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Tim is beginning to realize that research at the Institute is a very different beast from research at the publishing house. For one, there’s the content of the research. He’d done the occasional dive into the paranormal while fact-checking someone or the other’s “People Will Totally Be Interested in Jack the Ripper Again If He’s a Steampunk Time-Travelling Detective Now!” historical romance, but at the Institute, things are all spooky all the time. Which is what he’s here for, but...it can be a lot. For two, there’s the actual research materials. Mostly ancient, greasy, leatherbound tomes with faded print like something you’d find in a horror movie. Some of them, he’d swear to god — or at least to Sasha — are written in a dull reddish ink that has to be dried blood. He’s started carrying around a bottle of hand sanitizer. And for three—
“Come on, Tim.” Jon waves to him from halfway up the fence he’s currently scaling. “If I’m going to break my neck today, it had better be for a good reason.”
For three, there’s the research methods.
“Right, yeah,” says Tim, staring. If anyone’s going to break their neck, it’s not going to be Jon. He’d scrambled up the fence with the grace of some ballerina-Spiderman hybrid, and now he’s hanging at a jaunty angle with his leg wrapped around one of the posts as if he isn’t nearly six feet in the air. Tim desperately tries to recall anything about Jon that might have suggested he’s some kind of parkour whiz. Jon who constantly reminds Tim about Institute policy. Jon who launches into Ebert-worthy film critiques whenever someone asks him how he spent his weekend. Jon who wears his glasses on a little silver chain even though he never actually takes them off his face. Well. Actually the glasses thing could have been a hint.
“Tim.” Jon knocks a heel against the fence. “I’d really like to be out of here before sundown.”
“What? It’s like four o’clock.”
“We’re going to be thorough.”
“Fuck me,” Tim mutters, and then calls up, “You got it!” because he does have a reputation to maintain. He shoves his bag through the fence, like Jon had, and starts up after him. Tim doesn’t have Jon’s agility, but it’s easy enough to brace against the posts and pull himself up. By the time he reaches the top, Jon is halfway down the other side.
“Watch out for the finials,” he says to Tim’s knees. “Have you ever read The Virgin Suicides?”
“Uh—” Tim swings himself over the fence while resisting the urge to joke that he doesn’t have to worry about that. He joins Jon on the ground a minute later. They both gaze across a short lawn of brown grass, looking out at the church and the cemetery that lies beyond it. “Well,” says Tim, trying to sound cool and casual and not like he just climbed a fence, “definitely lives up to its reputation.”
“Yes,” Jon murmurs. “The Church of the Sheared Cross. Our Lady Without Mercy.” Apparently unbothered by this incredibly ominous statement, he drops to his knees and starts digging through the papers in his bag. “Abandoned since early eighteen, no, nineteen-hundreds...because of the deaths, right...” There’s the Jon Tim knows. Nothing wrong with containing multitudes, he guesses. “And people still hear the organ...but at night, right, so maybe we could leave a recorder? Wait, were they deaths, or disappearances…?”
Tim stares up at the aforementioned sheared cross, which tops the church’s shingled spire. It’s missing the arm-parts, and what remains has been carved into a jagged spear. Definitely spooky enough to earn a nickname. He tries to let an overwhelming fear and awe of god fill his soul at the sight, but it doesn’t really work. Maybe if he wasn’t Jewish. Or more afraid of clowns.
“Alright.” Jon pops back up. His glasses are a little bit tilted on his nose, and Tim really wants to reach over and fix them. That’s another thing about Jon: he’s so fucking cute it kind of drives Tim insane. “Obviously we’re going to have to exercise the utmost caution, but this is far from the most dangerous assignment I’ve ever undertaken for the Institute. As long as you stick with me— I mean, as long as we stay together, we should be fine.”
Tim feels like he’s been dropped into the middle of a mid-budget action movie. “Is this a regular thing that you do here?”
“Now and again,” Jon says carelessly. Then he blinks, and twitches his nose as if to wiggle his glasses back into the correct position. Oh god. “We’d better get inside before someone sees us,” he says, and turns, and Tim follows him up the stone steps leading to the heavy wooden doors of the church.
