Faux

Chapter 7

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

― Daniel J. Boorstin

-

Benjamin Calhoun ran from the church past his old-fashioned Volvo in the overflowing parking lot and through the paved pathway that led into Eatonbrook Forest. A broiling headache thumped over his left temple, a softer pang reverberating along the back right side of his head. As though a nail was being driven right through his skull. 

Heat filled his face. His gut rolling with yesterday's alcohol. The drinking had carried on long after his departure from Hoggs Tavern with some of the spirits he kept locked in his kitchen cabinet. At one time, following his wife's death, the cabinet had remained open all the time. Then his practice had come into question and he'd shut, locked and hidden the key with a promise never to return to the drink. The swirling images of Evie Sutton had broken that promise. And with good reason.

He stumbled against a tree trunk and leaned against it. The combination of beer, whiskey and vodka tumbling about in his gut had found their way to his chest. A scorching river of bile crawling upstream. 

He fell to his knees as his lungs squeezed together. A second later, he belched the bitter liquid lining his throat and drenched the tree trunk in a yellow-green muck.

"Ugh." His innards squashed together again and he gargled more puke onto the forest floor. As he heaved, a dark figure appeared behind him. A passing wind fluttered its dark robes, translucent in the Sunday morning sun and fitted like a sheet around its thin form.

"Calhoun."

Benjamin jerked forward, his feet stumbling over the roots to land on his hands and knees on the pool of vomit below him. He barely had a moment to register the sticky ooze before he was up on his feet facing the voice. He wiped the sticky hands on his pants, lips curled in digust.

"Who the hell are you?"

The figure, a woman from the way it moved, waved a hand dismissively.

"You're a drunk yet dare enter the holy sanctuary?" The figure pulled off the cowl covering her face and for a moment Calhoun's heart seemed to skip a beat. Marie, his wife, was standing before him in ghostly pallor. Then the sun shifted across her face and it was someone else. Someone familiar but...

"Who are you?" he asked again, head tilting slightly as shoulders hunched forward. While his desire to vomit hadn't dispelled completely, he controlled it enough to prevent the endless clasps tightening his lungs. For the time being anyway. 

"You continue to ask useless questions. You already know who I am."

"I do not know - " then it all clicked. At the same moment, a child stepped out from behind the woman' robes. A boy of golden locks who looked surprisingly like Ronan Thompson. Only it wasn't as the boy's eyes were completely black and his skin had lost all colour to look ashen. Then more children piled out of the black cloth like spiders bursting from an egg. Calhoun stumbled backwards, almost slipping on his own vomit. The sunlight cascading over the woman revealed that her robe was not made out f cloth as he first thought, but skin. Like the skin of a snake after it sheds.

"Sister Veronica." Calhoun whispered, eyes widening and flitting between the late, and secret, wife of Father Becket, and the children flocking her. He watched her raise a leathery hand and point a bony finger at him.

"Show the doctor what we do to sinners children."

In one brisk moment every child was rushing forward in perfect unison. Calhoun shrieked, tumbling backwards to land hard on the ground. The knock caused a an empty hic. A tiny hand gripped his ankle. Hard. He gurgled, kicking the girl in the face and scrambled to his feet. Then he was running through the forest, but they were followed. Persistent. Their hands brushing against his hip and leg and thigh. Nips at his clothing. One of them even managed to grab a fistful his shirt and it ripped out of their grasp.

It took a while as he ran to realise that he was not feeling the little grasps anymore and when he turned back he found all the children had disappeared. Only an empty forest stood in front of him. He slowed to a stop, hands resting on his knees as he bent over and took in large gulp-fulls of air. The bitter taste of bile still lined his throat and threatened to spill out again.

"What in God's name is happening." He breathed, moving to sit against a tree to catch his breath. That was when he heard the buzzing. Incessant against his ear that at first he thought he was sitting under a beehive bees. He lifted his head, cocking it sideways as though that would help him pin-point the sound. He whirled about a few times, tracing the sound until he saw them. A nest of flies, big as life, making lazy arcs through the air over a mound of grey grass.  He steadily rose to his feet, creeping towards the strange shape in the ground. He suddenly became aware of the stench of decay which made him gag again. He turned to the side and hacked out a single dribble of saliva. The acidity sitting right against his rib cage.

He stalked closer, seeing discarded clothing; a woman's red underwear next to blue boxers. Lovers. Out-of-towners? He stepped closer, fingers pinching his nose against the stench as the mound came clearer into view.

The sight was not what he expected. The rising stalks he'd mistaken as leafless shrubs turned out to be sticks lodged inside the skinless, maggot infested, grey bodies of two lovers. Indiscernible now, one of the bodies lay toppled over on its side with a cavity against the side of the head. The other gazed up at the sky from lidless black sockets. Rocks and pebbles were scattered all over them with the tell-tale purple-black splotches of bruising. 

A small plastic card angled upwards near the bodies. Calhoun picked it up and felt one final tug in his lungs at the sight of the student card. One of the bodies was Jonathan Carter. He could only speculate who the other was. He heard a snap from somewhere deep in the forest, the sound chilling his heart making him whirl around. Remebering the earlier episode he took off back through the forest. 

Secrets were about to unravel. He knew it was well as he knew that Sister Veronica Gardner-Becket was not dead. 

Or she had come back from the dead.

Just like Evie.