Before he knew what he was doing, Nate rushed at them. Stop! STOP! his mind chattered. But he was as mad as he’d ever been. They were bullies before and they still were. You had to stand up to bullies or you would spend your whole life in fear. You would grow up to be a man like his father.
Nate leapt and came down on top of the trapdoor. It banged down hard. He stood there a moment, seesawing his arms, fear rising in him like a fever. What was he doing? Was he crazy?
“Go away!” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”
He felt like raising his arms in victory, washed in a giddy sense of triumph—until the door popped up with a sharp bang, rattling the chains and spilling Nate onto his ass. He yelped and dug in his heels, trying to crab-walk away from the—
A withered arm shot through the trapdoor gap and snatched his ankle.
EAT KILL SWALLOW EAT EAT HURT KILL EAT CHEW KILL EAT
—schniiik!—
Nate reared back, screaming and clawing at his skull. Something had leapt into his head the moment those fingers closed around his ankle. His mind had been covered in choking oil that blotted everything out—everything except a powerful, uncontrollable urge to break and hurt other living things.
He was in the kitchen again. The trapdoor was shut. The skinny outsider woman was next to him. She held a huge butcher’s cleaver. Her lips moved, but Nate couldn’t hear her. His head was fuzzy. It had felt as if… as if a giant worm or leech had fixed its mouth around his brain, inhaling it into its black guts and transmitting its alien thoughts into him. They were the crudest, the most awful feelings imaginable: of eating and chewing and ripping and just hurting, hurting scared helpless creatures before eating them.
The skinny woman stabbed down with the knife, impaling something on the tip. A child’s hand. Black blood oozed from its severed wrist. She flung the knife and hand away. It skittered across the floor and jammed up under the fridge.
“You okay?” she asked. He could hear her now.
There were five icy blots on Nate’s bare ankle where those fingers had touched him. Nate managed to nod. Whatever had invaded his head was gone now, but coldness continued to seep over his scalp ten times worse than an ice cream headache.
The one-eyed man came into the kitchen, followed by Ellen and the Englishman.
“What happened?”
“One of them was grabbing his leg,” the skinny woman answered the one-eyed man. She stabbed a finger at the Englishman. “What the hell happened to you?”
The Englishman wiped sleep drool off his chin. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how I—”
“You fucking moron,” the woman said.
“One of who?” said Ellen. “Who, Minny?”
“The children,” the skinny woman said in disbelief. “The boy Eli. Jesus, I’ve never seen anything so awful.”
The one-eyed man approached the trapdoor. Nate said, “No, please don’t open it.”
The man pushed him out of the way and lifted the door a few inches. The skinny woman pulled Nate to her chest. The man took another knife off a magnetized rack above the sink, unhooked the chains, and went into the cellar. Nate waited for him to start screaming. Thirty seconds later, he came back.
“Empty. But the outer doors are open.”
“What happened, Nate?” Ellen asked.
The experience seemed too huge and horrible to talk about. The children’s dead eyes, the force taking over his mind…
The one-eyed man crouched beside the severed hand. He touched one finger with the tip of the knife. The other fingers jerked. Nate began to cry when he saw that. Sobs ripped out of his chest, these loon-like whoops.
We’re all dead, Nate thought. Or worse. Death might be better.
He glanced over the skinny woman’s shoulder and saw his father hovering at the kitchen door. He waved at Nate. Apologetically, or just confusedly, Nate would never know.
“Did you see anything, Reggie?” Ellen asked.
Reggie paused, then shook his head. “I was asleep like all of you. Didn’t see a thing.” He swallowed and said, “We need the Reverend’s guidance. He will tell us—”
“We don’t need shit from him,” the skinny woman spat.
Nate glared at his father.
I hate you.
The fury of Nate’s thought zipped through the air and slammed into his father. Nate saw his dad flinch from the psychic pain of it. He went back through the swinging door, leaving Nate in the kitchen.
2
THE REVEREND AWOKE in the chapel covered in blood.
He had been biting his hands while he slept. He’d worried divots of flesh out of his palms and wrists and woke up sucking on his own blood.
Amos was sleeping in the chapel sacristy, in the credenza. He felt safe in there, curled into a ball with the doors shut. He let his hatred collect into a hard little ball, too, nursing it on his own black bile.
His flock had abandoned him. All but a few—the stupidest and most useless ones. After all he had done for them! The bastards! Cunts! He imagined stealing into the mess hall and finding the largest knife to slit all of their Iscariot throats. Or, if not all of them, then those who had instigated the insurrection. He pictured grabbing Otis Langtree’s hair, drawing the skin of his neck taut, and sawing through his treacherous windpipe. Reaching into Nell Conkwright’s mouth, gripping her eelish tongue, slicing it out at the root, and laughing as the blood splashed his chest. Pinning Charlie Fairweather down and carefully slitting his eyeballs, pushing on them until the gooey centers burst through the slit like peeled grapes—
Yes! Nothing would be finer. But of course, he could not. He was physically weak, always had been. His gift was to make people do his bidding through guile and honeyed words and his command of the Good Book… or it had been until now. He was powerless, a declawed kitten. His most trusted lieutenants had instigated a rebellion against him. It made him boil with rage. And now, if his understanding of the situation was correct, it was too late to kill them himself. Langtree and Fairweather were dead. He’d watched the scene out of his window—the one-eyed bastard returning alone, then his assault at the hands of Maude Redhill. Good. It was perfectly fine that those traitorous scum were dead. His only sadness was that he couldn’t have watched the life drain out of them personally.
He heard something out in the chapel.
Amos crawled out of the credenza. His blood sang and his skin prickled all over. He walked out of the sacristy into the chapel proper. The Voice beckoned him.
He walked between the pews. Musical notes came from all around him, but from inside of him, too. Something was there in the chapel with him. But the doors and windows were locked. It was Christ’s sanctuary. Yet it was here. A presence. Something with a massive weight and gravity that sucked at the deepest part of him. His soul, just maybe.
“Hello?” he said childishly.
Up here.
His gaze ascended. Something lurked in the apse, in the shadows above the crucified Christ. It seethed in that arched vault, a dark mass that shifted and breathed and chittered.
“My God…”
Amos Flesher’s heart fluttered. His insides went to water.
Oh no, the thing spoke in his mind. Not God, child.
Of course not. It never had been. That understanding arrived with a thunderclap. What he was hearing now was the same Voice he had followed to this spot all those months ago. Not the voice of God, but a different one—a Voice of chaos and blood. A Voice that hummed like flies sometimes; other times it sounded like a worm of limitless length coiling around and around its own infinite body. And… Amos was fine with that. Yes, he was. The fact rested easily in his head. A gear locked in place, spinning contentedly on its axis.