The Left Hand of God

by Paul Hoffman

  Cale felt as if spiders were crawling along the skin of his back. And then he heard a groan. The light no longer held in by the Lord of Discipline, he could now see what was on the other table. It was another girl, tied and gagged, trying to call out. And he knew her. She was the more striking of the two girls who had been dressed in white and laughing with delight at the center of the celebrations the day before.

  The Lord of Discipline stopped humming, stood up straight and looked over at the girl.

  “Be quiet, you,” he said, almost gently.

  Then he bent back down, started singing again and continued searching.

  Cale had seen many dreadful things in his short life, terrible acts of cruelty, and had endured suffering almost beyond description. But for that moment he was stunned by what he was seeing and could not make sense of the dissected girl, her hand moving now less and less. And then, very slowly, Cale moved back out of the room, into the corridor and began to walk away as silently as he had come.

  5

  Ah!” said Redeemer Picarbo, the Lord of Discipline, to himself with deep satisfaction as he found what he was looking for, a long, thin skewer with a sharp pincer on the end. “Praise God.” He tested it. Snap! Snap!

  Satisfied, he turned back to the girl on the table and peered thoughtfully into the terrible but beautifully made wound. He reached down and, taking gentle hold of her hand, now lifeless, he placed it at her side. Then he took the skewer in his right hand and was about to continue when the girl in the corner started to try to scream again. This time he spoke more firmly, as if he had run out of patience.

  “I told you to be quiet.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll get to you in good time.”

  Whether he heard something or whether it was just the instinct born of long experience, the Lord of Discipline turned and raised his arm to block the blow aimed at the back of his head by Cale. The Redeemer caught Cale just below the wrist, a blow of such force that the half brick in his hand shot across the room and hit one of the cupboards with a crash, shattering into a dozen pieces. Cale was off balance, and the Lord of Discipline shoved him violently to the left, sending him flying into the base of the table where the bound girl was lying. She let out another muffled scream.

  The Lord stared at Cale in utter astonishment. It was just not possible that an acolyte could attack him, not here, not in this place, not at any time at all. In a thousand years no such thing had ever been heard of. For a moment they stared at each other.

  “Are you mad? What are you doing here?” demanded the Lord in a furious rage. “You will be hung for this . . . hung and quartered. You will be strangled and disemboweled while you are still alive and have your guts burned in front of you. And . . .”

  He stopped after the fast torrent of words, again overtaken by astonishment that he had been attacked. Cale was white with shock. The Lord of Discipline turned to one side and picked up what looked like, and indeed was, a butcher’s knife.

  “I’ll do it now, you little shit bag.” He moved toward the prone boy and raised the knife, standing over him, legs apart. And then Cale struck out with the skewer that had fallen beside him in the struggle, taking the Lord of Discipline on the inside of his thigh.

  The Lord staggered back, not because he was hurt, but out of an even deeper astonishment than he thought it possible to feel.

  “You struck me!” he said. Astonishment. Incredulity. Wonder. “You struck me.” He looked down at the boy. “By God, you’ll die slowly. By all that’s—” The Lord stopped, quite suddenly, mid-flow. A puzzled expression came over his face, as if he had been asked a difficult question. He cocked his head to one side as if listening for something.

  He sat down, slowly, as if pushed by a giant but benevolent hand. He looked at Cale as the boy moved back, shifting away from him. Then the Lord looked down at his legs. A large pool of blood was staining the skirt of his cassock. Cale suddenly seemed not to be either a frightened boy or an enraged murderer. An odd calm had fallen on him, and now he looked more like a curious child watching something of considerable but not overbearing interest. Redeemer Picarbo continued pulling at his cassock, bewildered, now revealing his undertrousers massively stained with red. He drew his hand back as if affronted, looked at Cale as if to say, “Do you see what you’ve done?” then reached down and tore the undertrousers away from the wound to expose the skin of his thigh. Blood was pumping out of the small wound in spurt after spurt. He stared down at it, utterly perplexed, then looked at Cale with the same expression. “Bring me a towel,” he said, gesturing over to a pile of large swabs on the table near the dead girl. Cale responded by standing up but stayed where he was. It was as if only part of what he was seeing was real. The Redeemer in front of him trying to stem the bleeding with his fingers and sighing in irritation as if he had sprung a small but deeply inconvenient leak—the black stain of blood spreading relentlessly across the floor. The sight and what it meant for him were impossible to take in. The part of him not able to grasp what he had done was thinking that it would be possible to go back and things would be like they were less than a minute before, and that the longer he waited to change things back the harder it would be. But he also knew there was nothing to be done. Everything was changed, utterly changed, horribly changed. A line he had heard a hundred times from the Redeemers’ Book of Proverbs came back to him and kept repeating itself over and over in his head: “We are like water spilled on the ground that cannot be gathered up again.” And so he kept on looking, paralyzed, as Picarbo leaned back as if terribly tired, resting first on his elbow and then on his back.

  Cale continued watching as the breath of the lord’s body stopped and the light in his eyes failed. Redeemer Picarbo, the fiftieth Lord of Discipline of that name, was dead.

