FALSE SAVIORS

2

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Ramrook Hollow seemed like the perfect place to rear your children, a stilled environment constantly thrumming with the quiet life of privacy. The wooden cabins, built on weathered stilts gouged with slashes from axes and knives, stood like fortresses as Brother Florence passed, peering at him with curtain-covered holes that served as windows. Beneath these worn structures were the coops, ruffle-feathered chickens hopping around behind metal fencing. Their beady eyes shined in the shadows, paying the slightest bit of attention to their masters as they passed on the dirt-worn paths beside them.

Florence continued farther than anybody else, right into the heart of the town, where the ground beneath his feet grew dusty and hollow, lacking the lushness of the thickened grass just mere feet away. A two-story cabin reared its head at him, marked above the doorway with the same, bloodied dagger that Florence shamefully carried at his side. There was a cross there, gouged deep into the wood in lines straighter than anything Mother Nature could give up. Brother Florence's eyes met it for a split second as he climbed the steps up to the rickety-hinged door, where he knew hell awaited him, but not in the way he wished.

As the door crooned its signature quarrel, Florence peered inside, brow heavy with hesitance as his hands streaked the wood beneath faintly red. The den was occupied by a blanketed shadow on the bed, moved there by three men after the terrible winter sickness that had struck them with a mighty blow. It was his father, the true Brother Florence, who's place he had been taking over for the past weeks—no, the past months—with increasing weariness about the job. The younger Florence was a mere shadow compared to the once powerful man sleeping before him as he padded up, careful not to disturb the creaking floorboards of the dreary cabin. Now, with sickness ravaging his vocal chords and body, Ulysses Florence looked like a frail deer, stick-thin and fragile.

"Vincenzo? Come over here, my son."

The rasping voice, like two stones scraping against one another in cacophony, made Florence's heart grow cold within his chest, and the blood in his veins grow icier than the winter that had nearly ruined his father's woodland empire. He halted in his tracks, and caught a glimmer of stunning-gray eyes, identical to his own. So his father was not sleeping, instead battling away his immanent death with his eyes opened instead of closed. It was harder to do so, that way. The fear of finally leaving the earth you've known all your life consumes you, until your mind is focused only on that, instead of fighting to remain.

Vincenzo shook himself out of thought and continued, drawing up a rickety chair to the bedside. A matchbox, one of the few in their dwindling supply bought in from the lands beyond the woods, was picked up with his still stained hands from the bordering table, a match struck alight and then put out after a waiting, white candle was lit. Its ghostly flickers, joined in by the few rays of sunlight that managed to squeeze in through the tightly-curtained windows, illuminated both their faces to look ghastly. The young Florence put the matchbox back, and then unintentionally—but also perhaps a bit intentionally—leaned away from his ill father as he continued to speak.

"Was the ritual a success? It doesn't seem like anything went wrong." A swift fit of coughing racked Ulysses before it disappeared as quickly as it had come, receding to a mere tickle in his throat. The older man shifted around, pulling the blankets higher up around him. He was always deathly cold and clammy to the touch, like he was already a corpse waiting to be thrown into the woods. The Florence family was not above any other in death, so their funerals were held just the same: briskly and orderly, with only close family seeing that they were far away enough from the town before leaving and mourning in private. "Tell me, child. Don't continue gaping like that, unless you're planning to catch flies."

"It went as planned," Vincenzo murmured beneath his breath, but he knew that his father heard every whispered word, every syllable that mocked him, as if trickster spirits had manifested in the back of his head, echoing everything that left his lips to sound horrendous, vile. The younger Florence's soul continued to struggle desperately with its heart and mind, tying and untying itself into knots as he continued, "We sacrificed Rose, just like you had requested, Father. She struggled, but then again, everyone does."

A weak smile danced across Ulysses' face, lined with wrinkles that seemed to grow in number every time that Vincenzo gazed upon them. He was rapidly aging, the youth being sucked out of his body as if by magic. The only thing that had remained the same was a cold-steel attitude, and the acute sharpness of his ever-so bright eyes. He wondered if his own eyes would grow to hold the same quality, or if they would be leeched of charisma and energy by the time his father finally died. The thought of his death was putting much necessary strain upon his shoulders.

"Good. You did well my son." The fatherly compliment fluttered over Vincenzo's head as if carried on the blue-feathered wings of a jaybird, and the increasingly anxious son could only avert his eyes down to his hands. The bright-red crimson had congealed, turning an ugly shade of brown, the life that it once sustained so obviously lost, smeared across his calloused palms.

"I have a favor to ask of you."

Out of respect and the obedience whipped into him from an early age, Vincenzo looked up. "What is this about, Father?" he politely prodded, gnawing at the insides of his cheeks until copper burst out over his tongue. A little bit more hesitantly, pausing quite a bit between each word: "I'll do anything that you ask of me."

Ulysses pointed to the black-bound book besides the matchbox. Vincenzo knew what was within it: names upon names scrawled out in pitch-black ink from generations beforehand, all people standing behind them meant to be investigated. It was something that Florence had been unintentionally dreading and fearing simultaneously, but never once did it cross his mind that he would have to do it so early. He had been waiting patiently, not bothering to even touch it. Vincenzo had always assumed that he would use it on his own terms, but then again... he should've expected this to happen.

"You know what you need to do."

"I know, Father. I know."