by Bryan, JL
“The world suffers and cries for deliverance,” said the quote beside his head. “But the Undying Lord said to me, our deliverance has arrived. The new messiah has been made flesh and placed into the world, but his—or her—identity remains veiled to us.”
The caption below the picture identified him as Eli Bernham, Founding Minister.
Below this was a golden-spiral logo and the words Church of First Light in a curling golden font.
She opened the inner flap, so the pamphlet was completely unfolded. Her eyebrows raised at the sight of the two inner pages, and her mouth dropped open.
Could you be the Messiah (or a chosen Disciple)? Consider the following questions and circle YES or NO for each:
Do you feel you have a greater purpose that you may not know or understand?
Do you ever sense you may be far more important than anybody else recognizes?
Have you felt alienated, as though this world is not quite the right place for you?
Do you have an unfulfilled craving to connect with others?
Do you often have ideas about how the world should be improved? Do you have insights into how other people could be improved?
Do you ever imagine creating a better society?
Does the world seem out of balance and in need of correction?
What shocked Cassidy wasn’t the questions themselves, but the fact that Kieran had taken the time to circle the word YES beneath each question, as though he’d taken the pamphlet seriously.
She glanced back at the metal pipe and crumpled baggie in his bottom drawer. Kieran hadn’t simply left the pamphlet lying around, he’d stashed it behind his clothes, alongside his illegal stuff, indicating he thought it might be important.
“Seriously, Kieran?” she asked out loud. “Seriously?”
Below the quiz, the pamphlet said: “If you answered YES to five or more questions, we would like to talk to you. Text YES to the following number:” This was followed by a local number with a 404 area code, which looked like it had been applied with a rubber stamp, as if the standard pamphlet were stamped with different phone numbers in different cities. She’d seen pizza franchises do the same thing on their menus and direct-mail coupons.
There was no other contact information, not even a website address, which she found strange. Didn’t every organization on Earth want people to visit their website and follow them on Facebook and Twitter?
She looked at the last page of the pamphlet, the very back panel, but it only featured the golden-spiral logo and the clip-art desert palace again. Cassidy read the whole thing over again, shaking her head. It looked like her mom had one more reason to worry about Kieran.
Cassidy set the pamphlet and her charging phone on top of Kieran’s dresser, where she could more easily reach them once she was standing again.
Then she tried to stand.
Her right leg was a heavy, aching dead lump, and she couldn’t bend her knee. She could push her body up a few inches from the floor, but that wasn’t much use.
She grabbed the lip of Kieran’s dresser with both hands and pulled, but there was just no way to get both feet solidly beneath her. Her arms were already so tired and sore that they shuddered with the effort.
She sighed and sank to the filthy, littered carpet again. She would have to rest a while and try again when she didn’t feel so weak.
A millipede creature as long as her arm trundled across the wall above Kieran’s bed, probing the bedsheets with mouth tendrils even longer than its body. It was barely visible, and she was glad, because it looked disgusting.
Cassidy closed her eyes to avoid looking at it.
Though her body and brain ached, there was a certain comfort in being in her bedroom from childhood, even if it was smeared with a layer or two of her little brother’s filth. She was still tired, and she felt herself dozing.
Then all the pain was gone.
She floated near Kieran’s dusty ceiling fan, feeling suddenly light and free. Her body slumped against the wall below, still damaged and in pain. She regarded it as a poor, injured little animal, and she hoped it got better soon.
The millipede-thing on the wall was rendered much clearer now, lapping its tendrils around Kieran’s empty bed with a sound like half a dozen licking and probing tongues. She could also see the usual worms and transparent insects in the air, their shells and mandibles so clear that they even seemed to have color, a kind of dead beige. Her notebooks were filled with sketches of such little monsters.
The critters paid no particular attention to Cassidy, neither her slumped body below nor the part of her that seemed to float near the ceiling fan. They were gruesome, but not new to her, and she didn’t feel particularly concerned about them at the moment.
Cassidy was too busy enjoying her sudden mobility, free of the damaged meat-cage of her body. She circled the room, avoiding the little monster-creatures, then floated out through the door to the balcony.
She drifted above the cracked, graffiti-tainted sidewalk three stories below. A few streetlights illuminated the parking lot to her left, where a group of teenage boys stood smoking and drinking, their bodies crawling with small transparent insects.
No lights illuminated the sinkhole encircled by chain-link. She drifted that way and looked down inside the fence. The pine brush and kudzu were thicker and taller than when she’d last lived here. Dirty trickles of runoff water collected into a cylindrical concrete sewer at the very bottom. The sinkhole was a great habitat for possums, snakes, and mosquitoes.
Her curiosity drew her closer to the ground, where she was startled to see a miniature-golf putter topped with a plastic purple monkey caught in the edge of the round sewer. She remembered Reese’s jaw dropping like a snake’s, blooming with rows of sharp teeth. The sickening thunk when the head of the club landed in Reese’s eye socket.
When Tamila called Cassidy from the hospital that night, she’d explained that Reese kept screaming to everyone in the emergency room that she’d been possessed by a demon, that a demon had taken her eye. When nobody seemed to believe her, Reese lashed out physically at the nurses and doctors and had to be sedated. To nobody’s surprise, they’d also found a few recreational and pharmaceutical drugs floating around in Reese’s blood.
