Fires Rising (31 page)

T
he foreman had one great arm wrapped forcefully around the Timothy's neck, his free hand clutching a fistful of the boy's hair. The boy's eyes bulged—even his swollen eyelid had managed to open a bit—as he pried furiously at Miller's beefy forearm in a bid for escape.

Pilazzo rubbed the rosary furiously, seeking immediate assistance. He felt the heated friction of his fingers against the wooden charms, but failed to unearth its support in this moment of dire need.

"Timothy…I'll get you out of this," the priest promised emptily.
Please, God, I implore you, help me…

Miller grinned, mouth rife with thick brown teeth. As though reading Pilazzo's mind, he barked, "God can't help you now, priest," voice feral, barely recognizable as human.

Yet, the foreman wasn't all that threatening in his appearance. In passing he might've been just another balding semi-overweight man in his fifties, face red and pudgy, puffy bags sagging under deep-set eyes. He looked more unhealthy than evil.

Still, Pilazzo knew: the evil dwelling inside this man could move worlds.

In order to save all of mankind (In this do-or-die moment, it all sounded so b-movie in context, but damn if it wasn't the dire fact of the matter), Pilazzo needed to kill this man at once, cut him off from his command of the workers, his authority of the fires rising over the city.

He shuddered at the grave thought. How could he possibly succeed in doing this? He was a priest, a holy man, truly incapable of murder. He reminded himself that he wouldn't be killing a man so much as eliminating an evil entity, but he still couldn't find it within himself to enact such an aggression.

"Father!" Timothy shouted, squirming in Miller's tightening grasp. The tendons stuck out of his neck like cords. His feet slipped in the carpet of blood, drawing streaks into it like skid marks.

The foreman grinned. "Come and get him father. The boy for the rosary."

"What good is it to you?" Pilazzo felt his face go hot with anger, frustration.

"It is everything…so long as its rightful possessor surrenders it to me."

"The boy is doomed either way," Pilazzo muttered. "We all are." He contemplated Miller's words with a staggering level of insight:
So long as its rightful possessor surrenders it to me. Which is why the beast needed me to come here, why it simply could not have taken the rosary for itself. It needed
good
to surrender it…to bow to the beast. It is just as the bible says: in order for evil to gain rule over man, it would need to abolish all that was good. The sinless one.

Miller laughed at the priest's pretense for logic. "So true." And then the foreman
changed
, becoming one with his workers by exposing the evil lying below its human surface. His face turned repulsively gray in the dim light, bloating slightly so that his features were partially disguised. His head jerked up and down and he produced a barking noise, gagging up clots of thick white foam that coated his swelling lips. When he looked back at Pilazzo, his nostrils widened and green stuff leaked out.

Pilazzo couldn't believe what he was seeing and smelling. He gripped his stomach as a wave of nausea filled him. Henry Miller's sudden change in appearance rose above all rational explanation, and his mind and body was unable to digest even the tiniest ingredients.

"Give me the boy, Miller…" he said, trying desperately to ignore the transformation he'd just seen. He drew his eyes away from the foreman and looked at the rosary in his hand.

He raised it in battle.
Or am I preparing to trade it for Timothy?

One life for millions?

"No Father!" the boy shouted, squirming in the foreman's—
the beast's
—grasp.

Pilazzo jerked the rosary back.

The foreman grinned.

Then, with a similar flick of the wrist, grabbed Timothy by the chin…

"…NO!…"

…and with cruel and inhuman strength wrenched his head sideways and snapped his neck, producing a resounding crack that flew through the hollow church as if a small firecracker had gone off. Timothy's body went limp in Miller's arms. The foreman sniggered, and released the boy. Timothy dropped lifelessly to the bloody floor, a puddle of urine darkening the crotch of his jeans.

Miller's grin widened, teeth now black, pointed like daggers. "So then…I shall make you give it to me."

Shaking his head in disbelief and horror, Pilazzo backed away. He turned and ran toward the altar, for a moment forgetting about the mass of workers near the transept. He peered over at them. They were twitching and grimacing, glowering at him with their screwdrivers and boxcutters and awls drawn. One of them was jutting a crowbar in the air, Rollo's head impaled on it like a meatball on a toothpick.

Pilazzo stopped at the foot of the altar, staring at the workers.

They all remained at a watchful distance.

Holding the gently writhing beads close to his body, Pilazzo took a deep breath and stepped up onto the altar.

"Your divine inspiration is commendable." Miller's voice carried across the church, deeper and rougher than it was before. He kicked aside Timothy's corpse and stepped down the aisle toward the altar.

The rosary began to grow warmer, its reddish glow beginning to emerge. A tiny wave of relief filtered through him, despite the hideous circumstances. "I am safe as long as I remain here on the altar," he murmured, unconvinced of his desperate theory.
But then what of the rest of the world?

Miller approached the altar, and in the pallid light Pilazzo could see his face had changed even further: the skin appallingly wrinkled, cut deep and sickly green. White gauzy hair sprouting from his previously bald head, like ancient webs. He appeared to have grown larger, round muscles defined beneath his bloody clothes.

"I've visited the altar once before. You remember, don't you? When we first met?"

In Pilazzo's mind, images of the hideous thing he saw on the altar returned to him. He remembered how the thing had emulated Larry's knotted ear—how it had birthed a pair of monstrous reptile claws and fed the doomed vagrant to itself. Pilazzo clenched his teeth, trying in vain to rid the horrific images from his mind.

Miller laughed loudly, guffaws that nearly shook the weakened beams of the church. He reached his arms out, flaunting hands that had somehow morphed into lizard's claws like those from on the altar. He swept them through the air, vile teeth gaping and stabbing forward, ancient-looking hair flowing down to his shoulders.

