Punish the Sinners

by John Saul

  Margo looked confused, and he tried to explain.

  “The Romance languages all stem from Latin. French. Spanish. Italian. But languages change slowly. So what would early Italian sound like? It would be somewhere between Latin and modern Italian, wouldn’t it? And St. Peter Martyr was an Italian from the thirteenth century! The Society is using the language of St Peter Martyr! That must be it. Of course we can’t understand all of it, any more than we can understand all of Chaucer’s English.”

  “But where would they have learned it?” Margo asked.

  “Who knows?” Peter said. Suddenly he felt much better about everything; the chanting had lost a lot of the mystery it had held in the flickering light of the rectory.

  “How much of this do yon remember?” Margo asked him suddenly.

  “Not much,” Peter said. “It all sounds vaguely familiar to me, but not nearly as familiar as it should. I mean, only a few hours ago I was taking part in that chanting.”

  Margo stared at him. “I thought you said you couldn’t understand the words.”

  “I couldn’t. And I still can’t. But at the time I was able to keep up with it, without even trying. It was like the words just flowed out of me …” His voice trailed off as he realized that now, in his apartment, the rhythms that had seemed so simple in the rectory seemed incredibly complicated.

  And then he heard the voice.

  It boomed sonorously out of the recorder, resonant and compelling. He recognized it immediately, and wondered why he hadn’t known it during the service. It was Monsignor Vernon.

  “What’s he saying?” Margo asked. She, too, had recognized the priest’s voice.

  “I’m not sure,” Peter said slowly, trying to conceal the sudden fear that was clutching at his stomach. “I … When I was there, I thought I was hearing the voice of St. Peter Martyr. It never occurred to me that it was Monsignor. And I can’t understand most of what he’s saying. It has to do with sin, and punishment, and celebrating. I don’t know. I should be able to understand the Latin—I teach it. But it isn’t quite Latin anyway. It’s more like Italian and my Italian doesn’t exist.”

  And then the booming voice stopped, and the chanting began again, accompanied now by a different sound. Slowly the chanting faded away, and the new sounds grew in volume. They began as a series of small whining noises, but as the tape ground on, the whines turned into moaning, mixed with heavy breathing, and other sounds that seemed familiar to Peter but that he couldn’t quite identify. Occasionally a cry of ecstasy penetrated the steady moaning.

  Peter knew what he was hearing, but didn’t want to admit it to himself. He listened to the tape, trying to shut it out, but at the same time fascinated. And he began to remember some of the images he had experienced in the rectory.

  The angels, seeming to glow whitely in the flickering candlelight.

  The closeness among the seven of them that he had thought was a spiritual closeness.

  The caresses that he had thought stemmed from a religious experience.

  Naked men, priests stripped of their vestments, stripped of everything, their bodies intertwined not spiritually but carnally, caressing each other not religiously but sexually.

  He was listening to the sounds of an orgy, an orgy he knew he and six priests had participated in only hours earlier.

  And then he heard his own voice crying out in that tight ecstasy that only comes with a sexual climax. His stomach knotted and he knew he was going to be sick. As he lunged toward the bathroom his right hand flew out, knocking the tiny recorder from the coffee table. But it didn’t stop: the sickening sounds continued as he fled the room.

  He stayed in the bathroom for a long time, waiting for the nausea to subside, not wanting to go back into the living room, not wanting to face Margo. Then, as he was beginning to hope that she might have left, he heard her rapping at the door.

  “Peter?” she said, her voice quiet and gentle. “Peter, are you all right?”

  All right? he thought. All right? How could I be all right? My God, what have I done? He sank to the floor of the bathroom, laying his cheek on the cool tile. He heard the click of the door opening, and realized that Margo had come in. Then he felt her touch him on the cheek.

  “It’s all right,” she said softly. “Peter, it’s all right.”

  He stared up at her, wanting to believe her, but sure that nothing would ever be all right again.

  Darkness closed around him.

