by D V Wolfe
“Just to make sure we’re being thorough,” I said. “There were no other common enemies you found between the three ‘saints’, except for them speaking out against the New Covenant preacher?”
Stacks shook his head. “As far as I’ve been able to tell, I can’t find a record where these three had any bad blood with, well, anyone besides Simpson. Their family and friends are horrified about the suicides, and the church has been silent. All three funerals were held at the Nazarene church, which still doesn’t have a steady preacher. And there was nothing about the suicides in the preacher’s column. Which is really strange considering how much he would probably love to nail these three for speaking out against him.”
“What if he was just being nice?” Noah asked. “And he didn’t want to seem happy about the fact that they’d died, because of what they’d said?”
“You think the church having a symbol so similar to the demons is just a coincidence?” I asked Noah.
“Could be,” Noah said quickly.
“And the sulfur on the rope, the pill cap, and the gun cleaning rag?” Stacks asked.
Noah blew out a sigh and shook his head. “I don’t suppose it’s naturally occurring in all three of those items?”
“Definitely not Hellfire Brand Sulfur,” Stacks said.
Noah shrugged. “Then it’s got to be the demons, right?”
“There’s only one way I can think of that would tell us for sure,” Stacks said, turning to look at me.
“What?” I asked. I really didn’t like the way Stacks was looking at me.
“We need your…” Stacks looked pained, “special talent.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your...allergies,” Stacks said.
“Oh no,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut.
“I need to see if you burst into flames when you go into The New Covenant Church,” Stacks said.
I sighed. “You know I will. My skin is starting to itch just from touching these files.”
“We need to be sure,” Stacks said. “I need to know what we’re dealing with. Chances are, if you are in excruciating pain when you walk into New Covenant, then I know it’s just people in some kind of power struggle and it’s a case for the police and the human justice system. But…”
“If I feel like I could roll around on the carpet and blow bubbles in the holy water fountain…” I started.
“Well, I don’t know that holy water is something New Covenant uses, but yeah, that is the idea. If you feel fine, walking down the church’s aisle, I’ll know there’s some supernatural bullshit going down,” Stacks finished with a nod.
I sighed and got to my feet. “Glad my skin peeling and face-melting can be of service to you.”
“Nya always said, you use what you’ve got,” Stacks started.
“Rosetta says that too,” I said, taking a deep breath against the sudden sharp pain in my chest.
“Bane, I’m sorry,” Stacks said. “Nya…”
I nodded. I could already see the pity forming in Stacks’ face. He’d flirted with and teased and been teased by Nya, but I wasn’t sure they’d have called themselves friends. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about either way at the moment. Not when we might have a new lead on the demons behind her death.
I reached down and held out a hand to Stacks. “Well, the day is not getting any younger. Might as well risk an allergy attack and get to the bottom of the shit going down around here.” Stacks grinned and moved back down the hall to the trap door. Noah stood from the couch behind me and I turned to look at him. “You alright?” I asked.
“Me?” Noah said. “Oh, I’m peachy. Just you know, processing the fact that three good churchgoers may have been murdered by other churchgoers… I remember going to church with my mom growing up. They were...good people. I guess, I thought they were, I don’t know...I thought they’d be safe from demons and all that.” For a moment, I saw how young Noah was. Still naive in so many ways. Still...innocent. He sighed. “But here we are, about to go kick a hornet’s nest of possibly demon-possessed churchgoers who are killing people and making it look like suicide.”
“Possibly,” Stacks and I said together.
“And hey,” I said, realization dawning on me. “Walter didn’t say anything about something going down in Messina during the weather forecast earlier today.”
Noah didn’t look convinced. “But you said Walter hadn’t seen anything for hours after and I didn’t hear any weather reports on the way here, did you?”
“No,” I said.
“Shit,” Stacks said. He started to quickly scratch the back of his neck, a Stacks-ism I’d learned meant he was scrolling through possibilities in his head while he worried. “If it is the demons, it’s definitely not a good sign if Walter can’t see them.” No, it wasn’t.
“Really only one way to find out,” I said.
On the way back through the tunnel, Stacks went first, then me, with Noah bringing up the rear and grumbling the whole time. We got out of the end of the tunnel and I looked down at myself, then at Noah and Stacks. We were smeared from head to foot with sludge.
“Not exactly our Sunday best,” I said as Noah and I helped Stacks replace the brush and branches over the opening to the tunnel.
“It’s Tuesday,” Stacks said. “They meet at seven every weeknight. We have about two hours before they get there.”
