Chapter 25
Chapter
I told the devil my plan, and he was silent for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “Come on,” he said, offering me his hand. “We have a lot to do, and not much time to do it.”
I went back to the house to gather my materials. When I returned, the tarp-wrapped body of the pastor was rising from the water, long strings of mud and weeds dragging from it as if the pond were trying to hold on to its prize.
I snapped the chains that bound it with bolt cutters and hurled them aside, finding my own body strangely hot with anticipation.
I stripped the corpse down, hanging the clothes on nearby trees to dry.
It was not as rank as I expected, perhaps preserved by the frigid depths of the pond.
But the skin was still slick and blue, and the abdomen bloated. It would need work.
I drew my knife and rent the torso open from chest to belly.
The viscera swelled upward, released from its prison, and I rolled the body on its side so I didn’t have to go in up to my elbows.
The intestines spilled out onto the grass, and I worked out the remainder with my knife before returning the corpse to its back.
The lungs and heart I had to forcibly scrape out, the blade of my knife bumping over ribs and vertebrae.
“I think that’s good enough,” I said, mostly to myself. “It’ll help with the stink, at least.”
I sewed the body back up, clumsy and hurried; there was no need to make it beautiful, but it had to be tight.
It was strange to me how, even days dead and years older, I saw shades of Norman in certain lines and angles.
It stayed my hands ever so briefly, and for a moment I saw it as the remains of a person rather than a cold, slimy puzzle.
When I’d finished, I stood up and shook out my numb legs. The body was, perhaps, even more horrifying now, the once-bloated stomach sunken over the ribs, blood smeared around the long, hastily stitched gash down the center, more of it matted in the gray pubic hair.
“I don’t envy you,” I said to the devil.
“I’ve done worse.”
I didn’t ask. I gathered the coffin nails and the red thread from my satchel, and the devil stood over the body, interposed between it and the moon so his faint shadow fell over it, matching it hand to hand and foot to foot.
I placed the point of the first nail at the pallid left wrist, lifted the hammer, and drove it home.
The body jolted, a spasm wracking it from head to toe. My throat closed around my scream, and the hammer fell from my nerveless fingers.
“Don’t stop,” the devil urged, just as he had when I took my mother’s teeth and bones. “Don’t be afraid. It’s just the magic.”
I nodded, picking up the end of the red thread and looping it around the nail and then the wrist, knotting it once.
Then I went to the left foot, repeating the entire gruesome process, and then the right, and finally the remaining wrist. Each time I drove in a nail, the pastor’s corpse arched and strained, and each time the devil told me not to stop.
His voice came quieter and quieter, but I didn’t dare turn to look over my shoulder.
When I knotted the final thread, there was a terrible moment of long, cold silence. Sweat dripped into my eyes, and my hands were slick up my forearms from the body’s entrails. “What now?” I asked the devil.
There was no answer. So long did the silence stretch that I nearly glanced back, but then the pastor’s eyes locked on mine.
A shiver of awe went through me. The eyes, by color and shape, were the same as Zeke’s, but I saw the devil in them. “You’re really in there,” I said.
The mouth cracked open suddenly, tendons in the jaw snapping. I expected to hear a breath, a gasp, but of course there was none—there were no lungs in that body. “Yeessss,” came the answer, a sound like an old door creaking open.
Minutes passed as the devil returned movement to the corpse, elbows folding, fingers digging into the mud, knees flexing. When he could finally stand again, it was with the wrinkled old back to me, and I saw the misshapen place in the skull where I’d struck.
“I need some time,” he said; the voice was Zeke’s but also not his at all. “Go get dressed.”
I gathered up my clothes in my bloody hands, and I took the pastor’s too, sodden and weed-netted, and went back to the house.
The pastor’s clothes I threw in the dryer, stinking and filthy as they were.
I brushed my hair and washed the worst of the grime from my face, the blood stinging my eyes as it sloughed away.
When I’d finished, I went to my closet and took out a single clothing bag.