"Come to daddy!" the Miller-beast bellowed. "Let us play!" Its voice resonated, deeply intoned with a chorus of many. The workers began to rustle noisily, their bodies jostling together like rats in a cage.

Pilazzo stepped up onto the upper platform of the altar and backed into the semicircle of shrouded statues—directly beneath the twelve-foot crucified Jesus. Colored lights fell in from the stained glass windows above, igniting the altar with their ghostly luminescence, as if the sun had somehow found its way in through the darkness. When he gazed up to view their source, instead of sighting some mystical radiance breaking through the night, he saw the spires of flames grabbing the roof of the church.

Oh my God…

The roof of the church was on fire.

He at once initiated a systematic probe of the rosary, fingers guided about the beads by some unseen force. The rosary remained unmoving, now cold to the touch. He squeezed the rosary tightly, trying desperately to simply comprehend the soon-to-come events, but fear had him wound too tightly in its grip.

Behind him came a sharp cracking sound. He spun quickly, half-expecting a blow from one of the workers…but nothing was there.

Nothing except the bound feet of the great wooden Jesus.

Blood was seeping from its wounds.

D
ear God!

The beads began to move vigorously in his hands. When he looked at them he could see them glowing more brightly now, the red warmth shrouding his hands like gloves as it had earlier in the rectory. Pilazzo spun away from the great crucifix and saw Miller—no, the
beast
that had replaced Miller—now doused in moving shadows: dark specters racing over his still-changing form like sharks circling a chum ball. It stepped to the forefront of the altar…but advanced no further.

Because it cannot...
 

Even in the deceptive light, Pilazzo could see the hideous transformation still taking place within the man, muscular limbs now tearing through clothes, the skin beneath partly reptilian, riddled with patches of hair that swirled and coiled like fire. It jabbed its claws toward the priest, and Pilazzo could see yellow talons on them four inches long, sharp as razors.

And then its face: a visage of utter repulsiveness that swam out of the moving darkness like a moray from an ocean fissure. Its forehead was low and supine, covered with thick flaring scales. Its cheeks, swollen and wet, the eyes glowing onyx, filled with evil intellect. Its mouth opened impossibly wide and roared, beckoning the workers to mimic its inherent evil with howls of their own. It shook its newly malformed head with incomparable aggression, thick streams of foam spraying madly from huge bleeding lips. Pilazzo pressed himself back against the wooden Jesus.

Warmth emanated from the hard, carved surface.

Just like the rosary…

The workers continued jostling against one another, anxious to flee their imprisonment but appearing supernaturally confined, as though trapped in a fish tank. The two workers holding the crate dropped it, producing a loud
crack
that echoed about the church like the resounding blasts outside. They kneeled down alongside it, rubbing its dusty surface as if searching for a hidden message.

Terrified, Pilazzo continued to rub the rosary, searching for an answer in them while making every effort to rid his mind of the want for it to act as a tool for slaughter. He found nothing as the foretelling message delivered to him triggered back and forth in his mind:
Follow the message that God delivers to you…bring down the evil that promises man the end of days…

But I am no murderer!

He looked at the charm in his hands. Its red glow had faded some, its ancient wooden surface beginning to re-emerge.
No!
In a panic, he shook it like one might jiggle a gadget in a hasty attempt to keep it functioning, wondering how it could further his chances of survival, much less save all of mankind from the fires of Hell.

The voice of Monsignor Sanchez filled his head with a previously unheard message:
The beast is afraid of it, afraid of what you might do with it.

Thomas?

"
Give…it…to…me…,"
the beast demanded, voice monstrous, booming, barely clinging to its humanity. Pilazzo set his eyes back upon the thing before him, gasping breathlessly at the mere sight of it, his terror widening to a previously unimaginable plane. He could feel his very sanity breaking down, his mind overloading with the plain reality of what Henry Miller had become in just seconds.

It stood seven feet tall, looking nothing like the man it had been moments earlier—a creature straight from the bowels of Hell, here and now riding the body of Henry Miller, who in the face of his hideous appearance, maintained only minute portions of his human features, now besieged by the beast's own atrocious characteristics: black scaly skin, a muscle-bound torso with a rattle-tipped tail that tore through the pants he wore. From its head, doused in thick cobwebs for hair, a series of serrated horns surfaced—not just a pair but a toadstool cluster of them—all four inches high with dark rounded ends. Although naked and glistening wetly, a few strips of Miller's clothing dangled from its shoulders and waist like strewn rags. It stared at Pilazzo in threatening silence, eyes glimmering angrily below thick flaring eyebrows that coiled up and disappeared into its white hair.

Pilazzo shuddered uncontrollably, urging his weakened mind to search the rosary for guidance in this moment of distress. If a time had come when he needed it most, then this was it.

"Be gone, foul demon," he whispered weakly, cowering, feeling foolish and afraid in this ridiculous effort. The rosary shifted and curved about his devoted fingers.

The beast bellowed a storm of hellish cries that shook the church, filling it with a palpable tension impenetrable in its promise for malevolence.

The rosary shifted again. It began to turn hot, a positive sign that help was on the way…he hoped and prayed.

And then, from out of nowhere, a foreign wave of anger and a want for retribution filled Pilazzo's mind. His muscles twitched and a surge of courage and bravery consumed him until he found himself shouting at the beast, "Do you think me such a weakling that I would hand my fate over to you as if it were a child's plaything?"

The beast, standing its ground, turned its huge head toward the priest. It snorted and a black craggy tongue emerged from its mouth, licking the dripping mucus from its huge lips. Pilazzo recoiled, inhaling the horrid stench of its breath, sulfuric and gassy and nearly unbearable. Its roar was a chorus of beasts: the growls of an angry bear reverberating above an orgy of squealing pigs and bleating of goats.