Chapter Text
“And this will be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples that have fought against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths."
-Zechariah 14:12
Shepard Love parked his truck on a residential street a few blocks away from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the low afternoon sun casting everything around him in orange sepia. He glanced at the parking sign above him and frowned, the street parking restrictions seeming paradoxical to him. With a shrug, he killed the engine, deciding to risk the ticket. The heat came off the asphalt in waves, staggering even in the middle of March. It had been a long drive from Omaha to Los Angeles, with many stops made at gas stations to talk up customers and chug down burnt coffee along the way. As he stepped out of his truck, he took his thermos and unscrewed the cap to dump out the remnants of his last coffee stop, glancing around the street. The sidewalk was thick with life, ranging from obnoxiously loud children to quiet families that seemed to live on the street. None of them paid Shepard or his Nebraska license plate any mind, he was just another tourist among many.
Shepard wasn’t that different from some of the influencers that called Los Angeles their home. He had his own dedicated platform of loyal listeners who helped him pay his rent on time, all just as obsessed with the paranormal as he was. His podcast was beginning to gain real traction and this story, a submission from a fan, was the kind of thing that might establish him as a real voice in the supernatural community. Not that Shepard was in it for the fame or the money, it was never about that. But as a human, living amongst creatures of different dimensions, there was nothing he loved more than chasing a peak behind the curtain. So when a long time follower gave him a tip about unsettling activity at a Catholic church in Los Angeles, Shepard felt it in his gut that it was the real deal.
After throwing his thermos back into the passenger seat of his truck, Shepard grabbed his backpack with all of his recording equipment and began his short walk to the church around the corner. As he walked over the cracked sidewalk and shielded his eyes from the setting sun, he mused about how nice it was to be back in California. He’d never had much patience for staying in one place, not while there was so much happening in the world around him. After this, he was planning to take a short trip to Palm Springs and check out an infamous cowboy themed demonic saloon. He heard the halflings that ran the place were welcoming to tourists and he hoped to score an interview with the bar’s owner. But, as he rounded the corner and the church came into view, he reminded himself to stay in the moment and focus on the story at hand.
There were many cathedrals spread out across California. Some of them were truly impressive, imposing things that reached towards the sky as though they hoped to reach the heavens. This church, the one Shepard had traveled nonstop for nearly an entire day to find, was not particularly impressive. It was short and stout, with a peeling wooden marque that announced that Easter Mass was on the horizon. This was not disappointing to Shepard, however, as it was often the most innocuous looking places that had the best stories to tell. He tried to contain his vibrating excitement as he approached the entrance to the church, knowing that he needed to come across as the serious journalist that he was trying in his heart of hearts to become. With one last deep breath, he gripped the iron handles of the entrance to the church and threw open the doors.
Inside, he saw what appeared to be a very normal, if not somewhat outdated, nave. The carpet was a dingy, stained maroon and the pews looked as though they had seen better days. There were stained glass windows, but not very many of them. The rest of the church’s interiors looked similarly worn down and dingy. Shepard glanced around and wondered where he should begin. If he couldn’t find anyone to help him, he supposed he could start by taking pictures of the interior of the church. After another moment of consideration, he heard a noise from behind him.
Shepard spun around to find a young woman staring at him from behind a pillar, her brown eyes shining in the dark.
“We don’t do evening mass here,” she said.
Shepard worked to ignore the flash of fear that sparked in his gut and cleared his throat.
“Oh,” he said, “Uh, I’m not here for mass. I called the other day? I’m Shepard Love. The reporter. I’m here to interview Father Kelly?”
The woman stepped out into the filtered light of the stained glass windows, washing her sage green dress in a murky rainbow.
“Mr. Love?” she asked, “I remember you, I’m the one you spoke with on the phone. I’m the parish secretary, Elspeth Bellamy.”
Shepard nodded, stepping forward to shake her hand.
“Yes! I remember you. Thank you so much for inviting me! It’s been too long since I’ve visited the Golden State.”
She eyed Shepard's extended hand before glancing at her own, a white bandage looped around her hand and wrist.
“I’d better not,” she said sheepishly, “I told you, we’re not sure what this is. But the doctors say it’s not medical, it’s divine. Or, rather, demonic. But still, you should probably keep your hands to yourself and wear a mask.”
Shepard frowned at her bandaged hand, wondering what exactly had happened between their phone call a few days ago and now that had caused an injury.
“Oh yeah,” he said, “My follower said that Father Kelly was sick but that the doctors cleared him of any natural virus or infection.”
Elspeth nodded.
“The hospital had a residential expert, a low level nephilim, come out to do an assessment. I made him stand back because we don’t know how this thing is spreading but he confirmed it. Whatever is happening is from the hellish dimension.”
Shepard kept his thoughts about the otherworldly dimensions to himself. He didn’t like to use the terms “heavenly” or “hellish” dimensions. After all, some of his best stories had come from the kindness of halflings while the nephilim weren’t exactly lining up to take his calls.
“I’ll put on a mask and keep my hands to myself,” Shepard promised, “I just want to interview Father Kelly.”