  6

  Kleist woke up with the sensation of being smothered and held down. This was for a simple reason: Cale had his hand over his mouth and Vague Henri had his hands pinned to his side.

  “Shhhh! It’s Cale and Henri.” Cale waited until Kleist stopped struggling and then took away his hand. Henri let his grip relax. “You have to come with us now. If you stay, you’re dead. Are you coming?”

  Kleist sat up and looked at Vague Henri in the moon-illuminated dark.

  “Is this true?”

  Henri nodded. Kleist sighed and stood up.

  “Where’s Spider?” asked Kleist, looking around for the sleepshed Redeemer.

  “He’s gone for a smoke. We have to go.”

  Cale turned and the others followed. Cale stopped and bent low over the bed of a boy who was pretending to be asleep. “You say anything to Spider, Savio, and I’ll disembowel you, you little shit, all right?” The not-sleeping boy nodded without opening his eyes and Cale moved on.

  Outside the door, which Spider had left unlocked with his usual carelessness, Cale led them into the ambo and, keeping to the wall side, made toward the large statue of the Hanged Redeemer and the entrance that they had uncovered the day before.

  “What’s going on?” asked Kleist.

  “Be quiet.”

  Cale pushed open the door and ushered the other two inside. Then he lit a candle, much brighter than anything they had ever seen before.

  “How did you get the door open?” said Kleist.

  “A crowbar.”

  “Where did you get that candle?”

  “The same place I got the crowbar.”

  Kleist turned to Vague Henri.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Vague Henri shook his head. Cale moved over to the far left of the tunnel and raised the candle.

  “God!” said Kleist as he looked at the terrified figure crouching on the floor.

  “It’s all right,” said Cale as he leaned down toward the girl. “They’re here to help,” he added, without much conviction.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” said Kleist, “or we’re going head-to-head here and now.”

  Cale looked at him and smiled, if a little grimly.

&nb
sp; “Listen . . . ,” he said, and blew out the flame. Twenty minutes later he had finished his story and relit the candle.

  The two boys stared at him and the girl in turn, appalled at what they had heard and yet fascinated by the girl. It took a moment for Kleist to come to himself.

  “You killed him, Cale—why drag us into this?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Once they realize it was me, they’ll torture Henri because they know we’re friends. Then they’ll connect Henri to you. This way you have a chance.”

  “But I had nothing to do with this.”

  “What difference will that make? You’ve been seen talking to me at least twice over the last few days. They’ll kill you to make a point and to be on the safe side.”

  “Does this mean you have a plan?” said Henri, afraid but trying to calm himself down.

  “Yes,” said Cale. “It’ll probably fail. But we have a chance.” He blew out the candle and told them what he’d come up with.

  “You’re right,” said Kleist when he’d finished. “It probably will fail.”

  “If you’ve got anything better . . . ?” Cale left the sentence unfinished. He lit the candle again and took it close to the girl, who was staring into the distance, shaking and holding herself in her arms.

  “What’s your name?” said Cale. She didn’t seem to hear him at first, then her eyes turned to look into his face. But she said nothing.

  “Poor thing,” said Vague Henri.

  “What’s she to you to make you sorry for her?” said Kleist bitterly, torn between his own fear and the strange creature huddled in the corner. “It’s yourself you should be worrying about.”

  Cale stood up, handed the candle to Vague Henri and moved to the door.

  “Now,” he said.

  Henri blew it out. There was the sound of the door opening and closing and Vague Henri, Kleist and the girl were left in utter darkness.

  The shock of the events of that night were beginning to wear off as Cale made his way through the Sanctuary for the third time. He was, of course, keeping to the shadows, but he was calmer now. He was beginning to realize that the habits of his lifetime—the awareness that you were always being watched, that there were always eyes prepared to note and report on every movement—no longer applied. The Redeemers had made an assumption, and for good reason, that their skill in watching the acolytes along with the viciousness of their response to disobedience in thought or word would keep order among them. They had made an assumption that at night, with the acolytes locked in their dorms, exhausted and rightly fearing the consequences of trying to get out, they could relax their deranged vigilance. On this third trip through the Sanctuary at night, in a few hours Cale had seen only one Redeemer in the distance.

  A strange exhilaration spread through Cale. The people he hated and who seemed so invulnerable and powerful were not. He had outwitted Bosco, killed the Lord of Discipline, and now he was moving easily about the Sanctuary. A warning sounded deep in his heart not to become cocky—“Be watchful, or else you’ll swing for this.”

  Still, however much he thought about it, however much it smacked of recklessness, it made sense to return to the Lord of Discipline’s rooms. He had taken a few things before he’d left with the girl, but if the four of them were to have any chance outside, they would need . . . In fact he didn’t know what they would need, but there was a chance to find many things to help in the dead man’s rooms, and it would be foolish not to take the chance. Given luck, there would be another four hours before the dead Redeemer was found.

