1

Craig fetched assignments from his locker when pain popped the side of his head, pain he instantly recognized from the hollow thunk; someone flicked him.

"Hey, dick-for-brains, what the fuck you'd do to Rue?"

Bebe. Bebe Stevens. Her honey hair was whipped over a shoulder in curled jumbles as moss crawls down a building. Her hands were planted on her waist, a hip cast aside as she glared at him.

She never talked to Craig unless she absolutely had to, and by the sounds of it, she was pissed. Wendy Testaburger guarded her side. She continued:

"She's been crying all morning, and I haven't seen one of my girl friends in this low of a drought since Kenny McCormick said we couldn't play rocking chair with his face anymore."

Bebe chucked back a thumb. Craig frowned and leaned and saw Rue lounged against her locker. She wore eye bags the size of teaspoons, eyes cast to the dirt-speckled floor, where she watched students' shoes pass in their respectful cliques. Annie Knitts and Red McArthur rubbed her back as she shouldered the occasional tear away. An emptiness sucked at Craig's stomach.

"You're the last person she's hung out with, and we only see her this emotional when it's over your dumbass, so you better go all balls out and tell us what's going on," Bebe said.

"Go away," Craig averred. The words were forced and quick. He didn't need to be reminded of the previous night, and he didn't need to be reminded of his involvement with Rue Newman. "I didn't do anything."

At first, he felt the lie came so naturally that he surprised himself, but then he wondered if it was even a lie at all. Craig Tucker didn't do anything to Rue aside from cursing her out, had he? He recalled the night like striking hot iron and bit back the thought. He didn't lie; he didn't sin. This wasn't his fault.

Craig shut his locker when Wendy twisted him and slammed him back. Pencils and pens danced at his feet, and papers tussled downward.

"Listen, Craig. We're not fucking around. If you hurt Rue, so help me, I will take that cross of yours and shove it down your throat. You hear me? Down your throat!"

Wendy's ears burned scarlet.

"Get off of me!" His hands dived forward and shoved her back—something he didn't think he meant to do.

Shame burned his face when students cast curious eyes toward them, students he knew would egg her on to punch his lights out and leave him for dead in the center of Lab Rats Hall, the science wing.

Boys weren't allowed to take chick beatings. That was the moral code. If you did, you were a sissy. Simple. But Wendy Testaburger was no ordinary pussy cat, and everyone at South Park High School knew that. Testaburger's cut up more boys than most bullies have ever tallied on their Juvy walls since she first learned to knock out teeth. Her status began the second she blew Cartman to his ass in fourth grade, earning herself various titles.

Wendy rocked back and blinked to herself, stunned. Craig was stunned, too, because he pushed her. That wasn't supposed to happen. Boys took their beatings from Wendy Testaburger, picked up their teeth, and went home. They weren't supposed to fight back. Craig regretted forgetting to pray for his ass to stay in one piece that morning when her eyes shot up, twin pistoles cocked at him.

She balled her fists, teeth grinding and

"Hey ladies, Craig. What's going on?" Eric Cartman said. He paused, and his eyes scoped the scene. A grimace developed when he realized his words may have been distasteful, then quickly added: "Woof. Bad timing?" to bandage his previous incompetence. It didn't work.

"Nope," Wendy said sharply. "Bebe and I were actually just leaving."

Her fist slammed into the locker inches from Craig's face. He held his breath and felt the faint trickle of a sweat bead abandon position from his forehead. They walked away, but not without Wendy twisting and mouthing: Down. Your. Throat.

"Whoa, don't piss your pants, Craig," Cartman said idly, but Craig wouldn't be surprised if he had already. "The bitches sure are nasty this time of year. What'd you do to piss off the biggest cunts of the school? Shit in Testaburger's pumpkin spice latte? Nice. Very nice."

Craig bent. Sweat swept through his hair and clergy button-up, leaving evident pit stains beneath his blazer as he collected his schoolwork.

Standing, he flashed Cartman the bird and walked off.

