Chapter 1, Episode 9

Transcript: Chapter 1, Episode 9

Blaze stands within the church, his grocery bag still slung over his shoulder with the baguette and leafy greens emerging from the top. He looks around while he pulls off one of his gloves, and he thinks to himself, “So there’s a murderous spirit here, huh?”

He reaches out with his bare, tattooed left hand.

He lowers his hand onto a gold doorknob and muses, “No energy here…”

As he touches a stairway railing, he continues, “Or here…”

He glances silently over his shoulder.

Behind him is a cracked concrete staircase leading down into shadow.

He approaches the stairway, holding his glove in his right hand.

He pauses, startled, when a voice calls, “Don’t go down there!”

Behind him, at the top of a stairway leading up, three nuns kneel huddled together. One of them prays intently, another stares at Blaze with worry, and the third says, “There’s a demon in the basement. You’re not safe!”

Blaze smiles and holds up a hand, replying, “The basement, you say? Thanks!” Off-panel, the nun yells, “No, STOP!!!”

Blaze descends to the bottom of the stairs, into a brick-walled basement. He holds his bare hand up to the wall and squints.

He holds his left hand up to a stained glass window.

The tattoo on his hand glows orange, and he grits his teeth.

He holds his glowing left hand with his gloved right hand. His eyebrows furrowed, he thinks, “This basement is overflowing with dark, angry energy. But those people upstairs were wrong. It isn’t a demon. ‘Demon’ is just a label used by people who don’t care to understand the motivations of a spirit.”

Standing within a long, dark corridor of stained glass windows, he glances back over his shoulder and wonders, “Why is this spirit angry?”

He pushes a door open slightly and peers inside. A room number plaque on the wall displays the number 3 along with Roman numerals.

In the dimly lit basement room, furniture lies strewn about and broken. Debris is scattered across the floor. Along the right wall is a wide set of double doors with oversized, decorative gold hinges in a horizontal pattern.

Blaze turns to look at the other side of the room. HIs eyes go wide with shock.

Lying face down on the floor, obscured by shadow, is the body of a man in a trench coat. He’s impaled through the back with a large gold cross that stands about three feet high. The top and right side of the cross are broken off.

Blaze recalls the taunting but handsome face of the man who’d approached him in the grocery store and realizes, “It’s him.”

Looking sorrowfully at the body, he tucks his hair behind his ear.

He approaches the body on the floor. The broken gold cross stands high in his back, catching the light.

He kneels beside the body, his grocery bag on the floor behind him, and he lays his now-bare right hand on the broken cross stuck in the man’s back.

He withdraws his hand. “Weird…” he thinks to himself.

The view pans up to reveal a faint, smoky silhouette behind Blaze. Blaze, unaware, stares down at the body and muses, “No spiritual energy on the murder weapon.”

As Blaze stares in contemplation, the shadowy silhouette behind him holds up a piano wire wrapped around its black, smoky hands.

Blaze’s eyes go wide as the string swiftly passes in front of his face.

The ghostly hands pull the wire taut around Blaze’s neck. Blaze grasps at the wire and clenches his teeth.