“This room is your strength, isn’t it? ‘Prepare ye the walls of your houses.’ Isn’t that what it says? What will happen if I destroy these walls? How will you manifest then?” she asked, stalling.
“Too late for that. The comet’s almost overhead. Three minutes more. You will be my bride, and your heart will assure my immortality. And you will live on, like the faithful. It is time, my Brethren.”
Beside Evie, the glistening walls breathed. They bowed out like a membrane, and she could see faces and hands pressed against them. Evie stumbled backward toward the altar as bodies pushed through and the room was filled with the hollow dead of Brethren—living corpses with skin weeping red, burned down to bone in places. Skeletal faces without eyes. Mouths torn away. The faithful. The damned. Ready for the final sacrifice, the last offering. They wouldn’t stop until her heart was ripped from her chest and the Beast was made whole.
“They are here with me. The chosen of Brethren, sacrificed for the first of the eleven offerings. May it please the Lord!”
It sounded like the wind whipping over Brethren as the faithful replied, “Amen, amen, amen…”
“They demand tribute for their sacrifice. And they shall have it.”
The dead of Brethren were coming toward her. Coming for her. Evie raced ahead of John Hobbes and grabbed a branding iron from the coals. It burned her hand and she dropped it, crying out in pain. She wrapped the hem of her skirt around the iron handle and picked the iron up again, holding it out in front of her. Her hand shook wildly.
“Into this vessel, I b-bind your spirit. Into the f-fire, I… I…”
She couldn’t remember the words.
John Hobbes’s laugh bubbled up with all the cruelty of a child delighted by the power of bringing his boot down upon an insect.
“It must be a holy relic! Only a blessed object can contain the spirit.”
“Jericho!” Evie screamed again, though she knew it was no use. She flung the branding iron at the walls and it skittered across the floor.
“No matter. I can anoint your flesh when you are dead.”
Evie laid a hand across her chest, as if this would be enough to keep the Beast and his faithful from tearing out her heart. Her fingers grazed the edge of her half-dollar pendant and she grabbed it and held fast to it like a frightened child.
Mute no more, the dead of Brethren opened their mouths in a collective din that crawled up Evie’s spine. Their jaws unhinged and they vomited out an oily black substance, which fell to the floor like a river of snakes. It crawled up the legs of John Hobbes, where it coalesced with the brands on his skin. It covered him like armor and then was absorbed into him.
“Look upon my form and be amazed!” He stretched out his arms, threw back his head, and cried out in what could have been either agony or ecstasy. His flesh rippled, as if something were trying to break out from within. Evie watched in horror as John Hobbes’s face contorted. His mouth curved into a cruel sneer. His teeth grew long and razor-sharp, and his fingertips sprouted claws. From his back, two enormous wings sprouted, white as the down of a lamb. The room was filled with light. He was manifesting into a thing of terrifying beauty right before her. Her eyes hurt to behold him. To be fully complete, he needed only to take her heart.
“The Lord will brook no weakness in his chosen!” The Beast said. His voice was like a thousand voices speaking at once, a demonic symphony.
For a moment, Evie lost all desire to fight. There was no fighting an evil this grand, this perfect. All one could do was submit. Let it happen and be done with it. The night sky seen through the small opening began to brighten: Solomon’s Comet on its prophecied return to the skies. The futility of the fight weighed on Evie like stones on a grave.
“The comet is almost overhead,” John Hobbes announced.
His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.