The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  Mike waited, pensive and ready, the echoes in the passage belying their true distance from him. As soon as he felt certain they’d reached the right side of the door he rounded the frame and raised the gun. He’d judged it almost right; they were still a good fifteen feet back but close enough that if he needed to discharge a round the narrowness of the passage would ensure one of them would take a hit. “If it’s Lucinda you’re going looking for,” he said firmly, “then she is up in the master bedroom under a sheet, dead. Only she isn’t Lucinda anymore, how’s that for fucked up?” All three faces were locked onto him, they wore a look of sheer surprise, to begin with, but as Mike spoke, they twisted in anger and hate.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Seth Horner spat, foam forming on his lips, he balled his fists but let them relax a little when he saw Mike’s finger twitch on the trigger.

  Mike nodded coldly, “Ended the torment of a girl taken over forty years ago,” he answered sweeping the deadly eye of the gun between the three of them, back and forth, back and forth, as if willing one of them to test him. “Where are Henry and Ellie Harrison?” he asked seriously. “Tell me and maybe I won’t shoot you all where you stand.”

  The chubby-faced guy chuckled defiantly and said, "It's too late, the night has begun and there are too few of you to stop it. Kill us if that's what you want but you can't stop it."

  Mike wanted to shoot him, he didn't need the voices in his head to want it, either. This was him and no one was along for the ride. Instead, he strode forward and closed the gap between them, all three started to back off but he was too fast. Reaching his target, he whipped the butt of the gun around and slammed it into his piggy nose. The guy cried out in both pain and surprise, staggered back and fell to the floor as blood gushed down over his chin. "In," Mike said to the other two, gesturing into the room with the shortened muzzle of the gun. "Any more shit and I'll just shoot one of you and to hell with the consequences."

  Piggy nose, now piggy broken nose picked himself up off the floor with the help of Seth Horner and one by one they filed into the cell, further surprise dawning on their faces as they saw June and Tara stood by the grubby mattress. “Is this where you held them?” Mike asked, his voice full of anger. None of the three spoke so Mike slammed the butt of the gun into Seth Horner’s kneecap causing him to drop to the floor. “I said is this where you held them?”

  "You'd best answer," Tara said coldly, the knife looking purposeful in her hand. “If he doesn’t shoot you, I’ll gladly cut your dicks off and make you eat them. If I can find them that is.”

  “The girl,” Seth Horner said, his voice creased with pain. “Just Ellie.”

  “And the boy?” Mike asked.

  “A room down the passage,” the young guy said. “He’s been kept sedated, so he knows nothing about it.”

  “You’re all heart,” Mike scoffed. “Where are they now?”

  Seth Horner, his hands clasping his smashed knee looked to the ceiling, “Up top,” he grimaced.

  “What do you mean, up top?”

  “In the woods,” he replied. “They’re in the woods.”

  “What are they doing in the woods, Seth?”

  “Every becoming starts that way,” he said. “They make them think they’ve escaped, gotten away, but then the village brings them back. It’s the final test.”

  Mike thought of Ellie and Henry up there now, in that storm. Lost in the woods full of false hope that they’d escaped and Ellie likely comforting her brother, telling him it was all okay and he’d soon see his mummy and daddy again, and not be afraid. As he thought about it his anger and disgust threatened to boil over. “And is that where everyone is now? Save for you three, up there enjoying the game?”

  Piggy broken nose guy laughed, it rattled from all the blood in his throat making it sound as sinister as he'd likely intended. "You don't understand," he said.

  “No,” Mike said with disgust. “I understand. I understand that this sect has been taking young girls for hundreds of years, raping and beating them, making them bear children who are then sacrificed so that the mother can become. I understand that you men are no more than sick freaks who choose to live your lives in service to the fucked-up evil that allows it. Now give me your robes, all three of you.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” the younger guy shouted and spat a wad of phlegm at Mike's feet. Mike was too far gone to negotiate, his anger, hate and want to end them too much. Without talking he swung the Beretta at his face, stepped forward and pulled the trigger. At close range, the shot disintegrated the right side of his face, from the eye socket to the back of his head just vaporised in a mist of red that sprayed out over rough cut stone wall behind. The report from the gun was loud, and both June and Tara yelped in surprise as it went off. "Anyone else going to argue?" Mike said, swinging the still smoking barrel between the remaining two men.