He doesn’t think anyone is going to see them, though. The church is set far back from the street, and far away from any relevant parts of London in general. Almost a half-hour ride from the Institute. He’d groaned when Sasha had told him, even though he’s really still too new to be complaining about any of his assignments.
“Trust me,” she’d said, smiling that sinister smile that usually only appeared when she was doing something illegal with computers, “this is a very strategic move for your career. An isolated location with only one other person, plenty of spooky ghosts to huddle together against, probably lots of wildflowers, I don’t know what they do at churches—”
“Despite what everyone seems to think,” he’d said, biting back some real annoyance, “I am not here to date.”
“You’ll be partnered with Jonathan Sims.”
He has to admit she’d won that one.
Now he watches as Jon crouches down again and pulls an honest-to-god lockpicking kit out of his bag. There’s a heavy iron chain looped around the doorhandles, with a padlock hanging from it, and Jon gets to work on it like it’s a mildly interesting case. Did Sasha really think this was going to happen when she gave them this assignment? As sketchy as the Institute is, Tim can’t believe that its employees regularly go around breaking and entering. Or at least, not with as much skill as Jon has. His brow is furrowed, and he’s biting down on his goddamn lip, but his long fingers twist the pins as surely as if he’s repeated these motions a thousand times before. They’re going to repeat in Tim’s mind, anyway.
Jon gets the lock sorted after another couple of minutes, and Tim helps him unwind the chain and pull the doors open. They creak with age, but glide smoothly on their hinges, giving way to a yawning mouth of cobwebby darkness. “Ugh,” Jon says, but he squares his shoulders and heads inside. Tim follows him. He really hopes Jon’s brought a flashlight, because he sure as hell didn’t think he was going to need one today.
The church does get a little brighter once they’re past the entrance. The walls of the sanctuary are broken up by large, arched stained-glass windows, and even though they’re tinted grey with dust they still let in enough light to see by. A couple of the windows have been smashed in places, but Tim can’t find any other obvious signs of vandalism. Only long rows of wooden pews, also covered thickly in dust, undisturbed for god knows how long. There’s still prayer books sitting on some of them, with curling covers. Tim’s never been particularly reverent, even in his own synagogue, but he suddenly feels the urge to be very, very quiet.
Jon clearly does not. “Come on,” he calls over his shoulder. “We’d better have a look at that organ.” Holding back several excellent jokes, Tim trails him to the bimah. Not-bimah. Whatever they call it. The little raised-stage-thing at the front of the church. It’s as ancient and imposing as the rest of the place, with an immense lectern and a big, broken crucifix pinned up on the back wall. Tim takes a good look at the carving of Jesus, because sometimes you can tell exactly what kind of damnable lusts the sculptor was working out, but this one’s so mangled that it would probably only be hot to someone more into Christ-on-the-second-day.
“Beautiful work, isn’t it?” says Jon, catching him looking. “He’s probably still alive.”
Tim jumps about half his height in the air. “He’s what?”
Jon laughs. The sound of it is almost enough to make up for whatever the fuck is going on right now. “I meant he’s probably depicted as being still alive. Although I suppose it varies in the Western tradition. Does he have a wound over his ribs?”
“You tell me.” Tim tries to sound like he’s joking, but he walks away from the crucifix scraping his fingers against the back of his neck. If he reacts like this over some stupid misunderstanding, what’s he going to do when something actually bad happens? He can’t keep freezing up and freaking out. Come on. He can’t.
“This is in very good condition,” says Jon, sounding pleased, and Tim turns to see him standing in front of a large pipe organ set off to the left of the stage thing. It does look pretty good for being about a hundred years old, although Tim doesn’t think the cracked little cross nailed to the middle front pipe can be doing anything helpful for the sound quality. Maybe just somebody trying to kick the ghosts out. He walks up behind Jon, who’s humming something Tim thinks is from The Phantom of the Opera, and presses a finger down on one of the keys. Nothing happens. “No, this is an old one,” says Jon, now fiddling with some knobs set up above the rows of keys. “It’ll need someone pumping the bellows to actually move the air through the pipes.”
