The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  “No,” I admitted. “Lipstick. Do you know a Tom Swift?”

  “Should I?”

  “He’s the man who wrote your name on me.”

  “Then your beef’s with him, ain’t it?”

  “Ever worked in a travelling show, Mr. Murphy?”

  Murphy grinned. “After they told me I was too pretty for Broadway.”

  “Tell me: was your stage name Pliny the Pinhead?”

  “Not sure.”

  He cut his eyes at the coffee tin. I contributed a shekel.

  He barked laughter. “You need me to tell you my stage name? Whatever they’re paying you, Kojak, it’s too much. Pinhead. Awful descriptor. People only use ten percent of their brain, anyway. Einstein used eleven and was a genius. So I use all what I got.”

  “What’s with your windows?”

  “Neighbourhood kids kept mashing their noses to the glass for a free eyeful. My only rule: looky-loo all you want, but pay for all you see. Kids don’t have two coins to rub together. I smeared lard over the windows so they couldn’t gawp.”

  “You know, they’ve made some real advances in the curtain sciences,” I said. “They cover whole windows now.”

  “You a home decorator?” Murphy sneered. “Here I am thinking you’re a flatfoot with a fairy streak.”

  “I dabble in home decor consultation. Buy some curtains.” I took a shekel out of his tin. “My consultation fee. You get the friend rate.”

  His expression curdled. “Ain’t you a peach. Taking advantage of a handicapped fellow. Then again I s’ppose you got your own cross to bear, conceived lacking a sense of decency and all.”

  “Let’s start over.” I dropped the shekel back in, then opened my wallet to show Murphy all its brothers. “I have questions. I’ll pay for the privilege of your information.”

  He scuttled to the sofa; his gait reminded me of a fiddler crab. He wore grubby stevedore pants with thick rainbow suspenders slung over his bare shoulders. Torso white and fleshy, with an undeveloped baby chest.

  “Shoot.”

  “While you were part of this travelling show—”

  “Freak show,” he corrected. “Spade a spade.”

  “Freak show. Did you ever come into contact with The Prophet’s old tent revival?”

  Murphy snorted. “You could say I did. Their show, our show, we were rolling through the same scratch-ass one-donkey towns. We hooked up. Easier to draw in the rubes when you had a bigger spectacle on offer.”

  I dropped a shekel in the tin. “You ever have much reason or opportunity to traffic with them?”

  “Interesting choice of word. Traffic.” Rolling it in his mouth, tasting it. “I used to do this trick, blow a soap bubble and slip my head inside—the Astronaut Helmet, we called it. The Immaculate Mother loved that bit. She’d stop by my caravan so I could give her a private showing.”

  “Do they know you’re in town—The Prophet and his wife?”

  “Know?” Murphy circled one finger like a propeller. “Who you figure pays for this abundance? I’m a kept man.”

  “How so?”

  Another snort. “Listen, Perry Mason, why don’t you drop your whole nut in the kitty and I’ll tell you straight, no more drips and drabs. Truth is, the only time I’ve ever let it slip was this one time I was drunk. It’d be nice to tell it with a clear head.”

  Everything in my wallet went in the can. Murphy gave me my money’s worth.

  “She looked much better in those days,” he said. “Not the shrunken parody we saw on television. Young and attractive and really believing in what she was doing. Converting the masses. Saving souls. Something about a purpose makes a person beautiful; something comes shining straight out of them. I’m sure she pitied me.” Murphy shrugged. “I’ve made a lot of hay on pity. But she wanted me, too. Oh, yes. She wanted it real bad.”

  I remembered what she’d said that night: I fucked the little astronaut. Fucked the tiny bastard and loved it.

  “Not sure The Prophet knew at the time, or if he would’ve even cared,” Murphy said. “Our Mother didn’t fancy birth control, seeing it was a sin.”

  He forked chili into his mouth and smiled. His teeth looked like shoepeg corn.

