by Rebecca Wait
‘Let’s go outside,’ Peter said. ‘I can’t stand it in there.’
Together, they slipped out of the front door and walked away from the houses. It was a bright, clear morning. The wind sent the long grass reaching for their feet.
‘I don’t understand,’ Peter said. ‘She hasn’t done anything wrong.’
Moses wondered if his brother knew about Esther after all. He stared out across the moors, tried to take it all in at once. He’d looked at this view every day of his life, but it no longer seemed familiar. The moors couldn’t have changed, not when they hadn’t changed in a thousand years, as his father said. It must be Moses himself who’d changed.
He turned when Peter made a small sound, a quick intake of breath.
‘What?’
‘The car’s gone,’ Peter said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The car’s gone,’ Peter said again. ‘But all the men are here. Don’t you understand?’
And then Moses did understand.
His mother’s plan had been so much better than his and Judith’s. And he found he was hardly even surprised, in this terrifying new landscape, that she hadn’t tried to take her children with her.
Later that morning, they stood in the prayer room as Nathaniel prayed for their souls. The prophet’s anger pulsed through the room. His voice was louder than usual.
‘The devil is tearing the Ark apart!’ he said. ‘You let him in! You did this!’
It wasn’t clear if he was addressing one of them or all of them. Moses held himself very still, trying his best – as the others were surely doing as well – to avoid attracting attention.
Nathaniel ran his hands through his hair, making it stand up wildly. He spread his arms.
‘There will be retribution!’ he said. ‘There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.’
There was no lunch served that day. Nobody was hungry, and in any case Nathaniel said they must fast to show God their repentance. Ruth led the children to the schoolroom, where they would have lessons as normal.
Moses sat beside Judith and tried to concentrate on his sums. The numbers and symbols meant nothing to him and wouldn’t even stay still on the page. Judith waited until Ruth had turned away and then quickly swapped her sheet with his.
They all staggered outside at break time, and stood in a small cluster.
Ezra broke the silence. ‘God will punish her,’ he said.
‘Shut up,’ Peter said. ‘Or I’ll thump you.’
‘Then God will punish you, too.’
‘You know, Ezra,’ Judith said, ‘I bet you’re God’s least favourite.’
‘I’ll tell the prophet you said that,’ Ezra said.
‘I don’t care.’
Moses was hardly listening. There was a lurching feeling in his chest. Someone was going to be punished in his mother’s place. It would be Moses, or his father, or Peter. And even if Moses lived through this, he and Judith could never try to escape, because it was obvious – it should have been obvious before – that if they left, more people would be punished. Cleansing after cleansing. There was no way out.
‘Are you alright, Moses?’ Judith said, stepping closer to him.
He swayed on his feet, and she caught his arm. ‘Are you going to faint?’
Moses sat down on the ground.
Judith crouched beside him. ‘Take deep breaths,’ she said.
‘God’s punishment,’ Ezra muttered, but Abigail shoved him and said, ‘Be quiet, Ezra.’
‘I’m alright,’ Moses said.
There was a distant thrum, so faint at first that he wasn’t sure if he was really hearing it. The throbbing of an engine. Slowly, he stood up. Judith copied him.
The noise became louder, and now Moses could see the others had heard it too. Abigail said, ‘She’s coming back!’
They all turned towards the direction of the sound. The car was a dark shape in the distance, but it was quickly growing larger as it moved along the moor road and turned onto the track that led towards the houses.
My mother will be killed, Moses thought. She’s coming back to be killed.
‘It looks wrong,’ Mary said suddenly.
They screwed up their eyes and stared. As it came closer, Moses realized she was right. It was similar enough to their car to know that it was a car – but it was a different shape.
And there were more of them.
They could make out a steady procession behind the first car, emerging snake-like from the dust of the track: five cars in total, moving sedately towards them. As the cars came closer still, Moses saw that they were white on the front, with flashes of bright yellow and blue.
