Someone pounded on the church door, once, thrice, loud enough to echo around the high-ceilinged sanctuary as well as around Reverend David Severance’s small office.

Severance slowly slotted the last lens into place and fitted the kaleidoscope tube onto the object chamber that would, when the mechanisms were completed, form its end. His desk was littered with papers yellowed by age; a burning candle; a quill and inkwell; one curved tusk from an elephant and a twisted one from a narwhal; feathers and carved hunks of stone and one small wooden crucifix edged in gold. But the middle of the desk was bare, as it had not been for several months. The beads and thin lenses of glass strewn across it were now assembled into the kaleidoscope, its viewing tube now attached to the object chamber which would trick the eye into seeing branching flowers of color.

Another thud on the door resounded, and this time Severance heard. His shoulders jumped; his fingers nudged the object chamber, and one of the beads he had placed within escaped from its place and rolled across the table. He narrowed blue eyes in irritation that a loud human interruption had broken in to his safe, solitary creation of beauty. But delicacy was gone from his mind when he realized what the knocking must mean; he ran for the double doors of the sanctuary.

He drew the bar and peered out into the darkness. It seemed at first that high up the wind was lashing the trees, their leaves obscuring and revealing the navy blue sky like veils, but no breezes flicked at his thick brown hair.

A voice rasped from outside: “Help me.” A man hurried out of the darkness, his muscled, bare shoulders hunched almost up to his bald head. He lunged forward, trying to push Severance out of the way, and the pastor threw himself back into the foyer. The other man slammed the door; they stood there in the shadowy alcove, breathing , savoring the silence as the howling began outside.

“Jasper Gaunt,” the man introduced himself with a hand outstretched, but Severance’s thoughts were careening away, switching tracks from his delicate studies to the plan he had been formulating since the first refugee appeared at his door, talking of wild dog-spirits that chased and hounded and buried the man’s daughter in shadow.

Severance would find where in God’s universe the beasts came from, and he would go in and be rid of them.

“Follow me,” Severance said. Gaunt kept close at his heels as Severance returned to the office. The pastor mounted a short ladder leading to a barred window. “I remember you from the market; blacksmith, yes?” The hinges groaned as Severance pressed his palm against the glass and pushed the window open.

Gaunt turned from examining the kaleidoscope—beads had spilled out to form a rainbow field of migrating stones—and the quizzical expression on his fleshy, clean-shaven face morphed into fear. “Shut that. They’ll get in.”

“Hand me the crucifix.”

Severance looked out the window, across the graveyard, to the street whose dim yellow lamplight showed that the creatures had leaped over the wall and now prowled among the tombstones. He did not hear the creaking as Jasper nudged the office door open with one booted foot. He held out a hand behind him and felt Jasper pass the heavy object to him.

The blacksmith, out of his element of iron and fire and into one far too strange to be grasped in his calloused hands, asked, “Will that stop them?”

“Maybe.” Severance thrust the crucifix out the window and held it there like a banner, like a figurehead, squinting but willing his eyes not to close. He watched as great black beasts like cats as massive as wolves dashed toward him, growing more substantial as they came. Yellow teeth slick with spittle flashed and snapped; Severance flinched, sinews standing up on his pale, outstretched hand.

But as they neared him, the creatures swirled around like a flock of birds banking to turn, and they slipped away between the graves, disappearing into smog that floated in wisps to the trees and into the sky. The black thread drifted away like the ribbon of white from a smokestack, and Severance followed it with his eyes as it floated toward the towers of the abbey in the distance.

He sighed and dropped down from the ladder. Jasper looked at him, his tanned skin seeming jaundiced in the yellow candlelight. “What are these things, Reverend? We’re just…overrun. People afraid to go out and work in the fields or deliver milk or run errands. The town’s gonna collapse.”

Severance closed the window, latched it, shrugged. “The world’s getting older. I think they’re the dust of it.”

“And your God.” Jasper looked around, flicking his gaze into the dim corners. “He allows this.”

Severance sat on the ladder and stretched his long legs out along the rungs. “When you really believe in God, you have to believe in other things too; reasons for why He doesn’t just whisk us all away. He wants us to be able to choose between him and…the other things. The dark.”

“Why would someone choose that?”

Severance shrugged his shoulders and thought about human nature. “I know where the beasts originate now. We’ll…” And he trailed off, not knowing exactly what to do. He knew where they lived, how to repel them…but not how to get rid of them. “I don’t know yet. Fighting blind can’t be the way.”

Jasper stood. “Oh ye of little faith.”

A beast padded through the doorway, claws clicking on the flagstones, stood solidly on its four legs, with its head as high as Jasper’s hip; it lowered its wide, flat forehead and charged at Severance.

He tried to move, but one rough-furred foreleg as inexorable as a falling stone was suddenly pushing him down, knocking the crucifix out of his hand, and white light swept over him from somewhere near the back of his eyes—

Jasper watched as Severance’s head struck against the rock wall of the office, and as the creature turned to stand at attention in front of him, he murmured, “You’re smart, reverend, but don’t forget the old religions. You invited me in…”

Severance woke up cold. The strip of wall touching his spine chilled him, and his hands lay limp on a stone floor. He looked around at an alcove lit by slow-burning torches, a corridor with tan flagstones passing by a body-length away.

