one another in the potato field, now in speed, now in power. They would zoom across the ploughland like the wind, or, hitched together with cables, try to out-pull one another. Once a village man as solid as a stone wall, Dulskis Kabašauskas, swore he could hold back 6 tractors and 12 horses pulling in different directions, so the men, having had a drink, tore him apart like a frog, so that his flesh was carried right onto a branch of the lime tree at the farthest homestead of the village. On that occasion the wenches gathered up the guts in the fields and made potato sausages for everyone’s supper. The villagers could not stop rejoicing over the free treat and discussed with enthusiasm how Dulskis had lied about his strength and squealed at the end like a little girl. The next day, sobered up, they mourned and buried an empty coffin, stuffed with rubbish. True, later the stribai (fighters of the Soviet ‘destruction battalions’ who hunted the partisans, 1944–1954) came from the district centre looking for Kabašauskas, because he was a snitch. They knocked out the whole village’s teeth, shot three homesteads and, having written down the locals’ tales that Kabašauskas had supposedly been led away by the forest bandits (the Soviet name for the anti-Soviet partisans), zoomed back to the centre having plucked nothing.

During that IT event an impressive show was planned. The village drinker Anupras Kuišys (Endrius Žvingilas’s half-brother) announced that he would drink the entire contents of the cowshed complex’s slurry pit in 20 minutes. Even his wife Adelė could not believe it or talk her husband out of such a witless fancy. The villagers even wrote a letter to a certain miracle-worker, Copperfield, asking him to undertake to do it instead of Anupras. In return they offered to let him do all the village wenches. But he refused, for he was still young and did not know how to make such a hell vanish by himself and show other miracles. Afterwards the village wenches went about for several weeks with their heads hung, downcast that they had not managed... to save the village. And no one had cleaned out that hell-shed of shit and piss since the days of the First World War, for no one could get anywhere near that opening. The stench steaming from the pit would eat through the rubber of gas masks, even foreign ones, in 5 seconds once you came closer than a kilometre, as if doused with concentrated sulphuric acid. More than one collective farmer who had strayed there drunk or by mistake met his end in the dark of night. All the fields were strewn with skeletons and other bones. In case Anupras failed to carry out the plan (though many thought he could lap up in one gulp not only a barrel of moonshine but the lavas of hell too), the second part provided for an operation by another brave man (eternal rest to him), the local agrotechnician Zakšinskas Algimantas, with the technical development e-StalinecTR-666 presented at the exhibition.

But before the event began, the sky was covered with black clouds and the sun went dark. Pillars of sulphur rose from under the earth and the killer-priest sprouted up. Glaring fiercely at those gathered, he said:

– All who attempt to fill in my privy shall meet with retribution, and the village shall be swept off the surface of the earth.

And, having sliced off the exhibition cashier’s head with his scythe, he flew off towards the forest. Nobody paid much attention to this, since they were already drunk, so they carried on with their plan. Besides, after the festivities a disco awaited, and the village men’s greasy fists had long been itching. Holding out had become impossible. After the disco there were always attractions of scratching fists on mugs, ending with the wenches won in fierce combat being tipped over in the nearest bushes.

Anupras tried his luck first, but having walked a third of the way across the field he slumped dead like a rag. People watched with horror in their eyes as the acid sulphur fumes coming from the privy gnawed the flesh off his bones in a few minutes, and it dripped off like snot. All that was left was a skeleton polished to dazzling whiteness, onto which not even a leech would have latched. In the field lay one more spotlessly gleaming fixture for anatomy lessons. Nobody knows any more what Kušiakų Tarpakynė is, and nobody even thinks that 8% of the world’s skeletons used in the anatomical sciences were brought from that field. Another 14% are businessmen dug out of the Panevėžys forest lands by forensic experts. The people of that town have always been noted for an excessively unhealthy urge to bury everything that moves and does not pay tribute. Sometimes the skeletons from the Panevėžys forests are missing toes or fingers, and the skulls have holes or fractures, so they are not valued in the world as highly as the Kušiakai ones.

Disappointment possessed the crowd, but hope did not fade completely. Having boarded up the windows and sealed himself in with wax, which the local parish priest had given him after melting down the candles meant for the services, the agrotechnician Algimantas planned to scoop up sand with the bucket of the armoured excavator and fill in that pit. But he only got halfway across the field. His white skull, like a monument to superhuman efforts to vanquish evil, reflecting the moon, gleams like a beacon on the fallow ground to this day. People say that by its light at night you can even read the “Muzhiks’ Adviser” gazette or a prayer book. The wind blew away the remains of the paint film of the crawler “tank” a year later, when all the iron had evaporated like ammonia.

So nothing worked out for them. In time the villagers forgot both the killer-priest’s visit, which had carried one employee’s life off into oblivion, and his warning. But a few years later events began that were fateful for Kušiakai.

The phantom of the Second World War covered the world. All the men went off to the war to fight the fascists. They thought that, once they had escaped from home, they could rape other men’s wenches, plunder, merrily shoot off bullets and hunt enemies like grunting boars in the forests, or play crosses and circles with knives on the backs of their foes.

Only one elderly priest with one arm and half a leg was left in the village. Since there were no other men in the village, the village wenches soon took to catching him at night as he walked home and raping him, the whole pack of them, every evening. Another half a year later the village sank into a quagmire of feminism (i.e. female homosexualism) and zoophilia, when the wenches began to have designs on one another’s livestock, any they saw with a bigger horn or end. They organised all sorts of whorish amusements: which of them would stay longest on the head of a bucking bull or be dragged along the ground without letting her happiness slip out. It was from that time that the proverb spread in Lithuania: “Better an elk on the land than a sparrow in the hand” (the Lithuanian proverb ‘better a sparrow in the hand than an elk in the forest’, turned round). Like a plague there began to spread every variety of cucumberphilia and beetrootphilia. Even the pickets of the fences went into circulation, vanishing from the fences in an instant as if into water. Kušiakai turned into Sodom and Gomorrah. Even an envoy from the Vatican had come to put the situation right. People said that the very same evening the wretch was carried off by the all-sweeping wave of village wenches. Only after the war were his remains found among the overturned gravestones in the church cemetery, pressed deep into the ground, with a crotch charred from friction.

A sunny spring came. While new shoots had not yet had time to replace the grass dried up over the winter, during a service (which was led by Aloyzas Susnelė’s granddaughter Apolonija) the killer-priest flew into the Kušiakai church and, having bitten off Apolonija’s head with his bloody maw like a nail with pliers, said:

– It is not lawful for wenches to say Mass! The hour foretold is come, when I shall turn you onto the way of the chosen, and the knowledge of God shall visit your sinful souls.

The killer-priest was of indescribably handsome build or of sweet face, and not one of the wenches in the village had seen a man for several years, so they began to drool from every end. As if bewitched, they lusted insatiably to listen to his holy speeches, sweet as honey, and, suspecting no evil design, did as he bade them. Love hung in the air.

And the killer-priest taught the little women of the village how to experience new pleasures with moles, something they had never yet tried even to think of. First he told them all to rub their loins, tits and other places well with fragrant oils or pig lard. To put on their finest clothes with lace or patterns and, on the hottest day, to gather in a field strewn with molehills. There he commanded each to pick herself a molehill hole, one lying nearer the centre of the field. All the other spare molehills he told them to fill generously with diesel. When they had done it all, he directed them to sit down on the molehills they had chosen. Some with arseholes, some with other holes, as each liked best. The one little woman left over at the end, appointed for the task, set the field on fire from every side with a paraffin torch. The moles, hiding from the burning earth at the edges of the field and having nowhere to go, began to move towards the centre of the field. And when there was nowhere left to run and everywhere in the burrows the smoke or the diesel fire was already gnawing the creatures’ noses or roasting their fur, they began to crawl out through the molehills along with earthworms and other little beasts. And on those the wenches were already sitting, awaiting untold joy, their arses and arse-cracks planted on top. Some had not washed for a year, so a number of the moles, after shaking in ghastly convulsions, died on the spot, like the Japanese from sarin gas. For the wenches reckoned, and the killer-priest explained, that untold pleasure would be granted when the moles began to caress them from inside with their paws or their downy little bodies. But those, having crawled in, cruelly tore the wenches’ guts apart in an instant. The wenches left alive and shrieking with horror, the fire nimbly swallowed with its tongues, like down. The dry spring grass, generously soaked in diesel, burnt like the fire under hell’s cauldron, and the wenches rubbed with oils or lard blazed, sizzling with pork fat, and turned to coal like haystacks. Those who still tried to escape, the killer-priest cut in half with his scythe like sausages.

That is how the killer-priest did away with all the wenches of the village, but the children left in the cottages and the babies he led away into the forest. Talk goes round that the children led into the forest were the first pupils of the priests’ seminary founded in Lithuania. That now in the priests’ seminary they teach the divine sciences or cunning wisdom to the new host of black-skirts: how to lure the savings out of foolish grannies with loving sermons and to pull out their gold teeth with pliers.

Hence the old people say: “Covet not to fill in the killer-priest’s privy if thou wouldst not have thy wench burst into flames with a mole in her arse.”

– Chocolate crosses! Chocolate crosses! Who wants chocolate crosses? – Agota Prushinskaya from the homestead of Aviliai was shouting in the half-empty market. The day had gone badly – she had earned only two litas, and even those she had all but taken by force.

– Stop! Surely you want a chocolate cross? – she darted up to a lone passer-by. He hunched up, turned up his collar and hurried away.

Agota decided to stop milling about the market. The earnings were meagre anyway, and besides, her days were already fulfilled... She went home and at once bore her husband Aldonas a little child, and, remembering the injustices of the world, named him Antanukas. And she rejoiced in him so much that she would let no one even touch him. Go, she would say, and paw your own child.

But her happiness did not last long. After only a month Madame Prushinskaya saw that her child had begun to yield to the temptations of the world. One moment he puts an uninventoried object in his mouth, the next he poos out something belonging to the neighbours. Then her husband Aldonas yells and orders the property to be restored. He orders them to take whatever there is and hand it back to the neighbour, potty and all.

Agota suffered. She questioned all her friends, grabbed every beggar and kept interrogating them on how to shield a child from the world and its temptations, so that he would grow up a true son of Madame Prushinskaya and not a debauchee and evildoer. But her friends shook their heads, and the beggars too could tell her little. At most they would tell the tale of the Dimitravas hard-labour prison and the Four Communards (four communists shot in Kaunas in 1926, made martyrs by Soviet propaganda). And so life flowed on in Aviliai.

And one day Agota Prushinskaya got up full of resolve. With a blow from the hoof she woke her husband, thrust an axe into his hands and drove him off into the forest to build a cabin for the child, so that in that cabin he would be safe from fairies, witches and every kind of evil. And the two of them, rolling up their sleeves, put up a little log house for Antanukas. So now every month they would take bread to the child and were at peace.

But a year went by, then another and yet another. And Agota saw that her child needed to learn his letters, so that he could read the Polish prayer book and know how to look up a tip in the “Farmer’s Calendar”. But who was to teach him? She wanted to give him to the itinerant tutor who had arrived, but changed her mind in time. That townsman, as everyone knows, would teach Antanukas all sorts of wickedness. Then perhaps give him to Simeonas the beggar? He may not be able to read, only write, but then he is one of our own, and even has holy sores on his body. Thinking it over like this, she resolved to walk to the church village of Karmėlava and ask god’s advice.

On Friday she set off. And at the crossroads she saw the killer-priest resting in the shadow of a wayside shrine, and took it as a sign. She woke him at once and asked him to teach her son his letters. And as payment she promised some pork fat and a bottle of vodka.

The killer-priest agreed, and Agota at once fetched the child and handed him over to the priest, charging the boy to obey him in all things.

The priest whisked the child off to his presbytery and gave him a sort of horn to blow. He would order every one of them to, and if one could not, he would drive him out into Lithuania after cutting three straps out of his back.

– Toot-toot-toot! – rang out through the forest, so that even the hanged men’s ropes snapped one after another. The priest rejoiced. He decided to make Antanukas into the man-train, who would horrify not only Aviliai but Karmėlava and Elektrėnai as well. But at first he said nothing, only told him to put the horn down and learn a letter or two from the wooden primer.

And that primer was not an ordinary one but cursed. The sorcerer of Kriogžlys himself had made it on the government’s orders, so that village children would not go on to study or become priests. Whoever tried to learn from that primer learnt nothing, only turned into a complete dimwit.

Antanukas studied and studied, at last ran out of patience and, without finishing the alphabet, decided to take up other learning. At this the killer-priest said:

– The other day, having risen, I prayed to Saint Eusebius, and he told me to teach you, child, the craft of the man-train.

Antanukas even jumped for joy! So many times he had heard from his remote cabin how the trains rumble, and once he had even overheard the herd boys saying that great lords ride in those trains, and that the devil himself turns the wheels in the train, and it can be stopped only by laying a brand-new cross on the rails. So, trembling with impatience, he hugged the priest and thanked him, bathed in tears. The priest raised his hands, black with blood, spoke one spell, worked another, and the third, the most secret, he only thought in his mind – and Antanukas turned into a train. And not just any train, but one with a red chimney and the most enormous wheels and a host of all sorts of ironwork besides.

That day there was no end to the merriment of the two of them. Fireworks went off, heretics’ pyres burned. The killer-priest crawled about the yard drunk, and Antanukas, breaking through the fence, set off into the world to seek adventures.

