The Revelation

by Bentley Little

  McFarland shook his head. "Not tonight. I don't really feel up to it."

  Chmuragrabbed his arm, and McFarland realized that the deputy was already drunk. "Come on."

  He shook his head more firmly and peeled the deputy's hand off his arm.

  "I can't. I'm married."

  Chmuralaughed. "That don't mean shit. I was married once, too. Who cares?"

  McFarland looked at the younger man. Married and divorced? He couldn't have been any older than mid twenties McFarland shook his head and pretended to look at his watch. "Sorry. It's almost time for me to call my wife. I've got to get going." He downed his beer and stood up. He'd head back to the hotel and see what was on TV. Maybe he would call Denise. Who could tell? It might cheer him up. It certainly couldn't be worse than this. He clapped an arm onChmura's back in an expression of camaraderie he didn't feel. "I'll see you later."

  "Wait," the deputy said, and there was a tinge of desperation in his eyes. "You sure you wouldn't like to just stay here and talk or something?"

  McFarland shook his head. "Sorry, but I have to go. Maybe some other time."

  There was a sudden jumble of loud voices in the back of the bar, near the jukebox, and both men turned to look at the disturbance.

  Something slammed hard against the jukebox and the obnoxious sound of a needle being scratched over a record surface blared through the Colt's PA system.Chmura put his bottle down on the bar, hitched up his belt and grinned. "It's times like these that it's fun to be a deputy." He started toward the rear of the bar and noticed suddenly that the crowd which had been gathered there was slowly backing up toward him. One older woman abruptly turned and ran for the front door. A new song had started playing on the jukebox, a Waylon Jennings song, and Waylon's already low voice became even lower as the power plug to the jukebox was pulled out and the record slowed to a stop.

  McFarland watchedChmura hesitate for a moment, patting his waist for a gun and holster that weren't there, then start slowly forward, against the tide of people. He swore to himself, wishing that he, too, had brought along some type of weapon, and reached for the deputy's bottle.

  He smashed it against the bar and held the jagged edge out in front of him, moving forward to helpChmura . You could never tell what would happen in these redneck bars. You could never be too careful.

  The bar was silent now, all conversation stopped, and the dancers and drinkers in the front of the building were looking curiously toward the rear, trying to figure out what was going on. Some of the other patrons were still backing up, and some were standing their ground, staring toward the door next to the jukebox, but the vast majority of them were making a hurried beeline for the front exit. McFarland followedChmura through the crowd of people and stopped.

  A small infant, legless, its arms mere underdeveloped stumps, was flopping along the wooden floor of the saloon through the doorway, laughing and cackling to itself. The sound was low and barely audible, but McFarland could hear it clearly through the silence of shuffling feet and it sent a cold chill down his spine. He moved a step closer and stared at the baby. It was small, undersized, and appeared to be newly born. Its pink skin was still wet with blood, and behind it on the floor stretched a red trail, like that of a snail. Its eyes blinked rhythmically at even intervals as it flopped forward, staring at nothing. Its mouth continued its hideous cackling.

  McFarland looked around at the faces of fear and disgust on the staring patrons. He would have expected, under the circumstances, that some woman in the crowd, some compassionate mother-type, would have picked up the baby, feeling sorry for it, and tried to help it. But there was something so decidedly wrong about the infant, something so evil, that he could well understand why most of the people were backing away from the creature, why some were running away. He, too, felt a primal sort of fear at the sight, and he had an instinctive desire to rush over and stomp on the thing, crushing it beneath the heel of his boot as he would a particularly large and repulsive bug.

  There was a loud female scream off to the right, and McFarland looked toward the sound. Another infant, equally small and equally deformed, also laughing, was crawling through the open window at the side of the saloon. Its tiny body was halfway over the windowsill, crooked arms flailing wildly in the air. The window, he knew, overlooked a drainage ditch that ran along the side of the building to the field out back. It was a good twenty feet to the bottom.

  How had the baby gotten up that high?