  Chapter 52

  Ellie Harrison, with her comatose little brother over her right shoulder and every muscle in her weakened body crying out in protest, cleared the barn. She looked back as lightning scorched the sky with a horizontal fork of white-hot electricity. Now outside knew the building which she’d just left, it was the Horner’s place, and she’d been in their barn, the one screened from view at the bottom of their large garden, the one the forest had seemingly been intent on reclaiming for its own.

  Only a week ago she’d been in this very garden, laughing and joking with both Seth and Lucinda, laughing and chatting with the other villagers, villagers who all along had plans for her and her brother, who in a way had been doing no more than grooming them for this very event.

  Across that darkened sea of a lawn, lights glowed in a few of the windows, denoting where that chocolate box cottage stood, but Ellie had no desire to go there, she wanted to be as far away from it as possible, as far away from the entire village as she could get. Turning her back on both the barn and the cottage she found an opening in the trees, and then using the darkness as cover she slipped silently into the forest.

  The going was hard, visibility literally zero and every step pained her feet as sticks and brambles poked at her bare flesh. To make matters worse Henry seemed to grow heavier with every passing minute until it felt as if she had a fully-grown adult over her shoulder and not a five-year-old child. After a few minutes, and only when she was sure she was deep enough in and away from the house did she collapse to her knees and lay her brother down on the dried leaves of the forest floor.

  “Hen,” she shouted in his ear, whilst shaking her brother’s body. “Come on Hen, please snap out of it!” But he remained comatose, only the tickle of his breath on her cheek when she placed it by his mouth told her he was alive. Lightning strobed, thunder rumbled, and a warm breeze blew through the trees, igniting them in a thousand voices that called to her, “Ellllieeee,” they whispered as they rustled, and suddenly she was transported back to the vision in her dream. “Where are you, Ellliiieeee,” they mocked. “Come back to usss Ellllieee, come back to usss sooo that your brother can becomeee.” Ellie looked at her hands, half expecting to see them filled now with a grizzling infant. They weren't. Her burden to carry through this nightmare wasn't a baby, it was a five-year-old, and she knew that every girl who'd been in the wood as she had, had ended up in that room, ended up hearing the cries of her new-born infant as the blade sliced its skin. Only she didn’t have an infant, and this time the blade was intended for her.

  “Leave us alone,” she screamed into the night as if it were a living thing that she could scare away. She pulled Henry’s still body into her arms and cradled his head in her lap. “Just leave us,” she sobbed. But she knew they wouldn’t, this was a cruel game of cat and mouse, and the village, it’s people, and The Old Chapel all made the cat, she and Henry the mouse. Sitting still wasn’t going to outrun it, so she rolled Henry from her lap and stood, her legs protested but she quelled the pain enough to bend down, then through the agony and driven by her will to survive, she hauled her
brother back over her shoulder. Cruelly she made it no more than ten paces before her bare feet found the underside of a log hidden by both leaves and darkness. it pitched her forward, sending Henry crashing to the floor and her spilling over on top of him, yet still, he did not wake.

  “Ellieeee,” the trees called again, and now she felt things crawling, many things, things that just now were leaves, only now they could move. They scurried over her hands, up the backs of her legs and through her hair. As if working with the nightmare three brilliant flashes of lightning made day of night, and for a second she saw that the forest floor was crawling and alive with bugs. They squirmed and scurried, their busy bodies and feelers clambering over one another, and over her brother who slept on oblivious.

  “Elllliieeee,” the wind called. She got up frantically brushing the insects from her hair and arms. More lightning showed her the forest floor, but now and once again it was no more than dried, dead leaves, the bugs were gone, as were the ones scurrying over her flesh. She lifted Henry and staggered on, the voices on the wind taunting her as she went.

