Cleansing

by Roy A. Teel, Jr.

  Karen contorted her face and whispered to herself under her breath, “What the hell? Is Barbara here for the sleepover?” She moved quietly through the large formal dining room until she was near the service entrance to the kitchen. She could hear Barbara and Sara very clearly. Her face turned sheet white, not about the women but the conversation.

  “Thanks for coming over, Barb. I’ve got company, and I could use some help with a guest of the Eagle’s.” “No problem, Sara. Jim told me that it might be a long night. So what are you dealing with?” “I have no idea. The Eagle has a girl in one of the holding rooms. She’s somehow connected to the child killings, and he wants me to feed her. I wanted you to go out and chat with Karen because I have no idea what I’m going to be dealing with.” Barbara had taken a roll from a toaster oven that Sara had been using to heat Lisa Farmer’s meal.

  “So what’s the deal? Does the Eagle have a beat on the killers?” Sara was plating some pasta and sauce as Barb put the roll on the plate and covered it with a steel cover to keep the food hot. “I don’t know. He told me that this girl is involved, but to what extent I don’t know.” “How old?” “Seventeen.” “Jesus, Sara. The Eagle abducted a seventeen-year-old girl? Is he going to kill her?” Sara shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know…he told me that if she did have something to do with the killings directly she deserved the same penalty as an adult.” Barbara looked on and said, “I would like to tell you that I feel sorry for her, but if the girl was in anyway involved with the baby killings she deserves whatever justice the Eagle metes out.” Sara didn’t gesture one way or the other in response to Barbara’s comment. They walked back into the formal dining room headed for the living room when they saw a flash of white.

  Sara moved carefully with the tray of food in her hands into the formal living room. They heard a splash, and Barbara asked, “Is Karen in the pool?” Sara looked on and said, “It appears so now. I don’t think she’s been there the whole time though.” Barbara looked at Sara with a scared look on her face and asked, “Jesus Christ. Do you think she heard us?” Sara sat the tray of food down and walked out onto the deck.

  “What’cha doing?” Sara asked. “Swimming. What does it look like I’m doing?” Karen responded. “Barbara is here to hang out with us. Is that okay with you?” “It’s your house, Sara. The more the merrier. Hi Barbara!” Barbara walked into Karen’s line of sight and waved then took off her robe and jumped into the pool. “You two behave yourselves. I will be right back.” Sara walked off into the living room, and Barbara swam over to Karen and looked at her face.

  “How you doing, kid?” “Well, I have been working like a dog. Sara is a slave driver, but outside of that, I’m doing really well. How are you, Barbara? You look tired.” The two made small talk as they swam in Sara’s absence.

  Lisa Farmer was sitting Indian style on the couch in the holding room when she heard the lock on the door release and saw Sara walk in with a tray. “So, I’m finally getting to eat…is this going to be my last meal?” Sara put the food down on a coffee table in front of Lisa and sat down in a chair across from her. “That all depends on you, young lady. What do you know about the baby killings?” Lisa had just taken the lid off the food and steam from the fresh pasta was rising into the air and caught her in the face when Sara asked the question.

  “The baby killings? What baby killings?” Sara looked at Lisa hard then stood up and walked over to a white cabinet in the corner of the room. She placed her palm on the door, and it opened. Sara drew out a pair of latex gloves, a syringe, and a vial of clear liquid. She said nothing as she put on the gloves with her back to Lisa who was watching her every move. “What baby killings, ma’am? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sara pulled the cap off the needle on the end of the syringe and stuck it into the vial. “You weigh…ninety eight pounds?” Lisa looked on with a confused look on her face, “Yeah…why?” Sara put the cap back on the needle and turned around and said, “Stand up and raise your dress.” Lisa looked at Sara and said, “Not until you tell me what’s going on. What is that?” She was pointing to the syringe. “It will be the difference between life and death for you.”

