Where is Jo, anyway? he wondered, shining his light over a mural of smiling, round-faced children with chubby arms and legs. All of them had big blue eyes full of joy and wonder, white, black, Asian and Native. They played hopscotch and Cowboys and Indians; they rode Big Wheel tricycles and hung by their legs from trees. One girl was dressed as an angel with wings and halo, praying over a dolly in a casket, while another stood in mourning, wearing a pillbox hat with a veil. Several others wore animal costumes beneath a sign for a production of Peter and the Wolf. The entire mural was hand-painted, but the sign for the play had apparently been meant to look as if it had been painted by the children. The wolf, another boy in a costume, peeked out from behind a bush in the background. He appeared to be licking his lips.
Inscribed above all this was a motto, carved into a wooden panel along the length of the wall. The words LITTLE CHILDREN stood out under the LED, but the rest was covered in too much silt to be read from a distance. Owen swam to the beginning and wiped it clean, pulling himself along its edge, reading it letter by letter, until the whole motto was revealed. When he had finished, he swam back to take it all in at once.
SUFFER THE CHILDREN,
AND FORBID THEM NOT
TO COME UNTO ME:
FOR SUCH IS THE
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
All we've done is suffer, Owen thought, though he knew the word had a different meaning here. Crouch wouldn't let us do anything else.
His face prickled with oncoming tears, but he'd cried enough for his lost childhood. This place brought no fresh memories, only pain. It was as unmemorable as the child's—his—bedroom in the house behind the church. A single doorway led out of the classroom. The small hill of broken school desks beside it tumbled with a hollow metallic thunk. Owen swam out, eager to be gone, hoping he'd never have to come back.
He found Jo swimming near the end of the hall. She turned and waved as his LED caught her. Pitch black everywhere except in their little circles of light, the hall was an underwater topiary, its walls caked with mossy algae, the floors littered with broken boards and loose trash (Refuse, Owen corrected himself, causing another twinge of sadness), and baseboards sprouting a brownish, lettuce-like plant along its edge. The ceiling had rotted out entirely in places, revealing bare joists where track lights hung loose, their florescent tubes slick with algae. Boards littered the floor. A patch of spruce-like weeds reached out from a large hole between the exposed slats, swaying in the gentle undercurrent. Long, fibrous strands of dark green algae floated elsewhere. Owen pulled a slimy glob from his hair and cast it aside.
Brings a new meaning to the term "green building," he thought, vaguely amused.
Jo swam toward an even darker stairwell, ignoring the doors on either side. Owen tried one, found the handle rusted solid and impossible to open without a great deal of force behind him. He skipped the other door, which was slightly ajar and blocked from the inside by several large wooden crates, and followed Jo to the stairwell, as her head sank beneath the rise into the yawning darkness.
The stairs lay twenty or so feet below. Jo's flashlight swept across a toothy jangle of steps, broken handrails, and balusters, before she disappeared out of sight below the second floor.
Must be the cave-in Jo mentioned. Lucky she made it out alive.
Owen followed, a dreamlike feeling washing over him as the perspective shifted, the objects and surroundings so normal and yet somehow otherworldly. Though he'd evidently been here before, this was no world he was used to: here was a realm of scaly, hard-shelled creatures and deadly microbes, a beautiful, shadowy microcosm of algae and human waste, a hauntingly beautiful aquarium. Before the flood, he imagined it would have been scrubbed and swept and polished. It truly was God's House now, more than when he and his mother had come to worship.
He swam down, down, following Jo's lamplight, and when he reached the jagged remains of the stairs, he performed an easy somersault. What he saw when his feet came to rest on the decayed floorboards left him breathless.
The collapsed stairwell opened on the nave, or sanctuary, a hall so high his light caught nothing of the cathedral ceiling, only brightening as high as the balconies, cluttered with damaged seating. Black stretched above them, like an endless upward-stretching abyss. He felt its oppressive weight as he followed Jo toward the altar.
The baptismal font had tipped and cracked in two. Pews were toppled like dominoes on either side. Bibles, and footwear of all sizes and styles, at least a dozen shoes in all—some paired, but mostly singles—littered the floor by the altar. The Blessed Trinity had left their shoes behind, unable or unwilling to carry them into the afterlife.
