Souls - XXV

A knock on the front door rings through the church, impossibly clear and loud considering the distance of the door from this dark room. A voice that caused my skin to tingle rings out with an equally impossible clarity. 

“Hello Michael, I’m afraid we are going to have to have a talk.”

Michael’s body breaks into a tremor, it looks like he’s experiencing the angelic version of fight or flight.

“Fuck.”

He leaves the rooms and motions to the others to do the same. Looks like he settled on flight.

As they leave, Mary becomes clear in my view; no-one or nothing blocking us. She is staring back at me with disturbing clarity. She is sobering up faster than I am, a hazy halo still envelops her from my fuzzy eyes. 

The impossibly clear voice rings out, “You can kill them if you really feel it necessary but I will need that soul.”

I hear shuffling, the kind that indicates panic. Might as well have been a room full of cockroaches running from the light.

A mustached man with tattoos up and down his arms enters with a gasoline canister. He begins sloshing the flammable liquid everywhere in the room.

“You can’t kill us, you’re just going to make us living beef jerky.”

“Oh, I ain’t an angel luv, just an employee, like you.” He smiles lights a match and drops it. The edges of the room are filled with racing flames. They rush frantically all over the room, wildly reaching out for more fuel.

I reach inside me, trying to coax the heat to begin within me, if I’m going out they’re going with me. No luck, the drugs are still making everything inside me lazy.

I look to my daughter, she seems unnaturally calm. Still staring at me.

“Honey, I need you to focus. Can you did what you did before? When you took some of them out? I’m trying but I’m too hazy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me right there when we met?”

Fuck, she figured it out. “I wanted to hun, I really did but I didn’t know how.” 

The flames move ever closer to us, beginning to lick at our restraints.

“What are you? What are we? What did you do to me?”

“The fire, it’s gonna kill us.”

She lowers her head, her hair falling downwards covering her eyes. I don’t need to see them to feel the pain and rage coming out of her.

Then I see it. I see what I have experienced from the inside so many times. And it is terrifying. 

Her hair begins to wave as if she’s under water, raising up and floating above her. Her face is twisted and burning, her eyes red, blood running from the edges. Her chest expands, embers poking through her ribcage.

A blast emits from her with a force I have never felt. I imagine it is what it was like to be at ground zero of the Manhattan Project. The air in the room blasts outwards, the walls give, the ceiling crumbles. I have trouble breathing, she seems to have pushed all of the oxygen out of the room. The fire extinguishes with a disgruntled crackle.

She is like me, but more. 

I am a weapon, she is a force.

The screams begin; the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Michael, his angels, even Lucifer, seem to be painfully and perpetually disintegrating. This is hell, she has created hell.

Our straps disintegrate as well, I feel my body heap to the ground, it is cold to the touch. When she falls to the ground it all stops, the explosion, the noise, even the purple sky, it all stops. We are in darkness. 

“Mary?” My voice sounds foreign, scratchy and broken. “Mary?”

Slowly the darkness fades, the pulsating purple sky comes back into view through the broken ceiling of the church. 

It is finished.

I look to where Mary was, where her restraints still lie in a pile.

She is gone.