Mark climbed the stairs to the tower; he reached the rotting wooden door that separated him from his past. He went in and saw old man Grenden sitting by one of the three stained glass windows that allowed the room illumination. Grenden was gnawing on what was left of Dennis's head; a lot of blood and a lot of veins seemed to be all over the place.
"She hypnotized your friend and sent him to me. He kissed my ring right before I killed him. He said he loved Tessie. Say hello to your sister, Mark. Surely you remember your sister? Think back, think back to 1981. Think back to your baptism at your uncle's hands.
The psychic flashes continued-- this time they are memory flashes of when the congregation baptized him while they drank bourbon and orgied the nights away. A teenaged Maureen is blowing him as he rests against the old altar he and Maureen found the other day. There's a decapitated goat's head on the altar during this psychic flash however. It is raining blood on everyone.
Mark stared at the mummified creature; the dried out creature which sat still as death once had great jaws.
"She's as dead as dead but she's making a comeback!" Grenden exclaimed happily. Mark had never seen the ancient miserable exsheriff smile before.
The creature, his sister if Grenden was to be believed, looked a little like a walrus or a manatee. She was big and all her teeth were jagged or broken.
"Alcohol does terrible things to your memory, doesn't it Mark? Fucking blackouts. Do you accept Molech as your father and all the glory that comes with sitting at his left hand? Yes?"
"No," Mark replied, pointing his pistol at Grenden, sweat dripping from his brow. His soul quaked.
"Yeah every lifetime you get awfully shaken up when you find out why you are here on earth. This hot rodding suicide thing's been holding your father's kingdom back, Janus," Grenden said in a much deeper, much more Satan-like growl.
"What do you think of my art?" Grenden asked, tossing seven or eight 8x10 black and white photos Mark's way.
Mark looked at them. They were pictures of the house where Mark had found the old lady only days ago. It's Grenden, hanging out with the now dead old lady and all those dead street urchins that Mark found upstairs in Sophie's room.
"Yeah that kind of stuff really shakes the Christian minister types up all right," Grenden said, chuckling. "But that is the job your father created for me."
"Pretty elaborate setup, eh? I don't remember."
"You don't need to remember, you just need to accept and you've accepted. The minute you fucked your sister was the minute you accepted. You fucked her a thousand years ago and you fucked her this morning. I can hear Tessie singing again. Music to my ears."
But he remembered that the last time his soul quaked like this was back on the ancient European plains where the congregation huddled, ate and fucked in dark caves.
Grenden took another bite of Dennis's skull.
"Stop it, " Mark commanded, "or I shoot!"
"I'll be back, you know that as well as anyone does. Yeah, your sister stopped eating 20 years ago; she took after you, thought that she wasn't part of your father's church any longer. This here boy's brother finished her off. Been lots of infighting inside the congregation since Tessie died. Well, the good Reverend Eugene Kurtz will make his way back to Kurtzville eventually. I can picture him now so comfortable in some nice wealthy family's nursery, so cute, so pure; such a clever little one for his age I'm sure his parents are saying now ... someone had to send your father his sacrifice, no?" He took another bite of Dennis's head.
The headless corpse that had formerly been Dr. Ray Macpherson had by this time crawled to the scene of the crime and was making its way toward Grenden.
"Come on Mark, you know it's better to rule than to serve."
Grenden took another bite of Dennis's head. "Stop!"Mark cried out, his voice bordering on frenzy.
Grenden kept on eating and Mark shot. The gun's explosion was muffled considerably by the stone and moss. A trickle of blood came out of Grenden's forehead as he fell backward and was still. His last piss made its way across the dirt floor.
He limped back to the basement where Binder lay dead; he grabbed the gas can and made sure he had matches. Mark listened and heard the echoing and satisfied laugh of a woman; the laugh came from the recesses of his mind. He ran back up the stairs to the tower as fast as his broken body would carry him. Back upstairs for a little purification action.
Once he was back inside his newly discovered sister's room he doused all the corpses with some gas, even Ray's which was still writhing for some reason or another. He doused Tessie's mummified form, making sure he filled those empty eye sockets with gas. He dropped one of the wooden matches into one of her eyesockets and the flames spread so quickly that he was lucky to make it out before the room became engulfed in orange heat. He limped downstairs and outside through the Society's ground floor. Once outside, he stopped for a couple seconds-- to appreciate and to listen to the Society's beams collapsing and thundering to the ground.
As he limped across the field the Society burned to the ground.