Black & Orange

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  “So evil-looking out there.”

  Martin sat on the bed, re-reading the Messenger’s latest letter. The black envelope lay in fragments at his side like a shattered crow. “What I don’t understand,” he said, scratching his jaw, “is why four this time? Don’t we have enough on our hands protecting one Heart of the Harvest? What the hell are they trying to prove?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever’s behind this sick game.”

  “I told you already. The Hearts on the list all have the same last name. They’re related.”

  “But only one person grows the fruit—just one—that’s how it’s always been. What the hell? We go out to Flagstaff, so we get less time for planning and, and, and,” Martin stammered, “and more people to look after now. Why doesn’t the Messenger step in and help? Doesn’t he know you’re sick?”

  Teresa wanted to slap Martin. She wondered if she did, if he’d stop bringing up the obvious. It was driving her nuts. She’d bitten her fingernails down to sorry nubs. One of them actually throbbed because the nail had been shorn down too far.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he demanded.

  “Sometimes I can really appreciate your age Martin. I can.”

  “I’m nearly forty years old. I’m no damned child and—”

  “No!” she snapped. “If the messenger needs us to protect four, ten, or a thousand Hearts, so be it! If one billion of Cloth’s children hatch this year, we have to deal with them and Cloth and the rest of the Church! Like grinning, grateful idiots we have to endure. As always Martin! Stop asking useless questions!”

  Teresa fell on the bed beside him and stared up at the moldy ceiling. Martin said nothing and after a moment she felt bad and playfully slapped his thigh. He didn’t respond to this though and she stopped. “When I was in fourth grade I used to help the lunch ladies in the cafeteria.”

  His head did not turn to her. “Yeah?”

  A coughing fit sneak-attacked. It sounded awful, like bones roiling in snot. She grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and wiped her mouth, steadied, tried to will away the next series. It worked after a minute.

  Martin turned now. “You okay?”

  She began to mindlessly fold the wet tissue into halves. “So I worked at the cafeteria in fifth grade and one of the lunch ladies had cancer. Lucky her. She came to school missing a breast. I didn’t even really have boobs yet, so I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to lose one, but I remember the woman’s face. It looked so distant, like she was missing more than just her breast—I never thought I’d understand that face. It was too old, too miserable and hopeless. But I understand now. You can be surrounded by a million people and still be absolutely lonely.” She paused. “Which is to say, I don’t want to go yet. I don’t want to leave you. But things happen.”

  Teresa wasn’t crying but she could feel tears dropping inside her mind. Martin took her hand and clutched it. He didn’t seem to care if it hurt her. Maybe the hurt would heal her, maintain her lifeforce. “I’ll keep you safe. If I can protect a Heart, I can protect you.”

  “You can’t do both.”

  “Don’t put a challenge out there, girlie.”

  “Chaplain Cloth is already in this world, Martin. That can only explain why we need to hide in this room. You were right. We shouldn’t have gone to my mother’s. Somehow, I think the church got a bead on us somewhere.”

  Martin was silent for a minute and softened his grip on her hand. “So what are we going to do?”

  “Follow the letter, go out tomorrow to see the Heart Bearer and then get back here, just like it says. We follow our orders, like always.”

  “In the meantime, we practice building?”

  “I’m as good at that as I’ll ever get,” she answered, then drew up her pant leg to a knotty scar from knee to ankle. It was puckered pink and red and looked like second degree burns had melted the perimeter. “Don’t want to get another of these to match last year’s. I would better use the time exercising these old legs. You can practice building mantles though. If you want.”

  “Maybe they have a workout room here.” His hopeful smile spread and it made her feel bad for ever losing her temper with him. “I should get my knee ready for the big day too.”

  She bit her lower lip and threw a soft play punch to his jaw. Martin brushed his fingertips over her cheek and to her lips. “I won’t let them through again. I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Our purpose is the Heart of the Harvest.”

