by Urban Waite
“In the wilderness after you fled into the forest John had wanted to kill you. He had wanted you to go away, to disappear. I asked him not to kill you. I asked him to spare you as we have been taught to spare all that see the truth.” Drew came forward into the room. He studied one of the skins a little way down the wall, then he turned to her. “This one,” he said, gesturing to the skin. “This one is my own.”
She looked to the wall and read the sin written there, Envy.
“The Father and John helped me to see that I was envious. That I had always been envious and that it would continue unless I accepted myself for who I was. They helped to strengthen me, and in the process they showed me how lost I had truly been.”
“That’s yours?” she asked. She did not understand. She looked at him and then around the room. “What is this?” she asked. “What are those?”
He bent and knelt in front of her. He reached a hand out and touched her neck then ran his fingers down across the sternum of her chest. “They tattoo you right here,” he said. “They look into your soul and they see the sin that you are carrying and they bring it to the surface when they tattoo it across your chest.” He stood again, taking his hand from where it had pressed down on her. “Once you accept your sin, you can then release it.” He hooked a finger up and pulled down the collar of his shirt.
She could see the scar tissue there. Almost as if it were a burn, but she knew it was more than that—that the skin itself had been removed. She looked to the wall again. She looked to the sin that had sat atop her brother’s chest. When she looked back at him, she said, “What have they done to you, Drew? What have you let them do to you? You’re not this man. You’re not the man they think you are.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not that man anymore. You’re right about that.” He took the .38 from behind now and he brought it up and stared down at it like the gun itself were some treasure rescued from the bottom of the sea. “They never treated me like an equal. They never thought I could ever be anything like you, or like him. They always thought I was lesser. They never wanted me. I know that now. I know it was their sin that gave me life and I accepted that. I accepted them for that and for what they did when they gave this life to me. But they, in turn, never accepted me.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Mamma and Daddy loved you. He came up here to get you. He came to get you and bring you back, just as I did. You have to see that there is love there. You have to understand that.”
“No,” Drew said. He brought the gun around. He held it out toward her now, and he reached and pulled her to her knees. “You are the one that doesn’t understand. You are the one who has been marked with sin. Who needed to be cleansed. I am the one who has saved you. I am the one who saves you still.”
She listened to him, but what she heard most distinctly, and what terrified her all the more, was the sound of another set of footsteps now approaching down the long hallway.
* * *
WILL HAD COME DOWN THE BLUFF, WORKING ALONG THE SLOPE at an angle. By the time he reached the flatlands near the lake he could see the buildings through the trees and he pictured himself there among them. The trees were patchy in many places and his view looked toward the lake and among the trunks of the trees and though Will was one of them he knew he must be cautious in his approach. He threw himself down among a growth of thick underbrush and glassed the compound.
He had a straight shot to the house where the word SINNER had been written, but in its place now was white paint. He ran his eye across it several times before he was even sure of what he saw. The word was gone. Erased as if it had never been there to see at all.
Using the scope, he viewed the gravel drive then moved the scope along each building. He had little idea where to start or even to guess where he might find Mary May or in what state.
When Will had come to the church twelve years ago, he had come to confess his sins. He had come to speak to The Father and to ask him for his forgiveness. And while Will had always been a believer in the church in town, he had prayed to them and his prayers for peace and for acceptance of the things he’d done, had, in his mind, gone unanswered.
The Father had told him to have faith. He had laid his hands upon Will in a way so different than Will had seen, or felt in town. The Father hugged him and brought him toward him like a brother. Gesturing in that moment to his own brother John, and the eldest among them, Jacob, he had said to Will, “You will be to us a brother, and that bond you share with us will be even stronger than the one we three share even in our blood. You will be family to us and we will care for you as family and you will care for us as family and in this we will take comfort and provide for one another for the rest of time.”
Will had been released and he had stood there with The Father, and with the ten or so followers that soon would grow to become many hundreds. And Will had looked back at him and The Father had said for him to bathe in the water of the river and to immerse himself and wash his sin.
John, himself, had been the one to baptize Will. And afterwards he had said to Will, “Now you must confess. You must confess your sin.”
“But I do not know it,” Will had said.
“You know it. You know it just as you know your own reflection seen—but then forgotten—in the passing of a mirror.”
“I cannot see it,” Will said. “I am lost. I am lost without them, without my wife and without my daughter.”
John had pulled him close just as The Father had, and he had led him to the edge of the river, bringing him to a tranquil eddy where the water sat calm and still. “Now you see the sin inside you,” John had said. “You are a hunter. You are a killer. You are a man of Wrath and not of good. You are here for this very reason. You are here to appease your sin and erase the Wrath that lives within you.”
Will dropped the scope from his eyes. He knew now where they had taken her. He knew now what had been done to her and he feared now he might be too late.
* * *
JOHN CRADLED MARY MAY BY THE BACK OF THE HEAD. HE BLEW the powder upon her, and then he knelt and looked inward on her. It seemed to her that he was looking through her, in through the eyes then out the back. The powder roiled within her like a smoke, pouring past her eyelids and down her throat.
