#hymn chews on a brick wall actually

[saint-hymn]

studying anon i'm in no shape to reply but i swear you occupy a sizeable portion of my head like the raven perched upon a bust

[xf-cases-solved]

Bedroom Church Choir

MSR

Explicit

Pt. 1 (can be read as a standalone)

Melissa sang in the church choir.

She stood front row, sang first soprano, and always got the best solos. She’d had a gift—an uncanny ability to carry a multitude of emotion with a single syllable. A man who had never been fed a drop of religion in his life could know what it was like to know God, just by hearing Melissa sing.

Scully sat in the pews.

She’d be the first to tell you she couldn’t carry a tune. Her musical résumé included a few simple hymns she sang under her breath on the rare occasions she actually made it to Mass, and a monotone rendition of a Three Dog Night classic; she never wanted to be in choir.

But still she envied Melissa.

As a child, tugged out of her muddy, ripped jeans, and forced into a dress, sitting on an old, creaking bench with her mother at her side, hissing, “Sit like a lady, Dana!” Scully’s heart was green when she heard her sister sing.

It wasn’t the notes she was jealous of, but the emotions. Scully, who felt deeply but was twice as guarded, couldn’t fathom the ease at which Melissa poured herself into such a public display of self-expression.

Maggie Scully always said, that when she was born, her eldest daughter didn’t cry.

“I asked the doctor what was wrong, but he just smiled and said, ‘She’s just taking it all in, Mrs. Scully. You’ve got a very curious baby on your hands.’”

And of course, that was true. As a newborn, she prioritized understanding the brand new place she’d been pushed into, over giving into the fear of its newness, and thus began the repertoire of Dana Scully; a constant of hers, literally since birth. Melissa was truly gifted, but never let it be said that Scully was not without her own wealth of talents. It took, after all, an incredibly talented person to hold the Universe in the palms of her hands, and pick it apart until it was nothing more than atomic numbers on the elemental table.

But the drawback was that she had walls, somewhat by nature, and certainly by nurture.

It’s not that Scully was dispassionate. No one who truly knew her would call her cold or calculating. She laughed easily at things she found funny, and cried when it was necessary, and she carried within her a heart so full of sentimentality and romantic idealization that among her wealth of medical journals and scientific studies, one could find Austen, Brontë, and du Maurier. But surely, with a heart so fragile and a mind so analytical, it was only logical to keep it safe.

It wasn’t always about safety, however, but rather, shame. Scully, so independent and self-assured, had the bizarre tendency towards hero worship. Likely, she was born with an overflowing amount of loyalty, and like opposing ends of a magnet being drawn together, she gravitated towards anyone she felt she could unburden some of it on.

Her first hero was her father—a naval captain, who was emblematic of what a man of his time was meant to be. He loved to his core, but was wont to express it more often with a salute than with a hug. And Scully idolized her father, trying so hard to emulate what she saw as a representation of perfection, that she began to see every tear, or hurt, or pain as a weakness, and she began to keep them inside.

And then she had to go and become a doctor, of all things, where she had to work ten times as hard as her male peers just to prove she belonged there. Short, petite, and so very much a woman, Scully could never let her classmates see her as anything but the hardened intellectual facade she brought to her lectures, and into her labs, and then into her residency, until suddenly, that was just who Dana Scully was to any new person she met; logic and intellect personified, in order to avoid the misogyny, both purposeful and ingrained, of her peers.

(She had loved one man in med school, opening her heart exactly once. He was a man who saw her both as a woman and an intellectual, and he was someone she had no right to claim, and when she finally walked out the door and into the arms of the FBI, she couldn’t be so sure if it had been her heart that she had opened to him, or her ego.)

And this all brought her here, to this life she now led, as the voice of reason sidekick to a man she had given her wealth of loyalty to, to the surprise of them both.

Mulder, of course, was not someone she needed to fear judgement from—she had witnessed him proposing alien abduction as a plausible theory to a room full of his superiors on more than one occasion—but by the time he entered her life, or, more accurately, by the time she had been forced into his, her walls had been widened and caulked so substantially that it never occurred to her that vulnerability was an option.

