by D V Wolfe
“A what?” Noah and I asked.
Stacks rolled his eyes. “A fulcire or a fulcrum. It’s something that can be used to magnify and stabilize their power coming from Hell. Make their spell big enough to control anyone in the area. That might also explain the creepy kids in the neighborhoods around the church with their fliers.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t see any when we were at the church today. Granted, we were in the service alley behind the church and I wasn’t really looking for them when we were leaving.”
“Trust me, you’ll know when you see them,” Stacks visibly shivered. “It was dinner time when we were there. They were probably sitting inside with their Stepford families, counting peas on their plate or something.”
“Ok, now this is starting to sound like a trip to Stephen King land,” Noah said.
“Let’s focus on one thing at a time,” I said. “What’s this full-seer thing look like?”
“Fulcire,” Stacks said, shaking his head. He sighed. “It’ll be some kind of object or an altar. Something they would be very protective of because if something happens to it…”
“They’re screwed?” I asked.
Stacks nodded. “Yeah. And the home office might not be too happy with them for fucking up. If they are all demons and they’re taking over a church, whatever the endgame is for Hell, it ain’t good for the rest of us.”
“Ok,” I said, kicking Lucy’s door open. Stacks and Noah piled out after me. “So we need to find this thing and destroy it?”
Stacks shrugged. “Wouldn’t be a bad start. I mean, if that is how they’re controlling everyone.”
“So when do we go back to look for this flu-crumb thing?” Noah asked, dabbing at the corner of his eye where the demon had drawn blood.
“Fulcire or fulcrum!” Stacks snapped. He was holding his head in both hands now.
I looked over at him. “Are you ok?”
“I’m fine. Just a really bad headache,” Stacks said.
I looked at Noah and noticed he was looking rather green. I’d heard of the aftershocks of a compelling spell. It had been compared to the Incubus Revenge. To me, the after-effects of the “compel” spell didn’t feel nearly as bad as the Incubus Revenge I’d felt after we killed Kosmas.
“You want me to fix that?” Noah asked, pointing at the wound in my arm.
“Do you have it in you?” I asked. Noah nodded and I moved over towards him. He seemed a little shaky on his legs. I bit down on a twig while he cauterized the wound. I took some deep breaths and tried not to puke. Noah let go and straightened up, still not looking completely steady on his feet.
“So do we go back tonight?” Noah asked, putting a hand on the trunk of a nearby tree to steady himself.
I looked from him to Stacks and shook my head. “I’m going back by myself. Tomorrow.” Both of them made noises like they were about to protest, but I held up a hand. “It’ll be easier with just one person doing the scouting. Besides, I don’t think the demon’s compelling affected me as much as you two. Maybe I have some kind of handicap score for dealing with them since part of me is still in the pit.” I shrugged and I heard them collectively sigh. “In the meantime,” I said. “You two get back inside. I’ll grab some grub for us and be right back.”
Stacks and Noah protested again, but I told them I was going for pizza and they relented. I swung back onto the road and headed for Sylvester’s, the only pizzeria in Messina. There were only two cars in their parking lot. This was odd because Sylvester’s lot was usually so full that there would be several cars double-parked or blocking a fire lane. The bored girl behind the counter was popping her gum and reading the horoscope section of the newspaper.
“Hi there,” I said and she looked up in surprise.
“Wow! Hey Charlie,” she called over her shoulder. “I owe you ten bucks. A customer just walked in.” She suddenly glared at me. “Unless you’re one of those church freaks, which in that case, move along, we’re all going to Hell here, and proud of it.” She looked closer at my outfit and snorted. “Of course, you don’t really look like the other ones that have been in here.”
“From the New Covenant Church?” I asked.
She blew a huge pink bubble and nodded her head as she pointed at the bulletin board near the register. I glanced over. It was covered in fliers, but even from where I stood, I could see three of the bright pink church fliers.
“Nope,” I said. “I just wanted to order a pizza.”
“Sure,” she said. “What can I get you?”
I ordered three pizzas to tide us over and while I was waiting for the order, I sat down on the beat-up leather couch in front of the counter. The girl went back to her newspaper.
“Good horoscope today?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Not really. It’s better than nothing though since the whole section got cut from the Messina Journal.” She waved the paper at me. “I had to get an Indianapolis Chronicle to see what was going on.”
“That’s weird,” I said, trying to sound shocked. “Why did they take out the horoscope section?”
