Night of the Witch-Hunter, page 5
Then, as the door opened, the screaming began.
The witch-hunter’s journey to the Meeting Hall had been a strange and unsettling experience. After stepping through the witch’s circle, Nathaniel Pryce had found himself in a very different Fallen Church than the village he knew so well. At first, he’d believed himself pulled into a new type of Hell. Everything around him was too loud, too bright—an absolute overwhelming of his senses. Even the flooring under his body was not the familiar mud and thatch straw on which he trod daily. Instead, there was a strange, almost mossy covering across it. Only it was too clean to be naturally occurring. The blasphemous ritual candles sat balanced on this material, exuding scents unnatural. By their light, he’d raised his head and found the two witches he’d glimpsed in the woods now staring at him with slack-jawed faces. Each girl was dressed promiscuously, wantonly. Succubi, if ever Pryce had seen them.
Indeed, the blatant sinfulness writ large upon their faces awakened the purity in the witch-hunter’s heart. Of that much he was certain. Finding his cutlass and blunderbuss still on his person, Pryce ascertained he’d been whisked away by some unholy magic to an unfamiliar land, but not to Hell. He raised his gun and pulled its trigger, giving notice to the witches that he would be no easy mark for their magics.
Their shrill cries, imitating the yelps of imperiled children, did nothing to sway Pryce from the righteous path. Even as the flames grew at his feet, his skin warming and reddening in their proximity, the witch-hunter focused on his life’s mission: eliminating witches. He found further proof of their wicked ways in the appearance of one of the girls. He was near certain he’d seen similar features in the visage of his most recent quarry—Goodwife Rebecca.
Rebecca!
Her wicked name echoed in his head and his heart.
With his weapon reloaded, Pryce fired again. The smoke was thick by then. Some of the fire even managing to penetrate his water-logged clothing. Finding the door to the room blocked—no doubt by the witches, Pryce had but one means of egress from the inferno left.
Cape clutched in his hands, arms crossed over his face as further shielding, he ran at a full-sprint to the window—covered in fine, thick glass, as if something taken from a fanciful European castle—and crashed through the pane.
His fall was short, his landing messy. Pryce permitted himself a single scream, a bellow of inarticulate pain. Then, he bit down on his bottom lip until he tasted the coppery tang of blood. He focused his suffering on that one tiny stinging ache, using that to cast his healing spell.
Eyes rolled back in his head and he spoke the words, using the blood as an offering to demonic forces. Cursing himself for a moment, but letting those feelings of guilt and shame pass from his corporeal form just as quickly.
After all, he reasoned, I’m doing this, performing these acts, in service to the Lord. I am on a mission most holy and by any means necessary, I must see my good works completed.
The small price paid, Pryce’s body healed and even his clothing was restored to pristine condition. Rising to his feet, both legs as strong as ever, he abandoned the inferno, setting off on a new hunt—both for witches and for answers. He noted the eyes of strangers peering from homes none too dissimilar to the new witches’ stronghold. These strangers watched him from the shadows but made no move to confront or hinder his progress.
Good. They must know better than to delay a witch-hunter who’s caught a scent most foul and wicked.
Making slow and steady progress along the tar-blackened roads of what he assumed to be a sinners’ paradise, Goodman Pryce heard subtle rumblings, chanting, and clapping sounding from some ways off. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of bright white light beaming onto the ground. Most unnatural. He shivered, assuming a Black Mass was in progress, picturing an assembly of sinners so thick that their mewling entreaties to the Dark Ones were audible even at a distance.
No other souls showed themselves as Pryce continued his hunt, not even the witch-girls who’d fled from him earlier. It wasn’t until he came to a tall post, nearly the size of a massive oak tree and crowned with strange gray and black adornments, thick rope-like appendages branching off and connecting to other similar posts along the route that Pryce discovered the broadsheet and his view of where he’d been transported changed.
He tore the page loose from its mooring and brought it close for reading. Lucky for him more of the world’s black magic allowed miniature lamps to glow atop curved metallic trees spaced evenly one after the other on the path, illuminating the text. The script was crude, syntax and spelling recognizable as English—though only barely.