  McFarland glanced towardChmura . The deputy was staring at the window, his face a blank expression of disbelief. Shock had apparently nullified the effects of alcohol. He turned to look at McFarland.

  "What's happening?" he said.

  The state policeman shook his head. He had no idea. He saw another baby crawling through the door next to the jukebox, following the red blood trail of the first. This one had a huge oversized head. In the front of the bar, near the entrance, several people screamed.

  They were coming in from all sides.

  McFarland looked around. The bartender had taken a sawed-off shotgun from beneath the bar and was holding it in both hands, ready to use it if something happened. He was staring at the fragmenting groups of panicked people in the saloon, confused. McFarland nodded quickly at Chmura, catching his eye, and ran over to the bar, pulling his badge from his front pocket. "State police," he said. He reached for the shotgun.

  "Hold it right there, motherfucker." The bartender lowered the weapon and snaked a finger over the trigger.

  "I'm a policeman," McFarland said in a louder, more authoritarian voice. "Please let me see your weapon. Mine is out in the car."

  The bartender's eyes darted quickly around the saloon and he saw, through a hole in the parting crowd, the first blood-wet infant flopping along the hardwood dance floor. His hold loosened on the shotgun, the weapon drooping, and McFarland wrenched it from his hands.

  The bartender looked up at McFarland. "What is it?" he asked. His voice was quiet, subdued, filled with either terror or awe.

  "I don't know," the policeman said. Holding the shotgun tightly, he started back across the floor towardChmura . Before he had reached the deputy, however, the saloon was rocked by a harsh shock wave. There was a loud metallic crash from the front of the building, and the crowd, as one, stepped slowly, silently, backward. There were no screams this time, no grunts or groans or mutterings of any kind. No one spoke. No one made a sound. There was only the quiet ragged breathing of the terrified patrons and the sickening wet slapping sounds of the strange infants as they flopped forward on the floor.

  Then McFarland saw it.

  A charred and blackened figure, wearing what looked like the tattered remnants of a priest's collar and uniform, stood at the front of the saloon, gazing at the crowd with unnaturally white eyes. The skin on its face was burnt horribly, peeling off in large flakes. Its hands and fingers were twisted almost into claws. Behind the figure, a large hole had been torn through the wall next to the door.

  McFarland sidled up to the deputy, swallowing hard. "What is it?" he whispered.

  Chmurashook his head.

  "Sinners," the black figure said, then chuckled. Its voice was grating, inhuman.

  Chmuragasped. "Selway," he said. "Father Selway ."

  McFarland could hear the whisper traveling through the crowd as others recognized the figure.

  "Ask and you shall receive," the thing said, its voice mocking. It smiled, revealing crooked blackened teeth. "I have come to set you free." Its grating voice chanted something in an alien tongue, and it pointed into the crowd with one charred finger. Through the hole in the wall, more infants came, fifteen or twenty of them moving slowly forward en masse. There was the sound of workmanlike scratching from atop the roof.

  Chmuralooked around crazily. "It's not human," he said. He grabbed the shotgun from McFarland's hands and pointed it toward the figure's head. He pulled the trigger. There was a deafening roar and then . . .nothing.

  The slug neither
tore the figure apart nor passed cleanly through it.

  Instead, the blackened head seemed to accept the slug and absorb it.

  The head did not even move backward from the impact.

  Chmurafired again. Nothing happened. And again. Nothing. The figure smiled.

  McFarland grabbed the shotgun from the deputy.

  "You've been bad, Carl," the thing said. "You have been straying from the path." It moved forward, the crowd parting in front of it as people scurried out of its way. McFarland found himself inching away from the deputy. The figure stopped directly beforeChmura . "Bad Carl."

  The deputy did not even try to move away. He remained rooted to the spot, apparently in shock, and he did not flinch as the creature reached out and grabbed his arm, ripping it from its socket. It held the arm high, blood dripping onto the floor, and grinned.

