But she doubted that murdering her husband would make travel any easier for her and Eliza. On the contrary, Major Collins of the Union command would surely take up the hunt for her where Obie Redger could not.
She sighed. She was tired but too keyed-up for bed. Too much to think about. She hesitated, and then opened her closet and shone the candle closer. There hung the blue dress with the wide collar and lace trim, the one she’d worn for Poppa’s, Momma’s, and Pierce Norwick’s funerals. Thorne had wanted her to burn it upon their arrival in Georgia.
Would it still fit after eight years? She put it on and found that it did. It felt right, too, as if she’d come home. Jonah’s death made it all the more appropriate.
The night was young. She decided to spend a good portion of it sitting with Jonah.
Outside, as she walked to the mouth of the graveyard trail, Alice sensed someone watching her. She stopped and shone her candle about until her gaze fell on the back of the Redger home, visible across the compound. Candlelight shone from an upstairs window, casting her observer into silhouette. That large head of hair, she knew, could only be Mariann’s.
“Jesus bitch,” Alice said before continuing on.
✽ ✽ ✽
As the evening passed at Jonah’s graveside, sitting upon the low stone wall, Alice wished more fervently that she had killed Thorne. What a fool she’d been! Defending herself in that way had only increased her danger. There was no telling how Thorne would react. Perhaps he would pass it all off as a drunken dream. Or, now that he knew something of her true nature, he would be more brutal.
Yes, I should have killed him. And I might still have to kill him. Mariann Redger, too.
This wish didn’t make her a killer. Quite the opposite, she decided. She had a right to protect herself. What was the word “killer,” anyhow? A moral judgement? As the original agent of Christ had said to her, “Morals come from Christ. You have none of your own.” And since Christ despised her, that put her beyond the realm of those morals. She had to follow her own code.
Fight, I must fight Him!
Therein lay the difficulty. She could and should kill everyone adverse to her, but what about the two segments of her memory that Christ had stolen: the Redger wedding and the night by the rose bush? Was that more toying, or was there something Christ didn’t want her to see?
“Fight, fight …” she mumbled to herself, and shifted positions where she sat upon the graveyard’s stone wall. Her candle threw long black shadows from each tombstone.
Fight—and escape. But was escape also a wise choice? She and Eliza were committed now, yes, but Alice wondered if things could be different on the plantation once Thorne, Mariann, and Obie were dead. She could claim this land as her own and be a needle in Christ’s eye.
She smiled.
And as if Christ were listening to her private ruminations and wished to retaliate, Alice’s candle blew out. She frowned at it in annoyance.
Her stomach tightened, however, when the scratch clickclick insect sounds of the woods suddenly fell quiet.
She gripped her thighs, her mouth opening in disbelief. Gooseflesh rose on her neck. For the first time, she realized how alone and vulnerable she was out here—and that her back was turned to the mouth of the graveyard trail, which, to her heightened senses, seemed to swell with whatever had just stepped onto it. She closed her eyes.
It had come.
The dagger or the icicle—it didn’t matter how she thought of it, because it had come, and it was Jesus’s weapon, designed especially for her. It didn’t have a smell or make noise, but she knew it was there, summoned by her foolhardy attack on Thorne that evening.
Bile flooding her mouth, Alice Norwick opened her eyes to the night and confronted her fate.
Chapter 20
The sky had doused the graveyard and woods with a flat darkness, and they in turn emptied the air of sound, even the hiss of Alice’s breath. She could only hear her heart.
The weapon stood on the path back to the house: a doppelganger of herself, gray and silent and still. It wore the same blue dress with lace trim. This other Alice gestured for her to follow it down the trail.
She was surprised that Christ hadn’t simply attacked her but knew that wasn’t His way. Perhaps I have nothing to fear, she thought, yet she was more frightened than at any other time in her life.
The fear decided for her. She ran away.
To her right was the access trail to the North Field. She fled down it, stumbling over unseen tree roots and rocks. The field itself, when she reached it, was full of tall grass tinged with what little moonlight shone through the clouds.
She fell once—got up, looked back. Nothing.
She found the trail to the West Field and dashed down it, her weak ankle threatening to re-sprain. Even darker here, the trees around her stood in a black wall. Something swooped by her head, and she realized she’d narrowly missed a low-hanging branch. Her breath came in short, throaty gasps like a locomotive.
Crying, running, falling, she looked back to see nothing but knew it was still there.
The West Field looked like the North, fallow and choked with tall grass that tore at her skirt. But the moon had emerged from the clouds, and now she could see. At the entrance to the trail leading back to the house, she stopped and looked behind her. Nothing.
She had a choice: continue to the right and pick up the bridle trail going toward North Road, or take this trail back to the house. Alice hesitated, her muscles wound tighter than her spool collection. Eliza could help her, right? Back to the house, then.
Once decided, she moved faster than before, her steam engine breathing tearing through her in harsh blasts. The roof of the kitchen building soon came into view.
And that’s when she saw movement in the ground shadows. She blinked, and there it stood. The doppelganger merely stared as Alice screamed and fell at its feet. She crawled backward, away from it.
