Authors: Bradley Ernst
F
ather König awakened
in the dark, swimming from a dream in which he pulled hair from his mouth. Just
one at first … teasing the side of his tongue, an odd, single hair as thin as a
fishbone. Unable to grasp it, König searched with his tongue to pinpoint the
nuisance, trapping the irritation against the roof of his mouth. Tugging, his
fingers found the fiber rooted deeply in his palate. Pulling harder, the root
thickened.
Its rubbery anchor, firm.
Yanking harder,
the thing moved farther back in his mouth: a weed that had shot a large root
sideways within the soil of his tender skin. As he pulled, hand over hand, it
thickened and became a long, dingy, clotted braid. Children’s things were woven
into the rope: small toys, gewgaws for a girl’s hair.
Relentless, the genesis of the intrusion
felt deep, down past his throat—past, even, König’s stomach. Shoulders
burning and aching, he continued to haul on the clog. The ravel of hair seemed
a magician’s trick taken too far. The snake of rope was wet, heavy—so
thick at his feet that he couldn’t move them either. It piled to his hips then
waist then chest … the hair was everywhere, had grown into his tissues and
clung, taking parts of him with it as he heaved. It shut off his air. Choking,
he tried to bite and swallow the never-ending horror. He tore at the invasion
until his esophagus, too small to accommodate the thick coil, joined the
hair-rope. His stomach birthed next, yawning, dragging its slick hot bulge
against the backs of his teeth. Links of his small intestine popped free,
followed by his colon. Screaming against his mouthful of bowels didn’t help. It
made an intimate, dull, gargling noise—like a child humming against a
water balloon.
Desperate,
the priest reached behind him, clawing the terminus of his tract free with a
burst of hot blood then expelled the rest of it through his mouth. Finally, he
could breathe.
M
omentarily, the dark
seemed better than the dream. Squinting to see, the predator felt relieved at
his breaths and gulped each greedily with his burning lungs. He couldn’t feel
his arms. The priest’s chin, he felt, rested on his chest, but his neck and
back were so sore he could not raise his head. Wincing, the efforts too
painful, he tried moving other things.
He could feel his feet. They were bare.
Dangling inside of—something.
König
swung them around tentatively.
Was he hanging? Somehow suspended?
Extending
his toes stirred up something greasy. The cloying stench of death filled his
nose, so he stopped.
“Hello?”
No
one answered. By the sound of it, he was in a small room. Attempts to straighten
his neck felt like an Old Testament trial. Eventually he succeeded. He enjoined
his fingers, next, to wiggle, but if they were connected to him anymore, he
could not tell.
Did he still have hands?
The
dark was complete. Beneath the smell of death was a more permanent, dank odor.
Wet stones, tinny earth, and decaying roots.
“Is
anyone there?”
The
pedophile could not bend his knees.
Oh God, the thirst.
The
thought of water made his tongue dart out. It seemed a cat’s tongue. The rasp
on his cracked lips caused more pain than it should. Even breathing hurt
deeply, as though the bases of his lungs were singed and black, smoldering, the
filthy charred lace of a burned-out street-whore.
Where were his arms?
Something
pressed against his ears.
It could be his arms.
Were
they above his head? If so, perhaps he hung from them. Experimenting, König
relaxed his neck; his head drooped yet more heavily. His feet were near the
ground. He explored, focusing again on the sensations at the tips of his toes.
They scratched back papery, leather sounds. Something hard. Wood? Bone? Bone.
He was sure they were bones.
“Help!
Help me.” He forced a deeper breath.
“Help—me?”
Someone put him here. What had happened?
He was in the confessional. Something was unpleasantly wet … There were … boys.
Two boys! They were going to burn him? He’d been terrified. Raphael? Yes. And
Michael.
They were bringing him to God. So where
was he now?
“Where
am I?”
“Here,”
came a voice. “With me.”
The
unexpected answer made Father König call out then sob. Urine trickled down his
leg as he kicked—a ridiculous but instinctive move—and the bones of
the dead woman’s ribcage lacerated his feet. He was bound where she’d been tied
(when alive) and his feet pedaled crudely inside the bone-dagger hull of her
ribcage.
Slowly,
Father König struggled less, learning. Movements of any sort caused jagged,
broken-glass bursts of misery.
Where did it all come from? Was this
Hell?