“So there’s at least two ghosts here, then.”
“Astute observation. You can include that in the report if you like. There should be a handle around the side…?”
“As you wish.” Tim leaves Jon to play with the organ and walks around to the right side of it, where he finds the promised handle. It’s pretty small compared to the rest of the thing, and there’s initials carved into the wooden case of the organ around it, which is weird. Did people come here to make out?
“You can start pumping now,” Jon calls. “Er, slowly would be a good idea.”
Tim makes zero incredible jokes about this and presses down on the handle. There’s a creaking sound, a couple clacks, and then, as he continues pumping, a long, low note that reverberates up through his chest and out the ends of his hair. “Not bad!”
“No,” says Jon. “But hang on, I should be able to— Let me look it up.”
The playing stops. Tim leans back from the handle. He can already feel in his arms what an hour or so of this would be like. “Must have been some buff Catholics back then.”
“Mm-hm.”
Tim takes a closer look at the initials. On inspection, they don’t seem to be in pairs, or surrounded by hearts or anything, so maybe they were just carved by the bored organ-pumpers of ages past. Might as well join that illustrious tradition. He traces a ‘T. S.’ in the dust with his finger, and on second thought makes the ‘T’ into a little cross. Probably be good to hedge his bets in here.
“No service,” says Jon. A dull thunk of un-bellowed organ keys. “Did you read anything about this?”
“I was looking into the architecture.”
“Right. Well, it’s not that important. Let me just try…”
Tim glances over at the initials again. That’s odd. He could have sworn he drew his own on an unmarked part of the wood, but now there’s long, jagged lines through the arms of his ‘T’. It almost looks like—
Slowly, as if something might spot him, Tim turns to face the rest of the church. He notices something now. A pattern in all the wreckage and rot. The windows are smashed, yes, but only to the exact right and left of the stained-glass crosses. Jesus’s face is pretty messed up, but it’s his arms that are missing entirely. Tim draws another cross in the dust on the organ. This time the scratches gouge themselves into the wood before he’s even finished, and he yanks his hand away at a sudden sharp pain in his finger. There’s a small bead of blood on the tip of it. He stares.
The church of the sheared cross. Apparently it’s not picky about which one.
“Jon?” Don’t freeze, don’t freeze. “Jon, I think we should get out of here.”
“But how many times will we get the chance to play a real— Tim?”
Tim strides back around to the front of the organ, holding up his hand for Jon to see. “Look.”
Jon looks. “Have you had your tetanus shot?”
“No, it’s not that, it’s—” He takes a deep breath. No need to make Jon panic too. “Look at the crosses. They’re all missing their arms. And I just tried it out, just now, and whatever— thing that did this is still here, and it can hurt us.”
Jon stares at him. Tim immediately feels like an idiot. Of course he shouldn’t have expected Jon to believe him. Just because Tim’s seen this shit before doesn’t mean that anyone else has, and won’t think he’s a complete lunatic when he starts raving about angry spirits snapping the arms off crosses. And of course the part of the cross that sticks out is going to fall off first, why is that even part of the urban legend—
“Artefact Storage is going to want to see this,” Jon says.
“Wait. What?”
“Don’t know what exactly they’d look for, though. Can they test for the amount of force it would take to break it? Signs of rot in the wood? Oh, there we go, that’s perfect.”
“Jon?”
Jon turns away from Tim and starts climbing onto the goddamn organ.
“Jon, what are you doing?”
“Hm?” Jon glances over at him. He’s already kneeling on the second keyboard. “Collecting a sample. That one should be easy enough to carry.” He points at the cross nailed to the pipe. “Of course it would be better if they could actually see it happen for themselves, but I doubt we’ll be able to get anyone to come all the way out here without—”
“You believe me?”
“Should I?”
