by Martin Kee
Her mother was focused on the darkest corner of the room where a black sphere rested on the floor, unmoving and still, roughly the size of a cabbage. It blended so well into the shadows that it was a moment before Skyla realized it looked very much like an eye.
“She’s not ready! Not ready at all! Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”
Shadows around the eye began to move in a way that made Skyla’s mind hurt, a limb unfolding from its center, long and covered in thick wiry hairs followed by more limbs, callused and plated. It unraveled from the corner in impossible numbers, as if it were bleeding arms and claws. They unfurled through the air, around the square of lamplight on the floor, avoiding it, passing through one another to gain purchase, wavering against the rug.
Skyla stood frozen as her mother continued to chant, beg, and plead, providing the only obstacle between the stairs and the never-ending nightmare of legs and spikes that now took up a quarter of the living room with disturbing speed.
The floor shuddered under the creature’s weight as it began to creep across the room on feet that were uneven and malformed. Blood dripped from her mother’s hand, forming a black pool at her feet.
“Do you hear me?” Lynn shouted. “Do you hear me in there? She’s not ready! Do you hear me?”
She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but Lynn dropped a hand to her side as if reading her mind. She waved Skyla away, not taking her eyes off the tangle of shadowed limbs, still unraveling throughout the house, consuming the space around them.
“Skyla, you mustn’t look at it. You mustn’t ever look at it.” Her voice sounded almost calm. It sent chills up her arms. “I’m going to run now. I want you to run!”
As she said it, Skyla’s mother charged past the growing beast and into her bedroom. From somewhere deep within the mass of legs, the creature bellowed and lunged after her mother, bursting the bedroom door from its hinges. There was a terrible wailing and then an inhuman howl that made Skyla’s neck prickle.
The noise shook the paralysis from her body. Eyes wide, she scrambled back into her room, pushing the door closed with jelly legs, collapsing against it.
“Hide!” said Orrin with a rusty croak.
“Where?” Skyla squeaked, looking in all directions.
Orrin raced across the floor, impossibly fast. “Hide! Hide hide hide hide hide hide!”
“I don’t know where to hide!” she shouted back at him.
He swooped past her, landing on the huge black trunk in her closet, pecking it. “Hide!”
She flung the lid open, digging clothes from inside and tossing them onto the floor, aware of the noises she was now not hearing from downstairs, aware of the sudden absence of her mother, the tangible silence.
“Hide!” screamed Orrin.
“It won’t fit up the stairwell,” she said, climbing into the trunk. “It’s too big.”
A slow, gut-wrenching scraping of bone against wood moved up the stairs, stressing the steps and vibrating the entire house, growing louder.
Orrin’s feathers batted at her face. “Hide!”
He flew off as she closed the lid. She squeezed her eyes closed, feeling the darkness hug her from all sides, the walls tightening, the shadows a tomb. Orrin was screaming and flapping haphazardly around her room, knocking books and metal trinkets off her desk. She was surrounded by sounds of her house coming apart as the creature squeezed its way up the stairs, coming to rest just outside her door.
It was quiet for a moment, just enough for the absurdity of her situation to take seed.
Clothes won’t protect you. Your mother protected you, she thought. Pity she’s gone now.
Silence stretched out like black placid water. Skyla held her breath, her face covered with clothing obscuring her body as much as she could, forcing herself to not look. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, her eyes squeezed shut—she knew—that if she could see it, it could see her.
I mustn’t look. I mustn’t look. Looking at the shadows makes them real. I mustn’t ever look.
The floor heaved beneath her again as a great weight shifted outside her room, popping the door from a hinge and sending it slamming against the plaster. Skyla felt the wall give and heard the wood bend, splinter and snap as the beast pushed its impossible panting bulk through the doorframe. The solid shadow came to rest inches from the trunk, rocking it, rough skin pressing and scraping the leather case.
