Patrick McNulty

ROLLING BOIL

by

Steve Dwight

“NO ONE BELIEVED ME, AND THEN IT HAPPENED AGAIN.”

The Pastor stared at the words in his daughter's diary, rage coursing through his body.

He stormed out, half slipping, half running down the stairs, all blind anger and fury, shouting his daughter's name.

Pastor James was a staunch advocate of traditional values, a fundamentalist guiding his dwindling congregation with unwavering conviction.

His group had been based near Cutler in Maine for most of the Pastor’s adult life. His wife had passed while giving birth to Rachael, their only child, who had recently turned 13.

It began with subtle signs. Rachel's sudden mood swings, eerie whispers in the dead of night, and her lack of effort around the church.

Pastor James dismissed this as mere teenage rebellion, a phase that he would drive out of the girl, not with the scriptures, but with his fists.

The brutality of his firebrand religious beliefs was only surpassed by the savagery of the church's surroundings. The congregation regularly walked the half mile from the church to a small inlet for rebaptisms.

The Pastor focused his brand of fundamentalism on Acts 19:1-7, which tells how Paul rebaptised those who had previously been baptised by John the Baptist and now came to understand the gospel more fully.

This practice, in the cold water of the Atlantic, was just one of the things that Rachael now refused to take part in.

Recently, Pastor James felt increasing disgust as he noticed the change in his daughter's body. She was becoming a woman, and he’d noticed a newly defiant glint in her eye.

He knew the girl had an unhealthy fascination with some of the congregation’s teenage boys, so he had located Rachael’s diary to see if she’d been guilty of acts worthy of punishment.

The line that threw him into a rage was playing on a loop in his head as he kicked open the front door and ran toward the small tin church, bellowing his daughter’s name.

Church members, many of whom lived and worked on the communal property, stopped what they were doing as they saw their pastor running toward the tin building, shouting for his daughter.

A small group of them had gathered near the church when he re-emerged, dragging Rachael by her collar, as she fought against him.

Their voices created a chaotic barrage of noise, hers screaming incomprehension, his shouting a stream of insults.

“You’re a whore, a worthless whore. How could you behave like this after such a Godly upbringing?” he yelled.

“What are you talking about, what are you talking about”, Rachael screamed back at him.

He started to drag the girl down the path, toward the beach.

“You will NOT taint my flock with your slatternly ways, we WILL wash you CLEAN!”

“What are you saying?”, she sobbed, “I don’t know what you are saying?”

She continued to plead with her father as he dragged her, stumbling down the path toward the frigid Atlantic waters of the bay.

Upon reaching the beach, Rachael started to fight back more vigorously, pulling herself free from the pastor and trying to run back up the track.

“No, NO! Don’t make me do it, I can’t stop it from happening!”

Confusion flashed briefly across the pastor’s face as he dived toward the girl, grabbing her long plaited hair and dragging her to the ground.

He threw her diary at her chest, “Your filthy ways will NOT disrupt the harmony of this flock, we WILL wash you clean….do you understand?”

He didn’t wait for an answer before grabbing her hair and dragging her along the sand toward the water.

After a few yards, Rachael managed to find her feet, and as they neared the edge of the water she wrenched bolt upright.

It was as if she’d suddenly become immovable as granite, and her father was jerked backward, falling flat in the sand.

The few church members who had followed the commotion toward the beach saw the pastor stop dead as Rachael, now looking skyward, let forth a piercing, otherworldly shriek, a noise, unlike anything the assembled throng had ever heard.

She fell silent, and her gaze, black as pitch, shifted down to her father.

With a subtle movement of her hand, her father was thrown toward the surf like a ragdoll.

“You….you….you’re the DEVIL!” he cried, kicking towards her as she glided along the beach.

She reached downward, picking him up by the front of his shirt. As his face came close to hers he could see that her eyes were sightless, looking right through him, as a guttural voice spoke quietly.

“You know nothing of me, or what I do. Your beliefs are pathetic, and you no longer have domain over me” she said.

Dropping the pastor into the surf, she knelt to him, grabbing a handful of wet sand.

Holding him by the throat with her other hand, she roughly rubbed sand into his eyes. He screamed and writhed, but he was no match for her demonic strength.

She continued until his eye sockets were nothing but a bloody, gritty pulp.

Bending down, she whispered near his ear, “They say what you can’t see can’t hurt you, let’s put that to the test”.

As she backed away, she raised her arms outward, Christ-like, facing the sea.

The creature appeared, as if from a dream, in the rolling boil of the surf. A mass of black, billowy, and amorphous. It enveloped the pastor, dragging him back into the waves.

His inhuman screams continued briefly between choking mouthfuls of saltwater.

The instant he fell silent and disappeared into the waves, Rachael stood bolt upright once more, a column of pure white light burst out of her, straight up into the low grey cloud. The intensity of the light grew until it seemed to absorb the girl.

The assembled church-goers, as if roused from a dream, stared at the open beach, blinking repeatedly as the light immediately disappeared.