Fires Rising (15 page)

The man shifted his knees closer to his chest, perhaps in an effort to maintain his balance. His face was an expressionless mask, eyes feral, reflecting like an animal's gaze at night.

His hand flicked up and down as he pattered the flat edge of a priest's collar against the wooden beam,
tap…tap…tap
.

More blood dripped down, now onto Pilazzo's face.

Pilazzo staggered back. Using the back of his hand, he wiped at the blood on his cheeks and lips, then looked up again and saw with utter incredulity the plummeting body of Monsignor Sanchez.

He had only a second to react. He leaped head first down the aisle, much like a baseball player trying to stretch a double into a triple. His ribs collided hard against the floor, sending a hard shock of pain throughout his body. His teeth came down stiffly on his tongue, bringing about a sour tang of blood in his mouth.

Behind him, a hideous
crack
of bone against marble echoed throughout the church as the Monsignor's body crashed down against the floor.

Pilazzo shot his head around and with hideous disbelief saw Sanchez's body lying motionless on the floor. The monsignor had landed in a face-up position, arms and legs twisted into dreadful slants, eyes staring vacantly at Pilazzo. His head was arched backwards, gray hair tossed back like matted webs. A chisel or spackling knife jutted from his exposed throat, the hilt drenched with blood. His purple robe glistened wetly from neck to crotch.

From above:
tap…tap…tap…

Pilazzo skittered backwards on all fours, gazing up at the rafters, at the man still perched there staring back at him with those horrible shimmering eyes. He continued tapping the plastic collar—
Sanchez's collar
!—against the wood beam, like some prehistoric man tooling with a slice of petrified bark.

Breathless gasps spurted from Pilazzo's lips. His shoes shuffled across the grainy marble in aimless fits. He cried out, assuming his seconds to be numbered, expecting the man to leap down and deliver into him a fate similar to that of his fallen brother.

But the seconds grew, and suddenly Pilazzo found himself clawing at the front doors of the church, gazing not at the man in the rafters whose unremitting gaze bore deep holes into his back, but at the brass hand plate screwed into the door. He struggled to his knees and pushed against it. The left door swung into the vestibule with a dry screech. Pilazzo scrambled across the threshold, guided by his undying will to live—to carry out the still indefinite task required of him by God.

Your church awaits you…

The door closed behind him, shutting him into the foyer—into darkness. A cloud of dust rose up, tickling his nostrils and palate. Bitter silence washed over him. He crawled toward the front doors, feeling with terror his eyes bulging in their sockets, his skin crawling, his gorge rising.

He struggled to his feet and with sick terror plunged through the front doors of the Church of Holy Innocents, into the unjust darkness of the night.

T
he seconds felt like hours. The dim light in the lobby grew even dimmer as the emergency beacons struggled with their fading batteries. Jyro widened his eyes against the poor lighting, hands locked in instinctive prayer, hoping to corral a bit of realism back into his life.

A horrific silence hung over the room. The air grew suddenly cold and a slight breeze sprung up. Jyro felt his ears go
pop
, and then a sharp pain clawed across his brain as if a set of talons had latched on for purchase. He heard another noise—his breath running out of him in a sickly wheeze. The strength in his body, what little remained of it, seeped away from him in a similar way.

None of the men uttered a word—they simply stood there, amazed and petrified, unable to tear their eyes away from the albino man hanging on the wall.

Like a wax statue, the albino's scrawny white body remained inexplicably suspended, arms extended out, palms facing outwards (his burned hand smeared slimy blood on the wall behind it), each finger pinned against the chipped plaster. His legs were pressed together, bare ankles crossed as if knotted with hemp. A stink came off of him as rotten as garbage.

The man's eyes jerked open.

They stared at Jyro, red and ablaze with fire.

The man's mouth shot open, revealing bloody teeth and gums. His body began to shudder and tremble, like a man caught on an electrified fence.

Jesus…oh my Jesus…help me…save me…

Jyro tried to tear his eyes away. He tried to move. He tried to scream. But only raspy breathing came out.

A hurting, helpless sound spilled from the crucified man's mouth, and a jolt of pain rose out from the center of Jyro's brain. He looked and saw the others in the room grimacing, a few of them rubbing their heads in frightened response.

The albino's red eyes filled up with blood. Thin red lines coursed down his parchment cheeks like two filaments.

Jyro's mind screamed,
I can't take any more of this! Creatures made of human waste! Men possessed by evil spirits! Help me God!

Help…me…

Lips barely moving, the albino spoke, voice weak and raspy:
"One holds darkness, one holds light, the mother of God's protection against evil is man's only hope. Find the sinless one…"

Using some final harsh effort of will, Jyro tried to step away, and may have succeeded but the all-consuming fear and terror made him numb.. He could feel only his lips moving, from which he may have produced a weak fearful sound.

The man on the wall began to jerk and spasm, inhumanly quick, looking like a frame-by-frame video suddenly put into fast-forward mode. These shocking movements made his skin appear almost gassy in nature, his face rippling as though caught in gale-force winds.

The words spilling from his trembling lips were broken, but perceptible:
"The rosary belongs to the Mother, the chalice to the Darkest One. Only the sinless one can bear her charms to bring It down.

To Jyro, its meaning was instant and conclusive: that one of them would need to use the rosary to defeat the hideous evil assuming control of the church…the church, and then perhaps much more beyond the crumbling walls imprisoning them.

But which one of them would it be?

Dark blood ran down the wall from the albino's palms. His eyes, still wide-open, were completely white now, nearly matching that of his skin. His lips drew back, revealing slick red gums. He made a cheated hissing sound.

