Evil Eternal (6 page)

Most of the survivors had been driven into blubbering madness, all covered in the blood and entrails of friends, neighbors and family. A naked woman, her teeth chattering with such ferocity that they had begun to chip, held a crying baby to her bosom in the pew to Father Michael’s right.

And in the center of it all stood Cain, all skin since stripped away from his body, throwing a handful of eyeballs against the stained-glass windows.

“I thought you’d never get here,” Cain said, still chucking eyeballs as if he was soft-tossing a baseball on a lazy afternoon. “As you can see, I decided to start the party without you.” The
p
in party barely came out because of his missing lips.

“It ends now,” Father Michael exclaimed, his voice booming over the constant wailing in the church.

Cain swallowed the last eye and leaned against a pew.

“You know what? I believe you may be right. I’ve done just about all I can here. Notice how I left a few for you. There’s a point to all of this, which I hope you’ll see.”

The muscles in his face and around his jaw twitched as he tried to smile. His face was a mass of red pulp with a large slash of bright-white teeth cleaving his horrid countenance.

Father Michael grabbed a dagger-crucifix and hurled it at Cain.

Cain swiftly ducked, but not before a three-inch section of his shoulder blade was carved off by the passing dagger.

“Nice move,” he mocked. “You’re a little stronger than I thought you’d be. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Father Michael threw two more daggers at him in quick succession. They each missed by more than half a foot. Gripping his trident, he prepared to charge the demon, his muscles coiling. His right leg gave out on his first step, dropping him to his knees.

“You ought to see a doctor about that,” Cain said, cackling.

Surveying the massacre around him, Cain said, “Well, it looks like it’s time for me to go. Time for another face, another place. I mean, we all wear different faces, don’t we? I just happen to have more options.”

“Don’t go,” Father Michael struggled. “Stay here and fight me, coward.”

Cain shook his head. “You should know by now that I’m no coward, Michael. A coward would take you on now, in this sorry state you’re in. I like you fresh, vibrant, angry.”

His feet squeaked as he sloshed across the blood-soaked floor, walking towards the first pew before the altar then standing on it.

“If you need me, I’ll be happily munching on an apple, enjoying the sleepless nights.”

He leapt up to the nearest window and shattered the stained-glass portrait of St. Francis of Assisi. Perched atop the sill, he turned to Father Michael and said, “Now you go do what you do best and really think about it. If I am true evil and you are true good, we’re living in a world of denial.”

That said, he jumped out the window and into the cold snow.

A middle-aged man rose from beneath a pile of severed legs and heads when he heard Cain depart. He approached Father Michael on legs palsied from trauma.

“You saved us.”

He fell to his knees, sobbing. “I prayed to God the madness would end and you came and drove it away. Thank you, Father.” The volume of his voice began to rise, quickly reaching a madman’s pitch. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Praise God, we’re saved! Saved! Dear God, your servant has saved us!”

Others who had been crouched in the shadows began to stumble towards Father Michael, joining in his praise.

“Hallelujah!”

“Bless you, Father!”

Father Michael felt a burning in his chest, and it was not from the injury he had sustained.

These people, these innocents who had called him to save a little girl, had all seen what no human eyes should ever witness. Worse still, their close interaction with Cain had marked them as potential hosts when Cain called his minions to his heel. Cain left indelible marks on the souls as well as bodies of his victims, obliterating their store of better, happier days to come. He left them barren, mere shells destined for destruction that would follow them into eternity.

Father Michael’s next course of action pained his very soul. Through the centuries, the remorse had never gotten easier to bear.

“Go with God,” he said to his half-mad supplicants.

Father Michael then let out a banshee wail, his jawbones popping as his mouth opened wider and wider. First, objects began to rattle. Everyone in the church clapped their hands to their ears. Next, anything made of glass shattered into minute pieces.

Still, the wail continued.

The survivors, especially the children, began to cry out in pain, their legs rooted to the spot from the ache that started to throb in their very bones. The floorboards rattled in protest.

Then it happened.

In unison, the heart of every living person in the church burst with enough force to shatter the bones in their torsos. Their bodies dropped as one, as though they were a stage full of marionettes whose strings had all been cut at once.

And just like that, the town of South Russell was no more.

More scars to be borne on Father Michael’s soul.

He collected his daggers, drew some incense from the pouch, and proceeded to set fire to the church. The baptisms, the weddings, the funerals, countless Sunday masses, the bright futures and pained hearts that had filled the spirit of the church, all obliterated with no one left to mourn the passing of all those lives once buoyed by promise and hope.

All of it, destroyed.

The only saving grace was knowing the healing power of the fire, how it cleansed their souls from the ravages of Cain’s embrace, ushering them into the light of the ever after.

Father Michael watched the church shudder, then implode in an explosion of fine ash. The winds carried the gray grit on their current, covering him from head to foot. He collapsed in the snow, his mind and body pulled under by the overpowering current of pain and sorrow.

Chapter Seven

It was two hours before Father Michael staggered from the snow, the bitter cold harsh enough to have frozen one of his crucifixes to the skin of the palm of his hand. He glanced over his shoulder at the blackened earth where the church with all the inhabitants of South Russell once stood. The sound of a hungry dog barking echoed down the empty street, the solitary hint of life in what had, in just one day, become a ghost town.

“Ungh,” Father Michael grunted with each step.

Time was needed to mend. Already he could feel his nerves immersed in the fire of healing. With each wound, his mortal flesh had to endure the fires of redemption, only to rise whole again like a blazing phoenix. It was a process that was many times more painful than the injury.