(Every now and then, Mulder would hack away a piece of metaphorical cement, and glimpse at the person behind the wall, and while he never once would pass judgement on her for simply being human, Scully would rebuke herself for her weakness.)

Which is why, today, she is thrown entirely off guard as Mulder asks her, so bluntly and inelegantly that she does a mental double-take, “Why are you so quiet in bed?”

It is either very late, or very early, depending on your point of view. The sun hasn’t quite started to rise, but the sky is starting to brighten just a bit around her halo glow. Scully and Mulder spent the better part of their Thursday night, and Friday twilight hours, on a stakeout outside of an ugly, brick apartment complex in a town of less than 4,000 in rural Kansas, which ended in a foot chase down a dead end alleyway and Scully’s gun pressed against the temple of a man with the marking that led them here tattooed on his right forearm, while Mulder read him his Miranda rights.

“Y’all might as well go back to your hotel and get some rest,” said the local sheriff who arrived on the scene shortly after. “I only got one other officer on duty so it’ll take some time to take care of the booking, and the forensic lab in KC won’t have gotten back to you with the test results on the corpse until at least this afternoon.”

And Scully should have jumped on the opportunity for rest, having not truly slept in well over a day, but she found she was still hyped on adrenaline, and with a single look at Mulder she knew he was feeling the same, which is how they now found themselves sitting in a lumpy booth inside a 24/7 diner, with Mulder inquiring about their bedroom habits.

Because, due to a couple beers over a Twilight Zone marathon taken too far two weeks ago, they actually have bedroom habits—a fact Scully is more or less never not thinking about. Even when she is preoccupied with paperwork, or meetings, or chasing bad guys down rural Kansas alleyways, the back of her mind is always replaying the feel of Mulder’s fingers or the taste of his tongue, like some sort of X rated background noise.

“Mulder,” Scully hisses, after she’s taken a moment to recover. She glances over her shoulder. The diner is entirely empty except for an elderly, heavyset man in the far corner looking like he’s trying, unsuccessfully, to sober up over a cup of black coffee, and the disinterested waitress leaning against the counter, snapping bubbles with her chewing gum while flipping through a gossip magazine without seeming to read a single word.

“Relax, no one is paying attention to us,” says Mulder, reading her thoughts, cutting off her reprimanding before it can begin. She turns back to him and puts both her hands around her mug of English breakfast tea, and stares into it with a frown.

“Where’d that question even come from?” she asks her tea.

“Just something I’ve been wondering since this whole…” He clears his throat. “Erm, thing started.”

“And a crappy diner at 4:30 in the morning is when you decide to ask it?” asks Scully, occupying herself by grabbing another sugar packet and tearing it open to pour into her tea. “Why were you even thinking about our sex life right now?”

“Not to be crass, but it’s probably safe to say that I’m always thinking about our sex life,” says Mulder, and Scully tries to shoot him a glare, but she’s pretty sure it comes out a smirk, because the idea of ‘our’ sex life is still so new and exciting that she gets the flutters in her belly at the thought.

“Hate to break it to you, Mulder, but real life isn’t like those VHS tapes in your desk. Not all women scream bloody murder when they’re fucked.”

Mulder regards her with a sly gleam in his eye that makes her suspicious as he takes a bite of apple pie. “I know that,” he says through his mouthful. He swallows. “I just have the distinct impression that you’re secretly one of them.”

Scully blinks at him. “What makes you think you’d know something like that?”

“I’m a behavioral psychologist,” he says. “It’s my job to know.”

Scully rolls her eyes, and goes back to stirring sugar into her tea, not dignifying that with a response. She takes a sip and grimaces—too sweet.

“That, and you always try to stop yourself from making noise,” Mulder continues, and Scully’s head shoots up.

“I do not,” she defends. In response, Mulder raises an eyebrow, and reaches up to pull the collar of his shirt to the side, revealing the fresh, red bite mark on his collarbone, and Scully flushes, remembering the night before in the motel room they were very much not supposed to be sharing, as Mulder pushed into her and she’d muffled her scream by digging her teeth into the flesh of his muscular shoulder. She scowls. “Circumstantial evidence,” she says.