Racing through the forest, he did in a villager – the poor fellow could not understand, right up to his dying hour, how a train could be running here in the forest. But what was that to Antanukas! He turned back into a man, took the poor wretch’s basket of ceps and, making his way to the district centre, sent it to his mum by post, telling her to stew them with sour cream.

Madame Prushinskaya was overjoyed on hearing her son coming home. In her excitement she not only burnt the mushrooms but baked a cake too, and, having bought in plenty of everything, invited half the village to the welcome feast. And she herself tied on her prettiest headscarf and stood leaning by the little gate.

Just then the man-train up and drove into the yard. What a panic broke out! The women squealed, the men hid, and Simeonas the beggar, with an agility unusual for his age, scrambled up into the stork’s nest.

– Antanukas! My child! – Agota shouted. – My child, where are you? – at a run she went round all the carriages, but found her son nowhere.

– Mum, I’m here! – a thunderous voice boomed from the chimney. Everyone was frightened even more, and Simeonas, still squatting in the stork’s nest, struck up the psalm “Marvellous are thy works, lord”.

No one knows what happened then, but Prushinskaya suddenly understood that the terrible man-train standing in the middle of the yard was none other than her son Antanukas, once sold to the evil priest for a flitch of pork fat. So she hugged the child and led him to the table.

Everyone went back to their places, and the merriment went on. People chatted with the Prušinskas boy, wanting to find out the strangest things. Was it true that in Ignalina the sun rises only ten days a week, and even then comes from the south, was it true that in Kybartai there live nothing but bambizai (‘pot-bellies’, a slur for Protestants, who did not keep the Catholic fasts)? And others simply gawped, quite unable to understand what sort of apparition this was – a man after all, or a train.

Madame Prushinskaya too marvelled greatly at her son’s appearance. A headlamp instead of eyes, wheels instead of legs; he drinks no vodka and bites no cucumber, only lets off clouds of steam at the table.

Here I must remark that Antanukas was not the kind of man-train that usually goes about. Neither a diesel nor an electric was he, but the truest of true steam locomotives, with a water tank, a tender, a firebox and a sooty stoker inside. That stoker sat without ever climbing out and kept stoking the steam engine.

And when the feast was half over, a few men plotted an evil deed. They decided to get Antanukas drunk and find out where the killer-priest lives. They asked nicely – the Prušinskas boy kept silent. So they crept up and went and poured a bucket of alcohol into his water system.

The train shuddered through its whole body, the riveted seams groaned. The terrible steam engine rumbled harder and harder. The stoker still tried to release the valves, but it was too late... Overturning the table, Antanukas began to stamp out an inhuman train dance, crushing pots, plates and villagers’ heads with his wheels. Dazed by the gushing alcohol fumes, the people did not even try to run – they lay and waited their turn. It all ended as suddenly as it had begun, and soon a menacingly black column of smoke hung over Aviliai.

Arriving with the firemen, the district head found only one living person – Simeonas, squatting in the stork’s nest. Having got him down to the ground after long negotiations, the officials learnt the whole truth about the new danger that had arisen for Lithuania – Antanas Prušinskas, nicknamed the man-train. The child his late mum had so zealously guarded from the temptations of the world and from evil.

Once there lived a certain old village man, Vincas. I nursed him while taking part in the secret programme “Testament” of the international organisation “Red Cross”. “Red” symbolised the blood of the tortured grandads, “cross” – the plus-sign signature on the deathbed document leaving their goods to the organisation, and the cross on the grave. So that the “wards” would not take it into their heads to leave the contents of their stocking or other property they had built up to anyone else, we ironed their shirts so thoroughly that on some of the juicier grannies the tits came to the boil. For our efforts we got 10% of the sum left. Between farts and senile flashes of lucidity the old man told me stories of his youth. Once, having asked me to pull the soldering iron out of his arse for a moment and having squeezed out a pitiful little tear, he held forth about the killer-priest, who, he said, would take revenge on me for my evil deeds. This story interested me, because most of the time, trembling with pleasure even, he would go on about the post-war years in the forests of Pabradė, near the village of Kalabibiškiai. How, together with the other stribai, he would pick off Lithuania’s partisans at night with his Browning (a sort of gun from foreign parts), like a Dzūkian wench picking berries. And of those forest-men partisans, according to the old man, a whole sea had bred in all the surrounding woods in those days, like lice in a dog’s coat, so that he and his comrades-in-arms could not keep up with winding their guts round the trees. He told how, having caught a forest bandit, they would slit his belly open, nail the end of his gut to a tree and order him to walk round it, singing the anthem of Smetona’s Lithuania. They would promise that if he managed to walk round the tree 5 times, they would let him go alive. Of course, no one ever made it round, so the stribai would laugh, clutching their bellies, jabbing the wretch with fingers and daggers. He also liked to hold forth about how, with the Indian machete given to him by his great-grandfather, he would roll heads and other ends off their shoulders. Such horrors made my hands start to tremble, and through the welling tears it was hard for a while to hit not only his backside with the soldering iron but even the socket with the soldering iron’s plug.

And it all happened like this...

For a long time Vincas had been fighting Antanas of Kalabibiškiai from the Zabielius family, who lived in the forests and was also known as the Hairy Woodsman or the Forest Gorilla. According to the old man, that Antanas’s parents and forefathers had been pedlars and robbers in every generation, which is one and the same thing, because trade goes against the principles of social equality, and if today you sell bread, tomorrow you will sell your mother, and the day after tomorrow – your homeland. By day the old man and his gang would come barging into a village and, splattering heads with their muskets and interrogating, would slaughter part of the unarmed inhabitants because Antanas of Kalabibiškiai, whom they had never set their peepers on and sometimes had never even heard of, had supposedly visited them in the night. Stubbornly insisting they had not seen him was a fine occasion to torture the little muzhiks a bit more as well. And at night, with thunderclaps from all sorts of gunpowder gear, Antanas of Kalabibiškiai would burrow into the village and slaughter the rest of it because the old man had been there or because they had not done in that grimy, phlegm-spattered Trotskyist occupier and had even stayed alive themselves. Only one conclusion suggested itself to Antanas – the dung-caked villagers were despicable turncoats and sold-out traitors to the homeland, sucking Stalin’s knob. Wenches and babies alike. All the gang members would take turns with the wenches, while the driving of the devil out of the babies was seen to by Ignotas, the former steward of the Skiemonys priests’ seminary, nicknamed “Truth”. By trade he was a blacksmith, but in the gang he had been entrusted with the role of priest, because he swore by God that he had learnt everything needed for the priesthood and for driving out the devil by watching the life that went on in the seminary. After a couple of hours or so, when the screams of the children and babies in the cottage had finally died down, flinging the door wide open, all red in the face and sweaty and buttoning up his flies, Ignotas would tumble outside. Going round the cottage, he would run a torch along the edges of the thatched roof and declare with relief that Communion with the wenches and children had now been administered and they could stand before God.

So old Vincas, together with the Forest Gorilla Antanas, merrily ran riot through the surrounding parts, slaughtering all their inhabitants. They pulled out gold, silver or amber teeth, from which the Amber Room was later built. With that gold they covered the sculpture of the naked exhibitionist Archer in Šiauliai. Yet right up to the end of the fighting they never let fly a single bullet into each other’s noggin. Rumour had it that once they even celebrated Christmas together and gave each other a plush teddy bear apiece, sewn from the famous billowing tits of the Baškauskas family’s Bronė, which she would let no man of the village touch, because she herself, hidden alone behind the potato shed, kneaded them and did other obscenities or unclean contrivances to herself. There the two guardians of morals and truth found her, having gone together for a piss. They killed her and, while they were at it, cut off her tits.

Once the old man overheard that the killer-priest had flown in, like an angel, to his foe Antanas Zabielius and charged him to knock together a time machine for him, that he might travel into the past and bring back from there a certain Eve. He wanted, supposedly, to take a look whether that one truly has no navel hole, and to show that wondrous marvel to villagers or other ignoramuses for money. Antanas had evidently been chosen because he was not only a fine marksman and a connoisseur of the forest but was also famed as a man of golden hands. Later those hands were cut off him by imbeciles escaped from the loony bin. For them, at the scrap-metal yard, in the finale they got not a rotten penny but one on the head from the steel bar with which the scrap dealer Pranas chased the local wenches of the neighbourhood away from his cucumber field at night. Those cucumbers were the biggest in the whole World and lured wenches from all the lands around. People said that once even the Holy Virgin Mary herself had appeared in Pranas’s field and, heaving the biggest cucumber in Pranas’s garden onto her back, rose up in a pillar of fire and vanished into the nearest cloud. So, having learnt of the killer-priest’s order to Antanas Zabielius, the old man hatched a cunning plan and set about looking for Antanas.

Although Antanas was excellent at hiding and spent most of his time in the trees, gnawing dried pine cones, it was not hard for the old man to pick up his trail. The old man’s great-grandfather was the Indian chief Winnetou, and his great-great-grandfather Mototoaupa. Although historical sources name “Nurauti Varpeliai” (‘Ripped-off Bells’) as Winnetou’s father, he could not have children. As if on purpose, during an aristocratic hunt on his wedding day, an enraged bison swept off his knob and balls right down to the arsehole with its left horn. So that very evening his wife was inseminated, from a wish to have grandchildren and out of pity, by the father of “Nurauti Varpeliai” and chief of the tribe, Mototoaupa. For him, pale from the trauma he had suffered and renamed “Nurauti Varpeliai” by everyone, the troubles did not end there. During a drinking bout that night all the Indians got so plastered that, when the campfires had died down, they mixed him up in the dark with a captured pale-snout. Only in the morning did everyone realise that the corpse on the torture stake set up as entertainment for the festivities, stabbed all over with arrows or knives, with its skin flayed and smouldering brands set in its eyes, was not the white man but the bridegroom. A week later the unfortunate’s ripped-off goolies were found in the fields by the chief of a hostile Indian tribe (the Mohicans), Chingachgook. He made himself a dried pouch-amulet out of them and kept the peace-pipe grass in it together with pretty little stones. Over those balls great wars were fought between the tribes of Winnetou (the Apaches) and Chingachgook (the Mohicans). In the finale, having killed Chingachgook and won the family relics back from the Mohicans, and already on his deathbed, Winnetou gave them to the killer-priest as the greatest token of respect, together with his musket and his wife’s peeled-off scalp. Making an attempt on the scalp of another Indian with a tomahawk was dangerous. You could end up bald yourself. So the Indians would often reap their harvest from one another’s women and children. For badly prepared shaman’s lessons or a tasteless dinner, some would skin even their own, if the father’s hand was strict. They later traded the catch with the cowboys for bottles of fire-arielka. The cowboys got money from the government for the scalps and bought up the lands of those same Indians with it, telling everyone how “risking their lives in battles, they cut the hide off the noggins of slain red-arses”. Everyone was happy.

For the balls the killer-priest gave Winnetou his porcelain eye, in place of which he fitted a laser for slicing up foes. The porcelain eye he gave away (the other is kept in the Louvre) had earlier belonged to King Louis XVI. He used to insert them in place of his bollocks, which, during a feast when he was drunk, the Count of Florence’s Rottweiler, taking turns with the Burgomaster of Venice’s cat, had gnawed off along with the end of the sausage. For this the king commanded that the guillotine be invented and cut off the heads of the count and the burgomaster. Historians and scientists, not knowing the truth, are trying to this day to find out why King Louis XVI had porcelain balls. The most widespread version is that of the historian A. Bumblauskas (Alfredas Bumblauskas, a well-known Lithuanian historian): that back then it was simply the fashion. Meanwhile another historian, E. Gudavičius (Edvardas Gudavičius, a well-known Lithuanian historian; the two discussed history together on television), claims that in this way the king avoided his conjugal duties. For in those days the wenches did not wash, thinking that the only ones who washed were village women too lazy to scratch themselves and beggar women who could not afford luxury (little sticks for scratching off lice and fans for fresh air). Over their opinions the historians had even come to blows till blood flowed on a television programme, but the truth never came out, because the channel’s security service stepped in and threw them out of the studio.

Antanas of Kalabibiškiai managed to knock together the time machine. And that time machine ran on firewood. Antanas was a handy craftsman, and so to move one century into the past you needed to burn only about six small armfuls of firewood.

Old Vincas took it into his head to jump into that time machine after the killer-priest and travel into the past together with him, and there to tie one of Antanas Zabielius’s foremothers, out picking berries in the forest, to a tree, make holes in her with a knife and strangle her.

When everything was ready and the machine fired up, the earth opened, lightning thundered and clouds darkened the sky. Like a phoenix from the sky, a black, stinking figure glided down and vanished into the gates of time that had opened – it was the killer-priest. Before the gates of time could close, the old man ran up and jumped after him, although from the terrible stench and the reek of sweat even the hairs on his back stuck together and cramp seized his backside.

The old man came to lying in a mountain of his own and somebody else’s shit. It seems that during the journey all the muscles of the cloaca had relaxed. That other shit reeked terribly of sulphur and sweat, so the old man did his best to crawl out of it as fast as he could and, having picked the larger dried-on raisins off his arsehole, went off to carry out his plan.