Dealing with Eric Cartman was the last thing Craig needed. Nonetheless, Cartman scrambled to his side. He was a sheep when he needed to be, only if the outcome weighed in his favor, and there was no question Cartman had something on mind. Something he wanted. A goal he couldn't reach without his lackeys to step on. But Craig found it odd Cartman chose him, little Christian boy Craig, for his new little lackey, especially with their troubled history of ragging on each other.

"Oh, so cunt one and two piss you off, and now you're being a dick to me. Okay, Craig. I didn't know this school had three cunts. Jesus Christ. I come over here to offer you the deal of a lifetime, and this is how you treat me, as your bottom bitch."

Craig fetched a sigh deep from his chest. Something forced and quick. Efficient. Teach the little pig he doesn't care.

Cartman was full of tornadoes, each set off in the least desirable ways; Craig flips him off, clouds roll in. The storm flushed behind his copper coin eyes—the copper tarnishing and presenting itself gray and wicked as he focused on Craig. But Craig didn't care. He hasn't yet set off Cartman to the degree of Scott Tenorman or Kyle (Kahl, as Cartman enjoyed pronouncing it) Broflovski, resorting to mild anger issues and clear waters with the periodic ripple.

Craig's eyes tossed upward in annoyance.

"What do you want?" he said begrudgingly—something he'd later regret asking.

The storm cleared in seconds. The crease between Cartman's eyebrows leveled, and the copper tint rejoiced in his eyes, vacant of corrosion. His hands set out in front of him, held together business-wise as if he called a meeting regarding the elites—which Craig found odd but refused to comment on. It would set him off again, probably (which was undeniably funny).

"Any chance I could interest you in a Wiffle Bat?"

Confusion smacked Craig like an unexpected up-chuck.

"Why?" he asked, perplexed.

"Why?" Cartman parodied. "Oh, I think we both know why, Craig. We all have our demons, and I don't think Father Tucker would be too happy finding out his son had a few of his own."

Shit. That was the only word that came to mind. Shit shit shit.

Fucking Kenny.

"Alright," Craig said heavily. "What do you know?"

Cartman was dangling coins in front of Craig, waving his dad around like a carrot tied to a string before a slaughterhouse: Come out, pig pig pig.

He signaled for Craig to follow, so he did. He had no other choice. Cartman brought him to his locker.

First-place basketball ribbons, all soaked in oily ink, were strung along the outside, slashing out Broflovski and replacing it with a poorly scratched Cartman.

Craig squinted at Eric Cartman, that went unnoticed. Clearly, some shit sparked between the two, and it was too early in the school day for Kyle to have noticed.

Cartman's fat fingers screwed in the locker combination. His large body toppled over itself, masking his sweet combination from infiltrators daring to peek over his shoulder.

He even walled off Craig's view with a fat arm. It reminded Craig of an awful spy movie, except the main character was a huge fat boner.

Cartman stood tall and whipped his locker open. He disappeared behind the door and jerked out a Wiffle Bat, smiling. Craig stared at him wide-eyed.

"Why do you have a Wiffle Bat in your locker?" Craig felt the most obvious question was. "Is it for the Freshmen?"

Cartman ignored him. "Kenny talks about heaven and hell all the time—I'm not sure why, but we all have to jack off to something, I guess—and he found out through trial and error, and a verse in the bible, that it is foretold the only thing keeping those red-horned bitches back is the sacred Wiffle Bat." His smile wasn't slapped on right as he handed off the bat to Craig as if it were an ancient sword—even did the gayass bow and everything. "And I don't wanna make you the offer of a lifetime, but I'll let you keep the Wiffle Bat to deal with your little...dilemma."

The plastic knocked hollowly against Craig's palm as he tasted its strength. It was a nasty shade of yellow—the alarming color of piss when someone disregarded drinking water. It had a kick, though. Not a good one, but a kick. His fingers slipped along the buttery surface, interrupted by its crusty molded spine that lapped the toy, scratching his fingertips. He thumbed at it.

"A cheap piece of plastic is what keeps the demons back. A measly, lightweight piece of plastic," Craig said, less a question than a statement.

