by K M Stross
He glanced over his shoulder as he continued running and focused his right eye on the two headlights. When they looked only a handful of meters away, Cross stopped, turning and jumping onto the hood. His body rolled and crashed into the windshield before rolling again, slamming into the dark strobe lights before rolling down the rear of the car.
Sheriff Taylor stopped the car and stepped out, his hand firmly on the gun at his hip. He walked over to Cross’s huddled form in the dirt, pulling out a pair of handcuffs.
“You better have a wallet on you,” he said. “You better have some money in there to pay for those new tires. You better have some energy left, you son of a bitch, because I ain’t digging your grave. I dug enough graves in my lifetime already.”
Cross’s fingers dug into the dry dirt, gathering as much of it as he could into each palm. He curled up and waited for the gruff voice to grow loud enough for his ears to pick up the sheriff’s raspy exhale before turning, tossing both handfuls in the direction of the voice, catching enough of the sheriff’s face to force him back.
“You sissy little cocksucking pile of shit!” Taylor pulled out his gun, aiming it in the direction of where Cross had been crouched, firing once, barely missing Cross’s shoulder. Cross ducked under the sheriff’s gun, which followed his movements but with enough hesitation that Cross could pull away from Taylor’s line of sight. Taylor fired another shot at the ground, next to the damaged rear driver’s side tire as Cross moved inside the squad car and shut the door. Another shot rang out, this time ricocheting against the door’s frame.
Cross slammed his foot on the gas and the squad car veered left under the weight of the damaged tires. He righted it as much as he could, following the ghostly shape of the church in the distance. His hands gripped the steering wheel, the car zigzagging left and right under the grinding axles. The church seemed to be crawling toward him, and the feeling was strong enough for Cross to glance back over his shoulder to see exactly how much distance he had put between himself and the sheriff. The sheriff was a hundred yards away, walking slowly, his hands fumbling with the gun. He was reloading, Cross thought grimly—he would have to turn the car around and try to kill the sheriff if he wanted to survive long enough to find Morrissey.
When he turned back, he found the church careening toward him. He slammed on the brakes. The car skidded, sliding on the dry ground. The damaged wheels forced the car sideways, spinning, slamming the rear of the car against the wall and forcing Cross out of the driver’s seat, over the dashboard computer and into the passenger’s seat.
His head pounding, Cross crawled over the driver’s seat and out through the broken window. He glanced back in the direction of the Ramon ranch, waiting for the low black clouds to reveal the moon. Slowly, the flat landscape revealed itself and the fat figure slowly walking toward the church. Taylor had seen the crash and was now taking his time, huffing wheezy breaths. The moonlight disappeared again. In the silence, the metallic click of the gun’s magazine seemed to ring in Cross’s ears.
He turned and ran to the front of the church, forcing its doors open. He stepped inside, into the darkness, searching desperately for some place to hide inside the chapel. He turned, spotting the old wooden confessional next to the last row of pews off to his right, and started to move when a voice immediately stopped him.
“Sister Marcia,” a familiar voice whispered.
Cross felt his chest grow cold.
“Sister Marcia, please sit with me for a moment.”
Cross turned around. As he did, the church changed: it was no longer decrepit, dark, aged. The pews were new, the carpet fresh, the stained-glass windows undamaged with rays of light shining in from the heavens. The altar stood at the front, and behind it: Morrissey. Dressed in a black robe. A Mexican woman sat next to the pipe organ, dusting the keys with one shaking hand that held a brown rag.
“Sister Soledad,” Morrissey said again.
Marcia stopped dusting and stood up. Cross stepped forward, clutching his knife and stepping toward the blurry images. A drop of blood slid over his eyebrow and into his right eye, stinging it. More tiny blobs clung to his eyelashes.
“Please sit with me, Sister Soledad,” Morrissey said.
Soledad moved to the front pew and sat down. Morrissey walked over to the pipe organ and ran a finger down the high keys. The notes, eerie and high-pitched like a cat’s whine, resonated through the brass pipes above the altar.
“You do a very good job here, sister.”
