by Beth Goobie
“A woman’s inside,” muttered Dee, grimacing. “Some poor screwed-up bitch, her asshole sucked up the back of her head with fear.”
Even as she spoke, Jez saw something begin to materialize between Dee’s hands—the transparent outline of a life-size wailing woman, her hands scrabbling and clawing at her body as if it were a garment she could tear free. “My…my mother!” Jez whispered, stepping back. “It’s my mo—”
But Dee wasn’t listening—her face gone blank, her pale blue stare transfixed. “Not you,” she sing-songed, her voice floating aimlessly. “But almost you. A long time ago, almost you—”
“This has nothing to do with me!” yelled Jez, suddenly terrified. “It has to do with my mother. My mother and a guy named Pastor Playle. What you’re looking for is a bastard called Pastor Playle.”
The wailing woman vanished, leaving Dee blinking rapidly and staring around herself with a confused expression. “Jesus!” she whispered, rubbing her temples. “Where am I? Did I—” She faltered, her voice trailing off. “Did I go…weird, Jez?”
Her eyes slid across Jez’s, a trapped question, and Jez, staring back, stumbled against the rhythm of her own heartbeat going wrong. Slow realization opened between the two girls—Dee couldn’t remember what had just happened, as if for a few seconds she had stepped out of her own awareness. Which left the full truth of the incident only in Jez’s hands—hands that were, at that moment, admittedly distraught and devious. The immediate problem facing her, as Jez swiftly assessed it, was that if she told Dee what had occurred, the other girl might justifiably freak and run. And that would leave Jez once again alone in the unbearable labyrinth of her life, unable to discover what she most needed to know.
Because for her the veil hung firmly in place. She hadn’t been broken the way Dee had been; for her, those inner gates hadn’t been torn open. So she had to rely on Dee; there really was no choice. And anyway, Jez told herself, Dee owed her. Seekers on the hunt, they had taken blood vows together, had walked in through tonight’s church doors on a mission, and were here—poised, finally, on the front line of the war against God. They were about to find out.
So, dropping her gaze, Jez said simply, “Nothing’s weird. Shh, baby, nothing’s weird.” Climbing the stairs to the stage, she grasped Dee’s clammy hand and pulled her through a side door into the hallway that ran along the back of the church. “C’mon,” she urged. “Let’s go check out his office.”
“Whose office?” asked Dee, her eyes darting as she scanned the corridor ahead of them. “It’s stronger out here, Jez—the buzz.”
“That’s because we’re getting close to Pastor Playle’s office,” said Jez, heading determinedly toward a nearby stairwell. Although their encounter in the sanctuary had been a shock, it hadn’t revealed anything new. Upstairs, however, in Pastor Playle’s office—now that, she reasoned, was where the true mystery took place. Sunday after Sunday, that was the place in which her mother was inexplicably transformed into the Divine Sister.
“It’s on the second floor,” she told Dee, pulling her up the first few stairs. “C’mon—let’s see what you pick up.”
But instead of following, Dee jerked backward and out of Jez’s grasp, her body gone rigid, her eyes wide and staring. Then she turned and began walking back the way they had come. “Where are you going?” Jez called after her, but the other girl continued along the hall, her shoulders cowed, the usual shimmy of her hips locked into an awkward gait that was somehow very familiar. “Dee!” shouted Jez as recognition hit. “Wait, Dee! Wait!”
Oblivious, Dee stumbled onward, now mumbling breathily to herself. “This is the journey,” Jez heard her whisper. “The journey of the chosen ones. This is the journey of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the journey of the Israelites in the desert, the serpent lifted up in the wilderness. This is the journey of Joshua fighting for the Promised Land, the Battle of Jericho and the walls tumbling down. Walls come tumbling down, tumbling, tumbling down.”
Pausing, Dee felt about blindly, then turned to face a door close to the sanctuary entrance. “Dee?” Jez asked cautiously, coming up beside her.
Breath labored, Dee stood with her forehead touching the door. Sweat beaded her face as tremor after tremor ran her body. “Hush-a, hush-a,” she whispered. “We all fall down. Sin and evil and all gone dead. Sins of the mothers visited upon their children. Hush-a, hush-a, they all fall down.”
