Cursed by Christ

by Matthew Warner

  “You are nothing,” Alice whispered.

  General Gordon glanced at her strangely.

  “We are Truth,” it said. “And thy husband is Our emissary, just as Forney and Dawson were Our agents before him. Behold the signet of Our authority.”

  The monster pointed, and Thorne became transparent for an instant. Through his back, Alice saw the crucifix necklace resting on his chest, seeming to float in the air like a hooked star.

  “It shall follow thee for as long as thou doth bear Our disfavor.”

  Alice fought not to tremble. “You cannot hurt me. And neither can they.”

  A smile. “Then eat of the Tree of Knowledge if thou art so mighty.”

  It gestured languidly with one hand, and the angel’s wings launched from Alice’s head. They tore Alice’s perception along with them, back into Thorne.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  In the bedroom’s candlelight, Mariann’s face hovered over Thorne’s like a black cloud. Her bare breasts pressed against his chest.

  “You’re sure I don’t have to make love to him?” she said.

  “Obie’s a Sodomite,” Thorne said. His fingers explored the silkiness of her buttocks. “I’m sure he’d prefer one of the Parker boys to you.”

  Laughing, she slapped his shoulder.

  He slowly pushed her off of him. “I should get going. It’s almost dawn.”

  “Is your wife expecting you back from ‘land hunting’?”

  “Indeed.” He squeezed a breast. “I must tell her again of the nice hills I’ve found.”

  Mariann giggled.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  And Alice screamed.

  The congregation of ex-officers reflexively ducked from the sound as if a Union cannon shell had exploded in their midst. General Forrest’s liturgy caught in his throat, a look of panic on his face.

  The Forney-altar creature that called itself the Lord smiled and nodded. It didn’t need to say more. It—Jesus Christ—was behind everything. As the fount of existence, creation was its plaything, manipulable to its purpose, which was to punish Alice.

  By installing the chapel, Thorne had gone a good way toward violating all sense of security Alice felt in her own home—and to a plantation mistress, the home was everything—but there had still been one kernel of comfort remaining: the knowledge that the chapel was confined to the basement and that every place else was hers. But by using this woman to steal Alice’s husband, Christ had stripped away the rest of her well-being like stage scenery. Christ was revealing that the theater had been His property all along. She had come here for battle, not knowing all hope was already lost.

  And worse: Thorne would never love her. Never, not how she wanted, even after all the years of his neglect and indifference—and despite her constant disdain of him, a part of her had still hoped things would change, that he would change, that he’d turn away from Christ and return to her. But no, Thorne betrayed her at the most fundamental level.

  How could knowledge physically hurt like this? And yet it did, burning and bruising and ripping. On the inside. She doubled over and gagged.

  General Gordon, being right there, was the first to support her when her legs gave out like cheap cotton. Thorne just stood agape.

  “It’s burning me!” she said. “On the inside. It’s burning me!”

  “Get a doctor, you fool!” Gordon shouted to Thorne.

  Her husband rushed off as Gordon eased her down to the pew.

  During the years she had meditated upon herself in the dining room mirror, self-exploration had been a ward against this kind of pain. She had used her powers to probe herself and therefore could hide nothing from herself. Depression held less power that way. She had once done the same thing as a child. Afraid of blood, she had forced herself to stare at every particle of her skinned knee until she grew bored with it.

  But this was too much. Confronting the truth was fatal. She could never accept this, and just knowing about it was killing her. She had read about soldiers’ deaths in battle—the way they put hands to their chests and brought them away bloody—and like them, her disbelief gave way to the realization that death was imminent. And yet she knew, deep down, that she was the one doing this to herself. She wanted to die now, and her spirit was making it happen.

  Her arms and legs locked up. Fingers and toes curled. It felt as if her body were turning inside-out, like undergarments stripped off in a hurry. Her eyes rolled back, and she saw stars.

  Men stood over her. “Christ!” someone exclaimed.

  But her doubts gave her pause. What would happen after she killed herself this way? Death would be no escape from Christ.