Sister Soledad looked up at Morrissey, her head shaking slightly.
“Father Belmont would have been proud. Some day, we’ll be able to get you to a nunnery, and you can take your vows and become a real sister. You already feel like a sister to me.”
Soledad’s head nodded.
Morrissey’s face grew dark as if the light coming in from the windows was purposely detouring his visage. “What did you see that night?”
Sister Soledad broke into tears. Morrissey put an arm around her shaking shoulders.
“Come to the confessional. It’s time to confess all of your sins, child. You must receive a penance to be carried out in the name of God.”
Cross watched Morrissey lead her down the aisle to the back of the church. The small woman’s legs shook with every step, the air around her remained thick with body odor. They brushed past Cross, stepping into the twin confessionals. Through the gentle ringing in his ears, Cross picked up the sound of Sister Soledad quietly sobbing, her voice muffled by the heavy oak structure.
He stepped closer, straining to hear. Sister Soledad’s voice stopped, and Morrissey whispered something in response. Cross pressed his ear to the thin wooden paneling of the confessional where Morrissey had stepped inside, trying to hear through the ringing still echoing through his head. The door burst open, forcing him back against the pew, falling over onto the carpeted floor. Sister Soledad ran out of the confessional, her mouth agape, her pale gray eyes staring intently at the greeting area. The other door opened and a much calmer Gabriel Morrissey stepped out. The familiar shaggy black hair had returned, clinging greasily to the skin of his face and neck.
And the scar. The scar, under his eye, taunting Cross and begging for him to raise the knife and follow the line directly to Morrissey’s eye. To puncture that soft orb of tissue and cut into the brain.
Cross reached out as Morrissey passed, expecting his hand actually to grab something material. But Morrissey continued unabated, catching up to Sister Marcia at the front doors and grabbing hold of her with both hands. Her screams were quickly muffled by his hand.
“There, there, sister. Please.”
Sister Soledad screamed louder into Morrissey’s palm.
“Please! You came here for salvation. You came here because you thought this place would be safe. I won’t betray that.”
Cross dragged his body to its feet, stepping closer. He could see the tears streaming down Sister Soledad’s cheeks, her face red from the pressure exerted on her lungs to continue the incessant screams. She looked old, but with a smooth face and wide eyes and thin eyebrows. He had never seen her and yet he knew this was what she looked like. He knew it was all a hallucination and yet his body felt compelled to take it in, to forget about everything else and live in this moment even if it wasn’t real.
“You must perform a penance for your sins,” Morrissey said. “It must be a large penance in order for you to be forgiven in the eyes of God. And even then, he should not forgive you. He should not forgive any of us because we’re all so damned that seeing Him in Heaven would be an embarrassment. So your penance will be a sacrifice to the church.”
Morrissey grabbed onto the collar of her dress and dragged her down the aisle. With her mouth no longer covered, Soledad continued screaming. She was dragged past Cross, kicking and flailing her arms, trying to grab the backs of the pews. Cross turned to follow, but as Morrissey and Sister Soledad moved into the staircase leading to the basement, the altar disappeared.
<
br /> The doors in the greeting room burst open, the crash of the wooden doors echoing in the chapel. Cross jumped away from the greeting area and opened the priest’s confessional box, slowly closing the wooden door so it wouldn’t make a sound.
Inside, he held his breath, sitting uncomfortably on the hard wooden bench, exhaling very slowly only when his heart threatened to burst through his chest, inhaling quickly before his lungs could seize uncontrollably. In the absolute darkness, Cross felt cold. Blood slid down his right temple, over his swollen cheekbone. It traveled down his sweaty neck and sent a cold chill through his body. He wanted to jump out, to escape this coffin before his lungs caved in.
He sat, with his breath held tightly behind his lips, knowing this was his future: absolute, suffocating darkness.
“Cross!” the sheriff called out, his voice echoing through the empty church. His footsteps softened as his boots stepped onto the rotten chapel carpeting. Cross heard his name called again, this time closer to the pulpit. He exhaled slowly, his lips pursed. The sheriff called his name again, this time echoing up from the bottom of the staircase.
