The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  The echo of their footsteps suggested we were in a cavernous space. Warehouse? Underground parking garage?

  “An exponential equation. Joseph begat Joseph Jr., who begat Joseph the third. It’s strictly a numbers game. The more you have, the more you can afford to sacrifice.”

  We passed through a doorway. Dark, moist, hot. Gnashing tribal music. The pill was running roughshod over my nervous system. My extremities had gone numb, or nearly so: this sensation like a million ants tunnelling through the veins of my arms and legs. Rockwell set me down. The hood came off. My eyes adjusted. I was splayed out on a bed of plush pillows; ringing the pillows were chaises whose ergonomics seemed to suit an erotic agenda. The chaises were surrounded with people. None of them spoke a word. The silence was funereal.

  Swift knelt beside me and began to unbutton my shirt.

  “This is my clan.” His fingers worked through the sparse hair of my chest, cold as winter steel. “And while none of them are destined for this earth long enough to bear or raise anything that might be conceived tonight, I see no benefit in robbing them of that joy.”

  He unbuttoned my fly. Tugged down my trousers, my underwear.

  “Tonight we indulge the pleasure principle. Fuck and be fucked. All those things you’ve been told are immoral and sinful.”

  . . . the world phased out for a while and when it re-solidified a naked woman was sitting on my face. Couldn’t see her eyes with her thighs vised round my skull and my tongue buried inside her but she was moaning in a way that suggested I was doing something right so I ran my tongue over her wondrous geography until she gripped my head, steadied it as though it were a tool contrived for her pleasure and ground herself on my face, the knob of my chin, my nose.

  She whimpered, kittenish mews and said: “Do you like this?” and while none of it seemed to be designed with my enjoyment in mind, I mumbled the affirmative.

  An anonymous mouth fastened over my penis—oh!—taking it down to the root and I grunted, my abdominals constricting and I would’ve sat bolt-upright if not for this implacable woman on my face. The faceless mouth was fiercely talented, a sacred whore’s mouth, coaxing me toward climax while another stranger mashed herself over the busted contours of my face.

  My orgasm was so head-splittingly intense it felt as though a solid rope was being sucked out of me and for a panicky drug-fused moment I feared the lion’s share of my small intestines had been hoovered out through my urethra. The woman slipped off my face, slithered off to join another snaking ball of limbs and mouths. A voice came, hot and close in my ear.

  “Better for one man to perish than a whole society to dwindle in disbelief. . . .”

  I turned to see the Immaculate Mother wearing only a slattern’s grin, body of no more substance than a wet rag hung on a hook. Her fingers skeletal, icy, breasts a pair of speckled coin purses hung off her chest and her face a macabre travesty.

  “I fucked the little astronaut.” She rubbed against me, her eyes fixed on some indeterminate point. “Fucked that tiny bastard and loved it.”

  For the first time that night, the first in a long while, real terror stole into my heart. She was the embodiment of our values and to see her opiated and horny and so tragically human . . . Christ, the veneer was gone.

  “You’re . . . you’re my daughter’s friend,” she said, staring at me.

  She began to cry, or at least was trying to, face contorting but no tears coming. . . .

  “. . . and everything you’ve ever been told is a lie. All your gods are dead.”

  Swift’s voice addressing all of us. Everything you’ve ever been told is a lie. All your gods are dead. Perhaps this was so.

  The blackness burst into sudden incandescence. That effigy of The Prophet had been soaked in lamp oil and set alight. It burned in the centre of the room, a solid cone of flame licking to the rafters. The Prophet’s face pocked and bubbled, fire eating his head as that socketed meat grilled down to char.

  Everybody cheered. The Immaculate Mother loudest of all.

  Mom Again

  “I want to tell you that the greatest freedom you can enjoy is obedience.”

  I jerked awake and my first thought was: I’ve been buried alive.

  I was in a box. A black-walled box. A casket.

  Except I was sitting up, the casket reeked of urine, and a buzzing picture screen hovered at eye-level. The Prophet’s face lit up that screen.

  “Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.”

