Lust. The want she refers to is lust.
“You exploited their weakness, then,” the pastor states. He finds himself shaking his head, already knowing the next turn the story will take.
“Yes,” she says, absent of any shame. She’s remorseless. “A man pulled up in a car, and he was just like all the rest we’d seen. He’d go into that store and browse a little, letting his eyes dance over the covers: blonde girls with heavy makeup, mouths provocatively open, begging to be penetrated. Or maybe he wanted a redhead. Or a brunette. Or maybe he wanted a girl like me, warm and real and able to respond to his needs.
“We approached him, the two of us,” Madeline says. “He was cautious at first, but only until he realized how young we were, and it was clear that we hadn’t been eating well. The man stopped halfway between his car and the shop, unsure if he should keep walking or offer us help or tell us to ‘get lost.’ That’s when Pollux said he’d like to offer my services in exchange for money. And just like that, too,” Madeline says. “‘Would you like to purchase sexual favors from my companion for money?’ was his exact phrasing, and the man looked at me again, but not with the same pity he had only moments ago. It was the same expression he had when his eyes were locked onto the shop, but now they were aimed at me. Then he started asking questions.
“The first thing he wanted to know is if we were cops, but I think he knew this was a stupid question. We didn’t even look old enough to enter the store he was about to go into, so he went to the more logical question, asking if I was legal,” Madeline says. “Legal, meaning: the age of eighteen or older. Not legal in the sense the Feri defined it, which is what Pollux responded to with a resounding ‘yes.’ Yet again, this guy looked me over, only now he was mentally weighing how much was in his wallet against how much he was willing to shell out.”
“He finally asked how much it was going to cost him, and this is where Pollux sort of lost me. He said he needed a $100 bill. ‘Not two fifties, not five twenties,’ he said. A $100 dollar bill. He was firm about that part of the transaction, and the man had it, but first he wanted to know what he was getting in return for his money. ‘A hundred bucks for a dirty girl like that is pushing it,’ he told Pollux, paying me very little mind. At that point, he stopped looking at me like a person. When you know you can buy someone, it’s okay to objectify them,” Madeline says.
It’s yet another maxim of the story the pastor disagrees with, and has even preached about during his sermons, but he retains his silence for the time being. Madeline continues.
“Pollux said a half minute sounded like a suitable exchange, but then the man started laughing at him. He laughed, asking how the hell anything was supposed to happen in half a minute. ‘I can barely get my zipper down in that amount of time,’” Madeline imitates his voice. It has a sort of hick-like twang to it. “Pollux corrected him though, explaining that the climax itself would last a half a minute; not the actual encounter. And the man looked me over one more time, doubtful. It started to feel like a scam to him, just like most of the things our kind are able to do that people don’t believe,” Madeline gives the pastor a knowing wink.
“Then he closed him. Pollux said that if it didn’t last the full thirty he wouldn’t have to pay, and that’s all he needed to hear.” Madeline pauses briefly, taking a moment to consider how she wants to phrase the next part. “I got in the car and did what was expected of me. I’m guessing the logistics of that aren’t important to you.” She intentionally keeps this part vague—not for her own benefit so much as the pastor’s. She doesn’t want to offend him if she can help it. “The man lost consciousness so I took the money from his wallet. A $100 bill, just as we had agreed upon. There was plenty more there, but I left it.”
“Dare I ask why he was unconscious?” the pastor cuts in.
“Everyone has a threshold, Johnstone. Physical, mental, chemical,” she lists off. “Heroin, which comes from the opium plant, is tricky in that it’s very easy to overdose on. One milligram too much and your breathing and heart rate slow down, eventually stopping altogether, depriving your brain of oxygen. You either slip into a coma or just plain die, all because you had a fraction more than your body can handle,” Madeline explains. “Regarding our gentleman in the car, his threshold was about ten seconds. I took him past that and he couldn’t take it.”
Madeline frowns, looking down at Mary in her lap. “I gave the money to Pollux. He said our lives were about to change. He said this with the same expression he had back in the forest when he borrowed my pheromones for his spell…like he was up to something,” Madeline hints. “He wanted a high denomination bill because he had taught himself how to clone money.”
“You mean forge it?” Father Johnstone asks.