The killer-priest rushed off to look for his Eve, but soon realised that Antanas Zabielius had muddled something in his calculations and had sent him to the wrong place and time. His thoughts were overcast with dark clouds, so, drawing his scythe, he swooped down in his hang glider like a falcon, with one swing taking off about twenty heads of villagers who were mowing grass in the fields and understood nothing. Rising into the sky, he looked around and swooped down again, towards the wenches binding flax at the other end of the field. The locals, seeing such a phenomenon beyond telling and not knowing what to do, decided to gather the wise men and discuss the problem. In the end they decided to build the stranger a castle, for they reckoned that this phantom had come blundering in from the other world and was hanging about because it had nowhere to stay. The villagers had heard that such phantoms and ghosts live in abandoned castles. The long, priestly garments looked more like those of a count or a nobleman than of an unwashed muzhik, and the terror of the skies was plainly not local but had come from beyond distant forests. So they dubbed the newcomer the Count of Transylvania, Dracula (Latin “trans” – beyond, “silva” – forests, “draco” – dragon). Dracula, because he flew about the sky like some arse-winged bat, which in those days only vampires, vurdalaks or dragons could do, for mankind had not yet invented aeroplanes and bombs. More than one hunter, local or hired from other lands, tried to shoot down with bows and bang-sticks the stranger flying in the sky. Having missed, they were all left without heads. The flying creature from Lithuania turned into a local and a world legend, whereupon they named that place after him too – Transylvania, and him himself the Count of Transylvania, Dracula.

Old Vincas meanwhile began looking for Antanas Zabielius’s mother so as to do her in, but soon realised that the locals, beaten and grilled, spoke a language he could not understand and that this was not Lithuania at all. Sitting on a stump and pondering his further prospects, the old man caught sight in the forest of a girl of beauty beyond telling. From the mere sight of her bending down to pick a berry, her two anal loaves standing out through her clothes, his soul melted. And she too, on seeing the youth, began to be beside herself with happiness and like feelings. Her father guarded her from all manner of sins and, when he caught suitors, did away with them with an axe. Sometimes he would cut down a passing stranger as well, merely because the fellow looked at his daughter the wrong way. The beauty’s father had at that time gone off to town and was not keeping watch, so the old man had a shag with her right there under the lime trees, without either saying a word to the other, like a pair of mutes. So that he would not interfere, the old man later lay in wait and hacked to death with an axe the girl’s father, back from town. From that day on, orgies between the lovers went on without a break round the clock.

At last the day came to go back, and the killer-priest flew to the opened gates of time, and the old man tore off after him too, afraid of being left behind in the past. His love, too, saw him off to the gates, having packed a wicker basket with all kinds of sausages and fruit for the journey. Leaping after the killer-priest into the glowing hole in time, the old man at last could hold out no longer and decided to say at least a word of farewell to the maiden waving her kerchief, even if in Lithuanian, a language she did not understand:

– O damsel of beauty beyond telling, I do not even know your name, but I shall remember you for ever! Farewell!

And how amazed he was when she, amazed herself (that far from her homeland she had met a fellow countryman), replied:

– I be Aldona Zabieliūtė, a merchant’s daughter from the village of Kalabibiškiai, come here with my father to buy all manner of rags!

At that moment the old man’s knob simply drooped, shrinking from the surprise, and his hair stood up with horror. Even the lice in the old man’s crotch began running about like mad, not understanding why the blood-filled horn of plenty on which they had been feasting had so suddenly run dry. Then the old man understood that Antanas Zabielius, against whom he had fought, was his own fruit. He understood why the two of them alone, so alike in their pastimes, had rampaged through the villages and why their hand never rose to kill each other.

Historical archives mention that Antanas Zabielius’s mother, Aldona Zabieliūtė, after Antanas was born, took vows of virginity and became a nun in a convent, for she had resolved that the youth (old Vincas) with whom she had shagged was her only love and that she would marry no other. That very convent the old man had, only last spring, ordered his men to visit and, after inseminating all the wenches, to drown them in Lake Skiemonys with stones tied to them.

Back from the journey in time and having again come to in the dung of cloacal substance, the old man decided first of all to find his son and tell him his impressions and the news he had heard. But it was already too late. Lighting his way with a match, he found Antanas lying in the dark by the burnt-down barn. The guts that had tumbled out of his belly had already been eaten by wolves, and the above-mentioned imbeciles, having lain in wait and cut off his hands, were running through the forests towards the scrap-metal yard. The killer-priest had paid Antanas Zabielius 50 litas in silver coins for the time machine. And he, so as to get the machine ready and fire it up properly, had at once rushed off to the village piss-house and, having bought plenty of arielka, got sozzled and collapsed drunk as a log not far from home, leaving it set for a journey to the location and time of his mother’s fertilisation. Zabielius had wanted to travel there himself first and find out who his father was. Growing up, he had never seen him, and his mother told him nothing. According to her, he had vanished like an angel into the shining gates of heaven, without letting on who he be. That is how the killer-priest landed not at the beginning of beginnings with Eve but in the not-so-distant past. For such a sin the killer-priest chastised the drunkard, burning down his homestead and letting out his guts with his scythe as he lay drunk or asleep. Seeing such a calamity, the old man swore to take revenge on the killer-priest for the doing-in of his child.

He had heard that the killer-priest lived in a rock near Ignalina, and set off to fight him, the way a man beats a wench or a child, for he avoided risking his health man to man. He travelled day and night until he saw another man gnawing a birch.

– What are you doing here? – the old man asked him.

– I got a mite hungry, so I’m having a bite. I’ve chewed up a few birches for elevenses.

– Come along with me. I am going to chastise the killer-priest, and he is a hundred times more filling than a birch – said the old man, having realised that this fellow could gnaw through the wooden handle of the priest’s scythe.

And he agreed. So the two of them walked on until one day they came to a rock stinking of sulphur and eye-gnawing sweat. And the old man shouted:

– Come out, coward! We shall fight man to man till death swallows one of us!

And what a stench spread, a column of smoke rose, black clouds darkened the sky. Out of that hell emerged one wing, then the other, and between them, his eyes glowing red, stood the killer-priest.

He who used to devour birches fell dead on the spot, having pissed himself from fear and spattered himself with crap as if from a fireman’s hose. That wave of shit and piss nearly swept the old man away, but he still managed to grab hold of a branch. But that crap put out all the killer-priest’s sulphur flames and smothered the lavas of hell bursting out of the earth. Then even the killer-priest grew uneasy, seeing an apparition of such might, never seen or beyond telling, for he had not seen that the old man had come to kill him with one more man. For Beržinis (‘Bircher’) stood behind his back and in split seconds covered himself with several layers of excrement or blended into the mud and became invisible to the eye. And the killer-priest said:

– Why should we fight and quarrel? Let us live in friendship, for thou be my brother – and, lifting his cassock, he showed him a birthmark on the left cheek of his arse. Right next to the cloaca, one with a long hair in the middle, just like the one the old man had on himself.

– Such birthmarks only the Lord’s children have, when He visits the earth by night and breathes the miracles of life into mortals with His one-eyed implement.

Then the old man understood that he, like the killer-priest, was no ordinary man and that his mission was to punish people for their sins. So, back in his native parts, he long went on rampaging in the forests of Kalabibiškiai, striking terror into heretics or misbelievers and carrying the holy teaching on the blade of an axe. He crossed himself and swore that he would fight no more against the forest bandits, for he held them all to be his children.

Such is the story that old Vincas, whom I nursed, told, and then he died, after gurgling a while longer in his phlegm and in the grip of my hands, or choking on blood. And I wrote it down so that people would know this truth about a true child of God and brother of the killer-priest, and would not forget that the truth lies somewhere beyond Ignalina.

– Jesus, Mary, what will happen now? – the freight forwarder Marius groaned. – The client will ring any minute, and what will we tell him? The lorry is still in Holland, you know!

– Maybe throw him some excuse that the roads are slippery – his colleague Mindaugas suggested. – Or no, let’s do this instead... – Here he began to whisper something passionately into Marius’s ear.

A call. Picking up the receiver, Marius launched into complaining about how hard it had become to haul freight from the Netherlands under Landsbergis (Vytautas Landsbergis, leader of Lithuania’s independence movement and head of state in 1990–1992). There are queues at customs, and the driver is a complete beehive, and on top of that villagers have blocked the roads and are protesting with pitchforks.

– Better tell the truth – Mindaugas rumbled, leaning close enough to the receiver.

– The driver... His legs have rotted off... – Marius confessed, barely holding back his laughter.

At the other end of the line the client’s quickened breathing could be heard clearly.

– I did tell you he wouldn’t believe it – Marius took offence.

The conversation was over.

Meanwhile their “Scania” lorry, bouncing merrily over the potholes, was racing to the customs post at the border. And with barely a kilometre or so to go, the driver Zenonas’s legs began to itch. First the left and then the right one too began to throb and smell of herring.

Frightened, Zenonas stopped the lorry, stuck his hand in and scratched himself. And – god, let none of us go through this – pulling his hand out, he saw it caked with blood clots and lumps of rotting flesh. That was when he fainted.

A police patrolman ran up to the stationary lorry.

– Ai cvai policai! Rus, sdavaisia! – the bambizas teased. – Bitte Ausvais!

With great toil Zenonas reached out his hand and unlocked the door, and the rotted-off legs flopped onto the black Dutch asphalt.

– Vas ist das? – the copper did not understand. – Das ist Kontrabanda? – But on looking closely at what was left of the driver, he finally grasped the tragedy that had befallen this simple and honest man.

Straight away an ambulance took Zenonas to the local Heart of Jesus Hospital. The doctors did what they could, but there too the fateful itching and the smell of herring began to spread.

Fearing an epidemic, the authorities moved the hospital to another town – just as vomit-inducing with its orderliness, its tiled roofs and the fat faces of its burghers – but the terrible disease spread there too.

Panic seized the Netherlands. Borders, terminals, customs posts closed. In the newspapers the adverts multiplied: “Selling used lorries and semi-trailers.” Ragged prophets wandered all over the country, promising the end of the world.

So the hand of the lord was heavy upon the bambizai, and the groaning of every city went up to the heavens. There even appeared cemeteries set aside for the poor legs. Coffin-makers tried to ease the sufferings of the invalids by making luxurious coffins for legs.

... And the “Scania” lorry was left standing there by the closed customs post, doused with chloride of lime and covered with a concrete dome...

The moral of the tale would be this: Never lie to clients. Or, if in English: “Telling the truth is the best policy.”

It was night. The drunken youth of the village of Kalabibiškiai were coming home from the disco. Suddenly huge wings rustled in the sky, and something stinking of sweat flew past.

– Look! Landsbergis! – one villager shouted.

– You’re Landsbergis yourself! Why, that’s a ufonaut!

And only one grey-haired old man, dragged to the disco by mistake, shook his head:

– That’s the killer-priest, children!

Everyone laughed hard at those words. Suddenly a razor flashed in a half-circle in the darkness, and one villager’s head rolled onto the ground, while the blood that spurted out spattered the others.

Everyone laughed even harder, because the scene reminded them all of some series or other that the gentlemen from Vilnius show.

And so, laughing, they came home.

Many people of the village of Žvairiškės knew the good carpenter Bronius Šernasmaugis. Not only the religious grandmothers aged 65–90 but also the village elder Leopoldas Žvairys (‘Crosseye’) could not believe he was dead. Everyone sensed something amiss. After all, Bronius was not a bad man; he had golden hands, a gift of dear god, a wooden leg that had already begun to rot, and many more good things. And what a god-fearing man he was! Every day at home he said the rosary, and taught it to his own and the neighbours’ children. Coming home drunk, he never mistreated his wife Adelė, never performed sadomasochistic rites with his daughter Veronika. Yet the carpenter did have one vice all the same: when drunk, he liked to run about the yard naked. The little people of the village did not like this habit, but they dared not say anything – after all, the carpenter had done so much good for them and for the whole village. More than one of them, and more than once, went to Bronius to ask him to do one job or another. Sowing time would come – a new harrow was needed, a christening would come – a new cradle, a burial would come – a new coffin. Though there were times when they dug one up, threw out all its contents and used the old one again.

Many villagers suspected the killer-priest, of whom they had heard on “Panorama” (the main evening news on Lithuanian television) or on the First Programme of Lithuanian Radio, but others could in no way believe it.

But one late Wednesday evening Bronius’s goodwife Adelė, while watching the X-Files, heard a strange knocking at the cottage door. Just like her late husband’s. Frightened, she drank 30 g of valerian + 100 g of vodka and ran off to meet the uninvited guest. Lifting the door latch, she saw Bronius, long since missing without trace and entered in the missing persons department of the Žvairiškės village police station. Only now he was somehow strange – just bones and skin. And inside pulsed a demon’s heart.

Adelė took fright and came out in goosebumps all over. She wanted to run to the kitchen and drink another dose of valerian and a shot of the devil’s drops. But the deceased had asked her something, so it was awkward not to answer.

– Where is my axe, the one I bought from a Jew under Smetona? The time has come to collect debts, he still owes me 50 Lt for the hang glider.

– But who is this he, for the love of god, Bronius?!

– The killer-priest, you nitwit!

Feeling it her duty to help her husband, Adeliutė brought the axe, which until then had been used to press down the fermenting cabbage.

Pleased, Bronius licked his snot-smeared lips, took a deep breath and blew straight into his goodwife’s face air that stank of rotten eggs. The smell in the room became unbearable; it began to sting Adelė’s eyes, and she, having only just managed to cross herself, lost consciousness.

Having spat on everything and taken a big gulp of moonshine, Bronius went out into the yard without hurrying. He raised the axe above his head and, looking at the sky, yelled with all his throat:

– Where are you, you monastery dog!!! If you’re not afraid to fight, then let’s go out!

