by Trevor Zaple
“No,” he said, his voice shaking. “I don’t want to and neither do you”.
There was silence for a moment, and she got back up to her feet. She stole a quick glance at him and the look confused him. Was that pity he saw in her eyes? A strange species of compassion? He suddenly found himself more unsure than ever about what was happening to him. She gathered up her silk robe, placed it once more around herself, and again tapped on the wall. The panel slid across the wall and she disappeared behind it.
His hands clutched at his hair and he felt like tearing it out. He felt himself losing what few shreds of reality he had left, and his internal monologue had begun to gibber in a way that he found distinctively unpleasant. He began to think about crawling over to the remains of his oatmeal bowl and trying to scoop up the last few bits when he heard the panel slid across once again.
Not again he found himself begging silently and was cut off when two figures in much plainer, rougher black robes came through the panel. They were both male, bald, and stern-looking. They stared at him as though he were a child, or an animal, and after a moment of reflection Richard realized that he may as well be as such. He stared at them, frightened and shaking, wondering what their appearance meant, and whether it was for good or for ill.
They stood for a long time, not moving. Just as Richard was about to throw himself at their feet and cry out for whatever mercy there might be in the universe, the man on the left held out his hand, one massive, lined palm facing upwards. Shaking, uncomprehending, Richard took the hand with his own and allowed himself to be brought up to his feet. The two men then turned around so that their backs faced him.
“This way,” one of them intoned, and they left through the panel in the wall. Richard followed them after a moment, his mind quailing away from any idea that it threw up about what was to come.
FOUR
He was lead out of the white room into pitch blackness. It was hallway, in as much as it had a floor. He could infer the walls and ceiling from the echo of the footsteps of the two men leading him onwards, but from visual information alone he could not be certain. Those footsteps were all that he had to guide himself; there was no light to see the men in front of him.
He ran into the back of one of them and realized that they had stopped. There was a sound of fumbling, as if with a doorknob, and then light flooded into Richard’s world. He covered his eyes with his hands, wincing while his eyes adjusted to the change in light. One of the robed men grabbed his elbow and pulled him along; he stumbled a bit but was able to keep up with them.
As his eyes adjusted he saw that he was in some sort of utility basement. The ceiling was low and the walls were shelved with as assortment of spare parts, cans of lubricants, and tools. Light came in the form of lanterns that the men picked up from the floor and carried with them. They did not stop for anything and Richard was unable to observe much of his new, strange surroundings. It was cramped, dark, and dirty, that was as much as he could ascertain. He stumped along dully like a cow, his mind as blank as the walls he had just left.
They exited this basement level by a series of clanging metal steps. The robed men threw open the door at the top of the stairs, not bothering to stop to close it afterwards. The temperature dropped a few degrees once they entered this new area and Richard was painfully reminded of the fact that he was naked. His skin immediately prickled, and he began to shiver. The men did not notice his discomfort, or did not care; they did not stop to find him anything to cover himself. He thought fleetingly that he was being brought into hell, but dismissed this almost immediately. The entire situation was too real, he felt, to be something supernatural.
The men led him down a hallway lined with lockers and Richard saw with some sour amusement that he was being marched through a high school. That sealed everything in his mind: he was still alive. Dust covered everything and there was still that faint scent of decaying flesh hanging thinly in the air. This was the world he had left, or rather had never really left at all. He felt the metallic tang of fear spike upon his tongue. He thought back to the time before the white room, to his life after leaving Samantha. He had been certain that he had been followed out of a church he’d passed; he’d gone into a green glass building and made camp in a room on the top floor. They’d found him, though, and then...he tried to force his mind back to his last memory in that vein. There was gas, he thought with the relieving burst of the broken dam. He had been gassed, and then he had woken up in the white room.
