by Hart, Stella
“I’m glad you’re finally taking some time off,” my mother was saying on my phone’s loudspeaker. Then she laughed. “I never thought I’d say that about you, but here we are. You’ve been working nonstop these last few years, even more than your sister and brothers. You deserve a nice long break.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“And to think you’ve picked my home state of all places to vacation in!”
“All those times you dragged me here and harassed me to see everything must’ve rubbed off on me.”
She laughed again. “Are you gonna come visit me and your dad?”
I hesitated, drawing a mental map between where I was and where my parents had retired, slightly west of New Orleans. “I can try to get up there sometime soon, but I won’t actually be all that close. You guys are all the way over on the edge of St. Charles, so it’s about a three hour drive from where I’ll be.”
“Where exactly are you headed?”
“Just a friend’s place in Vermilion,” I lied. I didn’t want to worry her or my father by telling them about New Eden and making them think I was seriously joining a cult. I knew it was temporary, a few weeks at the maximum, but my parents would fret endlessly if they found out what I was up to. They’d worry that I’d actually been brainwashed.
“Well, have fun, and drive up here for a visit if you can,” she said. “Hope it doesn’t rain too much down there! Usually does this time of year.”
“Yeah, I know. Anyway, tell Dad I said hi.”
I cut the call and drove up to the gate of New Eden. This time the guy on duty there opened the gate as soon as he saw my face and waved me right through.
Jacob had contacted me last week to tell me that he and the Elders had decided to let me live with the commune for two months as part of a trial run. If I demonstrated a genuine conversion experience, they’d let me stay forever. Not that I wanted to.
Thad and I had been right about them spying on me in the two months I’d spent going through a ‘period of reflection’ back in the city. The guys they sent to watch me were nowhere near as smart and sneaky as they thought they were, so as soon as I spotted them, I hired a private investigator to follow them around, just so I’d always know when to expect them.
Thad and my secretary Vlada had helped me fake a staid, pious existence here in the city. Thad grudgingly accompanied me to church every week and Vlada hung around outside my apartment building every so often, pretending to be handing out pamphlets for prayer meetings run by yours truly. Really, the only men she invited were the ones sitting in the car across from my building, waiting to catch a glimpse of me.
Everything I’d done must’ve worked, because here I was, about to step into a new life at the commune.
Last week, Jacob mailed me a non-disclosure agreement that I was supposed to sign and send back to him before my arrival. Yet another way of making sure I didn’t talk about the commune. I’d signed it as per his request, but I had no intention of honoring it.
He’d also mailed me a copy of His Word, and I was supposed to have read it before I arrived. It was a very strange book. It was like someone had gone and taken the most violent, archaic parts of other religious texts and rewritten them in their own words along with the addition of chapters upon chapters of raving sexist shit. The general themes of the book seemed to be ‘keep women down’ and ‘men are the natural rulers of the world’.
Not surprising.
Jacob greeted me out the front like usual. “New car?” he asked, admiring my black Lexus.
I shook my head as I pulled out my suitcases. “The last one I had out here was a rental. This is mine. I drove all the way down here from New York.”
His brows lifted. “Now that’s dedication. Nearly a whole day of driving, not counting stopover times. You must be exhausted.”
I smiled. “Not really. I’m just so eager to be here.”
He grinned back at me. “I’m glad to hear that. Now, let me show you your room in the mansion, and then we’ll head down to the underground quarters so we can discuss all the rules and regulations there.”
“Wait, I’ll have a room up here in the mansion?”
He nodded as he led me into the house and up the sweeping staircase on the left. “The Elders and anyone else who can afford to make large donations to our church don’t have to work out here on the commune, and they also get a suite up here in the house. You’ll be assigned quarters of your own in the shelter as well. It’s just nicer to be up here sometimes, because even with air-conditioning, it can get pretty darn hot in the shelter during summer. Of course, we won’t have to worry about that for a while.”
I nodded slowly. “I didn’t realize I wouldn’t have to work.”
“Even for the younger ones, it’s only two hours a day,” he said with a nonchalant shrug. “There’s so many men and only one ranch.”
So the men mostly got to laze around while the women worked twelve hour days cooking, cleaning and caring for children. Again, not exactly surprising.
Jacob smiled at me again as he showed me around a huge bedroom with its own attached bathroom. “You can leave your things here for now,” he said, pointing to my cases. “I’ll have someone take them down to the shelter for you later, if that’s where you decide you’d rather sleep. Now, let’s begin the official New Eden tour.”
He led me out of the house and down a well-trampled grassy path behind it. It was one I recognized easily, even at night. It led toward the old white chapel where the entrance to the underground shelter lay.
I expected it to be completely dark out here, but the sky was lit with the orange glow of a fire. The acrid scent of smoke filled my nostrils as we drew closer to the church.