Fallen Church WILL BE Y2K-ready!
1999. . . 2000!
Reading the words a second time, Pryce felt his knees shake and his hand start to tremble.
Fallen Church? Could it be? But in the year of our Lord 1999, the year 2000 nipping at its heels. It seems a shame this corruptible material world has not been brought to an end by this point.
Goodman Pryce began to really study the geography of the strange land in which he’d found himself and discovered it was not so strange after all. He examined signposts, catching sight of familiar names. There was where Goodman Owens resided, the path marked for OWENS’ ACRE ROAD. And over there, the site of a duck pond that once welcomed spry and overtalkative waterfowl now held a strange building marked with golden arches. A sign affixed to the entrance of this glass-enclosed structure read: CLOSED FOR THE GAME.
Peering at the smoky gray of an early evening sky, Pryce shaded his eyes with the tanned leather of his gloves, blocking the unnatural lights surrounding him. These lights glowed too strong. Too intensely.
They are a distraction. A temptation.
Even as he inhaled, breathing in substances foul and rotten as sulfur, Pryce found more layers of deceit to peel away. But once that work was complete and he stared at a moon hanging full and bright over his head, a moon he well-remembered, Pryce grasped the truth in full.
I’m home. Not my home as I remember, but a future version where the sinners have won.
The next thought came easy enough for a man who’d still set himself upon the holy work of witch-hunting.
God the Heavenly Father has sent me here. To redeem Fallen Church, to stop the sinners and the witches and all their foul begotten spawn. This is End of Days and I will be served as Redeemer.
Before redemption was possible though, the witch-hunter knew he’d have to establish a base from which to launch his cleansing campaign. With his bearings set, Pryce had one place in mind. One place where he could go and feel secure.
The Meeting Hall. Located on the outskirts of the village to protect their assets and records, Pryce had long conducted his business. He was certain the Hall would provide sufficient sanctuary.
The witch-hunter’s slow progress across the familiar, yet corrupted, landscape of Fallen Church was not without frequent interruptions. Navigating the labyrinthine rock-hard blackened streets where men, women, and children of God had once pushed wooden carts, walked arm-in-arm, and gathered as a community, proved a difficult task. Buildings larger than Pryce would’ve thought possible in the New World blocked paths and trails he’d once used as shortcuts. Worse still, when he imagined himself at the halfway point to the Meeting Hall, terrible, offensively loud roars echoed from behind him. These guttural cries made the witch-hunter suspect a bear or a wolf might be on his trail. Or worse, one of the giant Nephilim, or the beast Leviathan itself risen from beneath the waves and dragging its swollen carcass onto the land.
Then, a glint of silver, followed by strobing flashes of more bright colors, the swirl racing toward the witch-hunter and then jetting past him just as quickly. Fast, too fast. Blues and bloody reds and midnight blacks, each accompanied by twin circles at front and back, all lit like the moon. At the last moment, before he was due to be set upon by these unnaturally fleet vehicles, Pryce dove off the road, rolling to a nearby ditch.
Peeking his head up from his landing spot, his face stained by grass and mud, Pryce caught the tail end of a procession of what he could only describe as armored horseless carriages. Another false miracle. One youth, red-faced and wild, blonde hair butter-colored like a sunflower, poked his head out one of the final passing conveyances. The seemingly hale and hearty youth cried out: “Meeting Hall, fellas! Let’s gooooooo!”
His yodeling shout was as if made by a savage, a war cry into the night.
However, Goodman Pryce was nearly struck dumb by the words. Could the young men in their magical carts truly be heading to the same destination as he? Once his surroundings returned to quiet, with only the echo of the strangers’ passage buzzing in his ears, the man from the past, at last, resumed his journey to the Hall.
I should’ve known they’d leave no trace of goodness nor scrap of decency intact in this corrupted future land.
