Or perhaps God’s demeanor had been so odd because He didn’t want to grant forgiveness after all.
Perhaps He wanted to ask for it.
Tim.
Good Shepherd Family Church had been renamed and remodeled many times over the years. As far as Brandon knew, the quaint chapel had been built in the ’30s, served as some type of Red Cross center during World War II, then transferred between different denominations for some time during the ’50s. The Lutherans built the school structures, the Presbyterians built the ministers’ housing, then the Baptists had built the community center. The church had ended up with the Baptists, then suffered another series of denomination changes as congregation after congregation had disagreed with itself and split over its differences. Even as a punk teenager, Brandon had been fascinated by the chapel’s old stones and dank, mysterious basement. He’d been told the whole history of the place when he’d asked—
Tim.
This late at night, with moonlight coating the old graveyard next to the church, and all the interior lights off, the place looked ominous. If not for the friendly road sign and the lights in the empty parking lot, a passerby might mistake the church for the haunted setting of a ghost story, rather than the place of refuge Karen wanted it to be. Even now, though, Brandon missed all the good times he’d once had here. He missed the sense of home that these buildings had once stirred in him. He missed—
Tim.
When Brandon looked at the youth center, he saw Tim shingling the roof with him six summers ago. When he looked at the parking lot, he saw Tim nursing little Liam Tanner after he’d been hit by a car, waiting with the wailing child until paramedics arrived. When he looked at the dark chapel, he saw Tim accompanying a fourteen-year-old Brandon down the center aisle after one of Karen’s best sermons, then kneeling with Brandon at the altar, guiding him while he accepted Jesus into his heart. Tim was the man who’d saved Brandon from spending his teenage years in the foster care system, and likely from a life of poverty. Tim had been an intelligent, compassionate, moral man; other than his faith, he’d been everything Brandon had ever wanted to become.
And after one senseless act of violence, Tim was dead.
Brandon could ignore his grief no longer. The weight of it bore down on him, its intensity staggering. His knees gave way. Dull pain shocked his hands as they hit the grass and dirt in front of the chapel, catching his fall. He was only half aware of his body twisting around to sit on the curb. Teardrops sprinkled the cracked asphalt below him, spattering the rice thrown earlier by friends and family.
The memory of his garden conversation with Tim crisp in his mind, Brandon realized that all of his existential fears had been confirmed. Life truly
was
just a brief blip in the infinity of time, pitifully fragile and fundamentally meaningless. Half of the people Brandon had ever known had been killed in a matter of minutes. What kind of broken person would Brandon be without them? Who would Brandon be without his father?
I’ll never argue with you again, Dad. I’ll become a Christian again, if that’s what it takes. I’ll do anything—
believe
anything—if you’ll just come back.
And now Karen was pacing toward him from the side door of the chapel, determination in her step and contempt on her face. Had she come to lecture him on nihilism again? Would she mock him for it?
Should you ignore the emotions welling up inside you now?
she might say, taunting him.
Those emotions are just arbitrary perceptions that your evolutionary past is projecting, after all. Human life has no objective purpose to you, so your father’s death should mean nothing.
Brandon braced himself for her ridicule.
Karen crouched next to him and glided a hand over his face, wiping away his tears. Her other hand rested on his shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. “Hey, hey, Brandon,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Then she hugged him, and the hug felt strange and soothing. “Tim was a wonderful man. One of the best I ever knew. I want you to know that I’ll be here for you just like he was. I love you, and God loves you, and you just ask for anything you need, okay?”
She broke off the hug, and now Brandon could see dry tears on her face, too. He sniffled. Another sob escaped him. “You lost a lot of people tonight too,” he said. “This is so—How can this be happening? This doesn’t make any sense.”
Karen ran her hand through his matted hair, fixing it the way a mother would. “We’re under attack, sweetie. I don’t know if this is end times or just some bad ideas being spread around, making people do evil things. But everyone I lost is in a safe place now. Tim is too. It’s sad that we won’t see them for a while, but we have to focus. There’s more to be done to make sure we’re safe, and that the rest of the folks around town are safe, too.”
