Authors: Robin Wasserman
“You never tell anyone what happened tonight,” Scott said. “You even think about it, and I put
you
in the swamp. That would hurt me, but I’d do it. You get that?”
Yes, she did.
Afterward, most of the evening’s events were left mercifully blurred in her memory, but she would always remember promising to keep her mouth shut. She would always remember saying thank you, and meaning it, because she didn’t know then how hard it would be to forget, not just the smell of the body or the feel of the knife or the weight of the parasite and the twitch of his thing, but the glorious joy of the crystal coursing through her veins, the power and the clarity it gave her – and the hollow it left when it had gone.
Ellie knelt by the tub, with the deacon beside her. Steam rose from the water. She didn’t need to dip a finger to know it would be scalding hot, but she did so anyway, hoping the pain might clear her mind. It didn’t; it just hurt. It would hurt more if she disrobed and lowered herself into the water. She would scream, and thrash around a bit, and fear her skin was bubbling and burning, but in the end she would close her eyes and have faith and the Lord would guide her down.
At the beginning, it had been the deacon’s arms that guided her, seizing her bare shoulders and forcing her deeper into the boil until her body was submerged. Afterward, her skin would be raw and painful for days, but his promise held true: there was no lasting damage.
“Your clothes,” he said now. “You remember.”
The day her mother had discovered her with Baz, there’d been no time to gather her clothes and cover herself. Charlotte King had forced her wayward fourteen-year-old daughter into the car, driven to the deacon’s house, and dumped her on the doorstep, shivering, wet, and naked. The first bath had been curative, a warm, healing temperature to ease her shock and soak up her tears. It was only later, after the deacon had introduced her to the bedroom she would occupy until reformation was complete and her mother accepted her back into the fold, and to the daily schedule of chores and prayers, the ascetic, nunlike existence in which she would serve her penance, that he had introduced the cleansing ritual, the baptism of pain. He always carefully averted his eyes from her naked form.
That first day, he had taken her from her mother’s arms and covered her nakedness with the closest thing to hand, a dusty white sheet. She would always be grateful for that. Her mother found her bare and put her out; the deacon covered her and took her in. He had given her shelter, understanding, and, eventually, the Lord.
Salvation hurts, he told her.
Pain helps us defy temptation, he told her.
Pain will not let us forget.
She skimmed her fingers across the water again.
Pain.
“You’ve let in the devil before, Ellie. If you begin to think you can trust your own mind over the word of God, well, we know where that leads, don’t we?”
She could not go back to that.
But the water would burn, as Cassandra would burn, and she needed no one’s word to tell her that was wrong. That had to be wrong. Didn’t it?
The baths were their secret. She knew how people would talk if they knew. She knew what people would think.
They would be wrong.
It would be better if there were something indecent about the way his eyes passed over her naked body. If there were ulterior motives in his gaze, or in his touch. It would mark him as human – flawed as any of them, sympathetic to the desires of the flesh, victim to his own desires. But there was nothing in his gaze. There was no hint of impropriety, no thought of pleasure or trespass. He burned with righteousness, and nothing else. She’d never been a girl standing before him, naked and shivering. She’d been a sinner, with potential to be saved; she’d been a pawn in the devil’s game.
See
me,
she wanted to insist. But she recognized the impulse as a symptom of her own sickness. To strip her clothes off, as he intended, then force him to see what he’d wrought, the skin that would blister in the water, the smooth flesh he was forbidden.
Touch
me
– if it would remind him that she was a person, that
he
was a person, that there existed anything beyond law and judgment and God’s wrath.
He clamped down on her hand. Not in the way of a man reaching out for a girl, not like a father, or a lover. He held on because he needed her for his cause. Because he wanted her to burn bright.
She could see it in him now: he wanted everything to burn.
“Let me help you find your way back,” he said.
She tried to pull her hand away. “I’m leaving.”
He squeezed tighter. And she slapped him.
It was as if her arm had worked of its own accord. They both gaped at it, equally surprised.
“You’re very disturbed,” he said. “I can see we have a lot of work to do.”
She slapped him again.
He snatched her wrists before she could go in for a third.
He would let go if she insisted. She knew that about him; she thought she knew that about him. All she had to do was follow through on her word and walk out.
But you haven’t.
You’re waiting for him.
“I won’t stand by and let you kill someone tomorrow,” she said. “I won’t let you.”
He laughed. “You won’t ‘let’ me?”
“People listen to me now. You saw to that.”
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen if you go through that door, Eleanor King.” This was not the honey-voiced peacock who fluffed his feathers for her at every opportunity. This was someone new, someone cold and honest and empty of illusion.
The
real
Deacon
Wally
Barnes,
she thought, and was afraid.
“Let me paint you a picture of how this is going to go if you leave here like this, much less if you try to stop me tomorrow, or anytime from here to eternity.”
You
want
him
to
make
you
scream.
If
you
wanted
to
stop
him, you would make him scream.
You
would
slice
him
up.
Slice
it
off.
There was a letter opener on his desk. She could see it over his shoulder, through the door, sharp and gleaming in the fluorescent light.
You
know
who
you
are.
Soon
everyone
will
know.
Give
in
to
it.
Give
in.
It had to be the voice of God, she thought. It knew too much. It saw her too clearly.
“I will tell everyone in this godforsaken town how you tried to seduce me —”
“That’s a lie!”
“— how I’ve put up with it for the sake of trying to guide you back to the way of righteousness, but I can put up with it no longer.”
“No one would believe that.”
But she could see that, already, he did.