And what a storm came up, how lightning began to slash the sky, so that even a few of the more pious grannies fell to the ground in the shape of a cross and repented of their sins.

Suddenly it began to stink of sweat everywhere, and Bronius Šernasmaugis caught sight of his eternal enemy – Giedrius, twirling a nunchaku above his head – the killer-priest.

– Brace yourself, you killer of carpenters! Maybe you’ll finally pay me the 50 Lt for the hang glider, or at least bless me, or give me absolution? – B. Šernasmaugis spewed out through his rotten teeth, clenched in anger.

– Defend yourself, you’ll get neither the one nor the other for free!

And a battle boiled up that could be compared only to a villagers’ uprising against the tsar’s rule. A great many people came running to admire the fine-looking men. Several women whispered: “Dear god, look how handsome that one in the cassock is, if only I had one like him.” Another retorted: “I’ll get him first – my dowry is bigger.” A third replied: “You’re both dimwits, you’re fools, and I’m cleverer – I’ll get him!”

Both mighty men fought fiercely, sweat dripping from their muscular bodies, until at last the priest, glancing at his watch, remarked:

– Well, all right, the upper hand is yours, muzhik. I need to hold a service now. Take those 50 Lt of yours. I’m off.

His hang glider rose with the wind, and nobody in Žvairiškės ever saw him again. And thank god.

When I was young I often kept company with a certain Jonas Šiaulys. His cousin Nerijus Ševeliovas, a wise and devout man, once told him of this incident.

Long, long ago, from time immemorial, there lived in the village of Kaltanėnai, by Lake Kriogžlys, a sorcerer. Not the kind there are nowadays – swindlers who know how to chop a cartload out of a match and wheedle out good money – don’t even try to compare. He knew how to make out of a cartload of firewood one single fine match, only without the sulphur. He knew how to set a cottage on fire. He would bash teeth in, too, wherever he turned up. But above all he knew how to conjure. He would take a horse turd, shove it between the teeth of an old church hag and let her hold it. An hour later he would shove in another – look, her little face has grown prettier already. He would shove in a third – and there already stands a wench so beautiful, lord protect us. Or an enemy would draw some water from the little well and carry it home – nothing but frogs and toads. Or he would strike up a song at a wedding – it was as if a billy goat were wheezing. For this the villagers greatly respected the sorcerer. And he also knew how to call in demons to help with the work and afterwards send them away from himself, so that no trouble would come of it.

But one day the sorcerer read in his black book that in Lithuania, in the Ignalina district, lives the killer-priest. And that there is no mightier man than he. He took his mirror and beholds: heads are flying in all directions, wenches wheeze as they croak, and in the very middle the killer-priest’s scythe is flashing.

The sorcerer of Kriogžlys grew terribly angry and challenged the killer-priest to a contest. Nobody knows how he did it: maybe he tapped out a telegram like everyone else, or maybe he made himself a wax figure of the priest and stuck a bewitched splinter into it somewhere – but the next day everyone sees: a hang glider goes whoosh across the sky, and lo, someone never seen before is standing in the middle of the village. Neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short, neither muzhik nor wench. Only by looking into his eyes will you understand that this is the killer-priest. “Praised be Jesus Christ!” he says, and twirls a nunchaku above his head. The men clashed... They rolled head over heels, gasping, hurled fireballs at each other, hacked at each other with sharpened crosses, shot at each other with proton guns that the ghostbusters had brought, but neither gained the upper hand. Then they sat down on the ground and began to cast spells.

The priest did a little conjuring – at once locusts came flying in a cloud and settled on the sorcerer’s field. And the other made a sign – the ascetic pilgrims of Šiluva (Lithuania’s chief Marian shrine) came running, and how they set about eating those locusts! The priest conjures on – and Lake Kriogžlys began to swell; any moment it will flood the sorcerer’s cottage. But what’s that to the sorcerer – he pulled some rope or other, and the water in the lake was as if it had never been, only frogs jump about and curse the priest.

Both see that nothing will come of it this way – they began calling on demons. One on the Devil, one on the archangel Michael, one on the President, and one even on Beelzebub. And the hullabaloo began...

Duncan MacLeod rushed to fight Dracula, Baba Yaga traded abuse with the Speaker of the Seimas, Godzilla lustfully lifted the roofs of the farm buildings, looking for King Kong, who was in hiding. Vytautas and the Forty Tatars (Vytautas the Great, Grand Duke of Lithuania, famed at home for the feigned retreat of his cavalry and Tatars at Grunwald in 1410) tried with a deceptive manoeuvre to lure into the copse Liucipierius (‘Lucifer’, the chief of the devils). The demons growled, tore at one another, and their howling could be heard even a good mile away.

Seeing such horrors, the people of Kaltanėnai scattered with their children through the surrounding villages to ask for help, leaving only the old men lying in their beds to wait for the end of the world.

But the sun tilted towards evening, everyone grew tired, the demons vanished. And the men sat down to talk man to man. One conjured up a red “L&M”, the other – a little keg of beer. One the tankards, the other – a bit of froth. And they became the best of friends and taught each other all manner of work. How to say Mass, how to sit a wench on a broom and fly her off to Šatrija Hill so that she never comes back. They taught each other all manner of spells.

And when dawn broke, the killer-priest got onto his hang glider and flew back to Ignalina, where much work still awaited him, where there were still many unslaughtered people and foreign tourists left.

In the whole history of the village of Ažubaliai, which begins in the times of Gediminas, or perhaps of Stephen Báthory, all sorts of things had happened. Shots cracked as brothers divided up the land, storms roared more than once, carrying off to Vilnius the roofs of the cottages and the taxes, racketeers had dropped by – but for the sun to go out, that had never happened yet.

But people do say – you won’t run away from fate, you’ll only rub blisters on your hooves. That is why, when a beggar who had wandered in announced that the sun would go out in three days, nobody worried; they only lashed him across the back with a whip and told him to go and mumble his prayers further away from the village.

The beggar went off, fell on his knees and began fervently praying to the lord to send some evil or other upon the village of Ažubaliai, where they regale beggars with whips. Be it a flood, be it a rabid dog, or perhaps even the Economic Police, if possible. And he prayed so persistently, and so smeared his snout with snot, tears and roadside mud, that the lord, unable to stand it any longer, sent down upon his head the killer-priest.

Swooping in on the greatest gust of wind, he stood before the beggar. In his eyes – the flames of evil. Tall of stature, but cruel. With a steel scythe on his shoulder. The hang glider on his back. “Why,” he says, “are you bawling, you parasite?” He wanted to kill that beggar at once, so that it would be a lesson to everyone, but he saw how grubby he was and took pity on him.

And the beggar told him all his woes and troubles, and especially – what wicked people live in the village of Ažubaliai, how they despise beggars and do not believe their prophecies. And he would have gone on bawling for a long time, moving the killer-priest to tears with his fabrications, but the latter flapped his wings and flew back to Ignalina with a heavy heart.

And three days later it so happened that a wench of Ažubaliai, Marijona, looked up at the sky and began to cross herself. There one could see the big, terrible killer-priest flapping unhurriedly towards the sun, and beneath him a black shadow running over the earth.

The villagers all came running, shouting, sticks in hand, but what can you do here, how can you resist the evil priest who has resolved to plunge Ažubaliai into darkness? And the shadow kept coming until it arrived, and covered the whole village; even brigade leader Anupras’s barn could no longer be seen.

Everyone even fell silent with horror. Each ran to his own hut as if blind, arms stretched out in front. And, of course, in that darkness there were quite a few who mixed up their own cottage with the neighbour’s. And some began to appropriate not only the cottage but the wench too.

You come home from the field, a man who has done some job or other blind, you rush into the little bathhouse to wash, and lo, your hand has touched – all manner of softnesses and roundnesses are to be found in that merry little bathhouse. And women’s voices besides. Whoever was stupider would rush outside, dressed in women’s clothes. And if he was clever – who knows what shameless things he got up to in there.

And so all manner of lusts began to multiply in the land of Ažubaliai. The men worked in the fields following one another, and often even tied together with ropes. And the women, left at home, dreamed up all manner of fornications.

The lord saw how full of iniquities the land of Ažubaliai was, and recalled the killer-priest. And peace and calm returned to Ažubaliai again, and everyone lived: some long, and others happily. And from generation to generation they told of the time when, by the will of god and of the killer-priest, the sun had gone out.

Once there was in Kaunas a mighty and rich gentleman. He lived in a two-storey house, having surrounded himself with Alsatians, drove about in a BMW 7 Series and paid no taxes of any kind to anyone. But people said that it was not by any honest work that he had piled up so much wealth, but by the very blackest witchcraft. And not for nothing did they say it, for he had a countless multitude of fields in which he grew magic herbs. For charms, poisons and other marvels.

And by night, when ordinary people sleep, the gentleman would go to a secret tavern in Kaunas where cut-throats gathered, and there he would feast with them until dawn.

Each time he came in, he was met by the image of Satan on the wall. “Sit beside me!” it would order the gentleman, and the candles, set in place of its eyes by a skilful craftsman, would light up with merry little lights. Yesterday’s drinking companions would come crowding in, vodka and German beer would flow, drunken songs would ring out. But it was not the songs, not the beer and not the cards that drew the gentleman – his eyes were fixed on the image of Satan the whole time. “Drink,” it would order, and the gentleman would drink. “Sing,” and he would strike up a song. And merrily the little flames fluttered in the devil’s eyes, lighting up the table and the drunkards’ faces.

As the feast drew to its end, when sleep had felled them all, that devil would whisper to the gentleman all manner of spells and commands. Which herbs to take, how to boil them and what to do with it all.

Then the gentleman would get into his BMW and, without looking back, race off to his fields. Stumbling, he would wade through the dewy grass and gather the miraculous roots, and his lips would whisper incantations known only to him and his dark patron.

The villagers would take off their caps from afar and bow to the gentleman, having grabbed a stake just in case. Meanwhile the mothers would hide their children under their skirts and forbid them in every way to set foot on the poisoner’s land.

He would come back to Kaunas soaked through, worn out, laden with herbs, and wait for his patron to call him again. And in those rare moments when he broke free of the smell of vodka and herbs, when Satan’s commanding voice no longer rang in his ears, a kind of emptiness would open up in his heart. Then the gentleman would think that his whole life had been lived the wrong way. But how should it be, then? While searching for an answer he would find the bottle again, and then a troop of fairies, cackling with glee, would drag him off to the tavern.

Life grew ever harder for the gentleman. Even in the tavern he would seem to sober up and see that everyone was laughing at him. Satan’s mask laughs quietly, behind his back his friends, used to feasting at another’s expense, mock him, the innkeeper titters, having slipped him a counterfeit coin in his change. Seized by despair he would drink even harder, wiping the tears from his sunken cheeks.

And then one night, when the feast was at its very height, someone knocked at the door. Frozen, they all saw an unknown priest come into the hall and, without saying a word to anyone, cross himself.

At this the gentleman could hold out no longer. Driven by a hope that had flared up, or perhaps by despair, he fell on his knees before the priest, kissed his hand and begged for protection from the Devil. With a heart suddenly come back to life he confessed his sins to him, all the wrongs that had weighed on him for so many years.

The priest (and it was the killer-priest) stretched out his hand as if wishing to bless him, grabbed him by the hair, swung him and smashed his head against the wall. Then he kicked the body under the table and sat down in his place. He drank, sang, played cards and danced all night long. The priest had extraordinary luck, and at cards he won a manor and a purse of gold.

And that night Satan’s eyes glowed more merrily than ever...

And it was like this. One day the killer-priest sat at his ease under an old linden, on which there was not a twig where the head of a guilty muzhik had not hung, and counted the clouds, which looked like the saved little sheep. His hunt had not gone well that day: he had chased and chased a tourist with his hang glider, but the wind went and changed, and the hang glider flew off in quite another direction; neither could the killer-priest’s strong will control it any longer, nor his vigour, of which there was not so very much left in his old age. That must have been a bewitched tourist. So the killer-priest sat in the little garden of his presbytery, fretting and cursing the hang glider and his old age.

