The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  A dangerous man. Amid all the patsies and stiffs and losers I’d come in contact with in the line of duty there had been but a few truly dangerous men. Those ones you recognized right off: something in the voice, the eyes, the viperlike way they moved.

  At quarter past eleven on the third night, a van rolled up. A man exited the passenger side and crossed the sidewalk. He did not push the buzzer. He had a key.

  Angela’s kitchen light went on. I socked a pair of binoculars to my eyes and thumbed the focus wheel. Angela and Tom Swift. The two of them smiling, Swift touching her shoulder, Angela’s cheeks colouring, Swift tossing his head back in laughter.

  They sat. I stewed. At some point Angela guided him to the front door.

  I hustled to an unmarked prowl car in the motel lot and caught the van as it pulled away from the curb. I didn’t radio for backup—none to be had, not that I trusted.

  The van meandered for twenty minutes before cutting off Mount of Beatitudes into one of the tony suburbs ringing the SuperChurch. It pulled up at a stop sign. A few people approached. Some looked like they might own homes around there; others looked to have crawled from cardboard shanties.

  The van’s rear door swung open and the people vanished inside. When it opened again, those same people exited the van and went away down the street. Nobody appeared to be carrying anything, so what were they receiving—drugs? Benedictions?

  The van hit three more neighbourhoods: Jewtown, Little Baghdad, Preacher’s Row. I surveilled from afar, idling in the darkness of smashed streetlights. I counted each person entering the van: forty-three in total. They went into the van, a few minutes passed, then they got out of the van and walked away. They fit no known demographic.

  It was past midnight when the van rounded down a cracked two-block stretch of tarmac leading to the Damascus Towers. The Towers had been built decades ago to house the previous Prophet, an ex-monsignor. But, seeking to distance himself from the old Monsignor and all tokens of his regime, The Prophet had ordered the Damascus Towers shut down. They remained standing, if barely. Scavengers had gutted the insides, tearing out the marble counter-tops and brass fixtures and ivory carpeting. After the easy meat was gone, the most industrious foragers had ripped out the doors and window glass and copper plumbing pipes and teak floorboards.

  Like any creature with its guts yanked out, the Towers had basically collapsed into themselves. All that remained was a pair of yawning fire-gutted skeletons, upper stories crumbled on weird angles. They resembled decayed tusks poking at the sky.

  I popped the trunk and grabbed a flashlight. I had my pistol and badge but otherwise bore no trace of office; in my three-day-old clothes and beaten night watch jacket, I passed for a fair facsimile of the wrecks who called this area home.

  I picked a path across the shattered cobblestones, my intention being to pass between the towers to the rear parking lot where I was certain I’d find the van. This course took me past the courtyard fountain; a knee-high stone tub presided over by a headless statue of the old Monsignor. That the head had been hacked off was old news—but now a carved pumpkin had been perched atop the stained marble stump.

  Two figures huddled on the street side of the fence. One struck a match while his partner cupped his hands round the glowing matchstick and touched his cigarette to the flame. Had they scissored in behind to cut me off? Or were they only a couple of rummies? I pulled my pistol from its shoulder rig and made my way between the towers. What had once been a series of manicured terraces were now risers of brittle grass littered with cracked stone flowerpots. My gaze trailed up the western face of the left tower: bricks scorched by old fires, yawning window frames consuming the cloud-filtered moonlight. Thunder rumbled nearby, filling my mouth with a dry ozone taste.

  The van was parked on the decline of a loading ramp that led into the far tower. Its doors flung wide, interior empty. After checking it on the off-chance its keys had been left in the ignition—no dice—I hugged the wall leading down the ramp.

  It emptied into an underground parking garage. Skids of canned food were stacked along the walls; was Swift gearing up for Doomsday? Rats skittered across sewage pipes overhead. I could hear voices or music coming from somewhere.

  My shoulder brushed something. I dropped the flashlight. It spun on the concrete floor, illuminating the garage in a revolving fan. More canned food, a few cars, words scrawled on the walls that passed too quickly to read . . .

