A Black House... Or, A Flash of the Lightning.

[Sicko]

Outside of the church, the storm continued to rage.

" - with no warning, the effects of this freak storm seem to be spreading to surrounding counties, but the epicenter is swirling hundreds of feet in the air over this abandoned church. I've never seen anything like it, Don." local news correspondent Cal Karnes was having to raise his voice over the sound of the wind and the rain, as across town, in the news station, his anchorman was watching it unfold incredulously.

"Now Cal, you say there was no atmospheric evidence of this storm gathering?" his anchorman leaned in, voice showing very studio poise concern, with tinges of real alarm. The camera wavered, and Cal Karnes in the inset ducked his head, but looked back, consummate professional, and continued his report.

"That's right, Don, and what's more, we can't be sure this storm is of natural - " the correspondent went on, but then suddenly the entire side of the church blew off in an explosion of rotted wood, sending spears flying into the air, and Cal Karnes and the cameraman both ducked, Cal letting a string of profanities on the air.

The cameraman kept the lens trained on the now vacant side of the church, as a lone figure in a black robe came striding out, and held his arms out, as if glorying in the wind and the rain.

"Back to you, Don -"

The force of the explosion had knocked some beams loose. A support strut fell with a loud KER-THUMP down, smashing into the pulpit and leaving damage, and wind lashed at the hole Jason had blown in the side of the church. Loose boards fell from the hull, and debris kept falling. The place was crumbling, trembling due to new structural integrity issues.

The monster opened his eyes.

He sat up, rubbing his head and blinking. He immediately thought that it was so strange to be coming back to corporeal viewing after spending accumulated decades being forced to exist in between dreams. "Actually, thousands of years" said the new voice in his head.

"Abnegazar, you're only here so you can direct me what to do," Ephrain counseled the new, lighter passenger. The voice was like fluttering butterfly wings, a shy and fleeting tickle in the base of his head. It brought him a sense of calm and peace that he wasn't used to. "How we can separate Jason from Shadrach, and free Moloch from his bottle dimension."

"You have to get me close enough to the host body so that we can erase his mark," the ancient one came back, gentle as a spring and direct. Easier said that done, he thought to himself.

He thought of the cumulative thousands of years he had spent in the winding pathways. Of seeing Steph and Lourdes again, to live the life of another, previous man, only to experience the tragedy, the shattering and the painful rebirth from fire again and again. Jason had tried to torture him.

But as he exited the new hole in the side of the church, he found something equally as disturbing.

Jason was standing in the middle of a quaint, Boot Hill cemetary, many weathered gravestones spiked near him, and as he was raising his arms, the rune brand on his exposed wrist glowing hotly, the dirt around him was pulsing and mixing.

Jason watched him come, with a smile. "You're too late to stop me, Ephrain!" he shouted over the rising wind. "The power of MY dark passenger trumps yours. I don't know how you slipped out of the strangeways but, it doesn't matter. Now that you're back here on terra firma you will finally see me access real power."

"You aren't accessing it, Jason," he called over, walking among the century old headstones. The dirt over the graves was swirling. "You're riding it like some cheap whore doing the saddle ride at a country-western bar, but it's going to throw you off."

"You're jealous," Jason hissed, "And delusional, because Moloch never gave you power like this. Moloch was selfish. He fed you unlimited strength, but only quid pro quo if you hurt people for him. Shadrach... embraces my vision, he's giving me the powers over life and death."

Sickly green lightning flashed behind Jason, and the swirling dirt on the graves, mixed with chittering, scrabbling noises that spiked madness behind their eyes, rose along with the cacaphony. And then, pushing through the dirt, decayed, skeletal hands began to push their way to the surface.

"You were never more than a thug, Jason. A narcissistic, manipulative thug who had a god complex. Shadrach is using you to spread his influence."

"I would never have expected My Sicko to try and reason with me!" Jason crowed, and a false sense of paternal pride was plastered over his face with a shit eating grin. "The dummy I sprung from that asylum was too slack jawed to put a sentence together. And now here you are, articulating words and stringing together empty nonsense to try and make me think the power isn't in my hands. Face facts, Ephrain!" he said, clapping his hands together, to wake him up, "I only ever, wanted power. I thought small before. Before, I only wanted small time, limited power. I thought small because I was a young man. But it took the writings of your witchy little girlfriend Mariah to show me that power was not controlling a stable like the Inner Circle, power was not gassing up idiots like Danny or weak minded lowlies. Power... real power... is here!"