Mulder cracks a grin, and responds by reaching over and gently taking Scully’s hand that’s wrapped around her mug, and closely examining a faded mark on the skin between her index finger and her thumb, also in the shape of Scully’s bite, and Scully pulls her hand away, thinking about a week and a half ago in her apartment, when Mulder went down on her while she was sitting on the couch, and she had caught her moan before it escaped by clamping down on the webbing between her two fingers, so hard she drew blood.

“What’s your point?” she asks crossly, wishing Mulder had the decency not to look so smug.

“It’s not a point, it’s a question,” he says, sitting back in his chair. “Are you quiet in bed because that’s just how you are, or is it for some other reason?”

“What other reason would there be?”

Mulder shrugs. “You tell me.”

And Scully is at a loss, because the truth is that Mulder’s right—she isn’t a quiet lover. But she wishes that she were, because inside every moan, groan, and wail of pleasure, there’s a vulnerability attached. To be vocal in bed is to admit to feelings she’d rather not say.

“I’ve been louder with other people,” she says.

“So just not with me?”

“Of course not with you,” she says, almost annoyed, because he sounds almost hurt, but he knows her so well, shouldn’t it be obvious? “Not with you because you matter.”

Mulder makes that face he makes when she says something unexpected. He pulls his eyebrows together, and his mouth forms a question he can’t find the words for, and Scully secretly revels in it, because it’s rare.

“You don’t get it,” she says for him, and he doesn’t disagree.

“Explain it to me?” he says instead, and she stirs her cooling, overly-sweet tea.

“I could never sing in church choir.”

“No offense, but among your many talents singing isn’t one of them.”

She smiles, knowing that for a moment they are both back in the woods in northern Florida, flirting about sleeping bags while monsters lurk in the dark. She says, “I could spend my whole life perfecting vocal technique, and I’d never sound beautiful, because I don’t know how to put emotion behind it. I don’t want to put emotion behind it.”

“Art requires a degree of vulnerability,” Mulder agrees.

“So does letting someone you care about know the things they make you feel,” says Scully, and Mulder understands.

“I’m not a congregation, though.”

“No, you’re something worse.”

“You don’t have to give me anything you’re not comfortable with.”

“But you deserve it,” Scully finds herself saying. God, she’s been up for so long. God, she’s been fighting for even longer. “But I want to. I just don’t know how.”

Mulder is silent. So is Scully. The man in the corner grumbles about his hangover into his hands.

“I have an idea,” says Mulder finally. “But you need to tell me if it’s too much.”

“It’s not too much,” says Scully automatically. She trusts him with her life.

—-

Even as the sun rises, the hotel room is dark. It faces west, and the light is in the east. They’ve got the curtains pulled tight, and the lamps off. It’s an old motel, with only five channels without static, two of which are local weather stations, and the comforter pattern doesn’t match the carpet. Scully lays on her back, a sleeping mask resting over her eyes, as Mulder takes her wrist and locks it inside the cool metal of his handcuffs.

The backboard of the bed is made up of discolored, metal columns, and Scully listens as the opposite end of the handcuffs is placed around one. She tugs experimentally. She’s stuck in place.

“Safeword?” Mulder asks her for the third time, as he takes her other wrist gently in his hand, and takes her own pair of handcuffs to trap her to the bed. Their superiors would love to know what they do with FBI property; maybe it’d finally get them out of the building.

“Abduction,” she says for the third time, and she can’t see it, but she knows Mulder smiles, because he laughed for a full minute when she picked that as the word.

“It’s about sensation,” he explains again, as though reminding himself. “It’s about feeling and letting go. But if it gets to be too much—”

“Mulder?” she interrupts.

“Yeah?”

“Shut up.”

And she hears him huff out a breath of laughter, and she feels his lips against hers, just briefly, in a chaste reassurance. “Okay,” he breathes, hot on her skin. And she waits, chained and entirely nude, more vulnerable than she has willingly been, possibly ever. The fear she feels treads the line of exhilaration, as Mulder runs a hand along her thigh.

