by Willow Rose
I leaned back and stared out the window. Big snowflakes were dancing outside as they slowly found their way to the ground. I wondered how the people of this town had even heard about the Ranters. Then I went back to Google and took the next link. It was a web-page describing the Ranters as some who embraced the concept of the ‘indwelling spirit.’ Whatever was done in the Spirit was justifiable to a Ranter. Apparently the Ranters were seen often parading naked in the streets at a time when nudity was a huge taboo. I went back to Google and found a definition of a ‘Ranter‘ on the free online dictionary. According to it to rant meant ‘to speak or to write in an angry or violent manner.’ I sighed and opened one more web-page that stated that the Ranters were an Anarchic religious extremist group of the English Revolution that was often accused of sexual immorality, blasphemy and drunkenness.
I exhaled and closed the laptop. This was leading nowhere. It was nothing but a nickname.
“Well I’d better get going now before the roads are closed with snow,” I said and emptied my coffee.
“You sure you don’t want us to come with you?” Asked Sune.
“I’m positive.”
Chapter 25
Mette Grithfeldt didn’t go down for dinner that evening. She wasn’t feeling well and stayed in her room thinking about her past and if she was going to have a future after this night. Someone brought her evening tea that they always drank before bedtime. It was a soothing herb tea that always made her relax and get ready to sleep. The Priest had called it medicine for the soul and told them to drink it every night before bed in order to get closer to God. What was in it Mette didn’t know, but it always did make her feel better. Right now she needed to feel better, she needed to calm down. She exhaled deeply and emptied the cup while thinking yet again about the Priest and how they first met.
Nadja had kept her word to Mette. The next day she woke her up by touching her hair gently. All the girls had just fallen asleep on the cold tiles in the room. They didn’t know if it was night or day, they never knew since the men came at all times. Mette had woken with a start thinking it was another client, another man who wanted to use her. She was shaking and Nadja had held a hand over her mouth. Then she had signaled to her to be quiet. Mette understood. She got up from the floor, sore all over from all the men who beat her and taken her as they willed. Nadja held her by the hand and led her to the window that was covered with plywood behind a thick curtain that didn’t let any sunlight get in to let them know it was day. Nadja looked at her with worn out eyes. Then she reached in her pocket and showed Mette something. A knife. A small pocket knife. Mette never knew where she had gotten it from but guessed that she had stolen it from some client. Maybe went through his pockets while he was on her. She didn’t tell Mette since they never spoke in order to not let the people standing outside the door know they were awake. They would beat the women half to death if they knew they were talking. They had seen it and both felt it before. No one was supposed to talk. “Just lie still and be ready for next client,” the men said. Punishment for not obeying was hard and often led to death. Mette was terrified of becoming their next victim. She knew she meant nothing to them and she had been there so long the clients were growing tired of her, they craved fresh meat and hers was growing old.
Nadja began working on the plywood with the pocket knife and Mette looked at her resignedly. This was her plan? This was it? There was no way they would be able to cut through the thick plywood with just a small pocketknife. Had Nadja lost it?
But Nadja didn’t give up, with almost supernatural strength given their situation and circumstances she kept working on the plywood with her bony fingers, jagging the knife into the wood and chopping it. Her face was strained and almost manic as she kept hacking the knife into the wood again and again. Mette had no idea how long it took but it felt like forever, until suddenly a small ray of sunlight broke through the plywood. Mette looked at Nadja and suddenly realized that even if it seemed impossible then miracles did happen and might happen to her right there, right then. So she started pulling the edges of the plywood with all her strength while Nadja made the hole bigger with the knife. She was smiling, trying to make as little noise as possible to not alert the men on the other side of the door.
Suddenly more sunlight broke through when Nadja managed to make the hole bigger and Mette could put in a hand and with all she had she pulled it and some of it broke off. Mette froze when she realized how loud it had to have sounded. She stared at the door, her heart in the throat, but it didn’t open. She turned and looked at Nadja who was staring out the hole with a paralyzed look in her eyes. Then she let Mette look through it as well. It hurt her eyes and she had to shield her face from the brightness. But what a sight. Houses and mountains in the distance. All that space and oh oh the sky, the blue sky right above her, leading to an endless limitless universe. If she ever managed to get out of that room, Mette promised herself she would never live in a small place again. She would sleep outside in the open whenever the weather permitted it, she would live in houses with high ceilings and she would never ever lock the door.
But to her surprise and disappointment Mette also realized that even if they had managed to make a hole in the wood big enough for them to escape, they were in an apartment many, many floors above the ground. Too many. They wouldn’t be able to jump without killing themselves. She turned and looked at Nadja who had just realized the same thing. Together they stared at freedom right outside these windows knowing they would never be able to reach it.
