Those Who Are About to Die…
(The Host Watched And Lucas Thought They Looked Pleased.)
The man recoiled as if burned by the light, his hands flew to his face, and the girl scampered free. He slapped his hands over his eyes to shield them against the explosion of light. He could see his bones through his palms, the red veins radiating around them. Then he felt something wrap itself around his wrists. His arms were pulled apart with a gentle force that was beyond his comprehension, pulled out either side of him as if he had been crucified.
He strained against it, but he felt no stronger than a child. The grip on each arm was like iron wrapped in silk. It was an unyielding force that held him. He could feel his muscles press against it. It gave slightly as if cushioning him against harm, but would not yield enough for him to break free.
“Open your eyes,” something said. The sound was like a whisper that pushed through the bone of his skull directly into his brain, and his eyes flew open. Before him was a sight he thought would break his mind. He opened his mouth, he wanted to scream, but the breath would not come.
“See yourself,” The voice said, and he did, “Now see me.” Ryan moaned as something in his mind broke, he saw his boy standing before him. The boy was older but the same, taller but unchanged, and he was not the person Ryan had always known while being the exact boy he had raised.
“You will not touch her in anger again Father,” The boy who was no longer a boy said, “She is of my worlds and I will protect her with everything I have,” He said, and Ryan saw a smile flicker over what he thought was his son’s face, “And what I now have is far more than any living soul could handle.”
Ryan was himself again, and inside he felt something dark strain against bonds that Ryan had not put there. The man looked at his son, and his arms were released from Matty’s invisible clutch. Ryan stared at his hands then let them drop to his sides.
“Oh, God,” Ryan muttered, “I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” The boy said, and raised his hand to Ryan’s face. He caressed it as if he were the adult, and Ryan knew that he might be. He was older now, and far wiser than Ryan had ever been. He could see it in the clearness of his son’s gaze.
The girl rose from where she lay on the ground, and Ryan saw she was also bathed in a white light. She was taller, but still the same, older but unchanged, and she gazed at Ryan’s son with obvious love in her eyes.
“Grown-ups are weird,” Charlotte said, and Matty laughed joyously. He took her hand and it was as warm as only true love could be.
“They are,” He agreed and looked at her with grown-up eyes, “I never want to be one.”
“Me neither,” She replied, knowing that the truth of adulthood was to forget all that made life good. Matty took his hand from his father’s face and placed it over hers, and the warmth filled her soul. “I never want to grow up,” She said.
“Are you going to stay my friend Charlie?” He asked with eyes moist from tears of joy, and she gave the only answer her heart would allow.
“Forever,” She replied.
“Forever?”
“Yeah, forever,” She said.
She knew that forever was a very long time.
Matty turned to his father, his face gleaming with contentment.
“You have a job to do Father,” He said, “Do it well and I’ll be seeing you…”
And He was gone.
With the absence of light, Ryan found himself in utter darkness. The floor beneath him evaporated. He hung in nothingness and the throbbing sound of the portal tore through him. It drowned out his thoughts and pulled at his sanity.
Down became up, and he fell.
He landed on his shoulder and the side of his head. His neck muscles pulled tight, and he felt something rip with hot pain. But what came next made it pale by comparison. Something lifted him like a doll. This wasn’t the gentle restraint he had experienced earlier. This was each wrist encircled in pure agony. He felt the ligaments of his joints stretch and pull. His elbow popped and his bicep burned as it pulled tight. All he could see was the blur of movement around him and then the force that held him aloft held him still. His vision cleared and he immediately wished it hadn’t. What he saw was all his nightmares made one.
Lucas landed on his knees, and he felt the impact up to his rib cage. He struggled to draw breath through the debilitating pain. The breathless moment drew out. His head swam, but it was probably no more than seconds. As he struggled, he wondered if this was his moment and found he had no fear of it. If he was to die, then he knew where he would go, and a part of him welcomed it. He coughed and saw blood hit the rooftop.
Then the pain subsided, if only slightly, and he drew in ragged breaths.
They were back on the rooftop, but it looked different. The black congregation were gone, and the sky was stained with the crimson of a coming dawn. His body was riddled with pain, and he knew most didn’t come just from recent experiences but from a lifetime of them. He was old again. As his head cleared Lucas saw what he had just seen clearly for the first time. His mind was unveiled by whatever had made him see the world through the eyes of his childhood self.
