by Sam Witt
“Our Father,” he began, but pain blossomed in his gut and sliced his words off clean as a razor’s swipe. The preacher leaned on the altar, and the old wood groaned under his weight. His boys gathered around him to lend their strength, but Walker knew it wasn’t enough. He could feel her coming.
The door opened, silent and slow, revealing a chunk of blackness that flowed up the church’s central aisle like an unrolling carpet.
She floated into the sanctuary, stumps sizzling with black lightning that chewed chunks from the floor as she approached the altar. The wind that blew in around her was colder than winter’s breath, the kiss of the void. “Hello, preacher.”
Walker raised his eyes to the girl and struggled to catch his breath. The closer she got, the deeper the pain gnawed into his guts. The blood wasn’t leaking from the sacrificial wound now, it was running in streams as thick as his fat thumb. “There is no place for you here,” he grunted through the pain.
“What does it feel like?” She grinned as she floated closer, filling the air with the scent of ozone and scorched wood. “To be cut off from your God? I can’t even ‘magine how that must hurt.”
Walker tried to ignore the girl. He knew the words to the prayer. A simple consecration ritual and some spilled blood would be all that it would take to reclaim this place for his God. His blood was already smeared across the altar and splattering onto the floor all around him, he just had to say the words.
But the words wouldn’t come. Whenever he tried to speak pain crawled deeper into his belly. Blood stung the back of his throat, and every breath felt like it might be his last. He was losing this fight before it even started.
“My God is with me, always.” But Walker no longer believed that. There was an emptiness in him, a hollowness that echoed the sacrificial wound he’d carved into his fat. The Red Oak was somewhere, but it wasn’t within Walker. Not anymore. He’d failed, and it had withdrawn from him until he could prove he was worthy of its gifts. Walker hoped he’d live long enough to earn his way back into the good graces of his God.
The boys shifted nervously around Walker. They drew back from the approaching girl and raised their voices in wordless praise. They sang with the righteousness of the innocent, but the girl did not flinch in the face of their faith.
She reached out with her wreath of hands and a dozen fingers crooked in different directions. One of the boys cried out and stumbled past the altar, head bowed. He knelt before the monstrous girl, muscles trembling in protest, brown eyes welling with terrified tears. “My god enjoys a different song,” she purred.
The boy’s lovely voice rose to fill the church, a pure, high tone that silenced the others. It rose high, higher still, and yet higher, before it broke. His voice shattered into a thousand tortured notes, became the discordant jangle of breaking glass and screeching bats.
Walker opened his mouth to say the prayer, but the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t take his eyes off the boy, who was changing, withering.
The boy’s hair came loose and floated into the air, borne aloft by his terrified, splintered song. His bald scalp shriveled against his skull, revealing a swollen, pulsing network of veins that writhed like blue worms.
Walker staggered from behind the altar, pounding his hands against his thighs, trying to force the words to come. “Father, hear me,” he began.
The boy’s head turned, craning to the left until his spine crackled like cellophane and his body was forced to follow. He stared up at Walker with an old man’s face atop a throttled, wrinkled neck.
The little boy’s eyes rolled back until they showed only white, then rolled farther still until they were blank, black marbles that squirmed with life of their own.
“Father,” Walker struggled to find his strength. Years of faith abandoned him in the face of madness. He wasn’t strong enough to save his boy. His weakness tortured him.
The boy’s left eye unfolded, stretching out to reveal a bat’s membranous wing, the leathery limb dripping with blood as it thrust itself from the boy’s head.
“Where’s your God now?” The monstrous girl asked as she floated to Walker. She reached out and cradled the preacher’s head in her many hands as he watched bats tear their way out of the boy’s eyes. Through it all, the child kept singing his strange, damned song. “Has he fled?”
She squeezed Walker’s head in her hands, pressing on it from all sides. “Or was he never here at all?”
