The red church (21 page)

The claws clicked on the glass. Ronnie chewed nervously on the blankets, and a stray fiber got in his throat and made him cough. The clicking stopped. The monster had heard him. In the still-ness, Ronnie listened to the wet mist of its waiting breath.

Ronnie tried to pray. The preacher said that the Lord forgave all sins and protected the children. If God had control over the heavens and the earth, then surely He controlled the demons as well.
Dear Jesus, please forgive me for my sins of the heart. I know I've suffered bad thoughts, and I haven't
been saved in three weeks. But I want
you
in my heart and not the thing with livers for eyes. Please, please,
get me out of this and I promise I'll get saved every week from now on, even if Preacher Staymore's breath
smells like rotten fruit. Amen.

Ronnie opened his eyes under the blankets. It was working. The wet noises went away. The prayer had sent the demon back to hell, or maybe back to the red church.

Thankyou thankyou thankyou, O Jesus
—

The clicking started again, and Ronnie felt as if the door to his heart had slammed shut Across the room, Tim rolled over in his sleep. If the Bell Mon-ster came in through the window, it might get Tim.
And maybe if it gets Tim, it will leave me alone.

As
soon as he had the thought, his face warmed with shame. Didn't Jesus say to love thy brother? Or was that one of the Ten Commandments? Either way, he had suffered another sin of the heart, and Jesus would punish him even more.

The brave thing to do would be to go out and face the monster. To let the thing rip him open and gnaw on his sinning heart, the way it had ripped up Boonie Houck and probably Zeb Potter and that person on the side of the road.

Mom said that Archer McFall said that sacrifice was the way to heaven. If Ronnie sacrificed himself, maybe Jesus would take him instead of letting the demon drag him down to the hot place. But Archer McFall was weirder than any preacher Ronnie had ever heard of. Who else would hold services in a haunted church? And the memory of those strange hymns that Mom and the others had been singing made him shiver with strange, sick pleasure.

The claws were on the windowsill now, exploring the crack at the base of the window. Ronnie couldn't remember if the window was locked. Mom had raised it yesterday to let in some fresh air, and Ronnie went right after she left and latched it again. But maybe she had unlatched it again while he was asleep. Footsteps came down the hall, heavy footsteps. Dad's boots. Ronnie pulled the covers off his head and sat up, braver now that Dad was coming to the rescue. He couldn't help himself. He had to glance at the window.

Through the curtains, Ronnie saw the Bell Mon-ster pressed against the glass. It was moist, changing shape as he watched, the lesser gray of its mouth parting in some kind of anger or longing. And he saw the eyes.

Livers.

Wet, drippy, slick, and red.

Eyes that looked right into Ronnie's, that seemed to crawl down his eyeball sockets and into his brain, to reach from his brain to his heart, as if to say,
You're mine now, you've always been mine, can you hear
me aknocking?

Then the door to the bedroom crashed open and light from the hall spilled across the room and Dad's long shadow filled the doorway.

"Get down," Dad yelled, and Ronnie fell back against the pillows as the first shot exploded from Dad's rifle.

Glass shattered as the percussion echoed off the walls.

Dad yanked the bolt back, reloaded, and fired again.

Gunsmoke filled Ronnie's lungs, and though he couldn't smell it, he could taste it, as acrid as car exhaust on his tongue.

Tim woke up screaming. Mom ran into the room and hugged him, pausing for a moment to look at the window.

Dad hurried across the room and looked through the broken panes. Jagged glass framed him, sparkling in the moonlight like sharp teeth.

"Is it gone?" Mom asked. Tim cried into her chest, his shudders shaking them both.

"I don't see it," Dad said, the rifle at his shoulder.

"Did you kill it?" she asked.

"Who the hell knows?"

"Will it come back?"

Dad turned from the window and glared at her. "You tell me. You're the damned prophet."
Prophet?
thought Ronnie. Like Ezekiel and Abra-ham and all those? Was Dad committing a sin of the heart?