These were the people who’d been following him, then. He could not imagine what their intentions might be; in his half-starved, wild-eyed state he could not focus his attention on his current situation long enough to make much sense of anything. The men took him up a set of stairs and they passed along a balcony that looked out over the lower level of the school. He noticed a few other people, dressed in grey robes, walking through the lower area. He was marched along too quickly to make out much in the way of details on them.
He was taken down another set of stairs and through another, similarly locker-lined hallway. They approached an opulent, glass-walled administrative office and were met by a man in a resplendent white robe. He had slate-grey hair, cut close to his scalp, and bore a wide, accepting smile that did not touch his eyes. He greeted the three of them with his hands out to either side.
“Jameson,” he said amiably, “Alexander. Please, stand relieved. I will take the young penitent from here”.
Jameson and Alexander nodded there heads efficiently and walked away. Richard was still shivering from the cold that was settling deeper in now that walking had ceased. The man in the white robe took his measure with a glance and held his hand out towards the door to the glass office.
“Please, this way,” he said, his voice brisk. He opened the door and Richard followed him inside. They crossed to the back, brick wall of the office where there was a heavy-looking blue door. The man in the white robe knocked on the blue door in curious fashion: rap raprap raprapraprap rap rap. There was a pause, and then the man in white turned the doorknob slowly. They entered with smooth and fluid grace.
Inside the door was another, smaller office. It was nearly empty, and painted the same endless white as the room that Richard had been kept in. The difference lay in the plain, heavy mahogany desk in the center of the room, and the tall, severe old man who sat behind it. This man was dressed in a white robe like the one that adorned the man behind Richard, except that this robe was silk. He had a long, disapproving face and sunken, bruised-looking eyes. He was sitting with his hands folded on his desk and looked up as they entered.
“Paul,” he said. “Thank you. Leave us”. Paul nodded firmly and left, shutting the door behind him. Richard looked around for something to sit on but did not see anything. He stood uncomfortably in front of the door, his hands twitching at his side. He felt parched and nervous. The severe man in the silk robe stared at him, his dark eyes seeming to tunnel directly beneath his flesh. Richard put his hands in front of himself and then forced himself to put them back at his side.
“Please, young penitent,” he said, “approach me. Kneel before the desk”. Richard did as he was ordered; he was unable to stop himself from outright shaking, now. He sank to his knees in front of the desk and within seconds his chin was on his chest and he was weeping piteously. The man in the silk robe watched him wail uncontrollably into himself, his expression unchanging. After several minutes of concentrated weeping, he began to calm down. He looked up to the man in silk, his eyes red and wet.
“Please,” he croaked, “what do you want of me?” The man arose from his seat forcefully, slamming his fists into the desk and seeming to jump into a standing position. He glared down at Richard with all the fury of noon in August.
“What I want, young penitent, is to lift up your immortal soul. I would think that your continued existence is worth nothing less”.
Richard gaped at him, unable to understand what it was that the man was saying. The man did not wa
it for an answer; he walked around his desk and began to pace in a wide circle around Richard’s place of kneeling.
“I think you are worth it, young penitent,” the man proclaimed. “You have already shown admirable restraint in the face of temptation and a willingness to eschew the needs of your weak flesh for a consideration of the spiritual realm”.
Richard thought, in a dazed way, about how close to his own thought process this was. He shuddered and hung his head again. The man continued.
“You are one of the ones that God has seen fit to save from the great smiting that he laid upon the world. He leaned over the world and blew His fetid breath upon the lands, and o’er the length and breadth of those lands men died. Like he did to the sinners of Sodom, to the lost souls of Gomorrah. To the prideful, sinful heathens of Egypt. To the Romans who caused their own Saviour to die like a common thief. The whole world had become a pit of vipers, a den of sinners and beasts. God’s holy breath swept the land and cut these degenerate mockeries of his infinite love down where they stood. Where they lay, slothlike. Where they fornicated”. He said the word with a seething hatred that Richard suddenly remembered quite well. The man’s voice had been faintly familiar, and he figured out why. It was the voice of the man that he and Samantha had caught on the radio, ranting about these same things before a studio audience. He was suddenly very afraid.