She limited her breathing to shallow gasps, part of her brain wanting only to run screaming into the yard, part of her wanting to look just once. Clamping her hands over her own mouth as if it belonged to someone else she didn’t trust, Skyla suppressed the urge to scream.
In her imagination she saw yards and yards of brindled wart-patched flesh, frozen like stone, an impossible, inverted, negative object.
She dared not make a single noise. Her lungs ached.
I must not look. I must not look. Looking makes the shadows real. Looking makes them real.
From the windowsill, Orrin dropped something, a trinket from her shelves maybe. It went plink. Skyla flinched.
All at once, the floor fell away beneath her as the creature launched itself from the doorway, landing on her bed, smashing her dresser and tumbling into a wall. Skyla squeezed her eyes shut and cringed against the sounds of splintering wood and breaking glass, muffling the urge to scream as her home disintegrated around her, showering the trunk with plaster and shattering the rafters.
Then all was still. Silence swept over the room in waves, as if nothing had ever happened. The only sound was her pulse in her ears, muffled breath. She stared into blackness, unsure whether the world would even be there anymore when she looked.
Time stretched on for what felt like hours before Skyla heard a voice.
“Skyla,” croaked the raven, so human she almost didn’t believe it.
“Skyla,” he said again.
Her tiny hands pressed against the lid of the trunk as dim light illuminated the pile of clothing covering her. She sat upright, rising from her tiny prison, looking out with wide unbelieving eyes as she tried to comprehend the destruction. What she saw was unrecognizable as a room.
The entryway was bowed out on both sides, the frame in splinters, the door itself hanging on by a single hinge. Her bed, one that had never been very nice to begin with, was now bent down in the center, one leg kneeling, the mattress shredded with stuffing the color of rotten eggshells. What had been her dresser was now a pile of kindling. One wall near her bed was so badly damaged she was able to make out lamplight from the street through the cracks.
Skyla followed the path of demolition across the room to what used to be her wall. The window frame was now oval in shape and twice the width. The floor below was a spilled mess of splinters and broken glass.
On top of the debris stood Orrin, who chirped.
She leapt from the trunk as he hopped onto her shoulder. She scratched him under his beard of feathers before he dropped to the floor at her doorway, looking back at her with apprehension. Her heart sank. My mother…
Skyla stepped past her rucksack, her fallen books on broken glass, and out into the hallway. A deep gash ran from the top of the stairs and down into the living room, as though a large metal tool had been used against it. A pool of her mother’s blood was congealed on the floor, a trail leading to the far room, which gaped back at her.
“Mom?” she said in a small voice, clearing her throat. “Mom.”
She was met with irrefutable silence, no breathing, no crying. She stared at the misshapen hole at the end of the room, her mind painting a grisly image, bracing for the reality of dead eyes looking at her from a face that was once her mother, a discarded rag doll of flesh and human hair.
She stepped into the room, preparing herself, but she found nothing, no body. A trail of blood led to a darkened corner and vanished.
“Mom.”
It was worse not seeing a corpse. It left a hole in her mind with no answer to fill it. And what does this make
me? Am I an orphan now? Am I supposed to just… go to school tomorrow like nothing has happened?
She began to search the room in a panic, looking for anything that would provide a clue to her mother’s fate. She yanked the sheets from the bed, threw pillows, shoved a dresser, but there were no answers.
A trembling hand went to her chest, the loneliness consuming her. Soon there would be police and questions—they would not be kind questions either. After the questions she would be carted off to the orphanage, just like mother. And all that time, she would be wondering where her mother had gone. She would sit, alone in a room, looking out rain-streaked windows, thinking about her mother and never knowing.
A scraping noise at her feet yanked Skyla from the bewildering fantasy, a thrill of fear climbing up the back of her throat as something slid along the floor. A box covered in age coasted out from beneath the bed. Orrin appeared from behind it, gave it one last shove and looked up at her with a croak.