“Silence, harlot. They will believe it because it’s God’s truth, and because you’re stained in a way that will never wash away, and when I open their eyes, they will see.”
“Then I’ll tell them
you
—”
He held up a finger, and she fell silent. “Don’t be so foolish as to believe you have the support of this town. You’re an empty vessel for them. You’re a tool. Without me speaking for you, you’re nothing.”
She shook her head. But, true to his word, she could not speak.
“I’ll tell your parents you’re a godless harlot, and they will believe it because they already know it to be true. And when I tell them it’s best for them to put you out, when I tell them the only way you’ll find your way back to the light is if we let you stumble into deepest darkness, they’ll believe that, too. The town will know you to be a fraud. That you’ve never spoken to God, never heard His voice, that you’ve been lying all along, that you’ve made
fools
of them, and let me tell you, Ellie, no one likes to be made a fool of. No one likes that at
all.
You’ll knock on doors, begging for a place to stay, for food and drink, for a single friend in all the world, and all will turn you away, because they’ll take one look at you – pathetic and, soon enough, stinking of the streets – and know I speak the truth, that you’re worse than nothing, you’re a
pretender,
and they will shut their doors to you, and expel you into the wilderness. You will have nothing left, and nowhere to go, and naught to do but crawl into a hole and wait to die.”
The bath awaited. She needed only strip herself bare for him and let him guide her down.
“Your choice.”
Slice
it
off.
Her eyes betrayed her, straying to the bulge in his trousers.
Watch
the
blood
spurt.
An
eye
for
an
eye.
Justice
served.
The voice knew what she wanted, but she knew what was right.
She fled.
And all that he predicted would soon come to pass.
You didn’t sleep. Not on meth. You got high, then you tweaked, then you went cold and dark and took some more so you could feel something other than empty. Then you started again.
So maybe she hadn’t slept. She couldn’t have. But somehow, lying in that bed, she lost herself for a time. When she found herself again, she found herself in Scott’s doorway.
He was naked, tangled with the woman and the sheets.
Jule was holding his knife.
If he looked up and saw her there —
If it happened again, and the next time, she zoned out through not just the retrieval of the knife but its use —
If she had gotten a taste for it, and the knife had gotten a taste for her—
It was a silly thing to be afraid of. But she had no idea how she’d ended up there, or how the blade had ended up in her hand, or what might have happened next. In the dark, on that particular night, anything seemed possible.
In the dark, the drug leaching from her system, nothing seemed bearable. Not lying down in that bedroom, beside that bleached-out spot in the carpet, not with the Prevettes assembled down the hall, not with Scott knowing what she knew and worrying about what she would say. Not trusting herself to stay safe and stay hidden in her sleep.
She packed a small bag, tiptoed down the stairs, and fled.
She brought the knife.
Daniel couldn’t sleep. Not knowing what was going to happen to Cass tomorrow; not until he found a way to stop it.
He’d exhausted the narrow range of legal options. Demanding she have a lawyer, an arraignment, contact with her parents or with anyone in the world outside the quarantine lines – none of it had done any good. Unable to get a straight answer from the cops, he’d gone to Deacon Barnes, thinking that a religious man might realize that things had gone too far and have the moral authority to rein them in. But he’d forgotten what his father had taught him about religious men. The only help Barnes had to offer was an explanation – in short sentences and small words, as if Daniel were slow – that Oleander was on the cusp of transformation. Step one would be remaking the criminal justice system in God’s image, complete with final judgment. Even then, he hadn’t quite believed it. Not even when he saw what was being built at the center of town, the tower of scrap wood that he recognized from his history textbook as a funeral pyre.
The town was angry, he got that. Crowds could be more violent than individuals – stampedes, riots, lynch mobs. People could go crazy, swept up in a storm of emotion. But he’d known the people of Oleander his whole life. They weren’t the type to hang a girl from a tree or set her on fire.
That’s what he thought when he went down to the station that last day to persuade someone sane to shut it down. Before he had the chance, Coach Hart, varsity football coach, Eisenhower High gym teacher, and all-around bane of Daniel’s existence, had barreled past him, dragging his wife behind. Both were drenched in a massive amount of what looked like blood. Only the wife was screaming. She was also naked. They were instantly surrounded by cops, all with weapons drawn. “Better let go of her, Sal,” one of them said, but the coach held tight. She had her arms wrapped across her chest, but it did little to hide her ample bosom and nothing to shield the rest of her. Blood was everywhere.
“I have to confess to a murder,” the coach said in a flat voice. “And my wife here has to confess to adultery.”
He squeezed her shoulder, hard enough to make her wince. In a similarly flat voice, she said, “It’s true. I’m an adulteress.” And then, as if the admission had broken something in her, she started pounding at his chest and shrieking something incoherent. Daniel was pretty sure he caught the word
blowtorch.
The chief pushed his way to the front of the cluster of cops. “Now, what’s all this fuss about, Sal?” he asked, as if the man had wandered in to protest a parking ticket.
“Caught my wife in bed with George Stilton,” Sal said, slapping her on the ass, hard, the way he did his players after a touchdown. George Stilton was the high school principal. He wore suspenders, had pubic-like hairs sprouting from his chin, and looked like the kind of guy who’d been carrying a briefcase around since he was six years old. Daniel couldn’t imagine him in bed with anyone. “Spent the last couple days taking care of him. Put what’s left out on the front stoop for you fellows to collect. But I’ll tell you, I just don’t have the heart to handle Amelia. A man shouldn’t have to bring judgment down on his nearest and dearest, am I right?”