That was when they felt a hand grab their necks from behind. Mette turned and looked into the eyes of the man she recognized as one of those guarding the door. He held them one in each hand, clutching her throat so she was almost choking. Behind him Mette realized he had forgotten to close the door. The other girls were awakened by the noise and saw the open door.
After that hell broke loose.
All the girls were on their feet and ran towards the door. Another guy outside tried to stop them, by beating them, hitting them, throwing them back, some fell to the floor but others managed to escape. They were screaming panicky, hysterically freaking the guards out. Scratching them, hitting them, taking chances, jumping from the top of the stairs, hurting themselves as they landed. The guy holding Mette and Nadja dropped them to the ground and pulled out his gun. Then he turned and shot Nadja. Mette screamed and kicked the gun out of his hand. Then he slapped her across the face till she landed on the tiles. Blood was running from her forehead. While the guard looked for his gun, Mette managed to get back up and run towards the door. The other guard was shooting wildly at all the girls swarming the place like bats, like wild animals who had nothing to lose. Then Mette jumped. She jumped over the banister and was in the air, falling towards the next floor and the stone stairs. She heard shots being fired behind her but it drowned in the screams from the other girls. Mette hit the stairs and heard bones break in her arm. Then she heard another shot fired and looked up. The guard who had killed Nadja was standing on the top floor aiming at her. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She managed to get on her feet and looked into his eyes once more before she was on her feet again and started running down the next set of stairs. She heard them yell and shoot after her but the fear and anxiety gave her the power to run faster and faster and finally escape out the building into the open. Then she ran all she could and never looked back.
After a while she ran out of strength and sank down on the pavement. A woman approached her and took her hand. She helped Mette get to a center where they took care of young girls who had been sold as sex-slaves. At the center run by a local church she met hundreds of girls with the same story as hers.
She also met a man whose merciful eyes she would never forget. His name was Anders Granlund and he was also from Denmark.
Chapter 26
My dad was feeling better, a nurse said when I entered his room. He wasn’t awake yet, but they were expecting him to wake up soon.
�
��Probably will happen tomorrow,” she said just before she left the room. I pulled a chair up next to his bed. He looked so pale lying on the bed breathing through the tubes. I held his hand tight and squeezed it hoping he could feel it, hoping he knew I was there, that he wasn’t alone. I had called my sister earlier and she was on her way, but the heavy snowfall on the south side of Zeeland had stopped her half way. The roads were blocked and she had called me and told me she had to turn around and go back home. I assured her I was taking good care of Dad and hung up. I felt tears piling up behind my eyes when I looked at my father. Suddenly I missed my mother like crazy. I didn’t want to be alone with this. I needed my family around me. I needed us to be happy and laugh. Life was so short. Suddenly people were no longer there.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I mumbled. “I overburdened you. I should never have let you do all this work for us, taking care of the kids, always cooking when you should have rested instead. I should have known better after the stroke.”
“Don’t say that,” a voice behind me said.
I turned and faced the doctor that I had spoken to earlier. Doctor Philipsen, his nametag said. “Sorry,” he explained. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I was just checking in on my patient before I go home for the day.”
I smiled and wiped the tears of my eyes. “It’s okay. I’m glad you care,” I said.
“Well I do,” Dr. Philipsen said. “And I have to tell you that keeping your dad busy with work at the house, taking care of grandkids isn’t why he ended up in here. On the contrary he needs it. He needs to keep his body working. Sitting still after a blood clot is the worst you can do. You need to move around, take long walks or whatever works for you. If housework is what your dad likes to do he should keep it up, by all means. It is in his best interest.”
“But … I don’t understand. Why did he get the blood clot then? If it wasn’t because he overdid something?”
“I don’t know, but the lab says they did detect something unusual in his blood sample that they want to look into,” Dr. Philipsen said.
“What are you saying?” I asked, quite startled.
“I don’t know anything for sure yet, but even after he wakes up we will need to keep your dad for a couple of days in order to run more tests.”
“But what did they detect in the blood?”
“I don’t know the details, just that they have to run more tests.”
I sniffed. “Did they find cancer or something?”
“As I said I really don’t know, just that they are asking for more time. Let’s wait and see. It’s probably nothing.”
Dr. Philipsen gave me a not very reassuring smile. It felt like all the blood inside of my veins froze. There was definitely something he wasn’t telling me.
“I’ll let you know as soon as we have the results,” he said and left the room with a gentle “Goodbye.”
I exhaled deeply and stroked my dad across the cheek. “Poor little daddy. What is happening to you?” I said while the tears rolled fast down my cheeks.
The snow fell thick and made the roads almost impassable when I tried to drive back from the hospital. The small roads leading to Arnakke had become slippery and hard to drive through. My car kept getting stuck in small piles of snow or slipping off to the side so I almost lost control. I texted Sune on my way that it was going to take a while for me to get back and he texted back that there was no need to hurry, he had started getting the kids ready for bed and they were all fine. Just be careful.
