PRAISE FOR ROBERT BOYCZUK
“(P)age-turning thrills aplenty . . . Boyczuk borrows from sources as diverse as Tolkien, Star Wars, and Alan Moore, and integrates the miscellany admirably into a fast-paced plot. The dystopian human dynamics . . . are the stuff of an epic nihilistic hangover.”
—Publishers Weekly
“. . . the writing is vivid, the characters . . . interact in a believable and thrilling way, and there is enough tension to make us suddenly start turning the pages hurriedly. . . . [Boyczuk is] a writer to watch.”
—Paul Kincaid, The New York Review of Science Fiction
“Boyczuk builds up his hauntings and often gruesome metaphors and imagery from the base of his stories’ human relationships, which imbues his fiction with an uncanniness that mimics the feeling of being trapped in a maze-like dream. Readers need not worry, however. The horror here is very real—Boyczuk just wants you to have a little fun finding it.”
—Rue Morgue Magazine
“Robert Boyczuk is a supremely talented writer.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother
and Pirate Cinema
ChiZine Publications
COPYRIGHT
The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven © 2012 by Robert Boyczuk
Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr
Cover design, interior design, and Map of the Spheres 2012 by Samantha Beiko
Additional interior layout © 2012 by Danny Evarts
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-928-6
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
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Edited by Helen Marshall
Copyedited and proofread by Kate Moore
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
—John Milton
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Apology to Readers of This Work
Orphanotrophium
Choir
The Society of Jesus
The New Boys
The Captain
A Skirmish at Night
Our New Master
The Postulants’ Camp
Amongst the Meek
Assumption
My Secret
Kite’s Secret
First Love
Second Assumption
Home
Boredom
Kite’s Past
The Charon
Rumours of War
An Impromptu Trial
Rome
Questions and Some Answers
Audition
Flight
Lent
We Come to an Arrangement
The Pontiff’s Atonement
Sanctuary
The Old Road
The City and Tower
The Unrepentant
A Lie in the Dark
The Babel Tower
Heaven
A Choir of Angels
God Weeps
The Vault of Heaven
Map of the World
Avenged
Purgatorium
About the Author
Also Available from ChiZine Publications
APOLOGY TO READERS OF THIS WORK
Memory, even memory such as I have, is frangible. It is true I cannot forget the things I set out to remember, such as the minute details of a map I have studied for only a few minutes. Or those memories carved in my mind’s eye because of their novelty or violence, moments thrust upon me freighted with awe, horror, or shame. These things I shall remember always, as clearly and precisely as in the moment they happened. Often, people have called this ability a gift from God, and they have mistakenly believed that, like God, this ability is absolute, perfect: that I can recall in totality everything I’ve ever seen or heard or smelled or touched. Nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways, my memory is unremarkable, no better than yours.
Although the events recorded in this volume are, for the most part, accurate in the smallest detail, there are certain incidents and conversations which are not reported verbatim. At the time they took place, they seemed inconsequential, and so made no special imprint on my memory. Upon reflection, however, I realized they were essential to my story. And so it is these scenes I’ve had to reconstruct imperfectly. As much as possible, I’ve tried to verify the details by interviewing others who bore witness, and I believe I have succeeded in capturing the spirit, if not all the specifics, of these moments. If these passages bear any inaccuracies, it is my fault alone.
I would also ask the reader to forgive any awkwardness in the language or structure of this work. Writing, beyond scratching a few numbers in a ledger or making a brief notation on a chalkboard, is somewhat new to me, and I am afraid the only written stories I know are the ones that were available to me in the Bible and its sanctioned Addenda (the Church having banned all other books two years before my birth). Of course, I’ve listened to plenty of stories. Not the kind of stories one tells about oneself—for instance, how one bested so-and-so at chess, or struck a particularly favourable deal at the market—the mundane stories of everyday triumphs. No, I mean the sort told by itinerant dramatists and singers. Stories about other people, other places, other times. Of victories, yes, and, defeats. Of truths larger than ourselves. Stories that teach us something important, even if the people in the stories never learn the important thing. Their learning is not the point. It is never the point. Remember that, and judge me, and my story, accordingly.
So, where to begin?
Perhaps it’s best to start with the most important thing:
Orphanotrophium
My father is dead, I thought, shivering in the thin nightshirt I still wore, the one I’d been in when they’d seized me. And I am to blame.
Yesterday, I’d turned ten. At least I thought it was yesterday. But it was hard to tell how much time had passed in the dank, windowless cells beneath the monastery. Four days? Five?