“I—” Jon reaches for the cross, and Tim’s heart rate speeds up. “You don’t want to steal from a church. I’m not sure about you, but I’d bet I’m already, like, seven circles down in Dante’s Inferno.” The words come out tight. He can’t let Jon do this. God knows these things will already fuck you up for nothing. What does revenge mean to them?
Jon just shrugs. “The church hasn’t had a problem with committing atrocities against us. The Crusades, the Alhambra Decree, the Goan Inquisition ... ”
“Okay, yes, but—” Tim runs his thumb over his bloody fingertip. “People died here.”
“Did they?” Jon considers this. “I think you’re right. Yes, you’re right, their corpses were found mutilated, I had the disappearances mixed up from the bookstore case—”
“Jon!” They both jump at that. Jon almost falls off the organ, and Tim forces himself to stay calm. Jon doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. Tim doesn’t want him to. He just wants him safe. “Don’t you think…” He tries to sound as scared as he feels. “Isn’t this dangerous?”
“Don’t worry about me, Tim.” Jon smiles down at him. His hand hangs in the air in front of the cross. “I told you, I’ve been on plenty of assignments like this for the Institute. If anything happens, I can handle it. And I’ll protect you too, of course. It’ll be alright.” He turns back to the organ, and for a moment Tim is fifty feet in the air above him, watching from the balcony.
Then something in the air snaps, and Jon screams. Before he even quite knows what’s happening, Tim lunges forward and grabs him by the back of his shirt and drags him to the ground. He loses his balance as he does, and they both go tumbling straight off the little raised platform and onto the floor.
“Jon! Jon, are you alright?” They’re all tangled together. Tim can’t see anything. They let Danny go once and then they came after him again and he can’t see anything—
“I, I, i-i-it cut me, it—”
“Jon.” Tim shoves Jon off of him. There’s nobody else there. Yet. “Where did it cut you?”
“I, it, he’s—” Jon’s breathing heavily, but Tim can’t tell if it’s from panic or pain. Jon levers himself into a crouching position, eyes darting around like whatever got him is going to come crawling back out of the shadows. “No, no, I, I’m sorry. My leg. It cut my, my, oh god.”
“Whoa, okay.” Tim sits up just in time to stop Jon from pitching sideways onto the floor. “Calm down, you’re alright.”
“I m-might faint, I, I’m prone to it—”
“Okay.” Tim lowers Jon down onto his back and kneels next to him. The whatever-it-is has only attacked so far when they’ve messed with the crosses, but is it going to change its mind? For all the months he’s spent at the Institute, Tim doesn’t know how any of this bullshit works. “You’re okay.” He rolls up the left leg of Jon’s trousers, which is shredded enough that he doesn’t have to do much rolling anyway. “Just let me take a look at— Oh Jesus motherfucking Christ. Er. Sorry, Jesus.”
Jon whimpers. There’s a gash up the back of his calf running from his ankle to almost his knee, and deep. Tim can’t see any muscle or bone, but there’s plenty of blood to make up for it. “H-how bad is it?”
“Bad.”
“Shit.”
“Just stay calm. Did you bring a first-aid kit or anything?” Tim tries to put pressure on the wound, but can’t quite cover it all with his hands. “Um. Plasters?”
“No. No. Shit.” Jon’s breath catches in his throat. “Of course I didn’t bring a kit, that would have been reasonable—”
Tim really thinks that, all things considered, he’s doing a great job of not completely losing his shit right now. Not that he brought a kit either. “Jon, relax,” he says. “I’m going to chivalrously use my shirt to bandage your wounds, and then we can get out of here.”
“Wh—” Jon blinks up at him. “Don’t take your shirt off in here!”
“Come on, have you seen this?” Tim peels off his jumper, then the plain t-shirt he’s wearing underneath it. “God won’t mind.”
“Jesus,” Jon groans.
“Him neither.” He puts the jumper back on, though, and gets to work tearing the t-shirt into strips. It seems like he’ll have enough fabric to cover the cut, although for all he knows the thing could be cursed or something. He decides not to tell Jon about that. “This is probably going to hurt.”