Suddenly the air quivered, a terrible but familiar smell spread all around, the cottage door just banged, and all was quiet again. The killer-priest looked around, sniffed the air – nothing. But then he hears: something is rattling inside, as if someone were lifting pots about, as if opening and shutting the cupboards. The killer-priest was surprised: for many years now nobody had dared to cross the threshold of the cottage, and whoever did dare learnt what it means to get caught in his claws, and never knew what it means to escape from them. The killer-priest was not only surprised but frightened too – or maybe it is yet another debt enforcer who has broken in and is looking for money. And what if he is just as mighty as Bronius Šernasmaugis? The priest had no wish to meet such a mighty rival again. So slowly, slowly he got up, lay down on the ground, covered himself with linden twigs and, having crawled like a real Indian to the shed, pulled out his shooter with silver nails, which Winnetou had given him back in the good old days. With a shooter like that there is no one to fear. The killer-priest crawled up to the window of his cottage and looks – someone is tidying away, sweeping away at devilish speed. The master of the house was even more surprised: who could this be? And the creature inside just spins and spins. Suddenly the window opened, and the soup the killer-priest had cooked only a week before went splosh! Right on his head… The killer-priest got angry, forgot all caution and stepped inside. He looks – a rolling pin comes whizzing out of the kitchen corner and cracks him right on the forehead! Sparks even flew. The killer-priest shook himself, narrowed one eye and took aim with his terrible rifle, thinking that it would really be better if this were the straightened scythe: he was not used to all sorts of modern fancy contraptions. But the killer-priest had no time to pull the trigger before that familiar smell spread everywhere again and something cold wound itself around his neck. It was then that he recognised the intruder – it was his sister Irena. The two of them had been apart for more than 50 years, and the killer-priest knew nothing of her life. Once he got a letter from her, but thought that someone wanted to make fun of him, and began searching everywhere for that insolent infidel. Many heads fell, much blood ran in that time, but the killer-priest never found the real culprit, try as he might. Then he waved his hand at that letter and forgot it entirely. He thought his little sister was no longer even among the living. But when that cold hand wound around his neck, the killer-priest suddenly remembered the happy days of his childhood, before he had entered the priests’ seminary. He remembered how he and Irutė used to kill frogs and stick flies into spiders’ webs and watch the little spider eat them. And he also remembered how once he and his little sister pinched the church key from the parish priest and, sneaking inside at night, ate up all the Communion, and then let in a mouse and were going to blame it, saying it had eaten everything, but the lie did not come off and they both got it on their hides... Those were good times. Brother and sister spat at each other, as they used to do in childhood when they were merry; the killer-priest put down his shooter, the two of them sat down on the little bench and began telling each other how each of them was getting on, what was new and what was old. The killer-priest held forth about his deeds, about his victims and his hang glider, about his failures and successes. And from Irutė he learnt that she worked in Ukmergė as a maths teacher, that her life had not turned out well, that she and her husband had been failing to finish building their house for fifteen years now, that her son sat on her neck and her pupils shat on the desk. The killer-priest took pity on his little sister and let her stay with him for a few days, until her sadness passed.

Out of gratitude for this, his sister began to pamper the killer-priest in every way: while he hunted by day, she would tidy the rooms and sweep the yard. Every day the homestead looked lovelier and lovelier. That year she even won the prize for the most beautiful homestead – a thorn apple in a little pot and a bottle of skull-label spirit, for schnapps had not yet got cheaper. But best of all was that Irutė could cook. And whatever she cooked, it was all delicious. The killer-priest liked best of all macaroni made of muzhiks’ bootlaces with blood sauce, but these days few people in the village go about in lace-up boots; it is all galoshes and army jackboots. She could also cook soup out of an axe. Once, not finding the axe, she took the straightened scythe and nearly threw it into the pot; the killer-priest only just managed to pull the pot off the fire and take his killing tool away from his sister. He never let anyone touch those tools, but he was not too angry with his sister.

And one day, when the priest had come back, Irutė said:

– Brother dear, would I be much in your way if I stayed here for good?

The killer-priest, having thought of all the good deeds Irutė had done for him, replied:

– No, sister dear, you won’t be in my way. You can stay.

And so Irutė stayed to live with her brother, forgetting her good-for-nothing son, her lazy husband and her slovenly pupils, who neither knew maths nor respected her, and were only quick to shit on the desk. And the two of them lived long and happily.

Among all the beauties of Antaviliai, between the old folks’ home and the moonshine still that supplies firewater to the home’s administration and to the tractor drivers of the “Golden Ear” collective farm, there is a place where even the foresters are afraid to set foot and even the beasts of the forest do not wander in. You will not meet a living soul there, you will not hear a single sound in that gloomy forest – neither the rustle of leaves nor the hoot of an owl at night. Everyone knows that the killer-priest has made his nest there.

No one has ever yet come back from there, and even the very bravest who tried to enter the killer-priest’s domain never came home again. In vain did their mothers wait for them in mourning, in vain did they buy Masses and try to win the lord’s favour with groats earned in the sweat of their faces – not one came back, as if they had never existed at all.

But once, while the police were combing the forest, a joyful shout rang out: Junior Inspector Bagaliūnas had found the killer-priest’s chapel! Having driven out the bats and beggars that had lived there for centuries, the policemen went inside.

God, how beautiful it was in there! The sergeant found in the censer a pair of pliers and a handful of gold teeth, which he at once swept into the front of his shirt. A few others, rummaging in a heap of rags, went and pulled out into the light of day the bloody arm of a forester who had recently gone missing in those parts. And the others, now they really got busy... They found an axe, a set of knives and a little bottle of clonidine, which the priest would secretly sprinkle into the villagers’ pig swill on gloomy winter evenings.

It was a brutal search... A search without any warrant, without witnesses and without the church’s blessing. But when at last they had finished everything, the massive door creaked eerily and the killer-priest appeared.

Tell me, if you’d be so good, why does it always happen like this? You go to buy bootleg vodka – you find a police ambush. You want to visit your neighbour – you find only his wife, pining for men. And when you try to go home from that brothel – your briefs vanish. Really, why?

And this, after all, is even scarier than a red-snouted police commissioner with dogs and Special Investigation Service operatives, even scarier than a neighbour gone rabid – why, this is the killer-priest!

They broke into a run. Without even looking back they dashed through puddles, through tussocky bogs, throwing away the goods they had grabbed as they went. “Throw it away, throw everything away!” shouted Inspector Šiaulys, who knew the killer-priest’s cunning nature better than the others. And indeed, at every object they threw away, the killer-priest would stop and sniff it over. Then he would sprinkle it with holy water and chase the fugitives again.

A little more and he would have caught up with them, but then one of them threw away the pliers found in the chapel. At once a forest grew up so dense that the killer-priest had to hack his way through it with an axe. And he would have caught up with them again, only Inspector Šiaulys threw the little bottle of clonidine at his feet. At once a sea appeared in that place. The wind blows on that sea, whales dive, and all kinds of living things besides, and ships with sails sail about.

The killer-priest looked at that sea, spat and went back to his chapel to say Mass, to pray for all manner of evils upon the human race. And the policemen went back to the police station and never went to that place again.

Travelling through Kybartai in those days, I heard volleys of gunfire and saw flares and bursts of tracer bullets slashing across the sky. Friends explained to me that the town’s mayor had long been at odds with the killer-priest, and so had brought over from the district head a four-barrelled anti-aircraft machine gun.

And it all began when the mayor refused to pray in the killer-priest’s chapel at Antaviliai, made famous by the newspapers more than once. Thereupon the killer-priest killed three of the mayor’s relatives who were being cared for in their old age at the Antaviliai old folks’ home; after that came the turn of his wife and his cousin. To the bellies of all his victims the killer-priest would pin notes printed by the “Tyto alba” publishing house, reading roughly like this: “Lithuania, our homeland (the opening words of Lithuania’s national anthem) – for ever, amen. Death to the antichrists.”

As we talked, I at last saw the priest in the sky with his hang glider. Diving between the bursts of tracer bullets, he was singing “Ave Maria”, conducting with a wooden cross stolen from the graveyard.

At this I took such fright that the very same evening my foot was no longer in Kybartai, that small god-forgotten town where everyone lives in the grip of fear, praying to Fate to save them from the killer-priest.

– Who is this Fate, then? – I wondered aloud while feeding the pigs.

– The name of Fate is Lithuania! – squealed the hosts’ spotted hog, and dived back into the swill...

In the days of Landsbergis and Gediminas Vagnorius (prime minister of Lithuania in 1991–1992 and 1996–1999) I met my old friend, Economic Police Inspector Jonas Šiaulys. Over a tankard of beer we remembered our young days, grew a little sad... And then Jonas told me this incredible story.

A year or two earlier, at Vilnius railway station, the police detained an intoxicated man from whose trousers a knob 25 cm long stuck out triumphantly. Curious womenfolk were already crowding around. Upholding public order, the officers took the detainee off to the police station. They read him his rights, offered him a lawyer, acquainted him with the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and questioned him.

During the interrogation it emerged that the detainee was Bronius Burgislovas, who had once worked as a mechanic at Kaunas railway station and had been sacked for absenteeism and drunkenness. But the rest of the account given by the mechanic-drunkard-exhibitionist Burgislovas turned into sheer delirium.

And it was like this...

Old, drunk and no longer needed by anyone, Bronius stood on the highway hitch-hiking to Vilnius. But in those days poverty and unemployment were considered a contagious disease, and everyone, as if by agreement, kept well away from the former mechanic of the train repair workshops. Slowly dusk settled over the land, and the highway emptied. Only now and then a passing car would light up with its halogens the face of Burgislovas, lonely as the end of Brisius (lt. ‘Brisiaus galas’, a story by Jonas Biliūnas: an old dog, no longer of any use, is shot by his master), and vanish into the darkness again.

At one point he seemed to hear a train puffing in the distance, but then everything went quiet again.

Then a man he had never seen before came up.

– Are you hitching to Vilnius, Bronius?

– To Vilnius – Burgislovas sighed.

– Then get in, and off we go!

Before he could answer, Burgislovas found himself in a train of some sort. Kilometre posts flashed past the windows.

– Who are you? – Bronius asked in fright, addressing the darkness.

– I am the man-train! – a thunderous voice replied, and Burgislovas, no longer understanding anything, slumped onto the floor.

After racing a good stretch of the way, the train stopped.

– A wheel has jumped off! – the voice boomed. – Go and change it!

Lighting his way with a torch, Bronius got out and did as he was told. Then the two of them travelled on. Out of gratitude the man-train taught him spells. And not just any, but those very same terrible ones that turn a Lithuanian man into a train, and a train – into a man. And such terror seized Burgislovas as he listened to those curses that he did not calm down until he had drunk all the spirit from the first-aid kit, sniffing iodine by way of a snack.

As the time passed thus, a need pressed upon the man. But by the time he had crawled to the toilet carriage, by the time he had torn off his trousers, which simply would not come undone – bang, everything vanished, and Bronius came to his senses standing on a platform in Vilnius, surrounded by inquisitive compatriots.

Such, in broad outline, was his testimony. The policemen laughed, shrugged their shoulders and in the end, losing patience, threw him out of the door, since the lock-up was overcrowded anyway.

From that time on Bronius began to heal people. But not with aspirin and not with “Bittner” balsam – god preserve us! Knowing only how to repair trains, he would first turn a person into a shabby locomotive, then remove the fault and disenchant him. Far and wide spread the fame of the miracle-worker, and the sick flocked to him in droves, and plain curious gawpers who fancied being trains for a while. True, not everything went smoothly for him; sometimes a bolt would be left over for life, but then, it is not the saints who mould the pots. Burgislovas’s former workmate Marius T. even got a fuel tank in place of his head, but everyone insisted that even before, nothing but fuel oil had sloshed about in there.

The doctors terribly envied him his glory, so they conspired and denounced him for not paying taxes and running a spare-parts business. And the police investigation that followed uncovered several horrifying cases in which B. Burgislovas deliberately did not disenchant his patients but sold them to “Lithuanian Railways”. The relatives would then be told that the patient had gone off to a Conservative party seminar and was unlikely ever to come back. The family could never understand how this could have happened; they blamed themselves, the school, bad friends and television, but no one ever doubted the words of the mighty miracle-worker. True, the sorcerer of Kriogžlys divined for the mother of one patient that her son was alive and travelled every day from Vilnius to Klaipėda, but neither of the two could imagine such a horror.

That is the story Jonas Šiaulys told me. Back home, with trembling hands, I wrote down everything he had told me, and I felt extraordinarily sad for Lithuania, where perverts like Burgislovas and other rubbish of life’s roadside run riot. Alas, only the evil killer-priest can stop them.

And if he does not stop them, it is probably because he has finally become disillusioned with people...

Admin’s note: I consider it my duty to warn young readers that the hero of the story has nothing in common with the editor of the popular illustrated magazine “Kompiuterlionė”. Anyone who has measured the knob of the great Lithuaniser of computer terms will agree with my opinion. Rest in peace, Mr Bronislovas.

This story was told to me, as I sat in the village alehouse, by a stranger. From his lips it sounded so horrifying that the alcohol drunk by me and by all the people who heard it evaporated. Having heard out his tale, the tipsy village men were afraid to go home.

His tale began like this:

While still a child, Petrelis, together with his six brothers and five sisters, heard from his dear father, who was then still alive, by a dimly glowing, fly-specked sixty-watt electric light bulb, a tale that had travelled from generation to generation, from lips to lips. It is a story about the battles of brave men against the eternal enemy of mankind, against the irreplaceable character of the stories that mothers tell disobedient children at bedtime. Against the monster that cannot find itself a place between paradise and hell, the servant of god and satan, who became an eternal seminarian and never did manage to finish the priests’ seminary – Father Aurigarijus of the village of Skiemonys.

Albinas – young Petrelis’s father – was a wise and pious man, and therefore highly respected by the village people. He also had a goodwife, whom he divorced for family reasons after 45 years of married life together.

In those days, when Albinas was still young, he had been a very wild man: he did not disdain going to dances, or sitting in the alehouse until he was groping the ground, or simply carousing with lasses not his own. Albinas was fond of vodka and of wine, and he did not spit at beer stronger than 8 degrees either.

One gloomy Saturday morning, as Albinas was returning home after merrymaking, something happened that changed his life to its foundations. Perhaps he was indeed that one among the few chosen of mankind who were destined to endure those hours of anxiety, suffering and uncertainty.

Albinas did not have much further to go to his home, where his wife stood waiting for him with a rolling pin in her hands, when suddenly the alcohol clouded Albinas’s mind even more: he no longer grasped what he was doing, the 6 litres of beer he had drunk made him feel sick, he took aim at the nearest tree and threw everything up. It would have been an everyday situation causing no surprise at all, but what Albinas had vomited on was none other than a cross put up back in the summer and blessed by the parish priest of Rokiškis, depicting the crucified Saviour.