Dad bent over Ronnie's bed. "You okay?"

Ronnie nodded.

Yeah, I'm as okay as I'm ever going to be, considering that the thing with livers for eyes is after
me because I've sinned in my heart, and now it's after you, too. And my nose hurts and you and Mom
are fighting again and I'm not going to cry, I'm not going to—

Dad sat on the bed and wiped Ronnie's tears away. "It's gone now. You're safe. I won't let that thing get you."

"P-promise?"

"Yeah."

"Will you stay here?"

Dad tensed, then looked at Mom. Ronnie felt their hatred in the air, a black electricity, as mean as the Bell Monster and almost as scary.

Tim had stopped crying, and now whimpered a little into the folds of Mom's shirt. Ronnie knew his little brother was waiting for what would happen next. They both knew what was at stake. If Dad left again, they would be helpless against the Bell Mon-ster. And despite the promises, Dad might just be angry enough to leave them all, to go somewhere in his truck and drink beer and do other things that he'd never done before.

This was one of those turning points, like when the Lord came aknocking, and you either opened the door or you didn't. Where everything changed, either for better or worse. No going back to last week, when life was nearly normal and all Ronnie had to worry about was homework and Melanie Ward. This was for all the marbles.

Dad looked at Mom again, then at Tim, then at the shattered window. The sky had settled into that deep blue of early morning and even the crickets had quit their chirping. Somewhere in the hills, a hound dog bayed, a lost, lonely sound in the pre-dawn stillness.

"I'll stay," Dad said, staring out the window at the black slopes of the mountains. Ronnie admired the muscles in his dad's jaws, the way Dad held his head up proudly, without a bit of back-down in him. Dad said that a man ought to draw his strength from the Lord, that nobody who trusted the Man Upstairs needed to be afraid of anything. And Dad made a pretty good case for it, too: Why should you be afraid of dying if dying only brought you into the presence of everlasting glory?

When Ronnie thought of heaven, he always imag-ined that color illustration in Dad's Bible, right be-fore the New Testament. The picture showed Jesus at the top of a set of golden stairs that rose up into the clouds. Jesus had long hair and a brown beard and the saddest eyes Ronnie had ever seen. He had his arms out and his palms lifted in welcome, but there was nobody on the stairs. Heaven looked like a lonely place.

And besides, no matter how wonderful heaven was, new things were always scary. Like the first day of school, the time he'd given that poem to Melanie, the first time he'd been inside the red church, this business about Mom and Dad being mad at each other. So he'd rather stay right here in bed, with Dad sitting beside him and Mom and Tim under the same roof. He'd rather just go on living, thank you very much. Even with a broken nose and a monster after him and schoolwork and Mom hanging out with that creepy preacher.

Even with all that.

He closed his eyes and waited for the sun to come up.

Archer crouched in the forest near the church. He had dragged the sheriff under the trees after sending Linda away. She wouldn't understand why the sheriff should be suffered to live. She was a good disciple, and she would willingly sacrifice herself, but she wasn't prepared for the truth. None of them were. Archer surveyed the landscape, his great cat's eyes piercing the darkness. God ruled the kingdom of heaven, but He had given Archer the kingdom of Earth, along with dominion over all of its creatures. Archer's brother Jesus had misused that power, had wandered among the humans and confused them with messages of love and hope. Before the rise of Christianity, heaven was attained only through pain, trials, and sacrifice. After Jesus' blasphemy was erased from the earth, people would again turn to those true tests of faith.

Of all the ludicrous Christian beliefs, the most laughable was that being forgiven would earn the sinner a ticket to heaven. Yet it was so utterly human. Why bother living right and enduring the rigors of true faith when all you had to do was say, "Come into my heart" and Jesus would be right there trick-ing you with lies?