“It already hurts quite a bit, actually!”
Tim examines the cut again. He decides not to mention the realistic possibility of infection either. “Sorry.”
“Not your fault,” Jon says, and hisses when Tim presses the first bandage to his leg. “God f— Oh, sure, climb on the organ, that’ll impress Tim, that’ll— shit shit shit!”
Tim grins, with slightly gritted teeth. “You were trying to impress me?”
“Gah!” Jon’s head rocks back against the floor. “No, no, I was trying to impress upon you the importance of the, the— Je sus fucking Christ!”
“Hold still.”
Jon throws his hands over his face when Tim starts to put the second bandage on, but Tim can still hear muffled noises of pain. He tries to be gentle even as his hands shake; there’s an image in his mind too clear to be ignored, of what would happen if something grabbed at the torn skin of Jon’s leg and started to peel it, working it up his body in long spiralling strips. Just when he thinks he’s going to pass out himself, or at least throw up, he feels a sharp tug at his hip — Jon with his fist clamped down on the hem of Tim’s jumper, a finger through his belt loop. Like biting down on a bullet. Tim lets the touch pull him back to ground, and by the time he’s finished he thinks he might have actually done a good job. He ties the last bandage, and Jon’s arm flops back onto the ground with a thunk.
“Feeling alright?” Tim asks him.
“Fine,” says Jon. His tone suggests they both know this is a lie and that neither of them should mention it. “I was trying to impress you,” he adds. He raises himself shakily onto his elbows. “Well. Are you impressed?”
“The breaking and entering was pretty hot.”
“Oh, don’t do me any favors.”
“No, really!” Tim wipes his hands off on Jon, since he’s already bloody. But safe. They’ll get out of here, and get him to a hospital, and he’ll be fine. “That was some impressive lockpicking. And shutting the door behind us to cover our tracks, classic stuff.”
“I didn’t shut the door.”
Jon looks at Tim. Tim looks at Jon. Slowly, they both turn to look at the door. It’s closed, and emanating some kind of weird creaking sound. Like a heavy iron chain being dragged back into place. The click of the lock goes off like a shot in the silence.
“Great!” says Tim. “We’re screwed.”
“Not until nightfall,” Jon says quietly.
“Is that when the mutilation starts?”
“Traditionally.” Jon sits up a little farther, and pushes some of the hair back from his face. He’s sweating. “See if you can call Sasha.”
Tim tries. “No service.”
“And no one around to hear us, of course.”
“They’ll hear the organ.”
“It’ll be too late by the time they hear the organ. Shit! This kind of thing is only supposed to happen in Artefact Storage.” Jon wrings his hands back and forth, muttering to himself, and Tim watches. He can feel the panic rising in his chest again, burning in his throat. Nobody around to help them. Nobody around to hear them. And even if somebody did hear them they’d just thinking it was the fucking ghosts fucking with the organ again. They’re going to watch each other die.
“Tim.” Jon’s voice breaks through the fog of his thoughts. “Any ideas?”
“I—” He barely has the breath to get the words out. “No. You?”
“Well, we could pray. Not as a last resort, I mean!” Jon holds up his hands, in supplication or demonstration Tim can’t tell. “We’re in a church. It might buy us some favor with— something.”
“Right.” Tim nods. He won’t let himself lose it again. “I think I can do The Lord’s Prayer.”
“That’s great. Heavy hitter.”
“Okay, uh. Give us this day our daily bread, because the Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want. Though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, lead me not into greener pastures, and cause light to go forth over all the lands between the seas— No, fuck, that’s not it.” He waits for something to happen anyway. Not that he knows what a miracle looks like.
Jon gives it about fifteen seconds. “Try ‘Jingle Bells.’”
“Fuck off.”
Jon grins, then turns serious again. “Is there a Bible around here, or something? With an index? Although I suppose any prayer could work, really. No, wait—” He starts to get to his feet, but falls back down with a yelp.
“Are you alright?”
