by Lily White
Three days ago, I'd pulled up in front of the looming iron gates with no clue of who'd I'd find behind them. But now? Now I was marching toward the gates of Hell knowing full well the demon who would be happy to step through. I wasn't even within reach of them before they parted at the center and Jericho walked out, a broad smile stretching his face.
"Jacob," he mocked, the roll of laughter adding levity to that one word. "And here I thought we'd never see each other again. At least, that's what you told me this morning."
"Save it, Jericho. I'm done with your stupid, fucking games."
He cocked his head to the side. "That's funny because I haven't even started playing yet."
Anger beat its steady drum inside me. "Why are you doing this?"
He grinned and slid his hand up to his ear like I'd whispered the words. "I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear you, brother. Why don't you step closer to my web, little fly, and perhaps we can communicate better."
"Tell me why, Jericho!"
I could feel every vein pulsing beneath my skin, could recognize the violence inside me rearing its ugly head to roar out its might. There was a man in there somewhere that I once had been, and this son of a bitch was slowly pulling him out of me. The entire time grinning.
"Why? Why? Why?" He smirked. "Always with the questions. But instead of asking me something you know damn well I won't answer, you should tell me something instead. How does it feel to know you never shed the sins of your past? To realize you'd only hidden them behind the veil of a religious life?"
"My life has nothing to do with you." I stepped toward him, but he lifted a finger, the sound of at least three separate guns being readied above our heads. I looked up to stare down the barrels of the guns pointed in my direction. Three men stood on wooden platforms that rose just above the tops of the wall surrounding the property.
"I wouldn't come any closer if I were you. I'd hate for your handsome face to be no longer."
Breath burst from my lungs, my body frozen within the rising tide of my fury. Turning to look at Jericho, I grinned. "You always were a fucking coward."
He laughed. "No. What I've always been is one step ahead. You just never knew it."
Kicking at a stone by the toe of his boot, he casually tucked his hands into his pockets, his black hair shining beneath the floodlights of the compound. When he glanced up again, I saw the man I used to be, the bastard that wasn't trapped behind the stark white of his clerical collar.
"Ah, now don't be so mad, Jacob. I haven't done anything to you that you wouldn't have done to me before you found God. We always knew when we started playing our games as kids that at some point we'd turn them against each other. It was only natural that siblings would form a rivalry. One that I assume you thought you'd won when you left for college."
He stepped forward, his eyes directed back to his shoes, his feet careful to move with the heel of one boot placed directly in front of the toe of the other.
Stopping just outside of my reach, he was a man with no concerns because of the guns his men had aimed at me.
"So, let me tell you how the rest of this is going to go." His gaze met mine. The silver-blue color a feature we'd used to lure in all the good little girls we'd destroyed in our lives.
"You're going to go back to your parish, and you're going to enjoy the present I gave you for as long as I let you have her. You're going to stop showing up at my compound because the next time you do, I won't come outside to warn you before my men take you down to your knees. And when I decide it's time for the game to end, I'll show up at your parish and I'll let you know."
"I don't understand, Jericho. What have I-"
"It's not for you to understand. That's what you're not getting in all this," he said, cutting me off.
"And maybe that's been your problem all along, Jacob. You always wanted to understand something. You were never the type to blindly believe, and that's exactly why I know that the collar you wear is a disguise. You're not a godly man, you never have been and yet you sit as the shepherd of your flock, the symbol of God and the might of his hand. Your church is so full of bullshit I can smell the stink of it from here."
Fuck the guns. Fuck the threat. Fuck every word that falls from my brother's mouth. I stepped toward him, my hands fisted at my sides, my pulse so wicked and strong that it was thunder inside my head.
"My choices in life are my own. They shouldn't concern you."
"I never said they did," he answered, his expression unchanging, unworried and full off satisfied pride. "But there you go again looking for a reason."
We were two brothers facing each other down beneath the lights of a madhouse. Two twins that had once been united now suffering the fruits of the evil we'd allowed into our lives. And where I was balanced on a precipice between pitch dark and blinding light, my brother had not only accepted the evil that lurked inside him, he'd embraced it.
"I'll explain this to you in a way you might understand given your new profession," he said, his voice low, calculating, and without emotion. "Christ died for our sins, brother. At least that's what's been stuffed down our throats each and every day since we left our mother's womb to come into this shithole we call a world."
He paused, his head tilting left and right to ease the muscles of his shoulders.
"But yet," he continued, his voice softer, a whisper against the cool night wind, "after the third day that son of a bitch rose again to show us all his glory and his might."
A grin tugged at his lips. "It's the third day now, Jacob. And just look at you. Still righteous and pure. Still a man who looks to his God and the Church that serves that God as a means to escape the sinner inside you."
Holding up three fingers, he repeated, "Day three, Jacob. Do you remember what happened after that? I assume you do given you're a priest, so why don't you tell me."
When I didn't answer, he screamed, "Tell me!"