Standing outside another glass edifice, watching a large man in too-tight clothing bleed from his gun-blasted right knee cap and from the gaping red wound carved across the man’s neck, the witch-hunter contemplated his next move, while still taking time to enjoy the sinner’s writhing on the ground.
What did this ruffian say as I approached him?
‘Hey buddy, Halloween was a couple months ago. Gonna need to see some I.D.’
Yet when I spoke my name, surprised that he could even hear me over the throbbing, thrumming rhythmic abominations emanating from within, I was rebuked!
‘I.D. Ident-if-i-cation. Show it to me.’
The dying brute of a man clasped a hand across his throat, but there was too much of his gushing serum expelled for that act to make a difference. On his knees, ravaged by the pain of shattered bone and shredded cartilage where the blunderbuss’s pellet-riddled blast found its target true, the man collapsed, screaming in agony.
Well, ‘tis a lesson he will not soon forget. For the brief remaining time he has on this Earth. . .
Flopping onto his back, whatever final words he might have shared choked back and his every exhalation blood speckled, the man stared up at the witch-hunter, confusion prominent in his features.
When Goodman Pryce had completed his trek through a barren landscape of nightmarish outposts en route to his once-beloved Meeting Hall, he’d found horseless chariots, the same ones that’d passed him earlier, sitting idle and empty in a sea of black. He’d followed the path to its inevitable end. But what waited for him there was not the Meeting Hall he expected or remembered.
Having dispatched the guardian at the gates of this hellish mockery of Fallen Church’s former sanctuary and worship hall, the witch-hunter hardened his heart and entered the palace of sin. His boot left its heavy tread across the ruined throat of the now-dead sinful doorman. Pryce’s resultant bloody footprints would mark his journey into the depths of Hell.
Inside the building, the assault on his senses was all-encompassing. Flashing lights, like will o’ the wisps gone mad, made erratic circles before his eyes. Too much screaming and howling, growling, all of these noises seemingly meant to serve as music. This was not the music of the spheres, but a chorus of the damned. Pockets and pools of darkness flooded the space, giving cover to the sinners present. Additional purple-hued lights pulsed at the feet of all. Similar lights lined the upper portions of the walls, strung up close to the ceiling.
In some sections, mirrors replaced the usual ceiling material. Pryce gazed up at his reflection amid the chaos. He saw the Hell-World reversed, turned upside down. As above, so below.
The stench of sexual awakening, of foul bodies in gyrating motion, nearly knocked the witch-hunter to his knees when he’d fully breathed it in. Head on a swivel, he looked for a source and first located an assembly of men, many young, a few old, imbibing suspect beverages, sweating in their seats, laughing like braying donkeys.
The same curly-haired towheaded young man who’d issued a rallying cry to his peers, inviting them to this bastardized version of the Meeting Hall, leaned forward with paper scrip in hand, thrusting the offering onto a platform upon which false lights in the Hall were focused.
A wanton harlot.
Hardly wearing anything at all, the woman on the platform was painted in pinks and purples, her bosom heaving, hips spread wide in a most sinful manner. She danced and gyrated up to the edge of the stage. There, she bent down and snatched up the young man’s offering. It was sinful. Ungodly.
But Goodman Pryce could not look away.
“Want a private dance, stranger?”
The whispered cooing so close to his person drew Pryce’s attention from the stage. His reaction to what stood before him was immediate, visceral. The witch-hunter felt his eyes bulging against the sockets even more than usual, his fleshy lips trembling into a snarl.
It was a woman.
Clad in undergarments, decadent ones at that, just like the strumpet on the stage, this new woman ran pale fingers up and down the length of Pryce’s glove-clad arm. He stole a glance down and found her bosom slick with sweat, glittering most unnaturally.
“You won’t need these gloves with me, baby. You can touch me all over. Xenia’s gonna take real good care of you.” Then, touching the barrel of his blunderbuss, she added, “I’ll make sure all your guns go off.”
She licked her lips. Performing. Going through a well-rehearsed routine. Pryce considered her an illusion, a thought-form given life to serve as a distraction.
