The man shifted his attention to Soma as the crowd streamed past them, heading toward auditorium C. Jewel bright eyes glimmered in dark sockets as he clasped her hand. “I’m Deacon Everett. That’s Deacon Paul,” he said, nodding to his partner. “Enjoy the service, and if you have any questions, need anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask one of us for help.”
“I got a question,” Perry interjected.
“Yes?”
“What do you call yourselves?”
The Deacon smiled at him in confusion, tilting his head. “I don’t…?”
“You know, like Catholic, Baptist…”
“Oh!” the man cried, teeth flashing brilliantly. “We call ourselves the Renatus, which means ‘born again’. And this is the Church of the New Covenant.”
“There’s some debate about the correct Latin word for ‘born again,’ ” the other Deacon interrupted. The two men dueled with their eyes, as if Perry had stirred up an ongoing quarrel. “The correct word for born again, resurrectio, was thought too unwieldy to use as the name for our denomination,” the second Deacon said.
“It depends on if you’re using it as a noun or a verb,” the first said.
“You can’t use a verb as a noun. That’s like a sprinter saying he’s a ‘running.’ ”
“Okay, thanks, take it easy,” Perry said loudly, and escorted Soma past the bickering deacons. “Just like our church back home,” he grumbled.
The corridor leading to auditorium C was long and wide, with alcoves that featured religious paintings and statuary. The denizens of Siloam surrounded them, a parade of dead flesh, talking animatedly as they walked toward the amphitheater. Most, like Perry and Soma, were pretty well preserved, their bodies relatively whole, but some were terribly disfigured, flesh chewed up, limbs missing. The smell of all that rotten meat was stifling, especially in such a confined space. Soma had been a nurse for half a decade and had smelled some wicked odors in her day, but nothing in her experience compared to the stench that permeated the Church of the New Covenant. Not even the hospital morgue.
They faltered at the entrance of the auditorium, shocked by the size of the room beyond. Neither had encountered such a vast interior space outside of a sports arena so it took them a moment to absorb the sight.
“Wow,” Perry said, eyeing the broad stage, the vaulted ceiling, the terraced seating. “How many people do you think this thing holds?”
“Fifteen hundred,” a woman said helpfully. She was standing near the door, passing out programs. She was dressed in a black cassock and sash like Sarge and the two deacons. She shifted the stack of fliers to her left hand and held out her right. “I’m Deacon Vanessa.”
“Hi,” Perry said, shaking hands.
“Auditorium C seats fifteen hundred,” she repeated, nodding her head toward the cavernous chamber. There looked to be only a hundred or so people inside. They were down at the lower tiers, near the stage. “It’s the smallest of the theaters. B holds two thousand and A holds thirty-five hundred.”
“Wow.”
“We rarely use the other two,” Vanessa said. “There’s no need. There are only three hundred Resurrects here in Siloam -- well, three hundred and growing!” She smiled proudly, as if it were a personal accomplishment.
She chatted on as worshippers filed past, thrusting a photocopied program into the hand of each new arrival. She mostly talked about the church and about its leader Baphomet, who had “called her out of the darkness”. Her features were supple and animated, her green eyes bright with zeal. In fact, she hardly looked dead at all. Her hair was a long and wavy honey blonde, swept across one shoulder. Her skin was pale and slightly cyanotic, not dry or crinkled in the least. Soma found herself somewhat envious of the deaconess -- of her looks and her obvious satisfaction.
“Now don’t be put off by his appearance,” she was saying. “Baphomet was the worst kind of sinner before the Lord called him to service. His appearance… it’s a testament to how far he had fallen before the Lord poured out his wrath on the world. But I’m sure he’ll speak during the service this morning. He usually does when newcomers attend.”
“Are there other new people besides us?” Soma asked.
The deaconess nodded. “Three yesterday afternoon. Then one last night. Then you two. You’re the couple they brought in early this morning, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Perry nodded.
