by Willow Rose
She laughed and screamed and ran out of the room. “Try to catch me if you can.”
Giovanni called a little later when we were in the middle of a big puzzle on the floor. All three of us were heavily concentrating on the project.
“You were gone when I woke up,” he said with a gentle voice.
”I know, I’m sorry.”
”No note or anything? That was brutal.”
”I know. Sorry. I just needed to get back to my daughter.”
“I understand. I just never had a woman sneak out on me before.”
I laughed. “Well, there’s a first for everything.”
“It’s quite intriguing I must say. It makes you mysterious and hard to get. I like that.”
I laughed again. “I’m glad you do. ‘Cause I really had a nice time last night.”
“Me too. Let’s do it again, then?”
“Let’s do that.”
Chapter Nineteen
Pastor Bertel Due-Lauritzen was a holy man. He knew God and had a personal relationship with him. Everything he did was directed by the Lord himself. At least that is was he told himself when he hung up his collar at the end of the day. The kids in the juvenile detention center where he worked called him the Bishop which he didn’t mind too much since he knew all are created equal in God’s eyes. And like a bishop, he worked for God. He was there to tell the juvenile criminals about God, that there was a way out for them and his name is Jesus. It wasn’t too late for them to change.
In the very beginning when he first came to the detention center, he had been very patient with the youngsters. Since it was a prison, he had made what he called a confessional chair in the prison church even though he wasn’t Catholic. But he found it useful for the kids to be able to talk to him anonymously about what they had done. What he didn’t tell them was that he would always know who it was on the other side of the curtain he had put up.
When they came to confess their sins, he would nod and ask them to repent and ask for forgiveness and then they would be off to do more damage. But they seemed to keep on getting themselves into trouble. Again and again he had to ask for God's forgiveness in their lives, but nothing seemed to change. And he had a difficult time coping with the teasing behind his back. They would laugh at him when he gave them a Bible to read or when he would give them a Bible quote he thought might get them through the day.
“Remember you are all children of God. He will forgive you and love you if you ask him to,” he would say. But they wouldn’t listen. No one would.
He had given up on his old lifestyle. He had to. Give up his rich and wild life where everything was possible. Where the cars were big and the boats even bigger. After boarding school, he told his parents he didn’t want to work for their company. He didn’t want to end up like them. He told them he was gay and wanted them to accept it.
They had slammed the door right in his face. Called him a disgusting faggot and told him they never wanted to see him again. He was no longer their son.
After that he had to get by without his parent’s money for the first time in his life. He found love and helping hands at the gay bars of Copenhagen. Men brought him home and gave him money to have sex with them and sometimes he even got to spend the night. He lived on the streets, selling his body to whoever wanted it, eating only whenever one of his clients was kind enough to buy him something at a bakery or a hotdog stand. And he thought he had deserved that life. He loathed himself. He hated that his sexuality had brought him into this mess. Why couldn’t he just have oppressed it? Why did he have to blurt it all out in front of his parents?
One day he had sex in an alley with a man who turned out to be a priest. He proved to be a really nice guy and they started talking afterwards. He told him he had known ever since he was a kid that he liked men. But he had learned not to express his sexuality in public.
“As a priest, no one would ever ask you why you don’t have a wife and kids,” he said. That gave Bertel an idea. Not only could he hide his ugly disgusting, impure thoughts from the world, maybe he would also be able to help someone else out of their miserable lives. Maybe even young kids who needed to be saved, as he had needed it, when God came along in form of a priest.
After getting an education, with a little help from his friend from the alley, he got a job working at the juvenile detention. But very soon he realized he didn’t make much difference in their lives. He reached out to them but they didn’t change. God didn’t work in them and make them better. So he went to his altar and prayed about it.
“Why won’t they change, God?” he asked. “Why do they keep laughing at me? Why won’t they listen to your words?”
And he had gotten his answer. In God’s own words. “So if your eye—even your good eye—causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your hand—even your stronger hand—causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.”
Jesus had said it like that. So it had to be, then.
Pastor Bertel had then gone to one of the kids in the middle of the night and put acid in both of his eyes. Of course, he had sedated the kid first. He wasn’t a monster. And then he had left him there for someone else to find. No one ever knew how it happened but the kid never looked at a woman with lust again. And he never raped anyone again.
That’s how he began his real work for God.
Sometimes he would just teach the kids a lesson by beating them senseless and threatening them with death if they told anyone, and sometimes he had to go to more extreme methods in order to reach the youngsters. Sometimes he had to castrate someone to keep him from raping.