“No, I literally mean clone it,” she confirms. “The paper had the same linen to cotton ratio. It had the same watermark signatures and color shifting ink, same off-center portraits. Same serial numbers.”
“Craft?” the pastor asks.
“Right. But he wouldn’t share it with me. It was the first time he had done that…said it was best if I let him worry about it,” she says. “But currency, just like any composition, is made up of ingredients. If you can reverse-engineer something, chances are, you can make it yourself.”
“And how much money was he making?” the pastor asks.
“Too much to carry,” Madeline says. “Pollux didn’t trust banks nor did he have the necessary documentation to start an account, so he kept everything in a storage facility. Piles of it, Johnstone. I’m talking millions. For about a month we were broke and dirty and sleeping under playground equipment in the park. Within twenty-four hours of getting that first $100, we were in a four-star hotel and eating filet mignon in Egyptian cotton bathrobes. We bribed staff members to bring us champagne and vodka and a bunch of other things people our age weren’t legally supposed to have,” Madeline recalls with a smirk. “We looked like a couple of stupid rich kids. Literally stupid,” she says, absent of any shame. “We asked the concierge so many dumb questions. I swear, that woman probably thought we were retarded. ‘How does a phone work?’ ‘What’s the difference between shampoo and condi-tioner?’” Madeline quotes. “‘Why are people sneaking into our room and cleaning it?’”
It hits the pastor that perhaps that was part of the Feri’s plan, to make its residents so scared and unready for the outside world that they’d be terrified at the thought of departure. He’s watched this same phenomenon play out in Pratt nearly all of his life. People rarely leave, and if they do, they don’t wander very far.
“The money gave us a pass on a lot of things. Neither one of us could drive at the time, so we hired chauffeurs. We didn’t have the credentials to get on a commercial plane, so we flew private,” Madeline says. “Pollux got sick of having to go to the concierge every time he had a question—and he had a lot of them, mind you…so he hired one. If he wasn’t cloning more money or buying shit, he was asking this woman what a McRib was or how a traffic light worked. It went on like that for about a year: we’d travel, see the sights, and soak in the culture. In each new city, I would go shopping with one of our employees while Pollux filled up another storage facility with cash. He had a bunch of them scattered throughout the country: New York, Vegas, Dallas. There must have been at least thirty or so.”
Madeline sighs. “Now think about it, Johnstone: two kids with infinite resources and virtually no restrictions. No rules. No one telling us to stop.” She asks, “What do you think happened?”
The pastor could rattle off another misremembered Bible quote about how money is the root of all evil, an axiom he very much agrees with, despite its origins. Instead, he chooses to put it in Madeline’s terms, telling her, “I think you went past the threshold.”
“The superiority complex kicked in again and he started buying people,” Madeline says. “It wasn’t just limo drivers and information assistants anymore. He started booking whores…usually four or five at a time,” she says, no
ticeably distraught about this part. “He’d have them sent up to the room and fuck them, or he’d sit at the foot of the bed and shout things for them to do to each other while he watched, and I must admit, it made me angry. I had given up my livelihood and my family for him, and in return, I got to witness him degrade all these women in the same bed we slept in.”
“I thought you said you didn’t believe in infidelity,” the pastor reminds her, but not in a spiteful way.
“Whores are one thing. Sex is sex. I can understand that part of it,” Madeline says. “This was torture though, like watching a kid pick the legs off an insect.” She goes silent for a moment, appraising Father Johnstone’s own mental threshold for what he can take. Respecting his virtuous nature is important to her, but equally important is his understanding of what threatens the town. Fortunately, the pastor makes the decision for her.
“If there’s more to it you can tell me.” He prepares himself for the worst. Now more than ever, he needs to learn to endure. He can’t be coddled anymore.
