Unholy Night

young commander sat atop his horse, his eyes darting between the house they’d surrounded and the long, dark cloud hanging low to the horizon. Sandstorm, he thought. A big one, and growing closer.

For all the fugitives’ fears of charred flesh, Pilate had no intention of burning them out. There were Jewish zealots in there, and he knew how zealots thought. They would rather give themselves to God as burnt offerings than surrender to a godless Roman like me. No, if he ordered the house set alight, he would only be able to watch as they martyred themselves in the flames. And what good would that be? And the Antioch Ghost? What glory was there in burning him? Pilate wanted to present his emperor with a living, quivering specimen, not a heap of charred remains. Unlike Herod, he wasn’t comfortable having the blood of women and infants on his hands. This campaign had taken on a dark enough tenor already.

It was a dark thing to hunt a newborn child with swords and spears. But Pilate had comforted himself with the idea that he was merely delivering his targets to their judges. He wasn’t responsible for what happened after that. What Pilate wasn’t comfortable with was the magus. The way he frightened the men with his strange little rituals. With his very appearance. The power he seemed to have to conjure visions from the air, to breathe life into places it didn’t belong. The way he seemed to know exactly where their targets were going. This was an altogether different kind of darkness. One that any rational man would know to fear. But in this case, Pilate’s hands were tied. Augustus wished it, and so it must be done. But Pilate had tried to keep the emperor’s little mystic on a tight leash — keeping him sequestered “for his own safety.” Under guard, alone in his tent. Miles from where they now stoo —

Stop.

Pilate caught his mind wandering and reined it back in. The image of the magus had just popped into his head out of nowhere, distracting him from the task at hand. Regaining focus, he noticed the torch-bearing solders beginning to advance on the house, their faces uniformly blank. Their movements stilted and awkward, as if they had strings attached to their limbs, being pulled from above. At first he thought it was some kind of joke.

“What are they doing?” cried Pilate to his officers. “WHAT ARE THEY DOING?” But when he got a better look at their faces, Pilate knew. They have no idea what they’re doing.

“STOP!”

But it was too late. The torches were laid at the foot of the house on all sides, and in seconds, the flames had taken hold. They climbed the walls, hastened by the dryness that permeated all of Beersheba. And though he would never have the opportunity to prove it, Pilate would go to his grave believing that the magus was responsible for it all: flooding his thoughts to distract him. Sitting cross-legged in his tent, eyes closed, muttering some strange old chant. Controlling his men, all the while thinking, This is what you get for trying to keep me on a short leash, you insignificant little nothing.

Inside, Balthazar and the others backed away as the flames climbed through the windows, filling the room with blistering air and setting the curtains ablaze in the process. Smoke began to pour in almost immediately, crawling across the ceiling and forcing the fugitives to crouch. As Mary covered the baby’s face with her robes, Sela hurried to the wall farthest from the fire, grabbed a washbowl, and threw its contents at the burning curtains. But this had all the effect of spitting into a volcano. The flames were spreading too quickly, the smoke already too heavy to be beaten back. They were faced with the unsavory choice of burning alive or running out of the house and being captured by the Romans.

Before Pilate could order his men to storm the house and take the fugitives alive, his eye was drawn away from the conflagration by a darkness in the west. The low cloud had risen from the horizon and doubled in size in the few moments since he’d last looked at it. Pilate had never seen a sandstorm — or any storm — move so fast. But that wasn’t the only strange thing about this cloud. It was shrieking. The sound had been barely perceivable at first, but it was unmistakable now. The cloud was shrieking. Emitting a constant, otherworldly sound — like the ceaseless scream of an angry animal. The scream of an angry god. A million voices raised in unison, growing closer by the second.

“Sandstorm,” said Gaspar. “We should take cover.”

“It’s not a sandstorm,” said Pilate, his eyes fixed on the shrieking cloud.

It’s a swarm.