“Fine. Just, ah, just wanted to pace.” He huffs a sheepish laugh. “God, I need a cigarette.”
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I quit. Unfortunately.” He pushes the hair back from his face again. Tim wonders if he’s got a jonesing tic, like the dad in The Shining. “What was I saying?”
“Something about prayer?” It’s getting incrementally darker in the church.
“Right. It—” He shifts, and Tim grabs him by the shoulder before he can stand up again. “Ah. Thanks. It doesn’t like prayer. Whatever’s in here with us. It’s been, it’s been desecrating all the crosses, obviously, and murdering people who I assume would have been devout churchgoers.”
“They could have been, what was Jesus on about, hypocrites?” Tim shrugs. “Stealing from the collection plate or something.”
“Well I don’t know. The point is that it doesn’t like religious trappings. Symbolism. So what does it like?”
“What makes you think it likes anything? What makes you think it even has a mind like that?”
“It likes the organ.”
“You like the organ.”
“Great work, Tim, you got me.” Jon bares his teeth. “Boo.”
“Sorry.” Tim squeezes Jon’s shoulder, more to ground himself than anything. He tells himself to focus.
“It’s alright. Look, the way I see it, there’s two options here. Assuming this thing has a conscious will. Option one is that it actually hates religion. It’s lashing out against anyone who— I don’t know, maybe it thought I was going to try to fix the cross or something.”
“So we’re about to get slaughtered by the disembodied spirit of an edgy teenage atheist.”
“Possibly. Option two is that it really does hate the trappings of religion. But only the trappings. It despises— hypocrisy, like you said. Any attempt to take something pure and, and—” He waves his hands around like he’s trying to convey the fullness of something. “—and of God and reduce it to, to our understanding. You know, like Plato’s allegory of the cave. Just looking at this church, at the decorative parts of it, I mean, you can only see the shadow of God. The reflection. This thing hates that. Maybe it wants to drive home the terror of Hell. Of Heaven.”
This is why Tim likes Jon, he thinks. The fence-climbing is cute, the lockpicking is fun, but there’s really something about him when he gets hold of an idea like this. Tim’s seen it before. He’s listened through a gap in the stacks while Jon expounded on some new theory to Sasha, hands flying around enough to knock against the books in their shelves. He’s left Jon at the Institute late at night, and he’s come early in the morning to find him there again. He’s watched Jon at his desk, bent over stacks of books and paper and muttering to himself as he scribbles things down, and he’s thought maybe he could love him like that. He hasn’t known what to do with it.
But since there’s only a ninety-percent chance that they’re both going to die, he says, “Are you saying that no one in the history of this church ever prayed hard enough for it to count?”
Jon deflates a little at that. “I mean, I don’t think this thing believes humans capable of it.”
“In which case we’re fucked.”
“Well. Yes.” He sighs. “There’s always option one. Maybe we can commit enough blasphemy to get on its good side.”
“Sure. I’ll do the first four deadly sins if you take care of five through seven.”
“Can you please take this seriously?”
Tim doesn’t reply. He looks past Jon, to where the panes of the stained-glass windows are starting to turn dull in the evening light. Maybe he deserves this, for getting away once and coming back anyway. He doesn’t think so, though.
“Tim.” Jon grabs the hand Tim still has on his shoulder. “Focus. There has to be a way out of this, if we can just think of it.”
“Does there?”
“Yes. If we can figure out why this is happening, we can—”
“Why this is happening? There’s no fucking reason it’s happening! These things—” Tim pauses. Makes himself calm down. Jon doesn’t know what he knows. “These things don’t mean anything, Jon. And they don’t want anything except to hurt us.”
“What, then,” says Jon. “It’s just our bad luck?”
“I think so.”
“That’s not true,” says Jon, but he says it quietly. “I’m sorry,” he adds, louder. “I’m the one who brought us in here in the first place.”
“I’m the one who joined this stupid Institute.”
“We both did that.”