She hums her contentment. Humming is okay. Humming is not revealing. It’s the noise equivalent of, “that’s nice,” which isn’t scary to say. Yes, that’s nice. Full stop. No barriers broken, image maintained.

He kisses her again, harder this time, and she responds enthusiastically, reaching out to run her fingers through his hair, but being met with the clang of metal on metal and resistance against her wrists. She can’t touch him, and that’s a bit unnerving, as she realizes how unlevel the playing field is. That is, of course, the point, but theory is never the same as practice.

Mulder moves his lips along her jawline, licking her lightly in the spot just behind her ear that is strangely erogenous, and she lets out a muffled, “mmph!” A step up from humming, but not quite the danger zone just yet.

He nibbles lightly on the skin of her neck, not hard enough to raise eyebrows at their meeting with Skinner day after next, but enough that it tickles in that way where it is indistinguishable from minute pain, and a groan builds in the back of her throat, like a low rumble of thunder, but it doesn’t escape.

Two fingers suddenly pinch around her nipple, and she can’t help the gasp that escapes. She can’t see him twist the sensitive flesh; can only feel his fingers tug, and his tongue joins them, and there’s something about the darkness that makes it that much more intense. She pulls her lips inward, and bites down on them, muting the sounds that threaten to pour off her traitorous tongue.

Without moving from her nipple, his other hand reaches down between her legs. A finger dips quickly inside her, and then encircles her engorged clit, lubricating her with her own wetness. “Oh,” she says, softly, turning her head and resting her cheek against her shoulder, and she tries to find something to bite down on, but she can’t reach. “Oh!” she says again, surprised this time, as the fingers around her nipple tighten, and his mouth moves to her other breast, expertly working three of her most sensitive spots at once.

Abruptly, he moves away from it all, and she protests, until she feels him positioning himself between her thighs, and then she smiles, because she knows this is his favorite. She never has to ask; you’d think her pussy was heroin the way he seems to crave it.

But she isn’t prepared for this, as his tongue makes contact, and his fingers slip inside her. She isn’t prepared for the intensity of it, as she pulls on the handcuffs, surely leaving marks in the skin, trying to grab hold of something to concentrate on anything other than the steady motion he’s gotten nearly perfect at.

A tightness begins to build where his mouth presses against her, and every hair on her body is standing on end. It’s too much, too much, and she goes to shout, “abduction!” but it comes out as, “fuck!” In fact, it comes out as a string of expletives, each one louder than the next, punctuated by high, desperate moans, as though she were a woman in one of Mulder’s VHS tapes.

And then her orgasm is washing over her, and she is faintly aware of her voice growing hoarse; of the clang of metal on the backboard pinging like mad, and she doesn’t care. Isn’t that something, she thinks somewhere in her blissed out mind, she doesn’t care. She is singing her own one-person church choir, and Mulder is her congregation, and they both know what it’s like to know God.

She comes down, breathing harder than she had in the alleyway with a gun in her hand, and Mulder pushes up her mask, his eyes wild, looking at her like she’s the answer to every mystery he’s ever encountered, and he crushes his mouth against hers, filling her tongue with the taste of herself.

With no prelude, Mulder pushes his erection inside her easily, and she buries herself in the warmth of his neck, saying all the things she’s never allowed herself to say, using filthy, single syllables. He says it all back to her in the same language. She comes again, which only happens when the sex is particularly special, and he follows her, spilling as deep inside of her as he can get.

Then there is silence; nothing but the sound of their tandem breaths.

“Jesus,” says Mulder finally, and Scully, who has said everything and more, can do nothing else but nod.

He slips out of her; undoes her binding. He rubs her wrists, peppering the red marks with soft kisses, and then gathers her up into his arms.

“I thought you couldn’t sing,” he whispers into her ear, petting her sweaty, properly-fucked-looking hair.

She smiles into his touch.

“I guess I just needed somebody to teach me how.”

[ecotone99]

[HR] A Wholly Superior Creature - Part IV: The God

Part IV: The God

We rolled out of Roger's neck of the woods and I set the wheels back toward the center of the city. My heart was in my throat and I wasn't sure why. I needed to get my mind off Roger and what he'd done.