The bastard was right in one thing: I couldn't look at any situation without stumbling over the question of why. Even at that moment I was mentally mapping every word he said, every expression he made, every crime he committed and every life destroyed in the game he was playing. And there was no rhyme or reason to it.
"Christ ascended to Heaven," I finally spit out. "Body and soul."
Jericho laughed, a short burst of sound that carried no humor. "He left us to fend for ourselves against everything wrong in this world, and what happened after that?"
I shook my head in disbelief. My twin brother was stone cold mad. "Are you telling me you're doing this because you're pissed that Christ died? What is wrong with you?"
His eyes clenched tight, his hand reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "I'm not telling you a damn thing, Jacob. I'm asking you to answer a simple question."
As if on cue, one of his family standing with gun at the ready shot at the ground behind me, I assumed to prod me along in answering the bullshit he was asking me. My gaze lifted to look at the bastard holding the smoking gun just so I could remember who to kill when I finally lost my damn mind.
Leveling my gaze back on Jericho, I said, "I don't know what part about after you want to hear. It's been two thousand years."
Jerking his hand from his face, he opened his eyes. "Man was left to fall again after Christ left this Earth. He took his toys and he went back to his heavenly playground, and just like how man was ditched after those three days we waited, you'll fall, Jacob. You had your three days and now they're over. And I'll enjoy watching you fall, because you were never a devout man to begin with."
Insane. My brother was certifiably insane.
"Get off my lawn, brother. I'm tired of seeing you around here."
Another gun shot rang out, the dust and stones kicking up around me close enough to hit my legs. Jericho turned without saying another word, slowly strolling to the gate that was opening as he approached.
I couldn't help it when I called out, "Do you want me to quit the priesthood? Is that what this is about?"
He stopped but didn't bother to look back at me. "Again, you're searching for the why. Just enjoy the ride, Jacob, and stop asking useless questions."
He took another step before stopping again, this time glancing over his shoulder toward me.
"Tick tock, brother. Tick. Tock."
He was gone two seconds later, the gates closing to hide him from my sight.
Hidden just behind the bars with white sheets woven through them, his voice rang out. "If you don't want to get shot, Jacob, I suggest you move along pretty quickly. My family will only give you a few seconds head start."
The men made a show of pointing their guns in my direction and I ran back to my truck. By the time I was speeding around a corner to turn onto the main road, I could hear shots hitting the bed of the truck behind me.
EVE
For you need endurance so that, having done the will of God, you may receive the promise. Hebrews 10:36
Tomorrow.
I’d find salvation in only a few hours.
His guidance, his fire, his light.
With this one last task I have to complete for him.
I will be the gates to the holiest of temples.
And he will become the sole worshipper at my heavenly altar.
That is what he promised me.
JACOB
Keep watching and praying that you may not come into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Matthew 26:41
I’d tossed and turned all night. Partly because of the insane bullshit my brother had spewed the night before and partly because of the wood floor I had the honor of calling a bed.
My eyes cracked open to a dimly lit room, soft, rhythmic breathing above me a quiet sound counting down time as it passed by.
Eve hadn’t stirred when I returned from Jericho’s compound, hadn’t noticed when my weight sank down onto the side of the bed and I stared down at her wanting to peel off the uniform of a priest and reveal the man below.
Based on her breathing, she was still up there sleeping comfortably while I lay on a pile of blankets, my head supported by a lumpy pillow that provided me with absolutely no sleep.
There were too many shitty factors colliding in my life, too much I couldn’t explain that I felt like I was drowning beneath whatever madness my brother could inflict.
Yet, here it was, on God’s holy day, and I had a duty to lead a service I wasn’t sure I believed any longer.
Although, the majority of what Jericho had said was maniacal nonsense, there was one point he made that I couldn’t see past no matter how hard I tried not to think about it:
I was a fallen man.
Maybe not at the moment of birth, but when I grew older and I learned why God had created women for men. Once I had that first taste, it was over. Jacob the doubtful believer became Jacob the hopelessly lost.
I was no longer part of the flock to which my father had indoctrinated me, and all I wanted was another taste of the divine, that moment where I became God himself, setting myself up in his golden throne above the body of whatever woman I was corrupting.
At that moment, there was nobody more vulnerable than the woman sleeping soundly beside me. Everything inside me screamed to shuck the cloth, to rebel against the vows the religion had forced on me and give in to the man I was inside.
Guilt and more guilt, it’s all I’d ever been taught. And even though I knew the games I’d played would eventually lead me straight to Hell, I thought that Hell had grown impatient and risen up to greet me on the night Cassandra died.
Maybe I’d been too rough? Maybe I hadn’t seen the signs she was in distress? Maybe I didn’t care enough to see them.
Maybe it was God’s punishment for the sins I knew I’d keep committing, and I got scared.
Fuck! How I got scared.
I ran back to the only thing I knew that could shelter me, a life without sin, a calling without remorse, and a mentality that kept me sequestered and alone, free of the temptations that were all around me.
