“Walk! Walk! Walk!”
The chant went on and on, and eventually Kendra manage to rise to one knee. Compelled to move forward, she eventually made it back to her feet.
One foot in front of the other, as if she was only just learning to walk, each step labored, every step threatening to take her down again.
She stared at every girl as she passed, recognizing some of the faces—Janice, Beth, and Charlotte—but most of them were unknown to her. Halfway to the tree, she spotted Lacy.
Unlike the other girls, her eyes were downcast, her face red.
Please, she pleaded. But this was quickly replaced by another, singular word in her head.
Walk.
And walk she did.
Kendra’s world closed in on her as she neared the tree, memories of all the horrible people that she had arrested flashing in front of her eyes. Before she knew it, she was standing on the small wooden platform, her back pressed against the hard trunk of the massive tree.
Somewhere far away, she felt a rope being pulled tight around her neck, and then another cutting into her biceps. Kendra glanced down at her pale, naked body, which looked like a slab of ivory in the moonlight. Only her scars had color, each of the inch-long raised bumps pink, standing out.
She closed her eyes and tried to regulate her breathing.
This is it, she thought. This is the end.
Kendra opened her eyes and turned her head as much as the rope tight around her throat would allow.
Mother stared back, her eyes, like those of the sisters, red.
“You could have joined us,” the woman said, her voice monotone. “You should have just joined your sisters.”
The woman was playing with something in her hands, but Kendra couldn’t seem to look away from her eyes.
“We had high hopes for you, Ken-Ken.”
A soft light finally drew Kendra’s eyes to the object that Mother was toying with.
Oh god.
“Such high, high hopes.” She made a clicking sound with the corner of her mouth.
The light was a flame from a barbecue lighter.
Kendra experienced a sharp intake of breath.
Part of her knew that she was going to be burned alive, but before seeing the flame, it had been a sort of abstract notion.
Part of her knew that this had always been her fate; for as long as she could remember, she’d suffered from a nightmare of the burning tree in the swamp. And this was uncannily similar. If it weren’t for what she had already seen, for being able to hear the sisters’ thoughts, she would have been floored by this revelation.
But as it was, Kendra was numb.
An audible snap could be heard throughout the swamp as Mother let go of the lighter trigger.
Kendra exhaled.
“Lacy, why don’t you go stand beside Ken-Ken?”
“No!” Kendra moaned, her struggle against the ropes suddenly invigorated.
Lacy raised her head and her blue eyes went wide. The other girls responded by lowering their own gazes.
“W—w—what?” Lacy stammered.
Mother sneered at the young girl.
“If you aren’t part of this family, Lacy, then you are against us. We have values, family values—values that you aren’t willing to uphold. Your actions put our entire family in danger, which is something I just can’t stand for.”
Run, Lacy! Turn and run as fast and far as you can.
But every one of the other sisters heard Kendra’s thoughts, and they were faster than little Lacy. The two lines collapsed into a circle, the innocent girl in the center.
Kendra turned back to face Mother.
“Please,” she pleaded. “Take me—leave her alone.”
Instead of answering, something shimmered across Mother’s face, once again offering a split-second image of a different woman. No longer was Mother a pretty lady with shoulder-length blonde hair and full pink lips. In her place was a hideous, charred creature, a blackened thing with strips hanging off of her face like someone had taken a cheese grater to a hunk of overcooked brisket.
Someone shoved Lacy, and she stumbled forward.
Kendra thought it might have been Charlotte, but couldn’t be sure.
“You are against us,” Mother hissed.
She flicked the lighter, and the flame reignited.
Chapter 65
Brett turned the corner of the house, and all of the air was immediately sucked out of his lungs by what he saw. His legs refused to keep moving, and his feet slowly began to sink into the mud.
He heard Father Callahan pulling up the rear, huffing and puffing, and then the man stopped at Brett’s side.
“My God,” the priest whispered.
They were staring at maybe two dozen girls of varying ages, all with matching blonde hair, who had formed a semi-circle around a large tree.
Brett squinted, trying to make out the details in the moonlight. He couldn’t see much, but what he saw did nothing to relieve the paralysis that gripped him.
There was someone tied to the tree.
“Kendra,” he whispered. Then his eyes fell on a man, standing beside the tree, his lips pressed together tightly.
Martin.
A bright light suddenly flashed beneath Kendra’s feet, and only then did he realize that in addition to being tied to the tree, she also appeared to be standing on a sort of stool. And then the flash acquired the familiar characteristic yellow-orange glow.
They are going to burn her alive.
This stark realization spurred Brett to action. He turned, intending on telling Father John to go back to the car, to call for help, but the man was gone.
It was for the best, he surmised. This was no place for a man of the cloth.
Brett turned back to the scene in front of him and started to move, his shoes making horrible sucking noises in the mud. His goal was stealth, and based on how everyone was transfixed on the tree, he thought he might be able to get close enough without them knowing despite the noise.