His deed was watched by the vigilant eye of the most holy Father, already very well known to us. Suddenly it began to stink of urine and sweat everywhere, a large figure (90x60x90) loomed up before his eyes, his favourite instruments of killing glinted eerily in the dark, and Albinas realised that he was dealing with none other than Father Aurigarijus, the centre of media attention – the killer-priest. The scoundrel fell to his knees. “Forgive me, dear holy god!” he began to repent. But the spoons were already after dinner; the killer-priest only uttered: “I’m counting to three, climb onto the back seat of the hang glider!” Albinas still managed to ask for forgiveness, pleading that it was his first time; the priest switched on the ignition and the hang glider took off. “Your fate will be decided by the church hag division on duty,” said the priest, turning round.

The two of them flew for a long time. Glancing down by chance, Albinas was enchanted – so beautiful did it look to him down there: the whole village sunk in darkness, only here and there a few floodlights shining, and in the middle the cross standing proudly. Because of that beauty he almost fell out of the hang glider – luckily, the priest held him back in time with his chromed hook, thinking he wanted to run away.

So they flew as far as the Antaviliai forest, where, as everyone knows, the killer-priest’s chapel stands.

When Albinas got inside, he remembered – he had already seen the chapel on a TV crime programme. And what a palace of never-seen beauty it turned out to be – everywhere the eye could reach, nothing but gold and silver wares, paths strewn with gold teeth and a great many other goods valued in our parts. But not a minute had passed before he found himself sitting in the dock.

At once the church hag division began to assemble: the priest used to recruit into it the very nastiest and most frightful wenches of the village. And their chief was the notorious head of the Antaviliai old people’s home, Marija Aukštuolienė. The unfortunate old folk still remember the crack of her whip and the shrieks of the offenders, and still tell of a Seimas commission that Aukštuolienė’s spells led astray in the Antaviliai marshes and that vanished there for ever. And now this very Aukštuolienė got to decide the unfortunate Albinas’s fate.

The church hags deliberated long over what to do, but with the help of the priest, who this time had taken on the role of judge, they passed a sentence that pleased everyone except the culprit himself – to make him drink the priest’s 10-year-old urine. Albinas took fright. Rumour had it that this was no ordinary urine and that whoever tasted it got eternal constipation. Albinas took off running so fast that even the devils were terrified.

After that event Albinas entered a monastery, and he visits his family only at holy Christmas.

It was midnight. Eulalija Davatkytė (‘Churchhag’) was tossing from one side to the other, quite unable to get to sleep, and trembled whenever she heard the slightest rustle. The moment a mouse stirred in the pantry, all her fleas would freeze stiff and she would start mumbling her prayers in a whisper, thinking it was the famous killer-priest coming for her sinful little soul.

Yes, how could you not be afraid… For some time now no one had either beheld or heard the priest. More than one began to guess that perhaps some Liucipierius or other had dragged him off to hell with him to lap pitch together with the devils. But then one day people found the village elder of the hamlet behind his barn, all drenched in blood. The poor fellow said that the killer-priest had visited him in the night. He had issued a new order that all the little church hags and other parasites feeding on the nerves of the living must get permission from him if they want to say a bad word against dear god or any of their neighbours. And as for those who busy themselves with all kinds of spells, they had better beware, for their last hour is drawing near.

The village elder passed this will of the priest on to the villagers and expired. And how uneasy they became… It became like an eternal Lent in the village – no merrymaking, no evening parties. In the evenings the villagers avoided setting foot beyond the door. Now even the village lads did not so much as think of running off to the lasses at night. Everyone feared the killer-priest would appear. It was like the silence before the storm…

That is why Miss Davatkytė could not so much as close an eyelid… More than once, after Mass, she had cast the cards with the other old dears, called souls up from the graves and got up to other devilries, wanting to find out whose head the priest’s sharp little scythe would send rolling next. Nor did she shy away from gossiping about others and rejoicing at their misfortunes, although she had not received the priest’s say-so.

Suddenly the whistling of a hang glider was heard and someone landed on the roof. Miss Davatkytė went numb with fear. She clearly heard footsteps and recognised the clatter of the priest’s iron-shod boots. She just pulled the eiderdown over her head and lay without moving, hoping to remain unnoticed. Suddenly someone tapped on the window. Davatkytė drew the covers apart a little and peeped in that direction. She saw the priest’s eyes glowing green in the darkness and trembled all over. Only then did she realise that she had given herself away. There came the ringing of shattering glass, and the priest was already inside.

– Perhaps you have a last wish, witch? – he asked, coming closer. It seemed to Davatkytė that he smiled…

The next morning people crowded round Eulalija’s cottage. Everyone already knew of her gruesome end. To the dead woman’s door the priest had pinned a note written in Davatkytė’s blood: “Alleluia to priests, death to antichrists.”

From that time on, all gossip and witchcraft vanished from that land.

One hot summer day, when you feel like neither beer nor water from the tap, the death-bearing shadow of the black hang glider slid across the village of Dievoniškės. The branches of the larch that grew at the end of the village crackled, and down to the ground clambered – guess who? – why, of course, the killer-priest, and, what is more, angry as never before.

So much had he prepared for his birthday Mass, so much had he polished his chromed hook, so many jobs of every kind had he given his sister Irutė to do, but not a single villager deigned to come to the famous chapel. Only two journalists from “Lietuvos rytas”, bored in the provinces, stuck their noses in and promptly met their end, having felt the killer-priest’s wrath.

Implacable as the Terminator and stern as RoboCop, the priest strode through the village, but everywhere he was met only by tear-stained wenches, old men and children. The priest marvelled. Perhaps the Estonians had come sailing in their dugouts again and driven the men off to Europe? But wait, what is that noise over at Plaučiūnas’s farmstead?

– Give back the remote, you fool! – Plaučiūnas threatened.

– Men, look there – Sabas (the nickname of Arvydas Sabonis, Lithuania’s basketball star)! – Izidorius Sobutilnikas (‘Bottlemate’) yelled in a voice not his own. – Go, you bastard, go! Goal!

– He looks poorly, maybe he’s caught a Euroleague again?

Dominykas Artojas hastily emptied the nearest bottle and switched the channel.

– Oooo... – the men sighed in unison.

– Mariana... – Dominykas mumbled, stupidly rolling his cloudy eyes. – As I love god...

– Aaaa! Don’t leave us! – Plaučiūnas fell to his knees, but someone switched the channel again. A well-dressed gentleman was explaining what horrors lie in wait for travellers in the land of Mozambique.

The priest grew sad. It is as good as the 21st century already, rockets soar into space, priests say an electric rosary, and here – there you have it, if you please. Complete ignoramuses gather round the devil’s box and worship all kinds of blockheads in it.

And his sister Irutė, having heard out his complaint, told him to walk in step with the times and create his own TV programme. She even suggested a title – “Without Idols” (lt. ‘Be stabų’, a play on ‘Be tabu’, ‘Without Taboo’, a cult TV3 show).

I shall deliberately skip the nuances of setting up the programme, which are of no interest to the reader. I doubt it troubles him in the least how many doors and backsides were kicked at the local TV666’s management before the director’s stiffening hand signed the required order in blood. So let us go straight to the programme.

As I have already mentioned, it was a hot summer, when you don’t even feel like beer, so instead the priest took a sip of some dark red liquid from the carafe he had brought along and, having waited for the camera light to come on, said:

– In the name of god the father, the holy ghost and the Lithuanian nation – amen. You are watching the programme “Without Idols”.

At this point all his fervour suddenly faded. Hosting a programme – that’s not farting into a barrel. What are those muzhiks out there thinking, I wonder? Probably laughing and pointing their fingers?

– Woe unto you! – roared the priest, having unexpectedly regained the gift of speech. – Verily I say: woe unto you, ye godless. I was and still am in your midst. I saw your every deed, I heard each word carelessly uttered in the forest, and every time you skipped Mass, I made a note of it! – He thrust out his black notebook with hellfire on the cover. – Therefore I say: woe unto you!

– You believe not in god but in the television! You care not for the Saviour and not for Mass but for Madonna’s tits, which, true, are in themselves a good thing after all... – the priest, lost in a daydream, began to twirl a little cross in his fingers.

– You pray for Sabas, sick with Euroleague, though you have seen neither Sabas nor Šiknabas (‘Arsabas’), you numb-fingered muzhiks! Why do you say: Kubilius (Andrius Kubilius, Lithuania’s prime minister in 1999–2000 and 2008–2012), give us bread! Or: Ozolas (Romualdas Ozolas, a Lithuanian politician), support agriculture! Know ye not that they are but idols, made and served by the hands of men? You gape at them open-mouthed, you follow them and like a flock of sheep you go to hell!

– Your children watch “Beavis and Butt-Head”, and then? Then they decide to test whether it is really true that without god’s will not a hair shall fall from the head. See? – he turned the bald back of his head to the camera. – They tried to smear my pillow with “Moment” glue in the night, the shameless ones. Good thing Irutė got there in time with the poker. Eh, Zigmas? Did you weep for your children that day the way you wept for the orphans of Chechnya the day before yesterday?

Terrible was the priest’s speech, enriched by the gurgling of the carafe and the banging of the table, which echoed through all the spheres and elemental forces of the world. Stirred up, three of the Universe’s elements came together in the sky into a blazing Lithuanian Tricolour, and the fourth turned into a giant Saint George spearing a dragon. And many more horrors of every kind did people see in the sky that day, wondering whether the last hour had not come. Even the grandads, some of whom remembered the revolution and some the Nationalists’ coup of 1926, shook their grey heads: no, in their day there had been no such things.

Louder and louder thundered the priest’s words, shaking the foundations of the world. In all that turmoil the demons, once locked up in hell by the angel Raphael, tore loose from their chains and, bursting outside headlong, did all kinds of damage.

– Are there not twenty-four hours in the day? Not seven days in the week? And are there not twelve months in the year? And all that time ye provoke the lord, serving idols!

Who knows whether it really was so, or perhaps I am making it all up here, but the priest went on talking for a long time yet. As he shouted and threatened, the posh TV666 skyscraper swayed so much that everyone expected it to collapse. Seeing this, the burgomaster ordered Eustachijus Ugniagesys (‘Fireman’) and Vygandas Urėdas (‘Forester’) to prop up that two-storey shack with old broom handles.

As the programme was drawing to an end, the inhuman drone of an aeroplane came drifting in from outside.

– Behold the fowls of the air – the priest, unflustered, turned to the window and pointed at Paksas’s plane (Rolandas Paksas, a stunt pilot, later president of Lithuania, impeached in 2004). – They sow not, neither do they reap, yet they have food in abundance through our lord Jesus Christ.

The camera’s little flame went out.

The programme was broadcast live.

That same day the villagers beat up Plaučiūnas and drowned his television in the river.

Here is the kind of holy and useful information about devils that the professors of theology Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger set out, and which, more than 500 years ago, Pope Innocent VIII blessed with his bull:

Devils are made of air, but they can take the form of any creature or human. They have no lungs and no tongues, but they know how to make a tongue out of their devilish body so that they can show it to the person they are talking to and not give away that they are not human. When speaking, they move the air not with the tongue and lips but in the inner cavities of the body, and the voice comes out fairly like a human’s. And when angels move into a human, they can also control all of his organs. Devils and angels cannot see with the eyes of a possessed body. Their eyes are only painted on.

Angels incarnated in a human can chew and swallow food, but cannot digest it or defecate. They have another way of removing food from the body. Christ had a normal digestive tract and did eat, but not in order to turn the food into his body (his powers were unlimited as it was), and he would destroy the food in his intestines in a single blink.

Succubus devils steal seed from wicked men. Then they pass that seed on to incubus devils, and these fornicate with witches. If a witch is infertile, the devil does not inject the seed into her; he does so only when she is fertile. Devils do not steal the sperm of nocturnal emissions, because such seed is not as fertile as that of a man who is awake. Devils most often come to debauch women during the great church feasts. When a devil has sex with a witch, he is visible to the witch but not to bystanders. Witnesses have many times seen naked women having orgasms, although no man could be seen with them.

If you cross yourself in a devil’s presence, he will vanish, because then they can no longer disguise their true appearance.

“The Hammer of Witches” (The Malleus Maleficarum, 1486)

St Sigis

Holy truth! I have had occasion to see quite a lot of documentary material on that subject. I remember, in our youth we were very interested in the catechism, in exorcism, in how to protect ourselves from devils and witches, so we went to the dear priest and asked: is it really so, holy Father, that when a witch fornicates with a devil, he is visible only to the witch and not to bystanders? So the dear priest crossed himself, called us closer and said quietly: “Holy truth, my children, but swear by all the saints and the blessed that for 7 years, 7 months and 7 days you will tell no one what I am now going to show you.” Since that term has already run out three times over, I can tell you.

And the dear priest led us off to the farthest room of the presbytery, switched on the television, put in a videocassette. And what horrors we saw there. It is the holy truth that holy men tell about those devils – the television showed women moaning in orgasm, and no man was to be seen with them; with horror in our eyes we watched a woman run her hands over her body, try to push the devil off herself, cover her shame so that the devil would not stick anything in there, but the poor thing could not defend herself from the evil one – she kept having one orgasm after another. And then more women came to that woman – and they all tried to drive that devil away, you could say, simply to scrape him off one another. They tried to cover the most secret little spots of the body so that the devil would not get in, but not a chance – the evil one was stronger than all of them, and before long they were all having orgasms.