The dress inside was black. The skirt and sleeves were long and full, layers and layers of chiffon; they dragged like filmy hands over my skin. The neckline plunged deeply, the V of my exposed skin a white fang in the lamplight. The bodice pulled in as tight as armor. I’d never worn it.
The dress was a gift from Evelyn. She’d stopped by one day, years ago now, her eyes sparkling as she’d pulled the bag from the back of her car.
“I know this isn’t your usual wardrobe,” she’d said, giddy as a schoolgirl, “but I thought of you when I saw it. I thought you could wear it to the harvest festival with Paul.”
She’d dropped a wink as she said it, as if Paul and I were going together rather than the entire group of us manning different booths and stations the entire evening. The dress was far too formal for any Burrsville event, but I’d thanked her anyway and told her I loved it.
I’d never found a good time to wear it, so it might as well be tonight.
The devil walked the pastor’s corpse to my door some time later. The fingers were still stiff and swollen, the nails tinged blue, so I helped him dress, buttoning the sleeves to hide the coffin nails and thread. He did not speak, but I felt his eyes on me.
“Can you talk yet?” I ventured.
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”
“It’s all right. I know it’s you in there.”
It was true, and yet I found that I avoided looking at him. It was too confusing with him wearing the pastor’s flesh like a mask, and besides, I had other things to focus on now. The real work still had to be done.
When he was dressed in all his dry but stained and reeking clothes, the buttons all done up to hide the nails and the thread and the very top of the incision at the sternum, we descended into the valley.
The walk, which would normally take an hour or more, felt like a scant five minutes.
The meadow grass was soft as paper under my bare feet, the soil cool and damp.
The wind came with us, whipping my hair around my face and the gown around my legs.
On this night, Main Street would usually play host to the harvest festival, and there should’ve been lanterns throwing ghoulish shadows up and down the block, pumpkins stacked in front of the businesses, carnival games and caramel apples.
Instead, the street was empty, but I could hear the faint sound of singing.
Curious, we followed the sound, and it didn’t take long to find where it was coming from.
The Pentecostal church was lit up like a beacon, golden light pouring from the windows and illuminating the sea of faces crammed into the building.
The strains of “Jesus, Savior, We Implore Thee” were so loud I could barely hear the out-of-tune piano playing accompaniment.
The vinyl sign outside, its new red letters slick as viscera, read, Prayer Vigil for Pastor Zeke.
The devil grinned at me with Zeke’s mouth, an expression far too wicked for a pastor’s face. “This is better than I ever could have imagined,” he said, and he seized the double doors and threw them open.
The music swelled into the night, but several people at the back of the church turned at the sound of the doors and fell into startled silence.
Their neighbors in the pews ahead of them sensed the disturbance and looked back, and one by one the voices died as the devil passed by them.
They sank into their seats like slow-moving rows of dominoes until, even from my place outside in the dark, I could see Rachel at the front of the church bent over her hymnbook, Evelyn’s arm wrapped around her narrow shoulders, David standing straight and tall as a sentinel beside them.
The music faded further, and I realized the devil was singing along in Zeke’s slightly flat baritone.
The pianist—Max, I saw—caught sight of him moving up the aisle and stopped playing, the final note a sharp tink that cut off the rest of the singers.
Everyone at the front of the church silently followed Max’s gaze, and the devil was left to finish the hymn’s line on his own:
“In our weakness, Lord, befriend us; from the tempter’s power, defend us.”
There was a long beat of silence, and while everyone else’s faces went rapt with awe, I watched the horror dawn in Rachel’s eyes as she stared at the thing that used to be her husband.
The nails and threads were hidden, the blue bloat of the pond gone, but she could see the devil in him, just like I could.
“Dad?” David asked.
“It’s a miracle,” Evelyn breathed. Someone repeated it, then someone else, and suddenly it was a shouted, jubilant chorus.
Chief Broder, who clearly thought his time was better spent praying than out beating the bushes, suddenly stumbled into the aisle, having climbed over the rest of the people in the pew.
The reflection of the pendant lights glistened on his bald head, and he leaped forward as if he would embrace the pastor.
