Nightside 07 - Hell to Pay

there.”
    “Don’t be so sure of that,” I growled. I wasn’t sure at all, but in my job it’s important to keep up appearances.
    Sister Josephine stood up abruptly, so I did, too. She drew the Hand of Glory from inside her habit and lit the candles on the fingers with a quick gesture. She smiled at me suddenly, and it was a warm and even kindly smile.
    “Come with me, John. It’s time for you to meet Melissa Griffin. The most Christian soul I have ever met.”

    She used the Hand of Glory on her study door, and it groaned loudly in its frame, as though protesting. The door swung open before us, and we stepped through, and immediately we were in another place. The ground shook briefly under my feet, as though settling into place, and the air was suddenly hot and humid. Sweat sprang out on my bare face and hands, and I had to struggle to get my breath in the thick moist air. It stank of brimstone and foulness and blood. We were standing in a simple chapel, with rows of basic wooden pews and a bare functional altar at the far end. The crucifix above the altar had been turned upside down.
    The pews were full of nuns, but they were all dead. There might have been a dozen or more. It was hard to tell now. They’d all been murdered, savagely, inhumanly. Torn quite literally limb from limb, gutted, beheaded. Blood soaked the pews and the floor, and body parts lay scattered everywhere. The stench grew worse, the more I breathed it.
    I moved slowly down the central aisle, heading for the altar, and Sister Josephine was right there at my side. I glanced at her, to see how she was holding together. Her face was terribly cold with a controlled fury, and she had a machine pistol in each hand now. Fourteen severed heads had been impaled on the carved wooden guard before the altar, still wearing their wimples, their faces stretched and contorted by their final horrified screams. The altar itself had been thickly smeared with blood and shit.
    “Do you see Melissa here anywhere?” I said, keeping my voice low.
    “No. She’s not here.” Sister Josephine looked quickly back and forth, her machine pistols tracking with her, desperate for a target.
    “Who else could get in here?”
    “No-one. Just me. That’s the point.” Sister Josephine made a visible effort to calm herself. “Only I know how to operate the Hand of Glory, to open the door between dimensions.”
    “So, to track Melissa here, and then force a way in and do…all this, means whoever beat us here has to be someone of considerable power.” I thought about that, and the more I considered it the less I liked it. If this was the same Someone who’d been interfering with my gift, that meant they’d been one step ahead of me right from the beginning.
    “If all they wanted was Melissa, why take the time to do this?” said Sister Josephine, her voice tight and strained. “Why mutilate these Sisters and desecrate the altar?”
    “Has to be someone who takes the Christian faith seriously, to hate it this much,” I said.
    Sister Josephine looked at me seriously. “I smell brimstone.”
    “So do I.”
    “Do you think Melissa is dead?”
    “No,” I said immediately. “Or they’d have left her body here for us to find, looking like the rest. No, she was taken away from here so I couldn’t have her. Someone who didn’t want me involved from the very beginning. I hate to say it, but all of this could be Jeremiah’s work. If he didn’t trust me to bring his grand-daughter back to him. The man made a deal with the Devil, and this looks like the Devil’s work to me.”
    I broke off as something in the chapel changed. The stench was suddenly almost overpowering, and I could hear the buzzing of flies. All the flowers in the chapel burst into flames, burning fiercely in their vases. It felt like there was Someone else in the place with us…and then Sister Josephine and I moved quickly to stand back-to-back, as one by one the dead nuns in the pews came slowly, horribly, to life again. Limbless torsos lurched out into the aisle, while hands pulled severed arms along the floor towards us. Lengths of purple intestines curled slowly on the floor like meaty snakes. Blood pattered down from the ceiling. And all the severed heads spiked on the wooden guard began to speak as one.
    Sister Josephine, John Taylor. Come on down! There’s a special place in Hell reserved just for you, and all the heroes who failed to protect those they swore to save! You’ll like it