I will never see him again—not in this life.
Or in the one after, if the Bishop was to be believed. Heretics, the Bishop had told me, were condemned to eternal damnation. But if I were to confirm my father’s sins, my father could no longer deny them. He would be allowed to confess and repent—and to live. So I had nodded numb affirmation to all the Bishop’s strange questions. Muttered the answers I thought the Bishop
wanted to hear even when the questions baffled me. But I was, and still am, a bad liar. The Bishop didn’t believe me, so my father had died unrepentant, while I bore witness. After, the Bishop had made me confess my lies. The ones the Bishop had forced me to make. My penance was light—two days of prayer and fasting chained in darkness. Improbably, the Bishop believed my soul could still be saved. But I knew better.
I killed my father.
After my penance, a silent Friar had unlocked my shackles and, with a crooked walking stick, prodded me up and through a small kitchen into open air. When I had been brought to the monastery it had been the dead of night. And now, as we emerged, it was night again. Or perhaps it had remained night the whole time. For all I knew, this might be a Sphere of perpetual night where the suns never kindled. I’d heard of such things. Perhaps that’s why the Black Friars had built their monastery down here, because the darkness suited their work.
We followed a footpath through rocky fields and denuded trees, the Friar whacking me smartly across the back of my legs whenever I slowed. I lost a slipper—but it didn’t matter, really, because my slippers were falling apart. A short while later I kicked off the other one. Once, we paused and I was allowed to go to my knees to scoop water from a small spring that crossed our path. My stomach rumbled; it had been two days since I’d last gnawed on a mouldy hind of bread.
At some point the path had become a rutted waggon track, and we walked past cultivated fields, the shapes of farmhouses and barns in the distance. Which meant people. And where there were people and fields, there were regular cycles of day and night. The kind that would allow those people to work and their crops to grow. There would be a dawn.
This knowledge failed to hearten me.
The path widened, became hard-packed dirt. We crossed a stone bridge over a fetid river that seemed nothing more than an enormous open sewer, and immediately trod a broad street paved with crumbling bricks. On either side of the bridge I saw that earthworks had recently been erected and that a crude tower was being raised, as if to defend the crossing. But the tower was only half-finished and seemed unoccupied—at least no one came out to challenge us. Even so, I took it as a sign of a bad place expecting worse.
As we walked, bits of crumbled brick bit into my soles. Houses stood shoulder to shoulder now, their porticoes set back a dozen paces from the thoroughfare. Here and there light leaked out around the edges of a shuttered window. The street narrowed, and the Friar and I turned, and turned again. The houses became taller and shabbier, pressing in on the street. None had porticoes, only doors and barred windows overhanging the lanes. There was no river here to carry away excrement, and the foul smell of fresh night soil in the gutters made me gag. Narrower back streets branched off ours, from which emanated the sounds of furtive movements. If the Friar heard anything, he ignored it, herding me impatiently through the labyrinthine alleys and finally down this last claustrophobic lane, no wider than my outstretched arms.
Rough hands shoved me; I stumbled over broken bricks and into a wooden wall that loomed out of the darkness. A dead end. I stood completely still, felt the wood damp against my cheek and under my fingers. Not sure what to do. I stiffened at a touch on my arm, but it was only a frayed hempen rope, suspended from something in the darkness above. For a time I waited, for a wordless kick or a blow, for whatever might come. When nothing did, I turned, but the nameless Black Friar who’d brought me here had already faded away into the barrio. Without ever saying a word.
I had no idea where I was, nor why I’d been brought here. Until this moment I’d been stumbling through the night, not thinking. Numb. My father was dead. What point was there to anything beyond that fact?
A shuffling sound from the impenetrable darkness.
It occurred to me, then, that perhaps the Friar hadn’t abandoned me. Perhaps he’d gone around the corner to relieve himself. . . .
But then I heard a retch and the sound of gobbing. A small, gaunt shadow congealed at the foot of the alley, ambled forward. “Yer a pretty one, ain’t you?” A drunken voice, the kind that promised pain. And instantly, sickeningly, I knew why the Friar had left me here: to die. Not by the Friar’s own hand—that would have been a mortal sin—but at another’s.
A man reeled forward, emerging from the shadows—an indigent in ragged clothes, his face pocked, his left eye socket empty and scabbed. I snatched up a chunk of brick. The indigent took stock of the brick with his good eye.
“Now, now, boy. No need fer that.” He offered a gap-toothed smile. “As God is me witness, I intend you no harm. I was just thinking, you being so young an pretty, and me knowing them what like that, there was a brass deacon or two to be made between us. . . .” As he spoke, the man patted his own clothing, absentmindedly, feeling for something.