  Burning. She remembered the bonfires Jonah Tefera had taken her to four years ago, when she had been buckling under the weight of life. She had danced with the slaves who writhed and circled the flames. They had chanted and smoked a strange weed, and at Jonah’s command, the raw sting of their memories had visibly flowed from their bodies. If she could only …

  Yes.

  She could do it. She’d be more clever than Jesus. She wouldn’t permit what He had just shown her to burn a hole through her head. Alice would take the slaves’ spell a step further. She’d transform the memories inside her and get rid of them permanently. Her powers—her curse—would save her.

  Inside her, the flames of memory shrank and turned blue. She saw it in her head: a flower of light growing dark and reflective at the same time.

  Press harder.

  The flames grew transparent, losing shape. Until, finally—

  Water. Yes. She squeezed her stomach as if she were urinating. Push it out—

  “Leave me!” she shouted.

  Gordon supported her head. “No, madam. We will not leave you.”

  The liquified memories sprayed from her eyes, mouth, nose, and ears. The water traveled outward in all directions except down, passing through men, furniture, and walls. No one reacted as Alice was the only one who could see it. But she felt, rather than saw, that the water now rained on more than a square-mile’s worth of the surrounding woods.

  Sleep crushed her into darkness, but already the ejection was having the desired effect: her depression departed like a cured fever.

  What had she been so upset about, anyway? She couldn’t recall.

  Chapter 14

  Cushy blackness. Alice awoke, gasping for air.

  She was riddled with bullets, porous with a hundred bloody tunnels, most of her body somewhere else.

  No, a dream. She threw off her weighty quilts and let an arm flop back, where it collided painfully with her bedpost. Sitting up was twice as hard as waking up. Dizziness made her dark bedroom sparkle. With a groan, she collapsed back into the feather mattress.

  But this was nothing compared to the neck pain. Had the fools carried her by the throat?

  And an even worse thought: what fools?

  “Ow ow ow …”

  She rolled over, supporting her neck with one hand. She decided that she’d been decapitated and her head had been reconnected to her right shoulder. She managed to sit by pulling herself up her bedpost with one hand and grasping her hair and lifting with the other.

  How did she get here? Perhaps she had collapsed during the bonfire ritual, and the Teferas had carried her back.

  No, no. That was long ago.

  She massaged her sore neck. She hadn’t felt this way since she got drunk at the Wharton Thanksgiving feast of ’57. Like last night, her memory of the meal resembled a patchwork quilt with half its patches missing.

  It took ten minutes for some of the torn seams to come together, the time it took to find a candle, light it and straighten her hair. Tonight—or last night, what day was it?—was, or had been, the Redger wedding ceremony. General Forrest had arrived with a couple of other former Confederates. And, after a friendly word and a shot of “fortification” from Thorne’s whiskey bottle, had changed into his slightly battle-singed general’s uniform. Another drink, and then he had nodded to the
stairway and said, “Shall we make our appearance downstairs, Missus Norwick?” She had followed him, knowing full well that she was walking onto the battleground of her greatest confrontation with Jesus Christ.

  She remembered nothing more.

  The upstairs foyer, with its high ceiling, windows, and glass doors to the balcony, was one of the more spacious areas of the house, but she thought she was suffocating. The candleflame jumped under her breath as she hyperventilated. She clutched her bosom, squeezed her eyes shut, and swallowed. What had happened at the wedding? This had to be another trick of Christ’s.

  She ran downstairs in search of Jonah, her candle blowing out in the process. Still dressed for the wedding, she stumbled on her wide skirt. Out the door. She’d stupidly forgotten her shoes, and the earth beneath her bare feet was as damp and chilly as the night air.

  The cook’s cabin was as dark as her candle, swing-down shutters pulled tight over the paneless openings that passed for windows.

  She knocked. “Jonah?”

  Movement inside. A soft curse, and then someone whispered, “Shhh!”

  She knocked again. “Open this door at once.”

  The door crept inward, and she saw Eliza’s eyes inside.

