Thomas Sniegoski - In the House of the Wicked

It was the saddest of songs.

A lament of the past, but also of the future.

And as the first notes of the song began-the first words of a divine message whose meaning meant only death, the first strains of power began to flow into the child and into the machines beneath the bed.

And Algernon Stearns truly understood the meaning of the word God.

If only for an instant.

Steven Mulvehill had been raised Roman Catholic.

As a child, and even into his late teens, he had attended Mass every Sunday, had gone to Sunday school, had received all the blessed sacraments, and had even been married in the Catholic Church.

But he’d never really thought of himself as a believer. He went through all the motions but could never truly commit to the idea of a guiding force in the universe, especially since he was a homicide cop, especially after all the badness he had seen.

How could there be any supernatural guidance with the kinds of things he saw going on every hour of the day, and not even just in his city, but all over the world?

It all seemed so terrible…so cruel.

So the older he got, the less he went through the motions, and the further he drifted away from the faith he had practiced since childhood.

Then he met Remy Chandler and he learned that there actually was a powerful force out there in the universe, a Creator of all things; that there really were such things as angels and devils, Heaven and Hell. And one would think that after all those years of wondering-questioning a faith that had been part of his life since he was old enough to walk-that would have meant something special to him.

It’s true. It’s all true.

Yet all it did was make him afraid.

Steven had been enticed by the world that Remy Chandler had hinted at, but he’d managed to keep it at arm’s length. He didn’t want to know because he wasn’t sure he could handle the truth.

And the verdict was in: He couldn’t. It was too much for his little human mind to wrap itself around.

Now he couldn’t even bring himself to talk to his friend or go out into a world that he now knew was vastly different and far more dangerous than he could ever hope to realize.

It terrified him, and that fear made him angry.

It made him angry that he had not yet gone back to work, that he had sustained injuries in his confrontation with something not of this world, something from a world that Remy Chandler, up until then, had kept him safe from, something that had almost killed him.

Something that had pulled back the curtain and forced him to look at a world that he did not want to know about.

And now he hid, locked inside his apartment, venturing outside only to buy the bare essentials-cigarettes, whiskey, microwave dinners-dreading when he would run out of something and have to venture into the world again.

Mulvehill was disgusted with himself, but it did not make the fear go away.

He guessed he was looking for some sort of answer, something that would tell him that everything was going to be all right, which explained why he found himself sitting in front of the television set in the middle of the afternoon, waiting to hear a little girl speak a message that she was supposedly getting from the Big Guy Upstairs.

There had been some sort of technical difficulties and the newscasters were wasting time until things were up and running again. He’d heard all about the little girl and how she’d been in a coma for years, until a few weeks ago when she unexpectedly awoke and started talking about how God was going to speak through her.

He remembered the Steven Mulvehill of a few months back, and how he would have scoffed at something like this, but after seeing what he’d seen-experiencing what he had-maybe God really did have something to say to the world.

And maybe it would be enough to give him the courage to leave the house again and get on with his life.

He’d gone to the kitchen to get some more ice for his second whiskey of the afternoon when he heard one of the newscasters say that they were returning to little Angelina. Mulvehill plucked three cubes from the tray in the freezer and hurried back to the living room.

Sitting down on his sofa, he reached for the bottle of Seagram’s and was just about to pour two fingers into the glass when his eyes touched on the screen.

The little girl’s face filled the television, and he was nearly brought to tears by the beauty of her. He couldn’t have pulled his eyes from her even if he had wanted to; it was almost as if she had gone inside his head, the message she was about to speak spoken only to him.

One after another, the Grigori drew their weapons.

The receiver was ready, open to broadcast her message- their message — to the waiting faithful.

Armaros gazed around the studio one final time, taking in the last sights he would see before his tortured existence was finally brought to a close.

The sorcerer stood ready, a look of euphoria on his face as he awaited the flow of death energy. And the pained expression of the Seraphim, Remy Chandler, imprisoned within a sphere of magick-he could see the terror in the angel’s eyes.

“It is for the good of them all,” Armaros proclaimed, positioning the tarnished blade above his heart.

“Don’t do it!” Remy managed, but it was too late for Armaros and his followers to be persuaded otherwise.

Now the Grigori would deliver their message. The Lord God is watching and He is very disappointed in what humans have become. But with their sacrifice, the human race still had a chance to reach its full potential.

“Brothers,” Armaros said, addressing the others of his host. They, too, held their blades, poised to strike, ready to end their lives in a flash of brilliance-a flash that would touch those who were watching and listening.

A flash that would end the Grigori’s lives and the lives of those waiting to hear Heaven’s message.

“The curtain falls.”

And with those words, the Grigori plunged the knives into their chests, piercing their hearts.

Their final message, their final cries flowing into the child, and from her…

Out into the world.

Rita Dollans moved her wheelchair closer to the television screen so that she could see. Her body had been racked with rheumatoid arthritis for years and she had great difficulty getting the chair precisely where she wanted it, but she managed.

And now she eagerly waited to hear what the Lord had to say.

Denise Kelleher cradled her crying infant in her arms, rocking him ever so gently. She wanted to hear the message, and as she bent forward to pick up the remote from the coffee table, as the little girl’s face filled the screen, and the child prepared to speak…

Her baby went quiet.

Almost as if he wanted to hear the message, too.

Dillon Ratner looked at his watch as he sat in the waiting room of the Toyota dealership. He’d been there for well over two hours. He’d brought a book and had read several chapters, but was now tired of reading and tired of waiting.

He was about to get up and check on the progress of his Camry when he noticed how quiet it had become in the dealership, everyone around him transfixed to the image of a little girl on the sixty-inch flat screen that hung on the wall.

Curious, he reached up, pulling the headphones that were attached to his iPhone from his ears.

And was assailed by the message.

The message had started to crawl into Peter Vestmore’s mind. He hadn’t any intention of even listening to the sickly-looking kid, wanting instead to check on an eBay bid he’d made for an original The Good, the Bad and the Ugly movie poster, but there was something in the little girl’s eyes, something in the strange, foreign words that she was speaking.