The Man Upstairs
“You?” Hanna says, in a tone of shocked disbelief. “Seriously?” She folds her arms over her chest. “This is what happens when you refuse to get laid! True love waits and withers and gets all murdery!”
“I never tried to hurt you, Hanna,” Sean responds calmly. “But please, check the licentiousness of your tongue. We’re in a house of the Lord.”
“Being held at gunpoint!” Aria exclaims. “I’m so glad I never went out with you!”
“I don’t believe it,” Charlotte says, skeptically. “This little pipsqueak? He looks like he wandered out of a boy band catalog. He’s the one who’s been trying to kill me?”
“I’m just the instrument,” Sean says, humbly. “I do the bidding of the man upstairs.”
“You take your marching orders from God?” Mona asks. “People should really be reading the warning labels, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Why would you say that?” Sean asks. “You remember how it felt, don’t you? The certainty. The purpose. It all comes from him.”
“That’s great,” Emily tells him. “But maybe you could just teach Sunday school or something? Instead of trying to terrorize and murder us?”
“I do what I’m told,” Sean says, his eyes moving towards the heavens. “He’ll be here soon. You won’t have long to wait.”
“Jesus is coming?” Melissa asks him. “To what - kill us all in person? What kind of belief system is this?”
“Jesus has nothing to do with it,” a second voice explains, as footsteps descend the steps from the bell tower. “We’re old fashioned, old testament folks around here.”
“The man upstairs,” Alison mutters.
“Thank you all for coming,” Pastor Ted says, smiling broadly as he steps into the pulpit. “Please, as Sean said, be seated.”
“Is he really going to do a funeral service?” Emily whispers.
“I might die of boredom,” Charlotte mutters.
The Liars file into two pews near the front and sit down.
“Rosewood is a perfect town,” Pastor Ted begins. “Full of good people. Godly men and women. On the surface, it’s all pretty scenery and white picket fences. But even the prettiest face can be rotten underneath.”
“Amen!” Lorenzo calls from the back.
“And as Eve offered the apple to the hapless Adam, as Bathsheba bathed wantonly on the rooftop, as Salome demanded the head of John the Baptist - so are you ladies their spiritual heirs. Fruit of the corrupt and wicked loins of your fathers, you’re bad seeds that have sown perversity and cruelty and wickedness among all those your lives have touched.”
“But that ends tonight. When I first met Mary Drake, through our spiritual crisis counseling at Radley, my heart went out to her. A fallen woman, repenting her sins, suffering for years at the hands of the greedy, the evil doers, her perpetually fornicating sister and her married lover. I heard her story. I watched you grow up. I saw you -” he pauses to point at Spencer and Alison “laughing, heckling a classmate for raising her voice to the heavens in this very church.”
“Which was wrong,” Spencer says, speaking slowly. “But not as evil as, for example, killing people. Or kidnapping them. Or -”
“Mona,” he says fondly. “I’d have spared you, if I could. You have the voice of an angel.”
Mona is staring at him in absolute horror. “I was getting messages, wasn’t I? You were changing the notes in the hymnal! I didn’t imagine it! It was you!”
“You were so good,” he says, his voice full of nostalgia. “A vessel of pure and righteous rage. We’d talked about your struggles, of course. You’re insecurity. Your envy of Alison and her friends.”
“I trusted you!” Mona says. “I was fourteen years old!”
“Joan of Arc was seventeen when she conquered France.”
Mona looks at him with deep disgust.
“This isn’t the Middle Ages,” Melissa protests.
“More’s the pity,” he agrees. “People had such faith. But where was I? Oh yes. As the Good Book tells us - he who brings dishonor upon his house shall inherit the wind. If your right eye offends thee - pluck it out. You are the right eye, all of you! The daughter of the woman who robbed a safety deposit box stealing $300 sunglasses from the mall. The daughter whose father had an affair with his student going on to seduce her English teacher. The man who sleeps with his neighbors wife begetting a girl who habitually arouses her older sister’s boyfriends. And worst of all - the unnatural corruption of lesbianism.” He nods at Hanna and Mona and Alison. “You see how the disease started with Emily, and then spread? The devil has long legs and a soft voice.”
Alison laughs in his face. He glowers at her. “I’m sorry,” she gasps. “This is all so ridiculous!”
“It’s not,” Pastor Ted insists, his voice quiet and deadly. “You did this to them. Made them who they are. Strutting around in their barely there outfits, parading the temptations of the flesh. Enticing half the men in town and then rejecting them! What did they expect? They wanted it! They craved the attention!”
“Feel free to shut the entire fuck up,” Hanna tells him, angrily. “I was rooting for you! I wanted you to be my step-dad!”
“I needed to keep a closer eye on you,” he explains. “Did you really think I would still want your mother after she’d been used by Darren Wilden? And Jason DiLaurentis? A woman with so little self-respect? So lacking in moral fiber?”
“You leave Ashley Marin alone,” Mona scolds him, putting a comforting hand on Hanna’s knee.
“But why are you trying to kill Charlotte all over town?” Alison asks, curiously. “You liked her mother.”
“He liked me, too,” Charlotte says. “That’s why, isn’t it?”
“Silence,” he bellows.
“She didn’t tell you, did she? That I was her daughter.”
“Because you are not her daughter,” he says, a vein on his head throbbing. “She told me her son was dead. She told me you were a distant cousin she’d recruited to help her. She never told me what you were!”
“Who she is,” Alison corrects him.
“She’s not a woman,” he sputters. “She’s an abomination!”