Only I had to be shouldered again with the unbearable weight of a lifetime of guilt for my crimes.
I was sick and tired of the guilt.
And it took a sick fuck to make me see it – which made me not want to see it at all.
In truth, the only thing the Church had done in my life was draw boundaries. They’d boxed me in with scripture, bound my hands with expectations, and drove a knife in my gut, twisting it each time I stepped just outside of those lines to explore who I really was inside. There were parts of me that were messy and without shape, parts that didn’t fit within those neat little lines that all devout people are supposed to respect. When I stepped outside those lines, I was whipped and beaten, dragged over the floor by a father who didn’t agree that life itself was just as messy as me, the abuse witnessed by a mother who believed the husband is the ruler of the house.
Maybe that’s where the darkness started: on those late nights and early mornings where Jericho and I both were beaten and flogged. Simple mistakes we made were somehow the same as us spitting in the face of God, and my father – a devout yet sinful man himself – made sure to brand us with our own sin, instilling in us a craving for the kind of pain that showed us we were alive.
It was only natural we’d follow in his footsteps. Once that door was opened, it was damn near impossible to close. Rather than shaping up and learning how to stay within those boundaries, we took that pain, that guilt, and all the horrible feelings that came with it and we turned it around on the good little brats who would drop their panties and let us invade and abuse them until they cried.
We didn’t just tempt them outside those boundaries, we forced them out, their eyes opening to the world around them once they were no longer sheltered in the strict ideas of what a good little girl should be.
What scared me even more than Jericho’s insistence that I’d never actually changed was his reminder that it had been me who always played the hardest, because, in that, he wasn’t wrong.
In the beginning, Jericho and I had just been looking for a good time. We were the normal teenage boys, horny as all hell, but still respectful of the boundaries set for us. But our first venture outside those lines set a fire in our bodies, a ravenous hunger to go further, push harder, until we could explore in intimate detail all the sexual deviances open to us if we only learned how to ask right.
A handsome man is enough to turn many a young woman’s eye, but two identical twins made attracting attention like child’s play.
A coordinated team, we learned to lure them in. Jericho was only there for the sexual release, at least, at first he was. But eventually I got bored with taking a woman’s virginity and I began exploring outward, seeing how far we could push them until they broke.
As it turned out, we could push very far.
Most women shied away at first, not trusting two men who wanted her bound and helpless. A little petting, a small stroke to awaken the fire inside her, and that woman was placing her wrists together, ready and willing to make herself victim to whatever pleasures we had in mind.
Fast forward a little bit later and bondage wasn’t enough. I wanted to hurt those women. I wanted them to know what it meant to be like us.
I’d had pain delivered on my body all my life, and I returned that pain with the gratification of a starving man receiving a slice of bread to ease his discomfort.
Jericho went along with it, like he always had, but then I pushed the boundary too far and scared a woman half to death.
He retreated back into the life safe within religion’s boundaries, and I pushed forward, packing my things and leaving for college – a free man unrestrained by the guilt I’d always carried.
Cassandra died because of me. I was as sure of that as I was the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. I never saw the autopsy photos, I never read the reports, but her mother came to see me one day, and she told me.
Almost every inch of her skin hidden beneath her clothes was bruised.
Her breasts, her hips, the insides of her thighs, everywhere that my teeth, or fingers, or the palm of my hand had decided to play. Perhaps it was a symptom of whatever blood condition she had, but it was like artwork to me. I loved to sit and admire those marks only because she’d worn them in remembrance of me.
I put them there on all the women I took to my bed, and I wanted to put them on the woman sleeping above me now.
I needed a sign.
But for some reason, I didn’t think God cared.
Or maybe his silence was the sign after all.
Pushing up from the floor, I darted my eyes to the bed to see Sedra sleeping soundly. The blanket had slipped down to her waist and the t-shirt she wore had slipped up to reveal the bottom swell of her breasts. Lush and full, they called to me to taste them, to bite them, lick them and claim them with my greedy hands.
Taking a few steps in her direction, I balled my hands into fists. It would be so easy to wake her, so easy to tell her every dirty thing I wanted to do to her, and so easy to follow through with it.
But it was Sunday. God’s day. The church would soon start filling with the parishioners from town. They’d look for me if I ran late, and the things I wanted to do to Sedra would take hours.
I forced myself away, just to turn and see the inverted cross on the ground. Just like that I was forced back within those boundaries. Snatching the cross from the floor, I hung it on the nail in the wall and muttered, “Not today, Satan.”
The serpent must have laughed his head off.
It took me a half hour to shower and get as ready as possible for the day to come. Dreading having to get up in front of the congregation and spread a message of hope and love, I sat on the edge of the bed in my room, fixing my clerical collar into place and staring down at Sedra.
She was so sweet. So innocent. And so off limits if I had any hope of not going insane. Every day it was getting harder. Every day I struggled with the question of whether I could go against my vows. Would I be willing to take advantage of a woman who doesn’t know who I am?