The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  I said, “What’s so odd about that?”

  “If his chest was girded with explosives, it’s hard to see how it could occur. The combustion should’ve scoured every vestige of tissue and bone.”

  Newbarr grabbed folders from a file cabinet. “I need your John Hancocks on these evidence reports. Eve’s remains need to be interred in a state burial, plus Kincaid’s manager has been hassling me.”

  The doctor gave a disgusted snort. “Apparently he’s packaging the ashes in crucifix-shaped ampoules for fans to wear round their necks. A sick little piece of Kincaid-iana. He wants the remains pronto, before his client’s star goes on the wane.”

  Before leaving, I handed Newbarr a packet of Hallelujah Energy Boost.

  “No, thanks,” the coroner said. “I’ll stick to rotgut coffee.”

  “Could you give me a breakdown of the ingredients?”

  “Says here it’s packed with vitamin V,” he said, examining the ingredients archly. “What more proof do you need?”

  “If you’d rather not . . .”

  “I’ll see what I can do. No promises, son.”

  Doe and I rode the elevator up together. It was the first time we’d been alone since the night I’d said in a roundabout but sincere way that I was in love with her.

  She stood very still, watching the elevator buttons light up floor by floor. Shallow incisions radiated from her left eye; I could only speculate as to which of Hollis’s subtle tortures had inflicted those.

  I said, “You were in Little Baghdad this morning?”

  She nodded.

  “Everything okay? I thought the residents might have been angry, on account of all the casualties. I . . . I was worried about you.”

  She performed an ironic curtsy. “Don’t you go worrying your pretty head.”

  A trapdoor opened in my belly. I’d never told a woman I loved her, not once—was this how it worked? You told someone you loved them and they did an abrupt about-face, dismissed you and made cynical quips?

  The elevator doors eased open to admit Chief Exeter.

  “Acolyte Murtag. The very man I was looking for.”

  He guided me out into the hallway. Doe slipped past us and was gone.

  “The boys giving you a rough go of it?” Exeter set a hand on my shoulder. “No fun being on the outside looking in, is it?”

  I resisted the urge to crack him in the mouth and leave him spitting up his pricey enamel crowns.

  “I’m fine,” I told him, keeping it diplomatic. “Busy.”

  “Anything I should know about?”

  “It’s Acolyte business.”

  Exeter bristled. His veneer slipped. I glimpsed the razor-toothed leer that lurked beneath his empty smile. It struck me there was little difference between Hollis and Exeter: both were wolves. Exeter wore his sheep’s clothing more convincingly was all.

  “A man on a tightrope should ensure he’s got allies on both sides.” He gave my shoulder a sly tweak. “Otherwise he risks finding his rope cut one day.”

  I held his stare. “The Lord is my keeper. There but for the grace of He go I.”

  “Yes, well . . . you have been summoned.”

  “By whom?”

  “The Prophet.”

  I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice. “Why me?”

  The angle of Exeter’s cocked head said I was an idiot for asking.

  “You were the last servant of the Republic to see Eve alive. I expect he wants to allay any lingering unease in his mind that his daughter’s final moments were overtly traumatic.”

  I wasn’t convinced. Men were sometimes invited to hold palaver with The Prophet only to vanish. And it wasn’t simply a matter of disappearing—they were retroactively erased from being. Names cleansed from public rolls and clipped from newspaper archives, medical records excised, life histories overwritten, their every vestige wiped out of creation. And it had always worried me, more than the tortures those men most certainly endured or even their unlovely deaths: the prospect of being unborn.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, before High Mass.” A sharkish grin from Exeter. “Dress reverentially.”

  The Prophet. A face-to-face with the conduit of God.

  When I returned to the squad room I was met with a skeptical glance from Applewhite, who was eyeballing the composite the sketch artist had sent up.

  “You’d better go wake your snitch.” He folded the paper in half and handed it to me. “The guy’s been dreaming up perps.”

