The Sect

by Lane, Courtney

  I felt overjoyed in the moment, happy to be with them. It didn’t matter where we were, they were the equivalent of home to me. A place I never thought I’d see again.

  As we walked down the hall, their arms around me, keeping me close and sandwiched between them, I had almost succeeded in pushing down the awful memories of seven months. Seven months that I was stuck in that place and had no idea. I didn’t believe it when the agent had told me, based on when I said I was taken. I was so careful in counting the sunsets, but it seemed either the days ran together, or I had days unaccounted for.

  Then, I saw something that forced the dark clouds to cover a small peak of the sun. An agent casually walked by, carrying the slightly burned and tattered version of the Rebirth Doctrine. I stopped immediately, calling out to the woman.

  She looked at me surprised and confused. I grabbed the book from her, much to her chagrin as she protested, warning me not to tamper with evidence.

  Ignoring her, I ripped the plastic open. I had to put my assumptions to rest. I had to see so I could move on. As I read the last line, the only handwritten sentence on the page, the hell came flooding back to me like a maelstrom, making it all make sense.

  A man of true power, the one with boundless influence, wields it while hiding in plain sight.

  It was so far removed from the teachings in the book it would’ve been hard to miss for those who clung to the sex-centered teachings of the book. But I saw it, and I completely understood it. I dislodged myself from my parents’ grip and began to walk back down the hall.

  Clutching the book, I stomped down the corridor while screaming Nadine’s name. My parents looked after me, lost and confused, likely thinking I’d lost my mind in a place that stole what was left of my soul.

  A door creaked open and an agent questioned what was going on. It was then that I saw Nadine, seated at the table, sipping a cup of coffee. Anger fueled me as I grabbed her up to stand. Agents protested, trying to talk me down as I marched down the hall with her. The slithery snake spoke with her forked tongue, assuring everyone that we just needed a bathroom break. I shoved her into the ladies’ room, slamming and locking the door. I checked the stalls, making sure that we were alone, we were.

  “What is the problem, Keaton?” Looking annoyed with me, she threw her arms across her chest. “The way you’re acting, they are going to shove you into a mental home.”

  I threw the book at her, hitting her square on the shoulder. She winced and looked down at the floor. Upon realizing what it was, her face sank. “Where did you get that?”

  “How long did you know?” I asked, keeping my voice level. “Were you a part of it this whole time?”

  With her eyes flickering, she continued to stare at the book. “What?”

  “Don’t do that to me!” I shouted, pointing at her. “You know what I’m talking about. Noah was The Revenant and he always was.”

  Her posture sank as she turned to the sink and closed her eyes. “Are you going back on your word, Keaton? Are you going to tell the agents the truth?”

  “I don’t even know the truth!” I shrilled. “Is he going to rebuild a place like Rebirth again? If he is, I will.”

  She turned, sinking against the basin. “Keaton, you have no fucking idea, do you? God, you’re so clueless. The answer to your question is no, unfortunately, he won’t and that has everything to do with you. That fire back there had everything to do with you. You ruined everything. We had a good thing going for a while. I don’t know how or what you did to ruin it. Noah is a tough one; a pretty, tight pussy and a beautiful face is not enough for him. Why he fell for you? I don’t know.”

  I sank to the floor, knowing the truth and being told so much more it was too heavy of a weight to bear. “No. He didn’t care. He didn’t…care.”

  “What were his last words to you? Before you thought you were going to die, what were his last words?”

  I wracked my brain, but I couldn’t remember. I wanted to, but the memory eluded me.

  “You remember those words and you’ll have your answer.” Her attention darted to the door. “This is going to look suspicious. Are you done? I just want to get this over with.”

  “Who are you to him?” I questioned. “Were you his friend? The one he tried to help who was brainwashed there?”