"So what got you kicked out of the fold, Padre?"

I didn't actually expect him to answer, but he opened right up.

"The Church made the same damn mistake they've been making since the Christianity first got started," he said.

"What's that?"

"They forced a priest to decide between doing right, or being orthodox.."

"Didn't go over well, I take it."

"It's my happiest sin, the one that got me excommunicated."

I had to know. "You officiate a gay wedding or something?"

"I performed an unsanctioned exorcism on an unbaptized child despite receiving direct orders from the Vatican not to do so."

"Shit," I said.

He nodded. "Indeed."

"So you pulled a demon out of a little kid," the words sounded just as stupid coming out of my mouth.

"I did."

"So that's what you do. That's what you're in a rush to get to Chicago over, right? Some true believer has problems with the supernatural and you take a flight, smash the problem like King Kong, then head back to the city for a fresh cup of Joe and some esoteric reading."

I could see out of my peripheral vision that he was just staring ahead, his bone pale skin flashing like a ghost haunting the passing street lamps on Ellison Street.

"If I owned my own life," he said grimly. "I'd probably choose another line of work--but I don't, so here I am." He turned his head to look at me, I was pretty sure that he was done with my flippant probing. "It has to be hard hearing what Roger had to say about what he did with the Mueller case."

"If you're trying to turn this car into a confessional, Father, I can go ahead and pump those brakes for you." He had opened up about his professional tragedies, that didn't mean I had to do the same. "I can't blame Roger for what he did. I won't. Can't say I'd have made the same decision, hell, I'd like to think that I would have stuck it out."

"Isn't that what we're about to do, Detective?"

I gave my eyebrows an elevator ride. "Maybe we hear something, maybe we don't. Maybe we find these Faceless Children or maybe we come out of the sewer in a few hours smelling like shit, holding nothing but our dicks in our hand. Either way, I intend to find some answers."

"If you're so matter of fact about all this, Sam, if you're so calm about it, do you want to tell me why your knuckles are white around the wheel?"

He was right, I was on edge. I had a hold on the wheel like it had taken my lunch money in the fifth grade. I eased up. "My dad wasn't a religious man, but there was a kind of genuineness to him that I never really appreciated until after he was gone. He used to say, 'Son, the only thing that matters in this life are the promises we keep to the people we love.' That stuck with me and hearing Roger tonight reminded me of it."

Father Daniel nodded. "You think he was keeping a promise to Carol."

"I do," I said, as I wheeled the car to the curb of the intersection of Bass and Ellison. "I also think he broke a promise to the people he swore to protect."

"That's a tall ladder of piety to climb for any person, Sam."

I shifted the car into park and looked at him. "Well, Dan, it's hard to deal with the fact that my mentor, the man who helped shape everything about who I am as a police officer, allowed a couple of spooky echoes to convince him to destroy evidence and give up on a case that, if he'd solved it, might mean that Courtney Davidson would be at home tonight with her family instead of being prepared for a closed casket funeral."

His hands were folded in his lap as he regarded me. "You're angry with him."

"Goddamn right I am."

"OK. Are you going to forgive him for loving his wife more than he loved his oath?"

I don't think I've ever rolled my eyes so hard as I did then. "You're so full of it."

"You love Roger. If you didn't you wouldn't be this mad. Forgiveness is love in action. Roger rightly deserves your forgiveness, just like you have every right to be angry with his failure."

I'm not much for yelling, but this Sunday school bullshit was getting on my nerves. "I didn't ask for your counsel, Dan. I'm not a Christian and you sure as hell aren't my priest."

The way his mouth turned to a frown showed me that I'd found one of the ways to wound him. He said. "Of course I am."

I shook my head in frustration. "Jesus Christ," I said on purpose. "Can we please just go into the sewer and look for these Molech-worshiping dickheads?"

I got out, popped my trunk and grabbed two flashlights and my shotgun. I handed the priest a flashlight and nodded my head to the open trunk. "There's a crowbar in there for the manhole. Seeing as I'm sure you've taken a vow of not shooting people I figure you can use it in case the Faceless Children don't respond to a sermon."