And he raised his hand to the sky, and a bolt split the sky, crashed behind him, spiking into a stone mausoleum. The release of power shattered stone.

"That's right. You always searched for power, in any form, because you are weak. You've always been the weak one, Jason."

"Uh uh, stay back!" he said, throwing his hands forward, and a powerful gust of wind buffeted Ephrain, who simply tucked his head and closed his eyes.

"Think about it, you recruited me when I was at my weakest, when I was mind wiped by tragedy, and when I had little will of my own, and you kept me drugged while you put my mind in an order that made sense to you."

"I MADE YOU," Jason repeated doggedly, that same fierce, proprietary and stubborn pride. "I molded you, everything you are. You are my monster. Mine."

The decayed bodies were rising from the ground around him, and the dead came to Jason's aid. One by one, skeletons and rotted corpses with only the barest scraps of meat and sinew began to emerge fully, directed towards him. He lashed out, shattering skulls.

"But you couldn't keep control of me, and when our company closed, you lost control. But Jason," he said, gritted teeth as he ripped the hand off of a dead body attempting to restrain him, "You needed me more than I needed you. You needed me to be your monster, to give you power, because without assistance, you're nothing."

"Shut your mouth!" his voice was piqued, and the lightning crackled dangerously in the sky as Jason's eyes squinted. "I could make you do anything I wanted. And you had no mind of your own, you did these things like sleep walking through a dream. You were no better without guidance."

It was true, and his monster side still felt like that sometimes. See, for example, why despite the beef with David Hunter seeming to be closed he had found himself out there, with no planning on anyone's part, to screw David out of a title shot. Maybe some part of him wanted to finally shut David's mouth after all of those ridiculous, petulant rants towards Kassandra Black, but still. None was more surprised to see Sicko going out there and attacking David Hunter yet again. He shook his head, gritting his teeth as he was attacked on all sides. It didn't matter to him anymore. When you got down to it, David and Jason Twisted weren't so dissimilar, weak little arrogant shitheads that press ganged weak willed people into cosigning their words and doing their bidding. David saw him only in terms Jason would understand, old, washed up, broken down. But he refused to acknowledge the one blind spot Jason was showing even now, by writing him off as nothing, he would never see the core of strength that had existed before Sicko was ever born, perhaps that existed since the dawn of time in the presence of three ancient brothers.

"Yes, my child," his light passenger coached him on, "You can do this."

He knew he could. He didn't need anyone's direction to be better than anyone ever thought he could be.

"Stop him!" Jason shouted to no one in particular, raging against the failure of the skeletons and decayed that were smashed to pieces. "Stop walking!" he barked Ephrains' way, as if that would slow his advance.

He had pulled the arm off of a decayed body. It parted like a rotisserie chicken leg, gristle and meat separating sickly.

He thought of Mariah, and the last time he had seen her. He had had to pull her apart this way.

"You are not in control, Jason," he taunted, and the sickly storm continued to rage it's radioactive green lightning around them. "How much do you think your dark passenger is going to tolerate? You are slipping."

"You couldn't be more wrong, Ephrain," he snarled, and then, switching tactics, he closed his hands into a fist.

A football teams worth of dead bodies piled on him, pinning his legs and arms, and Jason advanced towards him, getting close, now. The white fluttering butterfly sensaion in the back of his head seemed to lean forward in anticipation, as Jason drew close. Jason, in his robe, got closer than ever to Ephrain, an arm and a half's length. Close enough to see that he was dessicated, his muscled body beginning to waste, his hair falling out into a greyed widow's peak, and his cheeks sunken. The once powerful Jason Twisted was being eaten up from the inside.

"This body is reconstituted," Jason said, passing a hand over his chest, "It had decayed and decomposed, but it was rebuilt," and then his eyes flashed up to Ephrain's. "Moloch's tulpa."

