It’s been a while since I posted the German version of my little Christmas possibly horror story – but now I thought why not offer an English translation for those inclined?

So if you are, follow me into the church!

„No. No, I know that there is also the issue of  - Yes. Yes, of course I realise how - Joseph, I understand all that, but it doesn‘t change - Yes. Yes, I know. But do we really have to – I mean, has there ever been a - Yes. Yes, I know. Yes, all right."
Vira sighed. She had known that the bishop would not listen to her. She fiddled with her collar and muttered a "Merry Christmas," before disconnecting and pocketing her phone.
She sighed again, looking up at the stone ceiling of the hallway, smirking a little as she imagined how much it must make her look like a scene from some quirky comedy or something. Wasn't there some old series where a clergywoman solved murder cases against her superiors’ order? Something like that.
She pushed through the door into the main hall and looked around, with the usual lump in her throat. Briefly she felt relief as she thought the church was empty anyway - then she heard a noise and sagged a little.
Someone was there after all. But what was that noise? Was the person laughing? Or ... ?
No. It sounded more like ...
There, behind the column, someone was sitting in one of the pews, elbows on knees, face buried in their hands, sobbing quietly.
Of course.
As if it wasn't enough to have to ask someone to leave the church on 23 December, it had to be a desperate, sad person as well.
A person who needed help?
Vira stepped closer to them. At least they did not look as if they might be homeless, even if they could have been dressed more warmly.
But that didn't have to mean anything. Maybe their car was right outside the door, or something.
The person was wearing a dark blue hoodie, but hadn't pulled the hood up over the long, shiny frizzy black hair that voluminously haloed their head. Both their clothes and hair looked too neat for a homeless person.
Vira felt a little ashamed of this reflection, and tried to console herself with the fact that she was not concerned just now with disparaging others for being homeless, but simply hoped to evict only a person who could go back to their own apartment, if disappointed, instead of freezing to death on the streets. Also she really thought someone sleeping rough would absolutely need more layers simply not to freeze to death.
"Good evening," she greeted as she moved closer so as not to startle the crying person.
Head raised and hands lowered, and large, reddened and puffy dark brown eyes looked up at her, above a dripping smeared nose and quivering lips.
Vira's gaze fell briefly to their feet. She saw a light-coloured leather boot with a short shaft on the left, but on the right ... nothing at all? The trouser leg simply reached down to the floor. She squinted, briefly confused. Maybe an amputation. But wouldn't they then have a prosthesis or ...?
"Hello!" the stranger groaned and straightened up a little.
The hoodie was printed in a type that looked like handwriting with an excerpt from that old pop song. Was that from the 80s?
'There's a danger in loving somebody too much.'
Belinda Carlisle, the singer's name came to Vira's mind at that moment as the tune began to play in her head.
There was nothing immediately alarming about the stranger, they looked quite friendly and open beneath the thick layer of sadness, but still something about their reaction irritated Vira.
It was the way they seemed unashamed of their sadness - actually the term was too weak for such a breakdown, it had to be grief or maybe despair. The way they didn't mumble an apology or an explanation, didn't even try to wipe the snot off, but just looked up at Vira with teary eyes all open and curious, waiting for her to say something.
Vira had found crying people in her church before, of course. If the situation warranted it, she approached them and spoke to them. Almost always they were ashamed, hastily reassured her that everything was all right, got up and fled, or at least asked some question or asked for help.
Not this person. And even though Vira wished for a world where no one felt the need to apologise for grieving, she knew that she did not live in that world, and that her counterpart's behaviour was therefore conspicuous.
And unfortunately, Vira also lived in a world where it was advisable for her, as a woman, even more so as a small and really not particularly strong woman, to be cautious when she found herself alone and unobserved with a larger person in an emotionally extreme situation in a closed room and the other person was behaving in a socially inappropriate way.
"May I sit with you?" she nevertheless asked in the calm, controlled voice of the counsellor.
Not only because most situations were made more dangerous by showing fear, but also because it was her job.
Vira had for a long time been uncertain how proud she was overall to be a pastor. All the more reason to give it her all for the parts she still could be proud of.
The person nodded.
Vira did her best not to call them "The Woman" in her mind. The shape of breasts was showing under the hoodie, and even the wet shiny face would have clearly classified them as feminine in the past, but Vira had just completed a very fascinating webinar on inclusion with a focus on lgbtqia+, and even if she still had to think for a moment to get all the letters together, it was important to her to be a modern pastor who accepted the identity of her flock.
Identity wasn't such a good term either, was it?
She would have to watch that part again.
She didn’t actually like ‘flock’ either, but she occasionally allowed herself to use the term quietly in her own mind, especially when she felt she could use a bit of self-assurance and superiority.
Vira sat down next to the person, consciously inhaling through her nose, deliberately not too noticeably but still.
To her relief, she didn't smell any alcohol either. Drunks were the worst.
Still ... there was something strange.
Vira smelled ... No alcohol, no cigarette smoke, no body odour either, at least not a noticeable one. No deodorant or perfume either, not even detergent, but ... not nothing either.