“Bonfire festival,” Jacob said, motioning to the right. “They’re burning the Devil right now.”
A red, orange and yellow ball of flame was roaring upwards, chewing its way through the pyramidal wooden base of an enormous wicker effigy. Thick grey plumes swept into the night sky, carried every which way by the heavy winds.
Commune members were gathered all around the burning effigy. Men drank and laughed, boys whooped and ran around, and the girls and women seemed to be engaged in various servile activities—pouring drinks, caring for the youngest children, taking food to the men.
“You have festivals?” I asked, wrinkling my forehead in surprise. I’d expect that from some sort of pagan-based cult, but not these guys.
Jacob waved a hand. “Well, we call it that for the women’s sake, but really it’s just an excuse to let the men have a big bonfire and drink.”
“Seems there’s a lot I still don’t know,” I said, cocking my head to the side. “I didn’t realize you drank here.”
He narrowed his eyes. “If you read all of His Word, you’d know it’s fine for us men to partake in alcohol. But we don’t let the girls do it.”
This man really needed to get the word ‘hypocrite’ stamped across his forehead.
“Oh, right, yes. I forgot that particular chapter,” I said, nodding agreeably. I peered at a woman taking care of a baby. I noticed she was missing a finger. “So you let the women out for this?”
“They’re fine leaving the shelter for a few hours. They never go any farther than this, though. Now, come. We have a lot to tell you.”
As we stepped toward the old chapel, I caught sight of Jolie. She was in a pale blue dress, just like last time, and she was pouring beer from a jug into a large glass held by a man. His eyes were focused right on her face, and even from here, I could tell what he was thinking. He wanted her.
Maybe he’d already had her.
Jealousy flared to life deep inside me. “Is your daughter still unmarried?” I asked Jacob. “Or is that her husband with her over there?”
Jacob followed my line of sight. “She’s just pouring him a drink. Weddings only happen in April. She’ll be married then.”
“I see.”
“That’s one of the many things we have to discuss with
you once we get inside. The wedding season. But for now… patience, my friend.”
We descended into the underground shelter. The next hour was spent touring around the place, including the room which was to become mine. The men’s section was just as lavish and expansive as I remembered—like a fucking hotel, really—and the women’s section was just as dark and dingy.
I was right about the punishment dungeons in the women’s section, too. Jacob showed them to me without going into much detail in regard to what they were for, but it was clear from the context, given their appearance and the fact that he called them the ‘Penance Rooms’. There were four of the stone-walled rooms, and they were all equipped with various corporal punishment tools. Each had a crimson-painted door with several heavy locks to keep the victim from escaping during their castigation.
“This way,” Jacob finally said, ushering me back toward the men’s section a while later. He took me into a large room with a round mahogany table. The Elders were all there.
“Mason, we’re so glad you made it,” Thibodeaux said with a broad grin. “It’s a shame you’ll have to miss the first bonfire festival, but we have a lot to go through with you, and it’ll probably take quite some time.”
My heart thumped. This was it. The moment they revealed their secrets to me.
“The majority of our traditions at New Eden will not be directly shown or taught to you tonight,” Fontenot said, gesturing for me to sit down. “You’ll simply live here and get to know those customs and practices as you go. But still, like Elder Thibodeaux said... there’s much to discuss this evening.”
“I’ve already explained the work situation to him,” Jacob said. “He understands he doesn’t have to do anything, given his donation.”
“So what can I do, then?” I asked.
“You can take full advantage of the peace and quiet we have to offer out here,” Jacob said. “Or you can work if you really want to. We encourage new members to leave their old lives behind, but that isn’t mandatory. After all, I still run all my investments out in the real world.”
“As do I,” Fontenot chimed in. “If it’s something that can bring good fortune upon our commune, we don’t mind. So if you wanted to work on your own things every so often, we wouldn’t stop you.”
What they meant was: if I could make even more money to send their way, they were totally cool with it. No shit.
“Anyway, sit back and relax, son,” Jacob said, holding up his palms. “This is the part you’ve been waiting for. You’re about to discover what we’re all about down here.”
“Great.”
He formed a pyramid with his hands on the table in front of him. “The main reason we accepted you is that during your interview, you proved to be very similar to us in mindset. We think you’ll fit in just fine, though some of our ways may come as a surprise to you. A pleasant surprise, we hope.”
I nodded. “I’m all ears.”
“During your interview, you mentioned how you thought the only way to truly fix society so that women don’t wind up straying from their natural paths is to keep them away from the influence of the outside world. But you said you thought that was impossible.”
“Yes, I did.”
He smiled widely. “Well, it took a lot of planning and great sacrifice, but we were actually able to make it happen here.”
I leaned back and pressed my lips together, waiting for Jacob to tell me what I was already sure I knew.
