The Church of Broken Pieces

by David Haynes

And horny.

  Especially when they dropped onto their knees and prayed. Now that was something else. Man or woman, when they’re down there like that, he could do just about anything to them. They think they’re at God’s mercy, whoever that is, but they’re not. They’re at his mercy and that’s far more powerful than any whimsical character from a storybook.

  He turned around the side of the church toward his house. One of the stipulations of him taking the position was that he live on-site. Big deal. There were other conditions too, lots of them, but they were easy to manage. He opened the door, conscious that his cock was pressing hard against his underwear. It was the thought of all those people lined up on their knees in front of him, their eyes looking to him for help. For guidance.

  He flicked the light switch and dropped his keys on the console. Courtney kept him in food, she catered for him on a weekly basis. Stocking up his freezer with delicacies like meatloaf, turkey dinners, pot pies and macaroni cheese. All his favorite things. Not because she wanted to, not out of the goodness of her blessed heart, but because he paid her for it. And paid her well.

  Now there was a damaged girl. One miserable bitch. The girl was smothered in a despair so deep and rich it made her homemade BBQ sauce look like river water. He thought he might love her for it. Not the sauce, although that was pretty damn good, no, it was that constant state of melancholy she dressed herself in day after day; a coat of dashed dreams. That’s what made her so alluring. Her dirtiness.

  The first time he saw the cigarette burns on her arms, it told him all he needed to know about Miss Courtney Douglas.

  He pulled a plastic tub with ‘meatloaf’ scrawled on the lid out of the freezer. Watching those two big-city attorneys eat had made him hungry. He hadn’t felt quite so hungry in a while. But he hadn’t watched them eat to make himself hungry. He’d done it for the same reason as he had told them about Fat Phil Moody drinking his beer. It was a display of power. Of knowing.

  The food thing made at least one of them feel uncomfortable, he’d enjoyed that. And telling them about Fat Phil’s beer-drinking habits made them wonder. It made them ask themselves why a man would tell them that if not to let them know he was the man. If not in name, in position. Subtle but effective.

  He dinged the meatloaf in the microwave, pulled a beer out of the fridge and sat down at the table. He would allow himself two bottles tonight. Tomorrow wasn’t going to be a taxing day, not like today had been. Hamilton hadn’t liked it when Sheriff Taylor asked him to sit in with them to discuss Thomas Newsome’s death. She hadn’t liked it one bit and had actually argued with Taylor in front of him. He didn’t mind that, he knew how she felt about him and his gang of visitors. Until Sheriff Taylor knocked on the door and asked him to come up to the hospice, he hadn’t even known about Thomas Newsome’s suicide.

  He’d been pretty bored while they discussed the case. Watching the Sheriff take notes, Cavendish had worked out that at the moment Thomas Newsome stuck the shard of glass into his eye, he’d been masturbating while sitting in the front pew of the chapel.

  It almost bought a smile but the context was wrong. You couldn’t be a man of the cloth and make happy faces at a moment like that. It was good that Sheriff Taylor wanted him there, though. It reinforced the notion that Hal Cavendish was a community leader and the community needed him at a time like that. He couldn’t give two shits what the community needed. It was power, and power was all that mattered.

  He pointed the remote at the TV and switched it on. He had a state of the art satellite dish out back. All paid for by donations and the organization, of course. Even the subscription channels came free of charge to Rev Hal Cavendish. The channel he had been watching last night didn’t come back on air until 10pm. A scantily-clad doll of a woman told him that over and over again. He watched her for a moment, marveling at the pert nature of her enormous, and most certainly false, breasts. He would come back to that channel later. That or one of the other channels dedicated to flesh. He clicked down through the European news stations, the foreign language movies and the sports. He was after the local community channel. He knew the number of the remote but he loved to surf the channels; catching less than a second of each felt marvelously decadent, dismissive. Powerful.