  The sketch was nightmarish. According to Tibor Goldberg’s recounting, the perp had a bald wedge-shaped head like a V, nose crushed flat over off-kilter cheekbones, ears like open Buick doors, and a forehead like a grocer’s awning, sheltering pisshole-in-the-snow eyes—one of which was completely white: no cornea, no iris. The physical dimensions Goldberg guessed at were absurd: 6’ 10”; 420 pounds.

  Applewhite groaned. “You expect us to canvass town for the Jolly Green Giant?”

  “Goldberg did say the guy was big. Freakish, was the term he used.”

  “That’s certainly a freak. Circus left town last month, mind you.”

  I said, “What about Livingston?”

  Applewhite frowned. “Henry Livingston, the Wiccan ringleader?”

  “He’s massive, isn’t he? Mug all screwed up from some nerve disorder?”

  Applewhite said, “Gigantism. That was the reason the witches and warlocks followed him: he scared the bejesus out of them.”

  “Scared—past tense?”

  Applewhite nodded. “He’s dead, Murtag. Executed. His freak head hacked off.”

  I considered the other sketch on the board. The Muslim extremist, as witnessed by the sole survivor of the Up with God Minstrel Show bombing. On a whim, I picked up the phone and dialled Mount St. Mary’s Healing Hands Centre. After airing my credentials I was forwarded through to the ICU charge desk.

  “How may I help you?” a nurse said.

  “The bombing victim from the Up with God Show. He still alive?”

  “He is, officer. He was making progress but has suffered a setback. Infection of the lungs. We’re praying for him round the clock.”

  “Is he awake?”

  “The poor dear goes in and out. We have our most fervent practitioners sitting at his bedside.”

  “If I were to stop by, what are my chances of finding him lucid?”

  “Who can say? Only God. Prayer is a powerful curative but—”

  I hung up on her, irritated. I stuffed the sketch composite into my pocket. Rooting through my desk, I rounded up my set of plastic devil horns and a tube of spirit gum. My phone rang. It was Newbarr.

  “I’ve figured something out,” he said.

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve been working from the theory that the bomber was wearing a dynamite vest or some such. In which case, how was he not spotted?”

  “None of this is new information, doc.”

  “No, but this is: what if the bomber was packed with explosive?”

  He gave it a second to sink in.

  “Those spine fragments set me off,” he went on. “They were fused to the metal plate, meaning the explosion had to originate from somewhere inside the spinal column. The human intestinal tract can accommodate seven to ten pounds of foreign material, so long as it is malleable. The stomach can hold roughly five pounds itself.”

  “So you’re saying . . . ?”

  “I’m saying C-4 is malleable. I’m saying it is possible for a man to ingest, or be force-fed, five pounds of tungsten ball bearings. He’d be the most uncomfortable man on earth but if he felt his cause was worthy he could put up with the discomfort.”

  I gaped. “So you think the guy was a bomb?”

  “And perfectly concealed. Metal detectors wouldn’t be ab
le to ping through the skin, fat, and stomach lining.”

  “What about a detonator?”

  “Just a wire and a battery. It would be a simple matter of slipping the wire up his, er, you know what, and triggering the blast.”

  Calling Dr. Satan

  My apartment remained a shambles—door blown off, copious smoke damage. So Hollis arranged for me to be put up at the Harbinger’s Harbour motel a few blocks from the stationhouse while my landlord made repairs. Doe was here, too. Just down the hall.

  My room’s window overlooked an alley strung down the rear of the motel. Crucifixes glowed on rooftops on the west side of the city. A lot fewer than usual: dark gaps in the skyline where lit crosses once stood. My gaze trailed down the alley mouth. . . .

  Something was spray-painted on the grimy brickwork.

  LET YOUR SINS GO UNPUNISHED.

  I’d stopped at a store for a birdcage and a sack of birdfeed. I removed the rescued bird from the shoebox. Its wings were still gummed with blood. I spritzed it with warm water from the tap. It sat docilely in the sink, shaking bloodied water from its wings until it was clean enough to flit around the bathroom. I lined the cage with newspapers. It flew into the cage of its own accord, perching on the swing and chirping happily enough.