Wordless, Jez fought off a mounting panic. Either by bizarre chance or by instinct, Dee had ended up pressed flat against the door of the storage room in which the Divine Sister’s red velvet box was kept. Thank God, Jez thought fervently, that door is always locked. Open-mouthed, she watched the other girl shudder and whimper, shudder again.
“This is the garden,” Dee whispered to the locked door. “The garden where the journey begins. The garden where the body is broken and sin enters in. Hush-a, hush-a, sin enters in and we all fall dead. But the few, the chosen few, are lifted out of darkness into a great light. Lifted into the light. Into the light.”
Her head snapped up. Then she turned and began a slow, shuffling walk toward the sanctuary, her body taking the same broken posture Jez had so often seen in her own mother. “No!” screamed Jez, launching herself after Dee just as the door to the sanctuary opened and her father came through, followed by her mother and Pastor Playle. Startled, the three adults halted and stared at the girl shuffling toward them, twisted and groping as if half blind.
Reaching Dee, Jez wrapped her arms around the other girl, pulling her out of the high, white scream of the mind and back into the comforting solidity of flesh. “Jez?” mumbled Dee, as the two girls nuzzled and burrowed into each other’s necks. “What the jeezus fuckin’ shit, Jezzie?”
“It’s okay,” whispered Jez, hanging on tight. “Everything’s okay now, I promise.”
A frown on his face, Pastor Playle cleared his throat. “Mary-Eve,” he intoned, “explain immediately what has been going on here in the Lord’s holy house.”
Dazed, Jez stared at him. “Uh…my friend’s visiting from school,” she stammered. “She has a headache. We—”
To her relief, her father stepped in. “Ralph, we’re running short on time,” he said. “The Divine Sister needs time to prepare.”
“Yes, yes. Of course,” replied Pastor Playle, glancing from the two girls to Mrs. Hamilton, who stood beside him in a white pillbox hat, smiling radiantly. No, not just smiling, Jez realized suddenly—her mother was displaying the exact rapturous expression she always gave right before she underwent her transformation into the Divine Sister.
“Come, come,” Pastor Playle said to Jez’s mother, taking her arm and leading her up the stairs. Without a glance back, Jez’s father followed, the sound of his footsteps carrying him out of sight. Heart pounding, Jez stood staring after the disappearing adults. It’s about to happen! she thought excitedly. The signs had been with her mother this past week, but not strongly—at least not strongly enough to indicate a visit from the Divine Sister. And so there had been no velvet box session at today’s morning service, no divine prophecy, and the congregation had been sent home dissatisfied.
But now, she thought, peering up the stairwell to the second floor, satisfaction looked to be right around the corner. The transformation—or mutation, depending on how one looked at it—was about to take place once again. Only this time, Dee was here. The girl with the Eye. The butterfly girl with the inner gates.
“All right, Jez,” came Dee’s voice from behind her, and Jez turned to see the other girl slumped against the wall, her closed eyelids paper-thin. “You’re not going to fuck with me twice. I went weird. I know it, and I know you know it, and this time you’re fucking going to tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened,” muttered Jez, edging around the truth. “I think you…Well, all of a sudden you changed. You were trembling a lot, and whispering…things. You
talked like someone else.”
“Yeah!” exploded Dee. “That was some bitch! What was she talking about—sins of mothers, children dying, and a great light? I must’ve run into some kind of memory of her.”
“Memory?” asked Jez.
“Things she’s done and said, left behind in the air,” said Dee. “People leave them everywhere all the time. Usually they just fade, but this one was so strong it took me over. And then, when I was in the middle of it, something tried to come after me…the way it goes after her, I guess. It was something that feeds on souls. It’s not human, whatever it is.”
Jez swallowed around the fist in her throat. “What does it do to…that woman when it gets her?” she whispered.
“Uses her,” snapped Dee. “To connect with the other losers in this church. All it needs is one torn-open soul and it’s got a gate straight into everyone else. The thing that has this church is really big.” Dull-eyed, she stared down the hallway. “You have to be pretty far gone for it to plug into you. I got blasted so bad, I barely remember anything.”