“Most of those that lived were deemed unworthy,” the man continued, “and were crushed when God’s breath crushed the soul from their flesh. Their souls are awaiting final judgement, in a place much like the one you just left”. Richard felt his breath coming much more quickly. “Those left behind are slowly being separated, like the proverbial wheat from the chaff. The liars. The thieves. The fuckers. They will be eliminated as the wretched, slattern animals they are. Others, however, such as yourself, will be worthy of a second chance. Do you feel worthy of a second chance, young penitent?” The man’s heavy hand fell on Richard’s shoulder and he felt driven down under the weight of it. A sobbing gasp escaped him and he stammered uncontrollably before he was able to speak.
“I...I don’t know!” he wailed. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”
The man squeezed his hand on Richard’s shoulder and the flow of his admission was cut off. He looked up into the man’s carefully hewn face dumbly. The man smiled, slightly, and it seemed to spread light. Richard’s mouth fell open.
“My son,” he said kindly. “Of course you do not. It says in the Book that there are none righteous, not one. All clear-thinking men must know only that they do not know; they are no more confident of their worthiness than they are of the worthiness of any other. We may only know are under a constant state of testing. You are being tested now, as we speak. You and I can never know when we might be called upon to be judged, and we must face that judgement with as clean a soul as we can manage”. He cupped Richard’s chin in his hand and drew his face upwards to look into his eyes. “I believe my soul to be clean enough to pass muster,” he confided. “How does yours feel?”
He let this pass without waiting for Richard to answer. He released Richard’s chin and paced away, stopping to regard the door with his hands clasped behind his back. Presently he turned back to regard Richard.
“It is information,” he spat, “information that keeps you from healing the corruption within you. You are born into corruption, and it is allowed to fester because you are allowed to know that it exists. Is it not evident, right from the beginning? Adam and Eve were brought into being by God, innocent of sin as befits the hand of the Maker. They were corrupted by that Tree of Knowledge, the one that God Himself warned them of. They let the Serpent slither its way into their hearts and it was the knowledge that they gained from the fruit of that tree that made them depraved. What’s ignorant is blessed, that is the lesson that God wishes you to take away from this. There is none so accursed as he whom knows he is accursed. There is none so free of sin as the one to whom such sin has never occurred to in the first place. Think about this, young penitent, let it truly sink in”. The man returned to the other side of his desk and slowly sat down. He returned to folding his hands upon the desk and waited. Richard stared at him, his vision blurred and his mind reeling.
“So then,” the man continued, his voice shocking Richard back into semi-awareness. “It is information that is the culprit. Information serves as a distraction to the immortal soul; it drowns out the sweet, flat hum that is the Voice of the Almighty. The history of the increasing depravity of the world is the history of the growth and expansion of networks of information. Look to the Romans! Their empire grew, and in doing so the amount of information that they could produce to pass along grew along with it. It is no coincidence that the more knowledge they gained, the more intricate their lives became, the more depraved they became. Think upon it. The orgies. The licentiousness. The callous, useless bloodthirst. As the empire expanded, the evil grew within them. They were cast down by rude animals who rode out of the fornicating wilds of Europe and burned their pretty, godless cities to the ground”.
He rose to his feet with a sudden flourish, ecstasy shining now from his deep black eyes.
“Our world was the most depraved of all!” he shouted. “The endless orgy of bloody-minded violence and cheap, degrading fucking. All aided and carried along by a flood of symbols that has drowned us all as surely as the waters of God drowned the world before Noah set sail. The amount of information being passed around at any given minute – any given second – was staggering. The secrets of everything were laid out upon a platter that anyone could take from! Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law they chanted, and went about their business as though it were the most important work of all”.
He slammed his fists down on the table and shouted into the ceiling. Richard cast his eyes upon the floor and could not keep his shivers at bay. He felt perilously close to breaking down into another storm of weeping.