It was safe to breathe.
Then: the sound of footsteps. Cross drew in another breath, listening as the soft carpeting directly outside of the confessional stiffened under the weight of heavy boots. The other confessional door opened, a swift rustling of fine fabric echoing between the mesh window as a body sat down on the bench. The door closed. Cross couldn’t see the figure through the dark mesh, but he could smell his rank body odor, and then he heard the voice, the smooth alto that once graced the St. Joseph’s choir.
“Forgive me, Chandler.”
Cross let out a quick breath, drawing in fresh oxygen and clutching the knife hard enough for his dry, dirt-encrusted knuckles to crack like the arid soil.
“I killed a woman, father. I brought her to the basement—this church’s basement—and peeled her layer from layer and fed her to the crows so she wouldn’t share my secret, and then I buried her in the desert under the shadow of a flock of mourning doves. Do you know where the mourning dove name comes from, father?”
“No,” Cross whispered, trying to control his heart before it could burst.
“The mourning star is Satan. I taught you that a long time ago. But you never listened all that closely to what I had to say.”
Cross closed his eyes.
Morrissey grunted between his thin lips. “Marcia was a pious woman, but she began to break down, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she told someone about Father Belmont’s burial site and then the whole charade would be over. I had to close off the basement after her disappearance. I had to because the smell of her decaying was too much and I didn’t know what else to do. When the sheriff came by asking questions, I told him I knew exactly where she went because she told me the night before: she was leaving, back to Mexico, to begin a new church in her hometown which had none.”
“Murderer,” Cross whispered.
“The sheriff, being incompetent as he is, ate up the story because he believed in me. I could have told him she flew a rocket to the moon.”
“Confess your real sins,” Cross said.
Morrissey was silent for a moment. “I tried that, once, when I still believed Christ left his powers in the hands of competent followers.”
“Father Tony was a good man,” Cross said, feeling the knife in his hands creep closer to the small mesh window.
“Father Tony,” Morrissey hissed, “was an alcoholic who lusted to break his chains of sexual sobriety.”
“He was a dedicated man.”
Morrissey slammed his fist against the wall, causing Cross to flinch. “And just what does dedication have to do with anything, Cross? Are you not an example of a dedicated man? A man who spends his waking hours hellbent on tracking down a man for the sole purpose of murder? A man of the cloth who carries a sharpened knife with him everywhere he goes, praying to a God he doesn’t believe in for just one chance to use it on another human being?”
Cross felt tears coming to his eyes, but he pushed them back. “He meant everything to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Morrissey said quietly. “But this is bigger than you and me. Saint Aaron is so much more.”
“You’re finished,” Cross said, taking a deep breath to stave off the shuddering deep within his chest. “I found Father Belmont’s body.”
“Then I’ll start over in a brand-new town,” Morrissey whispered. “I’ll assume a new name, a new identity, and I’ll begin again.”
“It won’t be as easy outside of Purgatory.”
Morrissey laughed. “It’ll always be easy as long as the dedicated flock truly wants to believe. This entire church, to this day, is still full of a dozen different hallucinogens, and deep down everyone in this town knows it.”
They were silent for a moment, exchanging only breaths—one deep, calculating, and slow; the other quick, loud, primal.
Cross steeled himself, forcing his body to slow its nervous convulsions. He pressed the handle of the knife against his chest. “I won’t let you go this time.”
He heard the other door open—then, just as quickly, his own door was ripped from its hinges, two dark shapes for hands reaching in and grabbing Cross’s collar, wrenching him from the confessional. His face slammed against the hard wooden frame.
All went black.
“Look at me, Cross!” Morrissey hissed from the darkness, his low voice wet and hot against Cross’s bare face.
Cross held onto the knife, dizzy. He saw black shapes upon black shapes… everything swirling around like a river in the middle of the night. His ears rang. Two different dark shapes blurred together beneath the swollen folds of Cross’s right eyelids. His hand faltered, the knife’s sharpened edge seemingly pulling itself forward without the help of Cross’s hand and a strong cold hand wrapped tightly around his wrist.