Jez swallowed again. Even with everything she had just witnessed, everything she knew, she felt herself pulling back, not wanting to take this in. “How come it went after you and not me?” she asked.
With an effort, Dee pushed away from the wall. “Fear, baby!” she hissed. “You ain’t got enough fear. When you came after me now, it took off. Which way is Sin? I’m outta here.”
“No!” cried Jez, grabbing her arm. “Please, there’s one more thing. It’s up in Pastor Playle’s office, where they went—Pastor Playle, my father, and my mother…the bitch you found in the sanctuary. At least, that’s what she turns into after she goes into Pastor Playle’s office. But not before—you just saw her, right? She’s not like that now. Something happens to her, every week, in that office. I’ve been trying to figure it out for years, but I can’t on my own. I can’t.”
Desperately, Jez stood watching as Dee rose and fell on one shuddering breath. “It’s Pastor Playle,” she pleaded. “He’s fucking my mother; he’s got her under some kind of spell. He’s the one who must’ve called in that thing—whatever it is.”
Eyes lowered, Dee continued to hesitate somewhere deep within herself. “Okay, Jesus-girl,” she said finally, her voice cobweb-soft. “But don’t think I don’t know you lied when I needed the truth. Don’t think I don’t know you’ll play me the way I play you.”
Their eyes met, and in a fierce, singing rush Jez felt the invisible barrier that had always resonated between them tear wide open; then, in some naked virgin place, they were flushed and rooted against each other.
“No one—not you, not anyone—is fucking better than me,” whispered Dee. Exultation, almost beauty, crept across her face. “We all turn into the same inside-out asshole crawling across the floor and begging in the end, don’t we?”
“I’m sorry,” whispered Jez.
“Don’t be,” hissed Dee. “It’s freedom.” Gingerly, she straightened, the cat returning to her body. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll stay. But remember—that thing comes after me, not you. So what I say goes. If I say we’re outta here, we’re gone. Got it?”
“Got it,” mumbled Jez, wiping tears from her face.
“That was a shitload to carry, Jezzie,” Dee added quietly, watching her. “Always having to be better than everyone else.”
“Not as bad as having to be worse,” said Jez.
“Maybe,” said Dee. Without speaking, they climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked along the upstairs hallway until Jez paused opposite a closed door.
“Here,” she mouthed, and Dee nodded, studying it. “It’s locked,” added Jez, “and you can’t hear anything through it. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
With another nod, Dee leaned one shoulder against the wall and closed her eyes. “C’mere,” she whispered. “Put your forehead to mine and close your eyes. Then wait. Just wait.”
Hesitantly, Jez touched her forehead to Dee’s and closed her eyes. Immediate darkness enveloped her; she became aware of her heartbeat and the sound of her breathing.
“Usually you need blood,” murmured Dee, her breath a gentle pulse against Jez’s mouth. “But with the freak-out I just had…” As if in response to something, her voice trailed off, and gradually Jez also began to sense it—a growing heaviness, a density of mind. Then she seemed to be turning ninety degrees and passing through the wall, but so unhurriedly she could see the grain within the plaster and wood. Next, this vanished, and she found herself gazing directly into Pastor Playle’s office with its familiar curtained windows, framed theology degrees, and family photographs. In an armchair opposite sat her mother, face serene and beatific. Perched beside her on the edge of a large desk was an intent-looking Pastor Playle; across the room, Jez’s father leaned against the outside wall. Motionless, both men were watching Rachel Hamilton the way a heron scans the water’s surface for the prey that swims underneath.
“I dreamt of angels,” she was saying in a high breathy voice. “Amber and rose-pink angels that were weaving songs of light through my body.”
“Ah,” murmured Pastor Playle. “Truly a vision sent by the Lord, sister.”
Catching Jez’s father’s eye, he gave a quick nod. Instantly, Deacon Hamilton straightened and began to pace, his breath growing labored and a flush darkening his face. Between his hands, a softcover Bible twisted in and out of an angry curl.
“You slept!” he hissed in a tight voice, pointing the Bible at his wife. “You, with your sins covering you like maggots! Yes, the Devil paints your sleep with false visions of angels and light.”