“THEY WERE SHOWN! They were told the error of their ways but did not turn aside from leaking out their own damnation into the world! God warned them that their endless quest to gorge themselves upon the fruit of that Tree would have so many unhappy returns! For the Serpent of Old was wrapped around that tree, as she has been since God brought life to the swirl of dust that He came upon! To eat of that fruit is death! As is commanded!”
The man subsided for a moment and then continued in a low, almost casual voice. He gazed down at Richard, the kindly expression returning.
“Now it is no more. The masses denied their Maker and were swept from their places on the Earth. Those left behind will tend the Garden and make it grow again, as it was before Adam and Eve ate and fucked in the shadow of the anger of the Lord. We begin here, in the least of His Places, covering up the sins of the dead and beginning anew the work of Man upon Earth. We test those whom come along, for their worthiness in the eyes of the Almighty”. He smiled down at Richard and Richard felt as though his heart might burst asunder.
“You are one such, young penitent. Tell me, child. What was the name you were given when you passed through the veil of corruption into this stinking world?”
Richard swallowed, his throat feeling hot and choked. He struggled to get out his words through the film of coarse phlegm.
“My name is Richard,” he croaked. The man brought his hands together.
“You may keep that name for a little longer, Richard,” he said, his voice proclaiming how generous he was. “You will be given a new one, in time, but you must earn it first”.
Now Richard began to weep again, but it was not as wild and bitter as it had been before. It felt cleansing, like the rain that bursts from the sky after a torridly humid day to cut through the sticky heat and bring refreshing coolness to the land. He felt glad – of what, he could not correctly say. The emotion was enough, in that moment.
“I am Brother Bentley,” the man offered patiently. “I am the shepherd of the flock that seeks to restore the tabula rasa. In time, this will become
your mission as well”. He expanded his hands to encompass the entire room. “You have been brought unto the work of God Himself, and you will be rewarded through the pristine nature of your reborn soul”. He put his hands together and smiled beatifically. “You will be given a robe, some food, and a place to sleep. I suspect that you could use all three of these things rather badly, yes?”
Richard could only nod, numb with cold and hunger, a strange, eerie feeling of deep gratitude bubbling up from within him.
“Good,” Brother Bentley replied, “very good. We will speak again, when you are in a more serene state of mind”. He suddenly clapped his powerful hands; the sound was very loud in the close confines of the room and Richard jumped, startled. The door opened and the man in the rougher white robe opened the door, a careful expression on his face.
“Brother Anderson,” Brother Bentley said swiftly. “Please bring our young penitent Richard to where he may be fed and clothed”. Brother Anderson nodded efficiently, and entered the room to stand next to Richard. Within a second, Richard was hauled to his feet and lead away by the gentle, firm grip of Brother Anderson. He stole a last glance at Brother Bentley before leaving the room and saw that he had returned to his original position, sitting at his desk with his hands folded, staring into the middle distance of nothing.
FIVE
True to Brother Bentley’s word, Richard was lead away to a place where he was given more porridge, as much water as he could drink, and a warm, thick grey robe. After eating and getting warm, he found himself to be impossibly tired. He was taken to a room that must have been a science lab before the plague; now there were bunks set up with thin mattresses atop them. He climbed into one of these bunks and was asleep at roughly the same moment that his cheek made contact with the firm, new pillow.
Over the next few days he was left more or less to his own devices. He was only allowed into certain rooms in the old high school; the place to eat, the place to sleep, and the place to exercise. The place to eat was the first place he had been taken to after leaving the company of Brother Bentley. By the looks of it, it had been the cafeteria before the plague and was serving the same basic function now. He was given nothing more than porridge, and although he grew steadily sick of the bland nothingness it offered in terms of taste he appreciated it as food, on its own merit. He had spent three days without it and was of the opinion that he would never take food for granted again, even canned tomato pasta.