Fires Rising (11 page)

They.

Jyro nodded coldly, thinking of the tentacles, wet and marauding, grabbing him, trying to
feed him
to the thrashing tree-trunk of sewage. He peered toward the door and saw the albino man still staring at him with those creepy red eyes. Something about the pale man bothered Jyro, but he had neither the energy nor the wits to formulate any intuition right now. Eyes still pinned on the albino, he said, "After what I just saw in there…I'd believe anything." The albino looked away.

Strangely, no one asked what it was he saw in the bathroom. Instead, an uncomfortable silence filled the room where the men just stood looking at one another, minds no doubt wondering if they were going to die in the next few minutes. Clearly, they were all just trying to cope.

The dreadlocked vagrant began pacing erratically, sharp brown eyes glaring condescendingly at Weston and Wrath. "So what are we gonna do, man? Huh? How the hell are we gonna get outta here?"

Timothy stood up from the bed. Pieces of waste fell from his body and plopped on the floor. He marched into the uneven circle that had formed, gazing around the room with a sharp, weighty stare. Jyro imagined him thinking,
Little did I know when I woke up this morning that I'd be hanging out with a troop of vagrants, covered in shit. This, after battling a demon-creature from Satan's toilet. God works in mysterious ways.

Timothy eyed the dreadlocked man. "We're gonna get out of here. We just need to work on this, together." A promise as empty as the church below.

Weston spread his huge arms out, the white of his skin seeming to shed some light into the shadowy room. His head quivered madly. "How?" He pointed a scorched finger toward the door. "If we try to leave, we're just gonna get burned again!" His blue eyes bulged like balloons as they swept across the entire congregation.

"Well, we can't just sit here." Jyro struggled to his feet. The muscles in his body stretched audibly, like rotten rubber bands. He sidled up alongside Timothy. "Me and the kid were almost eaten by a god-damned monster in there!"

Again an unnerving silence filled the room, none of the men showing any desire to confirm what they already knew—that Jyro and the boy had confronted something evil in the bathroom, and had almost died in the process. But Jyro felt it necessary to give it to them anyway, as it seemed the only way to prepare them, however inefficiently, for the sights that lay ahead.

The sights that lay ahead…

From the corner of the room, Rollo held his bible out in a
Heil Hitler
gesture and lamented, "The end of the world is nigh! The Devil has risen and has disgorged its atrocities upon us all!"

"Shut up, dude," the dreadlocked man shouted. "We don't need that kinda crap right now."

Rollo thrust the bible back and forth. "The scourges of Hell are upon us. What do you think it was they battled inside that bathroom?"

"Enough!" Jyro shouted, silencing the room.

Rollo looked at Jyro, eyes piercing him sharply, balefully. "Are you afraid to confront the truth?"

"I've seen the truth, and it ain't pretty," he replied loudly, reaching for emphasis but sounding mostly frustrated and scared. He shambled past the homeless man with the taped-up glasses, knowing that they couldn't just stay put; they'd all end up killing each other out of fear. He stopped by the door, ignoring the albino's creepy glare. He grabbed the doorknob; it felt warm, almost hot, but there was no fire here as the others had claimed.

He opened the door and went back out into the hallway, the image of the monster in the bathroom now playing out in his mind like a video in frame-by-frame.
Are there more monsters here?

And then, adding to his trepidation, he wondered:
Did it appear because of what I did? The chalice? The rosary?

The Rosary!

He took a deep, gasping breath, held it in his lungs. The harsh image of the creature in the bathroom faded abruptly…only to be replaced with a stronger, more tangible horror.

Larry, thief of tools, was kneeling on the floor just beyond the threshold of the bathroom. Like Jyro, he was covered in sewage from head to toe. His pulverized face was seeping fresh blood, an utter contradiction to the grin he wore, lips spread wide, gray teeth bared as if entertaining some amusing story. His eyes, glossy despite the poor lighting, bulged and jittered back and forth as if observing a game of ping-pong.

In his clawed hand was the rosary, swinging like a hypnotist's timepiece.

Jyro stepped toward him, gazing intently at the rosary, unblinking eyes watching it go back and forth, back and forth. The blessed charm seemed so
unreal
in the hands of such a thief, a monster, a
sinner
.

It does not belong with him.

Larry's legs and arms twitched and quivered, as though charged with volts. The rosary continued moving back and forth, left and right. Jyro could do nothing but stare at the charm and allow his thoughts and memories to cloud up in his head. Despite the horror of the moment, he felt a sudden
longing
—not a desire for the beaded charm itself, but for the message buried deep within its ancient elements.

Timothy appeared at the bedroom door like a shadow. So did Weston. Behind them, Wrath loomed.

Weston made a move toward the bathroom. Jyro held a stiff arm out, holding him back in an act that was purely instinctual. He whispered, "You don't want to go in there," eyes still wholly focused on the charm. A feeling of unreality stole into him, making him feel as if the top of his skull were open, his consciousness floating up and away like a helium balloon.

You are getting very sleepy…

Larry's face contorted, eyes rolling up into his head, lips now wrenching into a twisted scowl. His throat swelled and undulated as if attempting to reject a large object, then produced a loud, screeching cackle—something a hyena might make with its muzzle buried in fresh meat. Jyro flinched back, so did the others. He heard someone say,
"What the fuck?"

From behind Larry came a flashing beam of light. It ignited the bathroom in intermittent bursts, throwing the eerie shadow of the praying virgin upon the wall again. Amid the bursts of light, Jyro could see tendrils of hot steam rising up from the polluted matter on the floor, gathering about Larry like praying hands.

The flashlight
, Jyro thought quickly, staring at the shadow.
It's working again...

