Reprobation

by Catherine Fearns

  Stuart Killy stopped screaming when she moved away from his foot, but his head was moving from side to side in weak desperation, and muffled murmurs of pain were emanating from beneath his oxygen mask. The beep of the monitor was gradually decreasing in speed. Clancy leaned towards Mary. ‘We’re losing him. I think we’ll lose him some time tonight actually. But the virus has taken.’ He emanated the calm seriousness of an emergency room doctor.

  ‘Excellent. You’ll be off where you belong then, won’t you dear,’ she said to Killy.

  Then Mary and Clancy stood silent and still for a few moments at his bedside, and Helen realised that they were praying. She tried to manoeuvre herself closer to them.

  ‘Mary. Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. Have you been working with Andrew Shepherd?’

  Mary looked at her with theatrical disbelief. ‘Goodness me no, quite the opposite! We’re simply trying to reverse what he did. Can you imagine – to introduce the deigned reprobate to heaven? A veritable demon in heaven? You can’t imagine, can you? It’s too horrible.’

  Helen tried to elucidate what that might mean – for a member of the reprobate to be accidentally introduced to heaven, to overturn God’s natural order of things. Even the Bible didn’t say anything about that. Lucifer was cast from heaven, of course, a fallen angel, but nowhere did the scriptures mention the possibility of him coming back.

  ‘Mary, what have you done?’ said Helen.

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that, Helen. You’ve not exactly been an angel yourself recently, have you? And we all know that Shepherd is the so-called bad guy here. There’s no greater crime is there, than to deviate from God’s plan. How could we let that happen?’

  ‘The only mistake we made,’ said Clancy, who had now left Killy to suffer alone and was removing his surgical gloves and approaching Helen, ‘was overestimating Andrew’s faith. We thought he’d accepted his fate of reprobation. And I suppose we did rather underestimate his ability as a geneticist. By the time he came to see me last year, he’d only gone and made it work. When we got hold of his first subject, Jason – and frankly going into that homosexual club to find him was like going to hell in itself – we tested him here and couldn’t quite believe it.’

  Mary and Clancy began talking amongst themselves. Mary said, ‘It’s just as well these retroviruses don’t last long. By the time Shepherd comes out of that coma he’ll be back amongst the reprobate for certain. I mean, what on earth was his plan? To vaccinate the whole world? Ridiculous man. To say that the consequences would be untold.’

  ‘Something of an understatement, my dear.’

  ‘They are going to find you, the police, and you are going to prison,’ Helen said.

  Mary smiled pityingly. ‘We shall be judged by the eternal judge, and I already know what the result will be, my dear. Don’t you remember your Romans? Chapter eight verse thirty-three. “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect?” No-one!’ She said this last part with the fury of Margaret Mills. ‘God is the one who justifies, Helen, God is the one who justifies. And therefore, Matthew and I can do whatever we like.’

  ‘In any case,’ added Clancy, ‘we’re not going to prison. You are. You and that idiotic excuse for a musician. His UK tour provided us with the perfect cover. And I have plenty more hints to throw the police’s way. It’s all arranged.’

  Through the layers of confusion and panic Helen mused on the fact that there were four people in the world who knew they were of the elect. Mary and Clancy were psychopaths, Baptiste was a drug-addicted gambler, and she herself – well, she had broken all her vows, committed the sin of fornication… in fact, several of the other deadly sins.

  The baby had finished her bottle now and was squirming uncomfortably, so Helen tried inexpertly to hold her upright, which she thought might be the sensible thing to do. She looked into the baby’s face. She seemed healthy, but small, and Helen wondered how much of her short life she had spent screaming for comfort.

  ‘Mary,’ she said slowly. ‘Where did you get the baby?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s a whole other story, as I said. Fascinating, in its way. Shepherd wasn’t content messing about with the soterion. He wanted to remove the entire OS1 gene! Can you imagine? You can’t, can you? A human born with sin, to pass on to future generations? So he found this poor young girl and he managed to impregnate her with a vile, depraved version of an embryo.’