“Well, there you go.” Tim tries to laugh, but it comes out a sigh. Jon is still holding his hand. If Tim had about ten percent less impulse control, he’d grab Jon and kiss the living daylights out of him. Figure out some clever line about not having any unfinished business and breathe it into his mouth when they break apart. But he doesn’t actually know how Jon would react to that, and he doesn’t want making an arse of himself to be the last thing he does on earth. As much as he really, really does want to fuck somebody in a church. Anyway. “So,” he says. “How do you feel about dying young?”
Jon does laugh. It’s not a happy sound. “I suppose there’s nothing for it, unless we want to go smash a window and jump out.” He freezes. Blinks. Makes a choked little noise in the back of his throat. “Tim. Why haven’t we smashed a fucking window?”
“Can we do that?”
“I don’t know! We can try!”
“It won’t try to stop us?”
“It’s already going to kill us! Jesus Christ, why didn’t we think of this in the first place?”
Tim springs up from the floor. “We cannot tell Sasha about this. Like, at all.”
“This is what academia does to you,” groans Jon. He slumps over with his head in his hands as Tim books it across the church. “Fifteen minutes of philosophical debate on how to escape from a building with windows.”
“Looks like it won’t be too far of a fall,” Tim calls back to him, peering out through the middle of an angel’s halo. The bottom of the window comes to about mid-torso height, so it might be a bit of a jump for Jon, but Tim’s probably going to have to help him anyway. “We just need someone to break the glass with. You don’t happen to have a hammer in that bag, do you?”
“I don’t have bandages, why would I have a hammer?”
“You had a lockpicking kit.”
“Fair enough. Are those pews nailed down?”
Tim glances over at them. “They’d be too heavy for me to lift even if they weren’t. And I don’t think a bible is going to cut it.”
“No.” Jon gives a frustrated huff. “And of course the organ bench is long gone, and the thing is going to gut us if we try to go for the crucifix...”
“Yeah,” says Tim, and then, “Yeah, duh! Watch this.” He steps back from the window a little, to give Jon the full show of it, and then traces a small cross in the dust. He whips his hand away just as he feels the air rush past it, and a second later there’s two new holes smashed in the window. “L’chaim.”
“Are you fucking kidding me,” says Jon.
“Told you this thing doesn’t make any sense. Now I just have to make the hole big enough.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Jon says, but he doesn’t argue any farther. Instead, Tim hears him grunt with pain as he starts dragging himself across the floor.
“I can carry you, you know.”
“It’s getting dark.”
“Right.” Tim quickly draws another cross, then two more on either side of it, ignoring the little flecks of glass that cling to his fingers. The vengeful spirit trying to kill them bitchslaps these too, leaving a lattice of broken glass and bent metal. Tim pulls the sleeves of his jumper over his hands and manages to push this out of the way, creating a hole that’s still too small to fit through. He starts to draw another cross, but stops when he hears a crash that definitely didn’t come from the window.
“The crucifix just fell over,” says Jon.
“Ah. I take it that’s a bad sign?”
Jon’s voice is tight with pain. “Yes.”
“Excellent.” Tim draws several more crosses in rapid succession, not paying much attention to where he’s putting them now. The thing smashing them in gets faster and faster, until he can’t really avoid the cuts on his fingers and hands, and from behind him Jon continues to narrate the gradually increasing sounds of the church’s self destruction.
A series of loud clangs. “That’s the organ pipes.”
Tim draws another cross. Something rips off part of his fingernail.
A chorus of thumps. “That was a stack of bibles. Do you think I need to kiss them?”
“Just get over here,” Tim snaps, splitting his palm open on a jagged piece of metal.
“Sorry.” A crash that shakes the whole church. “Tim? That was from the ceiling.”
“Oh god damn it—” The church is shaking in earnest now, and the window panes are starting to come loose of their own free will. “Good enough.” Tim turns and scoops up Jon, who’s only a couple feet behind him now. His injured leg is slick with fresh blood, but there’s no time to worry about that. “Might be a little sharp.”
“I don’t care, Tim, just— Gah!”