“You’re an abomination!” Emily shouts at him. “You’re twisting the Bible all around trying to make it fit your own warped world view!”
“That’s why you wanted to kill her?” Hanna says, appalled. “Because you got all hot and bothered staring at her, before you found out she was born in the wrong body? That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard!”
“No one is born in the wrong body! God doesn’t make mistakes!”
“You certainly do, though,” Spencer observes. “Rollins and Mary Drake are dead. It’s just you, now. And the Keystone Kops back there. And your - whatever Sean is.”
“Sean is a good man,” Ted declares. “Who controls his impure urges. If he kills this - creature - he’ll be released from his wretched sexual confusion.”
“I knew he was gay!” Mona sighs. “What straight man wouldn’t be attracted to Hanna!”
Sean moves towards them again, a little dreamy eyed, holding a flaming candelabra. It’s solid silver and he’s holding it tightly with two hands. The Liars leap to their feet, preparing for a fight, Alison and Emily and Spencer taking a defensive stand in front of Charlotte. Aria throws a hymnal at his head, but misses. She’s moving back to pick up another one when she sees a shadow flitting down the stairs from the tower. She doesn’t have time to wonder about it, though, as Spencer has stabbed Sean in the leg with Wren’s pocket knife, now buried up to its hilt in his upper thigh. He falls backwards and the flames ignite the palm leaves with a whooshing noise. Mona takes off her shoes and hurls them in the direction of Lorenzo and Toby.
Floodlights are ignited outside, shining brightly through the stained glass windows, and a commanding voice booms loudly through the church.
“We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”
In the midst of the commotion, as the rest of them concentrate on subduing Sean and beating out the nearest flames, Pastor Ted grabs the altar linen and moves stealthily towards Charlotte from behind. He has the cloth over her head and his hands around her throat before anyone else has noticed she’s in danger.
Charlotte kicks out against the wooden pew, which draws the attention of Alison and Hanna. Alison tries to pry his left arm away from her sister, while Hanna pulls out all the stops and bites down hard on his right hand. He yelps in pain, but doesn’t loosen his grip, as Toby and Lorenzo move in to assist. Unfortunately the fire, at that moment, reaches Mona’s gasoline soaked shoes, which erupt into a high fashion fireball - setting both men’s dress pants on fire.
Someone is shouting more orders from outside, but Pastor Ted is refusing to relinquish his grip, choking Charlotte with every ounce of strength in his body. Emily and Spencer have joined in the fray, trying to pull him off her by force, but he’s like a man possessed. Aria and Melissa and Mona are doing their best to keep the flames at bay, but the fire is moving so fast that it won’t be long until they’re all engulfed.
A figure hurls towards them from the stairway and bashes Pastor Ted over the head with a metal cannister. His hands go nerveless and his body slumps over the back of a pew.
Charlotte rips the material away from her face, coughing hard between the smoke and the attempted strangulation. The metal cannister turns out to have been a fire extinguisher, and their new friend helpfully uses it to clear safe passage for them to the side door, grudgingly spraying Toby and Lorenzo with foam along the way.
The scene on the square has gone from sleepy and peaceful to pandemonium. Half the town is out of their beds watching the fire lick its way up the church. Detective Tanner is standing out there with a bull horn, directing an entire platoon of men and women in fatigues.
“Emily!” Pam Fields shouts, running over with Veronica and Ella at her heels. “Thank god you girls are alright!”
Wren and Jason appear behind them as Peter Hastings claps them both on the back.
“What is all this?” Spencer asks, faintly bemused.
“I found Barry Maple crawling through my yard,” Pam explains. “He said he’d been attacked by Toby and Lorenzo. I gave him a ride to the station -”
“Where we’d already been waiting for you for over an hour,” Wren says, gesturing towards Peter. “And where Jason had already been raising a ruckus, trying to get someone to go search the tunnels for his variously missing sisters.”
“We obviously couldn’t trust the Rosewood Police,” Peter continues. “With their winning mixture of corruption and incompetence. So your mother made a call to the governor’s office.”
“I was beside myself,” Veronica declares. “What’s the use of being a State Senator if you can’t call in a favor once in awhile?”
“You called out the National Guard!” Mona exclaims, in an impressed voice. “Ah-mazing!” She pulls a day planner out of her purse. “Are you free for lunch next week, Senator? Because I want to talk about exactly what I need to do to have your exact job in five years.”
Alison turns to Charlotte’s rescuer, hanging back in the shadow of the doorway. “Thank you,” she says. “I thought I was going to lose my sister all over again.”
“Wait a minute,” Hanna says. “Aren’t you Sara Harvey’s driver? Or manservant? Or good right hand?”
Emily turns around, and realizes it is the same guy she snooped the building plans from during the flirt and grab with Spencer.
“I am,” he says, shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. “I was trying to keep an eye on you.”
“Take a number,” Aria quips. Then she looks harder at the right side of his face. “Did you get burned? Your face is all - bubbling.”
He shakes his head, and reaches a hand over to peel away his ruined mask.
“Creepy innkeeper guy?” Hanna says, pulling her eyes away from the sight of Sean being handcuffed to a stretcher. “What are you doing rushing into a burning building to save our bacon?”
“Weren’t you the janitor at our school?” Emily asks. “You had that diary?”
“We had tea together,” Spencer says. “You’re Harold Crane.”
“No,” Ella says, a hand pressed tightly to her mouth. “He’s not.” She moves forward and puts an arm firmly around Charlotte’s shoulders. “This is Scott Montgomery, Charlotte.”
He holds out his hand. “Whatever you want to call me,” he says. “I’m your father.”