The room went quiet for another few seconds before, one by one, the children nervously took up their knives and followed Becca and Patricia’s motions. Very soon, a foul stench filled the room as more than a few bladders loosened as the campers placed their torn up wrists into bowls of lukewarm water, swiftly reddening with blood, and lost control of their bodily functions.
“Douglas?” whispered Becca.
Douglas, who hadn’t slashed his wrists yet, turned to her, a questioning look on his face. Rather than speak, she leaned over and gave him a light kiss on the lips.
“It’s really, really okay,” she murmured, then slipped into unconsciousness.
Douglas stared in horror as Becca face-planted onto the table in front of her, her arms flopping to the side as her bowl careened onto the floor. With a great clatter that seemed to continue, a number of other children around him began fainting as well, dumping over their own blood-filled bowls as their bodies plunged forward or they fell clumsily out of their seats. As their collective wounds continued to bleed out, bloody water splashed up onto Douglas’s shoe, causing him to flinch.
That’s when he felt Father Billy’s hand on his shoulder.
“It’s your turn,” said the priest.
“I thought we were all going to go together, Father,” Douglas said. “Where’s your knife?”
Douglas suddenly felt one of the nails digging into his side as Father Billy moved in close, the spike gripped in his fist.
“I was curious, Douglas,” Father Billy whispered, ignoring the chastising tone in Douglas’s voice. “Where did you get the flare gun?”
“Found it,” Douglas said defiantly through gritted teeth.
“Found it where?”
“Behind your cabin, near the washing machines,” Douglas replied. “By all of the fan belts you tore out of the Jeep. And those black work suits you keep washing the blood out of.”
Father Billy nodded, having figured as much.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I did,” Douglas replied. “To God, over and over and over again. I told Him it was you, but He didn’t listen. He didn’t do anything to stop you.”
“But you’ll tell Him now, won’t you?” Father Billy said, pressing the nail harder into the boy’s side.
“No,” Douglas said.
“No?”
“He’s not there,” Douglas said, plainly. “He probably never was. We’re all idiots.”
Douglas fell silent for a moment, holding Father Billy’s gaze.
“But, I would never have known that if it wasn’t for you. So, I have you to thank for that.”
Douglas suddenly raised his knife and Father Billy stepped back, afraid what the boy might try. But then, Douglas simply slashed his wrists, deep and with great violence. Father Billy was momentarily taken aback, but then kept the boy’s gaze until, a half-minute later, he passed out as well, his body tumbling to the wet floor with a splash.
Father Billy stared down at the body, still thinking about Douglas’s words. He found them strangely moving, but knew that only a few seconds later, Douglas would discover their inaccuracy on the other side, just not in the Heaven that the priest had promised.
That’s when he heard the most bloodcurdling of screams from behind him:
“AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!”
Deep and tortured, it came from just outside the screen door in back of the priest. He whipped around and saw Maia looking in at the room full of dead children. Her gaze moved up to Father Billy, but then down to his hand where he still held the blood-stained nail in his fist.
“Maia...,” Father Billy began, but as soon as he spoke, the girl turned around and ran away into the darkness of the camp.
“No!” he cried, then raced for the door. But by the time he ran out, Maia had already disappeared.
“Damn...”
The rain had stopped for the most part and the camp was now completely bathed in darkness, save for the lights in the classroom and one still glowing in the administrator’s cabin. Father Billy stormed to the dead center of the campsite, removing a second nail from his pocket and holding them both out in hands.
“Where are you?!” he roared into the night. “You run, you hide, you just make it harder on yourself!”
He looked all around, but saw no sign of the runaway girl. He was furious at having been caught. Another person who would have to die. But God put her there, didn’t He? If she’d just stayed wherever she’d been hiding. The diving platform.
The rain.
God had forced her to shore.