"No need to be such a negative Nancy about it, Craig."

"What's in it for you?"

Cartman's smile returned. The same smile that sent a shiver down Craig's spine and licked his hands damp with cold sweat. It made him reconsider if this deal was really worth it.

Change weighed in Craig's pocket. Change he collected near the bases of trashcans and public benches, but enough to undoubtedly buy himself his own Wiffle Bat if needed—which made him feel stupid for even considering it. It was ridiculous.

"Oh, my side of the deal? That comes later, my friend. That comes much, much later."

Craig glanced down once more and imagined himself whapping the asshole out of Cartman. Unfortunately, he realized that was impossible. He looked back up, ready to deny it, but Cartman was gone. He simply disappeared. His locker was closed, its front seat vacant of its favorite fan.

Craig's fingers hugged the plastic.

2

Velvet streamed through the Virgin Mary stained glass centerpiece above the marble altar. Mary's hands were raised toward the sky, coral clouds wheeling around her in soupy clusters. Her pupils focused upward at something cut from the frame, whites dominating the bulk of her eyes. The thing welcomed her as she opened her body for it—Christ, perhaps, as her cherry dress trembled in the eye of the storm. It cast puddles of crimson to stretch along the sanctuary's center aisle, drenching the red and gold carpet in a sea of tainted light.

Craig raised his hands to the light, allowing them to pool with blood and sunrays to river through his fingers. Tiny bubbles sizzled along his skin the same way soda foam melts in a glass, hands glossy as if he dipped them in a pitcher of polish.

But of course that wasn't the case. Craig watched balmy as the last of the rosy bubbles snapped before he withdrew and fetched a rag from the pale beside him.

Pink soap water sloshed around, speckled with dirt and hair. Craig wrung and slopped the rag onto a row of pew chairs. It sloshed and squished back and forth, irritating the calm lewdly.

Craig preferred music, but the music he enjoyed was deemed too distasteful and sinful for his father's liking. But Craig found nothing wrong with The White Stripes.

Stripe accompanied Craig Tucker once.

He missed his wheeks and continuous scampering around the cage. Each lap around the exhibit rustled the wood shavings, which echoed throughout the sanctuary—a white noise Craig had grown so accustomed to he no longer noticed it. But sometimes, he did. And when he did, Craig released Stripe to wander. Craig felt confident when Stripe left trails of squeaking wherever he went, and Craig often found him in seconds when he needed to.

Then Stripe crapped on the floor. That was the last time Craig permitted Stripe, any of them, to the Church.

No! Bad guinea pig. You cannot just take a crap on the sacred floors of the Lord's house.

That was Stripe #6, however.

Craig suspected his dad of feeding Stripe #6 to hell once he caught wind of what had happened.

It was night and day. Stripe was there, then he wasn't. His cold little body was flopped lifelessly on its side the day after service. It was a cold, parky Monday, where frost film licked windows, icing bubbles Craig later thawed with his fingertips beside Stripe's emptied exhibit.

He shoveled through the snow minutes later, ramming the shovel over and over again against a solidified patch of soil. Tears marked his eyes, yet Craig was more focused on the nauseated lurch of his chest as he cursed out the dirt. Soon, the shovel snapped, and they had to bury Stripe in a loose heap of powder despite Craig's constant nagging about burying him that upcoming spring.

They found his body during the season change.

Death wasn't a new feeling, nor any easier with each passing Stripe. Thomas chalked it up to disease, but Craig knew it was him. Craig knew he poisoned Stripe #3 for a similar reason and silently resented him for it.

Craig dived behind the seats, sloshed the rag into the rinse water, and slapped it against the wooden chairs. The heat in his face nauseated him, yet he scrubbed until his arm ached. He remembered when Tolkien Black, Clyde Donovan, Jimmy Valmer, and he would hide beneath the seats during service, giggling and playing ninja astronaut's space adventure.