  18

  Margo’s first impulse was to call the hospital. Before she got to the phone, she had changed her mind. What could she tell them? They wouldn’t believe her. Even if she played the tape for them, she was sure they wouldn’t believe her. And besides, Peter had only passed out. She told herself that it wasn’t anything serious: he had simply been overcome by exhaustion and the emotional shock of discovering what he had participated in.

  She went back to the bathroom, and started moving Peter Balsam’s unconscious body toward the bedroom. She would put him to bed, and then she would lie down on the couch and wait for him to wake up. Under the circumstances there just didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

  He didn’t stir at all as she pulled and shoved him into his bed, but he looked so uncomfortable that she decided to undress him.

  The first thing she noticed were the marks. The same marks that had been there a few days earlier. They were back, and they were identical to the earlier ones, standing red and angry all over his torso. She pulled his trousers off, then his underwear. The last garment seemed damp, and at first she thought he had simply been sweating profusely. But there was more. From Peter Balsam’s body an odor emanated. The sweet muskiness of semen.

  Margo Henderson buried her face in the soiled undergarment and cried. As the tears came, she realized that she had still been hoping. She had been clinging to a hope that the evidence of the tape had been false, that what she had heard was something entirely different from what she now knew was the truth. She had stumbled into a mess. And yet, even as she lay on the bed next to Peter, sobbing softly into the pillow, she realized she was not going to walk away; she would not—could not—leave him.

  It wasn’t Peter’s fault, she told herself, forcing back the sobs. He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know what they were doing to him. You watched his face as he listened, and he was shocked. So don’t blame him; help him.

  Margo rose from the bed, then pulled the covers up over Peter’s naked body. She looked down at him, and realized how vulnerable he must be right now. When he woke, she must be close to him. He mustn’t feel that she had abandoned him.

  She went out to the living room, and stretched out on the sofa. The first glow of dawn was beginning to light the sky outside as Margo fell into a fitful doze interrupted by dreams that took all the peace from her sleep…

  She was outside the rectory, and she knew what was going on inside. But she couldn’t stop it. She could only crouch in the darkness outside, listening to the sounds, hearing first the chanting, and then the moaning, knowing that Peter was inside, that he was in the middle of that group of six strange priests, and that they were seducing him. Their hands were touching him, and their lips kissing him in a way that only her hands should have touched him, only her lips should have kissed him.

  Then she was suddenly inside the rectory, inside that oddly lit room, watching the naked priests, their wrinkled bodies glistening sweatily in the candlelight as they stripped Peter’s clothes from him, their fingers greedily playing over his smooth skin, their tongues clucking away in that strange language. And then they were holding him down and Monsignor Vernon, grown suddenly to a towering height, stood over Peter, his monstrous organ thrusting toward Peter’s gaping mouth. The priest began advancing toward Peter, and Margo looked on in horror. She wanted to scream, but couldn’t make any sound escape her lips. She tried to lunge forward, tried to rescue Peter from the grasp of the old men, but she couldn’t make her feet move. They seemed to be mired in heavy m
ud. All she could do was look on in mutely fascinated horror as Monsignor Vernon, suddenly enveloped in a halo, forced his penis into Peter Balsam’s mouth. And finally, as the immense glans disappeared between his lips, she screamed.

  Margo woke up to the sound of her own scream, and felt her body shaking uncontrollably. She could feel a clammy sweat covering her like a wet sheet. And then she felt a hand touch her, and her eyes snapped open. Peter Balsam was bending over her. She stared silently at him for a second or two, suddenly unsure whether she was awake. And then she realized she was awake, and he was real, and she threw her arms around him.

  “Oh, God, Peter,” she cried into his ear. “I saw it all. I was there, right there in the room, and those priests—those six awful priests—they were naked and they were—they were doing the most disgusting things to you. And then the Monsignor—Monsignor Vernon—he—he—” She broke off, unable to continue.

