Chance Damnation Read online

  “Celeste Marie!” Jim Blackthorn screamed out the front door, sounding more worried than angry now.

  Aloysius grabbed the man and pulled him out of the church. Honey was outside, standing next to his sister Peggy. They were both staring at him. Or rather, at the church.

  “What was that, the pipes?” Honey said. “Aloysius. What did you do?”

  Aloysius turned around and ran back for the church. “Anybody know where the kids are?” he yelled over his shoulder.

  He didn’t hear the answer. The inside of the church was moaning and groaning, a million angry ghosts tearing it apart. The glass in one of the new windows broke and slid down to the floor in a dozen pieces of scraping glass.

  “Sebastian!” he shouted. “Anybody! Sebastian!” He banged on the door to the changing room; it swung open, empty.

  As he charged through the church, the floor shifted underneath him and he grabbed onto a pew. Earthquake? Maybe it really was the pipes. They’d just started installing running water at the church, digging the holes for the lines themselves, trying to get the pipes sealed up without leaking too bad. Aloysius had been helping lay the pipes on Wednesday, and he offered up a quick prayer: Lord, I will keep my da—my mouth shut if only you will make whatever I screwed up not quite so bad as it could have been. Amen.

  He’d just made it past the altar and into the sacristy when the floor crashed behind him. He couldn’t help it: he stopped to look.

  The floor had split almost straight down the middle of the church in a jagged hole about five feet across. Floor beams stuck into the hole like rotten teeth. The carpet runner down the center aisle dangled into the hole.

  Some of the pews in the middle of the church started to slide across the floor toward the hole. The feet of the pews scraped up the carpet tacks, and the carpet toppled into the hole.

  Aloysius could see the lights still on in the basement; a woman was screaming. Had he seen Maeve outside? He couldn’t remember. The lights went out.

  “Theodore!” the woman screamed. It must be Maeve. For a second, Aloysius hoped it was. He didn’t like the woman and suspected her of being a gold-digger. Then he realized that it must be his fault she was down in the basement screaming and felt ashamed of himself: he was a disagreeable man who hated almost everyone, and he was going to hell.

  But then again, he’d be damned if he was going to confess that to his little brother. If he lived through this, he was going to drive up to town and find somebody else to hear him out.

  Aloysius felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around and saw Sebastian standing behind him in black shirt and trousers.

  “Don’t tell me it was the pipes,” Aloysius said.

  Sebastian shook his head. “Did you hear that?”

  Aloysius couldn’t hear anything other than Maeve yelling and the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears. He shook his head, then stopped—no, he had heard something. A grunt.

  Another grunt.

  A sneeze.

  “What is that?” Aloysius said.

  “Shh.”

  He squatted down, trying to get a closer look into the darkness. He thought he saw a machine of some kind with a dark shape walking away from it.

  “A buffalo?” he whispered. “How did a buffalo get into the damned basement?”

  Sebastian grabbed his arm and dug in.

  “Ow,” Aloysius said.

  “Shht!”

  What sounded like a hundred hooves struck on the basement floor. Maeve’s screaming changed pitch from outrage to panic, then cut off. Sebastian and Aloysius looked at each other.

  Sebastian whispered, “Lord, give me strength.” He grabbed Aloysius by the shoulder before he could jump into the hole. “Use the back stairs, idiot.”

  They both took off running into the sacristy, and from there, the basement.

  Chapter 3

  Aloysius ignored the smell—it wasn’t any worse than a cattle branding—but Sebastian choked on it and covered his face with a handkerchief.

  The cement stairs had cracked, and going down them was more like sliding than like climbing. He tried to be as quiet as he could, but he couldn’t see that it would make much difference: whatever it was in the basement was making an awful racket, growling and grunting and stomping.

  Aloysius slid to the bottom of the stairs and peeked around the corner.

  The whole basement was full of, well, demons. He didn’t know what else they could be. They were about seven feet tall, with hooves, horns, and heavy black hair all over their naked bodies.