  She turned north, knowing that Trellen ran in a line along its road from east to west and that eventually if she headed that way for long enough, she’d breach its limits and be free of it.

  “Ellieeeeee,” the wind whispered, but it was fainter now, behind her and she allowed herself hope, and the further she pushed the less the voices came, and the less the voices came the more she hoped.

  Finally, and after an untold time on pained and cut feet with the weight of her brother burdening her weak body, she broke free of the trees and collapsed onto the soft grass, sweat drenching her body and her lungs gasping for air.

  “The Lord of Darkness brought you back to us,” a female voice said. Ellie felt her stomach drop and reluctantly looked up to see the face of the woman who'd taken the life of Scott Hampton. She smiled at her, "Come, child," she added, holding a hand out for Ellie to take. She wanted to fight, wanted to strike out at her but she was spent. Instead, she rolled onto her back as they lifted Henry from the lawn.

  “Hen,” she croaked, reaching out a hand toward him, but the effort was futile, for a second later he was gone, back toward the barn they’d surfaced in and escaped from, what now seemed like hours ago.

  Ellie felt hands lifting her tired body, they didn’t make her stand, instead they carried her, one person on each arm and one on each leg. As they took her toward her death the sky split open in a white-hot flash of lightning so bright it made negatives of everything for a moment, it cleaved down from the heavens and split a tree behind the barn in two with a hail of sparks. The faceless crowd behind her gasped in shock as the tree began to burn and for a moment the hands which held her wavered and she felt their grip relinquish, but only for a second. As if the heavens themselves were crying out in protest at her taking, more lightning rained down into the woodland behind, sending flames and sparks jumping into the air that now reeked of ozone and discharged electricity.

  “Get her below ground,” she heard one of the voices say, and now the hands had her true again, carrying her into the barn. As they manhandled her back through the hatch from which she’d escaped the smell of smoke hit her nose and she knew that out there, behind the barn the forest was on fire.

  Chapter 53

  Seth Horner’s intelligent blue eyes regarded Mike from behind his black-rimmed spectacles and in them, Mike saw fear and he liked it. Following the sudden and brutal execution of their younger friend both Seth and Mr. Broken Piggy Nose had both relinquished their ceremonial robes without further argument. Mike had handed both to June and Tara, then taken it upon himself to wear the one from the dead guy, because after all, he'd been the one to make a corpse out of him. Luckily the blast had distributed most of the brain matter, skull and other gunky crap over the wall, leaving little to soil the garment.

  “You’re supposed to be a scientist,” Mike said to him. “I can’t figure out how you got involved with all this?”

  Seth, now sat in the lightweight black lounge style trousers and a nondescript black T-shirt which he’d had on beneath the robes, half chuckled and massaged the knee that Mike had whacked good and hard with the stock of the A400. He had managed to stand on it to de-robe and sadly Mike didn’t think he’d broken bone. “Science and religion are more related than you can imagine,” Seth said. “And I don’t mean like cousins, they are more brother and sister. I’m not tanking Christianity, Buddhism, or any of that shit here, they are just ideas, but the basis for those ideas comes from a common source. Good and evil, black and white, the Ying and yang – the above and the below, call it what you want.”

  “And the work you do,” Mike began, his voice clearly wearing disgust.

  “You wouldn’t understand the first thing about what I do,” Seth Horner scorned. “We have learned how to open doorways between realities,” he marvelled. "Began to understand how those realities influence our world, how our physical bodies tie us here, but in death, we become free and move off to other realms.”

  “Why choose this, why evil, tell me – I need to understand how you can justify what you do. How it didn’t tear you apart to know that thing which masqueraded as your wife was no more than pure evil in the shell of a girl who was stolen from her family, who was robbed of her life!”