That’s when Father Billy sank to his knees, his hands falling dully at his sides, the nails tumbling into the mud. He thought about Douglas’s words, about Cindy’s, and about Mark’s and whether or not he put any stock in them. It was a miracle. He knew this. No tumor or hallucination. It couldn’t possibly be. But how could all of this have resulted from a miracle?
He didn’t know the answer and his eyes began to throb even as he thought about them. What was worse, he didn’t feel one step closer to the truth than he had three months ago. Doubt, the killer of faith.
After a long moment, he finally reached down, picked up the nails and got back to his feet.
“Maia? Faith?!”
Father Billy had stalked around the perimeter of the camp site for almost twenty minutes before deciding the pair were in one of the camp buildings. He’d moved back towards the screened-in classroom and checked the mess hall first, looking under every table and bench, his dark silhouette shadowing over everything thanks to the rising moon. Frustrated, he kicked over a few of the benches, hoping the sound might spook the girls into rabbiting.
Girls, plural, of course. It had taken a few minutes, but he’d come to realize that if Maia was around, Faith must be, too. She hadn’t been with Cindy’s group or the prayer circle and he didn’t think her the type to strike out into the woods on her own. Anyway, she’d been on the diving platform with the purple-haired girl, so it was safe to say she was now here in camp.
“FAITH!!” he shouted, storming into the kitchen.
He opened cabinets, pushed aside the large mixing bowls and pieces of equipment just in case the girls had managed to squeeze back there, but then turned his attention to the walk-in refrigerator.
With one of the nails raised in case someone came flying out the second he opened it, he grabbed the steel latch and swung it wide — only to find it as empty as the mess hall.
“Shit,” he cursed.
He left the mess hall and scanned the dark woods beyond, wondering again if they were somewhere out there, but then began going cabin to cabin. In each, it was more of the same. He overturned bunks and tore through wardrobes. He searched cupboards and looked behind shelves. He considered the idea that they had somehow gotten under the cabins, but when he checked the crawl space grates, he found them rusted shut, so he quickly surrendered that idea.
When he came to Cabin 4, the smell of the place hit him before he even opened the door – well over twenty rotting corpses. He covered his face and imagined that if Maia and Faith were going to hide anywhere, it would be in here. He moved through the room, angrily pulling back the covers on the bodies – David, Judy, Leilani, Penny, Whit, etc. — many of whom looked badly bruised as the blood remaining in their bodies had pooled against their backs and extremities. The violence of misshapen necks, gouged eyes and broken limbs was that much more obvious against pale, bloodless skin and Father Billy had a hard time children could be to blame for their injuries.
The bodies were also beginning to bloat, likely aided by that afternoon’s heat working in concert with the rotting, partially-digested food in their stomachs. It disgusted him, but not so much the smell as, but again, the recurring belief that this was how little God cared about his people.
He made his way to the back of the cabin, but soon saw that neither Faith nor Maia were in this cabin, either. He looked out the window towards the parking lot, but knew that if they’d tried the roa
d, there was very little he could do about it. He sat down hard in a nearby chair and was just about ready to decide that that’s what they’d done.
That’s when he looked down at the floor.
Faith and Maia had been hiding in the counselor’s cabin for the better part of an hour, but in opposite corners of the building. They had split up in case Father Billy came in and they needed to decoy him back out or something; the “something” being a hastily-made and instantly regretted agreement that if he caught one of them, the other wouldn’t stay and fight, but would run away as fast as they could and not stop. The only reason they hadn’t taken to the road before was because Father Billy seemed to have the ability to appear anywhere in the woods at any time. They figured he must have some other, hidden form of conveyance (a four-wheeler?) or simply a better knowledge of the woods than any of the campers. They hadn’t considered that it was more like good planning, exploiting a few short cuts and dumb luck, but they were in a heightened, paranoid state-of-mind.
They had first gone into the administrator’s cabin, but upon seeing Cindy’s burned-up body, which Faith initially believed meant that she had gotten caught up in the forest fire, but somehow made it back, they decided to go elsewhere.