  “Eliza, where’s Jonah?”

  The door continued opening until Alice could see him standing beside his wife. “Leave us alone,” he said.

  She was too stunned to speak. It was perhaps the worst thing she could have heard in her condition. She’d come here for comfort, and Jonah had responded as if she were a marauder.

  “Jonah, what are you—”

  Like striking cobras, Jonah’s arms shot out and yanked Alice inside. She fell over the tall doorjamb, and Eliza slammed the door shut.

  “Unhand me! What on earth are you—”

  Jonah clamped a hand over her mouth. Eliza’s powerful arms restrained her from behind as the woman’s fully pregnant stomach pressed into her back. Alice’s candle blew out as the holder fell to the dirt floor.

  An insurrection? She struggled, her six senses flashing awake. Her palms energized, preparing to psychically incinerate the two negroes with her fear and anger. Despite the sweaty hand on her face, she smelled every detail in the tiny cabin: the smoldering coals in the fireplace, the dirt floor, the hay mattress tied to the Teferas’ bed with rope.

  But Jonah removed his hand from her mouth. His breath covered her face as he spoke: “Won’t hurt ’cha, missus, but you hafta be quiet!”

  She stopped struggling and burst into tears. “What—why did you—”

  “’Cause they’s be out there, missus!” Eliza said. She let go of Alice’s arms.

  “Who are out there?”

  Jonah leaned so close that she could smell the bacon he’d had for dinner. “We’se told to hide in here. We gone clean the chapel after the marryin’, but the men say, ‘Just go to yer cabin and stay der, nigger.’ I ask why. They say, ‘Gwine be spirits out tonight. Ain’t safe for a nigger.’”

  “Spirits.” She didn’t like the sound of this at all.

  “Yes’m,” Eliza said. “’Cept we don’t feel no spirits right now. We knows of such things.”

  “Then why are you hiding?”

  She thought she saw Jonah’s smile in the darkness. “You think we lived here our whole lives by bein’ stupid?”

  He had a point. Alice tittered nervously and dried her eyes. She remembered why she had come here but decided not to mention it now. Her cooks, despite their magical powers, wouldn’t be able to explain her memory gap. Besides, now she was more sure than ever that her blackout—and these “spirits”—had something to do with Christ’s conspiracy against her. She felt her mind grope for that hole in her memory, like an amputee trying to scratch his missing arm.

  She swallowed. What would a great general do in a situation like this?

  Charge.

  “You two stay here. I think I know what’s going on. And it sounds like I, being a white lady, can more safely discover the truth than you.”

  The Teferas frowned but didn’t prevent her from opening the door.

  Before stepping out, Alice paused in the doorway, using all of her natural and supernatural senses to take account of the cabin and to confirm that her servants were safe here. More of those magical knots were present, the same kind as she’d seen in slave quilts and which the Teferas had used to tie up their luggage on that day when they all tried to leave three years ago. The knots resided here on bits of string, hidden in the room’s corners, and on the ropes in their bed. Quilts were here as well, hanging on the walls, not as insulation, but in positions and angles meant to have some kind of magical significance—or so that was what the angel’s wings seemed to feel. On a table under the windows stood several glass bottles with twigs stuck in them.

  Eliza, who Alice could now see in the faint light, followed her gaze to the bottles. “Dey’s our mousetraps for wayward spirits.”

  Alice grunted. “I think the spirits out tonight are bigger than those bottles.” She sighed, then stepped out.

  “You be careful, missus.”

  And as she left, Alice realized, not for the first time, that these two loyal negroes were her only true friends.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Her confidence flagged the moment she again felt the moist earth under her bare feet. The cabin door shut behind her.

  Just where did she think she was going like this? No shoes and no shawl against the damp night air and probably already sick from whatever enchantment Jesus Christ had used to block her memory. (Either that, or she must have fainted before the wedding, and then slept until waking in her bed, but she found the first explanation more plausible.)

  She could see Gramma Wharton now, shaking a finger: “Foolish girl. Foolish, foolish girl.”