  “Remember it’s plural this time,” he corrected. “Hearts. I’d like to say double trouble, but it’s really more like double-double trouble.”

  The next logical question about Cloth having the opportunity to harvest four this year made them mute. Teresa just hoped these four Hearts were faster than poor Tony Nguyen.

  Martin reached past his semi-auto and tapped on the power from the TV remote mounted on the nightstand. Teresa twisted off the lamp and the light bulb flickered and burnt out for good. The dingy room sunk into shadows, became blue-washed in the TV’s glow.

  She could tell how Martin sidled up to her that he wanted to make love, but he never asked anymore, possibly because of the malignant third party involved. Instead, she held him tight and they watched the news. The world wasn’t doing so well. Teresa wanted to care about the war and the hunger and the environment and the power-playing politicians, but she knew these were largely symptoms of a sickness trickling into the world every October. And they’d never be able to cure it completely.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Paul felt like he was going to throw up. He hadn’t had time to settle down with the rest of the church at the hotel. No shower. No lunch. With the marrow seeds sprouting through Paul’s lungs to other internals, with the panic of sitting next to a three hundred pound cuckold (Paul’s cock still filmy from Melissa’s hand-jive), and with the dizzy impression of meeting the Priestess of Morning tonight, he found no room left in his heart for a boogeyman.

  Chaplain Cloth had always just been a symbol to Paul, not an actuality. He knew that every big organization had its symbols, whether they were religious in nature or just emotive. Any story told about an October hunt featured Chaplain Cloth and Paul always took him as a metaphor for the Eternal Church, a united church—these were romantic, sentimental stories that anchored the weak-minded and helped grow the Church of Midnight through fear.

  But—Paul’s rationalizations were beginning to stretch too thin. As much as he wanted to continue to disbelieve the precepts of his affiliation, the matter remained. The seeds had changed him. Even the world moved differently. Paul saw things on another scale, his analog eyes switched digital. And not just his eyes... his soul felt high-definition and this change would be ongoing. He would continue past high-definition and into something better. Then a breath later, even his memories would be obsolete and he would charge forward into an unending state of improvement, and his mind would brim over—he would feel safe, for a moment—but then everything would splash down into a newer, better, larger mind, which was already conceiving another replacement that would outdo the rest.

  “You look like you’re about to shit a roll of barbwire,” Cole remarked. “You did well this morning with that girl. Are you still practicing those exercises?”

  “Trying,” Paul replied. The shutter to the Old Domain was still sealed in his mind. He felt the quartz in his pocket, but let it go, too nauseated.

  Cole swung the limo around a strangely configured intersection, half fork and half roundabout, and let a pickup truck go ahead of them. “You’re afraid of meeting Cloth, I take it?”

  I shouldn’t have made Melissa do that. It was overkill, thought Paul. But her crestfallen expression had been so priceless when I came up through her fist.

  “I’m not so afraid, just filthy, famished and worn-out.”

  “Good,” Cole put simply. His bandage had been removed and left behind a sour red crater in his jaw. It no longer bled. Now it j
ust looked like someone had taken out a flesh divot with a golf club. “There’s really no need to be frightened of Chaplain Cloth. He’s here for the Heart of the Harvest, not anything else.”

  “So he’s real. Is the Heart of the Harvest real?”

  Cole made a right down a residential street crowded with delineators and cones. He squinted at every street sign, trying to find his way.

  “So you don’t know either?” Paul prodded.

  Headlights glanced off the face busy with scars. The Bishop adjusted the tight band of his black tie and smoothed it down his worn Armani. He turned down several more streets. “The Heart of the Harvest nourishes Cloth’s children, which are pieces of the gateway born into this world. They are the only creatures able to interact and open the gateway, but they must gorge themselves on the Heart before expelling such power. The Heart grows inside a different vessel each year and it matures on the Day of Opening.”

  “Yeah, I know all that, but what happens when a Heart survives? I wasn’t in the Inner Circle yet, so I only know how success looks.”