“If she’s dead, that means we’re the last ones,” Maia had whispered.
“Mark and Phil...,” Faith replied hopefully.
“If they made it out, they would have called the police first thing,” Maia said. “We’d be rescued by now.”
Faith agreed, which led them to the counselor’s cabin. There were closets, cabinets, nooks and crannies galore and they prayed that Father Billy wouldn’t know all of them.
They’d easily found their respective hiding spots, Maia behind a hot water heater and Faith in a small, attic-like crawl space above what had been Cindy and Judy’s room and waited. It was just when Faith began thinking they were home free that the lights of the cabin snapped on and Father Billy called out to them.
“Faith and Maia,” he said, evenly. “I know you’re in here. I’m going to find you within seconds. I don’t expect you to believe me, but if you want to just come clean now, I’d like to talk to you both.”
Faith, tucked in a tight corner, held her breath, unsure what to do. She didn’t believe Father Billy, of course, but it sounded like he believed himself, which gave her pause. Regardless, she stayed perfectly still.
She strained to hear Father Billy’s footfalls, but he had gone still. She wondered if he’d left, but then he appeared in the doorway of the room she was in and she felt her heart leap into her throat.
Faith looked down through the slats of the ceiling as Father Billy turned on the light, which was so close to her face she was momentarily blinded. When she got her eyesight back, she saw that Father Billy wasn’t searching the room, but was on his hands and knees, looking at the floor. In this fashion, Father Billy moved from the doorway, past Cindy’s bed and over to the shelves that Faith had used to climb up into the crawl space and seemed to know exactly where she was as if he’d acquired the abilities of a bloodhound and had scented her all the way across the room. He looked from the shelves all the way up to the slats in the ceiling and Faith realized he was looking straight up at her.
But that’s when Faith looked down at her feet and saw it: mud.
In their haste, Faith and Maia had left an easy-to-follow trail leading directly to their hiding spots. Faith held her breath, imagining that the next sound she heard would be Father Billy rapidly ascending the shelves, pushing aside the crawl space door and yanking her to her death, kicking and screaming. Her whole body went cool with dread.
But then Father Billy did a strange thing. Still eyeing the ceiling, he let a wry sort of smile cross his face and reached into his pocket where he withdrew something long and shiny – one of the nails – and set it on the bed. He looked back up to Faith, but then turned and walked out of the room without a word.
Faith focused on the object on the bed, unsure what it was, though it looked like some kind of oversized tent spike. Why would he leave that behind? She didn’t understand, but didn’t plan on asking him any time soon.
Faith waited for a few more seconds, thinking he’d be coming right back, but then heard a horrifying shriek coming from the other room.
Maia.
Faith leapt into action, kicking through the crawl space door and scrambling down the shelves leading to the floor. She was halfway to the doorway when she stopped, looked back at the nail and went to pick it up. With it clutched in her fist, she ran into the living room.
“FAITH!” Maia screamed the second she saw her friend enter. “Run!!”
Faith looked at Maia and saw that she was being held tightly by Father Billy, who had one of the other nails at her throat. Maia looked terrified, like how she had been not even an hour before when she’d rushed to Cabin 6 to tell Faith what she’d seen in the screened-in classroom.
“He’s going to kill me,” Maia whimpered. “You have to do what we said. You have to run!”
“Father Billy, don’t...,” Faith whispered, beseechingly. “Please. Please.”
“Faith, but it’s already been a long, long day of too much talk,” Father Billy said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”
With that, he raised the nail and drove it directly into Maia’s chest.
Maia exhaled as if punched, her breath tinged with a blood-red mist indicating a punctured lung. an expanding splotch of blood swelled around the deeply embedded nail and soaked the t-shirt she’d thrown on after discarding her bikini back at the cabin. It was the one Faith had first seen her in, the one with the frog and “Rome” written over it.
