Chapter 18
First comes a hand.
It settles softly, almost tentatively in the grass. The pale fingers flex, then dig themselves into the sod. I’m reminded of hands gripping flesh, fingers digging into necks and forearms, of bruises and abrasions, of the god’s hands entwined with my own, cutting off Leah’s airway.
Hand over hand, the god pulls itself from the pitch-black mouth of the box. Pale gray, nearly white, forearms emerge, and then elbows too sharp to be human, and then the top of a head that gleams in the lantern light with black, inky liquid.
The god rests in the grass with its head hanging low, its shoulder blades flared like wings above.
Does it breathe? Is it catching its breath? Its back is flexing and contracting, so it must.
It’s this—the sight of the clever machine that is a body working—that makes my throat seize. This isn’t imaginary. It’s not a hallucination; it’s not whatever manifested itself in the basement. This is a tangible body made of flesh and bone and muscle. It’s real and it’s coming for us.
The god’s head snaps up.
It has no eyes. There wouldn’t be any, would there? This thing came from a deep, dark place that wasn’t meant to ever be touched by light. It has a gash stuffed with sharp teeth for a mouth that stretches from ear to ear.
The god straightens from its prone position on the ground.
It’s tall—at least eight feet—and thin in a sharp and angular way.
Though there are no eyes, I feel its gaze on my skin and in my head.
Its teeth hover over the pulse point in my neck despite it being thirty feet away.
Hot breath breaks over my skin. There’s no looking away from the inhuman thing that’s caught me in its fist.
The god’s presence ripples through the cultists on either side. They tilt away as it makes its way down the aisle. I understand. The closer it gets, the stronger the tuning fork at the base of my skull vibrates.
The crosshairs sway, and the ones with the hollow pieces tock, tock, tock delicately. The god doesn’t flinch, not outwardly. Inside, I feel it recoil from the sound.
Being restrained doesn’t stop my body from trying to make itself small.
It’s an unconscious movement born in the same instinctual corridor of the brain where horror and reverence are housed.
I didn’t need to see this thing take down prey to know it’s a predator.
The hair rising on my neck and the sweat coating my body tell me that.
Its feet thump on the steps leading up to the deck. One, two, three, and then it’s here. The god is here, towering above me.
It’s pale like something you’d find under a rock, with oily black smears marking its limbs.
Scars litter its skin, mostly in pairs. The culprit: the stick Ellis held in one of the memories.
A cattle prod. A few of the scars are sloppy asterisks.
Bullet wounds. The worst are the two ragged crosshairs branded into its belly.
A foul smell bleeds from its body. It’s the raccoon that got trapped under our trailer’s skirting until its bloating body burst, releasing the smell and alerting us to its presence.
Pools of shadow form in the contours of its skull; the craters of its collarbones; the ravines formed by its expansive ribs.
Ellis said they feed it more now than ever.
And still it looks like a starved dog left to rot in its cage.
That doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
A sick lion might not be able to take down a buffalo, but it could sure as hell destroy me.
One of the cultists lets out a quickly cut-off whimper. The god shifts its attention toward them, revealing the source of the smell.
Black liquid leaks from open wounds on the jut of its shoulder blades, the back of its arms and elbows, and on the sharp knobs of its spine. There’s even one on the back of its head. I’ve seen similar in the nursing homes where my mom worked. Bedsores. Wounds where the—
skin presses to wood, to iron, you try to uncurl, try to twist, the only way to move is in, to shrink and shrivel and wait
It turns to me again. Its attention is a wet snail dragging its body up the tops of my feet, the length of my calves, across the tender skin of my thighs, my navel, the meeting of my ribs, to the squeezable expanse of my neck. My breath hitches, then comes out shuddering.
“A sacrifice given in supplication,” Ellis says loudly. “Blessings returned tenfold.”
Ellis pulls out a long, vicious knife from somewhere. The gleam in his eyes is just as vicious and twice as maniacal. He raises it in both hands until it’s extended above his head.