From the witches. . .
Cutlass at his side, he brought his gloved hand to the temptress’s face and shoved her away. Hard. He half-expected her to burst into a cloud of hornets or dissipate as if some foul cloud of gas.
On the stage, the other woman continued dancing, removing her garments as well. The men watching paid no mind to the witch-hunter’s confrontation. They were under the spell of the woman performing.
But Pryce’s actions had not gone entirely unnoticed. A short, stocky, sweaty man, golden chains dangling from his neck and hair on his shoulders peeking through the ragged neck of his shirt, made a beeline for the witch-hunter. “Alright, pal, I dunno how or why Maurice let you in here, but you do not mess with my girls, capiche?”
He was a troll of a man. Sloppy, unfit, and unsound. It was nothing for Pryce to draw his blade and nick a quick sharp slice into the man’s cheek. He then ignored the way his would-be verbal assaulter burst into tears, holding a hand to his bleeding face. Instead, the witch-hunter returned his attention to the girl, the one he believed was sent as a witch’s distraction. She fled from the chaos of the building’s main meeting space, heading for a backroom in the establishment.
The man he’d cut sank to his knees, but Pryce grabbed him by the open collar of his shirt, forcing him to stand.
“Take me to the witches,” he commanded. His voice boomed above the music, the laughter and the sin, each word imbued with Godly power. Goodman Pryce would not be disobeyed.
The strange man that they’d accidentally summoned from Fallen Church’s past—Goodman Pryce, his name was. . . is Goodman Nathaniel Pryce, and Josey knew this because her ancestor, who they’d intended to contact, still floated around inside her head, telling her everything about the man and his cruel intentions—pressed the wide-mouthed barrel of his ancient firearm to the back of the sweat-slicked head of the trembling strip club owner he’d used as cover to access the dancers’ dressing room. Without hesitation, Pryce pulled the trigger, sending a spray of pellets from the gun that eviscerated the club owner’s face from front to back.
Josey retreated a half-step, expecting the spray to carry forward hitting her in the face as well, extinguishing her life as it’d just done to the club owner.
Instead, outside of her conscious control, her hands waved in a highly specific sequence. As the life she’d seen flashing before her eyes faded away still incomplete, she noted a glowing blue-tinted energy signature crackling from between her palms and extending beyond her person. This translucent blue light proved solid enough to ensnare the fragments of gunpowder and shot, along with the bone and skin scraps from the dead man, stopping all forward motion and holding these elements in place.
“Now, let go.”
Her ancestor’s words, spoken in Josey’s voice, served as both command and release. She thrust her hands forward, palms toward the witch-hunter. The cloud of pellet spray reversed course, and was launched with even greater force back at Goodman Pryce.
The witch-hunter twitched his head to the side unnaturally quick. His face was in the path of shrapnel one moment, then clear the next. In less than the blink of an eye. He moved that fast. Josey noted an afterimage of the man’s face, dissipating like red-tinted smoke when struck by the shot. The phantom’s features curled into a rage-filled snarl.
With the spell of this uncanny moment broken, chaos followed quickly.
More screams echoed from the club floor. Josey was certain she heard Ashton and some of the other football players among those shouting, panicking. “Yo! Is this for real? Is that blood? Like for real?!”
From the rear of the dressing room, Nikki’s sister DiDi attempted to keep order among the other dancers—soothing them, while also looking for a plan of action, a way to get everyone out and safe. She had the backdoor open, and was waving, urging the other girls to make their escape. “Come on!” she shouted. “We gotta get the hell outta here.”
DiDi clearly understood it was not the time to hesitate or mince words.
Josey, however, remained frozen in the doorway between the dressing room and the main floor. Her shoes were stained with blood at the toes. At least it’s not my own. The lights from the club still flashed, on and off, purples, pinks, neon greens, and icy blues. Their rapid-fire changing made it difficult to see what was happening in the main room.
Where did Pryce go?
Josey wasn’t sure if the thought was hers or that of her ancestor. Nor did she think it mattered.
