I ran my flashlight up the wall on my right, but this church had been a simple one even when it had been in use. There were no carvings or other decorations, nothing of the ostentatious gold leaf and vain decorative elements a lot of churches seemed to go in for. I skimmed fallen and rotting pews with my light, ahead toward the altar, and all of a sudden, the peacefulness drained out of the night.
There, in the orb of my flashlight, was a person, or something looking like a person. They had been bound to a cross that was propped or nailed to the altar. They were dressed in all black, and long black hair fell over a head that hung limp. In the light, I watched as a drop of blood glistened back at me on its way down. There was a puddle on the floor, bright still, and before I knew what I was doing, I was running toward the person.
“Hey!” I said, but there was no reaction. Someone had done this, had taken another human being here and hurt them. I wasn’t thinking rationally, because if I had been, I would have tried my phone to call the police. Instead I did what anyone would do when they see another person hurt. I helped.
I let the camera hang on its strap around my neck and very carefully lifted up the person’s head. This was a man, and he had longer hair than me. His face had been cut up, deep gashes, painful to just look at them. His eyes were barely open, but his lips sort of quivered.
“Oh, you’re not dead, you’re not dead,” I heard myself say. “Hang on, I’ll help you, just hang on.”
In the light I saw that the way he had been bound to the cross was elaborate. There were restraints, not ropes, that kept his arms and torso and legs in place, a sharp contrast to his clothing, which was all black but high end. It was the kind of thing people wore for gallery openings, not flashy to impress, just simple and beautiful. In places, it glistened wetly. Blood.
The restraints actually made it easier for me to get him off. There were no knots to undo, just buckles, which I attacked with shaky hands while also holding the flashlight.
When I began working on the first restraint, working it open with clumsy fingers and holding the flashlight in one hand, I had the strongest déjà-vu I ever had. In fact, this was more than déjà-vu. It was like almost remembering a dream you had that night, catching glimpses of that dream, only to then lose the whole of it in waking all over again.
I shook my head and kept working on getting him free. I started with his right arm, which fell to his side when I finally had the restraint open, then I went to his left. Before I did the strap across his chest, I had the good sense to undo his legs. I had dragged bloody footsteps all around the cross in the process, I saw that as my light tumbled everywhere, but I didn’t care. I cared that he lived, that I didn’t have to see him die, watch the life drain out of him as if the headstones outside were calling it to them.
“Okay, almost done,” I said, and then did the strap across his chest. This one was difficult, because his weight pulled against it, making it so there was hardly any give at the buckle. I did my best to push his torso up, hoping he didn’t have any major injuries I’d upset further by doing this.
Working as fast as I could, I got the buckle open and freed him from the cross at last.
His whole weight sagged against me, and I managed to hold him with a huff. He was a dead weight, and I a photographer who didn’t really work out beyond the occasional yoga session. I couldn’t quite hold him, had to let him go to the floor, although I tried to get him there as gently as I was able.
He moaned. His back felt wet under my hand, and I looked from it to the cross. Words stuck in my throat. Spikes had been hammered into the cross from behind, and he had been mounted on them. He had to be hurt badly, and I had to get him help.
“Can you hear me? My car isn’t far away. I’ll get you to a hospital, but I need you to get up,” I said.
As I was draping his arm over my shoulder, I heard noises from outside the church. The door was thrown inward moments later, and the commotion started.
Everything happened very fast, and I’m not sure I remember the sequence of events correctly. I do remember there were three of them coming into the church. The beam of my flashlight caught them, and the tone of their angry voices will ring in my memory forever.
“What are you doing? By the Holy Lord --” and more religious stuff and prayers that -- luckily -- didn’t sink into my memory. They were wielding guns, and they took aim at me and the man. Like a deer in a car’s headlights, I froze.
I couldn’t even begin to comprehend this. This church was supposed to be abandoned, and now there were people here. The man leaning on me heavily was close to dying, and crazy people dressed in black were here to get the job done sooner rather than later. They would kill me too. I’d had the chance to go home with a cute waitress less than an hour ago, and now I was about to die.
And I didn’t want to die.
The manmoved, and there was screaming. A part of my brain struggled to understand this, because right up until that moment, he had seemed too weak to do anything, closer to dying than I’d ever seen anyone in real life. The way his body jumped into gear now was beyond anything someone fit and rested might have been able to do. It didn’t compute.
There were the screams as well, and I did not comprehend those, not at first.
My flashlight fell to the floor, rolled away from me, and all I saw were broken pieces of what happened, caught in the kaleidoscope of scattered light and movement.
If what happened then were photographs, it would be one of the man, blurred for his speed and half out of frame, the others voicing their wide-eyed despair. My flashlight didn’t catch anything splintering or tearing, but even though I’d never heard the sound, I imagined twisted limbs and broken bones. Then, wet noises in the dark that made my stomach turn.
It did not take very long until the church was almost silent again, and my flashlight finally came to a stop by a pew. The noise I could still hear over my own breathing, I couldn’t place. There was the rustling of fabric against fabric, a low groan, skin on skin. It was less of a fighting noise, closer to lovemaking, but different from that in an unsettling way.
Trembling, I reached for the flashlight, because I needed to see.
Dark hair fell down his back where the black wetness of blood from his wounds still lingered. His shirt was torn too, and I watched. I watched and didn’t understand what I saw. The broken skin from those spikes, the violently tattered edges of his skin, the way what was beneath his skin had been laid bare, it… fused, healed, became whole again.
The other man’s hands were around him, grabbing on to the air in wild, clawing seizures of the despairing animal caught in the lion’s jaw. The man I had taken off the cross had his head close to the other man’s throat, and the other man’s eyes were staring upward, wide as gates that welcome death. There was blood.
Instinct rode me, and I got to my feet, started walking, and walked around them toward the exit. There was another corpse in my way -- a priest judging by the collar. I stepped over him. I needed to get away from this.
The door was still ajar, and my hand moved to open it farther, but before I could take hold of it, another hand reached past my face, slammed the door shut in its frame, and held it there. I stared, not daring to turn my head. The nails looked almost like glass, certainly sharp, and there was the weight and shape of the rest of his body behind me, enough to make me freeze, even though my heart beat like a blacksmith’s hammer in my chest.
“So long, I have waited… Objectively, fear is the appropriate reaction. However, you saved me, and I give you my word you’ll never have to fear me. Ever.” The voice did not go well with the things I had seen. It made me think of the comforts of a warm home, of books and pipe smoke. This voice ran over me, sweet and soft like wildflower honey.