XXX
It was
Latin, Henry recognised it immediately.
The words, growing louder, through the door beside them were clearly a
version of the Ave Maria, but the words were different and barely
without thinking Henry knew he could fill in the bits he wasn’t hearing.
Ave
Margarita, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui. Sancta Margarita, Alter Mater Dei, ora pro
nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora naturae novae nostrae et saecula nova
nostrae, in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
It
was a prayer to Saint Margaret of Devara, recorded in those papers Henry had
left behind in the hospital; a prayer repeated in secret since the , when
Margaret herself was still alive and stirring up a religious following that
nearly brought the city to ruin. Henry
new all this. He had been brought up
with terrifying tales of the Cult. He
knew them as well as he knew the stories of the Bible that had been his bread
and butter for thirty years of ministry and, until this night, he had rejected
them just a completely.
“I can ‘t
hear anything,” Paige whispered, “it’s just silence… no,” she tilted her heard
and Henry knew she was starting to hear the same thing he was, the same thing
Charlie must have been listening to. “Wait,”
she said, obviously listening now, “What are they saying?”
“It’s a
prayer,” Henry explained.
“So this
is some kind of prayer meeting, then?” She asked, disbelief creeping into her
voice. “I know all that churchy stuff
can be a bit creepy,” she giggled and Henry wondered if disbelief had been the
wrong judgement. He couldn’t blame her
if she started becoming hysterical after all they’d been through. “But seriously,” she continued, “a fter all
the monsters and nightmares and whatever the hell we’ve been through tonight we
get a prayer meeting now?”
“It’s a
bit more than that,” Henry said, surprising himself with how calm, how rational
and yet how honest he sounded. I’m
really going to tell them, aren’t I?
I’m really committing to this truth. “It’s not standard Christian doctrine. That prayer is heresy to conventional Christianity, and, I’m afraid
to say, it might explain everything that’s happened tonight.”
The world
changed then and so suddenly that Henry found it hard to believe it hadn’t been
in response to his words, to his giving in to the reality he had found himself
in. The posters began to fade and
crumple and fall away from the wall, the paint of which was peeling away in
like fashion, revealing bare, crumbling brick.
Weeds broke through the concrete floor and the fluorescent strip
lighting dimmed and then faded away altogether. The Latin chanting continued for a moment longer, then it too
faded, leaving only an echo. They were
surrounded by silence and ruins once again.
“I think
I need to explain some things to you,” Henry said, feeling more confident and
yet also, deep down, more afraid. It’s
all real, he thought with growing horror, all of it is real and we have
to live through it.
Charlie was gazing up at him
expectantly, big eyes gleaming somehow in that darkness. It made Henry wonder what the boy knew, why
it had been him who had led them to that door and the evil prayed beyond.
“Let’s find somewhere we can
sit down for a while,” he said, “and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
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