  I was in a Daily Benediction Booth.

  The screen faded to black on The Prophet’s blankly smiling face. The auto-unlock mechanism hissed. I staggered out onto the street. The sun, stabbing my eyes like cocktail swords. The street was deserted. I wasn’t far from where I’d left the prowl car.

  I slumped behind the wheel. My skull felt like it was packed full of sawdust and millipedes, ladybugs, and other insects were crawling through it. I felt around my right side, hissing when my fingers brushed over a series of shallow but surprisingly painful punctures below my ribs. Nail gouges?

  Faces flooded back: Swift and his gargantuan henchman, the Immaculate Mother, The Prophet burning in darkness. Angela? No, she hadn’t been there.

  I drove back to the motel. No doubt Swift was behind the bombings. The clues were abundant. Jeremiah’s photo on the milk carton. Tibor Goldberg’s description fingering Porter Rockwell for the tractor-trailer massacre. They had kidnapped the Immaculate Mother.

  One questions: Why was I still alive?

  After picking up Bird and Frog from the motel, I drove to my apartment. I fed them, changed the newspaper in Bird’s cage, and stripped for a shower.

  In the bathroom mirror I saw that five words had been written on my chest in candy-apple red lipstick. The first two words were a name:

  CALEB MURPHY

  The final three were either an entreaty or a warning:

  VISIT YOUR MOTHER

  Raphael’s Roost.

  Upon establishing my credentials at the front desk, electric locks buzzed to admit me into the ward. Gaily painted signs read THOSE WHO GO ALONG SHALL SURELY GET ALONG and THE PROPHET BELIEVES IN YOU.

  The rooms lacked doors, lacked privacy. Patients/inmates/victims were laid out under thin sheets that couldn’t hide their coma-shrunken bodies or stained skin where the feeding tubes were plugged in. Madrigals played on a constant loop. The dayroom existed in a state of suspended inertia. Residents dressed in pajamas or bathrobes tried to find their way out of the catatonic fog. Identical gaps in everyone’s hairline where the old incision scars lay.

  My mother sat in a folding chair before a garish mural of the Last Supper, to which The Prophet and Immaculate Mother had been added. Cherub magnets were affixed to the metal-backed mural; staff members moved the cherubs around daily and inmates were awarded prizes—hair barrettes, Fruit Roll-Ups—if they were able to spot all the little angels in their fresh configuration.

  A male nurse’s aide sat with my mother. Mom’s eyes were downcast: either she was bored or had slipped off to sleep.

  The aide smiled sunnily and said: “Is this your mother?” When I affirmed it was, he went on: “Why, she has such beautiful eyes. She should raise them to the Lord more often.”

  The urge to strangle him—perhaps using the quartz rosary strung round his neck as a garrotte—was remarkably strong. I requested he leave us be. I touched Mom’s elbow. She stirred, glanced up, smiled broadly.

  “Jonah.”

  Mom had been given The Cure—a method of surgical rehabilitation and a social control measure implemented not long after the Republic was founded. There were four stages of Cure. In stages one through three, brain tissue was excised based on the level of corruption, leaving criminals docile and pious. Stage fours were nicknamed “drool factories,” as this was the sum total of what they produced.

  My mother was a
stage two. The surgeon who’d performed the operation said her IQ would be that of an eight-year-old the rest of her life. I had been nine at the time of her operation, which amused the surgeon and caused him to remark, “I bet you’ve always wanted to be smarter than your mother, haven’t you?”

  She said, “Your face . . .”

  I must’ve looked a fright with my missing teeth and clown scars. She cupped my cheek. Her fingers were terribly warm and I wondered why.

  “I’m alright,” I assured her. “It was a . . . cooking accident.”

  The Cure had given her some of her old beauty back. During the rise of the Republic her face had become strained and pinched, windowing her anxiety. Now that tension was gone, along with every other adult concern; worry lines smoothed out, her face serene as a pool of water.

  She enjoyed the diversions an eternal eight-year-old would take natural pleasure in: animal crackers and drawing ponies and the arrangement of cherub magnets on a mural. The uncomplicated, unquestioning love of the Lord.