Father Daniel proved stronger than he looked by the way he popped the top on the manhole with no more effort than cracking open a beer bottle. The damp, earthy smell hit me like a kick in the balls. I swallowed the lump in my throat and descended the iron rungs and splashed down into the ankle deep water. The priest followed suit and we both clicked on our flashlights, the beams punched shafts into the voided depths as the sound of rolling traffic bustled overhead.

I attached my flashlight to the barrel of my shotgun and pointed the killing end toward the darkness. My nose adjusted better than my eyes could as both the priest and I kept quiet, listening for the whispers that Roger was so sure we'd hear.

Roger was right. They found us.

They were more than a sound though, the noise of voices weren't so much audible in my ears as they were bouncing around in my skull. The words made no sense, a rolling jumble of noises that wore the trappings of language. Harsh consonants, like the snapping furious jaws, pounded into long vowel sounds. Before I felt my hands begin to shake, I noticed that my light was trembling in the open chasm.

Father Daniel put a hand on my shoulder, his offset eyes looking huge and owlish in the glow bleeding off his flashlight. The look of fear on his face set new wrinkles on his skin I hadn't seen before. This was not a man to be put off by such things, but he was.

It did not inspire me with confidence.

"I have no knowledge of what I'm hearing, Sam."

I grit my teeth, thinking that this grating noise was likely the last thing that Courtney Davidson ever heard. My mind's eye took me back to her crime scene and the violation made so clear in the afternoon sun.

"Let's go," I said, as we sloshed through the tepid waters in that maze of sewage and concrete. We carefully navigated to places where the voices grew in intensity and turned back from where their potency began to dwindle. Harsher and louder the voices rolled from chants into dissonant choruses that drowned out our ingress through the black water.

Our flashlights bloomed wide against something that didn't match the concave grayness of the concrete tunnel.

We stopped dead in our tracks.

My mouth fell open.

Where once had been a dead-end was a flat, rusted door that had been set in the wall like the face of a furnace. Etched in thick, crude lines was the outline of some kind of creature I'd never seen before.

I looked at Father Daniel.

He looked at me and nodded his head in confirmation of what I thought we were looking at.

I found myself so overwhelmed by the chorus burning against my brain that I found I couldn't speak for fear that I might join in the dark hymn. I turned to the priest and flicked my chin at the lever handle jutting from the door.

The door gave way with surprising ease, swinging open on heavy hinges bolted into the wall. With the doorway open, the chorus became more noise than voices, like a rolling blast of thunderclaps hammering away at my conscious mind.

Courtney Davidson's corpse flashed in my vision. The ruined flesh, the desolation of her humanity, gave me rage that pushed me through the doorway.

It was a small room and a brief inspection revealed a latched door cut into the floor. The priest reached down and pulled, the door came up a few inches, but proved too heavy for one man.

I set my shotgun aside and when he lifted again, I set my fingers underneath the cool metal as we wrenched the door open wide.

I picked up my shotgun. The flashlight lanced over Father Daniel's face to reveal a crimson pair of lines dripping from his nose. I gestured my hand across my nose to reveal the nosebleed to him, only to find that my own fingers smeared blood across my lips.

The malicious chants, oppressive now, chewed into my thoughts. I was struggling to concentrate, my heart was pounding like I was sprinting in a race I couldn't see or understand.

I shook my head, trying to throw the voices from my mind as blood from my nose slashed against my cheek. I blew out of my nostrils hard, and aimed my flashlight down into the open throat of the aperture. Where I expected to see another ladder I found a set of old stone steps that curled out of sight. A dusky, yellow light flickered in stark contrast of my own against a dark, brick wall glistening with condensation.

We made our way slowly down the steps, following the bend for several impossibly long minutes. The raging blast of abhorrent voices were so loud now that the edge of my vision began to blur. I turned back to look at Father Daniel. His face was ashen with fear. He slid the crowbar into the handles of his medical bag, and the glow of his flashlight showed a trickle of blood flowing from his ear running down his neck, staining the white collar scarlet.

The end of the steps opened like a mouth, a huge archway that gaped impossibly wide at us.