Seventy feet.
Fifty.
Forty.
With every step, the fire grew. Now, less than thirty feet from the nearest blonde head, he heard another sound in addition to the slurping of his shoes and the crackling of the wood.
A voice.
Kendra’s voice.
“Please,” she was saying. “Please, don’t… not her. Do what you want with me, but don’t do this to her. I’m the one that you want, take me.”
As the fire grew—three-inch flames tickling the underside of the stool—Brett neared and he began to make out more details.
To his horror, he realized that Kendra was naked; completely nude, the scars that he recognized from the many nights that they had spent together seeming to glow in the pale moonlight. But that wasn’t the worst part. Brett tried to swallow the lump that suddenly formed in his throat.
It wouldn’t go down.
Kendra wasn’t alone. There was a girl tied to her, her back pressed against Kendra’s stomach.
Jesus.
The girl’s head was bowed, but when Brett took another step, raising the director’s pistol up in front of him now, she lifted her head.
For the second time in under five minutes, the air was forced from Brett’s lungs.
It was a little girl with pigtails, her round face awash in a flickering orange glow from the growing fire beneath them.
It was Lacy McGuire.
Brett forced himself forward again.
“Please,” Kendra whispered. She was crying, tears falling from her face and dropping onto the girl’s head.
And then he was within fifteen feet of the group, and, fearing that the flames would soon be licking both the little girl’s and Kendra’s feet, he leveled the gun at Martin.
“Put out that goddamn fire or I’ll put it out with your blood,” he shouted into the night.
He continued to walk as he spoke, aware that in addition to Martin’s hazel eyes leveled at him, near
ly all the girls had turned and were now looking at him as well.
“I’m warning you, Martin, I will shoot.”
The man appeared frozen, his body facing Kendra, his head twisted at Brett.
“Brett? Brett, is that you?”
Brett’s eyes flicked to Kendra’s tear-streaked face, but movement in his periphery immediately brought his attention back to Martin.
It was the girls. They had started to move, collapsing the semi-circle, clearing a path for him to walk through. On any other day, Brett would have been flabbergasted by their reaction; a strange man wielding should have sent them scattering, especially the older girls. Instead, they seemed completely oblivious.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that they were complicit in watching Kendra and one of their own—sisters? Are they really sisters?—burn alive.
What the fuck is going on?
He turned back to Martin.
“Kick the burning logs out from under her, and do it now.”
“Brett, please, you can’t be here. Please, Brett, you need to leave. Things are—”
Brett ignored his partner’s pleas. Her judgment was no longer sound—hadn’t been for a while, maybe. It should never have come to this.
His eyes skipped across the girls’ faces, trying to pick out those from the missing persons reports, but it was like finding a specific ant in a colony.
It was impossible; they all looked the same.
Sisters…
His frustration bubbled over.
“Put out the fucking fire!” he yelled.
Martin still didn’t move, which prompted Brett to take several more aggressive steps forward, the girls moving quickly now to allow him passage.
Kendra cried out as the fire reached the soles of her feet, but it was a blur of movement on the other side of the tree caught his attention.
A pretty woman with blonde hair, dressed in a long white gown that looked from another time, stepped out of the shadows.
What the fuck?
Stranger still was that the woman appeared to be smiling.
“I knew you would come, Brett.”
The words drew Kendra’s gaze as well as Brett’s.
As he watched this strange woman move closer to Kendra and the girl, a shimmer passed over her face. It was as if a swaying branch suddenly came between the woman and the moonlight.
Brett’s eyes bulged. The woman’s pretty face suddenly transformed into something else. He blinked twice, trying to force away the fatigue that was causing this hallucination.
But it didn’t work.
The woman’s face had become something horrible, something blackened and crispy.
“I knew you would come,” she said, her voice regressing into a horrible slither.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he realized that the air around him was becoming warmer, and that the girls who had been so eager to get out of his way moments ago were slowly closing in again.
“I was hoping you would come.”
Brett screwed up his face. He wanted to look away from the horrible thing in the white dress, needed to look away for fear of being sick, but he couldn’t.
If Martin hadn’t chosen that moment to make a break for the woods, Brett didn’t know how long he would have stared at the strange creature—at mater est, matrem omnium. But the sudden movement in his periphery broke the spell.
He swiveled awkwardly in the mud and instinctively pulled the trigger. The muzzle of his gun flared three times, but Martin was quick. Even though Brett was a good shot, it wasn’t his pistol, and when he had first sized the man up, he had been stationary. But now, zigzagging before vanishing into the dark woods, it was a much more difficult shot.
All three bullets missed.
Fuck!
Brett began to turn toward the woman in the dress, intending on running toward her, when something struck his left calf.
“No!” Kendra screamed. At first Brett thought that the fire had reached her toes, but when he looked down and saw one of the girls wrapping herself around his calf, he knew that her cries had nothing to do with her own predicament.