“You
are God?”
“I
am the spear God wields when he has want of one.” The small voice carried
terrible weight.
“You
are Michael? The archangel Michael?”
“It
is not time for you to know my name. Not yet.” The priest felt his heart
beating in his teeth and attempted to calm himself.
A few minutes, he guessed, passed, though it was
hard to tell.
“How
long have I been here?”
“There
is no time—we exist beyond it.”
Thump. Thump. Thump
. His heart. “Where
are we?”
Thump. Thump.
König’s
muscles in his shoulders jerked, nerve-damaged dislocations angry and hopping,
and his heart beat faster still.
“A
tunnel—behind a locked door—beneath the Berlin Wall.” The lulls
were sheer horror. Spaces of dead silence, except for his rushing blood, magnified
König’s mortal anguish. “I am where I reside always: in the hand of God, as I
never shall leave him.” Jerking, the priest quaked.
It was a devil’s voice.
“OK.”
Father
König struggled to understand; never before had he experienced such pain or
darkness, fear so ragged and raw.
If it wasn’t Hell, Hell could not be
worse.
“I
am dead?”
“No,”
came the reply. “You live yet.”
“That
is why I hurt so much?”
Thump. Thump. Thump.
“Your
remaining purpose is to understand your punishment. To atone while you live—if
you do not…”
THUMP. THUMP.
“…
if
this feels unreal to you, I have failed in one of my
duties: Lex Talionis—”
His heart whirred in his chest.
“The
law of retaliation.”
König swallowed, breathless. Desperate.
“An
eye for an eye?”
“You’ve
not taken an eye,” said the voice.
P
atient. His mother.
“‘
Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Just
as he has injured a person, so it shall be done to him.’”
Angry. His father.
He
plead
, promised. The pitch of his
voice wasn’t his. “I have taken neither teeth nor fractured any person!”
“You have injured many. Children. Reflect.”
“I love children! They love me!”
“They do not.” The devil’s voice was closer.
He approached.
“Please! It is not
my fault! The devil has worked through me!”
Thumpthumthumpthumpthumpthump—
“I will repent! I can change! Oh please, oh, God, I am sorry!”
Father König floundered and wailed, spitting froth he couldn’t
spare. Agonizing, twisting, he discovered more pain with each movement. He
begged, then made promises,
then
recited breathless,
familiar prayers that he finally appreciated.
A light flickered. König saw himself in a grimy, gore-streaked
mirror.
Things were so much worse
than he’d thought.
Sunday, April 8
th
, 1962.
T
hat morning the
French electorate voted in overwhelming numbers to accept the Évian Accords.
Roughly 12,000,000 Algerians were now independent. Most could not appreciate a
difference.
S
ix Catholic priests,
a deacon, and a vicar in Berlin pondered their new captivity, disgracefully,
from their seats in a Nazi-era surgical amphitheater. The adjoining tunnel had
been extended beneath the Berlin Wall.
The
tunnel had provided freedom to many men, women, and children. Whole families
were reunited in recent days via the thoroughfare, with the help of the boys
that played God. Though the literal captive audience in the chairs, unaware of
the various deceptions that had led them to their exclusive seats, did not know
they were mere mortals.
Each
man was naked and held his genitals, cupped as though he had a litter of baby
rats gently nested in his hands. Their most tender tissues had been welded with
cyanoacrylate glue to their paws. Then they’d been bound with ropes and allowed
to stew in their extraordinary fears. Every man now understood, intimately, the
bind he was in.
The
One Who Was Different wore a small white smock. None of the surgical gloves fit
him, so he had scoured his hands with soap and then soaked them in a bleach
solution as he lectured. Though the boy appeared fragile and wan, his words
were not. If his subjugates were not so thoroughly trussed and bound, they
might have found him comical—or even arousing. Despite their superior
vantage points, none of them who peered down the white funnel of seats to the
diminutive gamin doubted for a moment the palpable imbalance of power in the
room.
“Two
of you shall live.
The first; the last.
You will
recognize the first. One other survivor shall be identified presently.”
The
twins wheeled in Father König. His motor skills blunted, the priest wore a
dopey grin. Weaving like a drunk on a barstool, König flopped his head about to
see his visitors on the tiered seats, making out familiar faces despite his
blurred vision.