She laughed and slammed Walker’s head down onto the altar. His forehead split open and added more of his rich, red blood to the rusty stain left by the half-made girl. “Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, a daddy got very, very mad with his children. So he drowned them all.”
“Not all,” Walker gasped. “Not the righteous.”
Bats tore the boy’s head apart. His neck ended in a tattered flower of mangled flesh, from which bats crawled by the dozens. They flicked blood from their wings and took flight, befouling the church with their cries and drizzling shit.
“He did let one old man and his family live. What fun is it to be a god if there’s no one to see it?”
The girl floated higher, and the bats swarmed around her, flying in erratic orbits around her body, jagged teeth flashing in the candlelight.
“You know this story. They sailed for forty days and forty nights, and then found themselves a little patch of land to call their own.”
“Do not mock the Lord and his works.”
The girl tutted at Walker and waggled her many fingers in his direction. “You don’t know the whole story. While your hero floated on the endless ocean, waitin’ for his God to take mercy on his soul, things woke in the depths beneath him.”
“And even when the waters receded and carried the great leviathans away beyond your world, they waited and watched and lusted. Your God kept them at bay, kept you all to himself.”
Walker struggled to stand, leaning against the altar. The boys gathered close to him, pressing him tight against the old wood, supporting him.
“But all things pass, even gods. They grow old and weak. They kill their children to prove their power. But, in the end …”
The girl released Walker and raised her hands high. She twirled in the air, hair whipping around her head, bats swarming around her like bees to their queen. “In the end, here we fuckin’ are, and where’s your God now?”
CHAPTER 68
A MASSIVE TALON swooped toward Joe, looping over the dais and crashing down at his face.
He threw himself to the side, leaping clear of the attack. The claw dug into the cave’s floor, throwing up chunks of limestone that pelted Joe’s backpack like a volley of fastballs.
The other leg tore its way into the world, and Joe only just avoided its raking attack by throwing himself prone. He slid a few yards across the floor and came to rest behind one of the glowing stone pillars. He ducked behind it and slung the shotgun back onto his shoulder, drew one of his pistols. A knot of cultists took one look at Joe and ran the other way with their tails between their legs.
The thing was weakened and confused by Elsa’s hold on it. Despite its overwhelming presence, the new boss had made a terrible mistake binding itself to that particular little girl. She wasn’t the hapless anchor it was looking for, but a determined fighter who was going to make it pay for what it had done to her and her family.
One of the new boss’s freakish claws hovered over Elsa, frozen with indecision. Joe could see its dilemma. The girl was weakening it, but if it killed her its connection to this world would be severed. Its confusion filled him with hope.
Joe wasn’t sure he could kill it with just bullets. It was too big, a Godzilla-sized bat with a face bearded by whipping tentacles and a body that swarmed like a school of darting fishes, for even Joe’s ensorcelled guns to put a final end to it.
But he could give Elsa time to work on it and, between the two of them, maybe they could finish this fight. Maybe.
The grotesque head turned away as if it
could feel Joe’s thoughts, bulging eye sweeping from side to side as it tried to find him. Its breath washed across the cavern, a hot mist that stank of burning copper and sun-baked carcasses. Joe gagged against the stench and swung one of the pistols out around the stone column. He squeezed the trigger three times and each shot found its way into the thing’s eye.
It shook its head, spewing saliva and boiling tears in all directions. Joe could feel its pain, feel the power it had given him ebb for one moment before surging back. It felt pain, but it was still strong. He could sense it healing, like an itch on the top of his brain. He’d have to do a lot of damage, very fast, if he wanted to kill it before it could put itself back together.
Joe raised the pistol again, took a bead on the beast’s throat, and squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell on air. He cursed and holstered the empty pistol, reaching for its brother as he hustled to new cover ahead of the raging god at his back.
The alien god’s screams of unholy rage burrowed into Joe’s skull. The new boss sent a withering ball of hate down the connection between the two of them.