Dismay pleated Rachel Hamilton’s face. Mouth open, she stared at her husband.
“But the rest of us?” he continued, striding to his wife and gripping her shoulder. “The rest of us who sleep with the blood of Jesus dripping in our faces? The rest of us who suffer endlessly, knowing the price the good Lord paid to save us from evil? Do I sleep, Rachel? Have I slept for the last ten years?”
As if waking to the intentions of the room, Rachel Hamilton cringed back in her chair. “No!” she whispered, clutching her small white purse. “Please, no!”
The eyes of the men met, and again Pastor Playle nodded. Lips tightening, Jez’s father turned back to his wife, and the room contracted around them like a throat.
“You killed Louisie,” he said. The words were quiet, almost conversational. Like a favorite Bible verse, they left Deacon Hamilton’s mouth, flowed toward his wife, and blew her wide open.
“Arrogant,” he added steadily. “Willful. Slothful. Your sins mounted around you like the stones of a sepulcher, and you knew.”
Wordless, Rachel Hamilton stared back at him.
“You knew the wages of sin was death,” accused her husband. “You knew someone would have to pay the price. You knew and you chose the one who would pay—Louisie. You chose my Louisie to atone for your sins. Ten years ago, you took a helpless, God-fearing child and placed your sins upon her, knowing God would have to claim her. Your sin killed Louisie. You killed my little Louisie.”
Eyes closed, Jez’s father vibrated through his last words as if suspended along a high, singing note of pain. Then, something released, he grunted, opened his eyes, and stepped back. Slowly the flush left his face, his breathing quieted, and the Bible untwisted in his hands. Glancing at Pastor Playle, he nodded, and both men focused on the woman quivering in the armchair before them.
For Jez’s mother had begun to shake. Neck and spine now rigid, she sat plucking at the front of her dress. “No,” she whimpered, her eyes darting side to side. “I could have been more faithful. I was lax, I know that as God’s truth. I mocked the Lord’s holy name and disobeyed His commandments, but I always loved my little girl. I always loved Louisie.”
“Love isn’t enough,” Pastor Playle said gently, getting down on his knees and taking her distraught
hands in his. “Human love is selfish and blind. Was it human love you offered Louisie, mere hu—”
“It was the love of a mother!” cried Rachel Hamilton.
“Was it self-love?” Pastor Playle continued inexorably. “Self-love—the greatest sin of them all?”
“No!” cried Jez’s mother. “I never loved myself. Never. You could never fault me with the sin of self-love. It was always my little girls; everything was always—”
From across the room, her husband erupted. “Why did you choose Louisie instead of Mary-Eve?” he thundered, again pointing the Bible at her. “I’ll tell you why—because Louisie loved me, and Mary-Eve loved you. Mary-Eve was inferior, the insignificant one. Any fool could have seen how pure Louisie was standing next to her, how much closer to God. Even you could see it, and it filled you with envy. You coveted the love Louisie had for me. You had to steal it somehow.”
“No!” whimpered Rachel Hamilton, her hands scrabbling furiously at her bodice. Long and relentless, a shudder convulsed her body.
“You killed her,” repeated her husband in a thick, empty voice.
“Confess everything to the Lord,” said Pastor Playle, still on his knees and stroking Rachel Hamilton’s hands. “God forgives everything, even the secret sins of the heart.”
And then, for a second time, Jez saw it—the white wail of a woman rising within her mother’s body, its twisted hands clawing open a hole deep inside her spirit. A hole, Jez realized, stunned, that was brilliant with light—a gate to the other side.
“Yes,” whispered Rachel Hamilton, her head sagging. “Yes,” she sighed, and the transformation was complete—the radiance vanished and tremors once again haunting her limbs. This, thought Jez, staring at her, is the way she’s always led out of the office. How many times had she seen her mother exactly like this—her head down, shoulders slumped, shuffling toward…
At that moment, Rachel Hamilton started to jerk, her purse swinging wildly from her wrist. As a look of dismay crossed Pastor Playle’s face, she spewed several hoarse grunts and raised both hands toward the ceiling.