  The community channel belonged to the Church of Broken Pieces. More or less. That’s what he believed anyway. Once a month he would receive an email from his employers telling him a film crew were on the way to make a new recording, and could he prepare something for broadcast. It was an excuse for a new suit as far as he was concerned and the few hours it took to make the broadcast were easy.

  The one he watched now was the most recent. He was standing in front of a large group of... well, they were paid-for extras, he assumed. They came on a bus with the film crew, the same bus they used to haul in the visitors three times a week. The Church of Broken Pieces’ own congregation was nil, unable to support the number of patients – or were they corpses? – at the hospice, so they were simply piped in. ‘The Deliverers’ was what the boss called them.

  Some of the same faces were on the supporting cast for his broadcast too. Smiling, cheerful individuals who were sickeningly polite and always helpful. That was why they were there, no doubt.

  The microwave pinged but he kept his eyes fixed on the screen.

  “I am Reverend Hal Cavendish of the Church of Broken Pieces up here in beautiful Hemlock Mill and I want to help you.”

  As he watched himself, he was pleased at how earnest he looked. Earnest, young and handsome.

  “That’s right. I want to help YOU!” It hadn’t been in the script but he pointed down the lens with his forefinger. It was a bit like the Uncle Sam WW1 poster. ‘I Want YOU For US Army’ Without the top hat, of course.

  The throng behind him swayed and hummed some awful tune he couldn’t remember the name of. And then the camera faded to the church, and his words were given gravitas by images of the dead and dying in the hospice. He’d never understood why they didn’t have a banner requesting donations running under the broadcast, but that was their decision. Maybe they thought it was tasteless, vulgar. In his view it was no more crude than building a church and a hospice across the street from each other.

  He stood up and fetched his dinner from the microwave. It had been a long time since he shared a meal with someone, even longer with someone he actually liked. It was probably back in his days in the Thundering Third, Kilo Company. He hadn’t been Reverend Cavendish then. He’d been Corporal Harold Cavendish and he was proud to be one of the ‘Balls of the Corps’.

  Fallujah, now that was a place filled to the brim with wretchedness. Actually it wasn’t filled to the brim, it was overflowing. Torment crawled over the edge like a slug on a plant pot, looking for something juicy to slide over, enfold in slime; maybe even something to sink those tiny spiky teeth into.

  Cavendish shuddered, his appetite waning. Sometimes he wondered if it were true. If all he’d seen and done over there had actually happened and was not some elaborate ploy by his mind to tease him. But the images he saw when he closed his eyes were too real, too rich to be anything other than fact. His mind wasn’t his enemy so why should it lie? It wouldn’t, that was the truth.

  Demons walked through battlefields. Not the flighty fancy ones from movies or books, not even the fellows from the greatest work of fiction ever written – the Bible. No, these demons were real and they walked through battlefields like they were stepping through a meadow of summer flowers; skipping over the smashed ruins of humanity with a Gene Kelly lightness of foot.

  He’d seen them. He’d watched them. Untouched, unscarred, ambivalent to the perverted nature of man, their tongues lapping at the mists of blood discharged into the air by rifles and bullets. They were everywhere. And he envied them.

  He wasn’t a devil. At least he wasn’t the Devil, but Reverend Hal Cavendish thought he might be a demon. Not like one of the battlefield hellions; something less obvious, something sneaky and hidden. Dece
ptive.

  He believed there were parts of his brain that had been altered by his time in the Marines, specifically his time in Iraq. He didn’t think he’d been brainwashed by the military but in sending him to that place, they had opened up another area in brain, a part that he at first thought was rotten; a festering pit of the worst thoughts imaginable. He didn’t think of it that way now.

  “Balls of the Corps!” he shouted and then laughed.

  He stuffed a mouthful of meatloaf into his mouth and changed the channel back to Flesh 69. Satan was often referred to as The Great Deceiver and while his own deception was small-fry in comparison, it wasn’t insignificant.

