part0026

Sully’s whisper could not come fast enough. From the moment he placed the final stone, the one that covered her face, Roni fought back claustrophobic panic. She had never suffered from such a thing before, but then she had never been entombed in a rock pile before. The feeling of being buried alive did not sit well with her. Yet when Sully finally whispered his incantation into the golem’s ear, the stones muffled his voice too much for her to catch what he said. Not that she would have understood the Hebrew.

Regardless, the golem came to life. She could feel it breaking out of the stone mound, feel it moving on its own. Though she formed its skeleton, she had no control over its actions. Two small stones rolled off the face so that she could see. A third stone popped out providing her a much-needed breathing hole.

“Relax your muscles,” Sully said. “The less resistance you provide, the easier the golem will move, and the less chance of you being injured.”

Gram watched from several steps back, both fascinated and horrified with what Roni was expected to do. “Good luck,” she managed.

As the golem stepped out into the rain, Roni caught a glimpse of Elliot up in the hayloft. He had his cane held above his head, nearly vertical, and his free hand repeating several complex motions. She knew from past experience that much of the magic Elliot created took time. If she reached the church before he was ready, if she enacted her part of the plan too early, she didn’t think she would survive. But he promised it would be okay, and she believed him. She had to.

She squeezed both her hands tight — the golem paper in her left, Gram’s rosary beads in her right. The golem proceeded down the hill and the rain soaked through its stone crevices fast. Trickles of water fell down Roni’s back, chilling her spine and drenching her pants.

Steady footsteps brought the golem closer to the church. Roni tried to follow Sully’s instructions, tried to relax her body, but the excruciatingly slow pace only amped up her tension. She closed her eyes — the golem did not need for her to see in order to move — and she attempted to contact Maria.

This failed. Either Maria could no longer communicate or she refused to communicate. Probably the latter. Probably she needed to put her attention into the final moments ahead. They would be, after all, her actual, final moments — if all went as expected.

After fifteen minutes of a walk that should have taken three, Roni and the golem trudged by the dorms. A rich, purple color pulsed through the windows of the church ahead. The building had become so thick with rifters that the stone walls glowed as well. It was as if Prince had come back from the dead to put on his greatest private concert ever — but Roni knew that inside awaited no great music. Inside, awaited death. Hopefully not her own.

Once the golem set its stone foot upon the first stairs leading into the church, two rifters slipped outside and hovered in front of the entranceway. They made no noise. Simply hovered there, dripping smoke onto the ground. The golem halted. This would be the first crucial moment.

Sully had said that the living golem form would cover up any sense of Roni — any sense of her presence. Of course, he had no way to know for sure. He based his guess on the fact that they never noticed the golem when he broke through the stone wall. As the rifters descended around her head and drifted up and down the golem’s stone body, she made sure not to move. She closed her eyes. She waited and hoped Sully had been right.

Her nervous breaths bounced off the rock around her. Between her heartbeats they sounded like a howling wind in a heavy storm. Lightning flashed again, brightening her closed eyelids red, and thunder split the sky.

Roni kept expecting a strange sensation from the touch of the rifters. Perhaps an electric tingle or a static rise or even something as simple as pressure like a hand placed on her back. She felt nothing. The only indication that she had succeeded — the golem moved once again.

She fluttered her eyes open as the golem entered the narthex. The doors leading into the nave were wide open, and a weird, blasphemous service took place. Purple-black balls of smoke filled the pews, the walls, the air, all the way to the vaulted ceiling. A curved tunnel cut through the mass of creatures, leading from the nave straight down to the apse like some twisted wedding pathway formed from friends reaching out to each other.

Roni thought that if the nuns had been around to see this, they would have certainly believed it to be the hand of their Lord. To her, she saw the results of the rift beneath the floor. Like magnets moving metal shavings into odd shapes, the energy from the rift forced these creatures into this strange configuration.

Their faceless bodies pivoted and turned, and with each movement, she thought that surely, they would see her now. They would attack full force, rip apart the stone golem protecting her, and then tear her skin from her bones. She could see it as if it had already happened.

Tightening her hand around Gram’s rosary, she fought the urge to scream. Her bladder suddenly decided to put pressure on her abdomen. At least that provided her with something else to focus on. No way would she allow her bladder to let loose.

The golem turned to the right and headed for the spiral staircase leading below. Sully believed it would have little problem navigating the narrow stairs — its body was only slightly larger than Roni’s. If it could not succeed at the task, it would back up, leave the church, and enter through the hole in the wall made by the previous golem.

“I’d rather use the stairs,” Sully had said. “If the creatures do not react to you being inside the stone, I don’t want to give any indication of what we are up to. Coming in through the hole which was the site of the previous attack might tip them off. That is, if they think in any logical way.”

That was the thing. They had no idea how these creatures thought. The things lacked eyes yet sensed the world around them to some extent. They lacked mouths, they lacked arms, they lacked anything of substance yet had caused devastating harm already.

But Sully’s golem-building skills proved their excellence. The golem navigated the spiral staircase with ease, and in moments, Roni found herself standing before the rift.

The orange-red swirls continued in their mesmerizing fashion, and rifters popped out sporadically. But the rapid-fire force which Roni had witnessed earlier had ceased. Those rifters that did emerge quickly floated upward, seeping through the cracks in the ceiling, to join their brethren in the nave.

For the most part, the basement was empty. Roni knew that would not last for long. Soon, Elliot’s magic would take hold and she would have to make her move. But all indications suggested Elliot had yet to accomplish his task. She had to wait — again.

“I know you can hear me. I know you haven’t left yet. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me. I understand. I am not really part of your life. In some strange way, I’m from your future — a possible future. Except that even that’s not it really. But we are connected — we are blood.

“I don’t know what to think of you. But if I’m going to die today, then you need to know a few things. Mostly, I forgive you. Not you, of course, but the other you — the one that lived on to become my mother. I forgive you for leaving me and leaving me so empty. I forgive you for hiding this world from me. I forgive you for everything.

“As kids we see our parents as figures — not quite human. But you are. You have your faults and your desires and you made so many mistakes. I spent too much time wishing things were different, wanting to find my lost time as if that might fill the lost things within me. But that’s not true. Here I stand, with part of you filling me right now, yet I’m every bit as scared as I would’ve been without you. I’m every bit as empty.

“If I survive this, then you should know that I love you, I forgive you, and I will figure out how to move on.

“My lost time — I’ll still find it. But if a part of you could not fulfill me, then no memory will either. I’m going to find that lost time because Dad is still alive. He needs me. And I need to understand who he is.

Roni waited for the physical reaction from Maria but none came. That was okay. Saying those words, articulating those thoughts and feelings — that was what mattered.

The colors in the rift faded. Subtle at first, and Roni could not quite believe it. But Elliot had told her that would be the sign. That his power to amplify Maria’s force would drain from the rift — and in that way, they would overload it. Simple enough.

Roni expected no answer, but the familiar warm flush invaded her skin. She started at the sensation, then settled into a comforting grin.

With a few awkward motions, she pulled her left arm free from the rock surrounding it like removing her arm from the sleeve of a heavy sweater. She then performed the same series of motions with her right arm. Against her belly, she brought her hands together.

Roni ripped the golem paper in two. And the rocks tumbled away. The weight lifted from her body and the rain-soaked air breezing in through the hole in the wall cooled her skin. She had to step over the small pile of rubble surrounding her but she managed.

As she approached the rift, as she felt its energy pulling from her even as Elliot pulled from it, the rifters seeped through the ceiling. They sensed her presence now.

“You’re too late,” she said, and without giving herself time to alter course, stepped into the rift.