  “After the 31st the fruit dies, the vessel’s body becomes just like any other mortal.”

  The words came out before Paul could stop himself. “What a load of shit.”

  “You may get to see it all happen, if you survive the Heralding.”

  That did not set Paul at ease. He told Cole to pull over and once the car came to a stop he popped open the door and proceeded to vomit into a rushing storm drain.

  Light pollution from Colton, San Bernardino, Rialto, and assorted neighboring cities cast a gross hue over the stars. It reminded Paul of when he mixed coke with milk as a kid. Out here in Reche Canyon though, one could probably see more stars than anywhere else, except the mountains maybe. Fuck the stars, thought Paul. Fuck this place. Fuck the idea behind all of this. It was for one woman? He questioned what had brought him to such lengths.

  The headlights cut through a cloud of dirt. The brown particles looked electrified for a moment, turned to silver silt, like they were under a lake. Paul just wanted to leave. His nerves couldn’t take this a second longer—

  Someone in black moved through the cloud and Paul shot up in alarm. His newly attuned awareness lighted from the marrow blossoms and suddenly his mind pushed forward.

  “How—? Don’t!” Cole barked. “Cloth will kill us, you asshole!”

  There was no stopping it now. Paul had sent something vicious outside of his mind to push Chaplain Cloth back into the Old Domain. Frantically Paul clawed at his seat belt. Couldn’t waste a moment, had to run—

  “Quintana!”

  Cole’s voice was a water molecule in a tsunami. Paul’s fingers dug at the buckle; his seatbelt came free and slapped the interior frame. Cole reached for his sleeve, but Paul already had the door open. He threw himself outside and felt the cold, dirty air squeeze his body. A vile taste gagged him. There was no way he was going to participate in this shit—there was no way. Run away. Run far. Get those heels kicking. Never look back. Forget the Priestess. She was just another whore like mother...

  Paul slid downhill into tumbleweeds, fighting and ripping up his hands unlatching the skeletal plants. The limo headlights lessened and now Cole ambled across a dismal watercolor painting of browns and yellows and grays.

  Gravel crunched to his left. Paul automatically sent out another push. This time he had no chance to feel anything cross over. Instead, the impulse returned, a two thousand pound fist that nudged him back. That was all it took. Paul lost footing and dropped.

  Sounds of Cole’s searching through the dust grew louder on the hill above. Paul wiggled around and found his feet. With nothing left he charged into the hazy white light. Cole reached out with disembodied arms and tried to grab him. Paul slipped away. He heard new shoes pounding the gravel. He almost pushed out with his mind again, but wasn’t able to control it and kept running.

  He darted out of the dust into the blue desert night. An arm stretched out, then a pearl white finger. Paul had seen this ahead, wanted to stop, to turn, escape. But he sent himself right into that finger and before it even had a chance to touch him, Paul went rigid and his nervous system exploded. A hiccup of stomach acid blasted into his mouth, his heart seized and guts twisted.

  Cole ran up. Apologies were already forming through the big man’s heavy breaths.

  “The new Bishop?” a silky voice asked.

  Cole took a second to answer, either from lack of breath or confusion. “Yes, but he didn’t—”

  “Very well,” answered Chaplain Cloth.

  Paul managed to open his eyes. Cloth had melted into the surrounding, but his eyes floated in the night, one burning bright orange like a small sun and the other so black it sucked in the darkness around it, making the night seem gray.

  “Come this way, brothers. I mustn’t leave the gateway unattended.”

  Cole tucked a hand under Paul’s underarm and hefted him to his feet.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” Cole grumbled in his ear. Louder, “What the fuck?”

  “He startled me,” Paul said. It sounded just as stupid to him as he imagined it did to Cole, but it was the truth.

  The men and the monster walked up the black hill to a looming grain silo. A giant mouth swelled in the silo’s side like a meaty abrasion. This was the first time Paul hadn’t felt the marrow blossoms since they were implanted. He had no doubt it was Cloth who had put them into hibernation. Now the blossoms were hiding. Paul would have hidden also had he the chance.