He had to find a place to hide and allow his body to convalesce. Cain had invited him to follow and he would not disappoint. There would be no returning to the Vatican. Not until Cain had been stopped.

Father Michael pushed in the door to the house nearest the church. The mephitic scent of days-old ham and eggs wafted throughout the abandoned house. Limping past the kitchen, it was as if the family that had once lived there had only gone for a moment, bound to return and finish the family breakfast that was laid out on the blonde-wood table.

He wearily made his way to the living room and collapsed on the couch. The door had been left wide open but the cold had no effect on him. What mattered now was being able to meditate, take his mind away from the sheer agony that would accompany the healing. He sucked in a great breath, closed his eyes, and traveled, far within his mind.

Father Michael was back in Limerick, just before the close of the eleventh century, at a time when he was Liam Monahan, a strapping man in his midtwenties with arms the size of cannons and a mane of curly blond hair that made him the target of most of the village’s fairer sex. He was back in the comfort of his smithy, the coals so hot they could take a lesser man’s breath away. He gripped the iron mallet with a calloused hand, striking a hunk of red-hot metal with the force and delicacy of a finely trained tradesman. He had worked hard to build his smithy, having apprenticed under the tyrant William Purcell for ten long years where he was forced to endure the verbal and physical whippings of the aged, alcoholic blacksmith. As a young boy he hated the man, but since William’s drowning several years ago, passed out drunk in a bog, Liam had grown to respect the lessons learned at William’s sometimes cruel hands.

Liam was a man of great respect in Limerick. He had a beautiful wife, Ailis, whose dark, mysterious eyes, fair skin and coal-black hair still made his stomach quiver at the sight of her. Even though he’d had his choice of any woman, he’d never had eyes for anyone but Ailis. From the moment he spied her working on her father’s farm when they were both seven, he was helplessly in love. Years were spent stealing glances at one another, flirting relentlessly as they grew older, until succumbing to their desires along the riverbed after sneaking off from the harvest festival. Liam had been oblivious to the overt advances of the village girls as they tried to wrest his attention from Ailis. When he took over the smithy, he asked her to marry him, and she made fast in giving him the greatest gift of all, aside from her love.

They had a son, Kerwynn, a curious, towheaded five-year-old who had already decided he would become a blacksmith, just like his father. Kerwynn was a flurry of activity, never content to sit still until it was time for bed, where he passed out more than fell to sleep. His laughter filled one-half of Liam’s heart, while Ailis’s tender voice filled the other. They’d not been able to have another baby, and tended to dote on young, wandering Kerwynn, happy to live in the town of their forefathers.

Limerick had gone through many changes over the last hundred years, with the Norse invasion and their ouster almost fifty years ago. Liam beamed with pride whenever he retold his grandfather’s heroics in the Battle of Clontarf where the Norsemen were defeated by an army under the leadership of High King Boru.

The odd remains of Celtic and other pagan religions still dotted the landscape while Christianity began to gain a foothold not just in Limerick but in all of Ireland. Liam believed in no religion, entrusting his faith in his own abilities to shape his destiny. Ailis, on the other hand, had taken a keen interest in Catholicism. She tried to bring him to the tiny church at the edge of town, but to no avail. She once asked him, “Don’t you ever worry about your immortal soul?” His reply was to gather her in his arms and swing her around the room until she laughed like a young girl. He was far too busy enjoying this life to contemplate what lay beyond the grave. The history of Ireland was rife with long-gone as well as up-and-coming religious movements. With so many claiming to be the end-all of all things, it seemed to Liam that his best course would be to steer clear of them altogether, for who was to say which was the one true religion, if any at all could ever be declared as such by some almighty power.

Better to work with iron, to forge objects with his own strong hands, to shape his life and provide for his family.

He transported himself to that summer night where he lay with his wife, sweaty and exhausted after an hour of passionate lovemaking. A long lock of her raven hair lay across his chest as she fondled his softening penis, eager to make him rigid once more.

“You’re insatiable, Ailis,” he joked, breathing in the aroma of their sex.

“Why do you think I married the strongest man in Limerick, silly fool,” she replied with a sly smile across her alluring face.

Kerwynn stirred in the next room and they froze.

“I knew your wailing would wake him,” Liam mock-scolded. “If we’re to do this again, you need to be quieter.”

Ailis giggled softly into the crook of his arm. Pulling the sheet over her back, she straddled him, burying his face between her soft, full breasts. Liam moaned as he sucked longingly at her nipples.

“It appears you’re ready,” she said. She grabbed the back of his head, pushing him closer into her bosom while a fire grew between her thighs. “I love you, Liam. Promise me our love will always be as strong as it is this night.”

Liam shifted his weight and was now atop her. The muscles in his arms rippled as he supported his weight on them. He stared into her eyes and was lost. No other woman had ever plumbed the depths of his soul as Ailis could with just one look.

“Aye, our love will be stronger than the thickest slab of iron. I vow it, forever.”

She tenderly ran her fingers over the contours of his face. “I will never, ever leave you, Liam Monahan. No matter what happens in this life, I will always be by your side.”

They made love again, well into the night, savoring every kiss, every thrust, every moan that escaped their lips.

Father Michael’s mind was flung forward.

The sun hung hot and heavy in the sky that day. The stench of garbage and other waste was especially repellent along the main street. Proper plumbing and waste disposal had yet to make its way to Limerick, and on hot days like this, the sun baked the piles of urine and feces that sat below windows and back doors. Even Liam was finding it hard to keep up his normal pace.

He had just grabbed a ladle of water when the screaming started. Dropping the tin ladle into the barrel of tepid water, he ran from the smithy.