Tim would have liked to hear Karen reassuring Brandon that he’d gone to Heaven. Which made it even more painful to Brandon that Tim had been wrong—that there was no Heaven, and that all Tim’s hope for such a place had been false hope. Confident that death was not the end, Tim had lived more for the wished-for life beyond than for the real life right in front of his eyes.
“None of it matters,” Brandon said. “Can’t you see that now, Pastor Noyce? It’s all pointless. Life. Everything.”
“I’ve read the Bible, sweetie. I know what the point of it all is. That’s where I find strength now. You don’t have to take strength from God, but I’ll take it from Him, and you can take some from me.”
Brandon shook his head and tried to hold back more tears. “I would have believed you a few years ago. But there’s no such thing as strength, or weakness. Just… emptiness. If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.”
Karen muttered something nasty that Brandon couldn’t hear, then said, “Nietzsche, right?”
But tragedy weighed too strongly on Brandon for him to be surprised that Karen had recognized a Nietzsche quote. “It’s just too much,” he said. “Too much, knowing that there’s nothing after death. The strong, the weak… we all enter the void together. And being
this
close to the void, seeing so much pointless death. How can you
not
leave Christianity? How can you not see reality as nihilistic?”
Karen shook her head, but her gaze looked more pitying than condescending. She sniffled a little herself. “Brandon…”
“What are you waiting for?” Virgil said, walking up beside them. Though he spoke to Brandon and Karen, his eyes swept the gloomy forest on the far side of the parking lot. “We need to get indoors, out of sight. Heather found a flashlight. Let’s go.”
Karen offered Brandon a hand. He took it, and she helped him up.
•
The land line in the church was already out, and Thorn sabotaged the church’s internet router when the humans weren’t looking. They spent ten minutes fiddling with it, and with the computers’ settings, before Karen labeled the failed internet connection “the work of the Devil” and decided to lead them to the basement to find the radio instead.
At Thorn’s suggestion, they kept the lights off in the old church, so as not to make the place conspicuous to any demons—or angels—flying overhead. Even the basement had high windows where a light could be visible from outside. So Thorn had convinced the humans that the flashlight should be their only source of illumination. He was regretting that choice now, though, because the basement was eerie even to his hardened demonic heart. So much
stuff
had accumulated here over the years that the basement was less of a room and more of a labyrinth, comprised of pianos and organs, stacks of chairs, piles of books, ancient pews crawling with cobwebs, a gigantic plastic Christmas tree laid lengthwise, and countless other old things stretching outward into darkness. Just ten feet from the stairs, Thorn was already glancing over his shoulder past Heather and Brandon, worried that whoever had been watching him from the blackness beyond the daycare doorway might be lurking here somewhere, waiting for him still.
“Where’s the radio?” Thorn asked through Virgil.
“Near the back, sad to say,” Karen said. “Just keep left and we’ll get there sooner than later.”
The humans’ feet pattered against the sandy floor as Thorn led the way, holding the flashlight steady in Virgil’s hands. The basement’s darkness seemed to swallow the dim beam. Was it running out of batteries?
Thorn tried to ignore his growing dread. He needed to play the part of the fearless leader, especially for Brandon, who was falling apart. From what Thorn had gathered from Brandon’s conversation with Karen, Brandon had recently abandoned his faith. But the poor boy had had no worldview with which to replace his belief, so skepticism had given way to cynicism, and ultimately to nihilism. Thorn had seen the process a few times on Earth, and he knew that such thinking led to despair, to apathy, and possibly to the psychopathic Brandon from the Miami Sanctuary. Even if not, though, Thorn couldn’t have Brandon bogged down in dreariness. Not tonight.
“You know,” Thorn said as he swept his flashlight beam over a dusty stack of old offering plates, “Nietzsche himself viewed nihilism not as something to wallow in, but as something to overcome. He saw nihilism as a natural result of millennia of religious thinking—as the despair that comes when people realize that the myths they believed are untrue. But he also thought that humans were stronger than that despair. That we wouldn’t just resign ourselves to it. That we’d forge our own path and create—”
“Stop talking about that,” Karen said. “I don’t wanna hear talk like that now.”
