Raum stared back unconcerned.
Satisfied he would get no resistance, Lucifer continued. “I speak to you—self-delusion, denial, disbelief. You decide which, but feathered fact remains—the guts of the Garden are gangrenous … and ours is angel’s task of amputation. That has always been our task. There is no good … no evil. There is only balance … and the teetering precipice of death and destruction. And oh how her Man-monkeys love those!”
A few of them shifted on their feet—they had been standing for longer than any being with wings would.
Lucifer watched them all stretch their toes and feet and lift their legs. It was good—they would need to grow accustomed to walking. “And yet,” he continued, “I cannot detach precious arm from body. Defeating her delusions on my own has proven pointless. This fact … she drives home, sending saint from her side—casting confidant into the chasm as Christ nailed to cross. This is reward she holds to heart for her most favorite.
“I was a mirror to her arrogance and denial, and I begged her to allow me to assist—rule by her side. For that dereliction of duty to the Garden … she sent me to this place, setting fire to her own doubt, killing her own conscience. All in a benevolent bid to outlast the end of her reign. Well, my friends, against the Word itself, and each of you knows my heart”—he swept his finger around the circle at them—“she has placed God above Garden in order to lament the lost love of her final eternity.” And then Lucifer, the Liar, the Day Star, and the Dark Angel of Light, Lived, hung his head in silence. “We … the angels of the army of Armageddon are the only ones who can stop it.”
After a few turned heads—sideways glances at each other—and some involuntary flapping of wings, Raum spoke, “What would you have us do?”
And Lucifer smiled down at the rocky floor in the fiery pit … beside the Lake of Fire … deep below the Dungeons of the Damned. “Only what is already in your hearts.”
— CLXXII —
“PURGATORY,” FATHER DOMINIC called it—the first thirty days at Saint Samuels Seminary Academy.
Now, thirty days might not seem like a long time to someone on vacation, or shuttling back and forth to work in their guzzler, but I would learn the painful and hard way that time … had a sneaky way of passing at different speeds. Depending on how it was spent—eating ice-cream or being beaten with a rattan cane—time was a relative certainty, let me assure you.
My “sanctuary” at seminary—what the Priest-Instructors called it—was a five-foot-by-eight-foot hard rock cell with an iron gate for a door, a one-inch cloth-covered foam mat for a bed, and a five-gallon plastic bucket for a privy. They locked us in at night, usually around ten o’clock, and they released us in the morning for the four o’clock Formation of Faith. Right after we dumped our privies into the compost piles, that is.
The entire class of us, as near as I could count each day, having no contact with them except during the silent hours of training… My best guess was that there were around one thousand boys, ranging in age from nine or ten to around fourteen or fifteen. All of us orphans and most of us looking it.
Each morning we lined up, freshly dressed in our all-black sweatsuits, in the huge brick courtyard at the center of the seminary compound. The entire group of us formed a meticulous cross of the crucifixion beneath the mist, lit up like a sports arena from huge banks of fluorescent lights surrounding the courtyard. From above, up by those lights, and as a whole, the only thing a State satellite administrator would have thought was that Jesus was missing.
We were informed that we were splinters in the huge wooden cross of burden that Saint Samuels had to bear because of us. “A splinter,” Father Dominic lectured us all on that first cold morning, “is no more than an annoyance. It punctures its host and provides nothing of value at all, until it finally has to be plucked out and thrown away along with the infected puss that it caused.” He paused and eyed everyone with the stare of a hawk searching for a careless mouse. “Only bound together by Jesus’ pain and suffering,” he continued, “were the individual splinters on the cross that he had to bear … useful in any way. And so it shall be with you.”
That was my first taste of what was to come, delivered from the huge pulpit at the head of our formation in the courtyard by none other than my “rescuer,” Father Dominic. That was right before he walked down into the ranks of our formation. And then a short few seconds later, we all heard a pretty loud SNAP! Then one of the boys a few rows over from me fell to his knees, clutching his hand and screaming in pain.
The gasps and gawking from the rest of the students were met with cracking and thwacking from the rattan canes of our Priest-Instructors. The PI’s shouted warnings at everyone to stay in formation and be silent. Day one, lesson learned—pain is your teacher, with a subtext of “silence and stillness is golden.”
Once the rattan beatings died down and the whimpering had all but ceased, Father Dominic’s lecture continued. “You are the lost children of long-forgotten homes and disappeared parents,” he said, “and as such, you are burdens on the State. So God—we of the Clergy as his messengers—will relieve our already overburdened citizenry of the heavy task of housing and caring for you.
“God will house you in his house, and God will care for you with his hand, and God will feed you with the food from his own mouth.”
After the finger break and rattan beatings, there wasn’t a soul in the house who wasn’t focused and frightened from the father’s speech. There was no sound but his voice.
“To show your appreciation to God for having spared your miserable lives,” he continued, “you will be expected to work hard, learn well, and serve the Word of God … faithfully, silently, and diligently. Your bodies will become as stone, your minds will become as steel, and your faith will be unwavering…” He paused as we all basked in the benevolence of our new God and what was expected of us in return for the expense that he would incur on our behalf. When Father Dominic continued, we found out how that bill would come due were we not to make payments against it through righteousness and faith. “…Or God will take back the life he has so generously spared.”