Elspeth bit her lip, glancing anxiously behind her.
“You said,” her voice broke as she spoke and she cleared it before continuing, “On the phone that you had connections, right? I’ve sent messages to the archbishop but I don’t think they’re taking me seriously.”
Shepard shrugged off his backpack and set it down on the pew as he rummaged for a KN95 mask.
“I do,” he said, “I work with a witch based in London. She has connections to the Vatican.”
Elspeth’s shoulders hunched in relief.
“Oh good,” she breathed, “Thank goodness. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I just don’t know what to do at this point.”
Shepard’s stomach twisted sharply again, another instinctual warning that he tried to shrug off.
Generally speaking, when Shepard came around with his tape recorder and his smiles, the people he met were usually altruistically amused by him, knowing that they were doing much more for him than he was for them. He wasn’t sure he had ever encountered a supernatural situation where the other person looked to him for help.
“I should warn you,” Elspeth said, “Father Kelly has been deteriorating, er, quite rapidly. As I’ve said, I’ve been trying to get in touch with the archbishop and the hospital won’t take him. Either way, I’m not sure that you’ll be able to get an interview out of him.”
Shepard shrugged, fixing the mask in place around his nose and mouth and trying to ignore the fogging of his glasses.
“That’s fine,” he said, “I can always report on his condition and take photos.”
Elspeth nodded.
“I doubt the Vatican will approve,” she mused, “But they’ve given me little choice. I need to get the word out.”
With one last worried glance in Shepard’s direction, she gestured for him to follow her.
“He’s in the rectory,” she said, “Follow me.”
Shepard followed her out of the church and onto a quaint stone path that led to the small rectory. In the thinning daylight, he could see that Elspeth’s skin appeared a bit clammy and grey. He was beginning to feel grateful for her recommendation of putting on his mask.
“So uh,” Shepard said, “When did this all start?”
Elspeth glanced back at him.
“Father Kelly began exhibiting symptoms about a month ago. But things didn’t become too noticeable until two weeks ago.”
Shepard narrowly avoided tripping over a cracked stone in the grass.
“You said Father Kelly is doing a lot worse, right?”
He watched the back of her head bob in agreement.
“The infection is spreading faster every day. I’m afraid he will…well I’m afraid it’s too late, I suppose.”
Shepard frowned.
“You mean, you think he might die?”
She didn’t turn to look at him when she responded.
“Something like that.”
When she reached the front door, she turned back and stared at him.
“I warned you,” she said, “Father Kelly isn’t well. This is a demonic affliction and, well, I’m not sure how much experience you have with demonic diseases but…it’s not pretty.”
Shepard had encountered his fair share of supernatural afflictions. He’d witnessed an exorcism of a possessed family in Arkansas last year and had reported on a plague of locusts in Texas a few years back. There was very little that could shock him these days, even if the warning tone in Elspeth’s voice set the hair on the back of his neck on end.
“Understood,” Shepard said.
She nodded, more for her own benefit than Shepard's, it seemed, and opened the front door.
When they stepped into the house, Shepard resisted the urge to gag. He walked into a wall of pungent air, the odor so strong that it felt like a physical thing in the room with them. The mask wasn’t doing very much to filter out the stench of sulfur and rotting meat. He immediately switched to breathing only through his mouth, but the smell was so thick that he could taste the sour tang of it on the back of his throat. At that, he did gag, an automatic response from his body that screamed at him to leave the premises immediately.
Elspeth had removed an embroidered handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and was covering her mouth and nose with it.
“Sorry,” she said, voice muffled by the cloth, “I should have warned you about the smell.”
Shepard’s eyes were watering but he nodded at her.
“It’s okay,” he said, “I can handle it. Please, lead the way.”
Elspeth moved down the hall and Shepard, newly reluctant, followed.
As they moved down the length of the hallway, Shepard noticed that some of the framed paintings on the walls appeared to be vibrating and moving. For a moment, he wondered if someone had cast a curse on the space, warping the natural properties. But then, as he got closer to the paintings, he realized that there were flies, hundreds of flies, moving and shifting on the glass of the frames. He successfully managed to prevent gagging at that, staring instead at Elspeth’s back as he moved further down the hall. This would all be worth it, he reminded himself, as soon as he reported back to his listeners. Clearly, something bigger than a random locust infestation was happening, and he intended to be the one to uncover it.
When they turned to the left, he watched Elspeth grip the doorknob to another room, her hand shaky.
“Take as many photos or videos as you want,” she whispered, “I want them to see, to understand.”
Shepard swallowed hard.
“Okay,” he said, far less confident than he’d been when he’d first stepped through the doors of the church.
She opened the door and stepped inside the room, staying as far away from the bed as possible in the tiny space. If he had thought the smell was bad in the living room and the hallway, it was absolutely putrid in the bedroom. He forced another gag into a throaty cough, begging his body not to send him running to the bathroom to throw up. After he got ahold of himself, Shepard inched himself slowly into the doorframe, turning his full attention to the figure on the bed. As his eyes took in the sight, his body stopped moving completely, absolutely frozen in terror.
