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He watches the two children run away from him - the corner of his eye, the edge of his vision. Laughter in the dead quiet of the woods. Echoing through tunnel walls. Haunting him each time he steps forward.
This urge to follow sways him through the petrichor, through evergreen pines and the sewage, but John knows he won’t catch up. They slip away like the last rays of sunset fading over the horizon into dusk.
All he can do is watch as the boy holds the girl's hand, running and running ‘till they are nothing but a blurry silhouette.
____
The damned apartment building moves and creaks around them. It sighs, unsettled, and in turn, continues to unsettle John. His skin itches and he takes care not to run his hands all over his body. The blood has dried invisible on his black vestments, noticeable only by the sickening stiff and sticky texture. In some sort of profane joke, not a drop has touched the white of his collar.
Lisa lights a cigarette. There's a half-buried reprimand at the back of his tongue, curling like a habit, but he says nothing. What is a human vice against the sins of Hell?
She doesn't smile. He can barely look her in the eyes. Neither of them turns towards the black void of the door behind them.
Lisa blows smoke continuously to the side, but it swirls against the peeling walls onto his face. Embraced by the halo of diffused light, she reminds John too much of a thurible that exhales cigarettes instead of incense. Facsimile of holiness.
____
Hell tastes like acetone. His hands feel cold, so cold he can barely feel the edges and grain of the crucifix biting into his hand as he grips it close. Red flesh dances around him, like stalks of corn in the wind. John hears the howl of hounds.
The sliver of the devil stands before him, three-eyed and grotesque, grandfatherly. In the white of its eyes, John finally sees the family resemblance - the false kindness, the confidence of the person of the cloth, eyes of the liar that once fed him, and housed him, and left everyone buried except the twins burning silently indoors.
“The twins were never real, John.”
Gary laughs, shaking John’s brittle bones. Silently, he prays for peace. Seethes for retribution. It feels a lot like candle wax melting him all over. He knows what the creature means. He knows.
____
Lisa looks at him, straw-blond hair waving in the draft of the apartment, and all John can see is the endless rows of corn hiding a sorrowful angel and six neat graves. The boy and the girl are there, too, watching him from between the stalks with the same blue eyes. He watches them and wants to burn.
She tells him she’ll be fine. The smoke curls on her lips. He doesn’t fall to his knees and beg her to come with him. John remembers what happens when they go down to Hell hand in hand.
________
His legs shake as he climbs the stairs, walks down the halls with tired resignation after Father Garcia’s sure steps. He doesn’t look at the carnage by the front entrance, and glances away before the blood can engrain itself on the surface of his iris. He is already ridden with after-images - hollow face, hollow smile, hollow bones.
John tries to rejoice in the fact that it’s over, but Father Garcia denies him even that. Tells him all his suffering and efforts are the works of an ant chewing on a city wall. John is left to breathe too much to be anointed a martyr, aware that he stumbled into sin too often to become a saint.
____
There is a trapdoor that leads down underneath the church, and something about its mystique always inspires children to whisper dares. The reverend mother is too often busy to watch them all the time. They go down one by one. John waits but they don’t come back.
There are no children now, only dead hounds and rotting nuns, shattered mosaics of saints defiled. Only two of them, hand in hand, staring outwards where the scarecrow watches them back.
____
Lisa swoops in like a dove with a broken wing, stumbles towards him and John is speechless to see her like this again, shoes cracked in blood. He is struck that she’d walk all the way here, for him. She wears a yellow sweater pulled tight around her neck, the hem riddled with coffee stains and cigarette ash.
She offers him peace. Hand outstretched, more calloused now, fingertips burned, but he holds it and tastes wood at the back of his throat like church pews. Before, it would cut him up like paper, but now it feels calm and soft.
He leaves Father Garcia to his crusade, gets into his beat-up car. Lisa sits in the passenger seat, legs up to her chest and window rolled down as she flicks the ash off of the end of her cigarette. She looks at him and smiles, eyes crinkling up in the ways his own hadn’t for a while, and John feels home.