  Here he was, reverend of his own church, administering to the needs of the community and the hospice, all in the name of God. All the while, despising God and everything He stood for. Although of late he had begun to wonder if God existed at all. He hoped He did because without Him, he would have nothing to hate. He sipped his beer. It was an interesting situation to find himself in. One he couldn’t have predicted. Especially when they discharged him from the Marines for doing only what they had taught him to do. Kill.

  Of course some of the ‘kills’ weren’t exactly sanctioned by the authorities, the circumstances at least. But there was very little difference, in his mind, in shooting a man fifty yards away or using your knife to cut his head off. Death was death was death.

  Anyway, all that was over now. Finished. He was a man of the cloth. A community leader and bringer of peace to those who needed salvation. Life was very, very good.

  He finished the beer. Maybe he could have three tonight. It had been a very taxing day, one way or another. He needed to unwind properly before he could even consider giving the girls on Flesh 69 the attention they deserved. He unzipped his trousers. Dirty bitches.

  11

  Something howled in the darkness. Something huge, dangerous and injured. It was mournful. It was the pitiful wail of a trapped animal and it echoed along Main Street, crawling under the door of room number 12 at the Big Mill Motel.

  Wilson lay still, not sure if the sound had been part of a dream, a nightmare, not sure if he was awake or asleep.

  It sounded again, an elongated echo more pitiful than before. It wasn’t an animal. At least none he’d ever heard before.

  “What the hell was that?” Donovan whispered.

  Wilson shook his head, even though it was pitch black and Donovan wouldn’t see the gesture. “God knows.”

  “Sounded like He made it,” Donovan replied.

  “Only if someone stuck a pin in His ass.”

  “Thought I was...”

  The horn – and it was a horn, Wilson was sure of it now – blasted the air again, sending a shockwave through the room. It might have only been his imagination but he thought he felt the bed move.

  He took his watch off the nightstand and realized he couldn’t see the dial. Where was his cell? In his jacket, of course. Where else would it be?

  From across the room, a glow lit up Donovan’s face. “Three thirty-eight,” he said.

  “Jesus,” Wilson replied. A thin sliver of orange light trickled under the doorway. He stared at it for five seconds and then the horn sounded again. It was some sort of warning, like a foghorn or a...

  “Remember that film they made in the Eighties? ‘The Day After’, I think it was called. About a nuclear war and there were all these sirens going off. It sounds like one of those. Only one that’s low on batteries.”

  Wilson slid off the bed. As far as he knew, the Cold War had ended some time ago. Although things could change pretty quickly in the political world, he doubted whether things had gone so far south in just a day.

  “Either that or aliens,” Donovan said.

  Wilson slid into the suit trousers and pulled his shirt over his head. It was cold and damp. They would need clean clothes if they were to stay any longer.

  “I’m going to take a look,” he said and padded over to the door. He heard Donovan dressing behind him.

  He opened the door and looked out onto the motel’s parking lot. The only car was Wilson’s. Jerry either didn’t own one or had a spot out the back somewhere. The street beyond the lot was dead. Nothing passed either way. Pretty much as it had been all day.

  “See anything?”

  The siren cut the air again, making Wilson wince. “Nothing,” His breath sent a steaming ribbon into the night.

  “It’s coming from out of town,” Donovan said. “Over by the river, by the sound of it.”

  They both looked that way, toward the intersection. They couldn’t see the traffic lights from where they were standing but green light shimmered on the wet asphalt.

  “D’you want to take a look? See what it is?”

  “Not really,” Wilson answered. The siren wailed again. It was becoming more urgent, as if the batteries were warming up.

  “Me neither. I’ll just get my shoes on and we’ll go.”

  “Yep.” Wilson turned away and grabbed his shiny, black leather dress-shoes. Perfect for a walk by the river in the silver glow of the moon.

  *

  By the time they reached the banks of the Kennebec, they were jogging. On their right, the largely boarded-up shops gave way to the cookie-cutters. Every third or fourth house had a lit-up porch with two or three people huddled in the shadows. They watched Wilson and Donovan run past with vacant stares on their faces. It seemed more mildly interesting than surprising for them to see two strangers running through the streets in the middle of the night with a siren’s lament for background noise.