She was screaming for him.
“Get off me,” he grumbled, trying to shake her free.
“Leave him alone!”
The girl couldn’t have weighed more than forty pounds, but she had rooted her body in the mud. As he tried to shake the first girl free, another lunged and grabbed his other leg.
“Fuck!” he shouted, trying to move forward, to get away. But then a second girl jumped on top of the first, and she was quickly followed by two more.
Before Brett’s fatigued mind could make sense of what was happening, he was being dragged down into the mud. He tried to keep his gun level, to point it at the woman—Mother, her name is Mother, the girls are with their mother—but the weight of the girls crawling all over him now was just too much, and he was too tired.
Stay up! Stand up! Kendra will burn to death!
But the best he could do was to keep his eyes on Mother, who was again the blackened creature, her lipless mouth open in a grating laugh.
“No!” he shouted as he fell to his elbows. One of the girls was on his back now, trying to force his chest down to the mud. Only then did he realize the girls’ true intentions.
Save their Mother and Father, sure, but they were also trying to drown him—to push his head into the mud and asphyxiate him.
Mother’s laughter intensified, and Brett found it impossible to look away. Even as Kendra started shrieking, now clearly from the fire, he could only stare at that horrible black orifice in the center of its face.
Back in the church, he had passed judgment on the two priests, thinking them relics of another era for believing in demons.
Back in the church, he’d thought demons only came in the human variety.
He’d been wrong.
The thing standing beside the tree was from another era, and it definitely wasn’t human.
When a shadow appeared at her side, slinking out of the woods behind her, Brett thought at first that it was Martin returning.
But as the hunched figure made it further out of the woods and into the moonlight, he realized that the form was too old, too stooped to be Martin—Martin, who had bolted like a track runner into the woods.
And then the man’s black shirt came into focus, as did his white collar.
It wasn’t Martin.
“Father John,” Brett whispered, and Mother’s laughter immediately ceased.
Chapter 66
Father John held the cross out in front of him in his right hand, reaching forward as far as his crooked body would allow. His heart wasn’t so much beating in his chest anymore as it was buzzing—irregular, frenetic.
“Demon,” he said, trying to sound strong.
The word came out weak, more like a gassy whisper than a demand.
The woman that stood less than ten paces from him hissed.
Not a woman… a demon. She is not a woman.
He recalled what had happened with Christine, how the exorcism had failed because she hadn’t actually been possessed. Even Father Callahan had conceded as much.
Like Brett, Father John didn’t believe in demons on earth.
At least that was what he’d thought before seeing the thing standing in front of him now, the hideous, horrible thing. There was true evil in this world, demons that didn’t belong. And it was his job to send it back to whatever hell it crawled out of.
“Demon,” he repeated, moving the cross toward her. “In the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ—”
The woman hissed again, and her face changed into something different. Something burnt.
Father John cleared his throat, trying his best not to let the demon’s tricks distract him.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, I demand that you leave this vessel.”
She hissed again.
“I won’t leave shit, you fucking fake. I am here, I am Mother, and me and my children wil
l tear you apart.”
The demon laughed. It was a horrible grating sound.
“Mater est, matrem omnium, you old fuck.”
John continued with the words that he had first heard Father Callahan utter all those years ago, undeterred by the threats.
“You are ordered to leave, to abandon this vessel of God that you have inhabited, that you have stolen from our Lord and Father.”
Father John took another step forward, even as the figure before him continued to undergo its transformation, revealing what it really was.
You are the most important part of the exorcism, Father Callahan had said. You must believe.
The woman’s feet, protruding from beneath the hem of the white dress, started to change. No longer were they the pale pink flesh of a woman. Instead, as the priest watched, the toes merged into three claws with huge talons extending from the ends, the foot itself turning a deep black.
If he hadn’t believed before, there was no question he did now.
“Leave this vessel!” he yelled, pulling a small round bottle of holy water from the burlap sack that hung around his shoulder.
This time when he stepped forward, the creature’s obsidian eyes darted to the bottle.
“You think you can stop me with that?” A forked tongue snaked from between the woman’s lips, leaving dark stains where it touched, as if removing makeup.
A scream broke through the night, and Father John used all of his willpower to keep his eyes locked on the demon before him.
He was not oblivious to the fire that crept up Kendra’s and the little girl’s legs—it was nearly to the girl’s knees now. But his role in all this was to exorcise the demon.
He couldn’t help her; Brett would have to do that. If he didn’t take care of matrem omnium, they might wish that they had been burnt alive.
“Jesus Christ is our savior, he sacrificed himself for our sins, and he shall accept your sins as well.”
“Fuck you!” Mother shouted. She grew more hunched before his eyes, her back curling unnaturally, thick, knobby vertebrae poking through the sheer fabric.
It was starting to cower.
Father John popped the top off the billiard ball-sized bottle of holy water and then, in one motion, flung the open end toward the demon.
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