I didn't need my flashlight to see the darkly stained altar or the robed figures surrounding it—the ensconced torches gave me more light than I wanted. There were four of them standing there. Just behind them I could see two pale legs hanging over the edge of the stone lip. Set behind the altar was a huge, glowering statue; a massive bull with a giant ring of yellow metal looped among the hollows of a great iron nose. Its hands were upraised, palms facing us like the countless criminals I'd frozen in command as a beat cop. The stony skin was slathered in a crimson wash. Dozens of hollow mouths and eyes hung open, pinned to the statue's bulk in silent screams. This was a place of horror, a temple of constant slaughter where the titan god of insane men wore the skinned faces of the innocent.

I opened my mouth to let the butchers in this hellish tabernacle know what time it was. I barked an order I'd given a hundred times before, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was a hacking splatter.

I must have made some kind of noise, because one of the robed figures turned around to show us the featureless mask he wore and the crude knife he clutched in a bloody glove. He pointed at me.

The shotgun bucked in my hands.

The slug took the surprised cultist in the stomach, punching a hole in him the size of a baseball. Blood splashed against the stone altar behind him.

I went to rack another shell but the pump stalled on me, jamming the cartridge in the ejector like an old man chewing a cigar. I looked up only to find one of the cultists coming at me with murder in his eyes and a curved knife in his hands. I grabbed my shotgun by the warm barrel and swung the stock in a hard, flat arc that caught the cultist in the face. The mask he wore shattered like a fumbled dinner plate. I looked up thinking I'd see the last two cultist rushing me and the priest to finish our little reenactment of Bunker Hill.

The last two figures were still at the altar.

They were still carving into the body.

I pulled my revolver from inside my coat and fired the only warning shot I was willing to give that day, and they were lucky to get that. "Freeze, motherfuckers. Put your hands in the air, then, slowly, get those dicks in the dirt!"

"That is impossible." A woman's voice came from the taller of the two remaining cultists. She turned and slipped the featureless mask from her face. The hood of the robe fell back, her auburn hair shimmered in the torchlight. Whatever might have been her face was now a ruin of dark scars and pale flesh.

"Get on the ground. Now!" I could hear my voice again, the whispers were gone.

"We are subjects of the horned one, Police Man," she said, somehow making the title feel like the most insignificant position in the world. "Now is the moment of waking," she said, turning back to the limp form prostrated on the table. "With this," A quiet slurping sound whispered through the room. "We conjure." She pointed the skinned face at me, the flesh dangling in the open air like stretched out baking dough.

My guts rolled over and I swallowed what flowed up into my throat. "Goddamnit! Don't make me shoot you, lady. Now step away-"

She turned away from me as if I were a child throwing a sulking fit, the complete disregard for the gun I pointed at her sent a chill down my spine. I commanded her again, but she only kept walking toward the titan bull. The other cultist followed her, a crude stone hammer and long iron nail in their hand.

The cultist I smashed with the shotgun started to moan and open his eyes. I kicked him in the head and sent him back to La-La Land.

I looked over at Father Daniel, who up to this point had been absolutely shit at helping get control of the situation. He was kneeling on the ground, his hands buried deep in the medicine bag.

"The fuck are you doing in that bag? Help me out here." I said.

"Are you going to shoot that woman before she finishes the ritual?" His words came fast, his hands worked faster.

"No," I said.

"Then I need what's in the bag."

He pulled a purple stole, each end marked with a golden cross, wrapped it around his neck and reached back in the bag only to produce a large coffee canister in one hand and a crucifix in the other.

"You've got to be fucking shitting me, Dan. What the—"

The unmasked woman had turned and given a harrowing shriek. She was staring at Father Daniel.

"Curse you, Haruspex," she screamed. "Your god has no claim down here among the blood and suffering of the horned one! Moloch does not bow before lesser creatures!"

An unnatural wind, hot and fetid, sprayed out like two smoking jets from the statue. The steamy fog billowed through the room, snuffing out the torchlight faster than clicking off a light. Blackness dark as tar cloaked everything. I spun, looking all around for my flashlight.

