The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  I got a leg up and kicked the busted windshield, popping it from the frame and watching it crumple onto the hood. I thumbed the dome light and found three fresh cartridges in the grooves of the rubberized floor mat, snapped the revolver chamber, teased out the spent shells, filled the empty cylinders and calmly said, “Turn back around.”

  “What?”

  “Turn around. I am going to kill that thing.”

  Doe actually smiled. “I like a man with a death wish.”

  We charged across the flatlands in a shaky little car, creosote bushes and salt-plants crushed under the piebald tires as the night pushed in at us, wind rippling the skin of our faces like boat sails. The car took a bad hop off a hillock, wheels accelerating as the hood reared up and nosed down into the sand to send what seemed a dune’s worth up over the hood, blanking out the high beams. Sand blew clear of the lights and there, pinned in the glare like a moth to a velvet sheet, was the Quint.

  I squeezed off a shot, two, three as we pounded in on him like the hammers of Hell but they missed and the Quint squared to the onrushing car, leering as he returned fire. A headlight deadheaded in a shower of electric sparks; a crisp metallic ka-ting! as another slug drilled the radiator.

  The Quint juked deftly and we might have only clipped him with the fender had Doe not calmly juked the same way, centring him back on the hood to slam into him broadside.

  The Quint broke over the grille, engine squeal and buckled metal as the airbag deployed, a ghostly bubble pinning Doe back in her seat but she kept the pedal floored with the Quint’s body now lodged in the windshield gap, his rancid duster flapping inside the car and a maddening cockroach hiss coming from—from where, his body?

  The flappings and hissings and mere proximity revolted me so much I reared back and kicked, my ankle howling, but I ignored the pain as I hoofed at the Quint’s spine until the body tumbled free of the windshield, bumping over the hood down off the trunk.

  Doe finally slammed the brakes, bringing the car to a lurching halt.

  When we got out, the Quint lay face down in the glow of the brake lights. Saf-T-Glas winked in the sand. The duster torn up the centre, wadded round the shoulders and spread out on either side like a pair of diseased angel’s wings. He wasn’t moving and was in all likelihood dead, though with a thing such as that you had to wonder.

  The watchtower spotlight shaped a bright halo round the Quint’s body. We took a step back, shielding our eyes.

  “That’s it,” Jeremy’s bullhorn-amplified voice advised. “Stand back.”

  His first shot missed its mark, catching the Quint’s shoulder. The hydrostatic pressure was still enough to send blood jetting out his ears. The second tore off the crown of his skull.

  The spotlight snapped off. Jeremy said: “God watch over you both.”

  Confessions

  I awoke in the car. We were parked somewhere in the Badlands.

  Doe was awake, sitting next to me. She said, “There’s something you should know.”

  She sat up in the driver’s seat. I was reclined in the passenger’s seat. I lifted my eyebrows, waiting for it.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  I almost laughed. “No, you’re not.”

  She said, “I know my own body.”

  “Pregnant?” My head was swimming. “Me? I mean, us?”

  “You think I get around that much?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay. That’s . . . so great. You’re pregnant. We’re sinners, but that’s okay, too. I mean, it is, right? Isn’t it fine?”

  She drew away. “I can’t, Jonah . . . I won’t be keeping it.”

  “Please don’t say that. You haven’t—”

  “Thought it through? Don’t insult me, Jonah.”

  I said, “You didn’t even give me a chance to say whether I wanted it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, of course, for God’s sake, yes, I want our child.”

  Months ago I could’ve placed a call to the Parenthood Ministry and they would have dispatched agents to enforce the pregnancy. Not to say I would have done so, but the option existed. Now what the hell could I do?

  “You have to look at it rationally,” she said. “It’s so small right now—not even a person. A bundle of cells. It won’t know it ever existed.”

  “We’ll know, won’t we?”

  “Just some cells,” she said. “Grey cells. No face, no hands, nothing human about it.”

  “We could get out,” I said. “Of the city. Calvin Newbarr, he’s got a cottage someplace. He’d know a thing or two about delivering a baby—”

  She cut me off. “Listen to me, Jonah: the decision has been made.”

  “So why tell me?” I said angrily. “Seeing as every conclusion was foregone.”

  “Because it seemed fair that you know. And because I could use your help. I need . . . what’s his name? Jewish, runs a record shop? We busted him a few years back for—”

  “Goldberg.”

  “Tibor Goldberg, right. He knew a guy, didn’t he?”

  I hung my head. “That’s supposing either Tibor or the guy he used to know are still in the city.”

  Doe said: “Can you help set it up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “You’re asking me to seek out a hit man and make arrangements for a murder.”

  “You do understand I’ll find a way regardless.”

  “You’d make a good mother, Angela.”

  “Please. Just stop it.”

  She keyed the engine. The car rumbled to life. She set it in gear and we drove back to the city in silence.

  Arrangements

  We ran out of gas two blocks from Doe’s place. I left her without saying goodbye.

  The prowl car was where I’d left it. When I got back to the apartment there was a note in the mailbox from Doc Newbarr. A pencil-drawn map to his cabin. There were a pair of messages on the answering machine. One from Hollis, saying to visit him at home. Another from Swift, saying simply: Whenever you’re ready.