“A curling iron can heat up to over 400 degrees Fahrenheit,” Madeline says. “That means it can start burning your skin before your central nervous system tells you there’s any pain. Even one second of contact and you’re looking at a nice little blister,” she says. “More sensitive skin, like the inside of your mouth, for instance—it will burn so intensely that the body will lose consciousness as a defense mechanism in the event of prolonged exposure. So imagine my surprise when I walk into the bedroom and see Pollux holding this curling iron. One whore is passed out in the bed…two others are crying and squealing,” Madeline says. “He’s holding this thing, and there’s all these little pieces of meat sticking to the metal. Smoking and cooking…it smelled like charred pork. And this poor fucking girl, her cervix and labia had third degree burns and she was oozing some kind of pink fluid onto the sheets. Pollux was laughing…blood smeared all over his mouth and coating his teeth. He tells the other two whores he’ll toss a million on the bed if they’ll go down on her, pointing at the space between her legs with the curling iron. It looked boiled.”
Father Johnstone feels his guts tighten, twisting. He leans forward in the chair, clamping his eyes shut and trying to hold down the vomit.
“Well, you get it.” Madeline spares him. “There was no limit, no accountability. He could treat people however he wanted without consequences, and he took every conceivable advantage of that. Their greed, Johnstone, allowed him the kind of control he had been craving,” she says. “It brought out the worst in him…made him sick.”
“Did you leave?” the pastor asks, assuming this is the next logical turn.
“Not yet. Not at that exact moment, no.” Madeline frowns again. “I loved him, I’d known him for most of my life, and I wasn’t ready to throw that away. There was an attempt on my part to convey that things had gotten out of hand, that we had all but turned our backs on the Feri and its traditions. Apparently, this was the wrong thing to say to him,” she says with misgiving. “He snapped. Beat me up. Raped me, and not a soul stepped in to help. They didn’t want to lose their meal ticket. That’s how powerful greed can be.”
Madeline says, “Hours later, I woke up in a different hotel room with seventeen stitches and a couple separated ribs. Broken nose. One of my eyes was swollen shut.” A tear falls, sliding off her face into Mary’s fur, still coiled in Madeline’s lap below. “He hired a private doctor to come and patch me up. None of the other girls got that, so I guess I should consider myself lucky. The damage had been done, though. In our community out in the woods, we didn’t really have any concept of sin, y’know. It wasn’t like here,” Madeline makes a small circular motion with her finger. “We had an understanding, and we thrived on the ideals of peace, community, and love. To go against that, to either murder or rape, brought darkness upon a person in a way that can’t be reversed. They become damned in the eyes of the Goddess. Like your Christian diety, she also has a threshold for what she’s willing to tolerate. She too can be vengeful,” Madeline says. “In a faith predicated on the sensual experience, rape is blasphemous. I believe you would equate it with eternal sin.”
Also known as the unforgiveable sin or the unpardonable sin, it is the instance in which one speaks blasphemy against Holy Spirit. They are, therefore, unable to be absolved and beyond repentance.
“What kind of reprisals does that entail?” he asks. “Hell?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking of it, with the fire and brimstone. Not like that,” Madeline says. “Our understanding is that the crimes you commit on earth are paid for on earth.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“Well, I’m not,” she says. “After the incident in the hotel, I took off. I was done. No way was I sticking around to see what happened next.”
“Back to the community?”
“No.” Madeline shakes her head. “I knew I wouldn’t be allowed back, plus, I didn’t put it past Pollux to try and track me down. The last thing I wanted to do was lead him back to the people I cared about,” she explains. “I limped out of Vegas broken and beat the hell up and got on a Greyhound. Didn’t even know where it was going—I just needed to get away, y’know. So I rode on this thing for about a day or two, mostly just sleeping and trying to recover. I ended up in Kansas City and remembered that Pollux had one of his storage facilities there. Thought I’d be clever and break into it, but it was too late.”
“What? He emptied it?” the pastor asks.
“Not exactly. Took me about three hours to pick that lock. Magnetism is a bitch if you’re not used to it,” she says. “Tips of my fingers were numb and bleeding by the time I managed to pop the thing open.”
“Probably worth the effort though.”
“Would have been if it still contained any money,” Madeline says. “When I opened that storage facility it was nothing but ash in there. Reeked of sulfur. The money had died, in a sense. This is when I knew there were consequences for what he had done. Now that he had fallen out of favor with the Goddess, his abilities had been compromised.”
“Why not revoked completely?” the pastor asks.