Craig was always captain, first to take lead and first to get caught. A parent, or Miss Doyle (it was Miss Gargoyle amongst the children), would scoop him up, hooked under the armpits, and present him to Father Tucker. Craig remembered feeling like a sacrifice, and dread knocked into him each time he was caught.

They all resented Miss Doyle, and she resented them the same. Craig hated her sulfur-tinged breath that escaped from her seed-shaped teeth. They couldn't even be bothered to stick together properly, instead spacing themselves into ugly, unmarried piano keys jammed into the roof of her oily gums. Greasy rags of hair clamped to her scalp, and Craig felt if he rolled a lock between his fingers and tugged ever so gently, a piece of her flesh would peel away from her skull.

He cringed over it and whispered the thought to Tolkien, who tipped on his ass, flying backward in laughter with his hands clutched around his mouth. The others joined in until one of them was inevitably snatched.

Those were some of Craig's favorite services. He eyed the empty space sadly. Something hammered his heart as he marinated the rag in the pale.

It really was quiet, wasn't it?

The rag returned to the seat. Craig sliced his hand deep beneath it when a jolt of pain wedged into his hand.

Craig swore and whisked back. The rag slapped the floor wetly. A deep cut nestled into the base of his fingers, right between the middle and pointer. It shivered as soap water, and blood cried down his palm.

"Awesome. Isn't this great," he said.

Craig sucked his braces and shook his hand. Blood freckled the porcelain floor. He scooped up the rag, dumped it in the pale, and walked to the bathroom.

Gold spilled through the cathedral windows lining the hallway as the sun touched the mountain tips. He pushed the door open and eyed his wound in the basin.

Blood worked to envelop the basin in a bright scarlet. Craig washed it, water slicing thin needles into his wound that lit the flesh ablaze. He hissed and hurried off the faucet.

A large slice resided, buried deep within the meat. It looked as if someone had cut scissors into the web of his fingers, leaving flaps of skin to dangle absently. A rush of blood bubbled up, and Craig knew this wasn't something he could easily ignore as he would a paper cut or scrape. This was something infectious. Craig would dip his hand in the snot water rinsed from the seats and catch a major infection. This bothered him; the first aid dwelled all the way down in the basement.

Craig rinsed again, wrapped one of the cheap, sandpaper-esque paper towels around his hand, and left for the basement.

Nobody used the first aid. It wasn't often people injured themselves at a church. If anything, it was most frequented by children who have fallen through chase in the corridors. And when it was, parents always complained about the whereabouts of the kit, referring to the impractical network of the cellar. Father Tucker was always pulled to search for it himself, seeming to be the only one who could find it.

The basement was tucked in the back of the church in an odd little nook often overlooked by the public eye. But the children knew about it. They had to know about it. How else would they avoid Salem?

Craig flattened a wry smile at the thought, though there was nothing coherently humorous about it. More so the opposite. Just some dopey gossip passed around the children when Craig Tucker was no more than six.

Eric Cartman and Bebe Stevens were notorious for the magnitude of the rumors. They spread talk of witnessing a shadow slip by the mouth of the stairs, the call of an abandoned landline downstairs, or the hush of a thing whispering ferociously beyond the door—anything that would make the littluns to soil themselves.

Everyone theorized about it being one entity, and Bebe called dibs on naming it.

Soiling. That was her choice. Well, it was until Eric Cartman said, "Bebe, we are not naming the monster Soiling. It's supposed to be scary, not make people think the monster can't go without crapping itself."

The discussion continued.

Craig remembered Invis-o-Bill, Deadeyes, and Kyle (Cartman's suggestion) being on the table, but the kids landed on Salem.

The crackpot rumors spread until everyone knew about them, even the parents, and that's when the children were banned from nearing the stairs—reports of too many littluns crying back to mommy and daddy after Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick scared them by hiding beyond the door, dragging their fingernails and ooo'ing into a rounded piece of bible paper they ripped from the nursery.

Craig and Tricia Tucker were exempt from the rule, but that didn't mean they exploited it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Craig dodged the cellar every chance he got. When he walked near it, his eyes simply skipped across the corridor, and he hugged the wall as if Salem would plummet from the door and unzip his guts if he got too close.