  “Friend? No, he never had a friend he was trying to save, unless he was talking about you,” she snorted, slowly pacing the area in front of the stalls. She set her gaze to the window before checking her reflection in the mirror and releasing a sigh of displeasure. “And before you think it, we never slept together. Did Noah tell you his story? Did Reven tell you his story? I’ll tell you this, if Reven was still telling the story he always does, then there is a lot of truth to Reven’s story and a hint of truth to Noah’s. If you were smart, you’d know which parts of each story to believe. Put them together and you’ll find out the real deal behind all of it. “

  “My problem is that I think Reven told me the complete truth, because he said it was the story he never told anyone. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. Reven was telling me the story of his brother, Noah. And Noah was the revenant.” I asked sullenly as I began to realize who had shot Reven, “Why would Noah kill his brother?”

  “Reven—or Shiloh—was just a man who believed his own hype,” she chortled as she stopped walking to gaze down at me with incredulity. “He became the man Noah scripted him to be in order to make Rebirth a success. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  “Shiloh and Noah’s parents died when their prop plane crashed. Noah was eighteen; Shiloh was twenty-three. They left Noah completely out of the will. Shiloh wasted his parents’ inheritance away and drank instead of attending the meetings for their parents’ company. He was a complete and total waste of space while Noah was forced to deal with his life on the streets.

  “Noah was dishonorably discharged from the military for drug use shortly after his parents died. Shiloh wouldn’t lift a pen on a check to help Noah. After that perverted bastard tried to kill Noah—it’s lucky a doctor didn’t give up on him and revived him—Shiloh still didn’t come around. I met Noah in rehab while he was in recovery. Together, we thought up Rebirth. We both went to Shiloh about the idea, never really telling him the truth of the place and he bought into it. Shit, a narcissistic man like him being able to play God made him come in his pants.”

  Walking over to my position near the wall, she slid down and sat next to me. “I used to be a high-class escort with a tiny bit of a drug problem. I had connections and Noah was the man who got things done. Shiloh came aboard with the money and became the patsy. Things were good for a while—we were fucking superheroes—and then…the problem? Shiloh decided he was tired of acting and fucking all the girls he wanted. His head got inflated and he started making plans to screw Noah’s position over.

  “Noah…left for a while. Shiloh went to find him and he came back but wouldn’t say why. It was the same day you arrived. Shiloh just wanted Noah back to do his dirty work. He’d never admit that he needed Noah to run this place. In fact, he thought he could take over while standing on Noah’s back. What Shiloh didn’t know—what I didn’t know until the moment of the fire—is that Noah knew what Shiloh was going to do long before Shiloh did. Then, you became the factor that made Noah’s method for solving the problem very extreme.

  “He set up a plan to make Shiloh take the fall for the whole thing. The martyr has to die, so he can never tell the truth of what really happened. We’re victims”—she used air quotes around a word that couldn’t be further from the truth of what she was—“and as victims, our story will always be distorted but easily believed because we have the sympathy vote of the public.

  “Shiloh was just the voice and the look. Noah was the brains behind the whole thing. And the stab wounds…do I really have to break this all down for you?”

  “And you?” I cleared my parched throat, but only succeeded in making it worse. “Who are you in all this?”

&
nbsp; “A woman who trained Noah in how to break women. Who do you think broke the men? It sure as hell wasn’t him. Maybe”—her eyes floated up to me—“that’s what it was with you. I remember him having issues with you, and what he did—what he said he did—was nothing that I’d taught him.”

  I shuddered as I began to remember, and trembled more as I began to feel in the memory. I moved my thoughts to other things before the shame took hold. The shame of knowing an evil and cruel man could still have an effect on me as if he deserved to. “You did this…you let those sick people kill innocents for money?”

  “Innocents,” she snorted, having difficulty restraining her laughter. She shrugged it off as though she didn’t care; the worst thing of it all, she apparently really didn’t.

  If I had the right mind, I would turn on her and tell the truth, but I knew where it would lead. I remembered her expression at the table before I accosted her; she loved the attention. Her five minutes of fame in the spotlight wouldn’t be shared.

