“It was decided that if we could make the whole thing go away, the killings, the cult, all of it, that we’d be better off. My men and I armed ourselves to the teeth…shotguns, tear gas, assault rifles. Everything. We did it without the knowledge of local law enforcement. Didn’t know who was involved so we played it safe. Showed up one morning at dawn and gave them no quarter. Laid siege to their ‘church’ and left none alive. We opened fire on the lot of them.”
“Jesus…”
“I know how it sounds. And before you judge, let me stop you dead. I’ll never forget our convoy to the grove. My men and me sitting with queasy stomachs, wearing apprehension on our faces like beards. Were we supposed to turn a blind eye to what Abblon was doing?”
Melanie didn’t answer.
“We found missing persons.” He took a long puff of his cigar. “Many more than Forest Grove’s twelve disappearances. Bodies stacked high and spread all over that campground. Abblon had his followers fanned out across the state, abducting people for the soul purpose of hacking them to pieces. All to placate the same God you and I probably pray to. Was me who found Abblon, and with just three shots left in my magnum, I put him down and watched the son of a bitch bleed out.”
This was what Jed had tried telling her. Did that mean there were people in town who were Obviate? “Was that the end of it?” Melanie asked.
“Of course it wasn’t. We tossed the bodies in the caverns beneath the camp and burned them. The town had an idea of what happened, but it didn’t care enough to ask. They knew it was for their own good. Only we didn’t get everyone.”
“Some were off killing?”
“Hell if I know. Beefed up patrols for the next month and watched all roads to town, checking for that very thing. If any of them left before we got there, they never tried coming back. But Ron Sleighton…Brady’s predecessor…he’s the reason for your town’s bad juju.”
Lawson lapsed into a coughing fit so severe it didn’t look like he’d ever get out of it. His chest heaved, ribs cracked and his eyes went from looking like runny eggs to bloody ones. “You can’t kill the status quo. That town’s infected now.”
“What did Sleighton do?” Melanie said.
“Fell in love, got indoctrinated…whatever. Bastard smuggled a girl out of that place when he escaped…and took her as a wife.”
Melanie gasped and then cupped a palm over her mouth in embarrassment.
“None of us realized it until it was too goddamn late. We were supposed to exterminate the Obviate. For whatever reason, Sleighton saw fit to rescue a girl from that madhouse. Anyway, Sleighton’s lady already had a son…a son we thought died when we marched on Lake Forest Grove.”
Melanie felt sick. This son would go on to kill her friends nearly twenty years later. If only Lawson and his men had been more careful, her nightmare wouldn’t have happened. “Cyrus Hoyt,” she mumbled, “he was a child of the Obviate.”
“Bingo. People reported some wild kid running around in those woods in the years following our march. There were more disappearances but we never found any bodies. Didn’t know who was behind it.” Lawson looked at Melanie with almost apologetic eyes. “Until you killed him.”
“Sleighton is Brady’s father-in-law. I thought he said that Trish’s mother died when she was just a girl.”
“Not true. Zohra, I think that was her name, continued Abblon’s teachings in secret, behind closed doors. I don’t even think Ron knew about it until it was too late. After what happened in ’88, we went back to Forest Grove. My last order of business as a trooper was to apprehend that crazy bitch. She lost her mind when she saw it was her boy been killed. And she’s been locked up in an insane asylum ever since.”
THE PRIESTESS
1969
Zohra looked up at the impressive hand-carved crucifix that hung suspended over the pulsating light. She crossed herself and knelt beneath it, looking into the red glow with her heart outstretched. Its hue had changed from bright red to a crimson blaze.
Let me out, the whisper hissed. Break this barrier and free me. If you do it…the things I will show you…
Zohra was tempted to obey, as was often the urge.
“It is a test,” the Elder said each time it was discussed. “He wishes to see which of us will claim the power. Remember, God will not tempt the lost.”
Zohra agreed, but there was another explanation that was troubling. The good lord did not tempt his followers at all. She wondered if this beating glow wasn’t their version of forbidden fruit. On the occasions where she considered this, a muted whisper always laughed somewhere between her ears.
They had built a nave around the light. The Elder did not want his parishioners having unrestricted access to the ethereal voice, choosing to limit their exposure to infrequent mass inside this makeshift church.
The whisper was too influential, and the longer you were around it, the harder it was to ignore. Her mind often felt fogged and Zohra wondered if her appearance was anything like the Elder’s. His green pupils were completely colorless now, milky white, save for tiny black pinholes in the centers. She saw herself only in reflected puddles of cavernous rainwater, and never that closely.
They did not allow the whispers to permeate their brothers and sisters. The Elder and the Priestess lied to themselves daily, agreeing that it was in the church’s best interest. The reality was that Zohra worried about losing her influence, and the Elder admitted the same. They confided in one another in the afterglow of their most passionate moments. The Obviate viewed the Elder and his Priestess as conduits to the Word and that’s how it needed to stay.
Zohra might have doubted the divinity of the whispers, but she couldn’t bear to let them go, either.