  And to set off like this against a band of Christian agents without the slightest idea of what to do? In addition to finding shoes, perhaps one of Thorne’s guns would be in order.

  She headed for the back door to the pantry—and then stopped when she heard a horse’s snort. She looked down the sloped back yard and was astonished to see horses—dozens of them, saddled for riding—grazing in the back yard and grove. Why weren’t they at the stable?

  Light spilled from the basement windows flanking the chapel door. Covered as the windows were with red, stained-glass shutters hanging partially open, the candle light shining out looked like blood.

  Men’s laughter. The ex-soldiers were still in the chapel. For the wedding reception, maybe?

  Shoes and a gun. It would be smart now to find them before attempting anything. Or maybe a knife instead, since she didn’t know how to operate a gun. Then she could investigate this matter of “spirits.”

  But there was no one out here to see her.

  Just a peek through the windows, she thought.

  She crept down the hill and peered through the cracked-open shutters.

  And her mind rebelled at what she saw, eyes closing instantly. A moment later, she opened them and shuddered.

  They all wore white robes, as if they were angels in a Heavenly chorus. There was nothing mysterious about the robes per se—simply white bedsheets sewn crudely (by her standards) into knee-length togas—but why?

  Not a wedding ceremony. Generals Forrest and Gordon sat on the front row, and near them the groom, Obie Redger, looked as gaunt and unhappy as usual. She maneuvered to scan the whole room. Where was Obie’s bride?

  “Order! The den will come to order!”

  It was Thorne, shouting from the front. He stood behind the altar table as if it were a lectern. The cross had been stashed underneath.

  When the din of conversation didn’t die, he stooped to pick up an axe, which lay on the floor by the cross. He hammered the head’s blunt end upon the table. “Order!”

  Three more raps of the gavel/axe, and the room quieted.

  “The purpose of this, our temple to the Most High, is now at hand.” He spoke in the overblown fashion of a revivalist prea
cher. “I declare that our den is hereby birthed.”

  “Hear, hear!” someone answered.

  Alice stopped breathing for a long moment. Her fingers clenched the hard oak of the outside wall.

  It was then that she saw the crucifix necklace around Thorne’s neck. Reverend Dawson’s? But how, why … And as if from a forgotten dream, words echoed up from the chasm in her memory: signet of Our authority. She couldn’t remember who’d spoken them, but their meaning was plain.

  Could it be? It was beyond her why Reverend Dawson would give Thorne his necklace—Forney’s necklace—but it didn’t matter. Thorne’s wearing it apparently was by Christ’s design and confirmed her earlier suspicion that Thorne and Christ were collaborating against her. Her husband now stood in Reverend Forney’s place as Christ’s chief agent sent to persecute her.

  Quivering, she gripped the wall harder, now simply trying to remain standing despite her shock. This was certainly a conclave of Christian agents, men who had assembled to plot her downfall. Their wearing of white sheets in order to resemble spirits showed that they wished to become spirits themselves. Perhaps destroying her was a rite of passage, a way to earn entry into Heaven.

  “The town locals will stand,” Thorne said, gesturing to Roosevelt Parker and the men near him.

  Half of the congregation—perhaps twenty—rose from their seats.

  Thorne unfolded a piece of paper and read: “Gentlemen, I command you to listen to the following charge and take the prescribed oath:

  “We are here as the guardians of the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless, to relieve the injured and oppressed, and to succor the suffering. We are the protectors of this our fair South, which is besieged by carpetbag judges, Republicans and Loyal Leaguers. …”

  The angel’s wings, sniffing madly from within their mental cage, picked up a whiff of General Gordon’s thoughts: Norwick speaks well, but he’s still a vainglorious popinjay.

  “Our lands rot with the moral decay of insolent and insurrection-minded negroes and their Northern schoolteachers. The South’s legitimate and loyal citizens stand deprived of their ancestral lands by Yankee storekeepers, politicians, and negroes, and her women are daily raped by them.