Nobody spoke now. It was impossible to describe what they were seeing.
Then Deborah was there, and Ruth as well, saying, ‘Back into the schoolroom. Now.’
Deborah pushed their shoulders, forcing them back inside. They allowed themselves to be herded, too confused to resist, and huddled together at one end of the schoolroom. Deborah stayed with them, whilst Ruth strode out again.
Moses turned to Judith for reassurance. She was covering her mouth with her hand, but he could feel her excitement all the same. Then she hit his arm, hard enough to hurt, and said, ‘Don’t you get it?’
He turned to look out of the schoolroom window, from which he could observe strange men and women getting out of the cars. They were dressed in black and white, and he thought of the chessboard in the sitting room.
‘It’s the police,’ Judith said.
‘Who’s the police?’ Mary said, but at the same time Deborah said, ‘Be quiet, Judith,’ and for once Judith obeyed.
Ruth came back into the room, moving fast. ‘Take the children upstairs,’ she said to Deborah. ‘Keep them there.’
‘Come on, my loves,’ Deborah said, and began to usher them out into the hallway.
But then the front door opened and a strange man was standing there.
‘Leave the children and come outside with me,’ the man said to Deborah.
Ruth appeared behind them, saying, ‘Take them upstairs, Deborah,’ as though the man hadn’t spoken.
The man said, ‘Do as I say, please, madam.’
Through his terror, Moses thought how foolish the man was to think he could defeat Ruth.
But the next moment, Deborah was stepping away from them, stepping towards the man.
Ruth said to them, ‘Go upstairs,’ and they obeyed, running up to the landing as fast as they could. The others went to hide in the boys’ bedroom, but Judith stopped and pulled Moses back with her. Moses watched the door to the boys’ room close.
‘We need to go back downstairs,’ Judith said. ‘We have to make sure.’
Make sure of what? he thought. There was a strange expression on Judith’s face, but he recognized it. The old fierceness and fury were back, as though no time had passed since she had climbed out of the car that first day. He wanted to go and hide with the others, but instead he followed her down to the now empty hallway and out of the front door.
There were many strangers, some standing around the cars, some moving towards the small house, and another group striding towards the edge of the forest. A woman hurried up to Moses and Judith.
‘What are your names?’ she said. She had blonde hair like Esther’s. She seemed distracted, glancing around as if she had too many names to find out at once, though Moses and Judith were the only children in sight.
‘I’m Judith and he’s Moses,’ Judith told the woman. ‘Have you come to take us away?’
The woman hesitated. ‘We need to have a bit of a chat with everyone. OK? Nothing to be scared of.’
‘We’re not scared,’ Judith said. ‘But you can’t leave us here.’
The woman was giving Judith her full attention now. ‘We won’t, love. OK? We won’t leave you.’
‘But do you promise?’ Judith said.
The woman met Judith’s gaze. ‘I promise. You’re coming with us.’
Ju
dith made a strange, shaky sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh. She took Moses’ hand.
Moses looked past them both. Out of the small house came two of the chessboard men. They were leading his father between them, walking along in a strange trio. Moses stared at his father, but his father didn’t look back at him. One of the men opened the back door of a car, and his father climbed in. Then they closed the door.
‘Where’s my father going?’ Moses said.
‘It’s alright, sweetheart,’ said the woman with hair like Esther’s. ‘We just need to ask the adults some questions.’
Moses felt tears in his eyes, because ‘sweetheart’ was what his mother used to call him, back before the rain came and the river turned to blood.
‘It’s alright,’ the woman said again.
When he looked harder, he could just make out Ruth in the back of another of the cars.
‘I need to go and find the other children,’ the woman said to Judith. ‘I need to make sure they’re OK.’
‘They’re fine,’ Judith said. ‘Only they’re hiding, because they think you’re the devil.’
The woman smiled nervously.