  StillChmura did not move. He remained standing, blood flowing freely from the open socket, and stared up at his severed limb.

  The noises on the roof grew louder.

  McFarland could take no more of this. He raised the shotgun high and shoved it hard into the figure's blackened face, pulling the trigger.

  The end of the shotgun sank easily and deeply into the burned head, but the creature did not seem to notice. No slug emerged from the back of the skull.

  The thing turned to appraise McFarland, jerking the weapon from his hands and tossing it aside. It smiled at him.

  There was the sound of splitting wood, and McFarland saw out of the corner of his eye tiny malformed infants dropping from the roof onto bare heads and cowboy hats. These were not slow and plodding like their brethren flopping along the ground. They moved quickly, surely, with purpose. One landed on a burly man nearby and started digging in, small arms and small mouth working in tandem as it ripped apart the flesh on the man's head, the man trying in vain to pull it off him.

  The Colt was filled with wild screaming as more fell from the roof and began attacking.

  "I hope you said your prayers before going to sleep last night," the burnt figure said in its grating voice. It laughed.

  McFarland struggled as a strong hand gripped his neck. He could smell the fried flesh.

  Denise! he thought. / should have called Denise!

  And then Father Selway pulled his head from his body.

  Brother Elias sat alone in the well-lit conference room of the sheriff's office, thinking back upon the time when he was not known as Brother Elias. He had had darker hair in those days. And shabbier clothes, in keeping with the times. Then, he had called himself Father Josiah. Before that, it had beenIktap-Wa . And, before that, WikiupAsazi.

  Names changed, but people remained the same.

  Evil remained the same.

  He stared down at the black-bound Bible on the table in front of him and smiled slightly. He liked Christianity. It was a simple religion, with few standardized ceremonies, and it was easier to incorporate into the ritual than most. And, unlike some of the more holistic Eastern religions, Christianity understood that there was a clear dichotomy between good and evil.

  Even if it didn't understand the true nature of evil.

  Brother Elias maintained the placid smile on his face and stared benignly at the wall, aware that he was being observed through the small window of safety glass embedded in the steel door. One of the sheriff's deputies came to check on him every few hours, keeping tabs on what he was doing. As always, the man stared through the window for a moment then quickly disappeared.

  Brother Elias knew what was happening in the town. He knew that attacks were being made at various weak points. He knew that the evil was growing quickly now, that it was making firm inroads. He had seen it all before. In other towns, other times.

  In Randall.

  Brother Elias touched the small gold crucifix that served as his tie clip. He could not afford a debacle like the last Randall excursion.

  That time, four of the six men involved had been killed. The evil had been contained, its power effectively drained for the next century and a half, but they had come perilously close to failure. Only he and Ezra Weldon had come down from the Rim alive.

  He was afraid the same thing would happen this time.

  Or something worse.

  It might be too late already, he knew. He should have gotten to Randall much earlier. Things weregeting out of hand. But neither he nor Andrews nor the sheriff nor Gordon would have been ready. He was not sure they were ready now. The chance that they would succeed in their mission was slim.

  But he could not voice his fears. He could not show his lack of faith.

  He had to be strong for all of them. He had to provide the courage they did not possess themselves.

  If the ritual was done correctly, if everything went according to plan, there would be no mishaps, there would be no sacrifices. But nothing ever went perfectly. There were always variables. There were always changes to be made according to circumstances.

  There were always deaths.

  The narrow dirt road wound through the forest, tall pines lining the rutted trail like silent sentinels, black and forbidding against the moonless sky. Gordon walked forward, his eyes trained ahead, tripping periodically in shallow shadowed holes he could not see, stubbing his bare toes on rocks he could not quite make out. Before him, the trees seemed to be growing closer to the road, edging deliberately in on the dirt path, and it appeared as though eventually the road would dwindle away entirely.

  Gordon continued walking. He did not know what lay ahead of him, but he felt an increasing sense of menace, a growing paranoia, the deeper he penetrated into the woods. He wanted to turn back, but something inside him made him press on. On the sides of the road, between the trees, he could hear sinister whispering noises and what sounded like low chuckling. He increased his pace.