  My mother and Amira were sleeping in the same bed. I left them and went to find Tibor.

  The checkpoint shack leading into Kiketown was destroyed. A strange calm overhung the ghetto. Street signs had all been repainted: Pilate Court read as Yahweh Court; Iscariot Gardens was now Abraham Gardens. Divine Discs was closed. Goldberg’s apartment was above the shop. I laid on the horn.

  “Goldberg! Tibor Goldberg!”

  The upper-storey window rattled up. Goldberg leaned out.

  “The fuck you want?”

  “Just a question.”

  “I don’t converse with heathens.” Tibor was wearing a yarmulke. Proudly.

  “What’s written back on the checkpoint? My Yiddish is rusty.”

  “Kristlekh Sotn Avekgeyn,” he said, spitting the words at me. “Christian Devils Go Home.”

  “One question,” I said. “I come in peace.”

  “Try anything and you’ll be leaving in pieces,” Tibor warned.

  I waited patiently as he snapped the lights on and unlocked the shop doors.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Tibor said: “Geh cocken offen yom.”

  “Translation?”

  “Go shit in the ocean.”

  I followed him in. He took a seat, heels kicked up on the counter.

  “Of course you realize you’ve run a good chance of getting shot coming here, you dumb schlemiel.”

  “Calculated risk,” I said. “You guys are holding it together well.”

  “Always someone was oppressing us. We’re still here—and will be, when you and your people are just bones.”

  “I’m looking for someone to perform an abortion.”

  “Right to the point, huh? And you thought who better to consult than Tibor Goldberg, the unscrupulous
Jew, uh?”

  I showed him my palms. “You could sit there all day ragging me and what? It’s gonna change anything? Wish it were so.”

  “Do you?” He seemed genuinely curious. “Thing is, you weren’t one of the really bad ones. In that way, you’re nearly human. The bitch of it is, I’m left to wonder if it’s laudable—you could’ve been a bastard, same as your partner—or worse, because you knew how bad it was but didn’t lift a finger to change a thing.”

  “Can you help or not? Because if insults are all you’ve got, I’ve got plenty of those in escrow all over what’s left of this city.”

  “Give me your badge.”

  I dug into my trousers and handed him the badge. It meant nothing to me now. He buffed it on his vest, clipped it askew to his pocket.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and disappeared up to his room. He returned ten minutes later.

  “Tonight,” he told me. “No payment. He just wants a favour.”

  “What sort of favour?”

  “He’ll discuss that beforehand. You agree, it’s done. If not . . .” He shrugged. “509 Makht Avenue. Eleven o’clock.”

  I said: “There is no such place.”

  “There is now. Used to be Zundel Avenue.”

  Secrets and Lies

  Deacon Hollis’s house was the smallest on his court. A split-level California rambler, redbrick covered with adobe that, in the moonlight, resembled undercooked meatloaf. Frail light burned in the window. I knocked. The curtains parted. A shape moved in the direction of the door, which opened a crack. “That you, Murtag?”

  “It is, sir.”

  Hollis’s house was rathskeller dim. This proved fortunate, as it prevented Hollis from catching the dread that flickered across my face at the sight of him.

  “Didn’t know it was you, lad. Must be going blind.” He launched into song: “Mi-iii-y eyes a-a-har dim, I can-not see; I have not got my specs with me . . .”

  “If I may say so, sir, it’s not your eyes. You’re shitfaced.”

  “Always said you were a top rank investigator.” He chortled. “Very little gets by you.”

  I trailed him into the front room. His home stunk: the shuttered stink of unstinting habitation. A pair of loungers sat before the window; Hollis took one but when I went to sit in the other he uttered a grunt of objection.

  “Where my wife used to sit. Take the sofa, wouldn’t you please? Glad you’ve come, lad. You and I could use a little chinwag in these, the last days before doomsday.”

  I sat on the sofa. “I can’t help notice what you’re wearing.”

  “You’ve seen one before?”

  “A scapular, isn’t it?”

  “Green, for Saint Mary.”

  He fingered the simple Catholic charm: illustrated cards affixed to felt backing and strung round his neck on a loop of string. One card: Virgin Mary holding a dove. The other: a dagger-pierced heart encircled by the words, Immaculate Heart of Mary Pray for Us Now and at the Hour of Our Deaths. I also spotted his Republican rosary wrapped round the neck of a bottle beside his feet.

  “I’ve kept them hidden under a floorboard all these years,” he said. “A bottle of good Irish whiskey and my Catholic school scapular. My wife, God rest her, she never understood—why risk your safety for cardboard, string, and a dusty bottle of booze? I told her I’m the head of the Acolytes”—thumping his chest with his fist—“who in blazes would dare check my floorboards?”

  “You’re not Irish Catholic. You’re a Follower of the Republican faith.”

  He took off the scapular and handed it to me. “Made it myself, in the basement of Our Lady of Lourdes. Couldn’t have been older than five. I’ve been to many a masquerade, son, but the face under the mask has never changed.”