  “Keaton, what did you think everyone had in common?” She stood, straightening out the white dress I’m sure she wanted to burn at this point. “Did you think what everyone else did? That it was beauty? I told you; Noah and I were superheroes. Your housemates, the men and women in the penthouses, the throwaways? They were all criminals, Keaton. Criminals who got away with their crimes. The worst people stayed in the theater. They were pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. You name it, they were all there. The only thing that separated the ones in the basement from the ones in the penthouses was money. Those graves? They weren’t just full of housemates. They were full of members; their gravesites are unmarked. The ones who people will miss—the bigwigs whose disappearances important people will question—get cleaned and dumped within a hundred mile radius of their homes. Ever hear of a director or a politician going missing and found a while later with cause of death unknown? That was us.

  “The housemates’ crimes were different. They weren’t guilty directly, but they either paid someone to kill or indirectly caused the death of someone else. The housemates were the most affluent and the ones we took in the ransom money for. Radley killed a woman he raped when his erotic asphyxiation fantasy went wrong. He had a bad habit of doing that a lot.

  “Jayme?” she asked rhetorically, raising both brows. “The woman you went back to save? She hired a man to kill her lover’s wife. The list goes on, Keaton. The only ones who were innocent were the ones who stayed in the houses. Those people? They bid to kill people who wronged them or their loved ones. Sometimes they bid with money—sometimes they didn’t have anything to bid with. Noah would conduct a lottery for the ones who had nothing, but really, he just picked the ones he thought deserved justice the most. They were allowed to stay in the houses and eventually have their revenge when the time was right. You wanted to know what Rebirth really was? Now you do.

  “You should be glad the whole thing worked out this way. Had Shiloh had his way, Gregory would’ve killed you and proverbially killed Noah in the process. Then, a lot more people would’ve died because Rebirth would’ve lived on in Shiloh’s vision; the way you thought Rebirth was really run.”

  “And Mrs. Sherman? She indirectly caused the death of the man she loved?”

  Visibly shaken, her posture turned rigid. “She was different. She…kept Noah from going insane. She is repentant every day for what happened. Mrs. Sherman is a huge part of how and why Rebirth came to be. The woman is a saint who made a mistake, but she was for fucking sure planted there to help Noah. That is all I will say about her.”

  I pushed up to stand, resting my back against the wall because my legs barely had the energy to hold myself up. “Why was I at the house?”

  “You tell me, Keaton.”

  The cognition hit me hard, pinning my breath in my chest. Releasing a sob, I nodded. “Because Phoebe and Reese would still be here if it weren’t for me.” Sweeping my tears from my cheeks, I pushed down the emotions. I was done with the whole thing and just wanted to go on with my life. “I will never see you or him, again, correct?” I asked, staring at my hands as they trembled in front of my lap.

  She lifted my chin, giving me a smile. “Keaton, you weren’t there because you were a criminal. Sure, Gregory was a member and we were all set to kill him, or recruit you to do it. Something changed Noah’s mind. I’m not sure if it was while he was researching you or when he met you. Whatever happened, he decided to make you a housemate instead of something else. I think it was because you were living on the street like he once was.” She dropped her hand from my face and began methodically pacing the bathroom again. “You were never going to die, Keaton.”

  The pressure that I held in my chest began to relent. I shouldn’t have felt better about knowing, because it meant that all along Noah had been manipulating my actions and reactions for a very specific goal.

  She leaned against one of the closed stall doors with an “out of order” sign affixed to it. “I’m just speculating here. Noah’s reasons are his own, but I think he really did want to help you—or maybe he just wanted to keep you near and protect you. Unfortunately, he couldn’t have his brother knowing that you were special to him. You see what happened every time Shiloh thought Noah cared about you, didn’t you?”

  The corners of her mouth turned down to almost scowl at me. “As far as us seeing each other again? Unless you seek me out, you won’t see my face in person again. You’ll never see Noah unless he wants to see you. I don’t think that will happen. Things didn’t exactly go as he had planned with you at Rebirth. I think he feels guilty over the things Shiloh did to you—the things Shiloh manipulated into happening, forcing Noah to react. Anyway, nope, you won’t see my pretty face again. Pinky fucking swear, princess,” she said with a wink.