Locusts. Millions of them, flying in a cloud so dense that it choked out the sun. Moving so fast that it defied nature. They’d crossed into the city, washing over the dead streets and abandoned houses like a wave, heading straight toward them. There were no crops left to eat in Beersheba… but still they came.

Pilate’s men saw it too. They heard the shrieking of the millions of locusts, saw the wave washing over the city. Like their leader, they turned away from the flames that climbed the wall of the house and stared in rapt wonder at the cloud. This is no sandstorm.…

Some of them began to break ranks and run for cover, but it was too late. By the time they took a few steps of retreat, the leading edge of the cloud slammed into the Romans with enough force to knock men over. Pilate’s horse reared up in fright, throwing him to the street. Dazed and hurt, he covered his face with his arms and curled his body into a ball as the shrieking swarm washed over them. All around, men held their shields up to their faces to protect themselves from the onslaught, insects clanging against them like stones from a slingshot. Locusts flew into the mouths of those who’d had the misfortune to leave them open, lodging themselves in men’s throats twenty and thirty at a time, choking soldiers with their armored bodies, biting them from the inside until blood ran from their mouths and nostrils.

What had been an orderly siege was suddenly chaos. An endless swarm poured over the Romans, drowning them. Blinding them with their numbers, and in some cases, blinding soldiers by feasting on their eyes in groups. Men tried to swat them away, to crush the locusts in their fists. But for every bug killed, ten more seemed to take its place. The soldiers might as well have been swatting at boiling tar.

Still balled up on the ground, Pilate saw a man crawling past him, completely covered by locusts. The man pulled himself for a few feet, then stopped — and the locusts covering him flew away en masse, leaving behind a mess of ripped skin and exposed innards. His lips were gone, leaving his teeth exposed in a ghastly eternal grin, and his eye sockets were nothing more than empty holes in his face. His carcass looked like it had spent a week being picked apart by crows. But it had taken only seconds.

Pilate heard the crunching of winged bodies everywhere as soldiers ran for cover in adjacent houses or rolled around on the street, trying desperately to brush thousands of insects off their arms, legs, and faces. He saw one soldier sitting upright, his palms pressed to his temples and his body writhing as something feasted on the inside of his skull. The man let loose a muffled scream, then fell over, silent and still. A moment later, Pilate saw locusts crawl out of the soldier’s mouth and eyelids before rejoining the swarm. These weren’t the mindless, dead-eyed bugs that had eaten their way across half of Africa, leaf to random leaf. These had been possessed by something. Given orders.

Pilate turned toward a pair of nearby voices and found Gaspar and Melchyor pulling themselves along the ground, looking for refuge as locusts covered them like a blanket. It was strange… the bugs seemed to be targeting some of the men but avoiding others completely. Like me — so far, anyway. In Gaspar’s and Melchyor’s case, they seemed less interested in killing than torturing — biting at their flesh, feeding on them one microscopic bite at a time.

Pilate watched the thieves crawl along, wondering what all of this meant. Wondering if the magus or some other magic was behind it. And if not the magus… who? He might have kept watching and wondering forever, or at least until the locusts changed their mind and began eating his eyes, had one of his lieutenants not grabbed his arm and dragged him into one of the adjacent houses. As he was pulled inside, Pilate saw that the flames that had engulfed the front of the fugitives’ hideout had begun to retreat, beaten back by the bodies of locusts that willfully flew into the fire, sacrificing themselves to put it out, and in doing so, buying the people inside precious time.

Inside, Mary had turned away and buried her head in Joseph’s shoulder, terrified by the otherworldly shrieking and horrified by the sight of men being eaten alive. Balthazar turned away too — less horrified than dumbfounded, and found himself confronted by a smiling little face. Despite the chaos in the streets, despite the sounds of men having their skin torn away, the baby was back to his calm, curious self. Resting in his frightened mother’s arms, looking — no, beaming — at Balthazar. Sela hurried around the room, drawing the curtains over every window, as if the thin fabric would be enough to stop the swarm from entering. But they won’t enter, thought Balthazar. They won’t even try… because