Thomas Sniegoski - In the House of the Wicked

He found her withered body lying on the floor under broken pieces of the dining room set.

“I’m so sorry, my dear,” Deacon apologized, gently picking her up. “Things have become a little crazy.” He found an unbroken chair at the back of the room and set his wife down on it. Stepping back, he allowed the divine fire that pulsed through him to light up his new body.

“Things have changed,” he told her as he spread his arms to show off his magnificence.

Have they? she questioned, her skeletal form slumped to one side in her seat.

“Look at me,” he commanded. “Can’t you see how much has changed…how much I’ve changed?”

I see the same man that I courted and married, she said. A man striving to be better for a world that barely realized he existed.

Deacon was stunned by his wife’s hurtful words. Even after all this time, her opinion of him had still not changed.

“But now I can…”

You can what? she asked huskily. Show how powerful you are, only to have one more devious than you steal it all away?

“That was then,” he muttered. “I would never allow Stearns to…”

Stearns will smell your new might like a shark smells blood in the water, Veronica uttered harshly. And then he will come and he will take it from you.

The power of the angelic now dwelling inside him surged with his rage, wings of fire unfurling at his back.

“Stearns will do no such thing,” Deacon roared, body humming with the power to level cities in the name of God.

I wonder what he will do with all that power, she pondered.

“He will not have it!” Deacon raged.

Perhaps after taking it from you, he will seek out others of a divine nature and take away their power, as well.

“I won’t let him!”

Maybe when all the power of Heaven on Earth courses through his veins, he will pay a visit to God.

“He will not have it,” Konrad Deacon repeated, tendrils of living fire lashing out, setting the room ablaze…setting the corpse of his wife afire.

“That power will be mine,” he told the woman he’d loved, whose dry flesh was burning away to reveal a yellowed skeleton beneath. “Algernon Stearns and all the members of the cabal will pay for their crimes…

“And then I will make my way to God.”

And even though Veronica’s skeleton had become blackened with the intensity of his fire, burning so hotly that the bone was gradually turning to ash, Deacon could still hear her inside his head.

And she would not stop laughing.

Remy called the number on the piece of paper, and the phone was picked up immediately. A voice that sent a slight shiver down his spine quickly asked who it was, and when Remy told him, it gave him an address and abruptly ended the call.

He wished he could have been a little more surprised when he pulled up in front of the former Saint Augustine Church in West Roxbury. Saint Augustine was another one of those churches that everyone in the Commonwealth had read about, closed down by the Archdiocese because of poor attendance and even poorer contributions to the Catholic Church’s coffers, despite it having been a fixture in the old neighborhood for well over seventy-five years. The church had been deconsecrated, and now it was just an empty building waiting to be sold.

Remy closed the door of his car and crossed the street to the steps leading up to the old building. There were two older women sitting in collapsible lawn chairs in front of the entrance.

He knew why they were there; many parishioners of the closed churches had been sitting vigil twenty-four/seven, hoping that somebody with some power would take notice of their protest and eventually reopen their place of worship. Their faith in their cause was admirable, but it had all become matters of dollars and cents to the monolithic church; Saint Augustine, he guessed, wasn’t even a blip on their radar.

One of the women was knitting furiously and looked up as he approached, reaching out to nudge the other beside her, who had fallen asleep, a hardcover book in her lap.

“Good morning,” Remy said, placing a foot on the first step leading up to the entrance of the church.

The one who had been napping eyed him with suspicion. Remy could have sworn that he felt her eyes boring into the top of his shoe.

“Good morning,” the old woman who continued to knit said with mock friendliness. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”

“I don’t think so,” Remy said with a smile and a shake of his head. “I’m supposed to meet somebody.”

The old women shared a cautious look.

“I don’t know who you’d be meeting here,” the knitter said. “There’s only us until we’re relieved at two thirty.”

“There’s no one else around?” Remy asked, suspecting that the old girls knew more than they were letting on.

“Just Clara and me,” the knitter said, as Clara continued to practice her death stare.

He was about to retreat to his car when he caught the sound of a lock being turned, and one of the large wooden doors opened a crack.

“Let him in,” a voice whispered from inside.

“Are you sure?” Clara asked, her beady eyes going from Remy and back to the door.

“I’m sure.”

The knitter dropped her needles for a moment and gestured for him to approach. Remy climbed the stairs.

“Can’t be too careful,” she said, retrieving her needles and picking up where she had left off.

Remy took note of how quickly her hands manipulated the twin needles, and also the fact that they were quite thick and golden in color. He also noticed sigils that he recognized as markings of power etched upon them.

The knitter looked up, realizing that he was staring. She smiled, pulling one of the thick needles from her work in the blink of an eye and pointing its sharp end at him.

“Can’t be too careful,” she repeated, and, having made her point, returned to the blanket she was making. It was then that he chanced a quick glance over at Clara to see her adjusting her book over the pistol in her lap.

“Are you coming in, or do you plan to sit vigil with the girls?” asked the voice from behind the door.

Remy took the heavy wooden door in hand and opened it enough so that he could enter. It was dark and cool inside, and he had to blink his eyes repeatedly to adjust to the gloom.

“Where the fuck have you been?” an unfamiliar voice asked as the figure hurriedly walked away from the door into the empty church. “We don’t have much time.”

“I’ve been on a case,” Remy said, following the man. “Would it be too much to ask why you bothered my dog and scared my girlfriend?”

The figure turned and Remy recognized him as one of the Grigori. “Believe me, I didn’t want to get you involved. It’s just that when I realized how big a cluster fuck this was, and that it likely had something to do with you, I figured you might as well get involved.”

“You’re one of Sariel’s,” Remy said, watching a steely reaction come over the fallen angel’s face.

“Yeah. I’m surprised you recognized a face in the background. I’m called Garfial.” The angel quickly turned around again, motioning for Remy to follow him.

Remy followed Garfial across the deconsecrated church. He was surprised how bare it was; even the wooden pews had been removed, leaving only a large, empty room where the faithful had once communicated with their God. There was a sadness to the space but also something more, and since his senses were still numb, Remy couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

Garfial climbed the stairs to the altar, disappearing through another doorway and then down a set of stairs to more darkness.

Even though his senses were practically dead, Remy could still feel the preternatural energies that filled the air in the cool chamber below the church altar. It was like some kind of strange laboratory filled with tables upon which beakers and test tubes sat. There were stacks of books everywhere, and a number of jars sweaty with condensation, their contents a mystery.