He hopped onto her shoulder as she knelt, spinning the box around to read her name, painted in thick red letters on the lid and hidden beneath a layer of dust. It was held together with brittle twine. She had barely begun to undo the knot when a crunch drew her attention to the window.
A man-shaped shadow slid across the lawn outside, drifting along behind the closed curtains. Skyla clutched the box to her chest.
Letters? Toys? Gifts? A dead animal? Whoever that is, they won’t get this last thing from me.
“Pack,” said Orrin.
The shadow darted along the wall, moving to the locked front door. Staggering through the shattered doorway, across the living room and up the stairs, Skyla grabbed her mother’s old rucksack, shoving the box into it, hearing a clunk as footsteps entered the living room. She paused as her eyes met the red book, a gift from Missy. She grabbed it without thinking.
As she hefted the straps onto her shoulders, a shadow fell across the floor. She stood and turned, a wall of black lacquered armor standing over her. She only came up to its chest, a red cross emblazoned on the front, broad shoulders supporting an angular helmet, the faceplate a snarling lion.
Black armored gauntlets gripped her by the shoulders as a scream rose from her throat, the sort of scream that only young girls are capable of, the kind that shatters glass and annoys dogs. Startled, the gloved hands went from her arms to the helmet, forgetting momentarily how ineffective the gesture might be.
Orrin was suddenly between her and the sneering gargoyle faceplate, a flapping, clawing, swirling mass of feathers, clacking against gleaming armor.
Through her screaming she heard Orrin cawing, “Run run run run!” as he threw himself against her attacker.
She slid down the tin roof, landing hard on the damp grass as a gunshot went off above her. Grabbing the strap of her pack, she dashed across the slick lawn through a hole in the fence.
A dark cluster of feathers tumbled from the hole in her bedroom and flew off into the night sky, a black smudge against a gray canvas. The soldier stood at the gap in her wall—no point calling it a window anymore—looking for the bird and for her. He flipped the helmet up and she saw that he was just a boy, a teenager, maybe five or six years older than she was.
He scanned the yard for a few moments before ducking back through the hole. As Skyla peered across the yard, she spotted a vehicle in the drive, a shiny steam-engine car with brass headlights and sleek black tires, its headlamps emitting a malicious orange light.
Leaning against the shiny copper hood of the car was another man, dressed in a white linen suit. The soldier exited the house and they spoke for a time, gesturing in an informal manner, businesslike.
She could hear nothing of the conversation. Her eyes were fixed on the man’s shadow as it stretched over his car and across the street, threatening to swallow up light from the lamps.
The man in white lit a cigarette as he casually walked through the entrance of her house.
Chapter 2
The Reverend Summers had seen poltergeists and demons do their handiwork in the past and this was pretty much what he expected. He walked into Lynn’s bedroom and took a quick glance. It was a sinner’s bed, sheets unmade and unkempt, the pillows yellow and dirty with sweat. A trail of blood led from the living room through the doorway and up to the bed where it ended. There was no body—typical.
He noted the Bible lying open on the floor next to the bed. He stepped over to it and glanced at an open passage from Deuteronomy.
“They sacrificed to demons, which are not God, gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods that did not hear…”
“Sir?” came a voice from outside the room.
“In here,” said Lyle.
He turned and looked around the room. The broken door frame was bowed out and almost circular. He reached out to touch the crumbling paint.
“Big one,” he said, thinking out loud.
“Sir?” The voice was close now, a boy’s voice.
“Nothing, Charlie,” he said, running a hand along the shattered wood. “Do you mind bringing in my kit from the car?”
The young soldier left and returned a moment later carrying a small leather case. Lyle opened it and took out a shiny metal knife, wiping a smear of blood on the nearby bed. Squinting under his white hat, he scraped some of the paint into an envelope.
“Is it true what they say?” asked Charlie.
“What’s that?” asked the Reverend, still focused on his scraping.