Tim watches Jon hit the ground, and waits for him to scoot back a little from where he’s landed. Then he starts drawing another cross on the goddamn window.
“Tim!”
“You’re smaller than me, give me a minute—”
“You don’t have a minute. Tim!”
The church is falling down around him. Tim draws cross after cross, but apparently the thing is distracted now, and the holes take longer and longer to form as shards of wood and glass beat against his back. Jon is yelling something, but Tim can’t hear him, and he can’t pull his hand away in time when a chunk of rock slams down on the window frame.
“Move.” It’s Jon, gripping the window frame with one hand and the rock with the other. His jaw is clenched with the strain of staying upright, but his movements are quick and decisive as he smashes more glass away from the frame. Tim hurls himself through as soon as there’s enough room. He hits the ground just as Jon faints, and Tim grabs him under the armpits and drags the both of them back until they hit the fence.
The church continues to collapse even now that they’re out of it. As Tim watches, the remaining stained-glass windows burst outward like fireworks, and the sheared cross that brought them here in the first place tilts sideways. The noise is tremendous, but underneath it all Tim thinks he can hear the sound of an organ that shouldn’t still be playing. And then the roof caves in with a massive crash, and there’s silence.
Jon stirs where he’s slumped against Tim’s chest. “What…?”
“You fainted,” Tim says. “And also the entire church fell down. Please tell me you remember everything else.”
“Ugh.” Jon scrubs a hand over his eyes. “I knew I would.”
Tim wraps an arm around him. “You timed it well.”
“Thanks,” says Jon. He leans his head back onto Tim, eyes shut, and for a moment they just sit there, looking like a janky Pieta. Then Jon says, quietly, “Do you think we destroyed whatever was in there? Or do you think we just set it free?”
“Dunno,” says Tim. “But if it makes you feel any better, in fifty-odd years some poor asshole from the Institute is going to have to investigate ‘The Collapsed Cathedral,’ or whatever.”
“It really doesn’t,” says Jon. He sighs. “But at least we’re alive.”
“Lowered expectations,” says Tim. “The key to success.”
“I think we did well, considering.”
Tim laughs. “We make a good team, kid,” he says, in his best Han Solo voice.
“Don’t call me kid,” says Jon. “But yes. We do. With your brawn, and my brains—”
“Hey!”
Jon just grins at him. “So,” he says, “do we want to use our combined skills to climb this fence?”
“Think that’s gonna be a no from me,” says Tim. “Since you probably broke my hand with your brains.”
“Sorry—”
“S’alright.”
Jon pulls his injured leg up towards his chest. “We’re going to have to call Sasha, aren’t we.”
“Looks like it.”
Jon pulls out his phone. “Service,” he says grimly.
He starts dialing, and Tim lets his eyes glaze over a little, the pain in his hands coming to the forefront now that the adrenalin has started to wear off. Despite everything, it’s a nice evening, the air still warm for late fall and the only sound the occasional rush of a car driving past. Sasha may have been right about the church’s potential as a date spot, even if she probably expected the building would still be standing by the end of it.
“I’ll explain later,” Jon is saying into the phone. “No, I didn’t lose your kit, the lock on the fence is rusted over...Well could you take it out of the oven?...Oh. Ha ha. Yes, we’re hysterical over here…”
The sun is nearly down now, the sky bruised with night, but no monsters emerge from the shadows to grab him and Jon. Whether or not the thing from the church is dead, or free, or whatever other possibilities Jon is probably going to torment himself with, it’s left them alone. They fought back, and it’s left them alone. Could he do that to the thing that killed Danny? Send it off with its tail between its legs for some indeterminate amount of time? Hurt it?
Maybe. Good enough.
“Sasha’s on her way,” Jon says, hanging up his phone. “She’s bringing a rope ladder and she’s never going to let us live this down.”
Tim can’t muster up much of a laugh, but he pats Jon on the arm because he’s adorable when he’s annoyed. And Tim is going to tell him that sometime. Jon, who’s seen what he’s seen. Sasha, who’s seen enough to believe it.
This is going to be one weird fucking job.