  Lisa tried to run but tripped on the table and fell on her stomach. Sara pinned her down then injected the solution into her hip. Lisa let out a yelp, and Sara got up and walked back over to the cabinet and put the things away. She pulled out a small black device and put the needle into it, and there was a popping sound. She threw the syringe into a hazmat container and closed the cabinet. Lisa had gotten to her feet but was wobbly.

  “What did you inject me with?” Sara walked over and took a much more complacent Lisa by the shoulders and led her back to the couch and sat her down. “I gave you a truth serum, and in about ten minutes I’m going to ask you some questions.” Lisa’s eyelids were heavy, and she reached for her fork and missed. “You’re hungry?” Sara asked. Lisa nodded. Sara took the fork and began to feed her while the drug took effect.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “If they start mounting each

  other, I’m gonna lose it.”

  The house on Osborn Street in Northridge was snugged into the end of a small cul-de-sac. All the lights were out in the homes in this middle class suburb of Los Angeles. Charlotte Watson sat near the front window of a home she had inherited after the murder of her parents and three siblings some thirty years earlier. The house was left in trust under her stepfather’s name, and she was the sole living heir. She never took the house out of the trust or transferred it to her name.

  She got up and walked the rooms. She hadn’t been in the house since the night of the murders. She walked into a nursery where Ezra was asleep in a crib that had a blood-stained mattress. “I have worked hard to make sure this house has stayed exactly as it was the night my family went to be with the Lord,” she whispered into the crib to the sleeping child. “I remember it all like it was yesterday. They didn’t understand, Ezra…how strange that they didn’t understand. I was releasing them from their mortal coil, releasing them back to the Father. I tried to explain it to them, one by one, but they wouldn’t listen. They just begged and pleaded for their lives. What fools they were to hold on. I told them, ‘You are not of this world. I am freeing you.’ But Mother just cried and pleaded even after the second and third time I stabbed her. She finally fell silent with the thrust of my knife into her neck, and her blood pooled right over there in the corner.”

  Charlotte was staring off into a corner of the nursery where a huge stain remained, a remnant of the brutality that had been unleashed in the house. Her stare was cold and unflinching, and she thrust her hands forward as if reenacting the scene. “She was so foolish, Ezra, as was Stepfather. He had to be cleansed. He took me and ravished me. He had sinned against me, Mother, and the Lord. He had to die for his sins. I remember…”

  She smiled as she walked out of the room and into another bedroom next to the nursery. It was a master bedroom. All of the furniture was in place. The bed was unmade with blood spray on the walls and the mattress in an outline as if chalked off by investigators. There were no markings from police. She walked the room, touching the dresser and then the bed post. She was walking and talking as if in a trance.

  “Here is where you took me, Stepfather. Here is where you raped my body…and Mother allowed it, even encouraged it, night after night until the last. You lay on top of me thrusting your cock in and out of me, sweating and swearing. I can still smell the whiskey on your breath. I hid my blade under Mother’s pillow. You didn’t know she was dead in the room next door. No. You were too excited by the sex. ‘I’m fucking you, sin-free child,’ you said to me. You released my hands to flip me over, and I took my blade from under Mother’s pillow and slashed you across the throat.”

  Charlotte walked over to the head of the bed and placed her hands on the brown and white wall where arterial spray had flown from the violence of the slashing. “Your face…oh
the look of horror on your face was worth its weight in gold. I forgave you in that moment. I forgave you, and I released you from the sin that bound you and sent you back to the Father. I bathed in your blood and was cleansed of the treachery you had unleashed on me. Oh, Stepfather, I remember standing here holding your hair and pulling your head back. The gaping, gushing, in your neck, spraying your blood upon me. Feeling your blood striking my naked flesh. I forgave you and released you, and I was cleansed but only for a moment. The other three were asleep in their beds, and they had to be released as well.”

