The boy shook his head vehemently, panic twisting his dirty face. "I…I…can't." He looked at his mother's hand and saw a ruby ring of scars on her finger, swollen and bleeding, glowing beneath the golden candlelight.
"You
must!
" she insisted. Eyeing him tearfully, she released his hand and touched the glistening ring of scars on her finger. "You see this, don't you?"
He nodded.
"You are His son. You are the sinless one."
He knew—the previously unseen ring on her finger exposed her marriage to Christ.
He looked at the crude rosary in his hand. Beneath the beads, in the center of his palms, ruby bruises emerged.
Soon they would start bleeding.
She stood. "You have seen what evil does to men. You must use the goodness in your hands to restrain evil and place it back to where it belongs."
He gazed up at her, disbelieving.
I am the sinless one…I am the son of Christ.
"Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"Had I known it would come to this—"
The door to the room burst open, and one of the church builders appeared.
Evil had him.
He stood bare-chested in the threshold, streaks of blood defiling his body and face. His scalp was in tatters, hunks of skin hanging away to reveal white bone underneath. His eyes were rolled up into his head, revealing harsh, gleaming whites.
In his hand was a Civil-War era sword, its blade dripping with blood.
He stepped into the room.
The woman stood in front of her son, protecting him from the possessed man.
The man raised the sword, and lunged forward.
"Run! Now!
" the woman shouted, shoving her son away with an arm behind her back. The boy screamed. He thrust the rosary into his pocket and stumbled around the table, past the builder. He tried not to look at his mother…but was unable to tear his eyes away from the blade of the sword as it sliced into her shoulder. Blood jetted out, dousing the builder's hands.
The builder yanked the sword out. The boy's mother collapsed to the floor in a convulsing heap. Blood spouted from her wound. The builder raised the sword again…
The boy fled the room. Behind, he could hear the heavy grunts of the builder; the sound of the sword cutting into flesh and bone; his mother's agonizing screams of death.
Crying, he charged through the dark hallways. He passed into the church, nearly completed but utterly empty—a sight he never imagined possible. Five years of work, and no one here to embrace its otherworldly pleasures. He crossed the altar and exited into the rectory hallway.
He paced the dark passage, slowly, quietly. At the entrance to the rectory, he paused, listening intently. Through the sound of his heaving breaths, his ears picked up echoes of torture coming from the meeting room—the moans and screams of evil's victims, the guttural laughs of those caught in its grasp.
He clutched the rosary in his hand. It was warm, and moved slightly, like a snake in grass. He looked down at it and could see blood in his hands now, two jagged lesions centering his palms.
Stigmata…
He shuddered and moved into the rectory, knowing for certain now that he
was
the only one capable of salvaging the lives of those still alive.
I am the sinless one.
He walked down the hallway toward the meeting room, listening to the screams coming from inside.
In his mind, his mother's voice came:
The rosary will protect you. Heed its word and do your part to bring down the evil that promises man the end of days…
At once he recalled the moment the crate broke at the bottom of the pit. A sound like wind gusting from out of some violent storm had emerged, and then from within the crate a black chalice floated up into the air, to a spot four feet above the edge of the pit.
Everyone present had dropped to their knees, praying to the miracle before them.
But his mother…she had seen something else fallen from the crate, and while everyone else's eyes were fixed upon the floating chalice, she climbed down into the pit and took what appeared to be a set of rosary beads. She'd gripped the beads in her hand, seeing now for the first time what she'd come to expect all her life: the ring of ruby scars around her finger. She shuddered uncontrollably, knowing she couldn't disclose this incredible discovery with anyone except her son, for he was the only one—the sinless one—meant to use it for its true intent.
The boy entered the room.
And saw the chalice.
It was floating over the center of the pit just as he'd first seen it, black and glossy, covered with blood and fire. Below it was a scene born straight out of hell: the church builders, standing at the edge of the pit, covered in the blood of those they'd just sacrificed—their wives, sons, and daughters.
In their hands were the tools they'd used to build the church—the weapons they used to slaughter their innocent families.
Piece by piece, limb by severed limb, the builders fed their victims into the pit. From an unseen point below, thin streams of blood arced up and splashed into the chalice. From within the chalice itself, fires and wind raged, torturing the boy's ears.
The builders turned and looked at him. Their eyes were upturned, their faces bloody masks.
The boy held the rosary out before him.
The men cowered and screamed like burning witches…and then from within the bowels of the pit a wretched beast rose up, composed of blood and mud and the severed body parts of those slaughtered. Its head, formed of the heads of those recently decapitated, rolled back on a twisted bundle of spinal cords with a horrible cracking noise. The mouths of the human heads screamed in unison, expressing the beast's distress.
The boy stepped to the edge of the hole. The workers fled to the corners of the room, moving in odd jerking motions. Those still not sacrificed or possessed by the beast screamed hysterically and scampered away through puddles of blood and gristle.
The beast roared—with failure, with expectation, with disorientation.
The boy stepped to the edge of the pit, just feet from the beast.
Still holding the rosary out, he reached for the chalice…
Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the end of days.
Genesis 49:1
Stigmata is a phenomenon observed in a number of Christian saints and mystics for which no satisfactory natural explanation has been offered yet. It consists of the appearance, on the body of a living person, of wounds or scars corresponding to those of the crucified Christ.
Encyclopedia Britannica
I
n his dreams, he witnessed the past, hundreds of faithful worshippers—men, women and children—flocking to share their beliefs within the walls of the church he now slept in. They'd built the church by hand, working endless hours until they lay fatigued and bleeding and perhaps near death. Ultimately, some men did indeed perish beneath the watchful perfection they aimed to create, their bodies laid to rest in the cement foundation poured beneath the wooden floors.