The thing that lay on the bed resembled a man only in terms of shape and clothing. He was in a soiled, grey sweatsuit, his pants stained with all manner of brown, yellow, and greenish secretions. His shirt was worse off, clearly stained in all the same fluids but also tinged deep with a rusty, brownish red around the collar. The creature’s flesh, if it could be called that anymore, was in various states of decay, with puss, maggots, and necrotic tissue veining through the exposed muscle. The thing no longer had eyes, or if it did, they must have been closed. It almost looked like the creature was smiling, some of his teeth exposed stark white against the gore of his rotting face.
“Jesus Christ,” Shepard moaned, falling back against the doorframe, “Is he fucking dead?”
At the sound of his voice, the corpse moved, rising from the bed faster than Shepard would have expected from an ailing human. Everything in Shepard’s body told him to run, to get as far from the horrible room as he could and to do it fast, before the thing on the bed could catch up to him. Out of the man’s ruined mouth, an unearthly screech garbled its way out, sounding more like a growl than intelligible speech. It was then, as the thing reached out its decaying arms to grab Shepard, that he saw that the thing was bound by chains to the bed posts. When he surged forward to attack Shepard, they rattled and flung the undead creature back onto the bed.
“Father Kelly,” Elspeth shrieked, moving forward to push him back down on the bed, “Calm down! He’s here to help!”
Shepard stared in horror as Elspeth put her hands on his torso and pushed him back onto the bed, the fabric sliding wetly against his ruined chest.
“Don’t!” Shepard shouted, “He’ll attack you!”
She tried for a little longer to push Father Kelly to lie down but he continued to thrash violently against the restraints, animalistic noises gurgling out of his throat. After another moment, she sighed and walked backwards until her back hit the old dresser against the wall, her eyes wide with anguish and terror as she looked down at the brown sludge that now covered both of her hands.
“He doesn’t like it when people curse,” she whispered, “He hates it when people take the Lord’s name in vain.”
Shepard looked over at the creature that used to be Father Kelly and shook his head.
“No,” he said, “Whatever that thing is now, it’s not Father Kelly. That’s a corpse, Elspeth.”
She shook her head, tears spilling out onto her cheeks.
“I wish that were true,” she said miserably, “Then I could feel peace in knowing that Father Kelly was in the arms of the Lord. But that nephilim doctor confirmed it, poor Father Kelly is still alive. I’ve been checking every morning and his heart is still beating.”
Shepard couldn’t stand to look at the violent creature anymore, even if Father Kelly was trapped somewhere deep down inside of it. He felt horrible that the priest was a prisoner in his own body, but also confident that if they remained in the room much longer, his restraints would eventually fail.
“We have to go, Elspeth,” Shepard said, “And lock the front door. Before he attacks anyone or spreads this thing. This isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
Elspeth looked out towards the window, her chin quivering.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” she said, her voice catching on a sob, “I was really hoping you’d heard of this.”
He tried reaching for Elspeth’s hand, the bandaged one, desperate to get her out of the room, but she moved away from him in a flash, her small body hitting the window frame hard enough to make it rattle. When he looked at her face, he saw that it was paler than it had been before, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“Let’s go Elspeth!” Shepard said, backing out of the doorframe, “Before he hurts you!”
With shaking hands, she reached up and began to unravel the white bandage around her hand and wrist.
“That’s the thing, Mr. Love,” she whispered, unraveling the last of the bandages, “He already has.”
Shepard saw, with a feeling of dread like he had never known, what looked to be an infected bite wound on the back of Elspeth’s hand, black half moons circling around her thumb and into the web of thin skin between her fingers. That would have been terrifying enough, the knowledge that Father Kelly was so far gone that he had bitten the parish secretary in a fit of madness, but it was the rest of her hand and wrist that made Shepard stumble backwards into the hall. The skin around the bite wound was rotting, just like Father Kelly’s skin, the necrotic veining twining higher up onto her forearm like an omen.
“You said you had connections, right?” Elspeth asked, her eyes pleading with him, “Call them, now please. And make them listen.”
Shepard nodded numbly and moved hazily through the hallway, back towards the front door, desperate to get away from the cloying stench of the rectory and back into fresh air. When he managed to clumsily push his way out of the front door and into the last of the dying light, he took in a shaky, deep breath. After several mouthfuls of the evening air, he turned and vomited violently into the rose bushes planted outside of the rectory, his body heaving uncontrollably.
Once his body was finished expelling all of his gas station snacks and bitter coffee from the last twelve hours, he stood up and took out his phone, frantically scrolling for the right contact. It was the very early hours of the morning in London and Shepard didn’t expect her to answer, even though it was her personal phone. He closed his eyes against each ring and waited for the beep of her voicemail.
“Penelope?” Shepard gasped, “I uh, mean, Ms. Bunce? I need you to call me as soon as you get this. This thing is worse than anything I could have imagined. We need to talk to your nephilim friend as soon as possible.”