Tamila told the emergency room staff that the wound was self-inflicted by Reese, who’d been acting crazy all night. The doctors had naturally believed Tamila’s crazy-drugged-up-party-girl story rather than Reese’s I-was-possessed-by-an-actual-demon story. The lie had protected Cassidy against too much police involvement. The lie had also been Tamila’s last act of friendship before cutting herself off from Cassidy altogether.
Tamila had thrown herself into her schoolwork. Reese had thrown herself into religion. Cassidy and Barb had thrown themselves into blotting out their minds with drugs and music. None of them ever spoke of it, at least not to each other. It hung in the air between Cassidy and Barb, a huge unnamed thing that could not be discussed, because talking about it meant admitting it had truly happened.
Perhaps that was why the other friendships had dissolved immediately. Nobody could stand to be in the same room with one of the other witnesses, because that made the event too real. Somehow, Cassidy and Barb’s friendship had been the exception.
Cassidy felt shaken and decided she didn’t want to be near the old putter anymore. She floated up as if she’d pushed herself away from the ground.
She looked in on her body again, making sure none of the transparent vermin were bothering her. She didn’t feel ready to be trapped in her broken body again.
Cassidy moved out over the parking lot and over the stuck-open gate. She floated above a cinderblock strip mall housing a small Korean grocery, a pawn shop, a Thai restaurant, a bail bond place—all of it closed at this late hour. Traffic on the multi-lane road was still brisk.
A young woman stood at a stoplight intersection in front of a cheap motel, dressed in tiny sparkling shorts and a bra top, her face heavily painted, nervo
usly swinging her purse and watching the cars whisk by. A transparent worm as fat as a python coiled around her body, its round mouth sucking at her arm. Drifting closer, Cassidy saw the worm was feeding on what appeared to be track marks on her arm. The girl was a heroin addict.
Cassidy felt sad for her and found herself sinking down to ground level, as though her emotions propelled her up or drew her down.
She wondered how high she could fly.
She imagined herself rising up like a bubble on a warm updraft. She floated up, watching the city spread out around her, the horizon pulling away on every side as she rose higher and higher.
She saw more of the transparent bugs—swarms of bugs like winged scorpions with four or five eyes each, millipedes crawling up the sides of buildings, coiled worms and weird shrimp-like creatures drifting through the air. Pale creatures with bone-studded armadillo shells faded in and out of view, sniffing along after isolated late-night pedestrians.
She rose higher, and she could see the skyscrapers downtown. Their surfaces appeared to ripple and twitch, as though they’d grown organic hides.
Curiosity drew her closer. Larger transparent creatures swarmed the high buildings, long segmented worms with mandibles clicking and slurping all along their underbellies, more of the large spidery things with transparent hides and dark organs sloshing inside. The spiders wove webs of fuzzy, indistinct lines between the glass towers.
The skull-headed vultures, some of them larger than human beings, perched on buildings all over town, perfectly still until something in the streets caught their attention. Then they dove from their perches, their beaks open as though cawing, but their rotten throats made no sound she could hear. Horned creatures with spiky shells crawled up and down the sides of the skyscrapers, and a few giant rotten birds the size of pterodactyls flew among the buildings, dodging transparent spiderwebs. One of the enormous black bird-shapes plucked a spiky worm from the top of the black-glass Equitable building and heaved the wriggling creature into its bony beak, chewing and cracking its shell as it flew onward, past the towers and towards Cassidy.
The thing loomed larger as it flew toward her, its plumage filthy and matted, the red night sky of the city visible through the rotten holes in its outspread wings.
Fear froze her in place as it approached her, chewing the broken worm in its maw. Its head turned from side to side, as though each of its hollow eye sockets were having a look at her.
It swallowed back its worm and dove towards her, the hooked bones of its jaws spreading open, large enough to snap her in half if she’d had her body.
Cassidy held up a hand in front of her face, as though to block the enormous creature—and she realized she did have a hand. It was no more than a pencil sketch, but it was there, with fingers she could wriggle.
A hissing roar emerged from the enormous bird’s open beak, and suddenly it was close enough that she could see hives of maggots lining its lower beaks, feeding on decaying lumps of filth.
It occurred to her that if she had some sort of body now, the thing really might snap its jaws and eat her up, just as it had the worm.
I need to go home, she thought. I need to go home right now. Absurdly, she thought of Dorothy clicking her ruby slippers.
She felt something in the pit of her gut, or at least the area on her transparent pencil-outline body where her guts would have been. It pulled at her.
She shot downward across the city, as though she’d stretched a rubber band to its limit and it now hauled her backward. The sky and the streets spun dizzily around her.
She flew over the brush-filled sinkhole, over her balcony railing, and slammed into her body so fast all her muscles jolted at the impact.
Chapter Twelve
“What the fuck are you doing in my room?” Kieran’s voice asked.
Cassidy opened her bleary eyes. She was still sitting on his floor, slumped against his wall, her muscles sore and useless.