He thought of that night, in the desert, when the spirit of Mariah had pushed George into shooting him, over and over. How he had laid fallow in the desert, being feasted on by vultures. And then being reborn.

"But you died, Ephrain, and Moloch isn't the only one with access to the spells that reconstitute bodies." He laughed, darkly. "Who do you think created that spell?"

At a simple touch to his chest, old wounds reopened. A hundred white hot agonies bloomed, as first the gun shots reopened into gaping holes, and then his stomach began to burst open, innards falling out. Ephrain barely had time to choke out as the damage began to reassert itself, the decay and rot from being left in the sun to get picked apart and spoil.

"No! You must resist! I will use all of my... remaining... power to... stem the damage..." the white light in his head flared, "but fight back, Ephrain!"

His face was falling apart, meat sloughing off of his cheeks. He felt the vision in his eye cloud as it went white, but he still saw Jason standing there, smiling.

"You were mine before, and now, thanks to your reconstituted body... I still have this right to it now, Ephrain."

Despite it all. Despite the ghouls holding his arms down, despite the fact that he felt the muscles on his arms starting to waste away, felt sinew pop and muscles stretch and snap like guitar strings as he strained his arm, he pulled his way free of the clutching hands. And his arm pistoned out, and he grabbed Jason around the throat.

"No!"

The half-rotted, corpse-like body of Ephrain, even now trying to fight to keep Jason's reversal of the tulpa spell from working and making him fall apart all together, rose, and he pushed off the thralls holding him. He smashed the skull in of a skeletal wraith, it shrieked. He hurled Jason the length of the trail, and he smashed in to several headstones. Jason, not looking so fresh himself, raised his withered head, eyes wide, and screamed again, "NO!"

The shambling monster still rose. Nose gone, one eye just a white gel blob, teeth clenched in a ghastly grimace under what remained of a face. He glared across the lane at his foe, who even now refused to believe what he was seeing, that even broken down and rotted he still refused to give up.

Jason rose, floating, to his feet, but he seemed even weaker now than before. The wraith that was Ephrain stood across from him, and then lashed his picked-clean bone arm out, smashing into the face of a decayed thrall and knocking it away, before turning to roar at Jason.

"You - you have resisted - the nightmares of the Strangeways, you have resisted the collapse of me undoing the new body reconstituted by blood magic... you are cut off from the dark passenger that gives you his power... how - How are you doing this? How can you still be standing? HOW??"

His voice, even through the holes in his throat, came out in a hollow rumble, backed by the Greek chorus of the dangerous thunder, "If you don't see now, Jason... you'll never know..."

"Shadrach," Jason said, turning his head to talk to a voice no one could hear (in a familiar fashion), "I have done that - I've done everything... no, please, what do you mean? I told you I could -"

"You're losing control, Jason. Your obsession with trying to control me is making your master lose faith in you," he observed.

"I am NOT losing control!" He raged, lit by a flash of lightning.

"Stop," the tulpa said through it's rough voice, "It's over. Release Moloch."

"It is not over!" His eyes burned like coals, and the rune on his wrist glowed again. "It will not be over! This power is mine. Not Shadrach's... MINE."'

And he began to float. Then, before Ephrain could react, he was flying in towards him. The two bodies collided, and Jason carried him backwards, flying like a bat from hell, his robes the dark wings. "I will bring this all down on you!"

"I will bring this to it's end!"

Out on the street, Cal Karnes, correspondent for WTFR Channel 8, having seen little of the battle from his vantage point except for flashes of lightning and figures standing among headstones, but still, standing out in the street, with the cameraman trained on him, put a hand to his earpiece. He still, continued his report.

" - Don, the structure of the church seemed to experience significant damage in the freak explosion, and I can't tell what's happening but the two figures that were out in the graveyard just retreated back inside -"

"Cal, can you tell us what the status of the church is?" his anchorman said, eyes narrowing seriously, his voice grave.

"Not from here, Don," he admitted, "But if we can get closer, I - wait, something's happening."

The cameraman caught it all on tape as the church imploded with a loud, growing groan, beams falling through, the wood and stone falling inward as everything collapsed in on itself. A wave of dust flew from the collapsing building, and then, everything was silent on the tape, except for the wind and the rain.