Dull colored light shimmered in through cracks in the boards covering the giant stained glass depiction of Moses and the Israelites standing before the parted Red Sea. Crouch had put the mural in after the Schism, perhaps to inspire his followers to believe they could, with divine intervention, part the flood and spare their place of worship from destruction. And when, at last, the Blessed Trinity understood God would not intervene on their behalf, they'd slipped out of their shoes and cast aside their Holy Books. Their Pied Piper had promised salvation in martyrdom, and they'd swallowed Crouch's lies until all that was left to swallow had been water.
Owen sat in the front pew, where he assumed he and his mother had sat when they'd been part of the church, the Dunsmuirs possibly sitting at their side. He closed his eyes, trying to reach into the past and dredge up memories of Father Crouch preaching damnation at the pulpit, of voices raised in song and prayer, of surreptitiously kicking Jo's saddle shoes to get her attention, and, when she turned, pulling a face to make her giggle.
He listened, trying to conjure up the voice of Crouch—whom he refused to think of as his father, no matter what the evidence said. He'd seen enough televangelists to know the shtick: Put your hand on your television set, brothers and sisters, and the Lord will relieve you of your pain! Reach, brother, reach into the past and you shall see the light. The past is a bright, shining beacon, leading you home. Your soul is sick, your heart is sore! Here I come, Lord, I'm coming home!
He saw Crouch pacing the floor behind the pulpit, wringing his hands together obsessively, muttering to himself—Speaking to God, Owen's mother would have told him. Speaking to God. Owen tried to imagine what the words had meant to a five-year-old. He tried to imagine what he'd been doing in church while his father paced. Something like a memory slowly percolated into his consciousness. He seemed to remember lining up his army men on the pews, playing war until he heard his father's voice. He'd been sitting on the floor between pews, and his father hadn't seen him. Owen had peered over at the sound of his father's voice, had seen the man pull down on a candelabrum to the right of the pulpit, had heard a sharp click echo throughout the nave.
Crouch had opened a passage in the wall. He'd stepped into it, and the door had clicked shut behind him, flush with the wall. Invisible to anyone but those who knew of its existence. The divers looking for treasure, the police searching for the missing members of the Blessed Trinity, would have swam by without ever seeing it.
Jo floated near the secret door, looking but not seeing it, either. Owen pushed up from the pew and swam for her. He found the rusted remains of the candelabrum, and pulled with all his strength. A portion of the wall swung into the darkness with a cloud of silt. Jo turned to him, her eyes wide. She grabbed him in an excited hug before the two of them peered into the darkness.
Owen stepped in first, LED illuminating the wall directly in front of him, no more than three feet away. A bare bulb hung from the low ceiling, and a rusted chain pulley. It wasn't a room, as he'd expected—it was a stairwell.
He threw a look over his shoulder. Jo nodded, urging him forward.
The stairs were undamaged, eerily free of debris and algae, and descended to a riser before a sharp left into pitch dark. Owen swam down into the watery darkness.
Jo's light fell over his shoulder, throwing his long shadow in a sn
aking pattern down the steps. He settled his flippers down on the first riser, heart beating rapidly.
He's here, Owns. His sister's words echoed in his mind. Crouch is here, I can feel it. This is the place.
He waited for Jo to meet him on the riser, waited until she was standing right beside him, then he pulled himself around the wall, and shined his light into the dark.
A mere ten steps led down to a steel door of what was likely a fallout shelter. The large crucifix from the altar had been wedged between it and the stairs, barricading the door. Owen didn't know what to make of this; it didn't jibe with what they'd learned. From Jo's expression, neither did she.
Owen got down on his knees and began to pull. Jo crouched beside him, and the two of them strained their muscles until the cross came unstuck with a great groan, reverberating the stairs and shaking silt from the ceiling like flakes of brown-green snow. Together they moved the cross aside. It stood a good eight feet against the wall, even leaning.
He turned to Jo. They shared an anxious look.