  She walked out of the bedroom to another. There were twin beds in the room. There were posters of rock bands and girls on the walls and ceilings. The two beds were stripped of linen, only bare mattresses were on their metal frames and both were stained with blood. Charlotte walked between them and stared down at the giant stain in the middle of the floor. Something had flowed down the sides of both mattresses and had pooled in the middle of the floor. Charlotte touched each and said, “Mother and Stepfather always told me, ‘Boys will be boys,’ when you two were raping me. You weren’t like Stepfather. You were my BROTHERS!”

  She screamed into the room, lifting her hands high in the air and falling to her knees where the blood had once pooled. She started to cry as she felt the dry stain on the carpet and the tears running down her face. She watched as one shining crystal drop after another fell from her eyes to the floor then stood up and said, “I should shed no tears over you two…I sent you to hell where you belong…I can see you writhing in hellfire, the demons tormenting your sorry ass souls.” She let out a loud laugh and walked back to the nursery where Ezra was still sleeping.

  She put her hand on the side of his face and stroked it ever so gently and said, “The youngest of them had to die, too. She didn’t make a sound as I drove my blade into her back. She lay as you do now, Ezra, in this very spot. The blood pooled around her, and I drank it, for it was the only innocent blood. I drank her blood and from it I received the final cleansing.”

  Her purse was on the changing table in the nursery, and she walked over and opened it and pulled out a ten-inch butcher knife. She walked over to the crib and stood over the sleeping child and said, “The police are still looking for this, Ezra.” Charlotte held the blade over the sleeping child, moving it back and forth, the glint of the light off the steel making light patterns on the walls and ceiling.

  “This knife killed the people in this house and sent them to the Lord for judgment. The police never found it. I have kept it and hidden it for these thirty plus years. I have not used it since that night, but that is about to change, isn’t it Ezra? Your blood will be poured on the altar as a burnt offering that will be pleasing to the Lord and to help make way for the final sacrifice to usher in the final days. Bruno told me so. He told me that what I did here was right, and that now I am fulfilling his prophecy that the blood of the innocent will bring forth the great and awful day of the Lord, where He will judge the quick and the dead. Oh, what a blessed day that will be.”

  Charlotte laid the knife on Ezra’s back and walked over to the bedroom window and looked out into the darkness of the back yard. “Yes, Ezra, you will be the second to last sacrifice to usher in the return of our Lord, and I will be raptured with the others to be with Him as He returns to cast judgment on this wicked, wicked world.” Charlotte let out a loud laugh and was lost in thought when she heard her cell phone jerking her back to reality.

  The parking lot of the church was empty but for two cars, Erick Sr.’s Mercedes and Jim’s unmarked car. The Eagle moved through the darkness until he was at the rear entrance to the sanctuary. He moved in silence into a dark hallway and stayed near the ground as he headed toward a faint light at the end of the long concrete hallway.

  Jim and Chris had taken a position in a small gallery that overlooked what must have been a classroom. Both Ericks sat at a table below them. Hess Stevens sat at the middle of the table, and there were about thirty people present in the room. Chris had pulled his weapon when the room began to fill, and Jim put his hand on his arm and put a finger to his lips and moved Chris’s arm and weapon to the floor. He whispered, “This is not our job right now.” Chris looked at Jim with bewilderment and whispered back as the room was filling, “Well, hell, then whose job is it?” Jim never answered him, and the two men watched and recorded the meeting.

  Arnest was sitting in his parked car a block from the church. He had just pulled up but was hesitant about entering. He had his cell phone on speaker when Charlotte answered. “Yes.” Charlotte’s voice was calm and cold. “Where are you? I have tried calling the house for an hour!” “I’m in a safe place with Ezra. I needed to come back to the source of my cleansing.” Arnest was furious. “Are you out of your damned mind? Jesus Christ, Charlotte. You’re wanted, and there’s a warrant for your arrest. How dare you move Ezra without consulting with me. Is the child okay?” “He’s fine, F. E. How has the meeting gone?” “I am at the church, but I haven’t been in yet.” “Why not…how will we get this sacrifice done and the great day of the Lord brought on to man without you in there?” “I’m going, I’m going. I’m just making sure that there’s no police. I got a call from my security company that the FBI raided my home, and if they raided my home then they know I have Ezra.”

