Suex, blinking in neon red letters above the door, throwing a scarlet cloud in the alleyway. Harry stooped there coldly, wondering if Suex’s reputation was a honest one, wondering if he really needed to climb the chipped concrete steps to the landing under that door—a door that suspiciously resembled a jail cell—with cubed iron bars forming a sort of grate in front of it. Beside the steps, huddled in a piles of torn plastic sacks and water bottles hot with condensation, a pepper bearded vagrant hung his head, the arms of his flannel coat stuffed with crumpled newspapers.
Harry kicked a small pebble towards the breathing trash heap, it bounced wickedly and wedged against his boot, and the vagrant’s head shot up as if his spine was spring loaded. The baldy, he had no eyelids; ivory moons refracted the red neon; he curled his fingers and forked devil horns at Harry. A branded V scarred his chin.
V, for victim. That was the Mark.
Here was Satan’s Sanctuary.
Harry hobbled up the steps and, tentatively, gave the iron bars a rattle. His hand grasped the cold metal and somewhere inside his…body (not soul, souls were bullish hocus-pocus), he felt power, a power like a light fingers playing the fiddle on his ribs; the power of God trickling through a man, and his fears shimmed down, a little.
He waited. A hallow clank from inside. The door opened on creaking, rusted hinges. Behind the grate slouched an balding tramp of a lady, maybe sixty, pinched in a black dress four decades too young for her. Silver buckles ran down her sides. Behind her, in tranquilized silence, lay a room of uninterpretable shadows.
Harry stepped back because she pushed the grate and it swung wide. Then she stepped back; an invitation.
Harry lifted his foot to enter and was halfway there when the vagrant hollered, “Leave yer coat, boy! T’its plenty hot in hell. Best tern back, don’t be blind, like I—!”
The tramp snatched Harry’s hand and tugged, and Harry stumbled in. Despite her old age, she moved quick as a rat, shutting the gate and kicking the door shut before Harry had rebalanced himself. Then she held his hand again, and so soft was her grip, although she led with the velocity of a pitbull on a leash, pulling him through the darkness. He couldn’t distinguish left from right. Suddenly, they were descending a staircase.
“Listen lady, this ain’t another whorehouse, ain’t it?”
“Do you deny the Christ?”
That power in him, in his…body, it seemed to scream. “Well, I reckon I come here to find that out.”
“But you believed, once?” Her voice shriveled, “You made Him your Salvation?”
“Well, I reckon so. Once.”
They stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Harry could just make out the crack beneath a door, where vibrant red light seeped through. The tramp twisted the door handle, she pulled him into a room lit entirely with red lamps. There were men in there, pale and naked, and women, nude and standing erect, encircling an ivory table. One man, a Dark Priest, stood beside the table in white robes. The red light was penetrating, throbbing. The tramp dragged him towards the table.
“What—I ain’t come for a whorehouse!”
“Silly child,” and the tramp, her voice lost fifty years; she sounded like a schoolgirl. “We must take Him out of you.”
“Who—”
“We will exorcise the Holy Spirit!” She screeched. “He took us out of them, now we will take Him out of you!”
Somehow, Harry was thrown on the table. The tramp was, too. The naked men and women converged, straddling, screaming. The Dark Priest took a knife and gut his arm, cut the tramp’s wrist and cut Harry, and soon both of them were on top of Harry, and their blood mixed, and those silver buckles were becoming unfastened…
And that voice in Harry’s…body, silenced.