  I threw myself onto the sprung mattress. Roaches skittered in the wall behind my head.

  Angela. I couldn’t shake the memory of her in the moonlight: the knife wounds and bullet scars. Couldn’t shake the softness of her body or the steely bent of her mind.

  I got up. Put on my shoes. Doe’s room was down the hall. I found myself lingering outside her door, pacing a strip of balding Astroturf. From inside: voices. It took a moment to parse one from the other: Angela and an unknown male. A needle of ice penetrated my chest.

  I rapped on the warped door. The sound of feet padded toward me.

  Bisected by the security chain, Doe’s face flashed relief.

  “What’s going on? Something the matter?”

  “The matter? No.” My left foot twisted nervously into the Astroturf. “It’s just, we haven’t talked lately except for those few words in the elevator today, so I thought we could—”

  “I’m sorry, tonight’s no good.”

  The investigator in me, the habitual snoop and invader of privacy, stole a glance over her shoulder. I caught a long thin shadow cast on the chowder-coloured carpet.

  “Got a hot date?”

  A voice said: “Who is it, Angela?”

  The voice was as glossy as a cultured pearl. It spoke her Christian name. The needle of ice in my heart grew into a tenpenny nail, into a railroad spike—

  “It’s nobody.”

  —into a sharpened spear that screwdrivered out of my back and left me gasping.

  “Nonsense. Invite him in. I’d love to meet one of your friends.”

  The room’s other occupant stood at the foot of the bed clocking me with an expression that existed free of overt emotion.

  I’d never seen anyone quite like him. Tall and ethereally thin. I found myself looking for the bamboo pole he must’ve been yoked to, same as a tomato plant.

  He said, “Prophet’s blessings be upon you, my friend.”

  “From the Lord’s lips to His,” I said stiffly. “I can’t recall if we’ve ever met.”

  The guy was not handsome in a traditional sense but his face was striking in its angularity: it could’ve been chipped from a block of basalt. He wore boxy sunglasses with wraparound armatures custom-fitted to admit no light.

  “I don’t imagine we should have,” he said. “I am in all respects a law-abiding citizen, so there’s no need for our paths to have ever crossed.”

  I sensed two things immediately. Number one: he was lying. Number two: he was mocking me. Or not mocking me, exactly—mocking all I stood for.

  “Nice digs, huh?” I said to Doe, purposefully ignoring him. “Hollis went all out.”

  “We shouldn’t have expected any better.” She slopped Republic Claret into a motel Dixie cup and slugged it back. Her teeth were stained with the stuff. “See how they treated us today? At least lepers had the option of a colony.”

  “It’ll blow over.”

  The stranger said: “If you don’t mind me asking, how do you feel about your recent treatment?”

  I faced the guy head-on, chin tilted at an aggressive angle. “It’s got zero to do with you. Acolyte business. And who are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  He took not the slightest offence. “Thomas Swift. Tom, to my friends.”

  I shook his hand out of custom and immediately wished I hadn’t. His bones were clad in the slimmest stretching of skin and his grip mildly predatory: like shaking a bat’s wing.

  “Where are you from, Swift?”

  “Please—call me Tom. I’ve lived here and there. Most recently New Beersheba, until that city underwent a massive upheaval.”

  Very little had been reported regarding the situation in New Beersheba. Apparently there had been an outbreak of civic strife. The Divine Council dispatched a delegation to quell it.

  “The Quints?” I said. “Isn’t that who was sent?”

  Swift nodded. “Heaven’s own bagmen.”

  “And you were given a dispensation to relocate here? You must be well-placed.”

  He waved my question off and sat on the bed. The way he smoothed his hands over the coverlet raised my hackles: a possessive gesture that spoke to future intimacies.

  It was then that I noticed a shape hovering outside the room, behind the filmy curtains. Enormous: it looked as though a maintenance man had wheeled the motel’s soda machine in front of the window—an assumption that might have held if not for the subtle rise and fall of those blocklike shoulders.