  “Ah…but you don’t have Ezra. I have him. Now find out why the sacrifice for tonight has been canceled. Maria and Roberto have sent me a text that they will be leaving the hospital in the morning. They are also under police protection, but they are going to deliver Jesus to us for the final sacrifice when she is released. We must do things in order. If Bruno learns that we betrayed his orders and his prophecies, we shall surely die…and die badly.” Arnest heaved and said, “I will call you after the meeting. Don’t leave the house in Northridge. That’s where you are, right?” “Yes…and it has been a cathartic experience for me.”

  “Have you been back there since the killings?” There was a moment of silence, and Charlotte said, “Liberations, F. E., liberations. I freed the sinners from their captive bodies to be judged by the Lord. And no. This is my first time back here since that night. I even have the knife with me that I used for the liberations and my cleansing.” Arnest got an alarmed look on his face. “Charlotte, DO NOT HURT EZRA! It will be an abomination before the Lord if he is not sacrificed properly.” “I have no intention of harming one hair on his little head until I am instructed to do so. But his blood is going to wash away the last remnants of sin from all of us and make us pure, so that we may stand in the presence of the Lord.”

  “All of that is true, but if you break the cleansing covenant with the church and the Lord, you will taste death.” Charlotte was quiet for a while then said, “You have a meeting to get to, sir.” She hung up the phone, and Arnest opened the car door and stepped out into the hot summer air. He walked toward the sanctuary, the streetlights casting a long, bony shadow on the concrete. He placed his black derby hat on his head and walked silently inside.

  The Eagle had found his way into a small janitorial closet on the other side of the meeting room. The room had two doors, and he drew an amplifier from the pocket and pointed the device in the direction of the room. He plugged a small jumper wire from the amplifier into a small midi recorder and then plugged a pair of earbuds in. He could hear the conversation on the other side of the door perfectly.

  Hess was speaking when he saw Arnest enter at the far end of the room. He stopped and waited as he walked down the aisle to the front of the room, and as he did everyone in the room rose. He said nothing but walked up onto the small stage where he hugged Hess and kissed him on each cheek.

  Chris leaned over to Jim and asked, “Is this a cult meeting or a gay club?” Jim had to stifle a laugh and whispered back to Chris, “What you just witnessed was a holy kiss. It’s an ancient Christian greeting as was ordered by the apostle Paul in many of his epistles.” Chris shrugged and whispered, “Looks gay to
me. If they start mounting each other, I’m gonna lose it.” Jim smiled and looked back down as Hess moved out of the way and allowed Arnest to take the floor.

  “We have called you here tonight to deliver some devastatingly sad news but also to show a bright side.” Arnest turned to Erick Sr., who stood up and explained his situation to the gasping audience. Arnest looked at junior sitting next to his father and asked, “What is that traitor of a man doing in this room?” Erick said, “He is my son, and he will be taking over my church.” “It’s God’s church, and if the second coming of the Lord were not upon us I would cut him down here and now.” Jim and Chris looked at each other, and Jim whispered, “Well, I guess that confirms that junior had no idea what they were doing.” Chris nodded his head, and they continued to listen.

  Arnest’s bitterness towards junior was short lived, but he had to get at least one more jab in before speaking and said, “The sacrifices are almost complete. We have one child, and the second will be delivered soon. We shall build our altar in the Malibu hills and sacrifice the child tomorrow at midnight.” Jim and Chris looked on at junior who was seething. He stood up and said, “You have murdered innocent children, and you think that it’s acceptable to God? Have you all lost your minds? The only thing that awaits you is hell and the torments of Satan and his legions of demons.” Jim leaned toward Chris and said, “If they only knew how right junior down there is!” Chris was hanging on Erick’s words and shrugged at Jim’s comment.