  “Soon as it became clear she was in the motherly way, their show and ours quit company. Now you may wonder why, when that monstrosity sluiced out of her, it wasn’t offed straightaway? That’s because some people, like The Prophet, see value in what the rest of us find valueless. I’m guessing when it came out and he heard the sounds it made, he said to himself, this—this is worth something.”

  The sounds it made. “The One Child . . .”

  Murphy touched his nose. “The Virgin Birth. The Miracle. Your Immaculate Mother and I conceived it in a caravan mired in slop in the middle of bumfuck noplace. Funny,” he said expansively, “how this world worships freaks. My son isn’t one of God’s miracles—he’s one of His darkest mistakes. And you bow to him. Sometimes I wonder if the stars aligned differently maybe it could have be me or Otto or Henrietta the Mule-Faced Woman carted about in biers, fussed over and adored. But The Prophet’s got his grift down pat: he’s got the biggest damn coffee tin in Creation and you rubes kept it filled to the brim.”

  How had Tom Swift known about this?

  “Why are The Prophet and Immaculate Mother paying for you to live here—is it in repayment for your silence?” I asked.

  Murphy said: “Partially, sure. But my son’s a little mush-head—he really never grew much bigger from when he was born. All he does is make noises, and even those not without prompting. But he’s a willful creature. When he gets aggrieved he’s this habit of shutting his blowhole till he passes out. The Prophet got to worrying . . . what if he kills off the few brain cells he’s got? He’s forty pounds of useless, then. The Prophet got to thinking maybe a father’s touch could calm the kid down.”

  I was amazed. “What do you do?”

  “Say he’s colicky—surprising that a grown man can get the colic, but when that man’s got an infant’s brain less so—anyway, in that case they call me over. I dandle him on my knee, coo and cajole. Over twenty years I been doing it.”

  “His mother . . . The Immaculate Mother couldn’t?”

  “The boy’s genetics are more mine than hers. He responds to me.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Every week on Prophet’s Day they pick me up in a shiny black car and bring me to the SuperChurch.” Murphy drew himself up with odd pride. “There’s a trapdoor leading under the stage cut just my size. I crawl under to a tiny chair, positioned under a hole drilled in the stage. Leaning on the chair is a pole with a needle taped to the tip. I wait until my son’s bier is set over the hole. And when The Prophet gives the cue I stab through the hole and prick my kid with the needle.”

  He lazed on the sofa, body quivering like an overstuffed maggot. “Don’t think much of it, either,” he said, sensing my disgust. “Could be I’m stabbing a turnip.”

  He waited for me to ask it.

  “Why? Why prick your soft-brained son with a needle?”

  “You see,” he went on, “what all you gormless rubes mistake for singing ain’t singing at all. Those sounds are my son crying. The harder he’s bawling, the more melodious his tune.”

  If I sat another minute I’d commit homicide on this man. I made it halfway to the door before retracing my steps to grab the coffee can.

  “You high-toned sonofabitch!” Murphy hopped off the sofa, fists balled into impotent little knobs. “Hand it back! I earned it!”

  I took one final glance round this dusty ghoul yard and its vicious little landlord—set in a boxing stance as if to fight me for the contents of the can—and said to myself, yeah, you earned it. Earned it all and more.

  Taking Mom

  I drove east on a deserted Falwell Memorial Bouleva
rd. Raphael’s Roost was unscarred by the bombings. I hurried inside, where I found my mother facing the cherub-festooned portrait.

  “Mom. Hey, Mom.”

  She said, “You’ve cut your hair.”

  “Want to go someplace, Mom? Will you let me take you?”

  “Oh.” She touched her hair, bobby pinned into a bone-white nest atop her head. “Oh. I don’t imagine they’d allow that. Rules, you know. All sorts.”

  “Don’t worry about the rules.” I took her carefully by the hand. “Let’s gather some stuff.”

  The discharge orderly was my burly nemesis. His nametag, pinned high on his muscled chest, now read: REMO PALLADINI, HEAD ORDERLY.

  “And where are we headed this afternoon?”

  “Taking my mother for a walk.”

