Purgatory

by K M Stross

  Morrissey turned back to the altar and grabbed one of the circles of bread from the plate. He put it in his mouth, touched the chalice of wine to his lips and turned around, finishing all of the wine and then tossing the cup onto the floor. No sound accompanied its landing.

  “This Eucharist is complete. Get the fuck out of here.”

  Cross blinked. When he opened his eyes again, Morrissey was gone. The pew in front of him was covered in a thick layer of dust and dirt, just like all the others. The windows were broken, and the altar was gone. He stood and shined his flashlight in every direction, stepping into the middle aisle and making his way back to the guestbook in the foyer. He stopped at the doors to the greeting area, a chill passing down his spine. He could feel eyes on his back.

  “Mister Cross, if I could have just a quick word with you, please?”

  Cross spun around, feeling his legs go numb. He shined his light back toward the altar. It was still gone, but Morrissey had returned, sitting on the single step that divided the pulpit from the floor. He was still wearing the ceremonial black robe, his shaggy black hair drenched in sweat. Morrissey stood up and began walking slowly down the aisle, his feet barely touching the ground as he moved in one fluid motion. He looked just like Cross had remembered. The black hair. The scar. The tall, thin frame.

  “What are you doing here, Cross? Have you nothing better to do with your time?”

  “You know why I’m here,” Cross said. He cursed himself for giving in to the hallucination. He could close his right eye, and the image would disappear, but what would he be left with? His cursed eye, vision tunneled and blackened around the edges, just as untrustworthy. He was scared. He could feel it deep in his bones. The fear numbed him. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

  Morrissey laughed. “Beware the ghost of Aaron Abaddon. He haunts this town. He is his master’s eyes while He is away. The eyes will protect Him at all costs.”

  “You’re not real,” Cross said, stepping back. He held the flashlight out, and the beam refused to pass through Morrissey’s body. “It’s a chemical hallucination.” It had to be. The Morrissey that Cross remembered had been quiet, introverted, always anxious about who was here, how they were looking at him, whether their eyes were fixated upon his scar. This wasn’t Gabriel Morrissey.

  The figure in black robes stepped closer again, staring into Cross’s eyes. “I would appreciate it if you did not bring concealed weapons into my church again, Mister Cross.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Morrissey stepped closer so that his hawk-shaped nose was only an inch from Cross’s. When he opened his mouth, Cross’s nostrils picked up the sweet, stale odor of Christ’s blood. “And I would appreciate it even more if you would leave this town. Do not disrupt Father Aaron’s canonization. I may not be able to kill you, but I can still stop you.”

  “Fuck you!” Cross screamed.

  Morrissey cocked his head. “Listen. You never listen.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Listen!” Morrissey said. “Do you hear that?”

  Cross opened his mouth to scream again, but something low, something deep within his eardrums silenced him. He took in a breath and held it, never taking his eyes off Morrissey even as his ears began zeroing in on the sound below his feet. He recognized that sound.

  Ree…

  Reeeee…

  “Sooner or later,” Morrissey said, “You’re going to have to start relying on your ears. The curse isn’t going away.”

  “What did you do,” Cross whispered. “What… you’re not real. You’re a hallucination.”

  Morrissey smiled and stepped back. His body was beginning to fade, the empty pulpit behind him becoming visible through flesh.

  The sound grew louder; Cross recognized it. A rope. A rope, grinding against a wooden beam, something heavy hanging from the end. He tried the door to his left. It had to lead to the out-of-order staircase. It had to go down to the basement. If he could get there before the sound stopped, he could find the source.

  “You’re going to die, Cross.”

  Cross turned and lunged forward, holding out his flashlight like a hammer and swinging it at the visage. His body fell through Morrissey’s and onto the soft carpet floor, kicking up a cloud of aged dust. He got up and looked around—Morrissey was gone.

  But the sound continued.

