He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a scrap of paper. He held it In front of Maura's face for what seemed like forever before she took it.
“This has a direct line to me on it. Don't throw it away. Before long you will witness things that will convince you of the boy's true nature. When you see them, you will call me immediately. I'll be waiting. Until then.”
He walked away, vanishing into the darkness. Maura sat there in the empty parking lot for a long time, the car door hanging open, her hands shaking.
It's not fair, she thought, driving away from the church, knowing she would never return. He's taken it away. Why did he say those things to me? Scare me like that? She couldn't get the image of him leering at her with that deranged look in his eyes out of her mind. That was the only place for me and he chased me away. He said Darion was a heathen. He called Przemek a demon from Hell. He's gone insane.
But had he?
She picked up the paper he had given her from the passenger seat and crumpled it up. She rolled down the window.
Darion was a heathen. Przemek had told her himself, he worshiped gods, not one but several. Gods.
She was driving fast and her hair whipped around her head in the wind coming in from the open window.
He said Przemek was corrupt. Unholy. A nest for the serpent. But he's just a boy. Stealing a crucifix and wetting the bed don't make you evil.
She still held the paper in her hand.
Then why are you so afraid of him. Why did you sleep with the door locked? What is it about the boy that terrifies you so?
She smoothed the paper out as best she could and put it in her purse.
The house was dark when she entered. She climbed the stairs, turned down the hallway and passed Przemek's room on the way to her own. There was light coming from under his door. It was bright in contrast to the darkness in the rest of the house. The light seemed to fade and change shape; it flickered like candlelight. Why would he be burning candles? She wondered. And how many was he using to make his room that bright?
She knocked softly on his door. There was no answer.
She waited a few moments longer before calling his name. Still there was no answer. She knocked again, louder this time. The light inside his room flared and it crept out from under the door in long, bright fingers, pushing back the darkness.
Fire! His room's on fire!
But there was no smoke. She could feel no heat behind the door. She reached out and touched the knob, it was cool. She turned it slowly, just wanting to open the door a crack to peek in.
What she saw confused her at first. By the time she realized what was happening, she was in such a state of shock, she couldn't even scream.
The light was coming from a small candle burning on his bed. It blazed with an impossible light, far brighter than the candle, or even a torch several times larger, should ever be able to burn. Beyond the light was a darkness so complete she couldn't make out the opposite wall. Before the candle sat an idol. It was small, and appeared to be made of wood. The idol depicted a hideous creature with a vaguely simian face set into the center of a body that was a gross, evolution-defying amalgam of mammalian and insect-like features.
Przemek lay on the floor, naked and face-up, covered in sweat. His body twisted and his spine arched severely, pushing his abdomen into the air.
At first she thought he was looking at her, he was lying just before the door, and with his back bent and his head on the floor, he should have been able to see her. She looked into his eyes and they were pupil-less and blind, rolled back so only the whites shown. His body shook as if he were having a seizure, and his hands clinched into fists, his toes curled.
And then something seemed to be pushing out from inside of him. It happened from within his stomach first, the flesh rose out in a severe peak, like someone inside a tent trying to hold it up as it collapsed around them. And then another spike of flesh pushed up from his chest. And then another, and another. His entire body was covered in sharp mounds, rising from his flesh. They moved and some curled around one another and twisted together. The peaks rose and fell in waves that ran the length of his body, and all around him the walls swelled and pulsed, the floor came up in huge blisters and settled back down again.
Maura backed out of the room and shut the door quietly. She walked to her room calmly, despite her heart slamming against her ribcage with the force of a blacksmith's hammer. She shut the door behind her and locked it before sliding down to sit with her knees pulled up around her chest. She was shaking and crying, struggling to breathe.
She felt like her brain was going to explode out the back of her head as she desperately tried to make sense of what she had seen. She couldn't shake the images from her mind.
The candle on his bed.
So bright. It burned like a house fire.
The idol.
Twisted and horrible. That face, peering out of that chimera body. It was smiling at me.
Przemek, writhing on the floor.
Those peaks that moved in waves, reaching out from his body. What was that? Why was this happening?
But she was beginning to understand, even if she didn't want to admit it to herself. She knew. Pastor Hodges had been right all along. The serpent dwelt within the boy. She couldn't doubt it any longer. After all, didn't she just see him praying to it?
Maura picked up the phone.
Pastor Hodge's Mazda flew through the night. It snaked through the turns in the dark hills and when it crested the hilltops it seemed to leave the ground. His grip was vice-like on the wheel and he held the accelerator down as far as he dared. His tongue came out of his mouth to wipe across his dry lips, leaving behind a sticky resin of scum.