Thorn glanced at her, but her eyes were focused on the murky crevices that seemed to push in against them, waiting for a chance to swallow them up.
I’ll have to keep an eye on this one, too. She’s even more spooked than I am.
“You’ve read Nietzsche?” Brandon asked.
Thorn shrugged. “I heard him speak once.” Karen raised an eyebrow at that, but Thorn continued. “I would urge you, Brandon, not to jump to the conclusion that we’ll never discover structure or purpose to the universe around us. The universe is a big place, and we know next to nothing about it. Don’t assume that there is no meaning just because we haven’t found it yet.” Thorn spoke this to himself as much as to Brandon.
If I succeed in exposing God’s plans to demonkind, will I have a purpose in the resulting world? A world in which neither God’s despotism nor demons’ dogma hold authority over me? Will I have a reason to exist?
“There it is,” Karen said, pointing to a corner. Thorn shifted his flashlight beam and uncovered a gray metal box about the size of an office printer. Various knobs and gauges adorned its surface. A twirling black cord connected the box to a microphone on a small metal stand.
Karen swiped her hand over the top of the box, stirring up a flurry of dust, then turned a few of the knobs.
“Do you know how to use it?” Heather asked.
“I saw the pastor before me use it, years ago. I might be able to figure it out.”
“Can we just plug it in?”
“Not down here. Let’s take it into the chapel. Brandon?”
Brandon approached the radio, knelt, then lifted with his legs. Heather grabbed the microphone. “You sure your wound is okay?” she asked Virgil.
“I think so,” said Thorn. “I’ll be all right.”
Though the radio might cause me more injury than the bullet wound will.
Thorn would have to supervise their use of this old contraption, sabotage it if it started working. The humans might not trust him enough to go to the plane like he’d suggested, but he couldn’t let more victims become ensnared in this mess by allowing Karen to contact the authorities.
Thorn was about to follow the newlyweds back upstairs when Karen waved him over to a rickety wooden shelf. “Virgil. Look at this.”
Thorn shone his beam onto the shelf, and saw what must have been the church’s stock of candles. Dozens of white wax tapers and a few larger, thicker candles lined the shelf. No dust had collected on them, so they must have been placed here fairly recently.
“I’ll need a little bit of light to see the radio,” Karen said. “And I’ll need a lot of light cast on you if you want to stay with us.”
Thorn froze. He’d hoped that Karen’s suspicion of him had been mere paranoia based on her religion, but her voice bore an icy tone and her eyes radiated cold as they regarded him in the near darkness. A distance behind them, Brandon’s and Heather’s footsteps creaked up the stairs.
“The Bible warns me not to speak to devils,” she said. Virgil’s expression must have given away Thorn’s unease, because she continued with, “That’s right. I know what you are. You may have Brandon and Heather fooled because they don’t believe in things like you, but I can see right through you. Through the lies you’re trying to tell us. You and your kind caused the massacre tonight, didn’t you?” She stepped toward Thorn. “I’m not afraid of you. I fear only the One who created me. If you expect me to let you keep lying to us, you’d better have a very good explanation for why you’re here, and what you’re fixin’ to do.”
Thorn backed up, hit a wall, then realized she’d cornered him.
What can I do? Tell her I’m a demon and I’m trying to help her? She believes just as much as we do that we’re all pure evil. Or is there still a way to convince her I’m Virgil?
But she heard Marcus call me a demon. She might have even seen Virgil die from her perch on the second floor.
Thorn glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision. At the top of the stairs leading up to the chapel, someone was crouching down to peer into the open basement. Someone other than Brandon or Heather. Someone wearing a funeral suit. Someone floating in midair.
They found us.
A demon’s presence here meant that they’d survived their encounter with Thilial, maybe even killed her.
Thorn turned to Karen. “If you want me to leave you alone, I will. Call me if you need help.” With that, he eased Virgil’s body down onto the dirt floor. It went limp as he drifted up out of it. Karen knelt to examine the corpse, then faded into the darkness behind Thorn as he floated toward the stairs, giving him hope that whoever had been peeping into the basement hadn’t seen them there.