“Hey, yo, really,” Kieran said. “You can’t come in here.”
Cassidy looked around and yawned.
“You gotta go,” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. “I had to charge my phone.”
“Now it’s charged.” He unplugged it and tossed it to where she sat on the floor. “So you can go.”
“Stop being a little dickface.”
“I will when you get up and leave my room.”
“I can’t. My leg’s broken. I’ve been stuck here all night and you’re out of pot. Help me up.”
“You went through my stash?”
“That’s not a stash. A stash would include actual drugs.” Cassidy blinked at the window, where purple light glowed faintly through the dusty blinds. It was nearly sunrise. “Are you just getting home?”
“Yeah, like you never party all night.” Kieran gave her a smirking grin. “This party was unhooked, too. Everybody from school was there. Totally wild. Devin passed out in the bathroom, and they stripped him naked and wrote all over him with magic markers and lipstick. I mean they wrote on him everywhere. He’s going to freak out when he wakes up. I’ve got pictures.” Kieran held up his phone.
“You left him at the party?”
“He wouldn’t wake up.” Kieran shrugged. “He’ll be okay. What did you do last night?”
“I sat on your nasty floor and tried to stand up,” Cassidy said. “That killed a few hours. Are you going to help me or not?” She held up her hands.
Kieran blew out a long, exhausted sigh, as though he’d been doing nothing but helping her all night and was tired of it. “Fine,” he groaned as he approached her.
He took her hands and helped her slide up along the wall until he could reach an arm around her waist. He smelled exactly like a teenage boy who hadn’t bathed in a couple of days, and she leaned against him very reluctantly.
“Gross,” he whispered. “I’m like hugging my own sister.”
“For me, it’s like hugging an overflowing trash can,” she replied. “Hand me my crutches.”
She hadn’t noticed the pamphlet still clinging against the leg of her pajamas, but now it tumbled loose and drifted to the floor like a fallen leaf.
“What the hell?” Kieran released her abruptly, and she had to plant her hand on the wall to avoid toppling over. He snatched up the pamphlet from the floor. “Why were you going through my stuff?”
“I told you, I was trying to steal your crappy weed. If you didn’t want me to see that, you shouldn’t have hidden it next to your drugs.”
Kieran shoved it into his pocket, looking sullen. “Just take your crutches and get out.”
“Why are you so mad? It’s just the brochure for some weird cult. Why did you fill it out, though? You’re not taking these religious freaks seriously, are you?”
“I didn’t fill it out.” He held her crutches until she got them under her armpits.
“Somebody circled ‘yes’ for all the questions.”
“Probably Devin. He’s a dumbass. We were just making fun of it.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. ‘Are you the Messiah?’” Cassidy laughed. He half-smiled and gave a forced laugh.
“Don’t search through my stuff again,” Kieran said. “Okay?”
“Like you have anything worth searching for.” Cassidy pulled herself to the door on her crutches. She was stiff all over, but the pain in her right leg drowned out the aches in her arms and back. She had slept in an extremely uncomfortable position.
“Hey, you won’t tell Mom, right?” Kieran asked.
“Which thing? That you ditched me all night to go to a party, or that you’re dumb enough to keep a useless bag of seeds and stems in your room?”
“Hey, don’t be a narc, yo.”
“Give me my purse and my phone. Yo.”
Kieran held out her phone and purse, one in each hand.
“Here,” Kieran said after a moment, impatiently jabbing them at her.
“I’m on crutches, dickface,” Cassidy said. “Drop the phone in t
he bag and put it around my neck.”
With another pained, long-suffering sigh, Kieran did as he was told.
“Stop calling me dickface,” Kieran said as she left his room.
“Stop being one,” she replied, and he slammed and locked the door behind her.
Cassidy heaved herself across the little living room, past the “dining area” table cluttered with magazines and bills, and on into the narrow kitchen. A coffee maker and a microwave with a small toaster oven on top were crammed into the short stretch of kitchen counter between the refrigerator and stove.
Leaning on her right crutch, Cassidy opened the cabinet above the coffee maker and grabbed a mug. Then she took a step to the side, leaned forward until her hips were braced against the counter, and stretched up her left arm, gritting her teeth with the effort of staying balanced. Hot new pain rushed upward from her right leg. She tried to ignore the transparent worms and bugs that crumbled into sight around her head.
After some struggle, she managed to open the cabinet above the stove with her fingertips. Her fingers explored inside and found a glass bottle, which she dragged out. Powers brand whiskey.
She gently pulled it until she could wrap her fingers around the bottle’s neck and lift it out. Using only her left hand, she opened it and poured the coffee mug half full. It was the strongest medicine available to her.
Cassidy sipped the whiskey, and the worms’ mouths flared as they dove toward her. Transparent bugs landed on her tank top. She tried to brush all the critters away, but it was no use, because they weren’t real. They were just the hallucinations of her malformed brain, scraps of leftover nightmare that clung to her like parasites.
“Go away,” she whispered, and she took another big drink to help them do just that. Stupefying her brain was the only way to make the hallucinations stop.
“Kieran!” she yelled. “Stop watering down Mom’s whiskey. It tastes like crap.”