And the longer she concentrated on it, the more varied the faint aromas that flowed through her nose seemed.
The strange person smelled ... warm, in an almost neutral way, like warm metal, or ... No, not quite. Not completely neutral. There was a very slight smell of smoke, but not like cigarettes, more like a chimney? But there was something else underneath, a dull, not unpleasant smell, not strong, but ... like a dog? Maybe she had a pet. But there was not a single hair on the fabric of the hoodie.
Or was it like from another animal? A reptile even? A wolf?
Vira blinked and shook her head.
Where had she come up with such nonsense now? Reptile, maybe. But how on earth would she know how a wolf might smell different from a dog?
"What's bothering you?" she asked.
A bitter smile played around the person's wide mouth as they nodded slowly and thoughtfully.
"It's hard to explain," they said, in a very slight accent that was hard to place. "But also quite easy, actually."
"I have time," Vira said, not quite truthfully. "And I can listen. Do you want to talk about it?"
"He ... Left me," the person said. Shrugged, smiled melancholically. "Or more accurately, kicked mw out, just like that. And I don't even know why."
"Now? This close to Christmas?"
Now, standing there like that in the vast empty space of the church's nave, the question seemed richly unreflective even to Vira herself. But there she stood.
The person shook her head slowly.
"No," she murmured. "It's been a while."
"An old wound?" asked Vira, in an attempt to come across as a little less conservative-conventional.
"Something like that. But still hurts."
"I read once that it's just a lie that time heals all wounds, and that at best they scab over a bit and sometimes you forget about them until you bump into the edge of a table with them. I think there's something to that, even if I can't remember where it was."
"In a world made all out of table edges," the other person said. And something contorted in their face. Their mouth quivered harder again, their eyes narrowed, they sucked in a loud breath through a constricted throat, and their shoulders shook. "It's so fucking unfair," they pressed out. "I loved him."
Vira nodded and gently placed a hand on the other person's shoulder.
The webinar had also briefly been about only touching other people with clear consent, but Vira still found there were situations where the question didn't fit.
She wasn't sure, but ... At least she was sure that there were situations where she had to follow her instincts, and this was definitely one of them. There was no textbook for comfort. Or those were all just excuses to avoid a potentially embarrassing rejection and push the discomfort onto the other person.
She would have to think about that later.
"I loved him so much," sobbed the other person, much more distraught again. Vira wouldn't have understood a word if she had not heard the same words just before.
She patted the shoulder under her hand as the person curled up further, bending their upper body forward until their forehead almost touched the back of the pew in front of them, rubbing frantically at their eyes with the heels of their hands, a thin thread of snot running down from the tip of their nose onto the denim above their knee.
"I LOVED him!" they cried, and Vira winced while echoes raced through the empty church.
"Did ... did he love you too?" she asked, again not knowing if that was a good idea.
She wondered - not for the first time - if the pastoral care and comfort thing, the thing about her job that she had always wanted, in fact the only reason she hadn't yet shoved that silly collar into her bishop's self-righteous bureaucrat's face, wasn't also just nonsensical mumbo-jumbo and she actually had no idea what she was doing either, just telling herself she was helping.
But at least she was there. That was not a matter of course, and surely worth something.
It had to be.
"Yes," the other person sobbed. "Yes, of course. He still does, the bloody bastard." Not a good word, Vira thought, but this did not seem the right moment to bring it up. "And yet he threw me out because he's a control freak. Because he was afraid I was being unfaithful ..."
"Were you?"
"YES," the other person shouted, before the question was quite over, a shrill, pointed sound. "YES, I was. But ..." They calmed down again, the words separated not by silence but by soft, insistent whimpers. "But I did it for him. I did ... I wanted to ..."
They breathed a deep, shuddering, whimpering, sobbing, wet breath.
The knees of their jeans were now completely soaked on both sides. Vira resisted the temptation to stop the person from rubbing their eyes further, even though she was a little afraid they might hurt themselves, so impetuously and furiously did the heels of their hands keep going from left to right.
Vira left them alone for a while until the sobbing quietened down again, and just watched them.
It was strange. Something about this stranger was sympathetic to her, almost attracted her, and yet ... she couldn't help feeling something else, too, which was perhaps just nervousness, perhaps mistrust ... perhaps fear?
Finally they lowered their hands again, sniffed and looked up at one of the windows. 
"I was his. He was mine. It was perfect. It was perfect, and then ..."
Vira had been a pastor for four years now. She had seen and heard many people cry in that time, in many different ways.
But she had never seen an adult person cry so childishly-shamelessly-desperately as this one was now.
Their sobs sounded almost like a cough. They howled, shrieked, wailed.
And Vira sat by and patted her shoulder helplessly. 
"And then it wasn’t?" she finally asked.
And the person next to her nodded. And mingled with their sobs was a melancholic laugh.
"And then it wasn’t," she confirmed.
"Do you know that feeling?" she finally asked Vira. "When you love someone, but despite ... No, not ‘despite. When you have to do something they don't want just because you love them. Only for their own good. Because you know it's the right thing for them."
"Well ..." said Vira, thinking back to her conversation with the bishop.