“I thought so. Sarge told me about you. Said Baphomet was really interested in you two for some reason. More and more of us come back every day, but there are still so few of us, and so very much to do. I pray the service touches your hearts today, that you join us on this New Path of Righteousness.”
Perry looked as if he’d bitten into a lemon. He seemed on the verge of another outburst. His shoulders were rising higher and higher as his chin tucked down closer and closer to his chest. Soma butted in before Perry lost his cool, asking the deaconess where they should sit. The deaconess fluttered her eyes as if she had been daydreaming there for a moment, then directed them toward the seats nearest the stage, informing them that row one was reserved for visitors and new converts.
“Not too sure you’re going to convert this old boy,” Perry drawled. He just couldn’t hold his tongue anymore. Thankfully, they had moved several rows down the aisle, and Deacon Vanessa didn’t seem to hear what he had said.
People were filing in more rapidly now, and the auditorium, large as it was, was starting to get noisy. Perry and Soma made their way to the first row and sat a few seats apart from a trio of their fellow neophytes. They exchanged greetings with the gawking threesome and prepared to watch the sermon.
A vast crucifix made of varnished red wood dominated the stage. It was so large the upper half of it projected out over the first two or three rows -- mute threat of a crushing death should the cables it was suspended from ever break. Beneath it was the altar, which was draped in scarlet and gold, and risers for a choir to stand on. The backdrop of this impressive setting was a sextet of twenty-foot-tall stained glass windows. They were fake, lit from behind by stage lights, but bright and merry, like Christmas decorations.
“You notice how they keep talking about the guy’s looks?” Perry said. “Nobody will say what’s wrong with him exactly, but they keep warning us about it.”
“He must be pretty chewed up,” Soma said.
A bell tolled and the throng inside the auditory took their seats. A hush fell over the theatre as the citizens of Siloam waited for the service to begin. After a minute or two, Sarge entered from stage right and approached the pulpit. He unfolded a sheet of paper, inclined his head to the microphone and began to speak. The shriek of feedback was immediate and painful and Sarge jerked his head back with a wince. He looked reproachfully offstage. He waited a beat, nodded his head, then gave it another shot.
“Good morning, brothers and sisters,” he intoned, and his deep-chested voice reverberated throughout the arena.
“GOOD MORNING, BROTHER EINKORN!” three hundred reanimated corpses replied in unison.
“Jesus Christ!” Perry hissed, clamping his palms over his ears.
Soma shushed him.
“Isn’t it a glorious day today? Just a beautiful, beautiful morning, praise the Lord,” Sarge said.
“PRAISE THE LORD!” the congregation roared.
“As you have probably heard by now, God has seen fit to deliver six new Resurrects into the loving embrace of our extended family,” Sarge said, looking down into the front row with a smile. “It is our sincere hope that they will choose to become official members of our community in the days to come. Please join me in welcoming them to our church this morning. Welcome to you, brothers and sisters.”
‘WELCOME, BROTHERS AND SISTERS!”
“What is ours is yours.”
“WHAT IS OURS IS YOURS!”
“May God grant you peace and security.”
“MAY GOD GRANT YOU PEACE AND SECURITY!”
“Let us pray,” Sarge said,
lowering his head.
There was a soft rustling sound (and a fair bit of creaking and popping) as three hundred partially decomposed worshippers bowed their heads. Perry sat up in his seat and craned his head around as Sarge led the opening prayer, his voice sonorous and reverential. Soma looked around as well, impressed by the solemnity of the congregation. Their low whispers -- hands clenched together, eyes squeezed shut -- were so earnest she could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stirring.
Perry did not seem so impressed. In fact, he looked downright disgusted. His lips moved as he flopped back in his seat, arms crossed, and though he did not speak aloud, she was fairly certain he had mouthed the word “sheep”.
After Sarge had said the opening prayer, the choir, dressed in voluminous purple robes with yellow stoles, assembled on the stage and belted out moving renditions of “All Creatures of Our God and King” and “At the Cross”. Their voices were raspy but their enthusiasm was ample compensation for the decidedly froggy performance. Soma enjoyed it, though Perry sank lower and lower in his seat, eyes glazed over, as the recital continued. She knew he was thinking about that church in the woods, and the men and women they had encountered on their journey: crucified to utility poles, their bodies horribly mutilated, but still alive, still suffering.