  An indulgent smile from Palladini. “This is a holding facility, Mr. Murtag. Your mother is an inmate of the Republic. Criminals don’t go for walks.”

  I pulled my revolver. “Open the door, Remo.”

  Mom said, “Oh, no. Jonah . . . you can’t behave this way. . . .”

  Palladini sprung the electric gate. “I’m calling the cops as soon as you step out of here.”

  “You do that, Palladini.”

  We drove home in silence. Mom hadn’t been out of the Roost in quite some time. Hardly anyone was out. Sidewalks empty, shop fronts all dark.

  “Is everything okay?” Mom asked.

  “Okay how, Mom?”

  She tapped the window with one finger. “The city seems different.” She glanced at me with panic in her eyes. “Was it always this way?”

  “No, Mom. Everything is different now.”

  This settled her some. She eased back in the seat as the empty sidewalks fled past. Where had everyone gone? There was no place to go. The wide-open spaces past the city limits were lawless and brutal. You had to be a special kind of crazy to live out there, and anyone who had grown up in New Bethlehem wouldn’t last more than a few months. City dwellers were domesticated. Tame. Easy meat for the buzzards roaming the wastelands.

  But the fact remained. The city felt like . . . like a corpse or something. Something that had just recently died and perhaps didn’t quite comprehend its own death yet—its synapses were still firing fitfully, its eyes still imprinted with the last sight they had witnessed just before its heart stopped beating. But it was still dead, even if it didn’t know it. Maybe that was how it happened. How cities became ghost towns. I’d always thought it would be a slow process, a town gradually suffocated by bad luck and bad circumstances, holding on for years before the last few residents packed up and abandoned it. After that the buildings would fall down and rot into the earth until all that remained was the foundations.

  But maybe it could happen fast, too. A city dies overnight. And that was somehow eerier. Like a pristine diorama—everything still in place, clean and tidy, the electricity still running but nobody around. As if the entire citizenry had been vaporized in the midst of their day-to-day tasks, leaving a perfect emptiness.

  “The lights are on but nobody’s home,” Mom said. She smiled. “One of the orderlies always said that to me. I guess he thought it was funny.”

  “I guess he did, Mom.”

  Amira was there when I opened the apartment door. I drew the girl aside while Mom fawned over the budgie in its cage.

  “It’s my mother,” I told her. “She’s been given the Cure. You know the Cure?” When Amira shook her head, I explained: “If you said or did anything that made people think you were dangerous, they”—drawing a line down the centre of my head with a finger—“and then they”—fingers clawed, I removed an invisible chunk—“and you weren’t a threat anymore.”

  Amira said, “Is she sick?”

  “No, no. She’s very nice. I want to keep everyone under one roof. Does that make sense?”

  “I like her hair. A cloud of snow.”

  When the time for introductions arrived I was amused by their postures: hands clasped behind backs, eyes cast down at their shoes—or bunny slippers, as was the case. Like a pair of young girls on a playdate organized by their parents.

  “Mom, this is Amira. Amira, Mom.”

  Amira said: “Pleased to meet you.”

  Mom said: “Oh yes, and you.”

  Mom’s body vibrated: so much time had passed since she’d been in a child’s company.

  “I like your hair, missus . . .”

  “Murtag,” I said.

  “. . . Murtag,” said Amira. “A big puffy snowcloud.”

  “Oh.” Mom touched her hair. “Thank you so much. I like your teeth. So white and straight. Must take good care of them. They look like . . .”

  She trailed off, unable to finish her thought. The awkward moment was interrupted by the peacock making its popping-acorn noises. As we went to the bathroom to check on it, Mom touched Amira’s shoulder gingerly.

  “Like beautiful little seashells, yes? Your teeth.”

  Amira had emptied the tub and filled it with fresh water. A tin of kidney beans sat on the toilet tank. Amira doled a spoonful onto the bird’s styrofoam raft.

  “You made this?” Mom asked Amira.

  The girl nodded. “Its leg is broken,” she said. “It can float until it gets better.”

  “How very clever.”