The dear priest said later that if those women had had holy water and had crossed themselves three times, all the devils would have scattered in a flash. We came out of that little room then, I remember, all wet from emissions; it was frightening to think that the devil, having jumped out of the TV screen and out of the videocassette, might have made use of our seed, but the dear priest calmed us all down: the devil does not take emissions, for they are not so fertile, he said. He told us all to run home, wash, change our underwear and tell nobody anything, for dear God would smite us.

So that’s the story.

2004-12-15 10:22 DELFI.lt

Lured by the world of magic and mysticism, Panevėžys schoolchildren fell into a trap they had set themselves. The “Lietuvos rytas” supplement “Mes” writes that, wishing to make sure that spirits exist, they held a spiritist (from the word “spirit” (lt. ‘spiritas’, rectified alcohol)) séance, during which they supposedly summoned Lucifer, the ringleader of the evil spirits.

To one of the boys who took part in the séance the spirit prophesied seven children. Asked how he would earn bread for such a large family, the spirit said that the boy would work as a pimp.

The next morning the schoolchildren who had taken part in the séance needed a priest’s help. And on the whole, what was needed was not a priest for the children but a psychiatrist... for the adults who had decided to call in a priest.

The naive children thought it was Lucifer’s spirit speaking Lithuanian there. It was the killer-priest’s phantom: there lies the real truth, which the black-skirts are now trying to hide.

A reader’s comment (dramatised for entertainment purposes):

I had come up with the idea of finding out what spirits know. For the experiment I took a pack of cards, a sheet of paper with letters, a needle on a thread, a black candle and the like. I.e. I did everything according to the “Spirit Summoning Instruction Standard ISO-66601”. I summoned Lenin’s spirit. I turned the pack face up so that I would always see the first card, and I say:

– Tell me what card it is. If it’s the 9 of hearts, show “H” and then “9”.

It showed them correctly. I tried several times, and the spirit always answered correctly. Then I decided to summon the spirit of a Christian Democrat, only this time I turned the pack face down so that I could not see the value of the cards, and I ask:

– Tell me, what is the first card?

The spirit told me. I turn the card over, and it is... completely different. I tried several more times – the result was exactly the same.

Conclusion: Do not trust the spirits of Christian Democrats, because most of the time they know nothing themselves and constantly lie.

This story is based on true events, and the characters are not invented and from time to time provide new facts about the black deeds of the killer-priest.

Hard is the work of priests, anyone will tell you… It is no joke, day after day, to say Mass, to console the faithful and to kill one’s free time with other socially useful activity. While sitting in the popular “Craftsmen” tavern, where they communed very directly with inquisitive young men, though more likely young women, three friends, three Vilnius priests without parishes, in other words free shepherds of souls, Pijus, Mykolas and a third, whose name not even the oldest natives of the Cathedral precincts remember any more (for convenience let us call him Zikofetas), decided to rest in the forests of Ignalina from the sins of the big city. As they said, so they did.

It was a fine late Friday afternoon. Having borrowed a luxurious VAZ-21013 “Zhiguli” limousine belonging to one of the travellers, the gallant shepherds of souls set off towards their goal. And so that the road would not be dusty, they did not forget to throw in a litre or two of drinks that awaken holy thoughts and a modest snack. The journey did not drag; it even turned out very spiritual – lulled by philosophical conversations, with the help of “Starka”, the spiritual fathers not only enriched their own world but also dealt mercifully with the godless and plain sacks of sin they met along the way. One even dared to leap out of a pitiful little lane right in front of the limousine driven by Zikofetas, which was carrying the like-minded companions towards peace. Then, having merely shaken their fists forgivingly, the friends did not even suspect whom they would soon have to grapple with, nor whose eyes were glittering under a villager’s fur hat.

And the first hours, too, in the half-abandoned farmstead, which had nevertheless kept the honourable spirit of the ancestors, hanging here perhaps even since 1382, boded no evil. The friends sat down to commune and to work out the theory of relativity on theological grounds, that they might bring the light of science to the lost little sheep without ruffling their souls. Only Zikofetas, evidently sensing ill, prowled around the house, cleaving the surroundings with a suspicious gaze and not sitting down with Pijus and Mykolas. And then it began – there came an end to the juniper-scented gin that awakens inspiration, which the unenlightened count among the devil’s drops (which, by the way, Pijus and Mykolas refuted scientifically). The gallant fellows tumbled outside, and here is Zikofetas, having already harnessed the steel steed named Jawa, and he says: “Ech, spiritual fathers, darkness is drawing over the sky; let us go and visit the holy places, and so that the evil forces may lose their powers, seize the blessed weapons – a mock-up assault rifle and two pistols.” And the trio sputtered off into battle…

Long they rode through the valley of darkness; around them howled, set on by forces incomprehensible and unrevealed, vermin, dribblers and other gallibblers (lt. ‘amalai, varvalai bei kiti bambalai’; gallibblers are bumps and galls). The travellers fell and rose again, fell, but moved on again towards their longed-for goal… And earth mingled with sky, or perhaps rather with hell, trees snapped and brown dogs of hell snorted underfoot, aiming to latch onto the backs of their knees. At last, there it was, the little cemetery of Švedriškė – small, but tended by the locals, well groomed, and what matters most – generously sprinkled with holy water once every seven days – it is no joke to bring light and warmth to people in the land of evil, every second evildoer covets its holiness… In their own surroundings the Fathers’ souls revived, fresh strength came to them, their eyes shone and the resolve to fight awoke. The men seized their weapons and strode boldly towards the nearby lake, where the evil spirits, having crept into the villagers’ bodies and taken over their minds, were hurling indecent words about and otherwise breaking the order established by the Lord, glorifying the evil one… The spiritual fathers climbed onto the jetty and all at once shouted out the spell, known in olden times but also long since forgotten: “A, ty pomniš, Kibiras, kak my v Afganistane dušmanov gubili”… (Russian: ‘Ah, do you remember, Bucket, how we wiped out the dushmans in Afghanistan’; dushman, Soviet army slang for an Afghan rebel) The lesser little scoundrels rushed into the bushes, but, having nimbly laid down a few steps, met their end right there. The bigger ones were also thrown into confusion, scattered and bolted; perhaps the Lord of Darkness did manage to shelter one or another of them from the crushing stream of the light of eternal values, under the black wing of the hang glider, but most of them likewise departed to their evil creator, who looks like Bill Gates. Only the smell of sulphur was left hanging in the air.

Emboldened by such an outcome of the battle with the army of darkness, the three knights decided to accomplish an even greater feat. They had heard from the old folk that the lake near the hoary farmstead where they were staying was cursed, and that until three holy men had ridden round it on a steel steed, all manner of evil would breed in that lake and there would be no peace in the surroundings, neither for man, nor for little beast, nor for mushroom, nor for little fungus. They knitted their brows and set off… But it was not fated for them to reach their goal without a fight – when they had almost ridden round the lake, the evil vermin and other brigands seized the fighters’ steed by its forelimbs, shoving it, with everything, into the cold water. And a struggle broke out, man against man; several times the water had closed over Pijus’s head, but the gallant fellows held out and crawled out onto the bank, and Zikofetas dashed off headlong to fetch the Sixty-Five Horses. Before long he came back with the limousine. In a rage Mykolas harnessed the herd, Pijus and Zikofetas seized the horsehair ropes, and all together they freed the steel steed from the evil fetters. The men turned homewards without having ridden round the lake after all, but the great battle was not over. Several times the beast of steel fell, rolling off the fighter sitting on its back; everything went dark before the eyes of the Fathers, who, though they knew the places quite well, led only by the remnants of consciousness, somehow or other made it back to the Isle of Refreshment – the old farmstead.

But from that time on the ill-wishers vanished as if into a bog, took fright that their reign in Lake Piktasis (‘Evil’) was eternal no more, understood that the warriors of Truth would not rest until they had kicked their backsides, lopped off their tails and handed their hooves in at the buying points. They cleared off in an unknown direction, and people said they had seen them raging off the shores of Indonesia…

“And what has the killer-priest got to do with it?” You will ask, esteemed reader. But can You yourself believe that such horrors could take place without His knowledge, approval and guidance? Look around, perhaps behind Your back too His evil, bloodshot eyes are glinting, the straightened scythe is flashing…

Eternal rest grant…

It would be fitting to begin this extraordinary story not at all the way I shall do it. What is needed is a large-scale introduction matching the grandeur and importance of the tale, comparable to Tchaikovsky’s first concerto for piano and orchestra.

I try to recall Homer: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus”.

Alas, I am not that gifted, so I write as it comes out, and if I think of something afterwards – I shall be sure to correct it.

And so one fine day, or more precisely – one night – the killer-priest dreamt a dream. It seems he is sitting – no priest at all but plain Giedrius from the village of Skiemonys – in Vilnius, in the Writers’ Union café, and timidly sipping beer at 3 Lt 50 ct.

– Take me and read! (the first book printed in Lithuanian, Mažvydas’s Catechism of 1547, speaks to its readers: ‘Brothers, sisters, take me and read’) – declaims Salomėja Nėris (she, Cvirka, Daukša and Binkis are Lithuanian writers; Cvirka was a communist, Daukša a 16th-century priest), standing in the doorway, and her gaze burns the lad through and through. He leaps up from behind the table, already reaching out his hands to the green-eyed goddess, but Cvirka grabs him by the lapels:

– Where do you think you’re crawling, snotnose?!

In the drowsy café a certain stir can be felt all at once.

– Let go of the child, you communist! – threatens Daukša, pulling his nose out of his little glass. Binkis springs up and smashes the paraffin lamp under the ceiling, and a scrum begins in the dark.

The green-eyed temptress by the name of Salomėja is no longer in Giedrius’s head – now he is watching with interest a scuffle that vividly recalls the dividing up of land in his native village of Skiemonys. How, that time, old Jeronimas, meek and timid to look at, constantly plying the district head and the surveyors with drink, grabbed himself nine powers of land; good at least that he turned up his hooves straight away. How the priest then, while still beside the warm departed, taught the people that so it would be with everyone who coveted wealth and other earthly uncleanness, and to finish commanded: let him who has money to spare give it to the church. Having said that, the spiritual father snatched up four hams and rattled away.

And Giedrius had apparently been a clever child even then; not believing it, he saved up two tens of cents and bought ice cream from a Jew in the little town, but caught a cold and saw with his own eyes the terrible power of priests. That, after all, was when he made up his mind to become a priest... Onto the gaping Giedrius’s head comes down a tankard as heavy as sin, and the world is flooded with beer at 3 Lt 50 ct...

The killer-priest woke up and fell to thinking. It must have been a prophetic dream, for the bed was indeed full of some sort of beer – not beer. Good at least that no shards had scattered in. So, having got up, he took the dream book and read for a long time, running a nail as sharp as a razor along the lines: “To desire a woman in a dream – the earth will open”, “To see a communist – the godless will perish”, “Shards bring luck”.

And all three of those things in a single dream would, in the author’s opinion, mean the end of the world and doomsday.

All night long the killer-priest tossed and turned in bed, thinking what to do and whose advice to ask, but thought of nothing good. His sister Irutė had gone away to the Kėdainiai district to visit distant relatives, and the wise sorcerer of Kriogžlys had work up to his neck, warring with the Colorado beetles that had flooded the land, and with other unclean forces. He had even called on the ascetic pilgrims of Šiluva to eat those beetles, but they refused – those beetles, they say, have a very filthy taste, and you can’t roll every one of them in sugar, after all. So instead the sorcerer would send the neighbours’ boy to Lake Kriogžlys to catch frogs. Then he would cast spells for a long time, making terrible monsters out of them; at last he would make a whirlwind, pour the frogs into it and send it off into the fields. And afterwards he would rest on his porch with a bottle of beer, rejoicing in his soul at the distant growling of the sharp-toothed monsters and the dying shrieks of the Colorado beetles.

And so the killer-priest brooded all night long about the ascetics, the frogs and the end of the world, until a fire engine’s siren tipped him out of bed.

Shoving his bare feet into cowboy boots, the priest pattered over to the window and even froze in surprise: outside, flashing its emergency light, stood a fire engine. And beside it, smoking a papirosa, stood the legendary Širvintai Fireman. The story of how he came to be, edifying and equally useful for both children and grown-ups to hear, was this:

One foul autumn evening a man rang the Širvintai fire and rescue service, begging them to save his “Mercedes”, which had caught fire halfway between Širvintai and Ukmergė.

– Ring Ukmergė, you lump of a fool, you! – Lieutenant Ainošius answered, and put down the receiver.

He rang Ukmergė too, but heard the voice of the lieutenant there, Kaipošius:

– Ring Širvintai, you donkey!

Who knows how long they kept sending the wretch from Ainošius to Kaipošius (after Annas and Caiaphas: to be sent ‘from Annas to Caiaphas’ is a Lithuanian saying for being passed from pillar to post), until at last the Širvintai men, being of an incomparably kinder heart, took pity and sent out the only crew they had, kept for a black day or a white night – a German engine with the lame Sergeant Kvedaras and half a bucket of sand inside.

The crew raced as if the devil were carrying them, clanging all their bells and frightening the sea-buckthorn pickers still out late along the roadsides. And when they reached the scene of the disaster, they found only the burnt-out skeleton of a “Zaporozhets” (a small, cheap Soviet car) and a trampled “Comliet” mobile phone. At this such laughter seized Kvedaras that soon he gave up his spirit to God.

