Free Decoration Day by Vic Kerry Page B

again, the purple flame moved around the sanctuary past the windows. Someone definitely carried it this time. The woman in black who had disappeared at the grave moved back and forth, waving the hideous light as if to tempt David back into the building.
    The preacher ran inside, trampling his sermon underfoot as he passed. The woman carried an invisible candle topped by the purple flame.
    “What is this?” he yelled at her.
    She came toward him, bearing the candle ahead. The black veil obscured her face, and she said nothing.
    “In the name of all that is holy in this house of God, what are you?” David yelled.
    The flame flickered out, but the woman kept coming closer. He could almost touch her. When she drew close enough, David grabbed hold of her veil and pulled it down. The fabric slipped away from her face.
    Instead of a human visage or even a skull, a horrible mass of entwined, squirming, tentacle-like projections reached out from where the face should have been. They groped for him. He let go of the veil and stumbled backward. Terror like he never felt before engulfed him. His feet slipped on the hardwood floor, and he toppled, hitting his head on the edge of a pew. His world didn’t go dark, but lilac.

Friday
    Through the filmy vision of roused sleep, David saw a lavender glow at the edges of the ceiling. He blinked hard to clear his sight, but everything remained veiled and gossamer. The room wasn’t his apartment. The purple glow revealed enough of the ceiling for him to know that he wasn’t lying on the floor of the church sanctuary either. He stared at the ceiling in Marsh’s guest room.
    David sat up in bed. The springs creaked and poked into his bottom. In the brief time he’d drunk, no hangover had been this bad. The nightmare glow didn’t bother him. He needed to know how he had ended up in Marsh’s house. The last thing he remembered was the woman in black with the tentacles coming out from her face.
    The glow began to thrum. The feeling of it throbbed through his head. It rattled his teeth. The light demanded his attention. Never had it been this intense.
    “What do you want?” he said aloud, looking up at the ceiling and holding his hands over his temples.
    The light pulsed and thrummed harder. The rhythm of it took on the quality of language. The light tried to communicate with him, but he had no idea what it said.
    “I don’t understand you.”
    “Come to me,” the light said in David’s head. The words matched the cadence of the pulsing.
    “Who are you? Are you God?” he whispered, afraid to speak too loudly to the Almighty.
    “Come to me.”
    David didn’t waste time. He felt the light inside like the warmth God had sent to revive his faith. The rhythmic pulsing of the light fell into the same pattern as his steps as he walked out of his room and into the corridor. The whole hallway ceiling glowed. The light dipped like dripping water. He stretched his hands up at the drooping light as he walked toward the stairs. His fingers brushed over the energy. His arm hair stood on end like he was too close to an electrical field. The light drooped even lower, but not around his hands. The lights in the hall blinked out just like his phone and car had when he’d driven through the purple fog.
    At the foot of the steps, David looked up. The light spilled out from the third floor. Excitement almost overwhelmed him. The light had been such a burden when he thought of it as a nightmare. Now that it was God, it excited him more than anything else ever had. Soon he would be in direct contact with the Almighty. Any doubt he’d had about staying in Innsboro left him.
    As he started up the first step, a hand touched him on the shoulder. A surge of excitement jolted through him. God touched him, but none of the electrical feeling of the light joined the touch.
    “Where are you going?” Marsh asked.
    David looked down at the man. Grave concern etched lines on Marsh’s face. The preacher tried to