  “Hell,” he said.

  Sebastian grabbed onto the back of his shirt and pulled him back into the stairwell.

  The demons were making a big ruckus down there, and dollars to donuts, they were going to be looking for a way out. Aloysius was pretty sure the stairwell, no matter how busted up it was, was going to be the last place he and Sebastian wanted to be.

  Maeve screamed again. This time, it wasn’t anger or fear in her voice, but a terrible pain, the sound of a cowboy getting rolled under his horse.

  So he got hold of Sebastian peeked around the corner toward the kitchen. Either Maeve would be in there, or she wouldn’t, and they’d be able to figure out where she was from the service window.

  Maeve shrieked again. The demons turned toward the noise, and Aloysius and Sebastian ducked back toward the kitchen. The door was blocked, but the board that covered the serving window had fallen off, so they rolled through the hole and dropped to the floor.

  “Where are the knives?” Aloysius asked. He almost had to yell to be heard as he grabbed at drawers, pulled them open, and swished his hand around in them. The place was pitch dark and the floor was all cracked up.

  “I don’t know,” Sebastian said.

  “It’s your kitchen.”

  “The ladies don’t let me in here.”

  Aloysius grunted and jerked his hand back: he’d found the knives. “Got ‘em. Dull as dishwater.”

  Maeve screamed again. Aloysius found Sebastian’s open hand and put a bread knife in it. He kept a couple of big knives for himself.

  “What am I going to do with a bread knife?” Sebastian asked.

  “Same thing as I am. Damn the luck for not having a shotgun.”

  “I can’t attack the…things.”

  “Demons? Sure you can. They might not die, but you can attack them.”

  “I’m a priest now,” Sebastian said.

  Aloysius snorted. “You’re supposed to lead the fight against evil, aren’t you?”

  “Metaphorically speaking, yes. I’m also not supposed to kill.”

  “You went hunting with me when you were a kid. That’s what we’re doing now. Hunting for the Lord, get it?”

  Sebastian didn’t say anything. A lack of argument from Sebastian was as good as an Amen as far as Aloysius was concerned.

  He rolled back out the serving window. The light was a little better in the main room, and Aloysius could see there were about twenty of the big demons in there, and some damned big machine that was still chugging. It looked like they’d dug a hole under the church that led into blackness so deep that Aloysius decided, then and there, that that was what Hell was like: blackness. At least in the flames of Sunday-school Hell, you could see what the demons were doing to you. He thought the machine must be what they’d used to break open the church like a raw egg.

  The demons were climbing up the stairwell, talking in some kind of lingo that he didn’t understand but sounded like orders.

  Aloysius skirted the hole toward the office. Maeve howled again, and the chugging of the machine’s motor sped up and started grinding. The church groaned again, and another pew from above slid through the hole and smashed onto the machine.

  Sebastian shoved Aloysius aside.

  The other end of the pew dropped into the hole, swung around, and smashed into the linoleum where Aloysius had been standing. Meanwhile, the motor spluttered and stopped. Somebody yelled gibberish from inside.


  “Watch where you’re standing!” Sebastian yelled.

  Aloysius caught himself trying to see the machine better. Sebastian shoved Aloysius again, and they went toward the office.

  “Have to hurry,” Sebastian said. “Who knows what they’re doing upstairs.”

  Aloysius stopped at the doorway to the office. It was dark, but not dark enough that he couldn’t see what had happened to Maeve.

  Sebastian pushed him from behind, and he shoved the boy out of the doorway before he could see anything. Sebastian stumbled and fell down on the floor not two feet from the pit.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry,” Aloysius said. Well, the kid was a grown man now, and would have to see what he saw, whether he liked it or not. Aloysius stepped through the office doorway.

  Theodore was standing beside Maeve with a revolver out. His hand was shaking so bad that he might have shot Aloysius in the eye, if he’d pulled the trigger.

  (He must have brought it with him into church under his suit coat. Couldn’t he just leave his damned guns home for once? But, then again, it was a good thing he hadn’t.)

