Get Me To A Church

CHAPTER 13: TRUTH

           We had walked down the stairs and into a cavernous cult room. Statues of monsters spawned from the stone floor. Spikes were spread out all across the room and a puzzle that nearly formed a pentagram was splayed out on the floor. Humongous metal bars separated us from the next chamber. Above the cage-like gate door was a motto engraved into the wall: "MAY OUR SIGHT PIERCE THE HEAVENS AND OUR REACH BE INFINITE AND EVERLASTING."

           "Welp," said Larry. "This looks bad."

           "Incredible," Todd gasped. "This architecture must date back multiple centuries, at least."

           Larry's eyebrows scrunched together. "Centuries of blood and demon worship. This is freaky as hell."

           Todd carefully dragged his pointer finger on one of the stone statues, then rubbed that finger against his thumb. "Everything is coated in a thick layer of dust, which likely means the area is presently vacant and has been for a while," he explained. He glanced up at the sentence on the wall, shuddered, then said, "Let's hope the malevolent history of this place remains in the past." For some reason, I got the feeling that whoever had once used this place wasn't done yet.

           "Yeah, well... We need to get through that gate somehow," I thought out loud.

           Todd scanned the room, then shrugged. "There appears to be an absence of any obvious mechanisms to move it," he stated.

           "It must be built into the walls," Larry said. "The apparatus for opening the gate is probably hidden." He voiced my thoughts perfectly — a bunch of cultists weren't just going to leave the path to their secrets out in the open.

           "We better split up and search the room," I said.

           "Alright," Larry replied. He turned around and checked the back of the room while Todd went to the front. I stayed in the middle.

           I continued through the room and noticed a leather book with a goat head on it — maybe that's what the goat in Mrs. Packerton's freezer was for. The text looked Latin, so I couldn't read it, and the pages smelled like something dying. Freaky. What was freakier is that I felt some form of nostalgia looking at it, but I couldn't quite place it. 

           I kept walking, checking things out, solving puzzles, talking with my friends. I won't bore you with the details, though the story seems pretty fantastical and interesting. It was a brain-melting experience, and by the end of it, I had a major headache from thinking so hard. I wonder if Todd has a headache every day just from answering me and Larry's dumbass questions.

           We got around the gate, and on the other side, the motto was finished with a, "FOR WE ARE THE DEVOURERS OF GOD." Quite the metal name. Oh, and there was also a ton of dried blood stains that looked like the leaked from out of the holes in the walls, like a blood river. There were also a ton of bones and skulls piled up around the room. It smelled like ass.

           "Holy shitballs!" Larry said classily.

           I stayed silent, pursing my lips and walking through the next dark corridor. More skeletons, more skulls... and Ash, laying unconscious on top of a pile of bones.

           "Ash!" Larry cried.

           "Ash! Are you okay?" I asked, panicking.

           "Ash?" Larry asked quietly. "...is she...?"

           I watched her chest rise and fall steadily and let out a heaved sigh of relief. "She's still breathing," I whispered. "Come on, help me get her up." I quickly grabbed her back and tried to pull her up. Thankfully, Larry is tall and strong and way better at picking people up. Dirty bones crunched and cracked as we handled Ash.