“You only had a taste of the true power of the Bliss in which we bathe the sinners,” John said. “You did not have the chance to see the world in its truest form, stripped naked, and revealed.” He stepped back now and watched her. She was having trouble keeping focus. A cloud was moving across her vision and all she saw had morphed and begun to pull. Still, she was aware that Drew was standing with her, their father’s .38 still held in his hands, the gun barrel pressed upon her skull.
“There’s no need for that anymore,” John said. He told Drew to lower the weapon. He told Drew to cut the rope that bound her hands and feet then to step back and stand behind him.
She tried to move her arms and to get her feet beneath her, but she felt weighted in place as if she were made of stone. Her arms dangled now like the air itself had become a gel and she had dove headfirst into a world composed not of any solid conglomeration of atom or particle, but instead into a world made loose by the breaking of many different bonds.
She moved but also did not move, and afterwards, when her mind had time to catch up to the instinctual manifestations of her body, she wondered even if she had ever moved, or if, as she felt now, with John looking down upon her, whether she were even still within her body.
“I’m sure Drew told you what I’d wanted to do to you,” John said. “I’m sure he told you that I thought you might be better dead. But I think it’s better this way. I think it’s better that you know that he still loves you, even if you do not give to him the very same. That is why we marked you. That is why we brought you to be washed. And now we ask you to confess so that we can send you back as one who is marked with sin but not forgiven.”
Her head swam, and she tried to still it
on her shoulders. Everything was out of focus and even as she looked up to John and Drew, she could see they had begun to almost melt from off their bones.
She turned her gaze upon the wall. The skin hung all around her. Stretched and pinned with staples like long dead butterflies beneath their case. With the drug now streaming full through her she thought there was a kind of beauty to it. A kind of beauty to the sin and the skin that hung there, that had been taken from off the sinner’s chest.
John turned and spoke to Drew. He said the next part would not be easy for a loved one. He told Drew to go back to the house, to wait. He said this all would be over as soon as he could get her to confess.
There was hesitation seen, but then acceptance, and soon Mary May was aware she was alone with John and that as the door closed behind Drew and John stepped forward into the overhead light, he became a figure of some form that was only shadow. In her eyes it was the figure of her own father she saw looking down on her.
It was her father. She was sure of it now. And when he pulled back into the light she was certain of it. His face. His eyes. The touch of his hand across her cheek. Mary May could not understand it. She watched him move away from her and walk the full length of the room, and for a long time he didn’t look away from her. It is him, she thought. It is him. Her mind was trying to make sense of it. She now felt the drug in every vein.
Her father rounded back to her. He took her hands into his, and he leaned and turned each palm upward. His eyes searching out the whorls across her skin like he meant to create a map of the maze that was her fingerprint. Now he began, his voice stopping and starting. And the voice she heard was not John’s but that of her dead father, addressing her as if to give her comfort from the afterlife. His words carefully chosen, as he spoke and paused, drawing some words long while cutting others short.
“Your hands,” her father said. “Look what you have done to them—look what you have done to them just to be here. They are bruised and cut. They have been wounded, misspent, and misused. You came to us and though you might not see it now, you came to us in order to receive your purpose. And that purpose starts with these hands. The things they might build. The creation they might make. There is so much potential in just one of these fingers. In ten there is an infinity.”
There was a showmanship to this. A resonance that was somewhere between tent revival and southern Baptist snake handling, and Mary May was trying to understand it all. She was trying to make sense of this being she saw before her, John or her father, and she could not distinguish between the two. She listened to the rise and fall of his voice, and she wondered about a thing like the afterlife and whether a soul could cross back in time of need, and what that soul in all its infinite knowledge of life after death would see in her—whether she would be declared saint or demon, burned or saved.
He looked her over. He looked up and away from her to where the skins hung pinned against the wall. And in her mind the skins were moving and there was the sound of them rustling on the wall like snakeskin, spent already from the body, artifacts that showed the secession from one state of being to the next.
She didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe it was her father. There was no coming back from death. He was gone. He was gone from here and this could not be him.
John brought his eyes back to her. The gaze he cast upon her was almost predatory, like a cougar looking out of the darkness at its prey. The realization of where she was and who she was with and the danger she was in suddenly came rushing back to her. She tried to pull away, but his hand held hers firm in his. And when she looked down it was not John’s hands she saw but her father’s once again. Aged and callused. Loved. Hands she could not hate. Hands she wanted to hold to, as if holding to them would prevent him from ever leaving her again.
And when she looked again he was caressing that hand of hers like a father might the broken hand of one of his children. “Together,” he said, his voice now tender. “Your hands in mine, in the greater fold of this family there is only warmth, only understanding, only the true gift of potential we see for you. But without that gift you are alone.”