It was next to the shotgun on the ground. Before I could reach for it I heard a peal of a bell, a great ringing. It was a strange sound, an old sound, and it threatened to cut the courage out of me forever. Following the hollow boom of what I assumed was the hammer strike, I heard the sound of a great animal breathing. A low rumbling noise that echoed from the depth of that dark temple all the way to the sewer above us. I do not know why, but such a terror came over me that I fell to my knees and pressed the flat of my palms into my ears. My gun flew from my hands in the effort, the darkness swallowing it whole.

There came a horrible grunt, a rush of wind, a woman's scream. Then I heard what sounded like a great sheet tearing and a rush of liquid splattering on the stony floor. Unnaturally loud crunches were followed by what sounded like the grinding of stones.

My flashlight illuminated the shattered face of the man at my knees, and as all went eerily quiet save for the angry, mammoth breathing.

I reached down and gripped my flashlight. I was shaking with such ferocity that my teeth chattered in my head. The beam jerked in my hands, cresting over the bloody altar and the slender arm hanging over the edge. When the light reached the top of the altar I saw a cloven hand, the two dark nails sparkling like obsidian. Unable to stop my primate brain from the rest of the discovery, the beam of my light flashed across an inhuman face. The huge iris of the menacing bull contracted.

From somewhere in the dark came the voice of the Priest. I turned to see his own flashlight burst into the void where what I once thought was a statue had now become a living, breathing entity of unbelievable oppression. The sheer weight of its presence invaded my faculties and cracked the foundation of all bravery I'd ever learned from being on the force.

I was helpless.

I wanted to scream.

But instead I listened to the voice of Father Daniel who spoke in a harsh, racking chant that created a kind of dark light around him. The canister was clutched in his hands and he held the crucifix high above his head. Wherever the dark light of the priest touched it pushed back against the cloak of shadow that radiated from the bull.

Louder and louder Father Daniel cried. With manic eyes of blue and green he pounded the deity with commands I somehow knew were never meant to be uttered by human lips.

Suddenly he spoke in English. "Sam! You must approach and remove the flesh nailed to him! It allows him to connect to the mortal plane!"

Insanity flooded over my mind, and before I could tell my muscles to move I had taken three massive lungfuls of air and was running into the darkness armed with only a flashlight and a priestly command. The bouncing beam of the flashlight showed my advance on the massive bull, and when I reached him, I grabbed one of the long-dead faces. The flesh squished between my fingers and I yanked hard.

Over the cacophony of Father Daniel's incantation I groped and pulled and jerked nail and flesh, Moloch's bellows threatened to shatter the walls that had stood in this dark place for a hundred years or more. I took hold of the last face I could see, and I went to rip it free and save us from this living nightmare.

Suddenly, a devastating sense of pressure bent me at the waist. A flash of pain lanced through my back and I was lifted high into the air. Hooting cries of abysmal pain followed me as I felt myself floating above the darkness, the innocent body atop the stone altar, and then down into the stone floor below.

Laying there, I touched my stomach. Though I could not see anything, I felt the gaping hole that I guessed had come from a swipe of the Babylonian god's horns. The cold from the ground seemed to seep into my feet, my legs, my bones. Breathing was soon a chore as well.

Blinking and blinking, awaiting the final closing of my eyes, I was startled by an explosion of light.

"Sam, oh Christ, Sam."

"Is it--"

"Without you, it would have been impossible, Sam. You did it," he said, a lips began to tremble. "You did it."

"It's so dark down here," I said. The heat was pouring out of me now, like a busted drainpipe. "so cold. Father," I spit the words. "Father, listen to me, would you?"

"Would you like to make your confession to holy God, Sam?"

I shook my head lazily. "No, Father. I want you reach into my jacket pocket."

He did, and he found what was there.

"Open it and read the inside," a deeper darkness than I have ever known began to edge in on my vision, something more palpable than mere absence of light.

"A man delights when he does what he was built to do," Father Daniel said, his voice quavering.

"Take it with you to Chicago," I said. The priest said something and kissed my brow.

I smiled. "Take it with you everywhere."

The End

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