Except Father Ramos did not think God’s attention was on Magdalena yet. The Lord knew everything, so obviously He knew that the angel had been killed, but maybe He was busy elsewhere because the knowledge had not been acted upon. Once God focused the full force of His wrath on Magdalena, there wouldn’t be just crumbling marriages and missing children. There would be wholesale destruction. Vengeance from above.
And that was what Father Ramos feared.
The chapel needed to be swept, the pews polished, the confessional cleaned, but all that could wait until morning. He was beyond tired, and after he put out the candles and checked all of the doors, he intended to turn in immediately and let his worries be washed away by sleep. Yawning, he started up the aisle.
“Hector.”
Father Ramos had not heard the voice since that first night, though he had been dreading its return every second of every day, and he jumped at the sound of it. Once again, it came from everywhere and nowhere, was all around him, and with a cry of terror he fell to his knees, clasping his hands in prayer, closing his eyes tightly.
The laughter came, that terrible sibilant laughter, mocking not only his actions but his very existence, and, wide awake now, he sent up an entreaty to God, begging that his life be spared though he knew the Lord did not condone cowardice such as his.
As before, he heard the sound of shuffling, as though something large had entered the chapel and was lumbering up the aisle. Last time, he had turned to see what was coming, and there’d been nothing there. He opened his eyes, hoping for the same result.
But this time there was something.
A creature of dirt, a bastardization of God’s creation, not man but monster, fully eight feet high and as wide as two humans, had entered the chapel from the vestry and was shambling toward him. It had no arms or legs, only slightly delineated sections of its bulk that roughly corresponded to limbs, and it advanced in an almost waddling manner that did not require the independent movement of feet. The head, however, was less rudimentary, and despite the fact that its features were formed by the placement of small rocks and indentations of mud, it looked less like the primitive face of a child’s snowman than that of a perfectly rendered classical sculpture. Its expression was one of sly malevolence.
The cold had come again, not merely a change in air temperature but a complete transformation of the environment, as though the church had been dropped into a new and different atmosphere.
“Hector.”
The voice bounced around the chapel, echoing from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor. He did not think it came from the shambling monster, but the two were obviously connected, their strings pulled by the same puppeteer.
The Lord God.
“Forgive me,” Father Ramos babbled, his hands still clasped in prayer. He closed his eyes. If he was to die here and now, he wanted to do so in a state of forgiveness. “I am and always have been Your humble servant. I know I have done wrong and will accept Your judgment gratefully…” The words, spoken increasingly fast, flowed into each other. The creature, he was certain, had been dispatched to take his life, and he needed to unburden himself before he died.
He continued praying, and he sensed the presence of the monster next to him…but nothing happened. He did not open his eyes, afraid to find out what was going on, but beneath the by-now-rote prayer, his brain was spinning. If the monster had not been sent to kill him, why was it here? It certainly had a purpose and a reason for being.
For the first time, he thought that perhaps the angel had not been sent from God.
No. That was blasphemy. God would punish him for doubting.
It wasn’t blasphemy, though, was it? He knew that the creature they shot down was an angel, but maybe the only reason he was so certain was because the thought had been planted in his head. Maybe the blasphemy was believing that that grotesquerie was one of God’s servants.
He closed his eyes more tightly, his head hurting. There was no possibility here that was good.
“Hector.”
He decided to answer the voice rather than try to hide from it. “Yes?” he said tentatively. “What do you want?”
An image seared itself into his brain: the angel, dead and rotting in Cameron Holt’s smokehouse. Its decay and deterioration had been greatly accelerated, and its dark green skin, now almost black, seemed to have melted, looking like heavy chocolate syrup that had been poured over a deformed and twisted body. He understood instantly that he was meant to protect that form, that it was being resurrected, was in the process of becoming and was in a fragile state.
Father Ramos opened his eyes, feeling as though his brain had been jolted with a shot of electricity. Before him, the creature collapsed in front of the altar, devolving into its base components: mud, dirt, sand, rocks.