AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Heaven and earth both turn, Father. And so does hell.
The padre’s mouth was very dry…he would’ve taken any drop of water, or any sip of spirits either—except that it would mean leaving the vortex, and not hearing the heavy, buzzing, humming low voice explain itself.
(If indeed that’s what it was doing, when it might have only been spinning a lie.)
As far as he could tell, the nun and the Ranger heard none of this—or if they did, they understood precious little. It was hurting him to listen so hard, but he couldn’t stop now, not when he had it talking. Not when it had him listening.
“The deaths you’ve caused, they feed you like the tears fed the tree—is that right? You’re a carnivorous thing, at heart.”
You also grow stronger when you consume. How is it different?
“You’re feeding on…on lives. On people, and their souls.”
No one here, who has ever come or gone, has been innocent. Grant that much, at least. Grant us that there is a pattern, and that it has been served by the very worst—by men and women who have cheated, lied, and broken holy vows. Like yourself, and like the Ranger.
He flashed a quick look at the nun. Her eyes were closed.
The hotel explained, Her vows were merely bent, not broken. She cannot be held here, but still she chooses to stay.
Still in Spanish, still trusting that no one within earshot understood, he whispered: “What is she?”
She is afflicted, it said, but offered nothing else.
The padre thought about pressing the matter, but the storm was directly overhead—prying bricks loose and throwing them, pulling doors off hinges down in the open wing, and tossing them like skipping stones into the night. Time was not on his side.
And why should it be? Almost nothing else was.
Tonight—and very soon—the storm will have its way, and I will have mine. I will rise up into the air and break apart. I will become a million pieces, a million seeds scattered to the winds…and winds like these can hurl me a very great distance. I will have Texas, and Louisiana, and the old Spanish states to the east. I will take the coasts and the mountains of Mexico, to the west. I am one, but I will be many. You will call me Legion, because that’s what your holy testaments called me.
This structure above me will fall, and you will fall with it.
But I will rise.
“Padre? Padre? Father.”
Sister Eileen was immediately before him, standing on the mosaic—her small feet atop the edges, and it looked like she stood on a sheet of glass above a cavern. That’s what the padre noticed when he shook off the listening, and the looking. He noticed that he was on his hands and knees; he noticed how little her shoes were, and how they appeared to stand on nothing but thin air, but that was only a trick of the hotel, the terrible mirage of its voice.
“Sister,” he muttered. His head was still full of springs, a clock that was over-wound and on the verge of breaking. But he heard her, he saw her, and the vortex wasn’t speaking anymore. Sister Eileen was.
Relief was written all over her face, and more than a little fear, too. “I thought we’d lost you for a minute, there. Get up, and come around. We have a problem.”
He could hear it, now that she said it: over near the front doors, an argument. “What’s happening?”
“Cabin fever?” She gave him her hand and helped pull him up. “They don’t know how to fight the hotel, so now they fight each other.”
“I had my hopes, but it was bound to happen,” the Ranger said unhappily, as he set off for the fray.
At first, Juan Rios tried to avoid the mosaic as he staggered upright, then he gave up. The pattern was bigger now, even bigger than before. It didn’t just touch both staircase landings…it slipped underneath them. The padre couldn’t shake the sick, weird feeling that the thing had been feeding on him, even as it spoke to him.
He collected himself, tried not to lean on the nun, and rejoined the group out by the doors—just in time to catch a fight between the McCoy brothers and Ranger Korman.
“Both of you, sit yourselves down!” the old Texan ordered.
“But we heard him,” George insisted. “And David saw him! You’ve got to let us check, at least—you can’t just leave him locked out there, to die!”
“Who, Tim?” the padre asked, still trying to get his head around the situation.
“Oh no…where is Tim? Has anyone seen him?” asked Violetta, but the nun quieted her with a look before too many other voices could add to the query.