Thinking of those poor condemned souls spoiled all enjoyment of the hymns for her as well. Did they hold trial here, she wondered. Drag the lawbreakers before the church elders like Christ before the Pharisees, to be questioned, tried and condemned for their crimes? Is this where they mutilated their bodies, cut off their jaws so they couldn’t feed? Did they march them through the streets so the blameless could cast their stones? Did they make a holiday of it, like a Wild West hanging?
Overwhelmed with horror, Soma reached for Perry’s hand. He grasped her proffered hand and squeezed it tightly in his.
The choir departed, robes swishing as they filed offstage. Sarge followed them out. For a moment, the stage was empty, and then a figure in a vermillion robe strode out.
The new arrival was tall and thin, almost to the point of being skeletal. Soma could see little of his features as the robe was ankle-length and hooded and he walked with his hands clasped so that the sleeves met in one unbroken tube of shimmering cloth. Until he threw back the hood of his robe, all she could see of the man was his chin and the tip of his nose. The robe was a rich, bloody red, with no adornments apart from a knotted length of rope for a belt.
The silence in the auditorium was electric, expectant, like a lustful lover anticipating the first touch of a new partner.
The hooded figure -- she assumed it was Baphomet -- approached the altar. Head still down, he reached out and adjusted the microphone. He had large hands, she saw, pale as the belly of a fish, and thickly knuckled.
“In the days of Noah,” he intoned, his voice a sensual baritone, “when the stench of mankind’s iniquities rose up even unto the heavens, God poured out his wrath on mankind, destroying all living things but what be preserved aboard the ark: two of every animal that crept upon the land, both male and female, and a small human family, the wife and sons of Noah, and their spouses. All else the Lord God destroyed in a cataclysmic flood, which we have come to call the Inundation. But why? Why would God do this?”
Without raising his head, he answered his own question:
“God did this because He saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man, and His sorrow grieved Him to the heart. And so the Lord said, ‘I will destroy man, whom I created from the dust of the earth; both man and beast, and all creeping things, and the fowls of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’”
The hooded figure shifted. He reached beneath the hood as if to wipe his nose. He lowered his hand. Soma saw just the slightest hint of his lips beneath the rim of his hood. He had a broad mouth with full, fleshy lips. Faint, somewhat bitter smile.
“As it was in the days before the Flood, so was it in the days before the Phage. Iniquity, so great that God was ashamed that He had created us. He did not hate us. He did not wish that we be destroyed. He was simply ashamed.
“In the time of Noah, mankind’s chief sin was the sin of uncleanliness, and so God sent a flood to wash that sin away, to cleanse the world of our iniquities. In the days before the Phage, mankind’s chief sin was vanity. We worshiped the flesh. We worshiped ourselves. We made of human beauty a god and bowed down to it daily in our fashion magazines and television screens, our movies and duck-faced selfies, our obsession with fitness, our sexuality. We had become a race of mirror gazers and primping peacocks, fitness fanatics and celebrity stalkers.”
He chuckled softly, a man looking back on past mistakes with sad amusement.
“Even I, in my own way, was guilty of this sin. Worse than most, it could be argued, though not in the typical manner. I was a nonconformist, an anarchist, but I was just as guilty of our collective failing. In fact, I strove to make a virtue of my vice, to make of my treasured flesh a testimonial of my vanity, to become, in my fanatical self-love, a living, breathing idol. I knew I was ugly inside, and so I sought to aggrandize that ugliness, to engrave it in my flesh, to make myself a paragon of man’s self-obsession.”