  Something, a lot of things, lived inside that silo. Gears turning; the calls of bats; tangled voices; songs of hounds. The smell from inside came and went on the breeze, maggots and Malto Meal. Chaplain Cloth had retreated inside the silo, into the mouth of the gateway. All they could really see now was a single smoldering orange eye.

  “I’m glad you came to visit. I have high hopes this year for the bounty.”

  Cole sat on a hay bale, his curly gray hair looking like a Spartan helmet in the drizzling moonlight. He lowered his head, and despite feeling silly, Paul followed.

  The malto-maggot scent peaked again and Paul’s empty stomach fluttered. He had to do something. He couldn’t just sit there after nearly attacking this thing. Paul tried to speak clearly, but it still came out as mumbles, “Can I ask something?”

  “Can you?”

  Paul was afraid this was a test, but carefully went on. “What will happen after the worlds come together?”

  Lips smacked in the shadows. “Normalcy. Most of this world has already been populated with broken spirits, tenderized for us—blindfolded, gagged, bound and dropped into ethereal quicksand without much corralling. Its defenses have been lowered, especially in this land. Walking contradictions. The human animal has a dead heart but celebrates love and brotherhood. Funny.” Chaplain Cloth purred at the last. The bat songs, the howling hounds, the muttering insanity from inside the silo calmed suddenly. “The Eternal Church will begin its rule on them soon.”

  “I’ve decided to have my own say in that rule, as it pertains to the Church of Midnight,” Cole said carefully.

  “Would you now?” The orange eye flared and its color outlined its black twin. Chaplain Cloth was quiet for some time. The rain’s force lessened to mist.

  “I just thought you’d like to know.”

  “Really?” The eyes twinkled merrily. “And why?”

  “When you learn what happened to Sandeus Pager, I want you to know it was me. I am more worthy than he. I will prove the Church’s greatness by sacrificing him for ineptitude and lack of passion to the call. And I—I’d like your blessing.”

  “I’m a Chaplain in the Eternal Church,” Cloth explained. “There is no need to ask a blessing from one beneath your station. Besides which, I don’t involve myself in mortal pettiness, you understand.”

  Cole looked away, embarrassed. “Certainly, Chaplain.”

  “Now, I would think it wise to go build your strength for the Heralding. And
take Bishop Quintana there. He smells like he needs a shower.”

  The black and orange eyes watched them leave. There was a smile in the darkness somewhere. Paul was sure of it.

  Cole slammed the car door and dropped his heavy body into the seat. A minute passed, with him searching around like a man on the verge of a breakdown. He drove a big fist into the radio and Paul shrunk back. “Motherfucking shit!”

  Cole pulled back his big arm again and let another punch smash into the sagging plastic components. One of his knuckles burst and he ripped his hand away. He made like he was about to punch the console again, but threw his head back against the headrest and took a deep breath.

  Paul found himself pressed against the passenger door. “Something the matter?”

  Cole palmed his jaw wound absently and then sucked at his bloody knuckles. “He knows Sandeus should not hold the position. That twisted fuck knows that!”

  “He doesn’t have a problem with it. Does having a blessing change anything?” asked Paul, warily.

  “It does for me. After performing the Heralding year after year, being invaluable in tracking the Nomads, lasting all this time, gaining so many scars, I imagined Cloth would find me worthy.”

  Paul relaxed a little. “Maybe Cloth knows you’ll be worthy only if you pull it off. That’s all that matters, Bishop.”

  Cole turned over the ignition. “Forget it. This was a waste coming here. We need to get back to hotel. Conclave will begin soon.”

  Paul fell back, heart still reeling. The limo shrugged left and right as they went onto the paved road. The lights from the city brightened the night. In the back of his mind, Paul heard Cloth’s children scratching at the shutter.

  He turned to find Cole looking at him. “What?” he asked.