The devil brushed him aside like a fly and opened his arms to Rachel.
“My wife,” he said. “Your prayers have brought me home.”
The church fell silent again. I saw immediately that she wanted to shrink back. She knew the thing walking toward her was not her husband; she could see the depth of the madness and hunger in its eyes. She rocked back on her heels almost imperceptibly, and for a moment I thought she would run.
But the interest of the gathered crowd held her like a cage.
Almost everyone in Burrsville had come to pray her husband home, and now they were gazing in awe, watching this supposed reunion with bated breath.
She had always been a pastor’s wife; she had made obedience her crowning virtue, always following her husband’s lead but especially in public.
She’d worn that pattern so deep that she couldn’t escape it even now, when she knew she was being hunted by a monster.
In that long-held breath, Evelyn—Evelyn, who always thought she was helping—put her hand on the small of the woman’s back and gave her a gentle push into the devil’s waiting arms. He wrapped her up so tightly that her expression of utter terror was hidden by his shoulder.
The congregants broke into cheers, and I heard “miracle” repeated again and again.
I caught sight of Georgie, just on the other side of David, clapping wildly.
Christine was perched at the edge of the stage as if she’d been moral support for Max’s piano playing, and she stood with her eyes closed, hands clasped over her heart.
The pastor’s corpse released his wife, clasped a brief hand to his son’s shoulder, and ascended the steps to the pulpit. I saw his brief hesitation as he moved to grasp it, as though he thought it might burn him, and the gleam of his grin when it didn’t.
“Something is happening tonight!” he bellowed. “Can you feel it?”
There was a long, assenting noise, almost a moan, from the crowd.
“I have returned, just as Jesus did from his forty days in the desert. You have brought me here. The spirit moves through you!”
Another answering sound from the congregation.
They were starting to move, rocking from foot to foot, arms rising and reaching, heads swaying on their necks like charmed snakes.
“Hallelujah,” someone called, and the rest of them took up the cry.
Rachel was frozen in the front pew, her arms wrapped around her hymnal, and I saw her glance toward her son.
“The spirit moves through you!” the devil repeated, and pointed directly at Evelyn, who stood between Rachel and David.
I couldn’t see Evelyn’s face from where I stood, but her entire body seized suddenly—shoulders lifting toward her ears, fingers splayed and trembling.
She began to chant, at first too softly to be heard over the other voices, but then louder and louder until everyone’s attention was focused on her.
I thought it was a song, but the rhythm was unsteady and off balance, and I realized the words were complete gibberish.
Georgie moved toward Evelyn, concern creasing her brow, but the devil waved her away. “She has been anointed by the spirit! Let it move you! Let it move you!”
The rocking and swaying and nodding of the mass intensified.
The floor groaned under stomping feet, and the pendant lights rattled at the end of their chains.
Evelyn’s chant was infectious; one person picked it up, and then another and then another, repeating the same meaningless sounds.
People stammered and shrieked, and the stamping became jumping and spinning and thrashing.
The pews groaned as people hauled on them, tread on them, and more than once I saw someone fall, unheeded, between them.
Broder collapsed in front of the altar, his heels stuttering against the floor as if in a fit.
The worshippers overflowed the pews, the pounding rhythm of their dance shaking the entire church, and a foot landed hard, pushing Broder’s teeth through the back of his throat.
Perhaps they never noticed, or perhaps they simply had no choice but to dance, but moments later the police chief’s head was nothing but a pile of brain and broken skull on the ground.
Through the reveling throng, the devil’s eyes found mine.
I waded into the crowd, weaving my way through the outside aisle until I reached the front pew.
David was pressed against the wall, his chest heaving in terror, an ecstatic clump of congregants separating him from his mother.
I reached out to seize his hand. His fingers were so wet with sweat that they nearly slipped through mine.
“Come on,” I said roughly. “We’re getting you out of here.”
He came, docile with fright. I folded his hand more firmly in mine and led him away. If anyone saw us go, they would not remember it.