  The phone rang. I left them in the bathroom to answer it.

  Dead silence on the line. No, not quite: faraway breathing, snuffling almost, kind of like the other end was within the proximity of a sleeping baby.

  “Murtag?”

  It was Garvey. He sobbed softly, as an infant might.

  “Come over, Murtag, would you?” A hitching breath. “Only a little while.”

  The Land of Milk and Honey

  A van was parked outside Garvey’s apartment. Powder blue paintjob, windows blocked out with masking tape. Painted on the side was a mural of the Immaculate Mother cradling a newborn babe. Garvey lived in a three-storey walk-up above a Levite Ave bakery: Golden Rays of Sun. He enjoyed waking to the smell of baking bread. The bakery was shut down; a vandal had spray painted the sign to read Golden Rays of Sin, a defacement deeply lacking in wit.

  I let myself in. The door was unlocked. Garvey sat on a sofa littered with Hallelujah Energy Boost bottles. The coffee table was spread with electronics: a calculator and a stopwatch and a digital cooking thermometer. Junk now, Garvey having disassembled them to their component wires and diodes. He was presently dismantling his wristwatch with a screwdriver.

  Garvey glanced at the TV, tuned to static—that being all any TV could pick up anymore.

  “You know,” he said vacantly, “I’m pretty sure there’s something to all that.”

  “To what, Garvey?”

  “A pattern to the static. Watch long enough, you see shapes moving in there.”

  Soon he’d be glimpsing Jesus’ face in the TV snow, same as loons claimed to see it in their grilled cheese sandwiches or the oil stain on their garage floor. He took a swallow from the nearest HEB bottle, arranged a few stray wires into a runic pattern on the table and said, “You and Doe weren’t around. So it fell to us.”

  “What fell?”

  “Duty.”

  He fussed with his wristwatch but the screwdriver head didn’t match the screw slots so he stabbed the tool into the soft wood of the coffee table, left it quivering and went to the window. It overlooked the city’s southern rim. The view stretched to the southernmost limits and the Damascus Towers.

  “That’s where they’re holed up,” said Garvey. “The heathens who’ve made a mess of our lives. That’s their . . . nest.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “The Quints sussed it out.”

  “So you’re going to . . .”

  He didn’t answer. It smashed together in my head. The van I’d noticed down on
the street. How much explosive was packed inside of it? Garvey had martyrdom on his mind.

  “We’re Followers, Garvey. We . . . we don’t do those sorts of things.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes the tactics of your enemies are the only ones that work against them.”

  “It’s suicide, man. A sin.”

  “I considered that,” he admitted. “And this morning, when the Quints showed up with the van and opened the doors, those sacks of fertilizer stacked to the roof . . . it went through my head. But somebody’s got to. Us or them.”

  I followed him into the bedroom. A kid’s room: evangelical singers were tacked on the walls. The southern wall was plastered with half-naked men; I recognized them as being ripped from the Summer Fling issue of those Sears and Roebuck catalogues he’d been tasked with bagging up as evidence—evidence that never did find its way to the lockup, I suddenly recalled.

  A tuxedo was laid out on the bedspread.

  “I was supposed to be married in it,” Garvey said of the monkey suit. “Cost a pretty penny.”

  He drew a beach towel off a box on the dresser. An aquarium. Something was coiled round the rock. I drew closer. It was a rattlesnake.

  Garvey said, “It’s a hognose. My papa’s before he died. Almost as old as me, this tough old pig.”

  “Poisonous, yeah?”

  “His venom sacks were cut out years ago. Not to say he won’t bite you—just won’t kill you if he does.”

  “He got a name?”

  “Duke.”

  “You don’t still . . . ?”

  “Handle him? That’s not part of my beliefs anymore.” He pocketed his hands to hide the puncture scars. “Besides, without the poison it’s not a true test of faith.”

  Duke uncoiled from the rock, tail making a sound like a baby’s rattle. Its face was accordioned in as though someone had used a tiny hammer to render it snub-nosed.

  “What does he eat?”