  . . . and directly in front of me, a man.

  I levelled my pistol. “Don’t move.”

  He did not—not a muscle. I picked the flashlight up and shone it at his face.

  Wasn’t a man at all, but an effigy of our Prophet. Arms and legs made out of wheat chaff bundled with baling twine, jutting at perpendicular angles from one of the vanilla suits favoured by the Heaven-Sent Hero. Its clay face was an eerie replica of The Prophet’s own, except the features were outsized and cartoonish. The sculptor gouged deep thumb-holes in place of eyes: they were stuffed full of rancid meat. Scrawled on the wall behind it:

  MAY YOUR SINS GO UNPUNISHED.

  “That’s not for your eyes.”

  I turned toward the sound of the voice, my pistol coming round with me. It was engulfed by a hand so large it felt more of a paw—my mind snagged upon the scene outside Zoila’s Nail Salon, those officers who looked to have been torn apart by a gorilla. I brought my free hand up in a desperate bid to smash this monster’s face only to have it glance off a freakish expanse of chest. Next, something crashed against my skull and every ounce of light drained out of the world.

  A Polite Conversation

  “Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes,

  Long as I got my plastic Jesus,

  Sittin’ on the dashboard of my car . . .”

  It was dark, wherever I was now, though an ambient glow came from somewhere. My skull felt cracked open, some of its contents leaking down the back of my neck.

  “Comes in colours, pink and pleasant,

  Glows in the dark ’cause it’s iridescent

  Take it with you when you travel far . . .”

  My guess was that I was in an abandoned unit in the Damascus Towers. A hurricane lamp hung from a ceiling nail. Wind howled through the empty windows. I was lashed to a chair at ankles and wrists.

  “Go get yourself a sweet Madonna dressed in rhinestones,

  Sittin’ on a pedestal of abalone shell.

  Goin’ ninety, I ain’t wary ’cause I’ve got the Virgin Mary,

  Assurin’ me that I won’t go to Hell.”

  The singer sat at the edge of the lamplight. I’d heard his voice before. Tom Swift plucked a few more chords on his instrument: a milk box ukulele with a yardstick fret and fish line strings. The photo of the missing boy on the milk carton was familiar.

  “Have you ever heard this song, Jonah?” he asked. “It’s called ‘Plastic Jesus.’”

  “No,” I told him. “Never.”

  “It’s from a film,” he said. “Cool Hand Luke. Ever seen it?”

  “That’s a banned work.”

  “Why so?”

  “It valorizes disobedience of authority. It may cause people to . . .”

  “Question their masters?”

  I nodded tiredly.

  “How many times have you seen The Passion of the Christ?”

  Every Republican Follower was expected to watch that film yearly; it’d been playing in its own downtown theatre since before I was born.

  “Thirty-five times.”

  “Thirty-five times and you’ve never seen Cool Hand Luke.”

  Tom Swift shook his head as if to say this, in a nutshell, was the real problem with the world. He asked if my head hurt. I asked him what the hell he wanted.

  “Oh, the usual: peace for all mankind, an end to hunger, your Prophet’s head on a stick.” He held out his hands, wrists
touching. “Want to cuff me, Jonah? I’m a heathen sinner.”

  “I wouldn’t bother with cuffs. I’d shoot you.”

  He frowned. “That’s no way to treat your host, is it? I should be asking what it is you want, Jonah, seeing as it was you doing the following.”

  I switched gears. “What’s with the fake name? Tom Swift, some dried-up boy genius.”

  He offered a polite golf-clap. “Nice sleuthing. But you didn’t answer my question—why were you following me?”

  I said, “What happened in New Beersheba?”

  “What did you hear happened in New Beersheba?”

  “It’s a black hole. No information coming out.”

  Water dripped, dripped, dripped down my neck.

  “Do you love her—Angela?” The tilt of Swift’s head indicated that my answer would be of purely abstract or scientific interest. “I can see why you would. She’s intrinsically loveable.”