Free me and you will never have to let me go. We can come to know each other intimately and forever.
If you need freeing, Zohra thought with a chill, then what put you there? What could be so wicked that it needed to be banished deep beneath the earth and forgotten?
Something…evil.
Raspy laughter ran across her brain like the trail of a wet tongue.
The nave’s thick doors creaked and the Elder’s frame stood in the darkened doorway. He only motioned for her.
Zohra walked barefoot across the nave’s rocky floor and found Jessica in the cavern beyond. She was on her knees with tears streaming down her cheeks, mixing with her bloodied face. One of their brothers spat at the girl’s feet, labeling her a deserter.
She did not much care for the sadism in his voice, but the violence done to her was more troubling. The Elder might’ve allowed indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh (at the urgings of the whisper), but they remained spiritual brothers and sisters. Violence was reserved for the Lost—those who performed wicked actions and needed to be purged.
That was the only way to prevent Him from sweeping the world away in fire and brimstone.
“Do not speak to her that way.” Zohra knelt beside her friend and sister, thinking how she’d rather sacrifice his arrogance than hear his grievance. “My dearest Jessica, please tell me why our brother has brought such accusations against you.”
The girl managed a slew of hysteric vowels. Quite incoherent.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It’s me, Jessica. It’s Zohra. Whatever’s happened we will work this out.”
“I told you.” The brother spat again. “Whore was fleeing in the middle of the night.”
“Is that true?” the Elder said, taking a place beside the accuser.
Jessica nodded through her tears. “My mother is still alive. After all this time, the cancer hasn’t taken her.”
“You do not have a mother,” Zohra growled. “You have us!” This girl had worn the Obviate face through endless sermons. How many times had she preached their word and encouraged their path to prosperity? All while harboring worry and regret over her mother? One foot in this world only. An insult.
This is an affront! She must die! The whisper was giddy.
Jessica
deserved punishment. This much was true. But taking her life for what amounted to a weak moment—a lapse in judgment—was something else. Reconditioning was preferable.
“Bring her inside,” the Elder’s voice was so cold she expected to see his breath.
They got their sister to her feet and marched her forward, their arms locked into hers. She whimpered as they walked, begging for forgiveness. Zohra tuned it out, giving her old friend a harsh push forward into the nave’s seclusion. She slammed the doors and the Elder was already tearing at the girl’s tunic, ripping it away with a savage growl.
“You are not suitable to wear this.” His voice boomed throughout the chamber, startling even Zohra.
The deserter, this girl who had once been her friend, covered herself with trembling arms—truly painful to witness. Zohra’s shoulders slumped in discouragement while she watched Jessica take backward steps away from the Elder’s slow advance, bumping into a row of crudely constructed pews.
Sometimes they tormented the Lost in this way, and it brought them genuine pleasure to do so. Rows of enthusiastic Obviate chanted them on as they stabbed their sacrifices with daggers, completing their journey toward repentance. They took all ages without discrimination, because when the work of the devil was on display, all lives were forfeit.
Afterwards, they could indulge in the pleasures of the flesh, alleviating their pent up urges. Aggression and bloodlust expunged alongside the dirtiest of bodily fluids. It would have never entered their minds if it weren’t for the whisper’s encouragement.
“Help me, Zohra.” Jessica’s screams were desperate.
“Shut up,” she snarled. A piece of her, deep down, wanted to do as she asked. But her hands were tied. “We were your family. Not the cancerous…thing…that brought you into this world. That vile woman allowed you to travel a miserable path. The Obviate cared for you when no one else would, and you spit in our faces. In His face. He finds your actions insulting and without gratitude.”
Have her first. Both of you. Defile yourselves in her blood.
The Elder wrapped his hairy arms around her naked torso and threw her into the light. She landed on her back and scurried in reverse, quickly running out of space to retreat.
“Just let me leave,” Jessica’s words wobbled. “I want to see my mother. I just want my mom!”
The Elder dropped down on top of her, belting her across the mouth while forcing her thighs apart.
Zohra glanced up at the cross and thought, is this what you want?
Oh yes, it purred back.
Jessica writhed and the Elder rained a litany of hatred down onto the poor and wretched soul.
Zohra clasped her fingers around her blade’s hilt and approached. For a split second—as long as she dared—she flashed her friend a sympathetic look.
Then she dropped to her knees and plunged the knife straight down into her eye.
The Elder leapt off the naked girl, wiping spurts of blood from his face as her body twitched on the ground.
“Our sister deserved more than that,” she said, throwing the knife to the ground in a gesture of rebellion. “Will you do the same to me if there comes a time when I am weak?”
The Elder said nothing and there was no ceremony that night. Instead, the Priestess climbed from the Hall of the Arrival and walked the long, winding corridors for what felt like the first time in months.
She pushed up from the cellar and found the prayer hall outfitted with a grisly new addition. A decaying corpse had been arranged into a crucifixion pose, dangling above the altar table while a halo of flies swarmed around it.
“Lead us in early-morning prayer, Priestess.” One of her sisters begged, dropping to her knees and reaching for Zohra as she side-stepped her.
