Fires Rising (26 page)

"Don't go up there, man," Wilson said.

"Father! Please!" Timothy shouted, approaching the priest. "You have to trust us. We've received messages."

As have I
, Pilazzo thought, pulling away from the men.
And they're not telling me what to do now. Dear God, tell me what's next. I've arrived at my church. Should I wait for another message? Or…should I follow the lead of this mangy bunch of derelicts?

"Where's the rosary?" Jyro asked Pilazzo. "You say you have it. Show it to us."

"Look in his pockets," Seymour said. Wrath, Marcus, Wilson, and Jyro formed a loose circle around the priest. A few feet behind them, Pilazzo saw Rollo looking back at him, tapping the tattered bible he held against his heart.

Pilazzo shoved his right hand into his pocket and grasped the bulky rosary. It circled protectively around his fingers like a snake on a tree branch. Jyro grabbed the priest's elbow, and Pilazzo pulled away in a defensive twist, shouting, "I have it! I have it!" He broke through the circle of men and staggered into the rec-room hallway.

Ever so slowly, he pulled the rosary from his pocket and displayed it to the men.

The small crowd gasped.

Pilazzo leaned against the lockers, thoughts raging like wildfire. The rosary…it offered not only strength and resilience, but an intimidating power as well. The evidence was unmistakable. He himself had used it to drive the beast out from its place on the altar. Timothy had used it to defend himself and Jyro against another of the beast's incarnations. Indeed, it was a powerful charm—one that controlled men and monsters alike. He could
feel
its unparalleled command.

Still, his mind burned with questions: how did it convey such power? Where did it come from and why was it here at St. Peter's? He squeezed the beads tightly, quickly concluding that there would be no time for logical answers; as a holy man, he'd learned to acknowledge a world full of achievable miracles, and thus accepted the rosary as an object with divine intentions.

He peered at the gathering of homeless men. They stared back at him, swollen faces and droopy eyes filled with awe. Even Jyro now seemed to accept Pilazzo as the all-powerful sinless one they'd been waiting for.

A loud explosion outside shook the church walls. Dust rained down on the men. Pilazzo jolted and stood upright, feeling the reassuring power in the beads as it seeped through the skin of his hand, into his blood, his heart.

Jyro screamed razors at one of the other bums, something about 'gathering the troops'. His tone of voice rattled Pilazzo, and by the looks of it, everyone else too.
 

Pilazzo shoved the charm back into his pocket and asked, "What do you need me to do?"

Timothy separated from the small crowd. "Come to the hole."

F
ollowing Timothy, Jyro, and Wrath, Pilazzo walked unsteadily down the hall. He took a series of deep breaths in attempt to calm his harassing fear, watching Timothy's moving shadow against the wall. A mess of splintered wood jutted across his path as they approached the entrance to the rec room.

"I'm gonna warn you father," Timothy said. "It ain't pretty."

Pilazzo nodded, fearful as to what additional horrors lay in his path. He turned and stood before the open doors to the rec room, seeing no choice but to allow fate to carry him forward under the watchful guidance of God. He told himself that as long as he kept the rosary with him, he'd remain safe.

He hoped.

"Let's go."

They entered the recreation center. Pilazzo placed a supporting hand against Timothy's shoulder. A chill of dismay invaded his body as he took in the scene, stunned with disbelief.

Illuminated by a pair of halogen lights over the entrance, he could see that the small gymnasium was practically gone. A few months ago the place had been alive with parish members gathering with their children to organize fundraisers, playing games of ping-pong and pool and socializing amongst themselves in prayer and song, coffee and cupcakes. Now in the center of the room existed a hole that swallowed up nearly half the wooden floor space. The edges were jagged and splintered upwards, as if something huge had burst out from below. An accrual of deep brown stains, irregular in shape, coursed along the floor around the hole like a grisly aura.

Pilazzo slowly stepped to the edge of the hole. At once the hot pissy stench of the city's subway tunnels rose up to fill his nostrils. He looked down into the hole and gasped at what he saw.

A wasteland of bones: femurs, ribs, and skulls, the ancient remains of what might have been a dozen or more people partially exposed in the dark surface.

He pulled his gaze from the bones and ran it up along the exposed walls where twisted pipes and severed cables jutted from hunks of brown soil and cement. Then, sensing much more than the inanimate presence of the bones and soil, his eyes were drawn to what appeared to be a wooden crate at the hole's bottom. Gazing at it, he could estimate it to be about four feet long and three feet wide, with odd writing burned into its rutted surface. Its depth remained partially buried in shadows.

The crate was open. He peered into its dark depths…

…and in his mind saw the forefathers of the church shrouding the bodies of their innocents in a sacrifice to the beast, so that they may continue to thrive with no threat. Pilazzo could see the rosary and a glossy black chalice being wrapped in burlap and placed into the crate—goodness working against evil to keep it from emerging unfettered into the world.

And then, he could see the beast. It loomed behind the men, a dark shapeless form with huge red eyes like exposed organs in a freshly eviscerated gut, glaring at its bloodied offerings. Lambs to the slaughter, Pilazzo thought as the shadowed beast thrust itself forward, the burlap shrouds whisking free, the corpses beneath quartered and decapitated, parts flanking torsos like rotten vegetables fallen from the vine.

Pilazzo looked up from the hole, shuddered. The rosary was performing a mad dance about his trembling fingers, and he had to ball his fist up good and tight to keep it from leaping out of his pocket.

Timothy walked up beside him, his one good eye swollen with tears, the other springing its water in a damp smatter.

With the eerie image still fresh in his mind, Pilazzo said, "That's the Ark of the Covenant…isn't it?" He twisted around and saw Jyro and the other half dozen wide-eyed vagrants standing behind him.

"It is something that perhaps the bible never told us about," Jyro replied, his demeanor now calm and cooperative. In an unexpected display, the vagrant performed the sign of the cross, then folded his hands together and aimed his shuttering gaze to the heavens.

Beyond the walls of the rectory, another explosion occurred. This one could be heard and felt. The floor beneath Pilazzo's feet shot painful vibrations into his gut. The homeless men looked around precariously, as if expecting the ceiling to come crashing down upon them, but it didn't.

A nervous cramp hit Pilazzo's stomach. Making an effort to ignore the signs of disaster taking place in the outside world, he said, "What happened here?" His eyes scanned the bones, his mind trying desperately to justify some righteousness in their presence.

Timothy did his best to explain what he'd seen the night before: how the workers had been disemboweling and dismembering a group of homeless men beneath the floating chalice, how the chalice seemed to be drawing their blood in,
drinking
it.

"Where are the bodies?" Pilazzo asked, stepping back to look at the bloodstains on the floor around the hole. Something painful burned at the core of his fear, upon the inescapable doom that had seized him the moment he saw those painted eyes on the nightlight shift position.

Quivering, Timothy replied, "The beast took them."

Hearing Timothy's story, Pilazzo recalled the news report of the worker hurling body parts off the roof of a building, and then his mind's eye replayed the scene he witnessed on the altar, of the beast devouring the homeless man. These horrific images brought about a startling revelation in him: that the bones visible before him were not those of the bodies Timothy described. No, these bones have been here for years, since the days this church was erected.
Oh my dear god…

And it was at this moment he realized with unequivocal certainty that the horror he was dealing with was far above and beyond anything supernatural; it was something all-knowing and all-powerful, an immortal presence that could never be fully brought down.

It could only be incarcerated, and that seemed to be their only option.

Timothy went on, pulling Pilazzo away from his fearful reverie. "There were growls coming from the hole. Father…" He began to sob, then blurted, "There was blood everywhere! The chalice…it was expanding, getting bigger and redder. I-I couldn't take my eyes off it. I remember wanting to touch it and how I couldn't control the urge to just leap out over the hole and grab it!"

He cried, tried to wipe his eye but only smeared dirt around on his face. "I'd stepped forward and was at the very edge of the hole when I heard a whisper inside my head. Over and over it called:
rosary, rosary, rosary
, and it distracted me enough to make me realize where I was, what I was going to do. I panicked, seeing how close I was to the workers, who like in the church were ignoring me as if I wasn't there at all. I staggered out of the room and ran back down the hall and considered leaving though the church but remembered that there were workers out there, and if they were anything like the ones I'd just seen, then I couldn't take a chance having them see me. It was then I decided to go upstairs, and that was when I saw Jyro holding the rosary."

Rosary…rosary…rosary…

"At the very moment I laid my eyes on it, nothing else seemed to matter. The workers, the chalice, the bodies, they were all a distant dream to me. The word…it kept whispering around in my head, over and over,
rosary, rosary, rosary
, and it somehow gave me the strength to explore the rooms. I'd found the homeless men sleeping in the bedroom, and for some reason, despite my initial disgust, I knew that their presence in the rectory was somehow
right."
He halted here as if gathering his memories and said, "Eventually I got my hands on the rosary, and it ended up saving my life—and Jyro's life—from the beast."

Pilazzo nodded and peered over Timothy's shoulder toward Jyro; the vagrant's scraggly beard was littered with filth, face scarred and pimpled, eyes sagging from the weight of their experiences. He looked like a living dead man.

And Pilazzo thought,
This is your doing, isn't it?

Jyro looked the priest in the eyes, and as if reading his mind, confessed, "Forgive me father, for I have sinned."

T
hey moved back into the hallway, Pilazzo now leading the group, the rosary adding to his resilience a sense of authority now.

"I opened the crate," Jyro said, leaning against the wall. His voice took on a clear and articulate tone, despite the rawness of his appearance and the pained look on his face. His eyes marked Pilazzo with guilt. "At first I'd thought the workers were just disassembling the church. But then I realized they were also in the rec room, jack-hammering the floor."

"Did you see them?" Pilazzo asked, wondering if they were 'possessed' like those he'd confronted in the streets and subway.

Jyro shook his head. "No."

"Then how did you know where they were, and what they were doing?"

Jyro grinned thinly, the lines in his face cracking like dry desert sand. "Father…when you're living out in the wilds, you learn very quickly how to survive. It heightens your senses, makes you hear things and see things the average man might pass off as ordinary."

Pilazzo nodded. "What made you come
here
?"

Jyro coughed. "I knew the church was going to be shut down; for months it had been posted on the bulletin board outside. After it closed, I'd kept my eye on the place, on the comings and goings of the workers. About a month ago, I snuck in through an air duct and hid upstairs in one of the rectory bedrooms—imagine my surprise when I discovered there were still beds here. Of course, no good secret lasts forever. Word got around, and soon enough there were more than a dozen of us living here."

He rubbed his eyes and carried on. "Of course we immediately thought it odd that the workers never came up. They were making a helluva racket below, a week's worth that eventually got the best of some of the men. One night, after the crews left, I came down here to check it all out. And that's when I found the hole."

Pilazzo's tongue struggled to find a response, but failed. The real world, common only a day ago, had been extinguished permanently. His lips trembled silently to convey his dread, the slithering rosary doing its best to combat it.

Jyro continued, "I went to the edge. It was dark and I lost my footing. I fell in. I wasn't hurt badly, but had hit something real hard against my hip that's still hurting me something fierce. I'd had a flashlight and dropped it, but it was pointed toward sharp edge sticking out of the ground. In a few minutes, after digging around it with my fingers and hands, I uncovered the crate."