He took one hand off the wheel to reach into the passenger seat. There was a half-empty pill bottle containing twenty-milligram tablets of Adderall. He grabbed the bottle, popped the top off with his thumb, and shook out six or seven of the round, tan pills. He chewed them and swallowed with difficulty. It wasn't the bitter taste of the pills that made them go down so hard, but the act of swallowing anything solid was, itself, beginning to be foreign to him. He had been without food for days and without sleep for over a week. Sleep was the adversary; it was for the docile. Sleep set the world right each day and tricked the mind into obstructing the recognition of demons. A mere four days without sleep, and he could identify the shadowy presence lurking behind the faces of the infected. A few days after that and he could see the spectral trails they left behind, could follow them by seeing where they had been. But he had to be careful. They didn't know about his unusual talent. And if they found out, they wouldn't kill him. His punishment would be far worse. He would be made to serve. His body would be host to legions of the serpent's minions and they would mock him for eternity.
He wished he could have made Maura understand these things sooner. But she had to see for herself. He could tell she had witnessed demonic acts. It would be impossible not to, living so close to one of the serpent's own. Their phone call had been brief, only five words, but he knew she understood now.
“You were right. Please come.”
He just prayed he had the strength to do what needed to be done; to do battle with the demon. He knew if his faith was strong, the Lord would lead him to victory, and he would watch the demon drown.
Maura was still in her room, sitting on the floor and clutching the phone, when she heard pastor Hodges kick in the kitchen door.
She ran downstairs and found him standing in the kitchen. He looked like a madman, with his eyes forced open wide, covered in sweat. She noticed that he couldn't stop licking his lips and that his clothes were hanging off his body, they were easily a size too large for him. Behind him, the door was swinging on its hinges, splintered around the knob where he had forced himself in. She found herself oddly concerned about the door. It seemed rude, somehow, even though she had brought him over in an emergency she didn't think it necessitated the destruction of her proper
ty.
She could mention it later, though. When he wasn't so obviously worked up.
He was standing in the kitchen, breathing deeply, exhaling audibly, clenching and unclenching his fists, looking like a man preparing to leap off a high cliff into unknown depths.
“He's upstairs,” said Maura, starting to wonder if she had made a mistake.
“Show me,” he said, in a hoarse rasp.
“What are you going to do?”
“I will exercise the demon. I will pull him from the boy and destroy it.”
“Will he be safe?” She asked.
“I think you already know the answer to that.”
“Please, just say yes. Tell me he'll be okay,” she begged.
“I can't tell you that. There is an almost certainty that the boy will be harmed. He may not survive the ordeal.”
Maura was fighting back tears now. “Is there any other way?”
“No. There is only the Lord's way. His is the only way. You must take me to the boy now.”
Maura led him up the flight of stairs in a slow trudge. The climb was difficult, like her body was actively resisting the insanity of the situation.
Halfway up, Maura felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to face the pastor's rabid gaze.
“This is close enough. I want you to point out his room to me and then go run a bath in the upstairs tub. Can you do that? And make sure the water is cold, as cold as you can make it.”
She pointed to his closed bedroom door uncertainly, and he passed her on the stairs and continued upward. He walked to Przemek's door and waited outside, turning to Maura and whispering, "The bath! Go and run the bath. Have it ready by the time we get in there.”
Maura climbed the rest of the stairs and opened the door two doors down from Przemek's. She put the stopper in the drain and turned the cold faucet handle and sat on the edge of the tub while the water roared behind her. What does he want with the tub? She was too afraid to ask when he told her. I guess I'll find out soon enough.
As the bathtub filled, she heard a commotion from the hallway.
Pastor Reynard burst in, holding the frightened boy in his arms. Przemek screamed and flailed in his grasp, but it was useless, the older man had a grip that squeezed him like a vice.
“Maura,” he cried, “Auntie, whatever you're thinking of doing, it's a mistake. Please!”
Hodges dropped the boy on his feet and shoved him against the sink. Przemek's head cracked against the basin and he fell to the floor, a steady flow of blood beginning to soak into his hair.
“Halt thy deceitful tongue, demon.” The pastor screamed. “You will evoke no sympathy from this good woman, she is wise to your cunning.”
Maura looked down at the child, bleeding and crying softly on the floor. She looked up to Pastor Reynard. “I thought you said you weren't going to hurt him!”
“I never said that. I told you that the boy would more than likely be injured, and in truth, I would go so far as to kill this child if that meant the demon inside of him would be scourged from the Earth, though I hope it will not come to that. But that is entirely up to the demon. We've caught him off guard; we have the advantage, and now the body must be purified, do you understand?”
“I don't understand any of this,” Maura sobbed.
“You will.” He grabbed the boy and pulled him up. “Stand, demon!”
Przemek blinked, he looked around, dazed, through the mask of blood glistening on his face. Hodges walked him to the edge of the tub and the boy's eyes widened in fear as he looked down into the bath.
Hodges spoke excitedly, “There, do you see it? The look in his eyes, the revulsion, the fear? It is the demon dwelling within him that fears the purity of God!”
Przemek's mouth fell open and he moaned incoherently.
“Look down into the water, demon. Witness the pool of your undoing!” And he dangled the boy over the water. A drop of blood fell from Przemek's head and turned black the instant it touched the water, and it sank to the bottom.