  I handed it back. He poured me a respectable measure of whiskey, the rosary clinking against my glass. It tasted like peat moss and burned its way down.

  “Do you dream, laddie?”

  “I’ve had them.”

  “Taciturn! Admirable trait. Lately I’ve been dreaming. I say dreaming but I mean daydreaming, musing,” he said, “about souls. I’ve come to wonder if everyone is born with one. I don’t mean down religious lines—no, merely the idea that some people aren’t given souls. What is it that animates us if not the soul? But sometimes you come across a person and in him sense a lack of human capacity. The standard measures of tenderness or mercy.”

  He took a long pull from the bottle and shook like a wet dog.

  “Isn’t it possible the angels are overtaxed? Possible a soul here or there gets waylaid? So a child is born inhuman—an oversight of Heaven. Say that child was a boy and that boy is now a man. Say that man has come to believe himself soulless.” He ran a finger round the rim of the bottle, trailed it down his throat as if dabbing aftershave. “Tell me, then—what fear need such a man have of any place called Hell?”

  “What made you call me, sir?”

  “Taciturn. Beautiful.” He tottered up. “Come in the kitchen.”

  On the table: a bullet reloader and six standard issue centre-fire bullets lined up next to Hollis’s service revolver. A picture frame with the glass removed. The shape of a star there in the sun-faded velveteen.

  “I moulded it into slugs,” he told me. “My Star of Gilead. Made of pewter, turns out. The cheapest, softest metal on earth! There were fake gemstones on the five points, too; when I melted it down, they melted, too. They weren’t even glass.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “They’re coming for me,” he said, then after pausing: “The Quints. They’re not exactly human, are they?”

  “That’s a fair assessment.”

  He chuckled mordantly. “A werewolf, silver. Vampires, a stake.” He turned a bullet over in the candlelight. “Every monster can die. Just need the right tool. What do you think?”

  I said nothing.

  “Exeter,” he went on, “was Episcopalian—sad bastards are born useless. A lot of times I wanted to stick a knife in him myself. But the way they did it: head sacked like a common heathen, blade poked through his neck like a Christmas goose . . . we had a deal. That business with Exeter was a deal breaker.”

  “Who had a deal—you and Exeter?”

  He shook his head. “We were complicit in it, but the deal was brokered outside. Head office. Dispatches came from Kingdom City. Right from the tippy-top.”

  “What dispatches?” I said, confused. “What did they say?”

  “The bombings, lad.” He took another pull, his eyes charting me. “We knew they were coming.”

  “You mean . . .” I couldn’t grasp what he was saying. “The Divine Council orchestrated them?”

  He shrugged. “Knew about them, at bare minimum.”

  “Who else knew?”

  “All I can say for sure is Exeter. Our task was to provide the illusion of an investigation. Exeter did a good job—canvassing all home and garden centres for fertilizer purchases?” A stiff laugh. “What wasted effort!”

  “Did you know who was behind it?”

  “I only knew who wasn’t and made sure our focus stayed on them.”

  “What about the targets and times? Did you know Eve was going to be . . . did you send Doe and I to The Manger knowing what would happen?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “But if you’re asking had I have known, would I have sent you anyway—yes, I may have. I won’t apologize. You’re told what you need to be told, you don’t go seeking answers above your station. That goes for me, too.”

  “How was this smokescreen supposed to benefit you?”

  “Exeter and I discussed that—in fact, it marked our sole civil conversation. After the rubble cleared, we felt a reward should be in order. It’s too late now. Lad, you asked me who knew the bombings were coming. That’s only half the question you need to ask.

/>   “Okay, so who didn’t know?”

  Hollis said nothing, just watched me.

  I said: “The Prophet.”

  “And Bingo was his name-o.”

  I’d heard enough. I left him then, walked out to the car. Hollis followed me out. Thunderheads gathered in the western sky.

  “Have you ever had the feeling of a rope around your neck, lad?” He checked each cartridge in his revolver, snapped the chamber shut. “I’m going to tell you—when that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your arse.”

  He leaned on the hood of my car, not quite ready to let me leave.

  “I killed that farm girl.”

  I knew who he was talking about immediately. The girl in the Mormon farmhouse off RR #7. Young patrolman Hollis responding to a 533: Failure to Conform. For which he’d been awarded the Star of Gilead for conspicuous gallantry.

  “Cut that wee girl’s throat. Found her tangled there in the razor wire . . . I damn near cut her head off. Entirely too much adrenaline. You get into a killing like that, this haze, this reddish curtain, it falls over your vision; all you’ve got in your nostrils is the smell of blood.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Hollis’s tongue protruded a half-inch between his teeth. He bit and chewed at it restlessly.

  “What I’m saying is that if I’m evil—and yes, I am—I should not have to bear the brunt of that evil, its kindling in me, all by myself. Do we not live in a world that allows it, at times rewards it? So I’m a touch inhuman. Maybe I was born so. But the monsters coming for me, they’re inhuman, too. That’s why I can kill them. Like parries like. What do you think? Can I kill them?”

  “I don’t really care.”

  He heaved up off the hood. “Go on, hero, save who you can. May God save the rest.”