  Ten minutes later he was standing over Picarbo’s dead body again. He paused for a moment and then began to search. It was an odd experience because there was so much. Acolytes were not permitted to own anything. Even Redeemers were supposed to own only seven things, though why not eight or six nobody knew. Picarbo’s rooms were filled with stuff. Cale did not know what many of the things were, and he would have liked to spend time just rolling them over in his hands and speculating about their purpose—how peculiar and pleasant to the touch a shaving brush made of badger hair, and how wonderful the smell and slippery feel of a bar of soap. But death soon damped down his curiosity, and he began to pick and choose what would go into the rucksack he had found: knives, a telescope—a fabulous thing he had seen being used by Bosco from the battlements—a sharpening tool for Picarbo’s medical instruments, a linen bag, some herbs he had seen used for the treatment of wounds, fine-bore needles, thread, a ball of string. He searched the cupboards, but most of them contained tray upon tray of preserved specimens of bits of women’s bodies. Cale did not, of course, recognize most of them. Not that he felt any need to justify killing Picarbo, a man he’d seen beat many children in formal punishments and even kill one. But the carefully dried body parts made him feel both disgust as well as dread.

  Then he tried one of the doors leading off the room, avoiding looking as he did so at the poor creature on the dissection table.

  He opened it, and at once a strong smell of stale priest afflicted his nostrils. He had noticed before whenever he was in the midst of more than two Redeemers in a confined space that they smelled odd. But this room seemed to be stained in its very walls with the odor—something rotten, as if everything inside them, the very living spirit, was in the process of becoming rank. On his way out, Cale did not want to look at the body of the girl, but something drew him toward it. He looked only for a moment at the careful and meticulous mutilation of the beautiful young woman. He felt an unaccustomed surge of pity that something so soft and delicate should be laid to waste in such a way. Then his eye caught the small, hard object in the metal dish that the Lord of Discipline had removed from the girl’s stomach just before Cale left the first time. It was not bone or anything that looked very gruesome—it was the shape and texture of a small pebble washed smooth by long exposure to a fast-flowing stream. It was milkily transparent, and a golden brown color. Wary, Cale touched it with his forefinger. Then he picked it up and looked at it. Then he sniffed. The smell almost overpowered him, as if every cell in his brain was taken over by its strange but wonderful perfume. He stood for a moment, dazed and ready to faint. But he had to move on. He took a deep breath and continued searching, taking a few more things he thought could be useful and a few things he just liked the look of; then he was out the door and off to his hiding place.

  7

  For nearly two years Cale had been planning his escape. This was not a plan that he ever intended to use if it could be avoided, because the chance of success was so very poor. The Redeemers moved heaven and earth to recapture runaways, for whom the punishment was to be hung, drawn and quartered. No one, as far as Cale knew, had ever succeeded in evading the Dogs of Paradise, and his long-term plan to escape the Redeemers involved patience, waiting until he was twenty and sent to the frontier and taking his chance as it came. Still, he thought to himself, well done for preparing for this. He tried, as he crept along the ambo, not to think of the chances of success. Nevertheless he could not stop the resentment at what it had cost to intervene. Saving the girl was pointless. All he had achieved was his own almost certain death, as well as, though less important, the deaths of Vague Henri and Kleist. Stupid! He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. But she had looked so happy the night before, her smile so . . . what? It was hard to describe what he felt about happiness, watching someone actually being happy. That was what had come back to him as he tried to leave and stood in the dark corridor, trembling at what he had seen in the Lord of Discipline’s room and the horror of the disgusting cruelty. It had made him livid with anger and he was used to that, but this time, for the first time in his life, he had given way to it. But you didn’t do any good, he thought to himself. No good at all.

  But now he had arrived. He was in a small niche off the main ambo that had a gap at one end, not an entrance but just where one part of an internal wall did not quite meet with the main Sanctuary external battlements. He slid sideways into it, breathing in
and struggling to push himself inside. In a few months he would be too big to squeeze through. But he reached out and grasped a handhold he had dug out of the wall when he was smaller, and just about managed to pull himself inside. It was too dark to see, but the space was tiny and the hiding place familiar to his touch. He squatted down and pulled out one loose brick and then the one next to it, then shifted the two half bricks resting on top.

  Then he reached inside and pulled out a long rope braided with painstaking care, at the end of which was a bent iron hook. Then he stood up straight and squeezed back between the walls.

  Back in the niche he listened for a moment. Nothing. He reached up and felt around the rough surface of the main wall and jammed the hook into a small crevice he had made months before, just after he had finished making the rope. He had made the rope not of jute or sisal but from the hair of the acolytes and Redeemers he had collected from the washrooms over the years during his time as cleaner—a disgusting task, sure enough, and one that had made him gag many times, but one he had steeled himself to as a possible chance for life. He tugged on the rope to make sure it was fixed. Then he pulled himself up and jammed himself between the two walls of the niche, back against one wall, feet against the other. He loosened the hook, reached up with it again for another crevice and repeated the move again and again. Over the next hour, moving no more than two feet at a time and often less, he hooked and jammed his way to the top of the Sanctuary battlements.