Bewilderment and revulsion crept through Jyro, face and mind twisted with the extremity of his fright. He felt his sanity crumbling, eyes unable to render themselves away from the ancient-looking figure, the
man
whose body was caught in some possessive struggle of Good attempting to deliver its message against Evil. Here, Jyro realized, was an ethereal tug-of-war taking place with an albino vagrant being used as the rope.

A torrent of wind flooded the room, like the one upstairs. It blew over the men, whipping through their clothes, chilling their blood. The albino released a wretched scream—the agonized cry of a prisoner subjected to a thousand tortures. Brown vomit arced out of his mouth and landed in a splatter halfway across the room. Dallas gave out a horrific scream and cupped a wrinkled hand over his mouth. Wrath was the closest to the line of fire and backpedaled away, catching a few rebounding scraps in the leg. A second heave poured down the albino's chest. A horrible smell immediately saturated the room, like bad meat soaked in whiskey. Jyro's stomach leaped, and an acidic burp scorched his throat.

"Oh shit, oh Jesus!" Wilson shouted. He ripped across the room and staggered halfway up the steps. He spun and looked on, eyes starting from his face, beard trapping drips of spit as it spluttered from his mouth.

There came more answering cries in the room. Rollo blabbered an inaudible prayer. Marcus cried out and coughed up a huge wad of phlegm, which he deposited on the floor. Weston slid an arm around Seymour and helped him away from the albino as everyone retreated toward the staircase.. Timothy gripped his head.
"Oh my God! It hurts, it hurts!"

The albino cried out, "
Castigo laudible, corpus meum!"
Then his trembling slowed. The force that held him up seemed to slip, and his hands fell away from the wall. His throat swelled like a balloon as he coughed,
"Destroy…the…evil…that…promises…man…the…end…of…days…"
  

Trying like mad to think past the crude image in front of him, Jyro tottered into the center of the room, away from the clutch of cowering men and toward what he felt was an answer to this horrific enigma, despite the cries of protest behind him. With each step he took, the answers in his head grew clearer. He could feel his eyes bugging, his mouth hanging open, his bowels cramping furiously...but he could also feel his mind working overtime, as though some buried gears he didn't know about were now set into motion. Something inside him (damn, if it didn't feel like a little voice in his head) had helped him make sense of the man's words, which he knew now, had not been articulated through any focused intent on the man's part, but were in fact messaged through the undying will of Good lying beneath the shroud of Evil crucified upon the wall.

I can see…I understand…

The twisting breeze in the room hit Jyro hard. The tangle of hair on his head flew up like a wing, and he had to shutter his eyes as grit flew into his face. Arms raised, he howled his erratic thoughts through the storm, praying his desperate words made sense to the
Good
inside the man:
"What is this evil?"

The man uttered one word,
"Chalice,"
, then slid off the wall and collapsed to the floor in a knotted heap of rags and flesh, leaving jagged smatters of blood behind. At the same instant, the icy wind in the room dissipated, leaving everyone shivering in its chilling wake.

Staring at the now motionless man, Jyro muttered, "The chalice that belongs to the Darkest One…"

Dear God, help us…

A few seconds of silence passed before the remaining men started riling about. Incredibly, despite all the warnings of the past, Seymour leaped at the door again, this time with his coat wrapped around his hands. He screamed, "Get me the hell outta here!" As he came in contact with the door, a blue flame burst up and the coat immediately caught fire. He shouted out in agony, finding himself the recipient of a smoking scald on his face.
"Shit! Shit!"
he screamed, tossing the coat to the floor. He collapsed down on his rear, both eyes bulging like balloons behind the clouded lenses of his glasses, nose and both cheeks red and blistered, oozing drops of blood.

Jyro kept his eyes glued to the albino, now motionless and twisted, lying in a puddle of blood and vomit. His pants were bunched up high around his knees, exposing legs resembling snow-covered branches. His drawn face stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, blanched eyes coated in blood, mouth pulled into a rictus grin of terror, baring slick red gums. He looked like someone who'd just died after years of a debilitating illness.

Timothy hobbled over to Jyro and stood alongside him, gripping the vagrant's arm for support. "N-Now what?"

"We wait," he replied automatically, eyes still fixed on the fallen man.
The dead man.

"The chalice…the one he spoke of. I saw it."

Jyro nodded, and after a few seconds of daunting silence, replied, "So did I," at once realizing that he hadn't mentioned anything about seeing the chalice until this moment. He wanted to add,
I'm the one who released it from its ancient bonds
, but decided this information would do him and the rest of the men no good.

His harried thoughts quickly triggered back to the rosary, still in the possession—he assumed—of one-eared Larry. Both Larry and the crucified man had said,
The mother of God's protection against evil is man's only hope
. He recalled holding the rosary in his hands, how it had offered his fatigued body a level of strength and resilience previously unfelt for many years.
Protection.
And then, how it had seemingly healed Timothy's hands of the burns he'd suffered. How it seemed, by some incredible miracle, to be healing from a distance the wounds of those who were burned in their attempts to flee. Clearly this rosary was a powerful charm, and with its rightful possessor, a presumably critical weapon against the Evil rising in the church.

"I saw it floating in the air," Timothy said, looking frantically at the others, all of whom saw no choice but to stand by and listen as he spoke, except for Seymour, who had repositioned himself against the wall, staring at his burns. "Right above the hole in the rec room. This is what I started mentioning earlier, before…before…" Tears filled his eyes, and he shuddered visibly, the words throttling in his throat.

"Tell us," Weston said, oddly composed and strong in contrast to Timothy's state of panic. He placed a hand on Timothy's shoulder.
A healed hand
. "What did you see?"

T
imothy took a deep labored breath, closed his eyes, and said, "It was swaying back and forth, like a pendulum. And it was big, maybe the size of a small barrel, or something."