  Ree…

  Reeeee…

  Cross gripped his flashlight and walked slowly to the basement staircase, his legs numb with adrenaline, the flashlight shaking in his hand. He held onto the banister and made his way down into the darkness, taking each deliberate step as slowly as was humanly possible, as if the sound itself might escape upon hearing someone was descending the staircase.

  Ree…

  Reeee…

  It seemed to reverberate through his body, vibrating the liquid lubricating his muscles and causing each one to tighten up.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Cross carefully walked between the rows of chairs, avoiding the crows who sat perched and watching. His left eye had begun tunneling deeper, and he imagined the medicine in his body fighting a losing war with the curse, which was growing bolder with every passing second. Soon the vision in his left eye would be gone.

  The sound grew louder. His feet tripped over a chair, sending him to the hard floor. He got up, shining the light around the room. No rope. No hanging body.

  But there was a stench. Shit. Piss. Something else, something vaguely familiar that Cross couldn’t quite place. He followed the smell to the other side of greeting room and very carefully walked up the out-of-order staircase, which snaked around like a long, ascending corkscrew. Concrete flaked off the steps, grinding under the soles of Cross’s boots. He kept the flashlight on the stairs, carefully stepping where his right eye deemed it was safest: it was as if someone had simply taken a sledgehammer to each step, slammed it down a few times and continued to the next. Near the top of the staircase, he reached out blindly for the door and instead pressed his hand against the fabric of a shirt. He raised his flashlight.

  Phil stared at him through empty red eye sockets. His mouth was open to record one final attempt at drawing in oxygen, but the knife in his chest had allowed little more than a gasp. His dark skin looked cold, leathery, caked in a salty dried sweat. He was sitting on the last step, leaning hard against the door that must lead out to greeting foyer, long ago locked and abandoned.

  The knife. Cross recognized the hilt, the smooth rectangular dark wood, finished, polished, gleaming like a clean pane of stained glass. He reached down to his boot, touching the empty sheath. His body numbed, and needles crept across his skin, down his arms and legs. The adrenaline slowed for a brief moment and allowed feeling to return, and Cross experienced a staccato thumping in his chest that reminded him of the last time he’d come face to face with a dead body.

  Slowly, he reached out, grabbing for the hilt. It felt comfortable in his hand, reassuring and almost tingling with satisfaction that it had finally been used for its primary purpose. Cross pulled, gently, sliding the blade out of Phil’s chest with a sickening wet slurp that sounded like a lover’s post-orgasm withdrawal.

  He studied the knife, the coagulated blood on the blade, the way the hilt seemed to conform to the grooves in his palm. He wiped the blood off on Phil’s shirt with shaky hands. It was his knife. It had to be.

  When had he lost it? Who had found it? The knife had been purchased in Seattle, years ago, when Cross had first picked up Morrissey’s scent. He had purchased it with one intention: to run the blade through Morrissey’s chest. Since then, it had remained in the sheath on his boot, waiting, becoming a part of his wardrobe until he no longer even noticed the hilt when it rubbed against his calf as he walked.

  Everything felt unreal, more so here in the basement than in the chapel where the visions had first formed. How long had he been in the chapel, watching the hallucination play out? Cross’s mind doubled back, contradicted itself and questio
ned the very memories now running through his mind’s eye. Nothing felt real. In his memory, his vision was clear, absent the dark tunnel produced by his left eye. In his memory, the image of Morrissey standing in front of the pews was solid and opaque.

  Phil was holding something in his right hand. Cross reached out and peeled the cold stiff fingers away one at a time. It was a card, laminated, bent and creased under Phil’s clutch as if he’d been trying to crumple it in his hand. Cross shined the flashlight on it, reading the cool blue letters with his right eye, sure it must be a part of the hallucination. It was an ID card with the name Keyshaun Williams, his picture next to the name and below that, the word journalist. Below that: The Arizona Daily Star.