And after the solemn funeral, held, as befits a fireman killed at his post, with a brass band and drums, strange and inexplicable things began to happen all around. Drivers travelling the Ukmergė–Širvintai road told of seeing a ghost fire engine racing through the dark with siren and lights. Many even claimed to have seen at the wheel the late Kvedaras, whom many had known, and so they could hardly have been mistaken. And one Sipavičius, caught drunk at the wheel, told the traffic police that he had been drinking with Kvedaras, and that the latter was now roaming about somewhere nearby, terribly angry with the police. The officers were not frightened that time, but just in case they put that talk on record.

In the villages of the district Kvedaras also became a frequent guest. Women would hear him rattling about under the windows, would hear his voice calling them somewhere... More than once men saw him setting fire to a neighbour’s haystack or simply pinching some goods. Children too would see him in their dreams – big, with a horned helmet and a battle-axe, like the Viking god Thor, Odin’s son, who is often shown in fantasy TV series.

And so, accompanied by such contradictory fame, the Fireman made his way to the Antaviliai forest and presented himself before the killer-priest.

Our killer-priest was not one of the cowardly sort. In the past, a conversation with vagrants of every hair, advertising agents and night-prowlers would end in a fireball to the forehead. But this time the killer-priest felt a strange goodwill towards this stranger with a papirosa in his teeth, who had come knocking from distant lands, the gods know why. So he stayed his already rising hand and invited the guest inside. And he let him park the engine in the barn, next to the hang glider, lest the children of those parts should jump on it, take it apart and make themselves bicycles, as once very nearly happened to the evil man-train.

And when they had sat down at the table, Kvedaras told of the extraordinary matter for whose sake he had stayed on earth after death, banging about and frightening little children. Of course, here the reader, being incomparably cleverer than I, will explain without trouble why Kvedaras remained on earth to toil his little toil. Perhaps such was his karma, perhaps the stars somehow affected his disintegrating astral body, or perhaps it was simply God’s will, and it does not befit us to delve into such things, since it is a holy mystery. So be it! I be an unlearned man, but then I lay down the truth as it is, without any gentlemanly frills, and if my true words claw at anyone’s sitting part, is that my fault, then?

To put it more briefly, here is what happened. As we all know well, they do not take just anybody into paradise. Only upright citizens, gallant boozers, foul-mouths and other people of merry lungs get in there. But in recent times the room there has shrunk catastrophically, because, thanks to the killer-priest and his friends, there are more and more such persons among us. And so, as soon as he had arrived and passed through the compulsory Correctness of Views Detector (I have heard that one is installed in the US Embassy in Vilnius, near the registry office, and another in the reception room of the Seimas), Kvedaras saw a queue of souls waiting for a flat. Then St George pushed his way through to the bewildered fireman, dragging behind him the dragon along with St Florian. They offered to grant a flat out of turn if Kvedaras agreed to join the fire and rescue service of paradise, then being formed of volunteers. And since Kvedaras already held the rank of sergeant, Florian, who directs all firefighting and rescue work in heaven, offered him a lieutenant’s shoulder straps.

Thus Kvedaras received a uniform halo and wings, and before long he was summoned to headquarters.

There it was explained to him that the end of the world had drawn near, because down below the ancient rites that hold the Antichrist in hell had long since ceased to be performed. Which rites exactly, they did not say; they only ordered him to find the killer-priest and help him if need be. And to finish they also frightened him with fiery hell and doomsday, when before God not only Kvedaras’s good deeds would be weighed, but also his Young Pioneer past and his ballot papers.

In the past, the killer-priest would only have laughed at such nonsense, just as you and I would, but now he grew thoughtful – there were too many coincidences already. The evil cleric knew well what rites were meant. More than once or twice at the seminary the professor of liturgy had secretly told him about those times when priests used to save the world as it thrashed about in its death agony.

According to the professor, ends of the world used to be organised very solemnly. Participants – both mounted and on wheels – would gather in greater numbers than at the Kalvarijų market. In hastily set-up stalls, kiosks and tents, honey, paraffin, soap, sweets and nuts were sold – with a special end-of-the-world mark-up, of course. Having pushed their way through all that swarm, people, munching sweet treats, would go to watch heretics being burnt. One would even buy from an obliging monk a little bundle of drier firewood, that the sinner might stand before God the sooner. Others, however, scorned such doings, saying that a heretic, if he wants to get into God’s shelter, must suffer a while over a low flame, and would rather throw their spare penny into the offering box. Then they would go to receive Communion, and to pray and have a beer. And in the middle of that holy circus, their hands raised to heaven, five chief priests would stand in a ring. From all the surrounding hubbub, the smell of sweat, the jingle of money, the stench of the burning godless and their dying screams, they, like cherries steeped in vodka, would soak up a downright living hell of magical powers.

And when the angels’ trumpets sounded, proclaiming the Last Judgement, the tension would reach its highest point. The priests would set to work. Terrible anti-aircraft fireballs would pour into the sky, compared with which even the anti-aircraft machine gun of the mayor of Kybartai is a mere trifle. Bursting, they would scatter the horsemen of the Apocalypse and the army of angels following in pursuit. Then would come the turn of the Antichrist, who by then would already have managed to crawl out from under the ground. The priests would batter the army of devils with thunderbolts, reaping squad after squad and making the rest flee to Hell, where, after all, we usually send our foes too.

Giedrius very much liked listening to those tales, more interesting even than the adventures of Xena and Hercules. And when he asked how the professor knew so much about those things, the latter boasted that he himself had been the manager of one such event. That, evidently, was why he had been shoved off into a backwater, to teach at the priests’ seminary, because he knew too much. People who know say – and the wise confirm – that in Soviet times, too, several ends of the world were recorded, but, so as not to cause panic, they were written up as song festivals. The evil communist sorcerers would secretly amend the lyrics. Somebody would be singing “Dear Lithuania” – and in truth handing over his mind, heart and powers to the red shamans. And those wasted no time – a living horde of them would swarm into the stands. True, heretics were not burnt in those days, but it is not permitted, after all, to perform holy rites without torture – so, when the seers gave the signal, KGB dentists would begin torturing little children they had caught on their way to church.

Such, then, were those mysterious rites the decrepit professor of liturgy told the killer-priest about, and I hope that you, dear readers, will remember something of those ancient things yourselves. And if you had the misfortune to be born an ateitininkas, and your first little book was the catechism – better go and drink to my health, and don’t make my head spin.

And so, having tossed down a bit of this and that, as they say, to fortify body and soul, the two of them got into Kvedaras’s ghost fire engine and rumbled off to Vilnius, where ends of the world had been celebrated through the ages, and where this time too it behoved them to stand shoulder to shoulder and put off doomsday.

And in those days – happy coincidences do happen, after all – the World Lithuanian Games were taking place, which teenagers everywhere nickname the Massacre (lt. ‘žudynės’, echoing ‘žaidynės’, games). Heralds, mounted and on foot, sent by the authorities beyond nine seas and nine oceans, had summoned a living hell of tottering ethnographic grandads, curious folk wanting to taste cepelinai, and plain good-for-nothings fond of the Lithuanian way of life – thieving, whoring and cut-throat killing.

Naturally, it was to them that the killer-priest’s gaze, boding no good, turned, especially after he found stuck to his stole a piece of chewing gum that not even Kvedaras with his special tools could prise off.

Before long, reports of foreign citizens gone missing without trace began to pour into the embassies, the prosecutor’s office and the police. But the officials, after the good old custom of officials the world over, put those reports into binders, the binders into drawers, while the killer-priest, at that very time, was whetting his scythe in perfect calm, looking with satisfaction at the sacrificial stone darkening with blood, which he and the Širvintai Fireman had stolen from the local history museum.

And when the fateful day came, the killer-priest and Kvedaras drove to Vingis Park (the Vilnius park of the song festivals, where John Paul II said Mass in 1993) and were greatly surprised to see that everything was already prepared for the end of the world – traders bustling, gawpers jostling in a crush, a hubbub beyond telling.

And just then, as they were looking around, a loud blaring of horns rang out. At first everyone thought it was a scout band from Poland, but the clouds parted, and a shudder ran through the crowd, calm until then.

Striking sparks, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse came galloping nearer out of the azure of the sky with their swords, accompanied by an orchestra of angels. In another corner of the sky an angel was already tearing the seals off a book inscribed “Confidential. Self-destruction instructions”.

Meanwhile the killer-priest, raising the terrible sacrificial stone above his head, felt better than ever. Never before had he plunged into so mighty a whirlpool of magic. All around, the little people had fallen down and were praying, tearing their hair and repenting, trying to outshout the trumpets and telling their very silliest sins – and the killer-priest felt an invisible force enfold him, threatening to sweep away everything in its path.

– In the name of Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar! – the killer-priest shouted a spell he had heard in a TV series about Robin Hood, and, taking aim with his stone, let fly a fireball. The first horseman turned into a shrieking gust of flame and melted away somewhere in the stratosphere.

– In the name of Gwendalf, the Hobbit and Tolkien!

– In the name of Saint Ainošius, Kaipošius and Nekrošius (also the surname of Eimuntas Nekrošius, a celebrated Lithuanian theatre director)!

The only horseman left galloped ever nearer, threatening with his sword to split the Earth like a walnut. With great toil the weary killer-priest aimed the stone at him, but could no longer remember even the very simplest spell.

– In-the-namekins, rattlekins, carted a wench on wheelkins! (lt. ‘Vardantukų reketukų vežė bobą ant ratukų!’, echoing the knee-bouncing rhyme ‘Varnų turo reketuko, vežė bobą ant ratukų’, the Lithuanian ‘Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross’) – he shouted a ditty he had known as a child, and the explosion of the fireball tore the horseman to pieces.

The angel bandsmen hurriedly fled, dropping their horns. From under the ground came a rumbling – it was the Antichrist waking up. For half an hour or so he thrashed about, quite unable to open the manhole covers, which the prudent city authorities had welded shut, preparing not so much for the Antichrist’s visit as for the Pope’s. At last, as the crowd shrieked, the earth heaved up and burst in all directions in clods – and those gathered beheld the mysterious beast called the Antichrist.

The killer-priest could barely stay on his feet. The sacrificial stone, which he had thought would be a source of power, had discharged unexpectedly fast. Throwing it aside, the killer-priest gripped his scythe and made ready to fight to the last.

– Take that, you scum! – came a shout. It was the Širvintai Fireman, who, aiming his engine’s hose, had begun treating the Antichrist to the water and foam he had brought along. And – believe it if you like, or, if you like, don’t – the accursed one began in an instant to crawl back into Hell, writhing most horribly and groaning so that in the crowd of spectators not only noble ladies fainted, but a few bearded men as well.

Probably nobody but Kvedaras himself remembered the incident when the parish priest, having come to the Širvintai fire brigade with a preventive blessing, overdid it a little and, while being dunked in the tank, drowned his little cross there. That is why the water Kvedaras brought was always blessed and put out fires better than water drawn, say, from an ordinary pond with frogs. And as for driving out all sorts of antichrists and satans, it had no equal at all...

And when the earth closed up, hiding the Antichrist from human eyes for good, a strange thing happened. Descending from heaven, St Florian presented Kvedaras with a first-class medal for saving the world. He also blessed the people gathered there, told them to obey the authorities and to give to the church, waved his hand – and both of them vanished. Perhaps you think I am lying? I am telling the purest truth. May God rather grant you as much faith in my words as you now have nihilism in your souls.

Here ends my story about two brave men who stood across the path of the Apocalypse and saved humankind, drowning in sins, from fiery hell. Everyone delights in listening to it and retells it to their friends, but little by little the true things are forgotten, the characters fade, the names get muddled. True, the legendary Širvintai Fireman’s engine still stands in a special museum, much visited by schoolchildren and tourists, but does anyone care that the killer-priest had to trudge on foot all the way to Antaviliai? Does anyone even know that on his hang glider, which struck unspeakable terror into the surrounding parts, children had spray-painted “Depeche Mode”, “Satan” and “Omega”? That, were it not for the man-train who gave the killer-priest a lift, the vengeful and benighted villagers would not have left a stone upon a stone of the whole presbytery? Does anyone even care?

With an aching heart I take my leave of you, dear readers. Of late I have had to grow ever more disappointed in people who no longer believe in the killer-priest, nor in the Širvintai Fireman, nor in Dracula. Does anyone still know that the truth lies somewhere beyond Ignalina?

It is a great joy that the folk are joining in the glorification of the killer-priest and grasping the sacred essence of this majestic figure. Only in the words of a song is holy history exalted, and only the chosen can grasp the bliss when the blade of the scythe, accompanied by the whoosh of the hang glider, rolls the heads off the witnesses of a miraculous revelation. So let us sing psalms to the only-begotten son of the Lord Aurigarijus, the killer-priest. Blessed be the poets who have sung of Lithuania’s butcher in the name of Good and Love:

It is a great joy that the folk are joining in the glorification of the killer-priest and grasping the sacred essence of this majestic figure. Only in the words of a song is holy history exalted, and only the chosen can grasp the bliss when the blade of the scythe, accompanied by the whoosh of the hang glider, rolls the heads off the witnesses of a miraculous revelation. So let us sing psalms to the only-begotten son of the Lord Aurigarijus, the killer-priest. Blessed be the poets who have sung of Lithuania’s butcher in the name of Good and Love: