Riley took one look at the thing that used to be his father. Dim light filled Bobby Tate’s dull eyes while blackened gore streamed from his nostrils and lips, staining his Sunday best. A quiet voice spoke up within Riley’s head, a voice belonging to his late mother. You can do this, kiddo.
Bobby Tate took another step toward his son.
Riley didn’t wait. He pushed himself out the window and fell toward the chaotic world below.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1
She was naked when her brother arrived. Sitting at the edge of her bloodstained bed, watching the life seep out of Ozzie Bell, Susan Prewitt remembered the night she snuck into her half-brother’s room and teased him to orgasm. Even then, she heard the voice of her father in her head, willing her to satisfy her fleshly desires. Go on, her father told her, do as you wish. She would’ve, too, if the sound of her grandfather’s footsteps hadn’t startled them from their bedroom trance.
Susan leaned back and sighed as she slid her fingers between her legs.
Memories of Zeke’s shocked face filled her mind, playing back like a private film reel, preserved with the clarity of formative memory. How could she forget? The trepidation in his voice when he asked what she was doing, the innocent reluctance, his yearning eyes alight with desire, the way he chewed his bottom lip when she ran her fingers over him, the subtle gasp of breath, the desire to stop her despite visibly being unable, unwilling, to do so—all these images flashed before her as she touched herself, willing her brother to be there now, to join her, to finish what she’d started all those years ago.
Blood seeped from the tattooed glyph on her wrist, dotting her thigh, forming a lover’s trail to the promised land between her legs. She held his image in her mind, the horny boy she knew, the messed-up addict he’d become, praying to her father’s god to bring Zeke to her.
But will you follow through this time?
The voice echoed in her ears, a raspy thing that was at once her father and yet something else altogether. Something older, its very presence filling her with the slightest hint of trepidation, its voice numbing her skin and vibrating in her bones. The voice of her lord, turning a mirror upon the trespasses of her youth.
She’d gone to Zeke’s room, driven by hormonal lust and a deeper desire to rebel. Rebellion against morality, rebellion against the faith of the heretics, rebellion against the tenets of a false god—Susan had many causes to choose from, and when paired with her hormones, little else mattered. But while she sat at Zeke’s bedside, touching his erection through a thin white sheet and driven mad by the deep groan escaping his terrified breath, a smaller voice spoke from within. This is wrong. Stop before this goes any further. Before you do something you’ll regret later.
In the years since, Susan supposed the voice belonged to the false god of the heretics, trying to lead her astray from her desire. Even now, she was ashamed of not doing as her lord bade her, and she would atone for her sin.
I was a foolish child. Let me prove my faith to You, my lord. Your will be done.
The air in the room grew stale, heated, filled with the breath of something beyond her scope of understanding. She felt the gaze of her lord upon her and found she couldn’t open her eyes to behold its glory. The fear of what she might find staring at her was too great. Her skin erupted in gooseflesh, her nipples hardening to stone.
Will you prove yourself, child? Will you give yourself to him as you’ve promised yourself to me? If I give you this gift, will you go all the way for me?
“Yes,” she whispered. Ozzie stirred beside her, moaning incoherently. She ignored him, lifting her chin and her free hand in praise. “Let your spirit move through me. I will become Your vessel. Your will and the Old Ways are one, my lord.”
So be it, child.
A rush of heat swept through her in orgasmic waves, stealing her breath and freeing a shrill cry of surprise from her lips. Susan arched her back in the throes of ecstasy, fingering herself on the edge of the bed while her boyfriend bled out.
Susan sighed. “Is that you, Ezekiel?”
The stench of sweat, blood, and rancid earth wafted into the room, followed by the creak of footsteps behind her. Coarse fingertips caked in dirt traced along her naked back, along the nubs of her spine, following the contours of her shoulder blades before moving up to her hair. Her whole body tingled at his cool touch.
“It’s me, Susie. Our father sent me to you.”
“I’ve been waiting. Do you see the sacrifice I made to honor our lord?”
“I do. You did well. You’ve taken a filthy spirit like Ozzie Bell and turned him into living scripture.”
“He was going to have you arrested. He was going to keep us apart. I couldn’t let that happen. You were doing the lord’s work. It wasn’t fair to punish you.”
“I know.” Zeke’s hand slid down to her shoulder, his fingers caressing the nape of her neck. Susan cooed in response. “I’ve wanted you for so long, Susie. Ever since that night.”
“I was a stupid little girl. Let me make it right. This body is yours.”
“Yes” he whispered, “but first I’ve gotta ask you something.”
“Anything,” Susan said, her voice rising an octave as his hand slipped between her legs. “I’ll do anything to make it right for you.”
His hand left the moist heat between her thighs, trailing upward between her breasts, and stiffened around her throat. Susan Prewitt opened her eyes and swallowed back a scream.
The gaunt face of Zeke Billings looked down on her, the blue light of his eyes illuminating the blackened worms protruding from his cheeks. Dark phlegm streamed slowly from his nose and the corners of his mouth in thick strands shivering with life. Tendrils of black ichor sought the air, flexing outward in search of a host.
“Would you suffer for me, Susan?”
Zeke didn’t give her time to answer.
2
Dark colors burst before Riley’s eyes, clouding his vision with splotches of color as a stabbing pain shot from his hip to his knee. He’d landed hard in the bushes below his window and was lucky enough not to break anything, but the pain was ever-present in those moments when he limped across the lawn.
Somewhere behind him, his father bellowed in anger, crashing through his childhood home. Keep moving, he told himself. Don’t look back.
The pain muddied his thoughts, however, and he fought the urge to vomit. Maybe I did break something, he wondered, plodding across the grass in slow motion. But his limbs cooperated with his wishes despite the pain, and in moments he was around the side of the house and standing before the garage door.
“Fuck.”
In his panic, he’d not thought ahead. The garage door stood closed. His bike was inside. He couldn’t run for long, not with every step shooting needles into his muscles. Swarms of dark spots swirled about his vision, threatening to steal consciousness from him. His father’s heavy footsteps pounded across the house, down the stairs.
Panicking, Riley’s gaze fell upon his father’s car in the ditch. Bobby Tate had left it running in his haste to get inside the house.
I can’t drive, Riley thought, his feet shuffling across the driveway. I’ve never driven before in my life.
Except that’s not true, his mother said. Your father took you out last year and let you drive in the shopping center’s parking lot after hours. You had fun doing it, even if you wouldn’t admit it to him.
Riley sucked air through his teeth and stumbled ahead, focusing on what he remembered from that evening in the parking lot. He couldn’t remember why his father took him out that night. All he remembered was his old man wanting to go for a drive, and then, to Riley’s surprise, Bobby had relinquished the wheel.
It’s a rite of passage, Bobby had said, dropping the car in park before exchanging seats with his son.
“RILEY!”
Bobby Tate pulled open the front door with such force it slammed into the foyer wall.
Cold white panic floode
d Riley’s mind as adrenaline took control. The boy ignored the pain, pushing himself through the carrion colorations eager to pick away at his consciousness, and closed the gap between himself and the car. He scrambled inside, slammed the passenger door, and engaged the locks.
Bobby Tate slammed his fist against the glass.
“Open the door, son.”
Riley shook his head, grunting as he pulled himself over the center console and into the driver’s seat.
“Riley, I mean it. This is your father talking to you. You’re supposed to honor your father, boy.” Bobby leaned his head against the window, leaving a dark snail-trail of black gore on the glass. “I want to tell you about the lord, son. Our lord and savior doesn’t have a name. He’s glorious and comes from within. Old lies above, son. Old lies above and new love below. So it says in the Old Ways. And I can show those to you, Riley. I can show you everything you’d ever want to know about the Old Ways, but you need to suffer first.”
Riley placed his hands on the steering wheel and his foot on the brake. He looked over at his dad and realized he was crying.
“I’m sorry,” Riley whispered. “I love you, old man.”
Bobby Tate grinned, revealing a mouth of blackened teeth. Something slender and slimy like a leech protruded from his left nostril and slid along the glass. He didn’t speak again. Instead, Reverend Bobby Tate raised his fist and thrust it through the window, shattering the glass in one pulverizing blow.
Riley reacted without thinking, pressing the brake like his father taught him and shifting the car into drive. He slammed on the gas.
The car shot forward along the rut of the ditch before reconnecting with asphalt in a shuddering bump. The tires squealed in complaint as they met the road, and as Riley sped away in his father’s car, he thought he heard his old man shout, “Don’t look back.”
Riley did, but he’d spend the rest of his life wishing he hadn’t.
3
Stephanie’s phone vibrated across her coffee table and clattered to the floor. She awoke with a start, sitting up with a soft cry. Figments of the nightmare from which she’d sprung still danced before her—immeasurable dark things with a universe of eyes and teeth like stalactites—and she struggled to discern reality from dream while the phone vibrated along the floor.
Just a dream, she told herself, wiping sleep from her eyes. But her heart was still racing, her breath like a freight train, and when she looked about the room at the late morning sun streaming through the windows, dark phantoms skirted the edges of her vision. The vibration stopped, and she finally reached for the phone.
She thumbed through a list of missed calls. Several from Riley, one from Jack. Stephanie frowned. Seeing their names brought the previous evening’s revelations racing back to her, culminating with a shiver crawling down her back. She clutched the afghan on the back of the sofa and pulled it down around her shoulders.
All the messages from Riley were hang-ups. Stephanie smirked. Such an impatient little shit. The one call from Jack, however, yielded a voicemail: “Hey Steph, it’s Jack. Need you to drop by ASAP. It’s about our chat last night.” He paused. There were muffled voices in the background. “…Chuck’s on his way. Good. Yeah, Steph, please get here as soon as you can.”
“So ominous, Jackie.” She thought about the painting she’d hidden in the closet the night before, of her father’s bright blue eyes, and what Riley told them last night about the man he saw carrying his friends into the night.
Stephanie dialed Riley’s number. The call went straight to voicemail.
“Hey Riley, it’s Steph. Saw you tried to reach me. I’m going over to Jackie’s place soon, but if you need me, just call. I promise I’ll answer this time.”
She canceled the call and rose from her nest on the sofa. Her body protested with a symphony of cracks and pops, and she took a minute to stretch out her aching muscles.
This was supposed to be my weekend off, she thought. Whatever. No rest for the wicked.
When she was finished, Stephanie went to her bedroom to change clothes. Outside, police sirens rose and fell in the distance.
4
Riley was two blocks away from his home when he finally switched his father’s radio station. Bobby Tate was a devout country fan, which only amplified his disapproval of Stephanie’s potential influence over the boy. Now, as the surge of adrenaline slowly left his system, Riley found himself hesitant to change the station. An artist named Sturgill Simpson sang about flowers and thorns and dancing with demons, topics which Riley hadn’t expected to hear discussed in a country song. As he reached the end of the street, Riley realized he was humming along and felt foolish for doing so.
He switched the radio over to The Goat. Danzig filled the car, setting his mind at ease, the aural equivalent of a warm security blanket. His heart slowed, his breathing steady, but the cavernous pit in his gut was still there, a sort of emptiness he’d not felt since his mother died.
You can’t save Ben, he told himself, but maybe you can save Rachel. He remembered the warrior on the cover of his comic book, rising above a throng of blue-eyed monsters. Could he be that strong right now? Or that brave?
“I have to be,” he whispered. The street was empty of traffic, an oddity for an early Sunday afternoon in Stauford, when most churches were freeing their congregants to the world. Sirens cried out from somewhere in the distance, firing off in different cadences, and he couldn’t tell if they were police, ambulance, or fire related. He thought of the horrible scene at the church before they’d fled and wondered if any of those people made it out alive.
His mind wandered back to the text from Rachel. What happened at the church was happening elsewhere, and right now, she needed him. If she was still alive. If she was still normal.
“Riley!”
His father’s roar gave him a start. He looked in the rearview and saw a lone figure walking in the center of the street. Bobby Tate was less than a block away.
Riley didn’t wait. He stepped on the gas, and the car shot forward so fast he panicked and lost his grip on the wheel. The car turned wide, over the opposite lane, and jumped the curb. Riley cried out in surprise as he twisted the steering wheel and let off the gas, guiding the sedan off the sidewalk and back into its proper lane. The tires gave a shrill cry when they met the pavement once more.
“Holy shit,” Riley gasped, checking the mirror once more. Bobby Tate grew smaller in the reflection. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
A cool breeze swept his hair back as he traveled along 7th Street, and when he rounded a curve, his father finally disappeared. Riley’s heart slowed as the panic subsided, and he turned his attention toward the road ahead.
The way along 7th Street trailed up an incline, lined by several split-level homes. He went to school with a few kids who lived in this part of the neighborhood, but he’d never gone out of his way to socialize with them. They were just faces he recognized outside of school, names on the morning roll call.
Are they okay? Did they end up like Dad?
A burst of static hissed from the speakers, drowning out the rock music and filling the car with unbearable white noise. Riley cringed, reaching for the dial to change the station, but as he did so, a thick gurgling voice formed from the static.
“We are one, Riley. Your father is one of Us now. Your lovely Rachel is, too. Soon, you will be one of Us. Soon, you will know the Old Ways.”
All along the street, the front doors of homes on both sides slowly opened, revealing their occupants clothed in weird dresses. Riley did a double take to his left. Not dresses, he thought. Robes.
Mothers and fathers stepped outside, wrapped in bedsheets and curtains and whatever else they could find to serve their dark purpose, all covered in those familiar black stains. Their infernal children followed, taking their parents by the hand and leading them toward their front yards. Some of them smiled, revealing blackened mouths full of dark writhing creatures; others raised their hands and beckoned to him as
he drove on. “Sinner,” they chanted. “Heretic. Interloper. Outsider.”
Other families joined in the chorus, chanting their condemnations of him as he stepped on the gas. Sinner. Heretic. Interloper. Outsider.
“You can be one of Us, Riley. Your sweet suffering will set your soul free.”
He slammed his palm against the radio, silencing the awful voice spewing from its transmission, and placed both hands on the wheel.
The crowds standing on their lawns pointed at him as he drove past. He reached the summit of the hill, took a left onto Phillips Drive, and then a right onto Tanglewood. With each turn, he met more of the same: families corrupted by the filth of his late grandfather. The phone buzzed in his pocket, but he was too afraid to take his eyes off the road, too afraid one of the possessed fanatics would dart in front of the car. He drove on, guiding the sedan over the hill along Tanglewood Road toward South Stauford and the home of Rachel Matthews.
Sinner. Heretic. Interloper. Outsider.
“Whatever,” he muttered. “Story of my fuckin’ life.” The words sounded good aloud, and he wanted to feel brave, but deep inside he was screaming.
5
Officer Gray stepped on the gas as he sped past the pandemonium of First Baptist Church. He only glimpsed the chaos, but what he saw was enough. Men, women, and children congregated outside the building, babbling and raising their hands into the air, their eyes aglow with blue light, their clothes covered in oil. Black smoke billowed from the upper windows of the church, obscuring a hint of flames licking the air, while smaller fires burned on the sidewalk outside. Children danced around these fires in jubilation as the adults tore pages from their Bibles and cast them into the flames.
Chatter on the police band filled the car with reports of attacks all over town—North and South Stauford, Gordon Hill, Barton Mill, from the Cumberland Falls Highway to the Cumberland Gap Parkway, the whole town was erupting into chaos. All EMS services from Baptist Regional were already dispatched, and some police units were not responding to inquiry. Although Stauford’s fire department was called, the fires at the church and elsewhere downtown burned unchecked. There was no word if the fire departments of Landon or Breyersburg were called to assist.
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