Then Judith went very still and Moses saw that her mother was being brought out, walking between a man and a woman. Sarah turned at the last moment, when they were almost at the car, and looked over at them.
‘Judith,’ she said, but Judith didn’t say anything back. She watched as her mother was put into the back of the car.
And finally, the strangest sight of all. Here was Nathaniel, being led out to the cars from behind the barn. He wasn’t walking meekly like the others. He was struggling and cursing at the men on either side of him and he had his hands tied behind his back with something that looked like metal.
‘You’ll be punished for this,’ he was shouting. ‘God will curse you! God will kill your children!’
Moses stared at the prophet. Nathaniel’s face was red and screwed up as he shouted. His voice sounded high and harsh, not soothing as it had once been. It was as though a different Nathaniel had stepped out from behind the old one.
One of the men opened the back door of a car, and Nathaniel was pushed inside, another man placing his hand on Nathaniel’s head to stop him bumping it.
Beside Moses, Judith spoke very softly. ‘Good.’
Inside the car, Nathaniel turned and looked straight at Moses. Moses looked back.
So this is what the end times look like, he thought.
VII
Gehenna
1
Moses wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing at the window. There was no movement along the street now, not a single person. But from this position he could see a little way into the first-floor rooms of the houses opposite: glimpses of a mirror, a sofa, a wardrobe. The houses were scrunched together in a line, with no space in between. Moses was amazed at how close to one another people lived in Gehenna.
Peter came back into the room. ‘Stop looking,’ he said. ‘It’s better not to look.’
Moses ignored him, but suddenly a light went on in one of the windows facing them and the room came into bright focus. He could see a young woman framed in light, opening a drawer, pulling out a jumper. Moses stepped quickly back from the window.
He surveyed their new bedroom again. Two beds, side by side. A wardrobe, a pale carpet. Not exactly the fires of hell, though it was true that evil rarely came dressed in its own clothes.
He had been brave up to this point, but his courage was beginning to fail him. When they drove down off the moors in the line of cars, he’d watched unflinchingly as the familiar sights moved past him and disappeared. The ragged grass, the slumped rocks – all pulled smoothly away, like someone winding up a piece of ribbon. And as they descended into the valley and left the moors behind, still he had looked, even as the world collapsed around him. Fields and woodland curved up on either side, guarded by skeletal hedgerows. A sprinkling of sheep on the tiered landscape. Peter and Ezra sat beside him in the police car in silence, except for Peter asking once, ‘Is our mother alright?’
‘She’s fine,’ the woman in the passenger seat had said. ‘She’s just answering some questions at the moment.’
‘When will we see our parents again?’ Ezra said.
‘Soon, I hope,’ the woman said. ‘The police need to talk to them, and I’m not sure how long it’ll take. In the meantime, we’re trying to contact other family members for all of you. Please try not to worry. We’re taking you somewhere safe whilst we get everything sorted out.’
Her name, she had said, was Melissa. An odd name, Moses thought, but he managed not to comment. Melissa wasn’t wearing black and white. She was in dark trousers and a pink cardigan. Moses had tried not to stare too much at the trousers. The man driving the car, dressed in black and white like the others, hadn’t said a word since they’d set off.
Peter was staring at the back of the seat in front of him, and Ezra was looking down at his lap, despite the extraordinary sights passing by the window. Everything was becoming softer now, and strangely flat – where was the savage sweep of the moors? The grass down here was clipped and low and green. Look, Moses wanted to say, look!
But when they reached the edge of the town, he couldn’t look any longer. First one house appeared, then another, and another. The fields ran out, and everything was hard and grey. If Moses turned and craned his neck to look out of the back window he could still see the crest of the moors behind them, but he knew all the same that he had come to the burning place, the valley of the son of Hinnom.