  The private plane ride took approximately five hours from Grand Forks to Dulles International. The route to my parents’ home looked different somehow. New. Shinier. I felt the same sensation when I entered the house. My mother had obviously cleaned to an OCD extreme. I knew her signature in the way she cleaned anywhere. I wondered if she fired the housekeeper and decided to tend to the house on her own.

  I sauntered up the stairs to my room. The white walls and white linen didn’t call to me. It didn’t feel like my room anymore. I felt like a foreigner in an unfriendly land.

  My parents stood in the doorway, their eyes glossed over while wearing sullen smiles on their faces. They were waiting for me talk about it, but I could never talk about it with them. I hadn’t the slightest idea how I’d retell my story when the time came. I knew the news reporters were all over the police station. I heard some of the things they said; Thirty-eight people lost their lives in the theater. From the descriptions, I knew what happened. The members treated it as a free for all, massacring the “throwaways.” They left no one alive. I wasn’t sure if it was fear that they were locked in a theater during a fire, or if their dirty desires and the knowledge that they were going to die in a horrible manner pulled them to do so.

  What they excluded for reasons unknown, were the deaths of the people in the Rebirth House. Adam was mentioned as hurt and hospitalized for smoke inhalation, but it was said that he would recover. I wondered if he was allowed to survive because his crime was minor, or he truly believed the purpose of Rebirth and atoned for his sins.

  The fate of the rest remained a well-guarded secret.

  I clung to the white fluffy teddy bear I had owned since I was a child. My mother gave it to me when I was nine years old and told me it was a special bear that warded away bad dreams. Believing her, I had slept with it every night, and for almost ten years, I never had another nightmare. I sat on the edge, gazing back at my parents. “Did you give them a ransom?”

  “We don’t have to discuss that,” my father said as he and my mother stepped across the threshold and sat on either side of me. They shared a common look between them; it was as though I was a porcelain doll on the verge of breaking.

  �
�Please tell me,” I pleaded, my voice shaking with emotion. “I need to know. I won’t be able to sleep tonight unless I know.”

  My mother reached across my lap and grabbed my hand, kissing it and holding it as though she would never release it. “We did. Every month for seven months, but something strange began to happen four months ago—”

  “We don’t have to discuss this,” my father interjected, readjusting in his position.

  “Dad”—I closed my eyes for a moment and exhaled—“please let her finish.”

  He conceded, appearing mildly disappointed.

  “We were told to wire the money to an untraceable account at the same time every month,” my mother explained. “We were told if we continued to do this, you would be taken care of and eventually released. Four months ago, the money began to come back to us—every cent of it. We kept sending the money, thinking it might’ve been some sort of mistake. Last week, we received a phone call from a woman calling herself Mrs. Sherman. Of course, after you were found, we told the FBI about the woman. As far as I know, they haven’t been able to track her down.

  “She gave us directives to follow; alert the authorities and tell them a cult was in the midst of a purge. She gave me a day, a time, and a set of coordinates that led to the hotel and the compound. She warned us that if we didn’t comply, we would never see you again. If I had to do again, I would’ve called sooner. All those people…”—her lip quivered as tears spilled down her cheeks—“lost their lives because of a sick, sick man. I hope he’s burning in hell at this very moment.”

  My father seemed in agony over something he didn’t want to say. It was so palpable it called my mother’s attention.

  “Arthur? Is there something wrong?” my mother asked tentatively.

  “This stays between all of us, because it was told to me by Richard in confidence.” His cheeks puffed up as he held his breath, slowly allowing it to unfurl. He set his gaze to my window, watching the moonlight dance against the chiffon curtains. “They weren’t innocent people. Not a single one of the people whose remains they found were upstanding citizens. Some of them had been on several international most wanted lists for the most grievous crimes.”