  Mary came over and wrenched the baby from Helen’s arms, and Helen yielded in order not to hurt the child. ‘But that left us with something of a theological conundrum. Because a child born without sin, I mean, medically, biologically, officially born without sin.’ She held up the baby. ‘Is this the Second Coming, or is it the devil incarnate on earth? We just didn’t know, and so we couldn’t simply kill that girl, we had to take it out. Very unpleasant, it was, wasn’t it?’ She looked at Clancy, who nodded and looked at the ground.

  ‘Mary. What are you going to do with the baby?’

  ‘That, my dear, is the question. And we are rather hoping you could help us with that, Sister Helen. What with all your training and knowledge.’ She said this with no small amount of bitter sarcasm. ‘We have been praying and praying but God in his wisdom wishes us to decide for ourselves. It is the ultimate test of our faith, I believe.’

  Helen couldn’t help but wonder about this conundrum herself, insane as it may be. What does it mean, to be born without sin? When Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, when they ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they brought sin and death into the world. And they passed it from generation to generation, so that our very nature as human beings was corrupted in such a way that life without sin was impossible. To be freed from that innate sin, what would that mean? And do I even believe this anymore?

  ***

  ‘There, that’s fucking it! Take the next exit!’

  The shepherds and kings advance, following the moon through torrential rain. The ungainly coach lumbers down country roads, tossing the revellers inside on top of each other, accompanied by much hilarity.

  ‘Dude, where the fuck are we going?’

  ‘It has to be that woman he’s into.’

  Mikko ignored them all, peering desperately into the gloom at the side of the motorway, as orange lights glistened upon raindrops that trickled down the window.

  ***

  In the cottage basement, Clancy suddenly stopped still, put a hand out to warn Mary to do the same, and a finger to his lips for silence. ‘Listen. There’s somebody upstairs. Absolute silence.’

  Helen immediately began to scream. ‘Help, help, we’re down here!’

  ‘Oh for goodness sake, Helen, do be quiet.’ Mary put down the baby roughly in the Moses basket and grabbed Helen by the mouth, stuffing a baby grow into it which she secured with a muslin cloth. Clancy picked up a ready syringe and opened the door silently, tip-toeing up the stone steps. In the living room he saw a dark figure moving uncertainly, facing the stairs to the upper floor, contemplating going up. Clancy came up behind him, overpowering him, and grabbed him from behind as he struggled. ‘Easy now.’

  ‘Where’s Helen?’ Mikko said as he fought against the thick arm around his neck.

  ‘You know, Mr Christensen, you are a real pain in the arse. And your music is bloody awful.’

  Mikko felt a sudden stabbing pain in his neck, and everything went dark.

  ***

  Clancy dragged Mikko’s body down the stairs feet first. His head and torso bumped onto the hard wooden steps multiple times, and Clancy was so rough with him that Helen dreaded to think what injuries Mikko might have. If he was still alive.

  Clancy tossed him into the corner near to Helen, saying,

  ‘Would you believe, it’s our friend, Mr. Kristensen. And it’s rather convenient that he is here, since you two are of course the main suspects. Now, we don’t have much time, because there will no doubt be others behind him.’

  Helen tried to reach Mikko to check
if he was breathing, but she couldn’t get close enough.

  Much time for what? Helen realised with mounting horror that Clancy and Mary were now busying themselves with something else. In the middle of the room, against the wall opposite the doorway, was a wooden table that had been fashioned into a sort of altar. A sacrificial altar.

  ‘Mary, what are you going to do?’ she screamed.

  ‘Well, we’re still not sure to be honest with you, dear.’ Mary was less cheerful now, and had taken on some of Clancy’s urgency. Helen realised that the room contained a lot of religious books and papers; not strewn chaotically as in Shepherd’s apartment, but in an ordered, academic fashion, with a neat bookcase. Clancy and Mary had been studying. And they clearly hadn’t found the answer. Mary’s stress was mounting now, and she jiggled the baby too roughly as she implored:

  ‘Think, Helen, think. What does this mean? We now know that Shepherd was sent from Satan. Look at what happened when he tried to commit suicide? Which, by the way, as you know, is the ultimate blasphemy. He survived! The Revelation tells us about the Beast who came from the sea. “One of the heads of the beast appeared to be fatally wounded. But the mortal wound was healed, and the whole world was astonished and followed the Beast”. And so Shepherd came out of the water alive: wounded but alive. Satan get thee hence! Lord come to my aid!’