The dining room was even more macabre. Corpses of all ages were placed around the table, bound to the arm rests and chair legs with chicken wire. A row of brothers stood along the wall, reading aloud from the bible with chaotic urgency. She didn’t know if they were absolving the Lost, or asking for forgiveness for themselves.
Either way, nothing about this place was worth defending.
The compound’s grounds were dark and quiet as she stepped outside, sucking in fresh air for what felt like the first time ever. Taking Jessica’s life had jostled the whispers from her mind, even if echoes of it remained.
“Disgusted to the point of liberation,” she mumbled and headed for the water. This place used to be alive at night. Fires burning on the beach, beautiful hymns sung for as long as the voices would hold, and long talks of enlightenment that had a tendency to spill into morning.
A beautiful sense of community worth believing in.
It was a ghost town now. Abandoned in favor of pleasures of the flesh.
What happened to me?
A question to which she already knew the answer. Everything had fallen apart once they found the light. Whispers wormed into her most private thoughts, offering words that fanned the flames of her most repressed urges—stoking them until they felt like the only option. The thing that horrified her the most was that she had never been forced to do anything—the light did not have that power.
I did it because I liked it. We all did.
When acting on those impulses, it was like watching her actions through a foggy window. This wasn’t God, but it was too late to warn anyone. They had embraced the Elder’s violence and perversity without much goading, for they heard the whispers, too—and wanted to hear more.
“You.” Someone stood on the beach where the sand met the trees. “What are you doing here?”
It never occurred to Zohra that this might’ve been a stranger. This was their compound, and those who got too close paid for their curiosity with their lives. She walked toward the familiar voice in disbelief.
The kind-eyed policeman. Officer Sleighton. He stood in the foliage with a shotgun in his arms.
“What am I doing here…you can’t be serious. You need to go before…”
“Save it,” he said. “I’ve been watching this place for a week. You lunatics don’t come out at night. Too busy screwing each other’s brains out from the sound of it.”
Zohra heard swirls of ecstasy at her back coming from one of the other cabins. Would any of them care that Jessica had been killed? Probably only because they weren’t there to witness it. She had robbed them of an execution show today.
Sacrifice, Priestess. Noble sacrifice.
Execution, she decided.
“Ain’t seen you around for a while anyway,” the policeman said.
This was her first time seeing him outside his uniform. He wore an unbuttoned slicker with the hood pulled over his head.
“You’ve been watching us?”
The officer wore a steely glare tonight. “I started thinking you must’ve wised up and took off. That’s what I hoped for, at least. Now you show up out of the blue.”
“I…was…” Her mind was hazy as she struggled to recall just how long she’d been down there. Meals had been brought to her for as long as she could remember, although it was impossible to recall the last time she’d eaten. She relieved herself in one of the far-off caves, same as everyone, and bathed daily in a natural spring.
My God, how much time has passed?
She felt weak and tired. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she swayed off-balance.
Sleighton caught her. “Jesus, you must weigh eighty pounds! Were they keeping you prisoner in there?”
There was no explaining the things she’d done. Best to let Officer Kind Eyes think what he wants.
“I watched them drag a few people in there unwillingly a few nights ago. Did your people think they were going to get away with this?”
“Doesn’t matter what we thought,” she said. “You can’t stop them.” Her eyes dropped to the gun. “Not like that.”
“I’m not going to stop them,” he said, “but they are.”
A S.W.A.T. van smashed the compound’s fence, followed by a parade of oth
er law enforcement vehicles on its bumper. They spilled onto the property without sirens or lights and bodies filed out before the transports had fully stopped.
“What have you done?”
“Your people deserve this.”
“This is all I have,” Zohra said with defeat. Personal thoughts segued to the apocalyptic visions the Elder cautioned about. “Without us, you’re dooming the world. Everyone will die in the purge!”
“I think we’ll take our chances,” he said and pulled her closer. “When you didn’t show up for lunch a few months ago, I figured that was it. Thought your leader must’ve sent you away. This is your chance for a new start. Let me help you…please.”
The offer sounded similar to the one Tullus Abblon had once made. “Guilty conscience?” she asked. “You condemn my whole family to die, see me walking around and you think…what? That saving me is a means of justifying yourself?”
“I’m not that deep,” he said, “but if they find you, they’ll kill you, too. No one gets away from this.”
Was his offer the same kind of slavery in a different skin?
A hale of gunfire erupted as some of her brothers burst from one of the bunks and fired at the raiding party. In a second, the bunkhouse filled with smoke and horrible screams quickly followed.
Sleighton eased her deeper into the foliage, out of sight. “This was never you,” he said with a trace of desperation. “Don’t let Abblon take you down with the others.”
She turned back and started to say, “My son’s in there…” but the words were whispers. She remembered what happened to Jessica when she refused to yield her old life. Cyrus wasn’t hers anymore and hadn’t been for a long while. He was the Elder’s favorite son now, and passed his days wandering the caverns and surrounding forest lost in thought.
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