And what colors! The statues, the altar, the tapestries, the pews, each erected with utter devotion for those waiting to worship beneath their ethereal lure. The columnar supports, artistically carved to portray the story of Jesus's birth; the vaulted stained-glass ceilings and arched doorways, constructed to further inspire a reflection of the heavens. Here was heaven on earth, a protective sanctuary that offered peace, solitude, and gratifying conformity to the appreciative masses.
Something is calling me. And I must follow.
But these were just dreams—dreams of the past over a hundred years gone. He'd been having them ever since forcing entry into the abandoned church nearly two weeks ago. He remembered how the grates leading in from the subway tunnel had been old and rusty, proving easy enough to remove; the ventilation ducts just wide enough to crawl through. He'd made every effort to keep his special place hidden from the others—he
had
to, there were beds on the second floor of the rectory! But soon word got around, and the church filled up with his street brethren in a few days, all of them marking their territories upon the damp mattresses and carpets like stray cats on a doorstep.
When Jyro was a young boy and his mother was still alive and called him Jerry, she would tell him that
All good things must always come to pass
. Time and time again the adage proved itself true. And here it was again: just as things were growing uncomfortably crowded in the rectory, the construction crews arrived to tear up things on the floor below.
Some of the vagrants fled back into the streets and subways, unable to cope with the round-the-clock clamor. Others found the beds good enough reason to keep their heads buried and suffer through the noise, so long as the crews remained downstairs. Jyro on the other hand was unaffected by the harsh tolling of the jackhammers and circular saws—years on the city's streets had made him immune to loud noises—and slept soundly.
And in his sleep, the dreams of the mysterious past continued, seizing him like a fly in a spider's web.
Something is calling me. And I must follow.
After six days and nights of endless toiling, the workers ceased their activity. As the sounds faded into the night, the dreams left Jyro, and sleep escaped him. He tossed and turned endlessly, the moans and snores of the others—Jyro had counted nine in all—driving him toward madness.
How is it that grinding machinery lulls me to sleep, but the snores of men hit my brain like a shots from a nail gun?
He sat up and gazed at the sleeping bodies lying side by side in the shadows. One of the squatters, a man named Larry who had one ear and two teeth, kept a collection of pilfered tools alongside himself as he slept. Jyro thought it strange that the workers below never saw Larry rummaging through their things.
It is also strange that the workers have yet to come up here and discover us.
Unable to sleep, Jyro decided to investigate the quiet goings-on in the church below. Carefully he reached beneath Larry's blanket and 'borrowed' a halogen flashlight. Then, while the others slept, exited the bedroom and padded down the dark hall, tailing the wide beam, looking left and right and turning around to make certain that none of the others saw him.
He descended the still-carpeted steps, each creak like a firecracker pop beneath his plodding footsteps. He reached the bottom and went into the rectory lobby.
The room was fairly large, and at one point perhaps served as a living area for the priests and deacons. Cracks twisted up the walls and across the ceiling. A sole emergency beacon in the ceiling provided a dim glimpse of light, revealing a desk, a sofa, and a number of metal folding chairs perched against the wall. Everything was coated in dust.
Jyro stepped to the center of the room, swinging the flashlight back and forth. To his left he saw a hallway, ominous as it trailed away into darkness. He held the light up, narrowing his eyes as he gazed forward, but didn't see any evidence of work being performed here.
He moved into the dark hallway.
On his right he passed a doorway that led into a small white-tiled lunchroom. A row of rusty combination lockers followed, lining the wall like soldiers. Ahead, piles of splintered wood came into view, burying the threadbare carpet like the remains of a sunken ship.
He stretched his right hand out, feeling blindly along the lockers as he went. Soon he came to a large opening in the wall, a double-doorway. He grasped the splintered jamb and crossed the threshold, facing what appeared to have been the church's recreation center: a fifteen-hundred square foot gymnasium with a small stage running the entire length of the far wall. He shined the flashlight upon a lone basketball hoop anchored into the ceiling, then swung it downward, where he immediately beheld the hideous work of the construction crew.
In the hardwood floor was a hole, so large that it swallowed up nearly half the gymnasium. It resembled a trench in some war-torn countryside, the edges jagged and splintered upwards. Jyro could see a fold-up card table dangling precariously at the far edge, like a brown leaf clutching its withered branch in the last days of fall.
He stepped forward. In the trembling beam of the flashlight, he could see a variety of tools shoved against the stage and wall, white dust coating everything like snow.
Something is calling me, and I must follow.
The words surged through his mind again like an undertow, grasping him and forcing him to press on. Trembling, he took another step forward, frayed boots crunching on bits of debris. A sudden flash of heat enveloped him, making it difficult to breathe. Encroaching grayness created a tunnel of vision in his sights, forcing him to focus solely upon a lone dark spot in the hole. He stretched his arms outward toward the spot.
It is calling me. Something there…
The uneven edge of the opening met his feet. For a moment he remained still, frozen in place. Then the floor dropped out from under him. He pinwheeled his arms for balance, but slipped down, the flashlight falling from his hand and clunking somewhere nearby. His tattered jacket got snagged and tore down the back. He thudded on the rock-hard bottom six feet below amidst a pile of talus, his breath escaping his lungs in a painful
whoosh
. He rolled over and something jabbed painfully into his ribs; he cried out and rolled back.