The Exiled by William Meikle Page B

won’t just kill him?”
    “If that’s what was wanted, I’d have done it long before you got here. Would you just go—you need to see. You need to understand.”
    Grainger inched away towards the spot indicated by the big man. At some point in the last few minutes he’d slipped over into the Twilight Zone. Maybe he’d been right earlier in the evening—maybe the hard work had finally driven him over the edge. But Alan’s blood on the altar looked real enough, and this whole place had the weight and certainty of reality to it. There was that—and the fact that his copper’s instinct was telling him that he did indeed need to see what was waiting for him, even though that same instinct was also telling him that it wasn’t going to be anything good.
    A shadow passed across the windows as he approached the nave—large, winged and black, that’s all he could make out, but the gulls had gone silent outside, and the only sound was wind whistling through exposed rafters high above.
    He turned a corner—and it was as if everything stopped, the scene framed like a still from a movie, etched into his mind where he knew it would stay forever.
    He’d found the lost girls—or rather, what was left of them. All four were dead; all four mutilated. Swan wings, black and blood spattered, were roughly sewn in heavy twine onto the naked backs of each girl. The bodies were trussed up onto a wooden contraption much like a gallows and left to swing—and drip. Their blood, almost black now that it was dry, lay crusted over a statue on a stone altar under an intact window. Grainger forced himself to move closer to try to identify the statue, and as he approached he saw it was a representation in stone of something that was also depicted in stained glass in the window above it. He looked up at an outline of a huge black bird, wings pulled forward in a hood in front of it, only a long beak showing beneath pale white eyes.
    A breeze got up. The hanging girls swayed and spun in an obscene dance. Clouds scudded behind the window, giving the stained glass a semblance of life.
    The black bird in the window winked at him.
    * * *
    “Do you see?” the big man shouted from the main body of the building. “Do you understand why it has to be this way?”
    Grainger backed away slowly from the gruesome tableau in the nave. It took all of his will power not to rush at the big man in a blind fit of rage as he walked back through.
    “It should be you through there swinging from the gallows, big man,” he said. “Not those poor wee lassies. What harm did they ever do to you?”
    The big man was crestfallen and looked close to tears.
    “You don’t see, do you? He said you might not see—that it might be too early.”
    “Who said?” Grainger asked, stepping closer. The big man still had the stone axe raised over Alan’s head.
    “You need to go back,” the man said. “Go back and don’t bother looking for me. I’m staying here now—where I’ve always belonged.”
    The light dimmed, darkness seeming to fill in around them from everywhere yet nowhere. Grainger smelled bleach, tasted dust in his mouth.
    “Time to go,” the big man said, and wiggled the fingers of his free hand in a childish wave. “Bysie-bye.”
    The cathedral faded, becoming almost translucent. Grainger saw heavy flock wallpaper show through the wavering walls.
    “If I go back, you’re coming with me,” he shouted. He rushed at the big man, head tucked to his chest, intending to tackle him around the waist and bring him down. Beyond that, he had no idea what else he could do in this place.
    He didn’t make it. The big man stepped nimbly aside, as if he’d anticipated just such an attack. The stone axe went up; it came down across Grainger’s left shoulder. White pain flared and he fell in a heap at the base of the altar. He tried to roll away, expecting another blow—one he knew would probably kill him. He looked up as complete darkness fell like a pair of