The pain was too much. It knocked his legs out from under him before he could reach another stalactite, and he landed hard on his knees, left hand clamped to his forehead.
One of the cultists lunged from the shadows and wrapped scabbed arms around Joe’s shoulders. The Night Marshal struggled against this new attack, but he was dizzy, confused. He never saw the new boss moving in for the kill.
It lunged and whipped the leading edge of its wing at Joe’s head. A thick spike hooked the skin just above Joe’s ear, tearing his scalp open in a wide swath. His legs went wobbly, and he spun to the left, arms windmilling.
Joe hit the ground hard, one knee banging off the stone floor before he toppled onto his shoulder and his head smacked the stone. The world swam around him, a dizzy spiral that receded as his eyes fluttered and everything started to turn black.
CHAPTER 69
ZEKE HIT THE water so hard his skin split across his shoulders. A curtain of blood flowed from the wound like yards of unspooled cloth, drifting up around him as his body sank. The water was dark and cool; it embraced Zeke, and he knew his pain was almost at an end. He wished he could have done more, that he could have helped Joe when the boy needed it most.
Ah, well, he thought, regrets are for the living.
He saw the light coming for him. It fell from the sky like a star, a golden lance that warmed his face long before it reached him. He recognized it, felt the pure love of the God he’d never really understood. This God was dark and vengeful, but his wrath was reserved for the faithless and evil. Zeke had expected reproach at his failure, but he felt only acceptance and a humbling love.
A smile cracked across his lips, and Zeke let his eyes close. He was going home soon, and that was a great comfort despite the way he’d let Joe down.
“Not yet,” the girl’s voice cracked in Zeke’s head like a shattering bell. Her shredded arms hooked around him and hauled him up and out of the water with inhuman strength. They floated there in an ungainly embrace, and she sneered at Zeke. “We’re not done playing.”
She crushed Zeke to her, holding him so his head hung over her shoulder like a baby’s. His ribs cracked, and he tasted blood. But the light was still coming, falling from the sky toward the half-made girl’s unsuspecting laugh.
Zeke coughed against the constricting grasp. He turned his head and whispered to the girl.
She shrieked and held him at arm’s length, eyes burning holes in him. “What did you say?”
“You lose,” Zeke chuckled through a mouthful of his own blood.
The light touched Zeke at last, surrounding his body in a corona of celestial fire. Dawn arrived with a thunderclap that shook the trees and echoed across the spring’s valley. The half-made girl tumbled back from the light, hair alight, skin scorched bright red by the heat.
Blood spilled from Zeke’s wounded body, glowing with a pure, golden light. The drops of light sizzled where they hit the spring, and waves whipped the surface into a silver froth. The half-made girl screamed overhead as her taint was cleansed from the spring.
She came apart, bones burning white hot and sizzling away into sulfurous steam as her flesh peeled off in long strips that floated toward the rising sun before charring black and disintegrating into ash.
Zeke closed his eyes and fell, the light leaving his body as he landed in the center of the spring.
The half-made girl’s screams tapered away to silence. The wind carried her away, scattering her remains far and wide, leaving nothing to mark her passing.
CHAPTER 70
CULTISTS LIFTED JOE from where he’d fallen. They hoisted him into the air and draped his arms and legs over their shoulders so he hung face down. The floor scrolled beneath the Night Marshal, red drops of his blood staining the stone. He wanted to hate them for what they’d done, what they were going to do, but it wasn’t in him anymore. Everyone had picked a side, and all they had left was to tally up the score and celebrate the win.
He just wished it wasn’t Alma Pryor leading the procession, a reminder of what his weakness had cost him. Her, he found he could still hate.
They carried Joe back to the dais and put him down before Elsa. They forced him to kneel under the baleful eye of their god, who towered over the proceedings. The holes Joe had punched through its infernal hide were gone, sealed up by whatever dark power had spawned the thing. Its dangling tentacles curled with anticipation and Joe could feel its amusement in his head.