Father Billy turned and let her sink gently back onto a nearby chair, extracting the bloody nail as he did, leaving a ragged, gaping wound.
“NO!!!” screamed Faith, eyes exploding with tears. She raced to Maia’s side, throwing her arms around her friend. “Oh, God, no, please, please, no, no, no...”
Faith looked into Maia’s eyes, which were already rolling back into her head. She grabbed Maia’s face, trying to focus the girl’s gaze.
“Look at me, Maia, please,” said Faith. “Stay with me. Please. Please, Maia. I love you. Please, just... God, let her stay with me. I can’t live without this person. Just this one... please...”
Her last “please” was in a tone so hushed that Father Billy could barely hear it. He was almost embarrassed by the sound, as if eavesdropping on someone’s loneliest prayer.
“Faith?” he said, touching her shoulder.
“Fuck you!” she roared, batting him away. “Fuck you!!”
She turned back to Maia and, for a quick second, it looked as if Maia was staring right back at her.
“Hey,” Faith whispered gently. “I’m here. Talk to me. Please, honey. Talk to me. I love you...”
But the fluid that was building up in Maia’s brain chose that moment to flood over, pushing blood out through Maia’s eye sockets and tear ducts. Father Billy had driven the nail through her breastbone, directly into her heart. She’d been alive for maybe a second after it had pierced her skin, but was gone by the time Faith had reached her side.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no...,” whispered Faith, holding Maia tighter and tighter as she sobbed, her lips curling back and body quaking as her hands dug into Maia’s hair and pulled her close. “No, no, no, no, no...”
Faith cradled Maia for a long time and cried, Maia’s blood soaking Faith’s clothes. Faith didn’t make a sound, not really anyway, but shook every few seconds or so as her tears kept coming.
When she finally went still, Father Billy spoke.
“Faith, I know you’re angry and that’s anger I needed to create...,” he began.
Faith whipped around, her face filled with fury.
“You evil bastard. You sick, mean man. She was all I wanted out of the whole wide world.”
Father Billy was shaken by Faith’s words and was surprised to feel tears rising behind his eyes, so s
tartled was he by her passionate and emotional outburst. He reached out to her, but she batted his hand away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, meaninglessly.
“Fuck you!”
Without another word, he walked over and picked up the nail that she’d dropped to the floor when he stabbed Maia and placed it next to her hand. She looked down at it, then back to Father Billy, incredulous.
“I need you to kill me,” Father Billy said haltingly. “I wanted to give you the anger you’d need to do it with supreme justification.”
“You what?” Faith cried, incredulous.
“It’s for God,” Father Billy said. “You have to do this to punish me. For God. He’ll forgive you. It’s righteous vengeance.”
Faith looked down at the nail and certainly considered it for a moment. She couldn’t believe Maia was dead and the pain was incredible, but she just didn’t have it in herself to pick the nail up.
“You’re going to have to kill me, too,” she said, finally. “I’m not going to do it. You started this, you finish it. I don’t care. I just want to be with my friend and if not here, then in Heaven.”
Father Billy hesitated, but then rose to his feet. He didn’t know what to do next. God had obviously continued to outmaneuver him and killing Faith would do absolutely nothing. He turned to head out of the cabin, no idea where to go next. He was a man alone and he’d never felt the impact of that greater than in that moment.
“Wait, I need your help,” came Faith’s voice from behind him.
Father Billy turned, surprised to see Faith looking back at him, however miserable.
“I just don’t want her to be... you know, another number when the police and everybody get here. She wouldn’t want to be found that way. Help me. Please?”
It took some doing as Faith was exhausted and dehydrated, but she and Father Billy finally made it all the way out to the dock carrying Maia’s body.
“What now?” Father Billy said, gently lowering the corpse onto the end.
As an answer, Faith kicked off her shoes and stripped down to her underwear.
Sunday Billy Sunday Page 19