But of course he didn't actually believe Salem was real. That was stupid; monsters weren't real. They weren't real when he thought he heard rustling beneath his seat beyond the floor during service, and they weren't real when he passed the door and something real big banged against it once during cleanup. It was all bogus. Craig was sure of it.

And despite the pile of bogus it was, there Craig Tucker was, standing at the foot of the basement. He opened it.

The basement breathed on him—actually breathed on him. Craig felt the exhale drench his body in a sour, thick musk, whipping him as he wrinkled his nose. The basement odor was worse than ever today because of the flood. The church was low on Mason St., and they received the worst of it. Water drenched the old rock foundations and boxes and boxes of the Tucker family belongings that were stuffed into the cellar. And it stunk. The church had to air out for weeks, and finally, it was bearable to near the cellar door—even if it made you want to take only the shallowest breaths.

Craig's wound pulsed rapidly beneath his makeshift bandages, and he plunged himself into the mouth of the stairs.

Each step whimpered beneath his dress shoes. At the bottom, he fingered the wall for any light switches, slipping on as many as he could. The basement revved up like a forgotten amusement park, rooms blazing to life slowly at a time.

The basement isn't all that bad, Craig told himself. There was an attempt to maintain it. The steps still squealed like hell, but they were painted a nice eggshell white (paint that peeled, at least). And the carpets weren't as stained as Craig remembered them. They reeked to the point Craig fought to pinch his nose, but it wasn't so bad.

Toys infiltrated the flooring. Everything from Koosh Balls to a 3D deflated Bozo bop bag—the same one Craig remembered uppercutting so many times he blew a hole in Bozo's chin, and air (clown guts) sprayed Craig until Bozo was nothing more than a squishy sack on the floor.

Father Tucker believed it best to dump all their family belongings into the church cellar, exclaiming it would lead to fewer rats and more space. Which wasn't wrong. The space in the house was nice, but Craig didn't think it was worth it to tussle Salem for his life every time he needed something and had to trudge down in the basement for it.

The cellar wasn't built as traditionally as most cellars. There was never a distinct hall that led to a series of rooms. Instead, it was a puzzle. Rooms were sprinkled left and right, connected with a zigzag hall leading to another room and then another hall. Rooms branched into other short corridors, rooms connected to rooms, and it seemed never-ending. The rooms weren't even consistent squares, either. Some were L-shaped, others long rectangles.

Like everyone said, the basement was a spiderweb...but a spiderweb was useless without its spider, right?

Craig tensed when a shadow infiltrated his peripherals.

Wait. But was it a shadow? No. No, it wasn't. No spiders existed in the cellar. Only the traditional ones.

Craig walked until he reached a room where a speck of red glinted within. Hope leaped into his chest, and he changed course.

The first-aid kit. It was balanced atop a tower of boxes, chest-high, all tattooed with sharpie: Christmas Decorations, Craig's Hot Wheels, Grandma's Cassettes...Craig snatched the kit. Now he could finally leave. But something caught his eye beyond the steeple of boxes, something leaned against the vacant wall. A painting.

Thomas always enjoyed traditionally painted pieces. He admired the thought and story behind them and often glared at pieces for hours, searching for the hidden story behind them.

Every piece has a purpose, Craig, he said. Every piece has a story just waiting to be discovered.

Craig didn't entirely agree with him. The piece he sketched in class of Elvis Presley having a colossal dick sure as hell didn't have a story behind it, but whatever. Sure. Every piece has a story behind it, Dad. Whatever you say.

Thomas especially had a lure toward darker pieces of craftsmanship. The stories with darker themes only psychos fully grasped, such as the painting.

Craig always hated the painting, as did his mother, who banned the artwork from their household. It remained on their bedroom wall for less than a day until she came home from work.

Nowhere else to put it, Father Tucker banished it to the depths of the Church.