A knife!
I retreated a step, felt something between my back and the wooden wall. The rope. In one motion I whipped the brick at the indigent and spun around, grabbing the rope with both hands. I heard feet pound behind me as I hauled myself up with all my might—the rope gave way and I landed hard on my arse, a bell tolling once, loud enough to wake the dead.
Or at least to make the indigent pause, uncertain, a few paces away.
The man glanced up to the impenetrable dark where the bell had sounded, then down at me, close enough so that I could see the knife’s nocked and pitted blade. The indigent narrowed his eyes, advanced a step. I scuttled backward until my shoulders pressed against the wall—then tumbled backward as the wall swung inwards. A lantern flared, held aloft by an immense figure who stood astride me. The indigent raised a hand to block the sudden illumination. Waving his knife blindly, he backed away. “I seen him first,” he whined.
“Deus lux mea!” boomed a voice that shook the walls of the alley.
The indigent flinched, then turned and fled, scattering a string of blasphemous oaths over his shoulder.
Softer now: “Dominus vobiscum.” A benediction: May the Lord be with you.
The enormous man who stood over me was garbed in a brown, homespun robe the size of a tent. A monk. Reaching down, he grabbed me by the collar and hauled me inside without the least hint of exertion. He slammed the gate shut (for now, in the light of his lantern, it was recognizably a wooden gate) and barred it with a thick beam. The gate spanned the gap between the stone footings of two sizable buildings. Outside, the hovels must have accumulated over the years, anchoring themselves to these solid structures for support, a throng of beggars hemming in a rich man. Above the gate, the space between the buildings was closed off by sections of wrought iron bars, rising beyond the bowl of illumination, far higher than the roofs of the dilapidated structures outside. Difficult, I remember thinking, but perhaps not impossible, for someone to scale.
The monk grabbed a long wooden pole and put the handle of the lantern into a notch in the pole’s end. He swung the lantern high onto a hook above the gate, so its illumination flooded both sides. Then he turned to me. “That way,” he growled, pointing with the pole to a darkened passage. He shoved me harder than the Black Friar had, and I staggered. “Father Paul will be waiting.”
“You rang the bell.”
“I didn’t. I mean, I did, but it was an accident.” I sat on a small stool in the middle of an austere room, the lone decoration a dust-grimed portrait of a long-dead Pope. I had to crane my neck to look up past the edge of the trestle table at the gaunt, old priest wearing a threadbare and stained cassock. The huge monk who had brought me here, the one who’d opened the gate, had spoken to the priest in tones too low for me to overhear. Then he had gone back outside.
“Call me Father. Or Father Paul. You weren’t looking for succour?”
They don’t know, I thought. They didn’t expect me. “I was brought here.” This much of the truth, at least, seemed unlikely to betray me.
“I see.” Father Paul steepled his hands. “Are you afraid, my son?”
“No.”
“You lie.” The priest said. “Lying i
s a sin.”
I stared at a sputtering candle embedded in a mountain of wax on the tabletop. The only other thing on the table was a vellum-bound Bible. At some time in the distant past, a finger of wax had crept down the candle holder, split at the corner of the Bible, and snaked its way along two sides of the bottom cover.
“Do you have a name?”
“Thomas,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. When he furrowed his brow, I added, “Father.”
He leaned back in his chair. “You lie again.”
I had told few lies relative to boys my own age. Most of those I did tell, I owned up to when the inevitable guilt wormed inside me. Confession was the only balm for my soul. I believed all the things the Church had taught me: in right and wrong, in good and evil. That God loved me and watched over me. But now, after witnessing the inexplicable torture and death of my father, and after my own mortifying sin of betrayal, a small lie didn’t seem so important. I vowed not to hesitate next time. The trick, I realized, would be to anticipate the lies I’d need.
“So. Thomas the doubter.”
“No, Father.”
“No what?”
“I . . . I believe, Father.” At least this wasn’t a lie.
“You say you were brought here, Thomas the believer.” Father Paul smiled wanly at his own joke, revealing yellowed teeth. “Might I ask by whom?”
“A . . . a man, Father.”
“What sort of man?”
“A cruel man, Father.” I immediately regretted what I’d said—what were the chances this priest would believe anything I might say about another cleric?
But Father Paul misunderstood. “The man Brother Finn chased away?”
I nodded, no hesitation this time.
The priest looked at me oddly, but didn’t accuse me of lying this time. “Was he your father?”
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