I climbed behind Lucy’s wheel and watched as Noah and Stacks fought over who had to sit in the middle. “Look, we all smell like we just crawled through shit, so just get your asses in,” I growled. Noah lost the battle and ended up next to me with Stacks on the end. He rolled the window down and stuck his head out, grinning back at Noah as we backed up. “Stacks,” I started as we eased off the Jeep trail and back towards the main road. “Aren’t you worried about being out in the open if you’re being ‘observed’?”
Stacks shrugged. “This is a necessary risk. Besides, I went to Kroger for groceries and no one tried to burn down my house or anything. I think they’re just watching me, passively on the camera, waiting to see me open my door.”
I paused at a light and cut my eyes to Stacks. “And you’re sure it’s the church watching you?”
Stacks nodded. “About seventy percent sure. It’s been there for about two weeks. I didn’t see them install it and I haven’t seen anyone skulking around. I just found the camera signal when I was doing a perimeter signal sweep. The IP address is encrypted and if I poke at it, they’re going to notice. Better just to know that it’s there and take precautions. Maybe I can get into one of the church offices while we’re there and I can find out if they’re the ones behind it.”
We wound through town on the back roads and I drove down the narrow service alley that ran behind the church. I parked at the end so Lucy wasn’t on display in their parking lot, just in case the church building was also being watched.
We piled out and looked at the orange brick structure before us. The neighborhood was quiet, except for a strange low-pitched whistling sound moving through the fence line in front of us.
Stacks turned to look at me. “Anything yet?”
I held my arms out in front of me. I had goosebumps, more out of fear as to what was about to happen to me when I crossed into the churchyard than a feeling that something was off. The last time I’d comfortably stood in a church had been at the old one-room schoolhouse in Ashley which had been converted to Ashley’s Church after the new school had been built. Dad had been with me. I couldn’t remember how old I’d been.
When I’d made it back topside, I’d gone into a puking fit and gotten hives anytime I went near a church, so I’d had to start bartering for holy water with other hunters. Usually Rosetta. “No itching, burning sensation yet,” I said. We looked at the back door, still not moving from our spot next to Lucy.
“I don’t suppose you have your lock picking set, do you Bane?” Stacks asked. Noah snorted next to me and I glared at him.
“Yeah
, it’s in the toolbox,” I said. “Actually I successfully picked the lock on a women’s restroom…”
Stacks held up his hand. “I don’t want to know the details right now. I feel like this is one of those stories where I should have several beers in me before I hear it.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to Lucy to get the kit. The thump of a crash bar being pushed from inside a door echoed across the empty yard and the back door swung open. A little old man wearing a flat cap and a cardigan sweater, rolled a mop bucket out the back door, limping behind it. When he got over the threshold, he paused to look over at us.
“Hello there, folks,” he said with a grin. “Something I can help you with?”
Stacks was the first to speak. He grabbed me by the arm and smiled at the man. “Our…” he looked at Noah and then at me, “sister here, just got in from...Cancun and wanted to pray, you know to get the...uh, sin off of her.” I mentally rolled my eyes. This was why Stacks was never in charge of the cover stories. But, I wasn’t about to take the shovel from him when he was doing such a good job of digging himself a hole. I noticed Noah was looking at him expectantly and I did the same. The color in Stacks’ cheeks was rising, also turning the tips of his ears red. I glanced back at the old man who didn’t look like he believed it either. “So, uh,” Stacks continued. “Is it ok if we just...head inside?”
I expected the old man to see right through us and with our current state of cleanliness, tell us to get lost or he would call the cops. What I didn’t expect was for the man to kick the door, stop down on the door, roll the mop bucket out of the way and pull out a pack of cigarettes. He shrugged as he searched his pocket for a lighter.
“Sure sonny, knock yourself out.” The man sat down on a lone cinder block, turned on its end, and lit up. I decided not to rock the boat and followed Stacks up the walkway, nodding to the old man in thanks. The smell of cloves followed us on the air. Apparently, the church janitor appreciated a clove cigarette just like Festus. I made a mental note to tell Festus that the next time I saw him.
“Uh, that was weird,” Noah whispered as we made it into the narrow hallway inside the back door. There was a janitor’s closet to the left and further down the hall, I could see three unmarked doors that all had deadbolts.
I shrugged. “Maybe they have an open-door policy on the church or maybe the janitor is bored and doesn’t give a shit. I expected him to at least be pissy about our clothes though.” Stacks turned and looked at me expectantly. I stopped. “What?”
