Excerpt: Prologue
“All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew, and passing onward to the quire, he many people slew.”
- Rev. Abraham Fleming, 1577
August 4, 1577
Bungay, England
At first, the congregants believe the slight rattling is only wind insisting upon the church door. A sudden summer tempest. Rain begins to patter above the nave, the sound not altogether unpleasant—soothing, even. A woman closes her eyes and exhales the stress of the morning as she focuses on the rhythm. Her peace is soon jilted by the growing tempest above, for the rain is now a wonderful force with no less violence than abundance. Her eyes snap open and roll to the vaulted ceiling. The great, forceful torrent empties above in what she imagines as glassy sheets pouring from the eaves. A low grumble of thunder. A child presses close to his mother. The two men kneeling at the altar do not flinch in their prayer; one for an abundant harvest season to pay his debts and another for a wife ailing in childbed.
Lightning flashes in brilliant brightness through the clouded, stretching windows. Silhouettes are carved out of the pews. A gust through the crack beneath the front door snuffs out the altar candles as if the tempest is compelling the congregants to sleep. They are all at once aware of the palpable darkness, so much so that one person cannot perceive another. The only light discerned by the congregants is not from the god hanging above them, but from the intermittent great flashing of fiery bolts.
The roar of the storm is so powerful now that the congregants shift with discomfort. A chill tightens the base of their spines as sweat springs on brows with each fearful heartbeat. The men kneeling in prayer do not relinquish their positions, though they see little, and their knees begin to ache against the flagstones. Instead, they press their eyes and hands tighter and pray now for the light to return. The only answer they receive is a terrible crack of thunder with such force and might that the congregants begin to believe doomsday has come.
The doors are thrown open as if by a blast of gunpowder. Lashing wind explodes down the nave, spraying hot rain onto the necks and backs of the congregants who dare not turn from the cross. The woman who had before held a moment of peace, presuming a gentle patter could not turn tempest, winces at the scalding sensation of boiling water against her bare skin. The church seems to quake and stagger as the scent of glowing iron, not unlike a blacksmith’s shop, permeates the darkened church.
The child clutches tightly to his mother when, amid twin lightning strikes, a great shape dashes down the nave toward the altar. The drops of rainwater on the flagstones sizzle as the thing passes in a hot rush of a blacksmith’s bellows. And with another flash of fire, the child sees it—they all see it: a great black dog with one ember glowing eye running with incredible haste. The woman muffles her scream as others bend beneath the flimsy pews as if a mere board of wood will save them from this devil.
The praying men feel great heat against their backs as if a bonfire has been lit before the altar. A sacrifice. Liquid fear runs down their legs, and still they dare not open their eyes nor pry their rigid hands apart. In another crack of thunder and lightning, the great black dog wrings both men’s necks backward in one clean instant. Its movement is so violent, so swift, that the dead men still kneel in prayer.
The child gasps when the lightning illuminates the whites of dead eyes in the heads bent unnaturally back. He buries his face in his mother’s skirts as her nails dig into his narrow shoulders. The beast turns on the congregation, its low growl indistinguishable from thunder, like a thousand carts moving across cobblestones. It stalks down the aisle, its bellows as hot as the summer sun’s rays. The congregants close their eyes against the darkness, press their slick palms together, and pray for their god to save them in his very house.
The beast chooses a man who dares glance up, for he believes he can slip out the door and escape this hell. Instead, the beast’s shining obsidian claws grip the man’s back in so forceful a manner that it is as if his entire body becomes drawn together and shrunk, as if it were a piece of leather scorched by hot fire. Wordless, he topples over with limbs trailing smoke.
The beast shifts into shadow, and the woman sitting next to the burned but still living man stumbles away from the charred flesh and wheezes for help. The rector, who has finally slid out of the shadows, catches her as she falls from the pew. He prays over her—whispering first, then increasing to test the roar around them. He exhorts the terrified congregants to prayer, and in their extreme distress, do so in darkness. The hot wind and scalding rain lash them, for the tempest has now fully invaded their sanctuary. Some congregants are frozen in terror, save their lips flapping desperate prayers, while others try in vain to crawl for the door.
In a flash, the beast materializes on the main beam above the congregants. Its searing talons set the old oak to smoldering as if coaxing a fire. Its ragged back chars the angel carved into the ceiling. The demon swings down through the church. Three lightning bolts follow the dog jumping from one man to another, then a lad, killing all three instantly. The dog dashes from the crumpled boy, and a deafening crack as if the earth has split in two cleaves the roof, and with it, the steeple. The cascade of stone rumbles down the side of the church, and for one striking moment of terror, a woman cries out that hell has opened to swallow the church whole.
The dog bounds for the next man. He dives away, yet not before his hand is burned by the scalding creature’s touch. In shock, the man lifts his charred hand to the burning sensation where his ear used to be. The creature blasts through the church doors, leaving a trail of scorch marks in the wood. The mischief thus wrought, the beast flies with wonderful force out of the churchyard in a hideous and hellish likeness.
Like a decimated forest in the aftermath of a windstorm, the congregants are left quivering. It’s clear to the man with the burned hand and missing ear that there are forces at work mightier than God, who could not protect his devout followers in His own house. Dazed, the man staggers out of the ruins with his compatriots. He looks to the rapidly clearing sky and resolves to find someone with knowledge of these unseen forces—and how to master them. A conjurer with the influence to pursue the arcane unhindered. What other reason could there be for such hell if not as a path to Providence for England? He will accept no other explanation.
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