The pastor's face was a haze of insanity now and he bellowed these words: “In the name of God, Lord of hosts, I summon his righteousness to make this body clean! This child, I baptize unto the one true father. Now, drown, demon!”
Przemek snapped out of his concussed daze long enough for his eyes to fall upon Maura, and he reached out to her, pleading.
But it was too late.
Reynard Hodges flung the boy into the bathwater and he came down with a splash, struggling as the mad pastor held him under.
Maura watched as he thrashed, his hands came up out of the water to feebly grab onto the pastor's wrists. Dear God, he's going to drown him, Maura thought.
And just then, smoke began to rise off of the water. The bathwater turned black and impenetrable, like a lake filling with hot, volcanic ash.
A look of surprise mixed with abject terror came to the pastor, but still he held the boy under the murky water, even as it seemed to boil and the rising black smoke began to thicken in the air around them.
And then it was over.
The water calmed, though it still remained as black as ink. The pastor knelt beside the tub, panting, exhausted.
“It is finished, I believe,” said Hodges, between rasping breaths. And he slowly withdrew his arms from the bathwater.
“But what about Przemek?” Maura cried. “He's at the bottom of the tub. We have to get him out.”
But Reynard Hodges heard none of this. And Maura saw why. He was holding his hands up to his face and she could see the whites of his eyes, widening in horror from between his outstretched fingers.
His hands and arms up to the elbows, where they had been immersed in the water, had turned into a mottled tableau of putrescence. His skin dangled from his arms and fingers, the color of rot; dull yellow mixed with black and purple. Patches of skin fell away in sodden clumps and landed in an audible and sickening splatter on the floor.
His scream was deafening in the tiny room and he began to back away, out the door. He came to the landing and climbed down onto the stairs. His knee buckled on the first step and he fell down the length of the steps, his body crashing end-over-end. He lay at the bottom in a broken heap, struggling to suck the wind back into his lungs. He rose slowly, and painfully. He left the house, although Maura didn't see him. All that remained of his unfortunate presence was the broken door and a smear of foul skin along the handrail from when he tried to regain balance tumbling down the stairs.
He would be found dead, days later in his darkened house, sheets of aluminum foil duct-taped to the windows, abstract patters of dead flesh and blood dried to the walls, his crumpled body lying in a pool of blood beside the still-running circular saw, and his crudely amputated arms, mysteriously, in a state of decomposition far more advanced than the rest of his body.
His body was like lead. Maura's arms disappeared beneath the blackened water and she strained to draw the boy to the surface. She wondered how much time had passed; how long a person can go without oxygen. She prayed it wasn't too late.
She finally pulled him up from the bath and dragged him over the edge of the tub. His dripping body lay motionless on the bathroom floor. He wasn't breathing.
She put her mouth over his and breathed into him. She felt the swell of his body as his lungs filled with air. She put an ear to his chest, listening for a heartbeat. She pressed down on him with the flat of her palms, over and over, the way that she had seen in movies. She listened for a heartbeat again.
There was nothing.
Maura sat down on the floor with her back against the wall. She pulled the dead boy to her and ran her fingers through his wet hair. She looked down into his face, it was bloodless and tinged with dark blue, grim and placid.
And in an instant his eyes came wide open and he was choking.
Maura helped the boy turn over and held him as he retched up the vile blackness he had been submerged in. It spilled out of him and onto the bathroom floor in what seemed liked gallo
ns before he was through.
When he was finished, and he could breathe again, Maura pulled him to her and embraced him.
“I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, baby. I should have never brought him here. I should never have let him touch you.”
Przemek was shaking and Maura held him tighter, clutched him to her breast. He was weeping and he tried to push her away.
“Shhhhh,” she tried to comfort him. “It's alright now. Everything's going to be alright.”
“No,” he said between muffled sobs. “It’s not. You should have let me drown. You should have let me die.”
“You mustn't say that. You're alive. Everything's okay now, don't you see? You're going to be okay.”
He looked up at her soberly, “I'm dead. He'll come for me now. To drown would have been mercy.”
“He won't come back. I promise. I won't let him near you. I'll never let him hurt you ever again. He's insane, I see that now. I'm a fool for not seeing it before, but I was afraid. It was wrong of me to be afraid of you. I'm sorry.”
Przemek shook his head. “No, not him, not the holy man. If he's still alive, I don't think he'll be for long. He is cursed now. And so am I.”
“Baby, I don't understand what you're telling me. But you're right, he won't be back, not ever. I'll call the police.”
Maura moved to get up and Przemek stopped her and looked into her eyes, gravely, “He's not coming back here. Someone else is; the one who took my family. He'll come for me, now. He'll come because I've betrayed him.”
“Who,” Maura asked. “Who is coming? Who did you betray?”
“God. I've betrayed god. The ceremony your holy man preformed with the bathwater, it... changed something in me, it claimed me for a god that I am forbidden to worship. I know little of this god, but I know this: He is despised by the ancient pantheon of my gods. Your god is jealous, he claims to be singular, perhaps this is true here, but where I am from I know otherwise.”
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