Archer would also grant forgiveness. But his would be delivered after the sinner got on bended knee and begged, begged, even as the dark claws of justice performed the cleansing. Deliverance must be paid in blood. Redemption must be earned the hard way.

And Father above would burn with jealousy as Archer succeeded where Jesus had failed. Archer felt a brief twinge. Bullets passed through the manifested spirit that lurked at the Days' house three miles away. Archer threw back his head and growled a laugh at the moon, then sent the manifes-tation back to its home in the belfry. Let it eat the shadows there until the next night's work. Dawn would be breaking soon. The forest was in the held breath between the changing of the guards, the nocturnal animals returning to their nests and burrows and the morning songbirds shaking sleep from their heads. What a beautiful world God had made. Except for the blight of human hearts, a blight born of God's insecurity, the Earth nearly ap-proached heaven in its glory.

But Archer was here to erase the blight. All that sinned must be destroyed, so that a new, pure world could emerge. And all on Earth had sinned, even Jesus. Especially Jesus. All except the Second Son. Archer licked his fur, patient in the knowledge that he had forever. In the meantime, he would continue the cleansing right here in the place of his mortal birth. Here where Wendell McFall's soul had been trapped, where Archer himself had suffered the taunts and abuses of the unrighteous. Here where the sinless ones could come forth in an exodus of blasphemy and mockery.

Archer brought his teeth to the sheriff's collar and gently closed his mouth around the cloth. The sher-iffs eyelids twitched as Archer's warm breath tickled his neck, but he didn't awaken. The smell of the man's sin, and those of all the generations of Little-fields, crowded Archer's sensitive nose. Before Littlefield paid for his own sins, the sheriff first had to suffer for the sins of his ancestors. Archer dragged Littlefield across the churchyard, to a special place of punishment. Littlefield thought that the death of his younger brother had been enough to atone for Wendell McFall's hanging. But he would soon learn that sacrifice was the currency of a jealous God, and of jealous sons as well. There was joy in being a messiah.

FOURTEEN

Det. Sgt. Sheila Storie looked at the clock above her office door. It was one of those old round clocks of the kind that hung in elementary schools, with a black casing and plain, oversize numerals. The sec-ond hand didn't sweep smoothly. It locked into place on each tiny mark, then twitched over to the next. She watched twenty-three of the spastic seconds pass before she took her eyes away. She had spent the night in the office, napping a few hours in her chair. Now her back was stiff. She stood and stretched and made another pot of coffee, even though her stomach ached from the abusive night of caffeine and snack food from the machine in the hall. Just before the midnight shift change, Deputy Wellborn had called in to report that the hounds had found nothing.

Somehow, she wasn't surprised by the negative re-port. Hounds might be okay for chasing down run-away convicts, but this was the twenty-first century. Sifting forensic evidence and poring through crimi-nal databases were the ways to solve crimes, not sniff-ing around the woods. But she had to admit that a night spent at the desk with her reports had brought her no closer to solving the two murders. Where was the motive?

That was one of the first lessons of homicide in-vestigation: find the motive, and you find the mur-derer. But she had a near-penniless drunk mutilated in a churchyard and a farmer with his head caved in by a sledgehammer. As far as anyone could deter-mine, robbery was not a motive in either crime. In fact, the only connection between the two victims was that both lived in the Whispering Pines area. No, that wasn't the only connection. There were more of what she called the BDCs—big damned co-incidences. And most of the coincidences seemed to center on the old church. McFall's buying of it. Frank's spilling his guts about the childhood tragedy he'd endured there. Even the ghost stories seemed to be a red flag of some kind, though she would never in a million years admit that she gave them any credence at all.

Storie looked out the window. The sky was just turning pink behind Barkersville. The two blocks of Main Street were shadowed, the brick buildings cold and empty in the gasp of dawn. A few vehicles were on the road, most of them pickup trucks with tools in the back. People were heading to work, another week to get through before another payday, and then another two days to forget that they had to do it all over again on the following Monday.