“That’s easy for you to say,” I mumbled while trying hard to see through my front window where the wipers had trouble keeping up with the big piles of snow that kept landing on it blocking my view. Even when I managed to wipe the snow away the visibility in front of me was like zero. I could hardly see the road and tried to focus on just not ending in a pile of snow not being able to get free or even worse hitting something.
Of course that was exactly what happened next.
Chapter 27
Slowly and gently Anders Granlund managed to help Mette get back on her feet again. He helped her regain her self-esteem and her trust in people again. With love and understanding he helped her get back to life and soon she even found herself laughing. He could make her laugh.
Anders was only visiting Hungary on his trip around the world visiting different churches, a trip he referred to as his “spiritual journey.” He told her he was trying to find himself and God in a world destroyed by evil forces. Then he taught her what he believed, that evil forces lived in people, often even possessed people and made them sin towards God and do evil things if they weren’t stopped, driven out of the body they possessed. Mette had never heard anyone talk like Anders. She found him refreshing and different, and she soon became very fond of him, and later she fell helplessly in love with him, this savoir who wanted to save her from herself and the world surrounding her. He told her he was starting his own church in Denmark even if he didn’t like the term “church” - he would rather refer to it as a family. Mette had liked that. A family. She had never had much of one and had always dreamt of having her own.
“If you come with me you’ll get a big one,” he said. “No matter where you come from, no matter what you experienced in your past, we will treat you as family, we will love you.”
Mette had really liked the sound of that. So after a couple of months in the center Mette went back to Denmark escorted by Anders Granlund to meet her new family at the camp in Arnakke that they were restoring. At first they were so supportive and helped her in any way they could. She had a hard time staying in small rooms and they let her sleep outdoors since it was summer, at least for a couple of weeks. When it got colder she acquiesced to sleeping indoors in the big spacey common room and finally she felt comfortable enough to sleep in her own room. They were patient with her and very very loving. They even helped her at night when she woke up screaming and when she crumbled by human touch. They taught her that touching could be nice and filled with love.
It wasn’t until later she realized that something was wrong. When her new adventure slowly turned into misery. After a while in the camp she realized that they never had anything else to eat other than vegetables and that they were all very weak from not having proper food, and not enough of it. Mette soon learned that it was used as a control tactic by Anders Granlund who now wanted her to call him the Priest and not by his name. He would feed them very little and sometimes drag them out to walk in the middle of the night. Mette remembered how she felt so exhausted she didn’t even have the strength to protest when they came to get her. All night long they were forced to walk in circles in the courtyard. Mette loved the priest so much she was willing to endure anything for him. That quickly turned into him demanding her sexual favors which she provided and he returned the favor by letting her increase in rank and soon she was eating meat once a week at his table while the rest of the “family” were stuck with only vegetables.
The priest told them they needed to suffer, to deprive the body of its fleshly desires before they were ready to step up the next level like he had. It was vital for their survival that they fasted. It would starve the evil inside of them and soon it would be forced to leave. Then and only then they would be able to be closer to God. God demanded this of them, she heard the Priest say. The lack of sleep, the starvation and being engaged in intense physical activity during the day soon broke all of the members and Mette saw how they ended up worshipping the Priest and kissing his feet. So did she. Mette had only eyes for him and just the mention of his name could make her shiver. Shiver with a rare combination of fear and delight. The fear of losing him was worse than the fear of his rough treatment of her. Without him to guide her in her life where would she be? What would have become of her? That was why she gave him all of her money when her parents died, that was why she had devoted her life to serving him, to loving him and providing him the pleasure he needed, whenever he needed it. The Priest told her that she was “meant to serve” that it was a way
to find “inner peace.”
Mette tried to escape once. That was before she learned how to use her gender and sex appeal to have the Priest give her favors and make her one of the leaders. It was back in the beginning after only a few weeks in the camp when she had grown tired of all the hard work she was told to do. The members had told her to wash six of their cars and her hands were blistering and bleeding from scrubbing, but they told her to continue even if blood was smeared at the cars. So when no one was looking, she ran. Ran towards the exit and climbed the fence. She ran into the street and hid in a vacation house nearby that at the time was empty. Less than half an hour later she saw the six cars she had been forced to wash loaded with church members. They were driving on all the roads surrounding the house and knocking at all the doors, telling people they were looking for someone who escaped a sanatorium, asking if they could search their houses.
It didn’t take them more than fifteen minutes to locate Mette. When they brought her back the Priest looked at her disappointedly. Then he locked her in a small closet without food, water or toilet for four days. Mette screamed hysterically for the first two days. Then she went quiet. When they finally opened the closet they found her shaking, covered in her own excrement, broken.