She rolled her eyes. “That Bible-thumper for one. He has the whole town wrapped around his finger. You know he convinced the market to stop selling alcohol? I mean he closed down our one bar and now we can’t even get a beer at the grocery store. I tried talking Charlie,” she motioned over her shoulder back towards the kitchen where a big guy was tossing dough, “into getting a liquor license for Sylvester’s. We would make bank if folks knew they could get a drink and a pie.”
I nodded. “I’m sold.” She grinned at me and went to check on my order.
I stood up to stretch my legs and wandered over to the bulletin board. I stared at the symbol on the pink fliers. I felt the necklace against my leg, in my pocket. The symbols were so similar. Now that we knew demons were involved at the church, didn’t they have to be the same symbol? Something nagged at me about it though. In Hell, there were so many symbols. They culled and divided and pulled power from the engine. Stacks had told me that symbols pre-dated and then formed the basis for language. This symbol though. The symbol on the necklace. Maybe the symbol underneath all the church’s flourishes. It bothered me. Not because it had been used by demons working with cannibals, but because I’d seen it before and I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember where. I ran a hand over the flier, tracing the symbol, trying to remember. I shifted and the overhead light caught the glossy corner of a photograph underneath the flier. I pulled the flier out of the way and I felt the breath catch in my chest. It was a picture of Royson Gibbs. He was sitting with his arm around a woman, both of them smiling at the camera. Someone had x-ed out Royson’s eyes, but I remembered the comb-over and the Marines tattoo on his forearm from his crime scene photo.
“Did you find our wall of best customers under all those damned fliers?” The girl asked at the counter.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.” I unpinned Royson’s photo and turned to her. “Did you know Royson Gibbs?”
The girl’s face fell. “Yeah. I knew Mr. Gibbs really well. My sis is in the Special Olympics. Mr. Gibbs was always so nice. It’s awful.”
I nodded. “I didn’t know him well but he seems like he was a pretty good guy.”
She nodded. “It doesn’t make any sense. I had just seen him that morning. He was in uniform. His whole Marines unit was going to march in the Memorial Day parade and he was picking up a couple of pizzas for them to eat before it started. We talked about Kelsie, my sister. I’d told him that she wanted to run in the relay this year. He was going to practice with her that weekend.” The girl was tearing up and she shook her head and looked away.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. A bell rang behind her.
“Order up, Casey,” Charlie said.
So not only was Royson Gibbs a nice guy. He was ex-military and he died on Memorial Day. I took the pizzas and the picture and I headed back to Stacks’.
I hadn’t considered how difficult it would be to crawl through
the tunnel with three pizzas, but it was much slower going than I’d assumed it would be. I finally made it through the trapdoor and was immediately relieved of my burden by two starving, scrawny guys.
“Oh thank god,” Noah moaned, moving back to the middle of the living room floor with the boxes. “I was so hungry, I was about to eat the road salt from the fanny pack.”
I looked over at Stacks. “Did you scrub the pen clean?”
Stacks nodded, flipping the lid open on the nearest pizza box. He tossed the fanny pack back to me. “This pack is clean.” I felt a little stab in my chest remembering Nya who would always say that after a haunting. “Well, the pen is, anyway,” Stacks said. “That fanny pack needs a whole different kind of exorcism.” He took a bite and tried to talk around the hot pizza in his mouth. “And I’m keeping the pen.”
“Fine by me,” I said. I set the picture of Royson down on top of the papers scattered around the floor. Noah and Stacks leaned over to look at it.
“Is that Royson?” Noah asked.
“Yep,” I said. Over the first three pieces of pizza each, I filled them in on what Casey at Sylvester’s had said.
“Who do you think x-ed out his eyes?” Noah asked, picking up the photo.
“Demons. Other pissed off church members,” I said. “Maybe the creepy flier kids if they knew who he was and that he’d spoken out against their minister. Apparently, that church has some serious clout. They were able to get the horoscope section of the paper pulled.” Stacks nodded.
“Things are getting pretty bad,” Stacks said. “If we don’t close shop on these assholes soon, I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn their parishioners into their own personal army to kill and ‘convert’ the rest of the town.”
I nodded. “Ok, here’s the plan,” I said, not entirely sure that what I was about to say would come across as a plan.
Stacks and Noah each raised an eyebrow at me and dug into their fourth pieces of pizza.
“Oh goodie, ‘shit plan’ time,” Noah muttered.