  Cross stuffed the card in his pocket and ran back down the stairs. He ran through the basement, tripping once over another stray folding chair, wrapping up his ankle and landing hard on his knees while the crows took flight above him, screaming. He got up ducking under the flapping wings, following the concrete pillars to the safety of the other staircase. He grabbed the banister, realizing briefly that the edge of his knife had run across his palm during the fall and opened his flesh to the stinging dust covering the wood.

  “Morrissey!” he screamed at the top of the staircase. He ran toward the greeting area, scanning the darkness as he went. His eyes darted violently in every direction as shadows jumped out of the corners of his vision. The darkness seemed to fill the church to a bursting point, seeping in through the broken windows and expanding the walls. They threatened to break apart under the pressure, like an overfilled water balloon.

  Cross stopped in the greeting area and reached into his pocket, but his flashlight was gone. It had fallen out, or he’d simply dropped it in his delirium. He turned back to the chapel. Morrissey was standing in the aisle between the pews.

  “I’ll kill you,” Cross said, holding out the knife. He felt his back press against the doors leading outside. He wanted to leave, to breathe deep and stare up at the stars, a reprieve from the suffocating darkness. He couldn’t breathe except to force the words out again: “I’ll kill you.”

  Morrissey opened his mouth to laugh, but no sound came out. He took a step back. As he did, Cross could see the empty pulpit behind him. Cross blinked, and when he opened his eyes, Morrissey was gone.

  The cawing of crows bubbled up from the basement.

  CHAPTER 14

  Cross sat on his bed, staring out onto Abaddon Drive, dark except for the stars hanging above the buildings. Below the window, the air conditioner sticking out of the wall was chugging out a cool, salty smelling air. On the bed lay three prescription bottles, all open, their contents spread out across the white sheets. Red pills, blue pills, red-and-white pills, a veritable assortment of American pride, the best drugs Big Pharma could dish out—none of them, however, looked tampered with or otherwise suspect.

  Cross leaned down again just as he had only minutes ago and minutes before that, closing his left eye and examining each pill under the table lamp. None of them had any chips, any distinguishing marks—if someone had broken in and tampered with his medicine, they had done an exceptional job.

  What made it all so hard to believe?

  “It wasn’t real,” he whispered.

  But Father Aaron had been real. Morrissey could have impersonated a lonely priest, dumping the body in the middle of nowhere, applying some make-up to hide the scar and even getting a nice, conservative haircut. Or perhaps Father Aaron Abaddon had met Gabriel Morrissey in the church one night, and Morrissey had convinced him of a plan that would lead to Abaddon’s canonization. They could have worked together to carry out whatever God-forsaken scheme the two had concocted. Morrissey’s interest in chemistry and the priest’s natural fascination with miracles, maybe.

  “It was a hallucination.”

  The images had felt so real, and yet the only time they changed was when he closed his eyes and then opened them, a telltale sign that his brain wasn’t taking in the images correctly. He’d been sleeping for close to twelve hours a night since arriving. His left eye had grown progressively worse. Color was beginning to fade: the drapes were blank, the floral pattern on the bed dull as if someone had adjusted the contrast overnight. The images in his left eye were far away, running down a long dark tunnel and he had no hope of reaching the end. Through his right eye, he could see color—hope. Through his left eye, there was nothing but the promise of darkness, a curse for a sin he had yet to come to terms with. Penance, in Morrissey’s own words.

  The phone rang. Cross picked it up slowly, still staring at the pills.

  “Hello.”

  “Father Cross, this is Sheriff Taylor.”

  “Sheriff…” His mouth dried up. He could almost smell the stench of Phil’s body lingering in the cramped room.

  “Sorry to call you so late. I’ve been looking through a few files that I thought might be helpful to you and I found the address of the woman who witnessed one of Father Aaron’s miracles. I had to do a little running around yesterday to find her.”

  Cross sat up. “When can I talk with her?”

  “I could take you down there tomorrow morning if you want. You speak Spanish?”