He held her fingers for only a beat longer before he dropped them. What he said to her was true, she felt the cold of the room. She felt the decay in the air, not just skin, but dust, and loss, and solitude.
“Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you understand your sin, and the way it stands before you, blocking you from the gates of heaven?” He stood now in the light, his skin illuminated from above, her father. His hair seemed almost gossamer. She looked around now, as if coming out of some dream into the waking world, knowing the feel of danger, but not seeing it. She could see only her father and she wanted very much to go to him and to hold him and to never let him go, but she felt weighted to the floor, as if she were in the water still and he was looking down on her from the breathing world above.
He began to speak again. “This sin will govern you from waking moment to your final half-remembered dreams. But I can stop it for you. I can bring it toward the surface and then someday cut it from your skin. Will you do this willingly?” he asked, waiting now on her reply.
She looked around the room. She looked from skin to skin then back again to him. Her father had faded away but no one had taken his place, not John or Drew, or anyone. What she saw there was no longer human. He was a voice above her like that of some god speaking from atop the mountaintops many thousands of feet above. “Yes,” she said.
He seemed to reset and his voice began to roam about the room, and she was having trouble tracking it as he went. “What beautiful things are the gifts of hands. They are gifts given to all of us. They are like the tongue, or the mind, or the muscle beneath your skin. They are a tool and they have been misused. Chipped and bent, marred, even broken a time or two, but they can heal. They have this power and it is a power not to be forgotten. For all the bad those hands have done, for all the paths those hands have wrongly led you down, for all the days those hands spent in toil only to find you were building an effigy to a false prophet—those hands can still be healed. They can be tools again in the way they were first intended.”
He came back to her now, the drug fading a bit and she saw it was John there before her and not her father. He held her hands again. She was scared not because of where she was or who she was with. She was scared of the words he used and the way they had begun to seep inside her and bend and harden like scaffolding meant to support and soon overtake her very being.
“I am glad,” John said. “I am glad Bliss has released in you this path to a truer understanding.” He guided her hands now to where her collar was and he began to pull with her hands in his, ripping the material of the collar until she felt the bare skin of her flesh come exposed in the dead air. “Your sin will go here above your breasts, and it will be a mark for you to remember us by. You will have many days and nights to think on it, and in the end you will find there is only one conclusion, and that conclusion will be that you will join us here, giving up your sin, and your life beyond. But first we must prepare you. We must wash you clean, for your sin is envy, and it will be placed upon you for all to see.”
* * *
WILL LET HIMSELF IN THROUGH THE FAR DOOR THEN STOOD looking down the long hallway with the overhead lights in cages every ten feet or so, six of them in total and the doors of the rooms beneath each. He had not been here in years, but he had not forgotten this place. He knew where the room was, and where his own tattoo had long ago been stapled to the wall. He knew this was where they would take Mary May. He knew it because he had once been taken there himself.
He had gone only a couple of steps down the hall when he heard the opening of a door. He came to a dead stop and then, thinking fast, he ducked into the nearest room. With the blackness of the room behind he stood there with the door just cracked and a slivered view of the hallway before him. He wondered what would happen if he was caught here, whether they would be able to see he had lost the faith. H
e wondered whether it was that obvious, and whether they would have come to his own house to write the word SINNER upon his walls.
In what little light there was Will slid the rifle bolt down and checked the chamber, then carefully pushed it back into place. He listened to the soles of heavy booted feet pass by then fade again.
Will cracked the door a little then eased out. Going down the hall was Drew. Will watched him walk, his movements almost robotic. Each step labored and deliberate, one in front of the other all the way to the end, where he let himself back out into the light of day.
When Will heard the door close, he went again into the hallway. Will had not liked what he had seen and he wondered now why Drew was not with Mary May. Will started to doubt himself, but he also feared for Mary May all the more.
He held the rifle out before him and began to walk in the direction Drew had come from, heel then toe, the rubber beneath his boots softly echoing. If she was here she was down this hallway. He looked ahead and continued, his eyes fixed now on where he thought she’d be.
There was a creak of door hinges then the sound of footsteps up ahead. A voice was heard suddenly. A voice Will knew was John’s.
Will moved fast. He took three steps, trying to keep the sound of his own boot soles hidden. The inlaid shadow of a door sat before him, and he ducked in just as he saw John come into sight fifty feet ahead. He was talking to someone, but Will’s own pulse had begun to beat so fast and loud in the channels of his head that he could hear nothing. He had felt this way before. With the big boar grizzly, with his own wife and child, and before all that he had felt this in the war. Now he tried to push this feeling down away from him and loosen its grip from around his skin.
When he bent and looked again around the inlay of the door, John had turned and moved away in the opposite direction. Will saw him open a new door and then disappear within. Will was out and moving down the hallway. His heart still beat inside of him with a thump that shook the skin, but he kept going. He moved because he had to, because he thought there might not be another time. If he was going to save Mary May this was the only time. He only hoped now that he would find her and that whatever had happened to her, wherever she was in the process, was not now at its end.