It was a painting by Ken Currie—one Craig failed to name but never cared enough to learn it. A lonely man stood forward, shoulders sunken and tilted left. His brown shirt was stained with presumably red and white paint as he looked onward toward his audience. Though it must have been difficult with the sack over his head—or maybe it was a special type of gas mask, Craig could never tell, but he hated looking at it. One eye was cut out, a crude little hole with an inky iris staring out at him. The bottom of the mask-thing was a long fabric tube stretching downward toward the man's belly like an elephant trunk and lumpy like the rings of a maggot.

Craig blinked hard. He didn't want to bandage himself in the cellar with that thing glaring at him. It was hard enough when he went into his parent's room that fateful day when it hung tastelessly on the wall, sending Craig down the hall and toward a sleepless night. He'd just take the first aid upstairs and explain why he couldn't put it back. It wasn't a big deal, anyway.

He tucked it under his arm, walked toward the hall, and

Psst

Ice doused Craig's back.

One word.

Only one word hit his tongue:

"Salem?"

He swerved around.

His eyes landed on nothing, no matter how they hurled across the room.

All they settled on was that stupid painting. Flies to sugar. But before he allowed himself to relax, he caught it. It wasn't sneaky if it tried to be. But he caught it with two bulging eyes. Right there against the wall.

The painting was different.

At first he tried to allow logic through: It's all in your head. Don't let Eric-Fucking-Cartman's twisted story get to you. Salem? Really? You're sixteen; get ahold of yourself. The painting must've always looked like that. It had to. It had to.

But...had it?

Had it always looked like that?

Sweat licked Craig's skin with petrifying ease, and his hands grew slick around the metal box fastened beneath a flurry of digits.

The man's hands were moved in a position they shouldn't have been in. They hung, strung at the man's chest. Craig knew they inched to stir, but it was a snapshot captured before the desired result—like God paused time itself. Or maybe it just didn't want to get caught. The man's head was ducked, too, lowered into the baited hands. Craig was unsure what it was trying to do, nor did he want to find out.

The single sixty-watt light bulb, twisted into a screwy hole into the fiberglass insulation ceiling, hummed mercilessly. Luminance ricocheted throughout the room no larger than a storage loft. It heaved heavy breaths of light upon the space before it sucked it back up. Then rinse, repeat.

No, no. Don't you dare give up on me.

The light bulb was hissing now. Craig almost threw his hands up to hide his ears, but then it blinked. And it blinked and blinked until it snapped off with a grisly pop.

The pulse of Craig's wound hammered against the towel. He could feel it in his throat, the beat. The sick fucking beat. His eyes tacked themselves against the painting. The painting he now couldn't see. But he couldn't peel his eyes away. He couldn't.

Craig stammered back and slipped on a torn piece of carpet. He lunged a hand and caught himself on a box, the other buckling the first-aid against his chest.

The light snapped back on.

The painting was different again. The man's hands were higher, head dipped more.

"O heart of Jesus," Craig whimpered. A prayer stuttered past urgent lips.

He hadn't acknowledged the tears wetting his waxy eyes.

The box he weighed against crashed to the floor. He whipped around, catching a scream in his throat. The light blinked, and the man's hands were higher.

The light suddenly fell into a fury of flickers. The painting was animated.

Each flash brought a new frame of horror. The man reached for the mask-thing and jerked it off, releasing sprays of blonde hair beneath it.

Craig didn't want to see what was under that mask. He refused to. And when the man's head bobbed up, Craig dashed for the door. He threw himself into the hall and smashed the exit closed.

But where he was wasn't the hall. Not even close. Craig was stuffed into an ill-lit room, but even ill-lit was too generous of a word to describe the intensity of the chasm—a space void of stars.

He failed to acknowledge the disappearance of the first-aid kit as he turned. The door was gone, plucked away, or simply swallowed by the night. He looked around. There was a floor, at least. They were generous enough to supply him with a recognizable floor with the same ugly pattern as the basements, and if Craig knew any better, he would've said he was still in the basement. And maybe he was. But no basement room was as large as this one.

