The Fuckno Wars Ch 10 Going To Church

The ghost girl hugged me even as the sounds of boots thumping across the floor below echoed in the broken mansion.  I couldn’t let her go.  She didn’t say anything.

Then the blue faces around us started to whisper, and then they began to holler at us.

The sounds of boots below ceased, and the blue faces stopped shouting.

Down below, I heard a chorus of shouts.  They were from the cellar.  An army had awoken, and they were affirming their solidarity to a young man who cried at the drop of a tear.

I grabbed Lorelei’s hand and pulled away from her.  

I couldn’t let her go.

She had a hold on me, from her watery grave, half way around the Earth.

Madness   by Muse

She smiled at me, and even though she was a ghost, her smile warmed my cockles.

She pulled me to the other end of the room, and there she pointed at a wall.  I understood.  It was another one of those hidden panels.  Gawd dayam, how many secret stairwells did this place hold?  I pressed on the wall panel, and a door clicked open.  She pulled me through, and I followed.  So did the blue faces.  We went up another round of stairs, and this time, thankfully, there was no door.  Instead, it opened up into a tiny room with a door on the other side.

In this room, I could see from only the light of the glow of the blue ghosts.  There were no windows, you see.  There were pews.  This room had not been flushed from a water tower crashing down into the building.  This hidden room was between the second and third floors. It was above the huge foyer below, leading into the mansion, from the front.

It was a chamber with an altar before the pews.

Behind the altar, the wall was lovingly adorned with art pieces I had never before seen.

It looked like the wall in a museum dedicated to masks, shakers, drums, talismans, rattles, and bags of dried plants.

Who had done this, and why?

Lorelei pointed at the floor.  I looked down, as the blue faces crowded around us, and their unearthly glow illuminated the giant parcel before us. 

Lorelei said, “Put everything in zis sack.  Then vee have to leave.”

I said, “Why did they leave all of this stuff?”

She said, “Zhey can’t move it.  Zhis is their nexus.  It iss protected from vater und fire, and unseen by any others.”

I said, “How come I can see it?”

She said, “You have your eyes opened.  You vere shupposed to come to me.  I vould have done zhis for you.  But you injured yourself.  Ssomehow, you got your eyes open before you came to me.”

Huh.


Nothing was making sense at all.  I chust didn’t want to let go of her hand.  That’s all I knew.

But then, I did.

Fuck.

I had to.

I grabbed everything I could and dumped it all into the bag.  I was a thief.  I was Santa Claus in reverse.  If there was a fireplace with stockings hung up from the mantle, I would have stolen the yuletide logs as well.

I stopped, realizing that the altar wouldn’t fit into the bag.  It was made out of alabaster and marble.

Top Of The World   by Slightly Stoopid

Lorelei pointed at the door.  I nodded.  I hefted the bag up across my uninjured shoulder, and I turned the knob.  This was the door that Tellesco and Sean had exited through, when the Purple Robes left them.  They were supposed to be the next human sacrifices that night of the dance: sacrificed like the ones in the cellar, who were buried in desert silt.  I chust didn't know it yet.

Do you know, the Glinty was the reason for the escape of Sean, now called Seen, and Tellesco, whom we now called No One.

Yup, the old cowboy preacher, the Glinty, well, he had saved us all, in more ways than one, that night.

He was coming back.  

The moon fire had not been enough to keep him from his path.

Oh.

Huh.

God Help You.

God Help Us All.

---willies out.

.