Page 120 of Horror and Chill
I yank the duct tape away from his mouth then, because a man who taught other people to beg for mercy doesn’t deserve the safety of silence. His scream comes out raw and ragged and fills the sanctuary like an alarm.
With his eyes closed and mouth open, I grab the second bottle from Evander and shove it into Williams’ mouth, holding his jaw with my other hand so he can’t spit it out.
The murky brown liquid pours into his mouth as he gags and tries not to swallow, but he has no choice. When the bottle is empty, I pull it from his mouth and watch as he spits and cries, but his voice is ragged, his airway, I’m certain, is burned and swollen.
He starts to cough and sputter, his face turning a shade of reddish blue, then the vomiting starts and we sit down in the front pew and watch for thirty minutes while he dies slowly from the poison we pumped into his body.
51
Agatha
The office is a mess.Corwin and I move quickly, pulling things from drawers and sorting them, dumping what we’re taking with us into boxes. Receipts, photos, a hard drive. The more I touch, the colder I feel. There is a page in a ledger that says first sacrificial blood in ugly handwriting, and my stomach does a back flip. I chuck the book into the box. Don’t think about the meaning of it.
We find videos—files labeled with dates and places. Faces. Kids. Women with eyes that refuse to look at the camera. It all fits together like a map of how they used people. I feel sick and steady at the same time. That feeling is new, and it scares me less than it should.
Then I find his notebook. Pastor Williams kept a journal tucked into a drawer like a teenager hiding it from their parents. He wrote down schemes, quiet little how-to notes about how to keep his flock in line, ideas that came to him in dreams of how to make the women cower. The handwriting loops fromprint to cursive when he writes about me, about nights he spent watching my feed. He calls me a temptation.
I flip the page and there are payment dates, watch history of dates, and what I did in the video. I can’t believe he was User259.
I wonder if he used his own money to pay for his dirty little secret or if the church paid.
I could look from my portal, but my computer is back at the house, and honestly, it doesn't matter. We shove the files, drives, and brittle pages into boxes and tape them shut. Corwin lifts one and scowls at the weight.
“We drop these on doorsteps. We don’t give them time to bury it.”
I nod. “They’ll have to see it to believe it.”
When we walk back into the chapel, the light makes dust in the air. Williams hangs from the cross, slack and small where before his presence filled the room like a bad perfume.
He’s dead.
I expect regret to fill me; instead, I feel a cold clarity. The rightness of tonight settles inside me, and I only feel relief. I’m not sure when I became so unaffected by death. Maybe it’s not death itself. Maybe it’s just whose deaths these are. I felt bad and guilty in the woods when I found Jay, but standing here now, I don’t feel guilt or even the slightest unease about my parents or Williams. It makes me wonder if this darkness, this thirst for revenge, was always inside me and I just didn’t know it. Since I left, I’ve loved everything spooky; horror, the occult, all of it. But this is different. This is next level.
“How does it feel to know they can’t even think about you anymore?” Garron asks.
I shrug. “Good. I feel free. It’s strange because I thought I was free before, but this is different. This feels final. You know what I mean?”
Evander nods. “I do.”
"So, now what?" I ask.
“Now, Little Horror. You’re going to lure Lundy here. He gets to start his descent to hell,” Garron says.
“Okay. Tell me what you want me to do,” I reply.
“Go into the office and get Williams’ cell. Call Lundy, tell him it’s you. He’ll come. Then we pounce,” Evander adds.
“Okay,” I answer, setting the box down on a pew.
I beat myself up for not thinking of the phone sooner. Maybe I missed it, I tell myself. Maybe I was rushing. I go back and check the office again, slower this time, fingers running along file folders. I rip through the desk, drawers, and cabinets, but nothing stands out. Then I see a black android sitting on the desk of the church secretary.
I sit down at her desk and thumb the screen awake. Of course it is Williams’ phone. His bird, Proverbs, is the lockscreen. I can't believe that thing is still alive, but again, not the focus. Lucky for me, Williams is one of the few in today's age who doesn't have a lock on his phone so I can get into it, easy as pie.
I don’t overthink it. I scroll to his contacts, find Lundy sitting in favorites, and hit call. My voice goes thin as I fake shaking and sinning, but inside I am steady as bone.
The line clicks and a voice comes through. “Pastor Williams, sir, is everything okay?”
I force a small laugh, high and nervous. “Hi, Mark. It’s me, Agatha Templeton. You didn’t forget me, did you?”