Not that she loved that guy, for heaven's sake, literally even. But the Church ... She wanted to love the Church, she did. But she just couldn't manage it. Possibly that, too, in both senses of the phrase.
And in her situation, maybe what the stranger had said even made sense. In a relationship with a human being, it really didn't sound like a good idea.
"Most of the time, people know quite well for themselves what is right for them," she tried to contradict as diplomatically as she knew how. "Did he have a problem then?"
The other person was breathing more evenly again now. They wiped the snot from their face with a sleeve, took another breath, this time without tremors or sobs, and turned a little to face Vira.
"Did he ever," they said, "And he knew that, actually. But he couldn't get out of it because of his own rules. Because he couldn’t get over himself one fucking time, just once. Sometimes you have to break the rules and do the right thing, don't you?"
Vira suppressed a brief flicker of amusement because the sentence fitted so well with her phone call to the bishop.
"It depends on the rules," she said, "and who knows what the right thing is? There’s only one of us who really knows," she added with a glance at the cross, even if it seemed a bit corny even to herself.
A brash snort answered her. And the person turned their head so that a glow of light reflected in their eyes from somewhere, quite strangely, as if they were glowing from within.
"Yes," they said. "Yes, that's what they want us to think, isn't it?"
Vira smiled and shrugged her shoulders. She glanced at her watch. She should probably lock up really soon if she didn't want to risk reprimand. Security would be calling soon.
But she'd be damned if she was going to just throw a desperate person out of her church. At least for a few more minutes ...
"Who do you mean by that?" she asked.
The other person grabbed Vira's hands and clasped them between hers. Their hands were warm, and remarkably rough, full of calluses - and a little damp, but to her own surprise Vira did not feel disgusted.
She felt a strange mixture of spontaneous sympathy, almost attraction, to this strange person, and a vague but very deep-seated feeling of uncertainty, almost fear.
For a moment, Vira did fear that they might have a mental illness, and wondered if she had been too careless.
Then she remembered a Tumblr post she had read last week about how mentally ill people were much more often victims than perpetrators of violent acts, and she remembered wondering why there sometimes was more wisdom in the public diary of a sixteen-year-old than in the word of God.
"His is the kingdom and the power and the glory - he didn't say anything about wisdom, did he?" the person asked, almost as if they had read Vira's mind.
It was actually starting to get a bit creepy for her, and not just because of the strange connections between her thoughts and situation and what this strange person was saying to her. There was also something about their intensity and the look in their eyes.
"For the LORD giveth wisdom, and out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding," Vira remembered.
"Proverbs ..." the strange person murmured, and Vira was not quite sure if she meant to name the source of the quote. The tone of voice didn't necessarily sound like it. "But words are cheap. You could really help people in need. You do want to. Why don't you?"
Vira looked at the other person and involuntarily backed away a little. Up to now the conversation had only indirectly touched upon her own situation, but now ...
And ... had the smell of smoke become more intense, or did she just perceive it more clearly? And the other, of some predator?
The strange person was still holding Vira's hands, and Vira felt that their fingers were getting warmer. They almost felt hot.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I'm just ... I just work here." That was definitely a phrase she hadn't learned in the seminar. "And I'm afraid I have to close up now, so ..."
"Do you have to? Do you want to?"
Vira let out an embarrassed laugh.
There was that yellowish-red glow in the person's eyes again, and ... Jesus, it was in her mouth too. Something shone through between her teeth as if she had glowing coals in her throat. What a strange thought.
Vira looked around the church in confusion. It was already dark outside, and the lights in the hall were on, of course, but they were simple white lamps. Nothing reddish, nothing orange.
"You can stick to the rules," the strange person said, and something in her voice had changed. And the smell ... It was definitely more intense now. "Or you can do something to help others. Really change the world. Make a difference. Together with me."
"How do you mean ...?" asked Vira.
The other person cast a sideways glance towards the cross, and for a moment that look of irrepressible sadness twitched across her face again, and anger too. A lot of anger. Hatred, perhaps, even?
"I mean," she said, having turned her attention fully back to Vira, that strange orange flickering light fixing Vira's gaze, "That I'm making you an offer. Because ‘tis the season." The corners of her mouth twisted up a little, and Vira blinked uncertainly, squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and opened them again. Those teeth ... Those teeth ... And ... "But you have to take it right now. Otherwise there will be no set of free steak knives." 
"Who are you?" asked Vira. "You can't ... That's not ..."
The grin grew even wider. Far too wide. How was that ...
The person let go of Vira's hands, stood up and limped past her into the corridor. Her right leg, which Vira had thought earlier might have been an amputation, moved strangely, and it made a very ... hard, dry sound. Like a hoof.
"Yes, I can. And that is. But seriously, only right now. He had forty days," she said, with another sideways glance at the cross. "But then, he's daddy’s special little boy. You only have this one moment. One shot, one opportunity, once in a lifetime, you know how it goes."
The person extended a hand to her, but only a little. This time Vira would have to decide for herself whether to take it. 
Vira's gaze fell once more on her hoodie. There's a danger in loving somebody too much.
"So, what's it going to be? Him or me?"