  “No,” Cross said.

  “Well, she doesn't speak English, but I could interpret for ya.”

  “Yes, that would be fine, Sheriff.”

  “OK, excellent.” The sheriff paused to scribble something very loudly on a pad of paper. “Why don’t I go ahead and pick you up at ten?”

  “That’ll work just fine, Sheriff.” Cross paused. “Sheriff…”

  “Still here, Father.”

  Phil was dead. Nothing would change it. Stay focused, Cross thought—don’t stray when you’re so close.

  “Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Cross hung up the phone and walked over to the small table, taking a seat. The newspaper clippings littering the table were all different, all written mainly after the disappearance of Father Aaron.

  All but one. He closed his left eye and picked up the article, reading through it as best he could. It was an obscure story, one he’d found while combing the local papers in Phoenix. A body had been found in the desert west of Phoenix. Teeth removed. Burned to the point of cremation. The police wrote it off as a spillover from the drug war on the border, unable to come up with a positive identification. The writer was Keyshaun Williams, and the profile picture at the bottom of the article was clearly Phil. Smiling. A few years younger.

  Something had led him here. A clue that the police in Phoenix weren’t covering. Or maybe one they brought to Sheriff Taylor’s attention, which was then tucked away or thrown away or ignored. Whatever it was, Keyshaun had lied to Cross. He’d done it so well that Cross hadn’t even noticed.

  He stared at the article, considering whether to ask the sheriff about drug use in the town. Or drug dealers. Before he could make a decision, his legs forced him to the bed, where he carefully put away the pills without taking his daily dose. He rested his head on the hard pillow. He thought briefly of Phil’s body, Keyshaun’s body, of the need to give it some sort of religious closure, but exhaustion had already begun to deepen the blackness.

  He dreamed only of revenge. A sort of religious closure his own life warranted, a closure that took precedence over Keyshaun’s life and anyone else’s who might have crossed paths with Morrissey. Time was running out. Even in his dreams, the dark tunnel was closing in.

  He woke with the pressure in his left eye worse than before but without the dizziness that usually accompanied each morning. The alarm was buzzing, but its bright red numbers looked clear through Cross’s good eye. He turned off the alarm and stumbled into the bathroom, staring at the pills under the bright halogen bulbs. He spread the pills out, tasting them with the tip of his tongue and using his right eye to inspect them under the magnification of the bottom of one of the water glasses. Nothing looked or tasted out of place.

  The pressure in his eye wasn’t unbearable. The vision loss was alr
eady irreversible—the pills would do little.

  His pointer finger touched one of the red pills, sliding it across the countertop. He slid another nearby, then another, arranging the pills into the constellation of Virgo. Then he arranged the blue pills into the constellation of Taurus, superimposing it on Virgo so that the pills looked random and scattered to the untrained eye. With the red-and-white pills, he built the constellation of Gemini. Here were the two brightest stars, Castor and Pollux, and then from there it was just a matter of drawing an invisible line in a U-shape, tilted slightly. He pointed the ends of each pill toward the next star in the constellation.

  There. Now, if someone broke in and tampered with the pills…

  He left the bathroom and opened the bedroom shades, spotting the sheriff parked in the small parking lot. Taylor was waiting patiently in his car, moving his mouth to the words of a tune blaring over the radio.

  When Cross stepped outside, Sheriff Taylor got out and opened the passenger’s door. “Hop in, Father. Get outta this fucking sun. Damn, but it’s gonna be a hot one this afternoon.”

  Cross sat down, and the sheriff got back inside, whistling a high-pitched tune. He pulled the car back onto the road, heading west. Cross buried his feet in empty Pepsi bottles and Snickers wrappers. “I appreciate this, Sheriff.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Taylor said. He turned down the radio, so only the low, rolling bass of the country tune was audible. “Spanish takes a while to master, it really does. It can get confusing if you ain’t immersed in it day in and day out.”