When Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, he started off with the story of one main character. Little did he know when he began that novel that he would create a stronger character and have to change the book and the focus of the story to fit Captain Ahab. Fortunately, that scenario has not happened to me. What has happened is that a secondary character in several aspects of the plot and subplot has metamorphosed from their original design into something else.

Monsignor Daniel Whitfield was designed to be the strictest and perhaps most backward thinking of priests. We all know the type—the kind behind man’s most positive moments like: the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, witch burnings, and so on. Those kinds of church leaders that give the others a bad name. Yet as I rewrote the plot and have had the character move within the “Dark Medicine-verse”, he has taken on a more humanistic and spiritualistic role. Whitfield is a priest who has been on missions around the world, seen the rich and ministered mercy to the starving. He is the kind who looks at the human soul and does his best to help nourish it as well as the body it inhabits. Ready for retirement he is now faced with a moment of crisis in faith.

Unlike some crises, he does not question if God truly exists. Instead he questions if his faith is strong enough to overcome the onslaught of the most ancient evil. He questions if a soul can become so dark and so condemned as to never being able to be redeemed. He questions if standing firm in his beliefs is truly the answer or if surrender to the madness of the world is easier.

What would you do if suddenly faced with supernatural evil? What would you do if you had hard proof before your eyes of the existence of demons? I am not talking about seeing bad things in the world that you can say were caused by a demon. I mean having the demon standing before you, feeling the heat of evil coming off their body. What would you do? What would you question? How would you change?

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more on the articles, blogs, novels, poems, and short stories I write.