“Hold him him him,” its voice thundered and the cultists yanked Joe’s arms out. They lowered him to the ground, but held his arms straight back from his shoulders, pulling until he could feel tendons and ligaments creaking. Alma smirked at him, wicked eyes wet with joy as she presented her foe to the god she served.
It lowered its head, craning it down on a winding, serpentine neck until the drooping curtain of its wriggling tentacles brushed against his face. Joe could smell the eons of chaos and decay rolling out of whatever passed for the dark god’s guts. This close to it, he could see the flesh wasn’t solid, but a rotting lacework, layers of threads and holes, all overlapped and wound together like a million cobwebs. Through the gaps, Joe could hear the whisper of eternity, the voices of dead millennia urging him to submit, to bow down before the inevitable and accept his fate.
“I I I offered you you you this world,” the words rumbled out through the air and battered against Joe’s ears. “And yet still you you you fight. Now, I I I will rip my gifts from your your your flesh.”
Joe looked up into the madness of the glowering three-lobed eye. He could feel its hate, its growing power.
He could feel something else, as well, far back in his skull. The Long Man’s presence grew stronger, a sudden flare accompanied by a high keening sound that trailed off like rolling thunder.
The dark god threw back its head and roared, a haunting cry of pain and loss. Burning gashes appeared across its body, the tenuous threads of its spectral body shredding away to reveal a primal, chaotic energy that leaked from it like boiling blood.
Joe knew what it meant. One of the half-made girls was dead, and the new god’s hold on Pitchfork was weakened.
There was still a chance.
“No,” the eldritch entity howled, “there is no hope for you you you. I will devour you you you and yours yours yours. I I I will consume your your your lives and dreams. I I I will shit out all that was you you you.”
Its head streaked toward Joe, a massive blur of pink flesh and ivory teeth, opened wide to consume him in one gulping bite.
Alma Pryor shrieked and tried to leap clear, nimble for an old woman, but not nimble enough. The side of her god’s head clipped the cult leader on the hip and shoulder, sent her tumbling back into the cavern’s wall. She hit the stone with a crackling thud and slid to the floor, eyes rolled back to show their milky whites.
Joe curled one of his arms, dragging a trio of cultists off thei
r feet. The new boss wanted its strength back, but Joe wasn’t letting it go. He threw the idiots in one direction and himself in the other.
The fangs tore through the cultists, splitting two of them open like soggy piñatas and flinging the other one across the cavern in a bloody pinwheel of arms and legs.
He slipped loose of the others, who stood, awestruck, as their god raged and threw itself among them. Joe ran, and the cultists died, their bodies splattered across the stone as the new boss crashed through them in pursuit of its quarry.
The cultists screamed before the wrath of their god, sprinting down shadowed tunnels and dropping into web-covered holes, fleeing from a god who slaughtered them in its blind rage.
Joe dodged around stalagmites and doubled back through the remnants of the cultists, splashed through puddles of blood and skidded over spilled brains and loose guts as he tried to stay out of the gargantuan bat’s path.
The cultists hadn’t taken his pistols. Joe reckoned the weapons were terrifying things to those who followed the Left-Hand Path, emblazoned as they were with enough runes and sigils to scare off all but the most powerful haint. One of them even had bullets left in it.
He skidded to a halt behind one of the snake pillars and looked down at the cylinder. Five bullets left.
The bat head crashed into the ground nearby, the impact bounced Joe’s feet off the stone and nearly set him on his ass.
Joe stepped back and pumped three bullets into the bloody head, just in front of a scalloped ear.
The silver flame from the pistol was brighter now, and the bullets hit like falling stars. They left craters the size of Joe’s fist on entry and tore even bigger holes through its jaw where they exited.
Better yet, the wounds didn’t heal at once. Joe could see down into the holes he’d made to a pulsing pink brain smeared with steaming, red-black blood.