He had seen grey on the moors before, when the wind rose and the sky changed, but the grey of Gehenna had no life in it. And there were more cars now, in front of them, behind them, beside them. Gehenna was pulling the breath out of his lungs. He wished Judith were with them, not in the other police car with the girls and Jonathan. He closed his eyes.
The car jolted slightly as they turned a corner, and Moses fell against Ezra, who was trembling.
‘Almost there!’ Melissa said.
Almost where? Moses thought.
They reached it in the end, whether they wanted to or not. When the noise of the engine died, Moses opened his eyes. A narrow grey road, lined with houses on either side.
They were ushered up a short path and into the nearest house. Moses kept his eyes on the ground. But even that looked wrong, and felt wrong beneath his feet. It had no give like the ground on the moors – it pushed back at you. There was no sign of the other police car, and Moses was afraid Judith was being taken somewhere else. But he’d used up all his panic on the journey and now he felt nothing.
As Melissa stood back to let them through the door (‘This is only temporary, guys, whilst we get a few things sorted out, OK?’), Moses glanced round and saw a man in the garden next to theirs. He was watching them, and he didn’t look away when Moses met his eye. It occurred to Moses that perhaps the man was noticing the mark on his face. Would it make him stand out in Gehenna as it had in the Ark? But he decided he didn’t care. He knew enough now to understand that the adults had been wrong; it didn’t matter if your face was stained. Everybody was marked.
Inside the house, Melissa took them up some stairs covered in brown carpet. ‘You’ll be sleeping in here tonight,’ she said to Moses and Peter, gesturing to a door. ‘And you, love – ’ to Ezra, who seemed on the verge of tears – ‘will be in here, just next door. The other boy – Jonathan, isn’t it? – will join you when he gets here. Alright?’ She smiled at them. ‘I’ll give you a bit of time to get settled in.’
Now, standing just inside the door of their bedroom, Peter repeated, ‘It’s better not to look.’
Of course he was right. ‘There’s so much of it,’ Moses said. ‘So much stuff.’
Peter went and sat down on one of the beds. He bounced up and down a few times. ‘It’s really springy,’ he said.
Moses went to join him. ‘Do you think all the beds in Gehenna are like this?’
‘Don
’t know.’ Peter paused, then added, ‘The bathroom’s along the corridor. The water comes out hot straight away. You should try it.’
Moses nodded, but along the corridor seemed a long way to go.
The sound of a car outside. Please, he thought. Please let it be Judith.
They heard the front door opening, voices, then footsteps thundering up the stairs. Surely they could only belong to her.
And the next moment, Judith burst in.
‘Hi! This is weird, isn’t it? You OK?’
Moses nodded, weak with relief at seeing her. There were more voices out in the corridor, and then Jonathan, Mary and Abigail crowded in, Ezra behind them.
‘Did you see all the cars on the way?’ Jonathan said.
The others nodded.
‘And the sinners,’ Ezra said. ‘Their houses. There are so many.’
‘It’s not what I pictured,’ Mary said shakily. ‘It’s not how I pictured Gehenna.’
‘Lunchtime!’ Melissa called from downstairs.
In the kitchen, small sandwiches were laid out on plates. The man in black and white was standing by the counter, and so was another woman whom Melissa introduced as Kerry.
‘Have a seat,’ Melissa said. ‘And tuck in.’
Obediently, they took up their places round the table, but didn’t make any move to reach for the sandwiches.
‘What’s wrong?’ Melissa said. ‘Come on, guys. You need to eat something.’
Moses looked at Peter, who eventually spoke up. ‘But who’s going to say the prayer?’
The adults’ expressions seemed to freeze. The woman called Kerry said, ‘Well – would one of you like to?’
Peter said, ‘We’re not supposed to. Not without the – not without Nathaniel here.’
‘Well, can you go without, just this once?’ Melissa said. ‘I’m sure it’s OK just once. I’m sure – God will understand. It’s not your fault, is it?’
‘We can’t eat without saying the prayer,’ Mary said.