A single foamy light bathed Craig in a bucket of luminance. When he searched for a source, he found the never-ending sky vacant of one. It scratched at nothing but the floor and Craig wondered where the walls went or if there even were walls.

Craig blinked around the void. His gasps shuttered. Thousands of hairs stood against his arms. He turned again to find another door. Not his door to the painting room, but a different door.

It was a half lite door, and it was tucked no more than ten feet away from him, sampling grains of Craig's light.

Craig's wheezing grew frantic, and he clasped the flaps of his hat. The idea was to shove the material over his eyes and wish to be back in the church and wazza! He'd pull the hat back over, and there he'd be, standing back in the cellar hallway. The regular cellar hallway. Not whatever shitshoot this was.

Craig prepared to shovel up his chullo when a knock nipped the quiet. He yelped and jerked it off his head. The Pop Rock fizzle of electricity wafted through his hair as he perched his eyes on the door.

At first, Craig didn't understand who or even what he was looking at. It was a boy who looked around Craig's age, sure enough, but some aspects dismissed that probability.

It wore scarlet horns through tufts of scruffy, honey-accented hair (so scruffy Craig imagined it tossing its hair beforehand). Bat-like wings were tucked behind an olive button-down shirt. Yet it wore the face of a teenage boy—a pretty boy, Craig noted— and its face was slender and milk-white. Craig felt if he touched the boy, it'd be deprived of all pores and scarring. But that wasn't a bad thing. Or, it didn't feel like a bad thing; Craig didn't mind it. Two gentle carmine eyes drowned Craig in an accumulation of sea foam, and Craig almost allowed a smile.

It was inhumanly beautiful. It was almost hard to believe.

He didn't believe it. Couldn't. No human was that perfect.

But it wasn't offputting, as most would assume it to be. The boy-thing was nothing but pleasant, and Craig watched onward with a riding heartbeat.

The boy rapped the door again. His lips moved soundlessly, yet Craig knew exactly what it was saying:

"Let me in, Craig."

And he did. How could he not? All control slipped from Craig's body as his eyes whirled with the boy's. It was comforting. The same comfort children received from the hallway light snapping on right before the Bogeyman dragged them beneath the bed. It was hard to explain, but looking into its eyes felt right.

His feet droned forward, out of Craig's control. All he could do was look into the boys' eyes. Nothing else mattered. Nothing. All he had to do was open the door.

Craig's hand locked around the knob. The boy smiled.

"Open the door, Craig."

Another soundless behest.

Craig Tucker twisted the knob. The door whispered forward, and Craig was spit into a dreamless sleep.

3

Waves of pain banged against Craig's skull as he groaned and sat up. The first-aid kit was strewn across the floor. His vision spotted, and he blinked until he retained his sight. He was in the center of the basement hallway, scattered along the carpet. Craig's heart worked as he quickly looked around, back into the room with the painting. And his chest settled the moment he noticed it was back to normal. The way God intended it to be.

A batch of blood slept beneath his hand, and Craig frowned as he brought it to his face. He didn't understand. Why was he lying in the middle of the hallway? How had he got there, and why?

Craig picked himself up, and an ache anchored in his head, the seedlings of a future migraine. He attempted to recall what happened, eyed the painting again, and a flash of the man displaying his golden hair kicked him backward on his feet.

He imagined the man raising his face, and there he'd be. The boy. The boy, with its rocket-red eyes and sharp-toothed smile.

Holy shit.

Holy shit holy shit holy shit

The boy was a—

Craig scooped the first-aid supplies back into the kit and barreled up the stairs. He groped his crucifix as he flew past the corridor and into the sanctuary. He ceased at the door.

Virgin Mary no longer streamed rose-red into the room. No. This was different. It was blood-red, weeping down her stained portrait.

It was unclean. The church wasn't clean anymore. It was unclean, it was unclean!

Blood drooled down Craig's hand, but he hardly noticed. It wasn't what thickened the pump of the gruely blood through his heart, nor was the chilling church breath sprinkling through the room.

It was the crosses. Oh, God. The crosses. All of them. Every single one of them was turned upside down.