As he spoke, he unknotted the rope that belted his robe, let it fall to the floor. He pushed back the hood, revealing a lumpy, heavily tattooed bald head with ugly, coarse features. His bulging eyes rolled up and he met the gaze of each person gaping at him from the first row. Soma stared as if hypnotized, and when his eyes moved to her, met her eyes for the first time, she felt a cold shiver work its way up from her belly, like a mild electric shock.
Horns, she thought. He has horns.
They were not real horns, she knew, but some sort of implants just beneath the skin of his brow, up where his hairline would have been if he had had hair. Working in the ER of a large hospital, she had seen it all, from household items lodged in colons to the most bizarre physical alterations imaginable. But nothing she had seen before held a candle to the fantastic creature staring at her from the pulpit of this massive church of the dead.
All but his facial features were completely covered in tattoos. His entire skull was decorated with twisted occult figures, depictions of human depravities and supernatural creatures. On the left side of his skull was a green and red dragon breathing fire. On the right side of his skull was an angel with a sword. Imps and cherubs were engaged in sexual congress between the two mythological figures, from the center of his forehead back. There were silver hoops in his ears, piercings in his nose and eyebrows. When he blinked his bulging eyes, she saw the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on his eyelids.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,” he said, with just the faintest moue of self-disgust. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
He stepped from behind the altar then and cast away the robe. He averted his face as he did so, and stood with arms outstretched so that all could see him, a skeletal figure with a sunken chest and jutting hips and long, narrow limbs. He wore only a crude sort of loincloth beneath the robe, and looked quite Christ-like but for the fact that his entire body was illustrated, like the character from the Ray Bradbury story. Every inch of him was decorated -- arms, legs, torso -- with skulls and demons, snakes and spiders, naked women, naked men, and stylized depictions of every sin imaginable… and some she had never imagined!
He turned once, slowly, so that every eye could drink in the totality of him. The majority of the space on his backside was taken up by a huge depiction of a cloven-footed devil, forked tongue curling lasciviously from its grinning mouth, forked cock jutting lustily from between its wooly thighs. Embedded in his flesh, running down his body from shoulders to knees, were large metal hoops, the kind used by masochists and spiritual explorers to suspend themselves from chains.
He returned to the altar and took the microphone from its stand.
&n
bsp; “That was my stage name before the Phage,” he said. “Ozymandias, the Illustrated Man. I was a sideshow performer employed by Bailey and Sons Circus, just a small-minded man working in a small time freak show. A latter day nomad, I crisscrossed the country indulging in every vice and criminal activity you can imagine. Ill-tempered, selfish, unloved, unable to love, I was a monster -- in spirit as well as the flesh. There wasn’t a sin I did not commit, not even murder.”
He nodded at the small gasp that arose from the front row.
“Yes, I was a murderer,” he said. He grinned, held up one finger. “Just once. Just a little one. That is what I told myself anyway, when the nights were long and guilt gnawed at my guts like a rat. I didn’t mean to do it. And the fellow deserved it. He was a mark, a customer, a fellow who had come to see the show in a little town in Kansas. But I murdered him all the same. Beat him to death when I caught him raping one of the women who worked in the sideshow with me. He had caught her behind the tents, back where all our trailers were parked. It was shortly after dark, during the evening performance, and he was drunk. Drunk and angry, though I do not know what had angered him. I saw what he was doing and hit him in the head with a tent peg, one of the big metal stakes we used to tie the tents down. There were some spares lying in the grass nearby when I came across the crime, and I picked one of them up and I hit him on the back of the head with it. As soon as I heard his skull crunch, I knew I had hit him too hard. So I finished him off and we hid the body in my trailer until the show was over. After the circus had closed for the night, two other carnies, the closest things to friends I ever knew, helped me to haul away the body. We hid it in a drainage culvert not far from the grounds. I don’t know how long his body lay rotting in that sewer before someone found him, but I know we were a long way from Kansas when or if he was ever found. I was never questioned by the police, never arrested, never knew if they’d even found the body, but I paid for that sin. Oh, yes, I paid for it. God’s judgment might be slow, might even show up late on occasion, but He always keeps His appointments, even if it’s closing time.”
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 22