  Ahead, something large and black lurched out from behind a tree and stood directly in the middle of the road, blocking his way. The night was dark, but the figure was darker, and it loomed before him, standing completely still, not moving. Its very lack of movement seemed threatening, and Gordon forced himself to stop. He nervously coughed. "Who are you?" he asked.

  The figure did not speak.

  "What are you?"

  Gordon was aware that the figure moved, but he could see no movement and it scared the hell out of him. He turned to run away, and ... he was standing in the middle of Old Mesa Road, staring around him at the wreckage of Randall. In front of him, the Valley National Bank building was demolished, large chunks of concrete and metal protruding from a pile of charred ash. Two people, dressed in torn rags and leaning on one another for support, were staggering away from the smoldering hulk of what had once been the Circle K store. Further up the road, people were running as fast as they could away from him, away from the center of town. Above everything, high on the Rim, an enormous black storm cloud grew ominously, slowly shaping itself into the form of a gigantic clawed hand.

  Something bumped against his leg, and Gordon looked down. Something that looked like a large rat--a rat as big as a small dog--was crouched on the asphalt in front of him, grinning up in malevolent glee. Before he could react, before he could kick out at the animal or even scream, the creature had leapt up and attached itself to his face, clawing wildly, its carnivorous teeth biting with relish into the soft flesh of his cheeks. He could feel the blood gush warmly out of his face as the skin was ripped apart. Trying to pull the creature from his face, he fell backwards and .. . landed with a soft thud on a pile of wet garbage. Stunned, it took him a moment to get his bearings. When he realized where he was, he sat up and looked around. It was morning, and the sunlight glinted brightly off strips of chrome and shards of steel in the pile of metal next to him. On the other side of him, the pile of wood and combustibles was burning, and the air around the fire shimmered in liquid waves of heat. Gordon stared at the burning pile, transfixed. Though he did not want to, he could see within the fire strange shifting shapes. Figures. Faces. The figures were almo
st but not quite human, and the faces were known to him but not immediately recognizable. Though he tried to concentrate on one face at a time, he could not. They changed too rapidly for him to get a fix on them.

  Out of the bottom of the burning pile crawled a charred, smoldering baby. The infant was blackened almost beyond recognition, but Gordon could see that even if it had not been burned, the baby would have been horribly deformed. Its bones were heavy and oddly formed, and as it crawled out from under the fire, pulling itself over stray pieces of garbage, it smiled, revealing unnaturally long and crooked teeth that stood out in white relief against its scorched skin.

  The baby looked up at Gordon "Daddy," it said.

  Without thinking, Gordon jumped to his feet and grabbed a long broken stick from the pile on which he was standing. He shoved the pointed end of the stick with all his might into the center of the infant's back. He could feel the point piercing the tiny body. The baby emitted one long loud shriek of sudden pain, jerked once and was still.

  Gordon looked up and saw in the fire the wavering figure of Marina. Her face was unclear and indistinct, but it seemed to him that she was crying.

  He glanced around and saw, to his surprise, a ring of people surrounding the fire. Some of them were holding long sticks similar to his own. Many were not. He recognized among the faces Father Andrews and the sheriff. Standing next to the sheriff, looking up at him with something like admiration, was a young teenage boy with dirty clothes and greasy unkempt hair.

  The boy from his previous dream.

  He stared at the youngster and the boy smiled at him, nodding in recognition.

  Gordon walked across the gravel toward the boy and the sheriff and grabbed both of their hands. Across from him, he could see the face of Char Clifton, and, next to Clifton, Elsie Cavanaugh from the drugstore.

  Something large rose up from the fire .. . and Gordon was standing before the black metal smelter of the sawmill. He was alone. Around him, the wind whistled and howled, driving the dried leaves on the ground into a frenzy. The door to the smelter slowly opened.