No one had believed in Him.
Delroy tried to put himself back into his father’s Sunday school class. He tried to remember how safe he had felt on those mornings while listening to his father tell stories about creation, about Noah and the ark, and the parting of the Red Sea. God had been so real in those stories, so near. And now, well, now God seemed a million miles away.
The creature screamed in inarticulate rage. As easily as Delroy would turn a child over, the creature flipped him facedown into the muddy water and put a knee into his back. Delroy was so tall his legs stuck out of the grave, but his face was under water. He tried to lift his head clear. The creature grabbed the back of his head, wrapping impossibly long fingers around his skull. Claws pricked Delroy’s flesh. The thing forced his face more deeply into the water.
“I’m going to drown you, Preacher, if you don’t dig up this grave.”
Delroy struggled, but the muddy sides of the grave gave way every time he tried to use them to lever himself up from the water. His head pounded and his lungs burned from the lack of oxygen. The foul water burned his eyes. He gasped reflexively and bubbles escaped his mouth.
Just as he was about to give in and take a breath, the creature pulled his face clear of the water. His chin remained immersed.
“Dig,” the creature ordered.
Delroy thought hard, wondering why the creature was going to such lengths to make him cooperate. It could easily kill him. Why was exhuming Terrence’s coffin so important to it? And why didn’t the creature dig it up itself?
The thing shoved his face back into the water. Again, just when he was about to start drowning, his opponent lifted his face clear.
“Give it up, Preacher. Your faith is misplaced. I’m teaching you the only things you need to believe in right now. Dig up the coffin and know the nature of all the lies that have been told to you.”
Delroy didn’t speak. He concentrated his efforts on drawing air into his lungs. The thing shoved his face back into the water a third time. This time when it pulled him up, Delroy was choking and spluttering on water he’d sucked in.
“You’re a fool, Preacher. Too stupid to even be afraid.”
Lacking the strength to argue or even aid in his own salvation from the water, Delroy hung in the thing’s grip. He wanted to pray, but he didn’t believe anything he had to say would ever reach God’s ears. He’d been abandoned in the cemetery.
Suddenly the weight of the creature was gone from his back. For a moment Delroy believed he’d just started slipping into unconsciousness and was less aware of his surroundings as a result. Weakly, arms trembling from the effort, he pushed himself up from the water. He sucked in a breath, looking over his shoulder as lightning ripped through the dark heavens.
The creature was gone.
Suspicious that the thing’s disappearance was a trick, Delroy waited, taking a moment to recharge his lungs with air. He lacked the reserves of strength to move quickly. In fact, he didn’t know if he would be able to move at all for a while.
He didn’t know what had happened to the thing. It had disappeared back in Washington, too. But someone had seen the creature then. He wondered if it lacked the power to appear to anyone else. But no one else was around.
God—?
The possibility surfaced in Delroy’s frenzied thoughts an instant before he felt something move in the earth between his two braced hands. Instinctively, he glanced down.
A black-taloned hand shot out of the mud in front of Delroy’s face. Adrenaline slammed through his system anew, filling him with the strength to pull back. However, before he could get away, the hand reached past him and cupped the back of his neck.
The creature’s face surfaced in the water pooled in the grave. Predatory cat’s eyes gleamed amber in the flashlight beam. Fangs filled the thin-lipped mouth. Unable to move with the hand holding the back of his head, Delroy watched in horror as the creature glared up at him.
“Now,” the thing growled, “now you’re going to see what’s below.” The creature yanked Delroy’s head down again. This time it didn’t stop with just putting his face into the water. The creature dragged Delroy’s head and shoulders deep into the rain-drenched mire.
Delroy felt the cold mud all around him. Then he touched the smooth metal surface of Terrence’s coffin. He couldn’t see anything, including the monster that dragged him through the dirt, but he smelled the damp earth. Thunder cannonaded, sounding more distant because he was inside the earth instead of above it. Then a glow filled the coffin and he saw Terrence through the metal wall.
Delroy’s mind told him there was no way he saw what he saw, but his eyes took in the stark image of his son lying in the coffin. God, why have You forsaken me?
“He didn’t make it to the party,” the creature whispered into Delroy’s ear. “Everything you were afraid of—that your son didn’t find his belief, that you weren’t as good a preacher as you believed yourself to be all those years ago—it’s all true.”
Terrence’s body showed the ravages of the horrible wounds that had taken his life. No amount of mortician’s wax could cover the grievous burns that covered his body, or the bullet holes that had left his face shattered and inhuman. His left arm was missing.
Delroy tried to scream but couldn’t. No one had told them that Terrence hadn’t come back whole, only that his wounds had rendered viewing impossible.
“The military didn’t tell you,” the thing hissed in Delroy’s ear.
“Didn’t get all the parts back. Couldn’t find them.”
Delroy wanted to escape but couldn’t.
“What is that, Preacher? When someone willingly doesn’t tell you something they know you would want to know? Lying by omission, right?”
Horror gripped