  “It’s all right,” Peter said softly, holding her closer. “It was only a dream. You had a bad dream.”

  She lay still in his arms for a moment, and her panic passed. And then she remembered. He should have been in bed. She had put him to bed, then lay down to doze, only a few minutes ago. What was he doing up? How could he be up already? She wriggled free of his arms and sat up. The sun was pouring brightly in the front window.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Almost eleven,” Peter said. “I woke up half an hour ago and decided to let you sleep. I guess I shouldn’t have.”

  The dream came back to her, and she looked at him, tried to separate him from the Peter Balsam in her dream. But she couldn’t quite do it, and she had to tell him why.

  “Peter,” she said softly, “there’s something I didn’t tell you last night. Part of my dream just now wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. Last night I—well, I got so nervous waiting for you here that I decided to go for a walk. And I found myself walking up the hill. To the rectory.”

  “Is that why you looked so strange when I came in last night?”

  She nodded miserably. “I already knew what had been going on at the rectory, long before I heard the tape. I must have been outside the window of Monsignore study for hours, listening.” She looked at him beseechingly. “You have no idea what it was like. I didn’t want to listen, but I couldn’t make myself go away. I stayed until it was almost over. I only got back here about forty-five minutes before you did.”

  “Why did you stay?” Peter asked gravely. “I don’t think I would have.”

  “I had to. I had to see you, to see if you knew what was going on up there. And you didn’t. I could tell from your face.” Her voice rose. “Oh, Peter, they’re doing such horrible things to you.”

  She flung her arms around his neck and clung to him. Only this time, Peter picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, kicking the door closed behind him.

  “What are you going to do?”

  It was an hour later, and they lay in bed, her head resting on his stomach.

  “I’m not sure,” Peter said. “I have to stop it. I can’t let them keep doing what they’re doing.”

  “But what can you do?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I could take the tape to the Bishop, but frankly, I don’t think he’d do anything. The only thing he could do is talk to Monsignor and the rest of them, and of course they’d deny they were doing anything wrong.”

  “But those sounds …”

  “Religious ecstasy,” Peter said, trying to make light of the whole mess. “The sounds we were making thirty minutes ago weren’t much different.”

  Margo blushed, remembering, then spoke again.

  “But you have to do something.”

  “I know,” Peter said. “And I’m going to have to do it alone. No one’s going to believe what’s on that tape.”

  “I can back you up,” Margo said softly.

  Peter shook his head violently. “Pm going to have to do it on my own. I’ll talk to the Bishop again, but I don’t think anything will come of it. And believe me, I won’t be going to any more meetings of the Society of St. Peter Martyr.”

  “What about the dance tonight?”

  “I’ll go, of course. That’s going to come under the heading of acting as if nothing had happened. And all of a sudden I think it’s important that I be there. Important for me, and important for the kids.”

  Then he remembered Sister Marie, and her strange evasiveness yesterday morning.

  “And there’s someone I have to talk to,” he said softly, thinking: Someone who knows more about all this than she’s told me.

  He decided not to tell Margo about Sister Marie.

  The gymnasium of St. Francis Xavier High School had that look of slightly seedy festivity produced by high-school students valiantly trying to convert a gymnasium into a ballroom. The crepe-paper streamers, already beginning to go limp as the dance was beginning, hung unevenly from the light fixtures and the basketball hoops, serving more to accentuate the unsuitability of the room than to lend their intended air of gaiety.

  Marilyn Crane sat unhappily in one corner of the gym, the corner farthest from the door, and wondered for the tenth time why she had come. For the tenth time she answered herself; she was here to make her mother happy, and because her sister Greta had always come to the dances in the gym. The fact that Greta always had a date had not struck her mother as particularly relevant. So Marilyn sat in her corner, half hoping to be left alone and unnoticed, half hoping someone—anyone—would come over to talk to her. No one did.