Nodding,
excited, the big-headed
puppet seemed happy to see his friends. Ryker patted the steel table as if
inviting a loved canine to jump, a soft-mouthed retriever determined to please.
Father König leapt, his heft scooting the table on its runners with a jarring
thud
. König looked as happy as a mead-soaked
lark.
Rickard
held an ether-drenched cloth to his smile, and the obese pederast relaxed, eyes
lolling, trusting, and loose. The priest’s head and elbows clunked, arriving
like so much beef bone, knuckles for the butcher to cut, to cleave the marrow
free for a loose-toothed but favorite cur. His arms and legs were bound without
ceremony. A metal device bit sharply, screws turning into his skull until the
smallish figures seemed satisfied that his skull was immobile. The
different-looking boy toggled a sturdy pair of electric clippers and began to
shear the ungainly man’s head.
“Father
König is the first. He will live …” The buzz of the cutters whined against the
tiles.
“…
and
will be different once we are done.
Incapable of perpetrating abuse.
He will feel cheerful,
uncluttered, and serene. Father König has declared his sins, and with my knife,
I will absolve him.” Groans. Horrified murmurs filtered down.
“The
last of you will live as Father König lives. The rest of you will die, but as I
will take those parts of you that correspond to the damage you have caused
among innocents, your wards, you will ultimately receive salvation.” The boy
finished, clicking off the shears.
“In
order to become the last, you must confess for others. People far and near
alike.” The noises, their protests, became quiet as the men strained to
understand.
“Each
name you speak. Which we know is true—we know the names already, those
men not present here, but amongst your acquaintances who harm
children—that name will improve your standing. Upon giving a false name,
you will secure your visit to the table.” Now he shaved the stubble from the
fat man’s head, a Sunday barber whipping off cream with a straight and shining
blade.
“He
who provides the greatest number of names shall enjoy, with this man, the
blandest bowl of gruel, the sunlight on your face, the daily tasks and duties
you have previously forsaken to pursue your sin. You will do so, unlike this
fallen priest, with each part of you intact.”
“Begin.”
E
ight sets of eyes
watched Father König as the ether wore off. Ryker placed a jar on a small,
rolling table. Inside, Father König’s hands and genitals floated, preserved. As
he slid a circular, smooth incision in his subject’s scalp, the priest made the
sound of a cat slowly flattening beneath a boot.
Vicar
Thorsten Engel’s voice boomed, giddy with terror. “Father Reinhard Bardulf!” He
sobbed, teeth clacking—chipping with the surge of adrenalin, blinking
aloft at the tiled ceiling in a knee-jerk gesture to beg forgiveness.
The
young butcher nodded encouragingly. “The vicar understands.
Now
his location.
Secure your current place at the end of the queue.”
“Here
in East Berlin!”
The
One Who Was Different glanced at his cohorts. Thankfully, the twins took no notes.
If they did, the illusion would break. Archangels wouldn’t participate in
anything so banal as a written list.
They proved helpful assistants.
Pulling
back Father König’s scalp, he worked open a bone window, color and vigor piling
into him from the head. The scrawny savant lifted the osseous plate.
Closer.
Feeling
his face change—less pain. Still barraged with input but able to focus.
Sobbing
men, accustomed to power, cried out names. As the room echoed with
vocalizations,
the flood of putrid desperation was held back
by his blade
. Pulling, his thin hands gently draped open the priest’s
dura mater.
“Udo
Lutz! East Berlin. Father Udo Lutz!”
Horrified,
each observer struggled to keep count of his closest rival. Rocking like
troubled children yearning for walls upon which to bang their heads. Some
moaned. Others spoke in tongues. Teasing aside König’s arachnoid mater,
an ease
settled, glowing about him. He felt that to them,
all others, he must appear awash—in relative insouciant hebetude.
A million bombardments,
now ten.
Deftly
maneuvering the tiny blade beneath the pia mater, he slid the knife. Salvation
waited, glistening.
One thing. Here. Now.
The
organ before me.
The most complex structure inside the
most advanced natural species on their whirling, blue ball.
The brain.
Blissful,
he worked steadily, savoring each probe, excision, and caress. The yelling from
above, the ugly static of riot, became a blunderbuss-punch of birdlife sent
aloft by a blast. The sound of them would deafen him, if not for König’s brain,
but he felt strong. Vital.
Salvation provided by the sins of this
priest.