“No … no!”
It made no move to attack. Just continued staring. Alice scrambled to her feet, ran away two steps, and stopped.
It only watched her.
When it saw that she wasn’t running, it turned its expressionless face toward the house and began walking there. Alice watched it go, her chest heaving with gasps and the beginnings of sobs. Like at the graveyard, it only wanted her to follow. To what, a trap? A fight? Or something else.
Obviously, it was a battleground prepared for her. As in the hours leading up to the Redger wedding (which she still couldn’t remember) she knew had a choice: cower, or go there willingly to face the confrontation.
The specter had stopped to wait for her.
Clearing her throat, Alice wiped her hands on her skirt and started after it. Yes, this was in a way similar to the Redger wedding, but it was also different in one crucial respect, and that difference was in her:
As she had realized back at the graveyard, she was entitled to protect herself. And she would not hesitate to kill in order to do so.
✽ ✽ ✽
As it neared the Big House, Alice’s doppelganger walked with the slow, exaggerated movements of one neck-deep in water. Face expressionless, it took position by the cross-emblazoned door to the basement chapel and faced her. It pointed at her with one outstretched arm, and then to the closed door.
The ruddy glow of candlelight filtered through the stained glass windows as if someone inside were waiting for her. Alice halted by the kitchen building and shook her head no.
The specter jabbed its finger at the closed door.
Clenching her fists at her sides, Alice came closer. She thought she heard someone moan inside the chapel. Since she was curious—but she wouldn’t go in and didn’t have to—she stepped past the specter and placed her ear against the door.
sssssssssssssssss
The hissing came from the doppelganger. She jumped back against the door.
sssssssssssssssss
It advanced, stepping close enough for her to touch it.
She was paralyzed with terror. The other Alice’s eyes glowed yellow now in the moonlight, its pupils two vertical slits. The angel’s wings, unbidden, drew closer to those eyes, forming a link—
Thorne’s voice, now remembered: Uh … we’ve had a slight problem with our priest for tonight’s ceremony.
Her lost memories of the Redger wedding poured into her, over the link.
Mariann Redger, in a memory spied within Thorne’s mind: Is your wife expecting you back from ‘land hunting’?
As these memories had left her as spiritual water, so did they now return, flooding her mind with all the comfort of fiery hot urine. No wonder the doppelganger, when she’d sensed it before in the woods, had felt so familiar; this being had been the reservoir of her ejected memories. Christ had indeed designed the perfect weapon to use against her, and to add insult to injury, she had unknowingly been its blacksmith.
The evening when she had fainted by the rose bush, that came back to her, too—
Thorne’s hands glided over Mariann Redger’s body as she entwined her fingers in his hair.
But the worst parts, the final parts of these memories, dwarfed those images in their pain. Both times, she now remembered, she’d been forced to realizations about her life that were so horrible that they’d pushed her beyond the point of mental breakdown, thus forcing her to eject them to protect herself.
With the specter standing before her, flooding her with the noxious sewage of her own life, she returned to that point once again.
She slumped against the door. “No …”
It was the realization, on a level so fundamental that there was no denying it, no rationalizing it, no vain hope possible that she might bargain her way out of it, that she was trapped in the spiritual continuum between Hell and Heaven, a closed system where Christ was an omnipresent and unjust ruler who controlled existence from top to bottom. It was the realization that He would never put her out of her misery, only go on toying with her and torturing her for ever and ever.
That was the lesson of the Forney-altar creature, with its proclamations about Heavenly authority, who revealed that even the smallest event, such as the wearing of a necklace, was a Godly machination.
That was the lesson of her telepathic jaunt into the body of her husband’s mistress as he committed adultery with her, an event that showed once again there was no real hope, nothing to hold onto.
Which now revealed how foolhardy it had been for her to attempt escape with the Teferas and to have kept on planning it, even tonight, after her only true friend had suffered death for her.
sssssssssssssssss
Its bladder of knowledge now emptied, the doppelganger transformed. At first, Alice thought it was dissolving like her mirror reflection two nights ago, but the yellow, slitted eyes never disappeared—only changed position on the now-glistening face, never looking away from her.
It fell to the ground, its body darkening and lengthening, its blue dress and long brown hair melting into it. A filmy membrane stitched between its legs and drew them together, and similar membranes bound its arms to its sides.
The face had lost all semblance of humanity. Its nose and cheekbones protruded together as a bulb, and its mouth stretched from ear to ear.
Finally, its shoulders, which had grown ever smaller and more insubstantial, sunk completely into its torso. The neck had likewise expanded until there was no discernable break between head, neck, and body. Just a long, glistening tube a full two feet thick and as long as two horses put together.
sssssssssssssssss
Alice blinked and realized she was staring into the yellow eyes of an enormous snake.
She sobbed as the reptile, still hissing, inched forward. Alice was now seated on the ground, leaning against the chapel door, with nowhere to escape. It came closer until its head hovered only a handsbreadth from her face and tasted the air between them with its forked tongue. She inhaled sharply as the soft tip touched her nose and cheeks.