After a while, it had become even better than back at the boarding school when he and his friends used to beat other kids up, because this wasn’t meaningless. This was to make someone’s life better; this was working for God. And in the end, when it was all over, all that would matter was what he had done for him during his time on earth.
Chapter Twenty
Pastor Bertel Due-Lauritzen had just ended his ten o’clock Sunday service As usual, he would tell the juvenile criminals to come to the confession chair afterwards and tell him their sins. Now he was sitting in his chair waiting for someone to show up on the other side of the curtain. He waited for a long time, but knew nothing would happen. Pastor Bertel sighed deeply. It was always the same.
In the calm of the prison church that day in February he thought about the summers of years past. The smell of the sea, the laughter, sailing in the open water with his friends, the look on Bjorn’s face just before he jumped with the other boys in the water naked. Sitting on the deck wanting to kiss Bjorn and touch his soft skin. The lost desires in the light summer night. The unfulfilled longings. The torture of being so close to someone you love and not being able to express your emotions. Because he knew they would have resented him for it. They would have hated him if they knew how he felt.
And Bjorn would have been the worst. He would have hated Bertel more than any. Bjorn always was the strongest among them. He was the one with all the ideas. He came up with the Freddy Krueger rape. He even made that glove himself. He could do stuff like that.
Bjorn wasn’t quite like the average boy on the boarding school. He wasn’t rich and he could make things with his hands. If they ever were deserted on a desert island he would have been the only survivor. Not because he could have build a hut or caught food, but because he would have killed the others and eaten them. He was like that. He was a beast. The evilest among them. And Bertel had loved him. He had loved his strong muscular arms and his beautiful strong face. He had even loved the beast inside of him.
And then Bjorn killed himself.
A few months after their graduation he jumped off a bridge and was hit by a train. Bertel could never understand why he would do such a thing. It was incomprehensible. He had cried for days when he heard it. That was when he had decided to tell his parents the
truth about himself. He couldn’t hide it any longer. At least that is what he thought.
Boy, had he been young and naïve.
Bertel touched the rough fabric on the armchair and thought about the few times he would reach out and touch the skin on Bjorn’s arm without him knowing why.
Suddenly, he felt the solitude was broken, that he was not alone in the church. A light step, almost noiseless moving across the floor. Then calm, regular breathing behind the curtain. Pastor Bertel waited for the person behind the curtain to be ready. He looked under the curtain and saw the shoes, as he would always do. He would memorize anything he could about them. Their color and shape or even brand. Then he would later find them in the dining hall and know the face of the owner. But these shoes were different than the ones he normally saw under the heavy red curtain. Mostly the youngsters wore sneakers or Converse. But these were shoes like the ones Bertel would wear. Like a man of his own age would wear.
Bertel smelled the perfume of clean skin mixed with good cologne. And all of a sudden he recognized the smell. That exact cologne that only his long lost love would wear.. Bertel widened his eyes at the sound of the song long forgotten.
“Five, six, grab your crucifix …”
“Who are you?”
A moment of silence, and then the man answered in a deep resonant voice. “Does it matter?”
“Yes it does.”
“Who I am is of no importance.”
“Then what is important?”
“Why I am here.”
Pastor Bertel felt his throat constrict. The feeling of suffocation overwhelmed him. “I have read about you in the paper. You killed Didrik and Henrik. I figured you would come for me too. In a way I have been waiting for you.”
Bertel had an urge to get up and pull away the curtain to see his perpetrator’s face. But something kept him from doing it. Some force bigger than himself forced him to stay in his chair. The same force that the boys in the juvenile prison had come to know after the nightly visits with the prison’s pastor. The same force that would keep them awake night after night staring anxiously at the door to their cell. Afraid that it would open and they would once again lose a finger, an ear, be blinded, or even castrated.
It was fear.
“I suppose there’s nothing I can do or say to make you change your mind?”
“You suppose right.”
“So it is over?”
A long motionless silence. For an instant the pastor in the armchair thought the man behind the curtain was gone.
“Can I please at least see your face?”
Another silence from his perpetrator before the sound of the curtain being pulled aside filled the air. A face appeared on the other side. The glove from his past was pointing right at him. The pastor wasn’t afraid any longer. But he was indeed surprised.
“So it is you?”
“Yes.”
“But why? Why now after all these years?”
“Because your time is up. The game is over.”
The pastor was content with the answer. He had always known that the past that he had too long been running from, would one day catch up with him.
And this was it. His time was up. After all he was a priest. He wasn’t frightened by the end, only by the pain.
“Will I suffer?”
“Yes.”
End of Excerpt
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