He had seen an Angel. It could be nothing else, in the light, he had seen a serene face that held unmatched wisdom. The face had looked familiar, but Lucas supposed that all Angels would appear familiar to the Faithful.
A shadow moved across the rooftop and he looked up to a black silhouette that moved and undulated like a thick blanket blowing in the wind as it dried. It kicked and twisted against the dawn sky but Lucas felt no breeze. He watched it, remembering that a second angel had joined the first. She had seemed more than merely familiar. She had seemed like an old friend, one he had not seen in a long time but still felt a deep connection with, and Lucas wondered if she had been his Guardian Angel.
The shadow shifted again, and Lucas felt a gust of air pushed in his direction from the movement. He raised a hand as if to brush away a cobweb and felt it touch the rough cloth and the shadow kicked again. It was a man. He was held in the air, his feet arching through it inches from the top of Lucas’ head, and as Lucas grabbed the man he saw what was holding the man so effortlessly.
It was a demon. Its skin was the charcoal black of burned meat, as it moved Lucas could see the hardened plates of flesh shift against each other, revealing chasms of raw red flesh. Gelatinous blood hung in ribbons. They wriggled obscenely as the man kicked against them. Its face was a man’s face, Ryan’s face but it had been twisted so severely it barely resembled him anymore. Its lips moved as if it was trying to speak, but the skin around them cracked and it bled a beard of blood over its chin.
Lucas began the words. They flowed without thought. The creature emitted a rattling groan that came from the deepest pit. It twisted its head to the side and Lucas saw the misshapen mass that hung from the back of its head wobble. The light of dawn shone through it and something inside it moved as if trying to burst free. The man it held swung his fist in a clumsy arc. It slammed into the thing’s face, and a black chunk of it tore free, revealing the raw flesh beneath, and the sack at the nape of its neck burst. Something wriggled free, reaching into the morning air as if tasting it. Its shoulders dropped and its head pushed further up from them pulling at the skin of its throat. It was transforming as he watched, into what no one could tell.
Lucas’ words came faster, the sibilants became harsher, the fricative’s more grating until the words were transformed. What started as Latin had become another language. It flowed like a river of shattered ice. Shards sliced and drove into the creature’s spectral body.
Ryan was defenceless. He hung in the things grasp. If it closed its cold fist his neck would pop under the pressure. He knew it would be no harder than if he had burst a grape between thumb and forefinger. But then he heard a murmuring. He couldn’t understand the words but the things that held him could. Its eyes rolled. They were the blue of a man’s lips who had been deprived of air for far too long. Then its jaw dropped open and a thousand needle-like teeth shone.
He brought his fist around in another arc. His knuckle burst on the thing’s teeth. The needle tips piercing to the bone. When it let go he knew it wasn’t the damage he had caused. It was the words. The strange words were all edges and cryptic sounds, they pushed knitting needles into his ears and made his stomach ripple with distress.
He hit the rooftop and rolled. When he righted himself he was already pushing back away from the beast. It stood twelve feet high. Its legs had too many joints and its arms were long enough to touch the moon, it had hard muscles and soft bones that could wrap around you and pull, and tear until a body was no more than a leftover smear.
Ryan had to get away. He knew that he was no longer trapped in that awful dreamlike place. If he was not in his world he was close to it. He turned to run and then he saw the man. He held something up in the remnant of moonlight, the fledgling sun glinting off it. It was a silver cross and Ryan had seen it before. He saw the man’s lips moving and matched them to the words that flowed through him, they didn’t reach him through the air but through something that didn’t require it. He heard them in his mind. No, his mind wasn’t necessary either. Ryan knew that he heard them in his soul, and with that realisation, he heard another voice. It was a memory so acute that Ryan tried to turn his head to catch the speaker but only saw the man holding the cross in front of him like a shield.
“You have a job to do Father,” He heard his son say, “Do it well and I’ll be seeing you…”
Ryan could see the man was on one knee as if he was about to rise, or as he might if he were proposing marriage. The creature moved towards him. The words pushed it back. It was a tug of war. Willpower against willpower and Ryan could see that the man was losing, the creature crept closer, inch by inch.
Ryan had never been one who overthought. His actions had always been impulsive. He would spend time writing lines on a blackboard and fight with workmates over ill-considered words because of it. He would snap at his wife and bring tears to his child’s eyes because of it and it had been the downfall of his every dream.
