Joseph, Mary and the girl, Jesse. The irony was not lost on him.
Just beyond the wooden fence leading to the Carron’s property, the snow was covered in blood and animal carcasses. Pigs and cows lay frozen, their bodies ripped to shreds as if by a pack of rabid lions. Discarded entrails hung from the withered limbs of trees, rivulets of blood frozen in mid-drip. The house was dark and deserted.
However, light poured out from underneath the barn door just twenty yards from the house. With his trident in one hand and a crucifix-dagger in the other, Father Michael made his way to the true eye of the storm.
Peering into the barn through a small crack in one of the rotted walls, Father Michael was greeted by an obscene vision of hell.
The remaining Carrons, father, mother and daughter, had been transformed into ghoulish creatures that had no place in this world. What had once been Joseph Carron was on a throne of blood-soaked hay, thrusting his hips into the buttocks of a corpse that had lost the top half of its body. He suspected it was the body of the sheriff who had not returned from his visit to the farm. Joseph Carron had sprouted hundreds of dark, elongated nipples along his chest and legs. They wept with a foul, green discharge. Even his eyes had been replaced by seeping nipples. His mouth overflowed with a milky froth that audibly fizzed as it dripped.
Mary Carron, now a green-skinned demon with horny ridges protruding from every corner of her body, was slobbering over a pile of entrails on the floor next to the hay throne. Her back had twisted upon itself, so her head faced behind her. As she knelt over her feast, her breasts flopped over her ears.
Worst of all was the little girl, Jesse, whose only outward sign of transformation was a deathly white pallor and very long, jagged teeth. She was using those teeth to gnaw on the leg of a horse they had obviously slaughtered days before. Maggots flowed freely from its gutted bowels, inching along the tender flesh of the young girl-demon.
Anger rose in Father Michael’s throat like bile. No wonder the priest had fled screaming. What he had seen was just a preview, a show put on to lure Father Michael to this place. The evil that had come to this town knew no boundaries.
But it knew him.
What had started out as a little girl possibly possessed, as determined by her fundamentalist parents, had turned into a vision of madness. When Jesse began talking in foreign tongues and levitating, Joseph and Mary immediately called Father Rooney. A minor metamorphosis had confirmed the worst and scared the life out of the priest.
What Father Michael hadn’t counted on was the extent of the carnage. This was something not seen in more years than he could remember. A medieval nightmare of hell unleashed in the civilized world. The handiwork of hell had been dormant for some time, especially over the past century. Man and his mastery of weapons of mass destruction did all the work the dark lord could handle. Even when demons had gained entry into this plane, it hadn’t been like this.
He wondered why it had been taken to such an extent. What purpose, what grand scheme lay behind this macabre show? There would be time for contemplation later.
Father Michael swung one of the large, heavy barn doors open. The three demons froze for an instant before shrieking and rising to the rafters like a family of bats. He braced himself for their attack, and it wasn’t long in coming.
They swept down on him from the ceiling, rows of long, pointed teeth poking from jaws that had been cracked and distorted to accommodate their sheer number and size. Their cries filled his ears while their claws tore at his skin.
He was driven into the far wall with a loud crack and a shattering of bone. With a massive kick, he sent the Joseph demon sprawling across the floor. With a swipe of his trident, the female demons were knocked to the ground. The larger beast was back on its feet in a split