How long has she been trying to find this place? he wondered. Years? If she finds what she's looking for, will she let that be the end of it?
Owen nodded her ahead. Jo descended the last two steps, reached out for the uppermost door handle. He came down behind her, reluctantly, and took the handle nearest the floor. They twisted them together.
The door came open with a groan of rusted metal and swung heavily outward. Its weight and the suddenness of its opening threw them back against the stairs. The regulator rattled between Owen's teeth as his ass struck a stair, sending a judder of pain up his jaw. They sat there a moment, both of them winded, peering into the cold, dark abyss of the cellar.
Jo shined her light inside. The chamber resembled the inside of a cave, walls coated with thick algae the color of sick phlegm, jagged stalactites of the same orange-brown oozing down from the ceiling. It covered the floor, too, mottled and bubbled, repulsive and slimy. The shelves lining the walls were so thickly buried it was impossible to determine the objects beneath.
Jo grabbed him by the shoulder. She pointed at her nose, her mouth, and then shook her head roughly: Don't breathe this. Don't drink this.
She took a cautious step inside, her foot in the sock of her wetsuit squishing down into the phlegmy mess. She kneeled a few paces in through the doorway and began tearing at the sludge. She cast the clumps aside, breaking apart into smaller bits that floated between him and Jo like dust. Her fingers reached bare earth without finding anything, and she crawled a few feet to try again, digging furiously.
He knew what she was looking for, and pushed aside his disgust to crouch down beside her, where he reached into the muck himself and tore it up in big hunks that broke apart, sifting through the fingers of his gloves like handfuls of beach sand. It wasn't long before he grabbed onto something solid, and he pulled the thing up to examine it under his LED.
It was a bone, long and naked. He turned, holding it out to Jo—but she'd dug up remains herself, and pulled out a half-buried skull from the sludge, unmistakeably human. In the place he'd found the limb, he found the rotted bones of a hand hanging limp at its end. Brushing away more loose, slimy detritus, he exposed a ribcage, scraps of black fabric hanging from the bones. The ribs were shattered in places, as if something had punctured the chest. A small, leather-bound book lay beside it in the muck, its remaining pages clumped together. Owen wiped scum from the cover, several bits of paper tore and floated away in a cloud of silt. The words HOLY BIBLE did not surprise him.
Owen remembered his dream of the corpse hand that had dragged him under the water, and his whole body wracked with a sudden shudder. The walls, the shelves along them, the floor and the ceiling, all of it congealed with a sloppy mass of organisms formed by the decomposition of human remains. Under the living sludge lay the moldered skeletons of Everett Crouch and his Blessed Trinity.
He almost gagged, but managed to fight it back, struggling to keep his lips tight around the regulator, for fear of getting any loose detritus in his mouth.
Howie was right: the lake is poisoned, but not by the dump—by the dead.
Jo stopped digging and crawled to him, snatched the bones from his hand. Behind her mask, her eyes had changed, her brow knitted. It was difficult to decipher the emotion—fear, vindication, sadness, or some combination of the three, he couldn't tell.
Owen had seen enough, had never wanted to flee from somewhere as badly in his whole life. But he didn't dare go without her—for his own safety as much as Jo's. Crouch was everywhere down here. Molecules of him drifted in the water around them; no wonder he could manipulate it, no wonder he could use it to kill. Everett Crouch wasn't just a part of the water. He was the water.
Jo raised the bone over her head and drove it down onto the bare earth, shattering it to bits.
Owen twisted his look of shock into sympathy—but Jo whirled away from his touch, and flung herself from the shelter, kicking away, raising a cloud of filth around him.
He was alone. Alone with them.
Have to leave. I have to go now.
The sludge on the cellar floor began to writhe beneath his feet—it was living. Shapes formed in the gelatinous soup, gnarled limbs and misshapen heads, twisted faces crying out in voiceless agony.
The dead are in deep anguish, those beneath the waters and all that live in them... Abaddon uncovered...
Owen turned with dreamlike sluggishness, swimming for the door. The viscous sludge reached out for him, clawing at his legs, stretching down from the ceiling to snatch at his arms, his shoulders.