It was easy to drift to anger when the mere impulse was the god of your being, and so to anger he had drifted. His anger had made loving eyes turn to him with fear and distrust. It had taken his life and turned it into a catalogue of misdemeanours capped with the cherry of true crime. His anger had damned him.
If he had one job left to do he knew what it must be.
Ryan swung at the beast again. This time his blow aimed at the creature’s ankle. The leg buckled and the leg concertinaed bringing the thing to what served it for knees. Ryan was scampering up it, its boiled flesh tearing away in handfuls as he made his way to its head. The cross was raised heavenward, and the words were spoken in their strange half-human dialect. The creature tried to reach for Ryan, but now he was between its shoulder blades. One arm wrapped around its thick neck as Ryan’s face almost slammed into the wriggling mass of worms that had burst from the bulge at the nape of its neck.
It reared up and Ryan felt his legs fly free but he held on tight. The world around him twisted and turned as the creature tried to dislodge him. Ryan held on. He never planned but that meant he knew how to be tenacious. If pure stubbornness would not serve him then anger would. He drove his fist into the nest of worms. The dead flesh was cold inside. His knuckles burned with it, but he pushed them deeper and the creature spun. Ryan saw the rising sun and then the waning moon in quick succession.
Lucas was in a daze as he pushed to his feet so he didn’t see it as it twisted towards him. The impact lifted him from his feet and the air escaped his lungs and wouldn’t return. Then his body hit the rooftop again and he heard a crack accompanied by a massive lance of pain that ran from his shoulder to the opposite hip.
He lay silently, willing himself to be still. His hand drummed on the rooftop, the movement sending fresh pain throughout his body. He couldn’t stop it. His nerves had short-circuited. He tried to speak but couldn’t, he could not breathe in far enough to create words. His breath came in tiny gasps followed by racking pain. He tried to move but that caused a fresh burst of agony, and then he coughed blood into a little geyser and the world turned red and grey.
He could do no more than stay still and watch as the creature twisted and span. The man was on its back, barely holding on as it tried to buck him off. A hand pushed into the meat of its head and withdrew with handfuls of glistening flesh. They were released into arcs of crimson in the morning light.
Lucas moved to see two women huddled together a short distance away, watching with wide eyes. He recognised them both, but could only effectively place the one woman. She had short tousled blonde hair and the sight of her made his heart race a little faster. One was light and the other dark, and one was smaller and younger than the other and Lucas thought they could pass for sisters.
But they weren’t the only observers.
Above them, shrouded in the veil of dawn were a multitude of eyes staring down on them as if they were gladiators at the centre of a coliseum. Lucas thought they were just the stars peeking out from behind the rising sun’s glare, but then he saw them move in independent pairs as their owners shifted for a better view.
It was The Host, the Holy Host looking down on them, watching the struggle. There was no other explanation, Lucas thought, no other reasoning that he could entertain.
He shifted and coughed up blood. He was done. The pain that struck him was so severe that he felt like a bag of broken glass, but he could not stop, not with the audience he saw above. He coughed again and felt something shift in his throat. It felt as though he was swallowing an apple whole. The pain tore through his neck and he coughed again.
He struggled to his feet. The pain was unlike anything. It was euphoric and Lucas understood why some saints would rend the flesh from their bones in supplication. Again he spoke the words as he advanced. Behind him were footsteps in blood where he had stood. His body dripped with it but Lucas was no longer aware.
All he saw was the beast and the man locked in their final battle.
The dawn broke, and it was blinding. The golden sun finally seared the world in its purifying light. The beast smouldered and stumbled back. Its thrashing limbs were weaker, and Lucas’ voice cracked into a wet warble of noises that were no longer the word, they were no longer sounds a man could make.
Lucas coughed and gristle flew from between his lips.
He staggered forward, throwing his arms around the beast and he pushed its legs, they hit the edge of the rooftop and it staggered as the combined weight of the men pushed it over the edge.
Lucas watched as the world tumbled around him, the sweet air pushing against his skin as he fell. He saw a glint of brilliant light and the beast was gone. Its huge body disappeared like a dissipating smoke. He caught the sight of Ryan’s eyes and he saw victory in them. Windows rushed by as many eyes looked on. Behind the veil of sky, The Host watched, and Lucas thought they looked pleased.
And then there was darkness.