  Mary’s eyes were wild, and Helen realised she would have to think quickly. She was going to have to play-act now; she was going to have to pretend to try and understand their project.

  ‘Mary, Professor, you’re wrong, both of you. You can’t possibly believe this genetics of original sin – it defies all logic. Predestination is precisely that – preordained – it doesn’t depend on good or bad works, that’s one of the fundamental points of our religion. And so to associate a gene with someone’s moral behaviour during their lifetime goes against our religious beliefs. It defies all logic.’

  ‘Oh Helen, whoever said religion had to be logical?’ asked Mary, looking at the baby and seeming genuinely amused.

  ‘OK then, so what if it’s the opposite of what Shepherd thought? What if the soterion mutation is the marker for hell, not heaven, and you have it all the wrong way round? What if those criminals, those maximum security prisoners who provided you with the genetic samples, what if they weren’t evil and destined for hell? What if they were the elect? What if they committed those terrible crimes because they lost their moral inhibitions? They might have been the antinomians!’

  There was a flicker in Mary’s eyes as she began to consider this, but Clancy was busy sharpening a knife, laying out a cloth, filling a cup of wine, in a bizarre travesty of a Christian ritual. ‘Hurry up, Mary, if we’re going to do this.’ But Mary was wavering now at the thought of killing a baby, and Helen had to try and seize her chance.

  ‘Mary, think about false prophets. Margaret told us to beware of false prophets; the Bible tells us there are false prophets everywhere. What if Shepherd wasn’t a false prophet? What if the false prophet is Professor Clancy?’ Helen struggled on to her knees, trying to implore Mary.

  ‘I believe that Shepherd himself is the prophet. Think of John chapter three verse five. “You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin”. Think of John chapter one verse twenty-nine: “The next day John saw Jesus coming towards him and said ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”. That’s it, Shepherd was trying to take away the sin of the world!

  Now the baby was screaming, and Mary’s jiggling became more pronounced as she wrestled with herself. She shouted again. ‘Satan get thee hence! Lord, come to my aid!’

  ‘Mary, listen. John chapter two verse two. “He Himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours alone, but also for the sins of the whole world”. That is Andrew Shepherd, Mary! What if he didn’t change himself? What if he didn’t give himself the soterion mutation? I saw his apartment, I saw the spiritual struggle he was going through, and I don’t believe he changed himself, he was prepared to make this sacrifice: his own eternal damnation in return for the sins of the whole world.

  ‘And you, Mary! You are a prophet as well! All of you, those years ago back at Cambridge. You were supposed to find OS1. Everything that comes to pass is preordained by God.’ Helen was weary now, and her head hurt, but she clung to the theatrical energy she had learnt from Margaret. ‘It was now, in these portentous times, the times of Rapture, that God chose you to find the gene for sin. What it means, the way it manifested itself, we don’t know yet, there is much to do. But you are the disciples of Shepherd, and I believe the devil is tempting you right now. Jason and Chelsea were martyrs, they will become anointed saints. And Stuart too. Everything will be OK, Mary.’

  Mary had stopped moving and held the baby more gently now, tears rolling down her face as she nodded in recognition of her own divine part in this sacred story. But Clancy was not convinced and Helen could see the baby was still in danger; they were all in danger.

  The baby’s screams had made inaudible the commotion that had been going on outside, as the Total Depravity tour bus, which had dropped Mikko at his insistence at the end of the lane, now ploughed up to the cottage gate, spewing up mud and decimating hedgerows on either side as it went. There were deep voices and shrieks of laughter as the contents of the bus spilled out, having decided to try and retrieve their leader. The freezing torrential rain had subsided now, but there were muddy potholes everywhere, invisible in the pitch black once the coach’s headlights had been turned off, and bodies fell occasionally, to the sounds of squelching following by laughter. Some tottered in high heels and miniskirts, others staggered in boots and chains, and in their inebriation they gingerly approached the dark cottage like zombies, yelling ‘Mikko,’ accompanied by various insults in Norwegian.