  The room began to fill up, and Marilyn watched the sisters in their black habits cruising among the students like so many dignified black swans in a flock of brightly colored, raucously quacking ducks. Marilyn wondered how they did it; wondered if that mystic self-confidence was issued to the sisters along with their habits. Marilyn particularly liked to watch Sister Marie, her wimple framing her pretty face in a way that seemed to accentuate her beauty rather than lend her an air of remoteness.

  Sister Marie, unaware of Marilyn’s scrutiny, was standing by the main entrance, greeting each of aie students as he came in, and doing her best to keep her right toe from tapping to the music too obviously. Years of practice in front of a mirror had taught her the precise amount of movement she could make under the heavy folds of her habit without causing the telltale swaying of the material that had constantly given her away during her novitiate. But she still tended to get carried away, particularly since the advent of the rock era. Rock music always set her foot to tapping far in excess of the tolerance of her habit. She saw Janet Connally coming in, and smiled easily.

  “All by yourself tonight?” she grinned.

  “I get to meet more boys if I come alone,” Janet said. “Besides, Judy couldn’t come, Karen’s here with Jim, and Penny is working the refreshment table with Jeff Bremmer.”

  “How is Judy?” Sister Marie asked, genuine concern in her voice.

  “All right, I guess,” Janet said slowly. “She came home yesterday, and she’s supposed to be back in school on Monday.”

  “That’ll be nice,” Sister Marie said emphatically. “I’ve missed her.”

  “Sister Marie,” Janet began. She wanted to ask the nun if she knew what was going to happen to Judy, but suddenly, without really knowing why, changed her mind.

  “Yes?” the nun prompted her.

  “Nothing,” Janet said. Suddenly she felt nervous, and wanted to be elsewhere. “I think I’d better say hello to Penny.” She moved off quickly, and her place was taken by Monsignor Vernon, who had been standing a few feet behind her.

  “Monsignor,” Sister Marie greeted him gravely, her cheerful smile disappearing.

  “Sister Marie,” the priest acknowledged her greeting, looking dolefully around the room. “Well.” The word was uttered in a tone that conveyed deep disapproval

  “I think it looks nice,” Sister Marie said tentatively.

  “I wonder if it’s the sort of thing we should be encoura
ging.”

  Sister Marie knew what was coming, knew how the Monsignor felt about frivolous activities—sinful activities. She knew about St. Peter Martyr, and about the Monsignor’s fascination with the saint Often, in the lonely privacy of her cell, she had wondered where that fascination had come from, and where it would lead the priest And sometimes it frightened her. As it had frightened her when she finally remembered where she had seen that odd handwriting on the note Peter Balsam had shown her a few days ago.

  Now, sensing that the Monsignor was about to launch into one of his tirades, she glanced quickly around for a diversion.

  “I think I see Penny Anderson waving to me,” she said, moving away from the priest. “I’d better see if she needs any help.” Before Monsignor Vernon could make a reply, the nun was gone, gliding through the crowd, smiling and nodding to the students as they danced around her. The priest watched her go, his eyes noting the contrast between her dark habit and the brightly colored dresses of his charges. He felt his anger surging up, silently wished he could turn the clock back, turn time back to an easier day, when girls dressed modestly and a priest was respected.

  Monsignor Vernon’s expression grew even more severe as he watched the teen-agers merrily greeting Sister Marie as she made her way through the room. Not one of them had spoken to him. He turned, and walked back into the foyer of the gym, glad to be away from the glittering lights and festooning crepe.

  Peter Balsam glanced at his watch as he hurried up the steps of the gymnasium: he was already ten minutes late, and he had intended to be at least that much early. He burst through the door into the foyer, and almost collided with the Monsignor. He felt his heart pound at the sight of the priest, and hoped his voice wouldn’t give his feelings away. He wanted to back away, then turn and flee, but he forced himself to stand his ground and smile a greeting.

  ‘Monsignor,” he said. “Nice evening, isn’t it?”

  The priest seemed pleased to see him, and Peter began to relax. Maybe he was going to be able to pull it off after all.