He stood up, slowly bending stiff knees and rubbing his hands together. He peered out into a musty-smelling corridor.

Jasper sat there, shaven head bowed, and sprung up as soon as he saw the reverend. “Good! I worried you’d been killed.”

Then you could have done something to try and help me, Severance thought. “Where are we?”

“The beasts attacked! Must’ve carried us off.”

“How’d they get in? And why bring us here? People have been found dead with theirteeth marks in them.”

“Perhaps the door came ajar.” Jasper stood up. “There’s a stairway around the corner, and a window. We’re in the abandoned abbey.”

Severance rubbed at the goose bumps rising on his arms. “It must be for a reason.”

Jasper’s snorting laugh of doubt told clearer than words that he thought if there was a reason it likely involved being attacked. But he stood up and tentatively the two of them moved through the silent hall, conscious of the weight of stone floors above them, rooms for sleep, work, and prayer that had been abandoned for many years.

Severance turned a corner and flinched. A pack of the creatures stood before him.

One paced like a tiger at the bars of its cage, staring at him with a wall of teeth bared and the skin of its forehead pulled tight into wrinkles between the orange eyes. Severance froze—and then saw that the beast, and the pack of them ranging rampant behind it, were not moving; that bits of paint had flecked off of them to reveal the stone beneath; that graffiti from hundreds of years ago was carved into some flanks and alongside some sleek muzzles. A painting, as bright as if it had been done yesterday.

“Here’s another,” Jasper said, and Severance’s hand reached for the small crucifix at his neck without thinking about it—a nervous gesture from before he was a pastor. He turned around and saw another beast painted above the lintel that Jasper stood under. Its hind feet stood on the lintel and its front ones stretched out beside the door. Its mouth was closed, and its eyes calmly looked ahead, giving it the attitude of a house cat jumping from window ledge to floor rather than that of a leopard falling onto prey.

Jasper said, “And you were right about there being a reason.”

He pressed splayed fingers against the square of rock just below the outstretched paws. He pushed the stone back, and the one beneath it rose up to reveal a dusty cavity containing a thick brown book, its cover bright as if the dust had been dislodged from it before. Jasper reached in, picked it up. “All the generations here never found this, until I did. And it will give these creatures free reign of the world….to enter churches, homes, car windows, to run in packs far from the village. And I will control them. I will be their master, instead of letting them run by instinct as they did today. But…”

He spread the book. The pages fell open with a thud and a puff of dust. Severance saw paragraphs and poems of Latin. “I can’t read it. You can, can’t you?”

“Yes. But I—let those things go? You asked me why someone would join them before—why? Revenge?”

“You could say that. But those I want vengeance on are far from ‘ere. Nothing to do with you. Just read it, or I’ll find some other ageing scholar.” One black beast slunk around the corner behind him, its eyes fixed on Severance’s.

Bible verses flicked through his mind, none of them helpful. Turn the other cheek; give to Caesar what is Caesar’s; live by the sword and die by it.

He held out his hands almost automatically when Jasper passed the book to him. Severance asked quietly, “What part do I read?”

“There’ll be a spell labeled ‘unbinding’ or somethin’ like.”

Severance flipped through the pages, found the spell. Slowly he scanned its words, working the language out. The spell itself was a poem, but beneath its title another paragraph told what exactly it did.

And it seemed to have a cost. The paint demanded a subject. He hesitated a moment. To lie? To rid the town of monsters, and himself of the threatening presence beside him?

He said, “I’ll tell you how to pronounce it. You need to stand near the mural over there and repeat it.”

Jasper followed his instructions. Evenly, Severance read out the words. Jasper stumbled over some of them, but both men could see that they were working; the creatures painted on the walls began to stir. The loosened one which had entered the room behind Jasper, perhaps the same one that had broken into the church, sat down on its haunches and watched. What about that one? Severance thought. Was it under Jasper’s control already, or had he been under its all along?

The paintings gained shadow and form, finally stepping out onto the floor, their soft-furred feet with sheathed claws pressing down and propelling them across the uneven stone floor as smoothly as if they walked on carpet. They milled about, and Jasper smiled at them, reaching out to pet one ebony feline between its ears—

not realizing that his other hand was melting, reaching out for the wall in drips and gouts of paint. His shoulder, his foot, adhered to the wall, and then he realized what was happening; frantically thinking that he’d said something wrong he cried out for the final words of the spell, and Severance gave them; Jasper’s final half-scream-half-spell was frozen in two-dimensions on the walls where the creatures had been, graffiti chiseled into his flailing outstretched hand.

The beasts looked at Severance, and he stood with their book of command in his hands and a confused expression on his face. I just want to be left to my studies, to my sermons…

I can command them now.

He drew in a fortifying breath. “Ah. I order to you keep away from people. Or protect them, don’t harm them…” He searched for more eloquent words but did not need them; the beasts filed away, some glancing over their shoulders at him as he stood fearful in the middle of the pack.

Then he was alone with the painted form of Jasper, who had not understood the price—or the sacrifice of an ally—that his revenge required.

Severance offered up a prayer for Jasper’s soul—for his mind, whatever state it was in now—and followed the creatures out.