Long After Midnight. Ray Bradbury

      I, thought the Priest, shall go mad.

      “Do not,” said the Ghost, “or I shall go down to madness with you.”

      “I can’t give you up, oh, dear God, now that you’re here, after all these years, all my dreams, don’t you see, it’s asking too much. Two thousand years, a whole race of people have waited for your return! And I, I am the one who meets you, sees you—”

      “You meet only your own dream. You see only your own need. Behind all this—” the figure touched its own robes and breast, “I am another thing.”

      “What must I do!” the Priest burst out, looking now at the heavens, now at the Ghost which shuddered at his cry. “What?”

      “Avert your gaze. In that moment I will be out the door and gone.”

      “Just—just like that?”

      “Please,” said the Man.

      The Priest drew a series of breaths, shivering.

      “Oh, if this moment could last for just an hour.”

      “Would you kill me?”

      “No!”

      “If you keep me, force me into this shape some little while longer, my death will be on your hands.”

      The Priest bit his knuckles, and felt a convulsion of sorrow rack his bones.

      “You—you are a Martian, then?”

      “No more. No less.”

      “And I have done this to you with my thoughts?”

      “You did not mean. When you came downstairs, your old dream seized and made me over. My palms still bleed from the wounds you gave out of your secret mind.”

      The Priest shook his head, dazed.

      “Just a moment more … wait …”

      He gazed steadily, hungrily, at the darkness where the Ghost stood out of the light. That face was beautiful. And, oh, those hands were loving and beyond all description.

      The Priest nodded, a sadness in him now as if he had within the hour come back from the true Calvary. And the hour was gone. And the coals strewn dying on the sand near Galilee.

      “If—if I let you go—”

      “You must, oh you must!”

      “If I let you go, will you promise—”

      “What?”

      “Will you promise to come back?”

      “Come back?” cried the figure in the darkness.

      “Once a year, that’s all I ask, come back once a year, here to this place, this font, at the same time of night—”

      “Come back … ?”

      “Promise! Oh, I must know this moment again. You don’t know how important it is! Promise, or I won’t let you go!”

      “I—”

      “Say it! Swear it!”

      “I promise,” said the pale Ghost in the dark. “I swear.”

      “Thank you, oh thanks.”