“Do you still think you can kill me, Chandler?” Morrissey asked, letting go of Cross’s hand. “You can’t stop me.”
“I’ll find a way,” Cross said. His heart beat heavily in his chest, every inch of his body steeling itself to put every ounce of energy into his hand to put one blind stab in the darkness, to take this one opportunity that had evaded him for so long. Something held him back.
“You can’t do it!” Morrissey screamed. “You have to give up this ridiculous crusade!”
“No,” Cross whispered.
“Oh my God.”
Cross turned his head in the direction of the sound, trying to make some sense of the dark shadows creeping in through the thin slit of his swollen eye. This was his future, his penance for not being able to drive the knife into Morrissey’s chest when he had the chance. Now, he was blind and alone.
The cock of a gun.
“Don’t be a fool, sheriff,” Morrissey said. “Point that gun away from me and aim it right for the stomach of this heathen.”
“I don’t know what you are…”
“You’re hallucinating,” Morrissey said calmly. “Take a deep breath, sheriff. Let it pass. You’re not seeing things right. You’ve been poisoned.”
“You’re not human,” the sheriff whispered.
“We can go back to the way it was,” Morrissey said, shaking Cross’s body with a violent jerk. “Before he came and ruined this good town! The moment I’m canonized, I’ll disappear forever. You can even kill me if you want to. After I’m canonized.”
“You’re not human…” the sheriff’s voice had grown shaky.
“This is your saint, sheriff!” Cross screamed. “This is the man you’re willing to kill for! The man who you think is the savior of your precious town! This is Aaron Abaddon in the flesh!”
Dead silence. Cross waited for a response… his breathing mingled with Morrissey’s, neither one claiming a calm rhythm. Cross imagined the sheriff walking down the dark staircase into the basement, his hand running along the dusty banister. Dust mixed with something else. Some kind of hallucinogen.
&n
bsp; “Point that gun away, sheriff,” Morrissey said in a smooth voice, his tongue clicking against the back of his clenched teeth. “I am Father Aaron.”
“Shoot him!” Cross screamed. “Shoot him now while you have a chance!”
“Point that gun at Cross, Sheriff.” Morrissey shook Cross hard again, lifting him up so that they were both standing. Cross could feel the weight of gravity centered around Morrissey’s strong hands, the tips of his toes barely touching the floor. “Point it at the intruder. Point it at the meddler. Point it at the man who is trying to single-handedly destroy your precious town and throw it back into the dark ages.”
“Don’t do this, sheriff!” Cross said. “Don’t make the same mistake I did!” Cross dropped his head. “Father Tony was my friend.”
Cross’s ears erupted with the crack of thunder. He felt hot, stinging shards of buckshot hit the side of his torso, knocking him over. He heard Morrissey scream in pain, his body falling on top of Cross’s. Warm blood began to soak into his shirt, his jeans, the bare skin of his face… he could not tell which of it was his, only that Morrissey was still screaming in pain, struggling with both arms to push his body away from Cross.
The sheriff said something; barely a whisper lost to the ringing deep within Cross’s ears. He could see nothing, hear nothing, only feel the hot blood soaking into his shirt.
Morrissey’s body struggled under the splinters of wood. The two men began struggling over Cross’s body, crashing over the last pew and splintering the wood. Cross crawled on all fours, locating the knife and clutching it in his hand, crawling over the broken pew toward the very faint sounds that had begun permeating the ringing in his eardrums.
Suddenly both bodies fell on top of Cross, two sets of hands flailing wildly, fists clenched, elbows digging into Cross’s ribcage and pushing on the buckshot in his flesh. He screamed and fumbled across the sheriff’s flabby arm, finding the barrel of the shotgun and feeling another hand wrap around his. With the ringing slowly fading, he could hear the cool, calculated breaths of Morrissey to his left and the frantic shouts to God coming from Sheriff Taylor, who was leaning on Cross’s body. He felt another hand on the shotgun, and it began to move horizontally. He dropped his weight, hoping to right the barrel once more but felt a hot discharge through the metal barrel and another deafening crack of thunder.