He squirmed out of its reach, kicking out into the stairwell, taking shallow, quick breaths of cold, dead air, hyperventilation inevitable now. Jo had slipped away into the dark. Without turning to see the horrid things at his heels, Owen pushed the door closed. The living sludge slammed against it, throwing him back, but he dug his heel in against the bottom stair and pushed with all his strength. It wasn't enough. His muscles strained under the pressure, stiffening painfully.
He threw his shoulder against the door, then reached out for the cross with his free hand and pulled it down. It struck the door with a reverberating clang like the toll of a bell, forcing the evil sludge back into the darkness and slamming the door shut.
Hastily, Owen jerked up the rusted handles, locking the shelter door, and swam up from the tomb, leaving only death in his wake.
3
Jo waited for him on the dock, the regulator hanging between her legs, face cradled in her hands, shoulders hitching as she wept.
Owen sat down beside her. After a long moment, Jo felt him there, and pressed up against him. He put an arm around her shoulder to draw her close.
"It's all death down there," she said finally, speaking into his chest. "They were murdered, Owen. It wasn't suicide. Somebody locked them in there." She wiped a forearm under her nose. "We have to let people know. We have to let them all know."
"They won't like it."
"I don't care." she told him, and the cold look in her eyes made him uneasy.
Owen turned to face the church. Waves crashed against the steeple, the cross a black silhouette against the bright sky as the sun broke free from the clouds. A gull shrieked out on the lake, flying so high it was almost invisible.
He peered into the choppy water at his feet, looking for the dark shape of the church below. Crouch's last words—Earth, do not cover my blood. May my cry never be laid to rest—had been somewhat prophetic. However it had happened, the church had survived the flood and so had Everett Crouch. His mortal remains had been buried, but not by earth, and his voice had never been silenced. Until recently, it had only been heard by a few, in the chuckle of the waterfall, in the groan of rusted pipes. In nightmares. In death.
Soon, the doors of that monstrous church would be blown wide open, and the whole world would hear their cries. Soon, Everett Crouch and his Blessed Trinity would be laid to rest.
4
They drove t
he cottage road to town, Jo sitting silently in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the window the way a trauma victim would. She'd bunched her hands into fists and jammed them between her legs, as if she were cold and struggling to keep herself warm.
As the gate to Hordyke House passed behind them, she turned to him. "The Catholic Church said atheists who are good and just will go to Heaven," she said.
Owen remembered. He used to think of himself as an atheist, a skeptic. He'd never believed in God, at least not as far back as he could remember. He supposed when he was a child he must have believed, and maybe if he'd never left Peace Falls, if the dam had never happened and the flood had never come, if he and his mother had stayed with the church and his father had remained in their lives, he'd be an entirely different man today. He might have followed in his father's footsteps. He might have become a minister—he might have been the Reverend Owen Crouch, minister of the Blessed Trinity Mission, preparing for his next sermon. Of course, it was just as likely he would have rebelled, become the Lost Son. If his father really had been insane, he and his mother might have left whether the flood had swept away their hometown or not.
"The Pope believes in the Big Bang, and evolution," Jo continued. "He said that God isn't some magician who waved a magic wand to create the Earth in seven days." She looked at him finally, her eyes misty. "Who knows what we'll find out about God next?"
Owen considered it. "Do you believe in God?"
Her dark eyes seemed to search for a motive behind the question. "Do you?"
Owen considered it. "I guess if I truly believed, the answer would be easy," he said, struggling for the words to express what he'd felt his whole life. "But maybe faith is supposed to be a… a constant struggle between the known and unknown, the rational and the spiritual." He turned to see if she was following along; she'd pooched out her lower lip in deliberation, but otherwise expressed no opinion. "Faith doesn't look for proof," he said, "faith exists in the absence of proof. In that way, belief in God is a lot like believing in love, I think." Jo scowled at this, though he couldn't tell if she disagreed or was merely considering it. "Science tells us love is chemical, right? A reaction in our brains. But we can feel love swell in our hearts. Losing someone we love feels like a hole in ourselves. Like a… like a vast emptiness. It's like a piece of us is missing."
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