  Maeve had a support beam driven straight through her chest. She shrieked again. Aloysius had no idea how she had the lung power to make such a terrible noise. Weren’t her lungs torn to shreds? How could she possibly suck in enough air around the wood?

  “Merciful Jesus,” Sebastian said.

  While Aloysius was still standing there, gaping at the wood sticking out of Maeve and wondering just how that worked, Sebastian took the gun away from Theodore, cocked it, and shot Maeve through the eye.

  The scream cut out—Aloysius could see her mouth gape loose—but he couldn’t hear a thing, the way his ears were ringing.

  Sebastian dropped to his knees, set the gun aside carefully, and started praying over Maeve. Or maybe he was praying that Theodore wouldn’t kill him.

  Aloysius picked up the gun and left the office. A demon with the head of a buffalo and about six too many horns was crawling standing by the machine, apparently trying to repair it. Aloysius aimed the revolver at the demon’s back and fired.

  The thing bellowed—the sound had a weird whistle to it, the kind of sound you get when you shoot a deer through the lungs, the kind of sound Maeve should have been making—and the thing slid backward into the hole.

  Aloysius almost followed it down—what was down there?—but Theodore stopped him. Aloysius offered him the gun, but Theodore shook his head and pointed upstairs.

  Aloysius held out a bread knife, but Theodore shook his head again and pulled a curved knife out of his boot.

  Aloysius shook his head—what else did the man carry around with him, even at church?—and skirted the hole toward the stairs, which were now so ruined that he had to pull himself up by the handrail part of the way.

  The demons were in the church and spilling out of the front, into daylight. Aloysius, near the altar, had to shade his eyes from the brightness. Part of the roof had fallen in, and it looked like a tornado had hit the place. The whole foundation must be cracked.

  Aloysius and Theodore ran toward the demons. Aloysius stopped a few yard away, aimed, and fired at the back of the hindmost one. Theodore passed him as the demon fell, grunting. Theodore ran to the back of the next one and swept the knife across its hamstrings. Black blood grouted as the demon tipped forward. Theodore flipped the knife around in his hand and stabbed it into what would have been the kidneys on a human, twisting the knife.

  Aloysius spat out bile and aimed again.

  Chapter 4

  Aloysius fired. This time, he didn’t kill the demon outright but hit it in the back of the thigh, and three demons besides the injured one turned around and bellowed at him. They were bound to see him sooner or later.

  From the way the demons looked like buffalo-men with too many horns, he’d expected them to act like cattle and run from whatever was chasing them. Not so. He supposed cattle wouldn’t be tearing up churched from underground anyhow.

  He fired again, taking a step backward to give himself more room as the demons charged him, springing easily over the gap in the floor like deer over a barbed-wire fence. The heel of Aloysius’s boot caught on the last bits of runner down the middle of the floor, and he went down, landing on the ruins of the floor. In a second, he flipped over on his belly and slid down the crack to the basement, falling just as demon hooves smashed the place where his head had been.

  He missed falling into the pit, thank God, and managed not to drop the revolver, but he skittered around on the broken concrete and linoleum, trying to regain his balance. He turned around and started sprinting back toward the stairs.

  “We have to save the Bible,” Sebastian coughed. “And the host.”

  Aloysius turned and saw Sebastian still next to the office. He had a revolver dangling from his hand and looked pale, even in the darkness.

  “You all right?”

  “Gas leak,” Sebastian said.

  Aloysius took a breath: Sebastian was right, they were leaking propane from somewhere. “Damn it.” He took a deep breath, ran back for Sebastian, took his gun, and shoved him bodily up the stairs. Sebastian might have fainted somewhere in the middle, but he was awake by the time Aloysius got him to the top.

  Theodore was nowhere to be seen. That is, Aloysius couldn’t see him, but he could tell where he was: in the center of a group of demons who closed in, then fell back, lowing in pain.