  I jerked my body towards him. My aggressive move prompted a pillar—or what I’d mistaken as a pillar, huge and fixed as it had been—to step forward and place a hand on my shoulder. The hand was the size of a cast iron skillet. The man it connected to had the fridge-like dimensions to match.

  Swift made a soothing motion. “I’m sure our friend was only stretching his limbs, Porter. That’s all you were doing, Jonah, yes?”

  Lamplight curved the underside of the monster’s face. I recognized it as the face from the sketch composite by Tibor Goldberg—the fairy-tale giant who’d placed a call from the payphone outside his record shop. Freakish was the word Tibor had chosen. No hyperbole in that choice. Measured ear-to-ear, his head must’ve spanned a foot.

  Swift waved the man-mountain off. “Acromegaly,” he said. “Gigantism, in layman’s terms. Big as a house, isn’t he?”

  Swift made a pirouetting motion with his finger. The giant obediently turned to face the wall.

  “His name’s Porter Rockwell,” Swift said, “but we call him Golem. You know about Golem?” When I shook my head, he said, “Why would you? It’s a heathen Jew myth. A Golem was a giant shaped out of clay. Its maker wrote orders on slips of parchment and placed them in the Golem’s mouth; at night, the Golem came alive and did whatever it was commanded. Swept the hearth, mended the fence, murdered his maker’s enemies . . . anything at all.”

  “Why make him turn around?”

  “Porter’s deaf. He did it to himself—screwdriver. It’s partially my fault. I told him he was better seen than heard and he misinterpreted it.” Swift guided an index finger toward his ear with aching slowness. “No thought, all action—that’s a Golem for you. But he has learned to read lips quite well.”

  I thought: How could he have placed a call from that payphone if he was deaf?

  I said, “How do you know him?”

  “Oh, I picked him up along the way,” Swift answered, as though the giant were a stray dog who’d opted to tag along out of loneliness or fear.

  “Do you really want The Prophet’s head on a stick?”

  Now Swift smiled. “That was crass of me. What I meant was that your Prophet is a coward and a snake and I suppose it’s my wish for people to see him in his proper light.”

  “How’s that—by encouraging them to blow themselves up?”

  “Your Prophet is a figurehead,” Swift went on, ignoring my question. “Most people are such herd animals they’d prostrate themselves before anyone so long as he’s been certified a holy mouthpiece by your divine council. They need a little enlightenment, is the thing.”

  “And you’re just the man to spread that good word.”

  “I don’t see anyone else stepping up.” He spread his hands, as if in hopes that someone might absolve him his dreary burden. “I wish for people to think for themselves. Right now their lives are governed by a book of fairy tales.”

  “Your conviction is admirable,” I deadpanned. “There are plenty of soapboxes on Preacher’s Row.”

  He stood and walked to the empty patio window. We were high up—no lights, no rooftops.

  “I do wonder,” Swift said, “why it is we think so highly of ourselves. Why we’re the only species with enough . . . gall? Yes, gall, to think that some part of us, some essence, must live on after we die. We are unique in this view that something within each of us is so valuable it must exist forever in some form, on some plane—heaven, hell. Insects, animals: their existence is finite. Ours, infinite. Why should we be so special?”

  I had no answer to that.

  “I do understand our need for belief in a clinical way: we’re so fragile, our existence so uncertain, we need a centrepiece around which to orient our moral selves. One perfect being to look up to in a world where others so often act in their own self-interest. But what if there’s nothing to be pious for, sacrifice for, abstain from, look forward to?”

  Wind skirled between the panes of the hurricane lamp, blowing the flame slantwise. I could hear Porter Rockwell breathing heavily. When the flame licked up, I saw Swift had returned to his chair.

  “My fondest hope is to be wrong. Should I die in such a manner that spares me a moment to address my sins, I promise you I’ll recant. Do you want to know what the final words to pass my lips will be?” Throwing his hands heavenward. “Take it all back, Lord! I believe!”

