Issac, and his mother, lived alone, in a small house on a hill, just outside of Brockton Bay.

  Isaac kept to himself, drawing pictures and playing with his toys as his mom watched Christian-Scion broadcasts on the television.

  Life was simple, and they were both happy.

  That was, until the day Isaac’s mom heard Scion’s voice from above.

  “Your son has become corrupted by sin. He needs to be saved.”

  “I will do my best to save him, my Lord,” Isaac’s mother replied, rushing into Isaac’s room, removing all that was evil from his life.

  Again the voice called to her, "Isaac’s soul is still corrupt. He needs to be cut off from all that is evil in this world and confess his sins."

  “I will follow your instructions, Lord. I have faith in thee,” Isaac’s mother replied, as she locked Isaac in his room, away from the evils of the world.

  One last time, Isaac’s mom heard the voice of God calling to her. “You've done as I've asked, but I still question your devotion to me. To prove your faith, I will ask one more thing of you."

  "Yes Lord, anything!” Isaac’s mother begged.

  "To prove your love and devotion, I require a sacrifice. Your son, Isaac, will be this sacrifice. Go into his room and end his life, as an offering to me to prove you love me above all else."

  "Yes Lord", she replied, grabbing a butcher’s knife from the kitchen.

  Isaac, watching through a crack in his door, trembled in fear.

  Scrambling around his room to find a hiding place, he looked beneath his rug, but there was no trapdoor to the basement.

  He couldn’t hesitate, because there was nothing to hesitate in doing. So the boy cowered in his closet, until his mother opened that door as well, and stabbed the boy.

  Isaac died, then, with his mother’s knife through his heart.

  Then in his last moments, he saw the true face of his god and was reborn.

  John wasn’t sure what the hell he was doing around these parts. Sure, no one had seen the boy or his mother for a few days, but that wasn’t so strange. Magdalene had been heading to town less and less over the last year or two ever since she started homeschooling her boy.

  Still, someone near their hill had said nothing about the house had changed in a few days. Not a door, not a window, nothing. Isaac had always been quiet, an inside kid, but no lights in the whole darn house for three nights was too strange to dismiss.

  Besides, Magdalene had seemed to be getting… worse, ever since the divorce. The woman had always been religious, very religious, but he’d heard folk around town saying she’d said some things that crossed from religious to fanatic, and when he’d last talked to her, she’d had… a certain gleam in her eye.

  Feverish, he’d call her, if he didn’t know better.

  Now that he stood in front of their house in uniform, he couldn’t help but curse himself for not checking on the boy sooner. His dad had been a friend, even if he was who knows where now, and Isaac had always been a good, sweet kid, even if he was a bit shy.

  John should’ve been here sooner.

  The door was ajar, after all.

  Doors didn’t stay ajar for days at a time without something being wrong.

  He walked into the house slowly, the rusty hinges screaming loudly and creating a chill down his spine. He was trying to remember training as best he could, but he wasn’t some Bay cop who checked out three strange houses a week. He was a small town cop, and he checked drunk driving accidents at worst.

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  At least that was true, he thought, as a bead of sweat rolled down his back. If how off the house felt turned out to have any weight? Well, then he supposed he’d say that at least it wasn’t like the Moriah’s house when he responded to his next car accident.

  He left the entrance hall into the living room, and was startled at how… different, it was.

  The air was heavy, like in the stark emptiness of the house, something else had settled.

  He’d thought the house would have more of a woman’s touch after the divorce, but it was all so… bare. Everything stripped away, except the battered old chair he remembered as being far more plush than it seemed now, and symbols of Christ. Crosses, both with Scion and Christ, were all there was to see on the bare walls, even as the TV played a broadcast on Scion-Christianity.

  Strange folks, those were. Never really took hold for some reason, and even Magdalene had only expanded from Christianity into worshipping Scion after the divorce.

  The man on the screen was of course Scion doing good, as a voice spoke over the floating man, feverish and fanatical as he almost yelled for people to give up their sins and accept “Christ returned to us, reborn in purest gold.” It was off-putting to say the least, and played at the highest audio, so he was just about to reach down to turn the damn thing off, when he saw the thin dust on the remote.