  Aloysius shook Sebastian, who was threatening to pass out again. “Go get your damned Bible and whatnot. Then go out the back. I got to get Theodore.”

  Sebastian’s chest jerked as he struggled not to vomit, and he nodded.

  Aloysius yelled.

  A man who works with cattle for a living has to have a good voice; he’s bound to get trampled if he doesn’t. The cattle nearest Theodore didn’t lay off him, but he got the attention of most of the rest of them.

  Aloysius fired into the knot around Theodore and yelled again. “Hyaa! Hyaa!”

  The one he’d hit and one other went down, and the rest started milling around, unsure of whether to run or to charge—or in which direction.

  From the front of the church came more gunshots. Aloysius thought he heard someone rev a truck engine, but he couldn’t be sure. One of the demons from the front of the church bugled a call. The other demons froze for a second. The demon bugled again.

  Then more demons came pouring into the church from the front, and the ones already inside dropped down into the crack to the basement, cracking their hooves against the busted floor below. Maybe twenty of the demons jumped down into the crack.

  As the demons swirled into the basement like water down a drain, they left Theodore standing between two pews, covered in black blood and grinning from ear to ear. Six of the demons were lying dead around him.

  Aloysius loved his older brother, but sometimes the man gave him the heebie jeebies.

  “Gas leak,” Aloysius shouted.

  The last of the demons jumped down into the hole. Theodore put a gash into the creature’s arm as it went by then followed Aloysius into the sacristy and out the back door.

  Sebastian was already standing outside with his arms full of books, chalices, and so on, talking to Mr. Blackthorn and some others, telling them to get away from the church. Considering that most of the people were either blood relatives or had known Sebastian since he was young enough to wet himself, he was having a good deal of success: the only person disregarding Sebastian’s orders was their father himself.

  Liam limped toward the back door with his cane.

  Theodore wiped his blade off on his pants and made it disappear, then stood in front of the door with his arms at his sides. The black blood was all the way up in his hair, in his ears.

  “Stand aside, Theodore,” their father ordered.

  Theodore’s head twitched; it might have been a “no.”

  Liam raised his cane and used it to slap Theodore on the shoulder. “Move!”

  “No
, sir,” Theodore said.

  The only person who had been able to change their father in his course had been their mother, but she was dead two months gone. Aloysius knew that the only hope they had was that the church would explode before Liam could beat down Theodore. Or maybe he’d knock himself out with his own stick.

  There was nothing else to do for it but pick up the old man—at sixty, he could still rope a steer from the back of a quarterhorse and tie it down himself—and drag him away from the church. Aloysius knew he was going to be laid up for months with a broken leg, if he was lucky. He grabbed the man by his belt and his left arm and yanked him off his feet.

  A few seconds later, Theodore grabbed his other arm, which made things slightly easier, as Liam couldn’t beat him over the head with the cane any more. It was still like trying to hang on to a greased pig, though.

  They had him out to the parking lot by the time the church exploded. Most of the windows had already gone, so there wasn’t too much glass, but the force blew out the facing windows on most of the vehicles in the parking lot and threw lumber and siding around like a whirlwind.

  Damage done, they let go of Liam and backed away. Liam swung with his cane and yelled at them: “What do you think this is, some kind of practical joke? Look what you did to the damned church!”

  “No joke, sir,” Aloysius said.

  “You’ll rebuild your brother’s church from the stones up or I’ll see you dead.”

  Aloysius shook his head. “We didn’t do it, sir.”

  “I know how you feel about Sebas—Father Vincent Paul. You’d do anything to humiliate him. You been humiliating him all his life because he was chosen for the priesthood and you weren’t. Well, it ain’t going to happen this time!”

  Aloysius sighed. “We didn’t do it, sir. Demons.”

  “Those weren’t no demons! Those were bison that you let loose in church! Don’t give me any of your bullshit!”

  Mr. Blackthorn shouted, “Celeste Marie!”

  Liam turned so red it looked like he’d got an instant sunburn. “And you! Keep your damned Indian half-shit away from my son!”