  The tower whipsawed in the wind.

  “Something about you greatly puzzles me,” said Swift. “Tell me: why don’t you visit your mother, Jonah?”

  My breath locked up, this feeling of cold steel bands clapped over my ribcage. How did he know these things?

  “If you do anything to her . . .”

  Swift’s upper lip curled back to reveal teeth white and straight as organ keys.

  “You must think me a rare scoundrel! What have you ever done that I would seek revenge upon your mother?”

  “Then why do you care?”

  He said, “My own mother is gone. Murdered. It happened long ago, when I was a boy. Yours is not. That you would let her rot away in that house of ghouls . . . promise me you’ll visit her.”

  I said, “I will.”

  “I’ll know if you don’t.”

  “I recognize that. Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why are you here in New Bethlehem?”

  “A reclamation mission,” was his simple answer. “Reclaiming the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten and the damned.”

  “You want what happened in New Beersheba to happen here.”

  “Whether I want it or not, yes, it will happen. As it was bound to before long—if not me, some other catalyst. Tell me, Jonah. What is it you want for Angela?”

  “I wish for her to be happy.”

  He cocked his head. “That’s not exactly true, is it? You wish for her to be happy with you.”

  “And you think she’d be happier with who—you?”

  “She’s beyond the possibility of happiness altogether.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  He stood and tapped Porter Rockwell’s shoulder. The giant lowered his head while Swift massaged Porter’s neck above the fringe of close-trimmed hair. Rockwell made a noise approximating the nicker of a satisfied horse.

  “Golem’s going to pop a pill in your mouth,” Swift said. “No lasting effects, I promise. Please don’t fight it; Golem’s been known to break jaws.”

  I obeyed, thinking I’d stash the pill in my cheek until I could discreetly spit it out. But it dissolved like spun sugar the moment it hit my tongue. Swift retrieved the ukulele and plucked a couple off-key notes. I concentrated on the photo of the missing child on the milk carton. Who was that kid? I knew the face.

  “Once a man arrives at the conclusion that humanity is a sinking ship, can he be blamed for drilling holes in its hull?” Swift said. “The question becomes: How to make an entire species self
-destruct? What is the most effective system of annihilation? Religion. It’s a tool, and any tool has a right and a wrong use. And this particular tool has already been mishandled and manipulated by a thousand different masters. Fear, obedience, sacrifice, fanatic loyalty: these are the fruits religion cultivates in a nurturing hand. And the greatest part is that the nurturer doesn’t need to promise anything tangible: the reward is only delivered in death. It all rests on the bones of belief. And those bones are unbreakable.”

  I focused on the milk carton and finally recalled where I’d seen that face before. My last glimpse of it had been framed by the glass of a yellow school bus, that child’s stoic expression so much different than the young smiling version that graced the carton, that long-missing boy waving stone-faced as the bus pulled away. The boy. Jeremiah.

  The pill kicked in. My mind kicked out.

  Orgy

  I dimly recall being carried downstairs, Rockwell cradling me like an infant. He set me in the van, on a pile of stinking rags in the back. It jounced along the road leading from the Damascus Towers and smoothed out as we hit the main thoroughfare. Rockwell was scrunched into the driver’s seat like an orangutan stuffed into a kitchen cupboard. Swift rode shotgun.

  The van halted, a buzzer went off, and we sawed down a series of switchbacks. Rockwell killed the engine. He opened the rear doors and tugged a black satin hood over my head. He picked me up again—the man’s strength was terrifying.

  “What’s the best way to grow a religion?” I heard Swift say. “By fucking, my dear Jonah. Loads and loads of fucking. Look at the Mormons: Joseph Smith assembled a dozen virile gents and their docilely fecund wives and told them it was their sacred duty to mint as many ankle-biters as possible. With nothing else to do on those cold Pennsylvania nights, those Mormons got down to some heavy-duty fucking.”