  How long had the TV been playing?

  What had happened in this house?

  He left it on, refusing to tamper with what he was more and more certain was a crime scene.

  He walked into the worn down hallway leading towards Isaac’s room, the frantic screaming of the preacher loud behind him. Cobwebs and spiders grew ever more common as he ventured into the dark corridor, as the paint faded, and flies buzzed. The closet was door was open, a spider slowly crawling out from there. He took a peek inside, and saw the art Isaac had loved to make, and piles of clothes, with bugs nesting inside all of it.

  He shook deeper thoughts on it from his mind, letting it only sharpen his focus on finding the boy.

  Still, as he got closer to the boys room, a smell only grew worse. It was horrid. Sharp and tangy like rotted milk and garbage, but with both sweet and metallic undertones, even as the odor scratched at his nostrils, and he wanted to back away.

  He couldn’t though.

  So he walked on, until finally, he stood before the boy’s room, a new bolt lock on it, a heavy one, locking from the outside. The door itself looked battered, with cracks running up and down it, and splinters jutting out.

  He opened the door, and the smell that had before only seeped through the cracks hit him like a wave from leviathan, as the sweetness that had only been an undertone before swelled. There was so much rotting fat, after all.

  Magdalene lay on the floor, face towards the sky, set in rapturous glee even as her lips and cheeks had started to rot. A pool of blood was around her, and a knife wound was right above her heart. She looked like she’d just fallen out of the closet, and the closet door had scratches on the inside. He would have been concerned for Magdalene, if the scratches hadn’t been child height.

  He wanted to lose his stomach all over the floor. He had seen the recently dead, not the rotting dead, and certainly not those he knew. Maggots crawled inside he chest wound, thin and smooth as it was, expanding it, as flies ate what they could get, and many more bugs he couldn’t name took part in the feast just the same.

  He turned away, looking at the rest of the room, looking for Isaac, but there was nothing there.

  Only a bed, haggard and worn, with splinters and mold, a carpet flipped halfway over, a standing mirror, and an old chest in the corner of the room. The window was locked, again, from the outside.

  He was about to rush out, call it in to the specialized department, and start some sort of search to find Isaac, when he remembered one of the last conversations he had with the boy.

  “Sometimes I go into my chest. I can imagine a whole world in there, where everything is different. Did you ever do that, uncle John?”

  He breathed in deeply, and started slowly walking towards the brass banded chest. As he walked closer, he caught sight of a kitchen knife, stained with blood, laying half hidden under the bed. Like it’d been tossed there in a hurry. The chest was just barely ajar, a penny of all things jamming it, but he couldn’t hear anything from within.

  Actually, he couldn’t hear anything at all, with the ringing in his ears.

  Except, strangely, faint echoes of the preacher, yelling for him to seek salvation, and save others, as Christ did once and now again has descended to show them all the proper path.

  His trembling hand reached towards the lid of the chest, as the screams to accept god grew louder and mixed with static in his ears.

  He lifted open the lid of the chest, and inside lay Isaac, or at least the living shadow of the kind boy he had once known.

  Naked, he lay curled in on himself, covered in blood, and in a pool of his own making. He was sick with fever and infection, with clammy skin. The only hair he had was short, like it had only been growing for days, rather than the full mop of dark hair he used to have. He was emaciated and delirious, muttering and pleading for forgiveness as he stared up at John and the light with dread and horror, as tears streamed from his grey eyes, wide open, down his cheeks in unbroken lines.

  What little was left of Isaac’s art was hidden within the chest, yet most was of Isaac himself, as both devils and demons, condemning himself to hell, and the judgement of the light.

  John stood stunned for a moment, before bending down and carrying out the eight year old boy in his arms, small as he was for his age.

  John knew very little at that moment - could barely think - but he couldn’t help but notice that the tears, far too big to be natural, kept streaming as the boy fell into fitful slumber in his arms.

  Even as he called for an ambulance, he turned over the thought of the other number he had to call in his head.

  But there was no other option.

  He needed an expert on what the boy now was.

  And that meant the PRT.