  I turned back to Swift, who regarded me behind his dark glasses. A tear tracked down Swift’s face. “Beg pardon,” he said. “I’m leaking again.”

  He eased his glasses onto his forehead. His eyes were of palest blue. His bottom left eyelid was sliced in the dead centre, skin parted in a glistening V an inch down his cheek. He wasn’t crying. His eye was leaking the ichor of a wound that was never likely to heal.

  He dabbed at it with a crusted white handkerchief.

  “Years ago, I might have made a fine living.” He folded the hankie into a neat square, stimulated the necessary facial muscles to trigger a smile, and clarified: “On the freak-show circuit.”

  Angela gripped my elbow and guided me toward the door. I didn’t want to leave.

  “I need to talk to you about—”

  “Not tonight,” she told me. “I’m busy.”

  “Busy with what?” I winced at the plaintive note in my voice.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”

  I dropped my voice. “How do you even know this guy?”

  “We’re friends. Old friends, that’s all.”

  Swift kept eyeing me—not with malice, but rather the wry curiosity of a man watching a simpleminded zoo creature fumble about an unsuitable habitat.

  “I trust you’re a gentleman?” I said. “A pure Follower?”

  Swift laughed so hard I thought his paper-bag chest was going to explode.

  “Pure as the driven snow, Acolyte Murtag.”

  He eased his sunglasses over his eyes again. Doe shut the door.

  I drove streets slick with night rain.

  I felt more awful than I could ever recall. Humbled and broken-hearted and moronic. How could I have let that slit-eyed sideshow curiosity rattle me?

  My reasoning was idiotic: it had struck me that the man, Swift, ultimately lacked some critical essence of humanity—the essence commonly known as a soul.

  Tom Swift. Lately of New Beersheba. I’d be running a background check on that fine fellow right quick.

  As I idled at a stop sign not far
from Trinity Square, a homeless wreck shambled up and tapped the glass with one frostbitten finger. I unrolled the window and the stink of his mouldy flannels filled my nostrils.

  “Spare a shekel so a down-at-his-heel Follower might receive his daily benediction?”

  My eyes followed the black stump of his finger to the DBB across the street. I was less than surprised to find five words graffiti-tagged across it:

  LET YOUR SINS GO UNPUNISHED.

  I dug into my pocket but instead of a crumpled shekel I came up with the sketch composite from earlier today. I tossed the poor shambles a few shekels from my duster pocket and set off for the Healing Hands Centre.

  Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the parking lot. The Centre was all steel and glass and calculated angles. Dark at this hour save the odd square of light burning in the upper galleries and a stained glass portrait of Saint Luke, patron saint of physicians, backlit above the revolving entry doors.

  The air lacked that antiseptic undertone, everything constantly wiped down and sterilized. Instead the sweet, slightly cloying scent of frankincense. You would find not a single medical instrument—not a thermometer or an enema bag, not saline solution or calamine lotion or baby aspirin—at The Healing Hands Centre. Patients were treated with the power of prayer alone.

  I walked down a hallway past speakers piping out madrigals. When I dinged the bell a charge nurse parted a pair of thick purple drapes separating the desk from the ICU ward. Her nametag read: HEAD PRAYER-MASTER.

  I informed her that I came with questions of great importance to the Republic to pose to the witness of the Up with God minstrel show bombing. She guided me through the drapes.

  A contingent of off-duty Prayer Maids lounged in the break room near a punch clock. Young, female, dressed in diaphanous crimson robes, they were rented out at an hourly rate to offer bedside prayers of succour. The richer you were, the more Maids you could afford. The Healing Hands Centre administered exclusively to males; the Maids’ garb was purposefully revealing to ensure a patient’s last days in this fleshly realm were palatable. But the Maids were devotees of the Immaculate Mother, quaffers of Purity Purge, and so most of them resembled little more than ambulatory anatomy charts.