Then, as if it had tasted something repellant, the snake turned away. Leaves crunched under its body as it slithered into the woods.
Alice remained against the door, heaving and gasping, until the snake disappeared. She was surprised it hadn’t killed her. Then again, maybe it didn’t have to. Drowning in her recovered memories, she felt she might do the deed herself. But as before, she knew death would not be an escape. She would still be trapped in Christ’s universe and still be his victim.
So perhaps she should eject all memory of this truth again so she could at least suffer on in the ignorant belief that happiness might one day be possible. But no, that would be pointless. The memories would only return as they had tonight.
Denied all solutions, Alice sobbed and beat her fists on the ground. She slammed the back of her head against the heavy oaken door.
And it opened.
She fell inward but caught herself. Stood up. A rush of warm air greeted her like animal’s breath. The altar was visible through the crack she’d opened, and the large altar cross reflected goldenly between two lit candles guttering in the sudden draft. Some of the orange flowers that had adorned the cross during the Redger wedding still hung from it in withered clumps.
A choice, then. Run away, or go in?
Running away would be easy. She would find Eliza, and they would make their escape. She would live her life as normally as she could. She would find some way to coexist with the terrible knowledge she had previously tried to eject from her mind.
But stepping inside right now would require greater courage. To stand there before the altar cross and say her piece. This torture that had begun with Momma’s childhood theft of the angel’s wings had run full circle through both their lives. Now it needed to end.
No more. No more running.
Alice stepped inside the chapel. The door fell shut behind her.
✽ ✽ ✽
Remembering how the altar cross had turned into a creature during the Redger wedding, Alice stared at it as she approached. She held her breath, afraid to breathe the sanctified air, and didn’t inhale until she stood before the altar. The cross made no hostile movements. She did feel a presence, though, as palpable as if someone were standing in the room with her.
“I’m here,” she said, and waited, but nothing happened. But the sense of another presence did grow stronger, as if something would occur soon.
Candlelight glittered off a wet spot in front of the altar. She knelt and trailed her fingers through it, and they came away coated with semen. She smelled it. Thorne.
She started shaking, the emotions she’d felt before now washing through her again: rage, the sense of betrayal, and now the sickening realization that as Christ’s appointed agent, it was only natural for Thorne to commit adultery here—and also that Thorne must have counted on Alice’s continued aversion to this place to hide the crime.
Two feet away, she now saw, lay something else that flashed in the candlelight: Thorne’s crucifix necklace. She gingerly hoisted it by its chain.
We are Truth, and thy husband is Our emissary, just as Forney and Dawson were Our agents before him, the beast had said at the Redger wedding. Behold the signet of Our authority. It shall follow thee for as long as thou doth bear Our disfavor.
The sight of its hooked termini and Jesus-upon-the-cross also brought back how the pendant had danced in her face when Reverend Forney raped her in his church so long ago. Thorne must have cast it off while making love to Mariann. Where had he gone?
Deep chuckling came from the altar.
She looked up to see the altar cross again transforming into the creature she’d seen at the wedding. The vertical bar inflated into a muscular, golden torso that attached seamlessly to the table. The top ballooned into a head. The horizontal bar formed two arms. Finally, the face shaped itself into Reverend Forney’s. The remaining orange flowers moved and sharpened into the Crown of Thorns.
As before, the creature spoke with the combined voice of its billion disciples:
> “Alice Cynthia Wharton Norwick. Thy bloodline’s theft of the angel’s wings was another plucking from the Tree of Knowledge. Thou art accursed for it.”
She grew angry. She knew this already. Why was He stating the obvious? “What do you want from me?”
“Our blood hath washed this sin from all mankind except for thee.”
“I asked for forgiveness, but you denied it.”
The beast’s mouth curled into something approaching a smile. “Thou hath put conditions on thy penitence.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But she did, after a moment’s recollection. The first time she’d tried to reconcile with Christ had been just before Reverend Forney raped her. I assure you I came here not to ask—pray for—the same absolution as my mother, she’d told Forney, and he’d replied, Who art thou to dictate the expungement of sin?
And the second time had been the night she had knelt by the chapel door and said, So I’m here to declare my willingness to submit. To give you what you want. Anything. But her unspoken words had been, Anything but the dissolution of my soul.
“Is that what you want, then?” Alice now said to the creature. “To permit you to again violate me before you’ll grant forgiveness?”
The creature’s hint of a smile grew full and exposed pointed teeth. “‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’”
Blood began to trickle from its nipples in red trails.
“‘Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.’”
She stared in revulsion at the blood streaming over the stomach. The monster’s skin bulged and relaxed with unseen forces, like animals moving under bedsheets.
She still held Thorne’s necklace. She drew it back, and with all her might flung it at its chest, where it bounced harmlessly off.
“I defy you!”
The Forney creature’s eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed. Its mouth hardened into a scowl.
A soft footstep sounded behind her. She whirled around and screamed as she saw Thorne and Mariann standing in the shadows. They were both naked, Mariann with a hand over her genitals and the other over her mouth. Thorne held something behind him, and his swollen penis pointed heavenward.
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