This is it, I think. This is it.
There’s a commotion behind the lantern barrier. Ellis’s attention shifts to the rising voices. I want to look, but I can’t tear my attention away from the god.
The god itself is statue still. There’s a twitch at the corner of its mouth so subtle it might have been nothing more than the light sitting odd on its craven body. But then its mouth grows until it’s a grin as sharp as the killing blade itself.
“Keep her still—” Ellis starts.
There’s a wet squelching sound, and then the sort of silence that’s attached to a moment so incomprehensible no words fit around it.
A figure lurches into view. Youth Pastor’s neck is slick with blood turned black by the night. His face is slack with surprise. His hands hover around the wound, so I don’t see it at first.
Embedded just below his jaw is half of a metal claw clip.
Ellis cries out, “Don’t—!”
Too late. Emma darts forward and shoves Youth Pastor with both hands. His arms go pinwheeling. He falls backward into the lanterns in a cacophony of breaking glass and wet choking. Sparks like orange lightning bugs explode from the shattered lanterns. The smell of kerosene fills the air.
There’s a second, just one, where the god stands still, and Ellis is frozen in uncomprehending fear.
And then it’s carnage.
The god moves like a striking snake—headfirst and fast as hell.
It hits the first person—a middle-aged white woman in the closest chair—and sends her sprawling to the ground.
Her strangled scream is cut short by the god slashing her jaw off with its clawed hand.
The god falls on another person. This one makes a horrible wet sound when those claws are plunged into their back.
Its frenzied elation grows stronger with each kill.
Ellis blows the dog whistle again and again, but it doesn’t work.
He’s shouting about the lanterns and crosshair symbols, about staying calm, about remaining where they are, but the cultists are scattering and screaming and falling over themselves to get away.
The fear on his face feels good. It makes me want to laugh.
Ellis remembers the forgotten knife still gripped in his hand. He raises it once more and shouts, “Stop!”
The god’s eyeless face turns on him. Meat dangles from its mouth—red and raw and dripping.
A pot full of calendula cracks against the back of Ellis’s head.
He drops the knife. I flinch, certain I’m about to be impaled, only for it to embed itself in the dark wood of the altar an inch from my skin. Ellis clutches his head and disappears out of my view, though I can hear him groaning.
Emma’s eyes are wild. She picks up the knife, still handcuffed, and saws at the rope holding my wrists above my head.
Fire from the broken lanterns has spread across the brittle summer grass.
Shapes move inside the smoke. A man shrieks, “No! No!” and then says nothing at all.
Another shouts, and then something squelches.
I follow the god through the smoke by the sound of a person realizing they’re about to die and then the wet sound of their body being pulled apart.
The rope comes loose. I sit up and work on unknotting one ankle while she cuts at the other.
Suddenly, Emma gasps and looks down.
Greg lies on the ground with Emma’s leg clenched in his fist. There’s so much blood on him. That can’t all be from his nose, can it? Then I see the wound on his shoulder. Yellow fat and white bone stand out from the red mess of muscle and tendon.
Greg starts to say something. He stops, looks down at his feet, and then he’s ripped away. There isn’t time for him to scream before the sound of his bones breaking fills the air.
Frantically, we get back to work on my ankle ropes.
“The rope! The rope! Cut it!”
“Shit, shit, shit—”
I slide off the altar as soon as the ropes come loose, then immediately lose my balance to numb feet. Emma grabs my arm and helps me stand. We careen through the patio doors, clipping the frame as we go.
I yank the doors closed. They’re the French kind with too many windows and billowy sheer curtains. The spot where Ellis was kneeling on the deck is empty. I didn’t see where he went. Didn’t see him get pulled away by the god either.
Plumes of smoke choke the yard. There are no more moving shadows. No sounds of death—there’s just the dead and the smoke and the god hidden somewhere within.
Feasting.