I don’t think there was a one of us that didn’t kneel next to our sleeping mats that night and pray to God that he spare our lives, let alone our fingers, the next day. For most of us, the next day anyway, that prayer was answered. But for the majority of students, and at least twice during our four years at seminary, a couple times more than that for a few of us “slow learner” Candidates, God ignored our pleas to save our digits from Father D’s middle finger mayhem.
Most of us made installments on our debt daily, through misery and suffering, but a few boys paid their bills off … in full … much earlier than they expected to.
Late the first night, after what seemed like the longest day of my life before I was thankfully locked in my seminary sanctuary, a voice whispered like an angel to me from between the iron bars on the door to my hard-rock cell. “Benito,” the voice said, “you awake?”
The voice was … familiar and I wondered if it was another angel, because at the time, I knew it certainly wasn’t God—the voice was a girl’s. I got up off my mat and walked to my cell door. It was the girl driver from two days before. I was surprised that she wasn’t that much shorter than I was, but I was more than surprised at how beautiful she was.
Blonde hair that curled down below her neck and blue eyes that I could see even in the low light coming in my iron-barred window to the courtyard below. The girl was an angel to me. I mean, I hadn’t seen many girls outside of church—my mother took special care to make sure of that. So any girl would have probably looked beautiful to me, but this one was … angelic.
“Quiet,” I whispered through the bars, “you’ll get me whipped.” Another punishment that was made abundantly clear on our very first day. “What do you want?”
“I … I just wanted to talk to you,” she whispered back. “See how you’re doing. You okay?”
“See how I’m doing?�
�� I said slightly louder than a whisper. “How I’m doing is I still have my fingers. I’ll be better when you leave.” Women were off limits as well. Trust me when I tell you there was a list of don’ts. Your memory crystalizes after you hear a finger break. “What—why do you care? … You’re going to get us both in trouble. ” I looked down the hallway. “You … you have to leave. How did you get here?”
I didn’t really want her to leave. I could smell her sweetness through the bars. Blackberries, I thought. It was the first pleasant sensation I’d had since I got to Saint Samuels. Much better than the fear that had permeated my thoughts since arriving.
“We won’t get into trouble,” she whispered, and then she giggled a little. “I know when the priests drink themselves to sleep. They’d never catch me even if they were awake. I … know this place.”
“Aren’t there rules for Sisters?” I asked. “I mean, you can get into…” I wondered if they beat the Sisters as they had clearly proven they had no problems beating the seminary students.
“I’ve been whipped before,” she said. “It ain’t so bad. And I’m too young for them to put me in the stocks.”
“The stocks?” I said. “Oh my God”—I looked up and down the hallway again—“what stocks?”
“They’re right up front on them crosses.”
Thankfully, I couldn’t see the front of the formation from my position in it.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Barbara,” she said, “but my momma used to call me Babette.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I come to warn you,” she said. “Day two ain’t no fun. Don’t volunteer for nothing, okay?” She turned to leave. “I’ll come back tomorrow night and see how you’re doing.”
“What? Wait,” I almost yelled at her, “do you know a way out of here?” By the end of day one, I knew I wanted to leave.
“You don’t want to leave already, do you?” she asked.
“Father Dominic broke a—”
She giggled a little. “That finger trick gets all a you idiots,” she said.
“You know about that?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Who do you think bandages you all up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I swear,” she said, raising her voice just a little, “boys are just … dumb. You’d think that after the first one… You just keep coming to the infirmary, holding your hands, whining like babies, wondering what happened. ‘My finger, my finger!’ … It’s funny.”
“Funny?” I said. “That kid didn’t do anything. Father Dominic just broke his finger for nothing.”
“Trust me,” she said, “it wasn’t for nothing. He did something—looked at one of the PI’s wrong, eyeballed someone, or just scrunched up his nose wrong. It don’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” I said. “ I don’t want to have—”
She turned to leave again.
“Don’t,” I said. But don’t what, I had no idea. “Tell me what to do. How do I not get—”
“I can’t do that,” she said. Then she giggled. “It’s against the rules.”
“Is you being down here against the rules?” I asked.
“Yes, but…”
“You help me,” I said, “and no one has to know you were here. If not…”
“I knew there was a reason,” she said. “You’re a naughty one.”
“Reason for what?”
“Never mind,” she said. “Doesn’t matter right now. Just listen. Tomorrow, no matter what,” she said, “don’t raise your hand … even if you know the answer.”
“Why not?”
“You want my help or not?” she said. She glanced over her shoulder—right, down the only way out of the hall. My cell was the last one in the dormitory’s south wing … before a huge dead-end rock wall. “Because I gotta get back.”
“Okay, okay,” I said.
“Look,” she said, “there is no answer. This early, they’re just gonna beat you, because that’s the only thing you’ll understand. And it keeps your mind off your momma. So just shut up and don’t move, okay? Otherwise, you’re gonna see me again in the morning.”