“I imagine he discovered the same thing I did,” she says. “After I found out the storage facility was a bust, I wandered out to the country. I felt safer in that environment. The problem was that I was still in bad shape. I was coughing up blood. Some nights I couldn’t even sleep the pain in my ribs was so bad, and that’s right around the time I came across my first faith healer,” Madeline says, giving a small smile. “A priest and his assistant going from town to town, putting on a show. In this little vinyl tent filled with folding chairs, I watched them cure a kid with a bad kidney, a cripple, a burn victim. The priest performed his ‘miracles’ and the audience paid their money. Of course, I was the only one who saw the assistant for what she really was, and I noticed her eyes kept drifting towards me. It was like we knew each other even though we’d never met. She healed me, taught me about the branches and how they can work to compliment each other,” Madeline says. “The same way there’s multiple faiths, the same holds true for Craft. You can cross-pollinate, so to speak.”
“How is that even possible, though?” the pastor asks.
“Faith, Johnstone. Faith is an extremely powerful ingredient,” Madeline says. “It’s why the flock has followed you all these years without an ounce of proof, and it’s also why I’ve gone from levitating silverware to deflecting bullets. It’s the reason I can fully revive things instead of just healing them.” She sighs, smiles bravely. Madeline stares intently at the pastor, telling him, “You are the reason I haven’t run off again.”
“You mean from him?”
“Yes. He has a knack for finding me,” she says. “Doesn’t matter where. I go to a small town in Missouri, and two months later an EF5 tornado rips the town apart. I go to New York. Not even a few weeks go by and a hurricane hits.”
Plagues, the pastor thinks.
“Droughts, landslides, earthquak
es,” Madeline ticks off on her fingers. “It took me a while to figure out, but when he comes, disaster comes along with him. People get hurt, they die, and I’m partly responsible for that.”
“And it’s happening again,” the pastor says, remembering the bees, the moths. From dust they came; to dust they returned.
“I’m not running off this time though. I’m done with that.” Madeline looks at the pastor expectantly, as if she’s waiting for him to formally declare his alliance.
Sympathetic to her plight though he may be, Father Johnstone is thinking about himself at the moment. He nearly lost himself, and the flock found themselves in a state of disarray because of it. As much as he’d like to defer the problem and get Pratt back to the way it was, he can’t have that hanging over his head. He can’t allow Pollux to leave town only to repeat what he’s done in a different location. As Madeline would say, that would make the pastor partly responsible.
“What can I do to help?” Father Johnstone asks.
Madeline bites her lips, smiles bashfully.
“I need a virgin,” she says.
On the Road with Billy Burke, Truck
Stop Preacher
“Keep the Lord in your mind and your heart. At all times—keep him the fuck in there. The Lord is your weapon, more powerful than any handgun, grenade, or nuke. If you are a fat disgusting fuck driving by a Wendy’s—the Lord is what keeps you from ordering that Baconator. When some lot lizard is pounding on the door of your rig so she can suck your dick for a beer—the Lord gives you the strength to stick a boot in her face…and if that meth hooker gets up, you use the Lord to kick that crusty cunt right in her pie hole again. The Lord heals. He heals your gout and your shingles and anal fissures. He heals your anger. We’ve all got anger, don’t we, gentlemen? You can pray all you want…don’t mean some prick ain’t gonna come along and drop a big ol’ steamer in your life. When some cop pulls you over for some bullshit or the president fucks with your health care—that’s just Satan taking a shit in his hand and throwing it at you…like a goddamn monkey. He’s an animal. Only animals shit in their hands and chuck it. And how do we react to that? Are we supposed to just let the shit drip down our faces and turn the other cheek? There’s a time for that. Ol’ Billy Burke has done his fair share of walking away, I can assure you. But there’s also another side to God…a vengeful side. We—as men that walk the Divine path—we need the Lord to tell us when that time is…and I just so happen to know. I’ve communed with the Lord…and He told me, ‘Billy, you need to round up your flock, and you need to torch that mosque where all the terrorists plot against Uncle Sam on the magic carpets. Then you need to piss on the ashes. You and your boys need to show them America don’t take no shit.’ Those were His orders. Now, I don’t know about you, but ol’ Billy Burke don’t pass up an opportunity to serve the Lord. So I ask you…any of you boys hauling some gas you can spare?”
Good Sex, Great Prayers Page 25