  But now there was another commotion. Flashing police lights, sirens. Swift and Quinn finally pulled into the lane, followed by two local police cars called in as back-up, but they found their path blocked by the Total Depravity tour bus.

  ‘What the fuck is going on? Are they all in on this?’ said Swift as they exited the car. They waded through the freezing mud and past the Scandinavian zombies in the garden, and found the cottage door open.

  Just as Clancy was about to lunge forward and take the baby from Mary, there was a clattering down the wooden stairs and Swift burst in to the basement, closely followed by Quinn. They attempted to take in the bizarre scene.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  For a brief moment, there was a silence and a stillness. Like one of the sixteenth century woodcuts that illustrated the harsh Reformation texts in Argarmeols Hall library, the ones that Helen had studied for so long, each figure in the room was frozen in their own personal, timeless battle. Everyone waited in silent anticipation while Swift ran back the Shepherd case in his mind from the beginning. Matthew Clancy, Sister Mary, Sister Helen, Mikko Kristensen, Stuart Killy, a baby, a garden full of drunk Scandinavians. And in the time it took for his heart to miss a beat, Darren saw everything. It had been there all along, what Andrew Shepherd had been trying to do, and who had wanted to stop him. He remembered what Sister Helen had told him on the beach: Sometimes belief is more important than truth. All the detective training in the world – forensics, statements, records, procedures – that would only ever get him so far. He needed to get outside his own head and into the minds of others, and he was finally in Shepherd’s head, where he should have been from the beginning.

  Quinn approached Mary cautiously, her arms outstretched. ‘Give me the baby, Sister Mary. Easy now.’ Clancy grimaced and squirmed with frustration as Quinn took the baby gently in her arms, and then he and Mary held each other’s hands and began to pray quickly. But then Clancy stopped mid-prayer and, as if having just had an idea, he began an attempt to talk himself out of it. ‘Detectives, I’m so glad you’re here. We managed to apprehend these two suspects for you.’ He motioned to Helen and Mikko in the corner, where she was s
lumped against the wall, drained, while he was still unconscious. ‘And goodness knows what might have become of this poor child if we hadn’t got here in time.’

  But Swift wasn’t listening. He was looking over to the hospital bed on the far side of the room, where the rotting stump of a leg was clearly visible.

  ‘What the fuck… Is that Stuart Killy? Jesus. Colette, call an ambulance.’

  By now two back-up officers from Lancaster police had clattered down the stairs and blocked the doorway.

  ‘Matthew Clancy, Mary Jones,’ said Darren, ‘I am arresting you both on suspicion of the murders of Jason Hardman and Chelsea McAllister, and for the kidnapping of Stuart Killy and Helen Hope, and… of this baby. And… is that?’ He looked over at the body Mikko, lying face down on the floor. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but he needs help quickly, he must have terrible internal injuries,’ said Helen, who was trying to manoeuvre herself closer to Mikko. Swift was still confused by Helen’s and Mikko’s parts in all of this, but he was starting to suspect that they had simply been one step ahead of him on the same journey the whole time. ‘So whose side is he on then?’ he asked Helen.

  ‘Ours. Ours,’ she said.

  Clancy was led away protesting, with a calm incredulity, that it was all a misunderstanding and would be resolved by morning. Mary was overcome by her spiritual agitation, and as her handcuffed body was manoeuvred towards the doorway, she twisted around: ‘Look to the child, Helen! Look to the child!’

  In a blur of sirens, radios, bodies, paramedics and police lines, Helen was eventually released from her ankle cuff, shook out her stiff leg and shuffled over to Mikko’s body. He was beginning to stir and groan.

  ‘Mikko,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Listen, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe any of it.’