  “The fact you need me to explain it means you will never understand,” Seth answered coldly. "And the coven made her life far more meaningful than anything she would have ever accomplished." He paused, stretched the knee out, his face wincing before he continued. "The world is rotten, Mike Cross. You must feel it, chaos is taking over. Famine, war, chemical weapons, riots, people mowing others down on the streets in acts of terror, financial unrest, the list is endless. All the while the masses feed on the propaganda being fed to them on their TVs and in the papers. The revolution is coming, Mike. Darkness is coming. And when it does, when it spills out over the planet then it’s best to be on the right side.”

  "Bullshit," Mike spat. "You are a part of it because you like it because it gives you free rein to do what you want. Well, guess what? That ends tonight."

  Seth laughed as if he’d heard the funniest joke in the world, “This coven is eternal,” he said. “It’s existed undiscovered and pure for over three hundred and fifty years, and you think you and your two whores can come in here and stop us with a knife and a shotgun? You’re delusional, whacko, fucking crazy.” Spittle flew from his mouth as he spoke, and his face turned red with anger. “You’re all going to die down here tonight,” he continued with furious passion. “Just like your friend did yesterday. When they tear you apart later, which they will, they’ll do it slow, nice and slow so you feel every ounce of pain, every cut and as you scream, just like your friend did as the High Priestess gutted him from stomach to sternum. You’ll wish you never set foot in our village.”

  The mention of Scotty being disembowelled that way drew acidic bile into Mike’s mouth and he drew the gun down on Seth Horner, letting the barrel sit point blank between his eyes.

  “Mike,” Tara said urgently from the door. “Don’t!”

  “Why the fuck not? You heard what he just said, how they killed Scotty.”

  “They’re coming, the others. There’s a group heading this way.”

  Mike glanced at Seth as a bead of sweat ran down his forehead and ran into his thickset eyebrows. Seth wiped it away calmly with the back of his hand as Mike lowered the gun. He glanced at the door and looked as if he wanted to open his mouth and call out. Mike couldn’t fire for fear of being heard, but he could use the gun as an expensive and fancy club. “Your sick world ends tonight,” he said, and with that, before Seth could call for help, he smashed the stock of the gun into the side of his temple, knocking him unconscious.

  “W-wait,” Broken Piggy Nose stammered, he held a hand out and tried to scoot back, but there was nowhere for him to go. Mike swung the butt of the sawn-off hard, it connected with the side of his head producing a satisfying crack, kn
ocking him to the floor and Mike wondered if he hadn’t killed him with the force of the blow.

  “Masks on,” Mike said to June and Tara. “File in behind, stay together and don’t do anything until I make a move.” They nodded in agreement, both sliding on their masks, all three becoming anonymous.

  It was a risky move and Mike hoped that there was no magical number to the coven, for with Lucinda dead and the three in the cell the congregation would still be one person shy. He didn’t have time to worry about it, it was a shit or bust situation and the fact they’d got this far was nothing short of a miracle. Whatever was going to go down would have to go down at some point and if they got as far as the ceremony room and they figured they were one short or did a roll call, or whatever the fuck they did, then the gun would come out and the game would be on.

  Mike chanced a look around the frame, the group were about forty feet down the passage and coming their way. In the dim, dancing light of the lamps, he could see the robed figure at the front had a small child in their arms. They were too far off to see clearly, but Mike knew it was Henry Harrison. He looked dead, but then the words of the younger guy, who now only had half a face came back to him, ‘We’ve kept him sedated,’ he’d said. Behind the boy were two more masked figures, they held a girl, one at each of her arms. She wasn’t so much walking with them, more being dragged, her feet scooting along the dirt.

  “Ellie,” he whispered to himself, and just the sight of her alive filled him with hope. Behind were more masked figures, he could tell the women by the lower cut robes, but with his fleeting glances, he couldn't judge the ratio of them to the men. In all, he guessed there were fifteen to twenty, certainly no more than twenty-five. He had enough rounds to see them all dead, but the chamber only held three and if he unloaded them all he’d have to get the first shot back into the main chamber which was time-consuming. Firing two rounds meant he could just reload into the bottom of the receiver, a much quicker option.