  The river churned, boiled and hissed to their right as they turned onto Mill Road. It led away from town, following a parallel route to the river.

  Wilson knew where they were heading. Beyond the barrier of pine and hemlock was the tip of the mill’s chimney. It had stopped raining but the moon was hiding behind the clouds, and pretty soon the only light they had was Donovan’s cell.

  “Should’ve brought the car,” Wilson said. His thought processes weren’t always reliable when he was jerked out of sleep. As he grew older, the wiring up there was taking longer to get up to power. It was one of the reasons he usually left any major decisions until after noon.

  “Should’ve stayed in bed,” Donovan replied. Wilson grunted.

  Mill Road suffered from being as well worn and under-maintained as Main Street. Holes in the asphalt had been allowed to fester until they were open sores. Most of them were filled with black water so it was impossible to see how deep they were, but a step out of place would result in a broken leg.

  Wilson hadn’t run this far since high school and he could feel a stitch starting in his ribs. What the hell were they doing out here anyway? He stopped and doubled over, putting his hands on his knees.

  “John.”

  Donovan kept running.

  “John!” he shouted.

  Donovan stopped and turned around, the cell’s beacon achieving precious little. “There’s someone up there.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

  “What?” Wilson asked, his wind returning much slower than he’d expected.

  “There’s someone up there, I saw them.” He took a few steps toward Wilson. “Looked like they were running.” He looked away from Wilson, back down the track. “We were catching, until...” He turned back.

  “I get it,” Wilson said. “Until the old man slowed you down.” He looked past Donovan. Until that moment, he had kept his eyes on the few inches of road that Donovan’s cell had lit up. Now, through the gap in the trees made by the road he could see the great hulking shadow of the mill. It looked monstrous. Even more so because of the hideous screams it was emitting every five seconds.

  “Come on.” Donovan offered him a hand.

  He ignored it, pride getting the better of him and stood upright. “What are you waiting for, then?”

  He caught the flash of Donovan’s teeth and then they were both off again, shiny shoes slipping on the wet road. Wilson panting like t
he old man he felt.

  The siren grew louder but no less melancholy. The bass note put Wilson’s teeth on edge.

  “Where are they?” he asked, trying not to sound out of breath. His throat was on fire and he knew he was close to vomiting.

  “Can’t see anyone,” Donovan replied, his voice level and strong, no sign of fatigue at all.

  The mill loomed over them, filling the sky. It looked like what it was, what it had been built to be. A Victorian workhouse. They approached from the side but even from this angle it was impressive. Black voids contrasted against the brick and climbed the walls at regular intervals, showing the height of the building. Wilson counted six stories, and not residential or commercial-sized stories. These were giant rooms designed to handle massive lengths of timber.

  “There! There!” Donovan shouted, pointing around the front of the leviathan.

  Wilson saw a figure vanish inside the building, directly beneath a nest of at least ten public address loudspeakers. They pointed in every direction possible, even straight up to the sky. The source of the wail.

  He shouted, “Hey!” But his voice was drowned out by the siren.

  Donovan sprinted toward the front. He was too fast for Wilson, even if he’d been remotely in shape. His chest was starting to feel like someone very large and very strong was bear-hugging him. He followed behind, at a slow jog. The sound of his heartbeat louder than the siren.

  There was no sense of depth inside the mill; no sense of anything except a great emptiness. Wilson took a few tentative steps forward, the soles of his shoes slapping against the concrete floor. Donovan’s steps receded into the distance, somewhere.

  “John!” he shouted but all he got in return was an echo of his own voice. It sounded pathetic and weak.

  He took a dozen steps and looked for something to get his bearings. There was nothing. The voids on the outside, where the windows would once have been, only let in more darkness. It was like being in a cave, an underground cave.