He looked pointedly at my arms and I suddenly remembered why we were there. I stopped in the hallway. I felt nothing. No itching, or burning. No skin sizzling like a fast-acting sunburn. I shrugged. “I don’t feel anything.”
Stacks groaned. “That’s what I was afraid of. Just to be sure though, let’s go all the way to the sanctuary.”
The hallway was painted burgundy with dark wood trim and pictures of old white guys holding Bibles hung every few feet on the walls, each illuminated by their own brass track lighting fixture hanging above them. The carpet was stone gray and muffled our footsteps. I felt the skin on the back of my neck begin to prickle, but it wasn’t the painful sensation I’d learned to associate with organized religion. At the end of the hall, the room opened up into a large foyer with a set of double doors with windows that led into the main sanctuary. Noah and Stacks each opened one, leaving me to stand in the middle. I paused. I really didn’t want to feel my skin melt off. A shove from behind pushed me down the aisle a few feet. Nothing. No burning, tingling, or otherwise. I walked a few more feet and decided to go all the way up to the podium and baptismal font. The podium and font were on a raised black stone platform in front of the pews. I looked down at the white stone floor.
“Odd decorating choice to go with a black stone platform on a white stone floor,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re very observant, Martha Stewart,” Stacks muttered. “Now get up there.” I tried to breathe slowly, tried to actually feel what was around me and not the memory of what I’d felt the last times I’d gotten close to a church. I touched the wood of the podium and then took a deep breath and plunged my hand into the baptismal font. Nothing. It felt like a cold bath. I turned back to look at Noah and Stacks. They were coming up the stairs to join me and I flicked some water at Noah.
“Well,” Stacks said on a sigh. “I guess that removes the non-supernatural explanation as to what is happening.”
We heard whistling in the hallway and Stacks grabbed my arm and dragged me back down the steps to the front row of pews. I’d snagged Noah by the shirt and he was now smoothing out the imaginary wrinkle I’d created while giving me a dirty look. The whistle was getting louder and we turned to look at the old man, pushing the mop bucket again.
He stuck his head in the open sanctuary door. “You folks about done? There’s service tonight at seven if you want to come back for that, but I’m about to lock up for the afternoon.”
A thought struck me and I decided to act on it before Stacks stuck his feet in his mouth again.
“Excuse me,” I said, ambling down the aisle towards the man. “I’ve been away and I heard a good friend of mine recently died.” I rolled the dice in my head, trying to think of one that might sound plausible. “Ellie Miller? Did you know her?”
The man took his cap off. His face was drawn and sad, his white hair matted down by the hat. “Yes, I knew Ellie. Kind woman. And those little boys. Well, their father has them now. No idea what made her...go that way. I broke my hip last year and she and her Meals on Wheels made sure I didn’t starve.”
Stacks stepped up next to me and seemed to throw caution to the wind because he said. “Did you know Royson Gibbs and Barbara Mackey?”
The man looked startled but nodded. “I knew them. Good folks, both of them. I know it’s hell to get old, but they had no reason to give up fighting.”
I nodded. “And what’s your name, sir?”
“Nigel. Nigel Allik. I’m the janitor here, but I volunteered with Royson from time to time and Barbara was my neighbor.”
“Have you been the janitor here for long?” Noah asked, obviously trying to be a part of the interrogation.
“I was the janitor when this was New Hope church, two years ago, and I took care of the empty building and now with New...Covenant. It’s...changed a lot,” Nigel said.
“How so?” I asked, wondering if Noah had just stumbled onto a gold mine line of questioning.
“Well,” Nigel began. “For one,” he reached down and held up his key ring. “This thing used to be filled with keys, for the pantry and the audio equipment room and the preacher’s office, the deacon’s office, all of it.” The keyring in his hand only held two keys.
“And now?” I asked, trying to prod him on.
He shook his head. “They changed the locks and wouldn’t give me the keys to nothing, except my supply closet and the back door.” I thought for a moment and remembered the row of doors with deadbolts.
“I noticed some of the doors in the hall seemed to have extra locks,” I said.
Nigel nodded. “Yeah, they’re a real secretive bunch. They only hold their church leadership meetings after I’ve left for the day and they always keep those doors locked.” Nigel’s eyes suddenly shifted from Noah to Stacks and then to me. I had the impression that he was working out in his head what the three of us were up to. He snorted. “It’s too bad those deadbolts are in place. Pointless, really. Those doors are so cheap you could just about lean on them and they’d collapse.” He made a big deal of looking at his watch. “And it’s just about time I take these tired old bones home for the afternoon. My shows will be starting soon and if it’s about making a dress or a cake, I never miss it.”
