THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Four - Part Six

Before he opened his eyes, Eddie heard screaming.

He screwed his lids against the glare of light as he turned his head, moving his hand to shield it off before he dared to open them. He didn’t even know where he was, let alone what had happened to him but he was in agony all over his body, especially in his legs; at the back of his head and in his back.

Light was everywhere toward the church: like a pillar as wide as a house. Lightning kept coming down. There was fire. Near where the food van had been was a massive crater cutting across the drive and the grassy area, rubble and earth churned up around it. Half of the war memorial that had stood in the centre of the grass had been atomised. The other half was split and broken. There were bodies everywhere, some of them on fire; some of them still writhing.

The light in the crater; that seemed to be coming from something inside of it; was getting brighter, expanding up the sides of the pit to the jagged debris-strewn rim, far too bright for him to look straight into. Eddie screamed and tried to move then screamed again.

When the blast threw him he’d half hit the steps and half hit the grassy slope next to it. His legs were shattered, maybe his pelvis too but though the muscles in his right arm felt sprained he scrambled for purchase with his hands and wrenched himself over onto his belly. He didn’t know what was coming out of that hole, what had landed, surely killing everyone even close to where the van was parked, but he didn’t want to wait for it to get him too.

He clawed himself onto the steps and started to drag himself up. He didn’t cry out. There was nobody could hear him who wasn’t already screaming themselves. The light got brighter. He ignored it; kept climbing, dragging his useless legs over the steps, one after another. Every five steps or so there was a level section. He only had one more to pass before he reached the top; the blast had knocked him half way up already. Hand over hand; hand over hand; and the light was getting brighter, the temperature hotter. It was hotter now than the holiday he’d gone on as a kid with Travis’s parents: Crete in a heat wave. Then it went up a notch. Now it was like putting his arm into an oven with the door open.

He looked behind him. The light wasn’t in the crater anymore. It was at the midway point between the crater and the foot of the stone steps. Now he did cry out. He moaned in terror, twisting so he could push himself up backwards, see what was coming; what seemed to be coming for him.

He cracked his head as he hit the last flat section before the top of the steps, falling backward because he was expecting more steps to be coming. When he managed to right himself, scrambling back to the next flight, the light was on the bottom step; it was climbing toward him. It was smaller now – this light – but it was brighter, more focused, almost blinding. Eddie screamed and screamed and screamed.

He was almost at the top. He turned over on his front again and crawled on his belly, weeping for the pain in his legs and his back, He got to the flat area at the top and dragged himself off the path to the right where Mary Shelley’s grave stood. The thing in the light was on the big flat step he had been on seconds earlier and now he could see legs at the base of it; humanoid legs, climbing the steps, one after another. And veering towards him.

“Keep away!” he screamed. “Keep back!” “Don’t hurt me!” But it kept coming, kept climbing until it was at the top of the steps, only metres away. Eddie was blubbering, begging for mercy, trying to crawl backwards again until he came up hard against Mary Shelley’s stone sarcophagus (?).

The thing in the light approached him, the illumination intensifying even further, the terrible heat dropping  as it drew inside the figure that he could almost see within the maelstrom. But it wasn’t a real figure. It wasn’t anything above the waist: just legs and an explosion of light. Then he saw something forming in the light, growing from the legs in thickening strands. It paused there as he screamed, doing nothing but growing... intensifying; building itself. The strands reaching up from its waist were going to be its torso. It was building itself right there in front of him, making itself from the light. Then an arm formed. An arm formed that he could barely see in the glare that was coming out of it, the hand clenching and unclenching.

Eddie still had the broken bottle in his hand, forgotten until now. He raised it threateningly, knowing how futile it was, seeing his own arm shaking, the flesh blistering from the heat; the skin of his cheeks and forehead blistering too.

“Please,” he whimpered. “Please.”

The half formed humanoid thing in the light extended its arm toward him, even though it still had no shoulder to support it; none that had yet formed.

To his credit, Eddie’s last thought wasn’t of his revenge or even of the junk that had consumed his life. It was only of his beloved Angie, shrivelling away, waiting for him.

The thing in the light pointed its finger.

And Eddie screamed in agony as the fire consumed him.