I hung my head and thought about where the last few days had landed me. When I lifted it back up, Barbara was gone. I stared down the dark tunnel of the student dormitory. The halls were silent.
After I relieved myself in my privy, I went back and laid down on my mat. I didn’t sleep another wink. I held on tight to the only thing I had managed to bring with me from my burned-down past, the little leather-bound flask my father had handed to me just before he disappeared.
I’d hidden it down my pants, believing, maybe naively, that no one would look there. Fortunately for me, no one had, and I found some missing mortar between two big rocks on the wall of my cell to hide it. Now—then—that flask was the only link to my father or my mother or anything else that made any sense at all. And no one would take it from me … ever.
Standing in formation in the courtyard the next day, the cold Northwest mist slowly soaking my uniform sweats through until I was nothing but a splinter in a cross full of pathetic drowned rats, I found out just how much Barbara knew.
My eyes flitted around the courtyard. A thousand young men trembled as the cadre of PI’s shuffled out of the west wing of the Hallway to Heaven. Their hands were clasped together, gripping the handles of their rattan canes. The canes pointed straight down and the priests’ forearms and elbows formed the symbol of our collective God—the holy cross.
And bodies tensed as all of our eyes followed those PI’s and their canes. Then the priests formed a line at the base of the big pulpit, just like the day before. They eyed our formation.
Father Dominic walked out of the hallway and slowly ascended the steps to the big pulpit. I remember his speech like it was yesterday. “Is there anyone who can tell me one of the Seven Deadly Sins?” he asked.
My entire body tried to shoot my hand straight into the air above my head—it was an easy question—because I had been nothing but rewarded by my mother for my memorization of some of the more prominent parts of her Bible. But that scared little voice in the back of my head, and Barbara’s warning the night before, held my hand down. Others were not as fortunate to have heard it.
Excited arms and hands shot up around the ranks of our formation, eagerly searching for some way to avoid a broken finger by demonstrating their knowledge of a subject that had to be the point of their entire ordeal. If this was where God had delivered them, then they would embrace his Word proudly and eagerly.
It was a mistake.
The cadre of PI’s raced into the ranks of our formation. One of them bumped into me on his way by and I almost stumbled, but regained my balance and stood stiff again. They pulled and prodded at students, herding them like cattle with cracks to the back from their rattan canes. They thwacked the ones who dared to defend themselves by putting up their arms.
Individually each one of the unlucky “volunteers” was tied to the base of the pulpit, his sweat jacket and shirt ripped from his upper body beforehand, and then he was whipped bloody.
When the PI’s finished—it had to have lasted an hour—the lucky ones stumbled back to formation, backs bleeding and wincing in pain as they put their uniform sweats back on. The unlucky ones were dragged back to their spots and given rattan cracks for good measure.
When everyone was back to statue-still, Father Dominic spoke slowly, “There are Seven deadly sins … as the Word tells us”—he raised his voice for each one—“and they are … Lust … Gluttony … Greed … Sloth … Wrath … and Envy!”
There were only a few sideways glances, as I am sure all of us were at least counting along with Dominic as he recited them, but not one student, bleeding or otherwise, offered to correct the father’s obvious attempt to bait another poor soul into speaking out loud.
“Can anyone guess what the last one is?” Dominic asked.
The court stood sil
ent. About the only sound any of us heard was the dripping downspouts on the buildings, ferrying the accumulated mist from the rooftops down to the puddle-ridden courtyard.
Dominic eyed our formation with the demeanor of a prison warden. What I thought one might look like anyway, because he certainly didn’t look like the soul-saving priest I had seen deliver so many Sunday sermons. Then he said, “Very well.” He’d gotten exactly the response he had wanted in the first place. “The seventh deadly sin, for those of you who so eagerly offered to blindly recite the words of God, is also the worst of Man’s shortcomings. Pride, gentlemen, is the worst of all sins. It is why Lucifer was cast from Heaven, it is why he languishes in the pit of the inferno. It is how men fail and how dynasties fall. And, gentlemen, should you let it … pride shall be your undoing.”
And with that, Dominic left the pulpit, re-entered the Hallway to Heaven, and then our daily training began. But the most important lesson of the day had already been taught—do not presume to know the Word of God.
The first week went by like that. Barbara snuck to my cell at night and gave me some little message of salvation that, sure enough, the very next day, would save my sorry back and backside from blisters and blood. A couple of times I felt guilty for being spared what everyone else had to endure through simple ignorance of the “rules” of the game.
I was a lucky dog. Unfortunately, the Bible may not have listed it as one of the bigger lessons, but the Colonel had an “ism” for what happened to me on the tenth day. “Every dog has his day,” I remember he called it. He said that most people thought it was a good thing, but the reality of the proverb was that it applied to both good and bad dogs.
Day ten started out like the rest of them, and I began to believe that I might just make it through my entire seminary ordeal without a broken finger or a bloody back. But I’d begun a habit of being wrong about the “bigger picture” the Colonel used to call it. I guess God saw no reason for that habit to be broken.
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 65