Charlie looked away for a moment, and then shyly turned back to the Reverend. “They say you are the Pope of the South.”
Lyle paused for a moment, then chuckled. “They say that do they?”
“Is it true?”
Lyle turned and faced the boy, holding the silver blade to his side, “Don’t believe half of what you hear, son. I may be old, but the Pope I am not.”
“Oh…” The boy looked down, embarrassed.
Lyle cleared his throat. “Now, that’s not to say He and I don’t work closely.” He raised an eyebrow.
The soldier looked up at him again. “So, you are here on His errand?”
“You could say that.” He went back to scratching.
“Is it true that you have a hundred mansions east of the Mississippi?”
“My Father’s house has many mansions,” Lyle said, amused with himself.
“Sir?”
“Well, when you say it like that, you make it sound as though all those houses are mine and not Houses of the Lord.” He beamed a smile at the young man. “What you need to understand is that I have millions of sheep in my flock and I need places for them to gather all over the country. It’s all part of the job.”
“I wish I had a big church like that to go to,” said Charlie, feeling more candid. “All our churches here are old. They have to close the one on the North Wedge when it rains.”
“It rain much here?”
“Only in winter, but they can never afford to fix it. My cousin lives in North Wedge. She has to truck herself all the way across town for Mass.”
“That is a shame,” said Lyle, adjusting the brim of his hat. “For some reason I thought this was the poor side of town.”
Charlie laughed. “No way. This is beyond poor. I didn’t even know there were people living in this wedge. They used to call it the Gutter Wedge…” His laugh was cut short by a severe look from the Reverend. “Sorry, sir.”
Lyle said nothing, only stared at the boy until his face broke into a sudden grin. He placed a hand on the plate that armored the boy’s shoulder. He rubbed at some of the etching with his thumb and noticed a subtle grain beneath the gloss finish that gleamed in the light.
“That’s some remarkable craftsmanship,” he said, leaning in to get a closer look.
“Thank you sir,” the soldier said. He puffed his chest a bit and looked at nothing in particular. “We make them here. Bollingbrook’s finest.”
“I can see that,” said Lyle. “Surprised your city doesn’t sell mor
e of these to the local municipalities.”
“There is less of a market during peace-time. Ever since the Maka-Sichu crusades, there hasn’t been much need for armor.”
Lyle laughed. “Sounds like what you folks need is more wars. Nothing better for a man’s soul than a crusade.” He slapped the boy on the side of his pauldron.
“Yes sir.”
Lyle turned back to the shattered wood that lay all around him.
“Now,” he said. “The reason you never saw anyone living here”—he reached up and tore a piece of wood away from the bristled frame—“is because you weren’t allowed to see.”
“Sir?” The boy frowned.
Lyle turned to him, holding the splinter out. “Birch. Witches. It’s all witchcraft and trickery, my boy. The mind sees what it wants. It picks and chooses sometimes. Some know how to take advantage of this. I bet you never guessed that you had such summoners living right in your midst.”
And yet you yourself let one of them get away, he thought to himself.
Charlie blinked. “No sir. Bollingbrook is the center for the archdiocese. We would have known about this. The archbishop would have exorcised the premises.”
The young soldier shivered as he looked around, looking as if he felt the house would collapse in on him.
“You would have to have been invited in order to see it, much the way a vampire can only enter your house if you invite them. Evil has to be invited into the heart, just as the heart sometimes has to be invited to do evil.”
Charlie laughed in spite of himself. “Sir. Vampires? There’s no such thing.”
Lyle did not laugh. “Awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you boy?”
The soldier looked as though he had been slapped. All that remained of the old man’s jovial nature poured from his face like water from a pitcher. What remained pierced Charlie’s soul with chill blue eyes as the Reverend spoke slowly, cold and serious.
“I’ve seen things that neither you nor this dirt clod of a town could possibly imagine, boy.” His voice was as rough as dried leaves.