When it was over he stepped inside. The smell was stronger. He lit a candle with a plastic lighter. Before he spoke he cleared his throat as he would before the homily.

"Yoo-hoo, little creatures of the night. Father Joe, here to see you."

His candle revealed the holdouts still hanging from the walls by their feet, wrapped like football fans, not in blankets but in their wings. Some of them squinted into the insult of the light; some shifted irritably like insomniacs, all snouts and elbows.

"Not quite feeling up to it tonight? The halt and the lame and the old and the sick. Feeling just a little off, are we?"

The priest strolled deeper into the darkness and the stench. A bat ran across his path, upright, wings raised overhead like a tiny man with an umbrella, looking back and up at him.

The priest stopped and held up the candle. A bat peered down from the wall and the man saw the glitter in its purblind eyes, the quivering, inquisitive expression on its face. The man cocked his head. The bat bared its teeth and screeched. The mouth was large for the face and the incisors were large for the mouth, and needle-like. The leafed nostrils were flared and its ears were enormous. The little animal began breathing faster, and it extended its wings and resettled them back around its body.

"Cold, my little friend?" The man saw the froth of saliva gathered at the chin, and when the bat sneezed the foam flew off.

The priest extended his free hand toward the animal. Again the bat bared its teeth and screeched but the priest didn't move, and a moment later the animal crawled down the wall a few feet closer to him.