“At least you can always count on it,” Stacks added.
“Hilarious,” I said. “Tonight, we research. Everything about the victims and anything we can find out about the preacher and his people.” I felt that was a safe first step. The next steps, I was less sure about. “Then tomorrow, I’ll go back and talk to Nigel and see what else I can find out from him. Maybe he'll have an idea about what this ‘fulsom’ thing is.”
“Oh my god. Seriously you two, just call it a fulcrum. Fulcrum. Got it?” Stacks asked. Noah and I grinned at each other. Winding Stacks up was a favorite pastime that I was more than happy to share with Noah.
After a second, Noah’s smile fell and he shook his head. “I’m going with you.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll go, and the two of you will stay here.” Both of them started to argue and I held up a hand. “Look, if one of us gets caught, it’s much better if it’s me. There’s always a possibility that I could make it back up here before time runs out.” It was a pipe dream, but I had to say it. “You two, on the other hand,” I continued, “have one-way tickets.”
“Bane,” Noah said softly. “You don’t have time to go through that.”
I ignored him. “You two can keep researching while I go talk to Nigel.”
Stacks sighed. “Thank you for officially christening my new trailer with an in-person ‘shit plan’.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “You have a better one?”
“Nope,” Stacks said. “And I know I’m not able to throw off their puppet master bullshit like you and Noah were able to, so it’s probably best if I don’t go. I had an idea, but I’m not sure if you’re going to like it.” I braced myself, waiting for him to mention the ‘G’ word. We’d gotten too close over the last couple of weeks. We needed to put some distance between us. Otherwise...I couldn’t think of the “otherwise”. Not right now.
Stacks continued. “Before I called you, I called Rosetta to see if she could do a seance with our three victims to see if she could learn anything.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s a good idea.”
“And there are still some things I haven’t done an internet search for that might tell us something,” Stacks continued.
“Great,” I said. “Noah can help with that.”
Noah still looked annoyed at me for leaving him behind, but he nodded and the three of us went to work, reorganizing the carefully cataloged files into a mess in the middle of the floor.
8
“What about their suicide notes?” I asked, shuffling through the papers in Royson’s file in front of me.
“Only Barbara left what could actually be called a ‘suicide note’,” Stacks said, digging through the papers in front of him. “Here,” he said, passing it over to me.
I scanned the page. It was short. I’m sorry. I squinted at the bottom of the page. “There’s a number written here. 661211.” I looked up at Stacks. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Stacks shook his head, not taking his eyes off of Barbara’s open Bible in front of him. “Maybe it was a note from something else and she just reused the page for her suicide note. I mean, it’s not like she put a lot of thought into it.”
“And you’re sure it’s her handwriting?” I asked.
Stacks nodded and handed me another piece of paper. “This is a grocery list I took from her purse for handwriting comparison. It looks identical to me.”
It did. Damn. “Ok, so the demons just compelled them to do it,” I said. “Anyone have any other conclusions or are we feeling pretty sure about this?”
Noah nodded. “It had to be demons.” He pushed the articles he’d been reading back towards the pile in the center.
Stacks looked up from Barbara’s butterfly Bible. “I think I finally found something in common.” Stacks held up the Bible and pointed to a chunk of text, highlighted in yellow. “They have the same verse marked in Revelations,” Stacks said.
“All of them?” I asked.
Stacks nodded and picked up Royson’s baby blue miniature Bible and flipped to the back, turning pages of tiny text until he found something, and held it up for us to see. Another highlighted block of text. He picked up the old leatherbound Bible belonging to Ellie. He flipped to the back, pulled out a bookmark, and showed us the page she’d marked. She’d underlined a section of text.
I shrugged. “That doesn’t mean much. Isn’t Revelations supposed to be the end of the world, doom, and gloom champion of the Bible? Maybe they were just all listening to the same sermon and happened to mark that verse.”
Stacks shrugged. “Maybe, but,” he flipped through the rest of Ellie’s Bible, showing us only pristine, untouched pages. “And…” he picked up Royson’s Bible and did the same. No marks except for the single block of yellow highlighted text in the back. “And finally…” He flipped through Barbara’s Bible just like the first two. Also no notes or highlighting except for that single passage in Revelations.
“So what’s the passage that made all three of them break tradition and mark up their Bibles?” I asked.
“Revelations chapter twelve, verse eleven. ‘They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death,’” Stacks read.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said. “You think they saw this coming?”