  “You look nice, Mom.”

  “Oh.” Her hand went to her hair, touching the barrettes an aide had pinned above her temples. “Th-th-thank you so much.”

  I remembered what Doe said about certain things existing beyond humankind’s capacity to destroy. In that instant I wanted to grab her, grab Bird and Frog and flee this city. The idiocy of this notion crashed down: a man and a bird and frog and a woman with the intellect of a child—flee where, exactly? We’d all be dead before the first snowfall.

  Mom knitted her fingers together and went, “Here’s the church . . .”—tenting her forefingers—“. . . here’s the steeple . . .”—thumbs lowering like a drawbridge—“. . . open up the doors . . .”—curling her wrists, upturned fingers waggling—“. . . and there’s all the people.”

  She smiled as if she’d shown me a new trick. In truth, she’d first shown me this trick when I was three years old and now showed it to me each time I visited.

  “That’s great, Mom.”

  “Now you do it.”

  When I returned to the prowl car its passenger side window was smashed. I flicked pebbles of Saf-T-Glas off the seat, not caring, and drove home. I opened the apartment door in time to see Frog—who’d somehow managed to worm under the aquarium screen—performing an awkward Fosbury Flop out of the aquarium.

  “You little turd!”

  The frog nearly made it under the refrigerator before I nabbed it. I plucked dust bunnies off its tacky skin and dropped it back in the tank. The phone rang.

  “It’s Hollis, my son.” He sounded like a kicked dog. “You’re to come in tomorrow morning. The unit’s reassembling.”

  “Someone got a lead?”

  “Leads, no. More a shifting of command.”

  “Exeter’s been sacked?”

  “Of a manner, yes. Temporarily relieved of his duties.”

  “By who?”

  “The Quints, lad. They’ve been harkened.”

  The line crackled. Hollis breathed deeply, as though the simple act of voicing their name had robbed him of breath.

  The Quints. Heaven’s own bagmen.

  Amira and the Quints

  The next morning I found a girl asleep in my prowl car.

  She lay across the back seat on a cushion of flattened cardboard boxes. Barely teenaged: thirteen, fourteen. Greasy hair, face streaked with grime, a parka that should be burned in the interest of public health.

  She was a heathen. An Arab. And she was awake, watching me.

  I sat in the front seat and craned my neck so I could look at her. “What are you doing?”

  She said nothing, curling her knees into her chest and peeking at me over the tops of her kneecaps.

  “What’s your name?”

  Still nothing. Had her parents died in the Soul Glow plant bombing? If so, she must have been on the street for a while.

  “If you’re not going to give me your name I’ll make one up for you. You want that?” No reply. “Fine. Your name is . . . Gertrude. Do you know what I am, Gertrude? A police officer. If you stay back there I’ll drive to my work and put you in a cell.”

  She spoke her first word. “Amira.”

  “Is that your name?”

  She cocked her head, a gesture that said maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

  “Amira,” I said. “Arabic for princess, isn’t it? Your highness, may I be so bold to say you need a bath?”

  She nuzzled her head into her armpit, sniffed, and offered me a quizzical look. I thought about it a good minute or more. Why not? What did it really matter now?

  I got out and opened the back door. “Come on.”

  I took her upstairs to my apartment. I gave her the discount tour: the shower, kettle, cupboard with the bag of instant oatmeal. Was I really going to leave a heathen waif alone in my apartment?

  “You can shower and eat,” I told her. “The door’ll lock behind itself. Steal or wreck anything and I’ll find you. And don’t touch my bird or frog. They’re delicate.”

  Wind roared through the prowl car’s busted window as I lead-footed it to the stationhouse. In the precinct lot sat a quartet of menacing cars. Buick Roadmasters. Detroit rolling iron, they used to call such cars, back when there was a Detroit. Their battleship-grey panelling was scored with bullet scars. Sharpened metal spikes jutted from their grilles to increase their predatorial aspect.