Larry's eyes, huge and white and wholly shocking in their wickedness, filled up with blood and spilled two red runners into his gored face. Someone uttered dully, "Jesus Christ…help us…"

The rosary kept swinging, back and forth, to and fro. Jyro felt himself being pulled toward its promise of answers to this whole eerie mystery.

Like a baby bird begging for a worm, Larry opened his mouth wide. From it, red vomit gouted, dousing his chin and grimy shirt. A string of garbled words followed, his voice strident and clogged:
"One holds darkness, one holds light, the mother of God's protection against evil is man's only hope. Find the sinless one…"

A gust of cold wind whipped about the room, rippling through their clothes. Waves of horrible gooseflesh marched down Jyro's back. The wind grasped the door to the bathroom and slammed it shut, closing Larry inside. The icy gust moved across the hallway like an invisible tornado, forcing the men to grasp their own bodies for warmth and protection.

A feeling of sickness nailed Jyro's stomach—intense nausea stewing in him, threatening to push out his gorge. A clear sense of panic rose in the room as the men clutched themselves and cowered against the wall, crying out in fear…and then, as suddenly as it came, the cold air dissipated, along with the sickening attack of fear, leaving the men heaving for air in the rancid heat that again dominated the hallway.

But…not before delivering to them a message of hope amid the promise of disaster threatening to kill them all.

Find the sinless one…

Jyro, shaking away the hypnotic state he'd been in, could see the incredulous looks upon the men's faces as they gazed despondently at one another.

Find the sinless one…

They'd all heard it, the voice, like a distant call from a mountaintop echoing across a landscape of hills and valleys. It'd entered into their heads alongside the disturbing visual now haunting them like a sick virus: an apocalypse in the form of an army of tattered men facing a great evil rising up before a wall of raging fires and blackened smoke.

Jyro shuddered, seeing some sort of odd familiarity in the collective of men he just hallucinated. Had any of the others realized what it was?

"What the hell is going on here!"
the thin man with the taped glasses cried out, racing toward the landing. He teetered at the edge of the stairs and fell forward along the curve of the first few steps. Lunging, he grasped the banister, keeping himself from falling any farther. Tears sprung from his eyes like rain. From the bedroom, Jyro could hear Rollo shouting a prayer like a minister delivering a sermon before thousands.

"Jyro…" Timothy shouted, the look of confusion on his face immediate as he attempted to express his thoughts. He was scared now, not just with the sudden state of affairs taking place, but also with the eerie power he now seemed to possess. He paused…then uttered, voice trailing off, "How did I know—?"

"Just as I had," Jyro answered without delay, knowing that he'd never told the boy his name. Timothy
knew
. Just as Jyro had earlier.

Eyes wide with fear, Timothy glanced down at his hands again, flexing them with a look of striking incredulity on his face.

The burns on his hands were gone. Healed.

Timothy gazed back toward Jyro, mouth agape.

Jyro narrowed his eyes. His bond with the boy was stronger now, delivering to them both a trace of comfort amid the gathering doom. If they could reach into each other's minds, the same thoughts would emerge:
We were meant to be. It is a calling from God. We've no choice now but to heed His word, receive his messages.

In a voice slightly louder than a whimper, Timothy said, "The rosary…"

There was a moment's hesitation, and then Jyro replied, "Perhaps the thief is the one," wholly unbelieving in himself as the message from the rosary reasserted itself into his mind:
One holds darkness, one holds light, the mother of God's protection against evil is man's only hope. Find the sinless one…

Find him…

From the inside the bathroom, a quick succession of bangings struck the door, as though Larry had finally slipped free of his trance and with terror had found himself in a place and position he had no memory of putting himself in. A long, fading gurgle sounded, like that of a man trying to yell with a mouth full of hot soup, then tapered down. Soon thereafter, silence prevailed, setting the room into an aura of threat.

Jyro performed a quick head count. Everyone was out in the hallway now, gathered against the wall, looking to him for some sort of guidance, as useless as it might be. Marcus was trembling, staring at the floor as he sucked nervously on a Winston; Rollo had his eyes closed and was holding his tattered bible to his chest, mumbling to himself; Wrath and Weston, bodyguards by their own right, were looking toward the bathroom door, eyes narrowed, muscles flexing, seemingly prepared should Larry come barreling out. There was the old tattooed man, the young dreadlocked man, and the lanky man with the broken glasses who was still by the banister on the landing, clutching it like a squirrel on a tree branch. And then, the silent albino, who remained trembling in the bedroom doorway like an injured rabbit, red eyes cast downward.

What a crew, Jyro thought, realizing suddenly that his experience in the bathroom had made him, by default, their leader, with Timothy second in command.
 

Little did the others know that it was he who may have brought all this havoc into their lives.

Jyro turned and looked toward Timothy. Despite being covered in sewage, the boy stood tall, seemingly prepared for whatever evils lay in the perilous road ahead.
He looks like one of us now
, Jyro thought, scanning the others in the room, his army
  

(an army of tattered men)

standing crookedly before him like a cluster of forgotten mannequins, lame and wretched. In the moment of winded silence that followed, Jyro thought back to the message that had been delivered to him and Timothy.

One holds darkness.

The chalice filled with fire.

One holds light, the mother of God's protection against evil is man's only hope.

The rosary.

Find the sinless one.

The one. The rightful possessor that will use the Rosary's power to bring down the evil that…

…and it is here that fragments of his dream slip back into him, of the faceless men who were burying the crate in the soil beneath the church, and as he'd slept he'd been able to hear himself uttering over and over again,
The evil that promises man the end of days,
and it is now that he remembers it, and sees its significance…