  The Muster room was sparsely occupied. I didn’t see Doe. My late arrival went unnoticed. All attention was riveted on the four identical men sitting next to Exeter, who looked visibly nervous behind the lectern.

  The Quints existed in the same category as The One Child and New Nazareth’s beatified Seraphim Sisters: true miracles. Their genealogy was an abiding myth: separate trains of conjecture had it they were born under a blessed or cursed star; their parents had been occultists or atheists or the most devout Followers ever to tread God’s creation; their father either spent five years in a garret communing with the Lord or five years in prison on a pedophile beef; their mother was either a living saint or a filthy whore who’d earned the street name of Smooth Bones. Some conspiracy-minded Followers believed their parentage to be a melding of science and the Divine: DNA scraped off the spear lodged in Christ’s side cultivated in a petri dish and married to the egg of a virgin to create perfect clones. The Savior split into five equal portions and returned to earth in a test tube.

  The Quints’ formative years were not so much different than The One Child’s: they were paraded about during New Jericho’s Stadium SuperChurch services, symbols of the Lord’s sacred machinations. But aspects of their personalities soon presented themselves. Some accounts claimed they’d bound their nanny to the cellar door and urged their pet cats to chew off little bits of her face. The generally held and far less gruesome assumption was that the Republic recognized their practical value: less as emblems of God’s love and more as enforcers of it.

  The Quints had vanished shortly after their tenth birthday. A full decade passed before they had re-emerged into the public eye. The only remaining “before” photo of the Quints had been taken prior to their disappearance: ten years old, dressed in choirboy outfits, sandy hair buttonhooked with a cowlick, all smiling the same toothy, carnivorous smile. The single “after” photo had run in every Republic newspaper: the Quints standing before the grey facade of a nameless Republican complex, still identical but nothing childlike remaining in them—you got the sense you were looking at the result of a human tempering process, five children heated in a forge, rolled out, heated again and taken out glowing, hammered and honed and sheathed for future use. They had been rendered elemental of purpose. Tools. Sharp and glittering.

  Not quite human. This was the how the Quints were described by those forced to interact with them. Some critical facet of their humanity, judged injurious to future endeavors, had been burned
out of them.

  And indeed, lounging next to Exeter with long limbs dangling, the Quints did look somewhat less than human. Lean of body—whippet-like, the word that sprang to mind—with limbs that tapered, thick where they met their torsos but turning leaner, bonier, toward the extremities: arms and legs like honeycomb candles. They wore woolen stovepipe trousers, Kevlar vests over black tees, albino calfskin dusters so white you could see the tracery of blue veins shadowing the uncured leather. The shade suited the Quints, whose skin was so shockingly pale nobody could be blamed for the assumption they’d spent the last decade denied access to sunlight. Hair delicate as spider threads spilled over their duster collars. Prematurely balding at the same pace: four widow’s peaks sliced back from their foreheads in equilateral Vs.

  There were only two ways to tell them apart. The first was the pattern of scars hacked into their flesh. Each bore traces of brutal wounds on their necks and faces and hands and, I suspected, parts of their bodies hidden under clothes. The plainer identifiers were the three-inch numbers tattooed on their necks: 1, 2, 4, 5 respectively.

  So far as I knew, the Quints were nameless—or not quite, as their names were numbers: Quints One through Five.

  What was most remarkable this morning was their number: only four. Number Three was missing. AWOL? Unlikely. Dead? Considering their reputation, this seemed equally unlikely.

  I slid into a chair as Exeter went on:

  “. . . Operation of the precinct will be remanded into the care of these gentlemen here.” Exeter nodded at the Quints. “We plan to throw our full support behind their designs to stem the issues currently disrupting the long-held serenity of our city.”

  Hollis sat on the opposite side of the lectern. He looked utterly exhausted: skin drooping on his neck like a tube sock round a skinny shank. Every man in the muster room looked much the same. A lot of sleepless nights were carved into their faces.

  “Now, these gentlemen have just arrived, so I haven’t had an opportunity to speak to them about coordinating efforts—”