“Back in 1999, we found ourselves in a unique position. We’d already been working on the concept of New Eden for a while, but due to a certain event—one which you know all about—we lost the women and teenagers of the church. All we had left was men and children. While this was very distressing at first, we realized what we could achieve if we put our minds to it. We could create a society where women were finally subservient and didn’t try to act like men.”
I tilted my chin to one side. “How?”
Fontenot lifted his hands in the air. “This shelter… it’s not exactly what we initially led you to believe it was. The girls and women aren’t scared to leave because they’re traumatized from the 1999 attack on the church.”
“Then what?” I asked, feigning confusion. “What makes them stay down here?”
“Like I said, they were young when we first brought them here. The oldest ones would’ve been twelve, and the youngest were still babies or toddlers,” he replied. “Anyway, young minds are malleable. Very malleable. We took advantage of that, and we led the girls to believe that a cataclysmic event had occurred outside of New Eden. One which would stop them from leaving.”
Elder DuVernay pushed a sheaf of papers toward me. “You can read exactly what we teach the girls and women in these papers,” he said. “Please, take a few minutes to do so right now. One of your most important duties as a man is based on this.”
I frowned and flicked through the papers. They described an event called the Great Reckoning. It was just as I thought. The women here had all been raised to believe the outside world was nothing but ruins and radiation. They were told that New Eden itself had been protected by God during the ‘apocalypse’, which was designed to kill all the sinners, and that was why it all looked so normal out here despite everything that had allegedly occurred in the rest of the world.
They were also told that the ‘brave men’ of their commune occasionally went out to explore the rubble leftover from the Great Reckoning in order to find food and other survivors to trade with. In reality, the men were simply leaving the ranch to go to the fucking grocery store every so often.
These poor girls. They lived like rats down here, toiling away every day, and every single one of them was eternally grateful to the men, believing they were putting their lives at risk every time they stepped foot off the ranch.
“This is…” I shook my head. Even though I’d suspected this was happening, it was still an enormous shock to see it all laid out for me like this. “This is very impressive,” I finally said.
“Thank you, Mason.” Jacob bared his teeth in yet another creepy white grin. “Like I said, it took an immense amount of time, money, and personal sacrifice to make this happen.”
Personal sacrifice. From that comment alone, it seemed obvious he and his Elder minions had engineered the supposed terrorist attack on the church all those years ago, just to get rid of all the women and young adults who would be old and wise enough to realize the apocalypse never actually fucking happened. Of course, he and the Elders would probably never admit it out loud.
It was fucking sick.
“So the women never try to leave?” I asked, brows knitting.
Fontenot shook his head. “They’re far too fragile and frightened. We even leave the shelter entrance unlocked, just to make it easier for the rest of us to get in and out, and still, none of them have ever escaped. The farthest they’ve gone by themselves is up to the old chapel a couple of months ago, when one of the young ladies started to suspect the truth and tried to lead some sort of mini rebellion.”
“What happened to her?” I asked. This girl, whoever she was, could be a decent ally in helping me get solid proof of everything that was happening here.
He smiled thinly. “Elena was dealt with appropriately. Let’s just say she’ll never try to start any more rebellions.”
Knowing these men and their general attitude towards women, they’d probably belted the crap out of this Elena girl in one of those Penance rooms until she promised to keep her mouth shut. I’d have to find her and try to convince her to help me anyway, as scared as she might be at first.
Jacob leaned forward again. “We’ve found this is the best way to completely control women. Through isolation and abject fear, along with dependency on men. It may seem like a drastic measure to take, considering all the effort it takes to maintain the lie, but if they realized there was a whole world out there, they might be tempted to leave and abandon their true paths.”
“I totally agree,” I said,
forcing myself to keep a straight face. “Fear works.”
“But the fires of that fear must be stoked by men. We must always keep up the pretense of the Great Reckoning in order to protect the women from themselves,” he went on. “That is our number one rule for the men here. Never, ever reveal the truth to the women.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
The first fucking chance I got, I’d tell Jolie the truth. The rest of them, too.
Thibodeaux looked at a piece of paper in front of him, then glanced back up at me. “You also mentioned during your interview that you believe, and I quote, ‘Submission should be forced by any means possible. Even violence. Sometimes pain is the only real way to teach creatures as naturally simple as women’.”
My jaw twitched. “Yes, I said that.”
“We’re very glad you believe that, because we have a lot of strict rules here to keep the women from straying off the path set out for them. The punishments for breaking any of the rules are very harsh in order to keep the girls scared and submissive, as that usually deters them from acting out. Still, some girls are incorrigible and must be punished time and time again. Sometimes a reckoning is even necessary. We won’t go through it all tonight, though. You’ll learn the details of the rules and punishments for the women as we go along.”
I frowned. “I saw a woman earlier who was missing a finger. Was that due to a punishment, or did she have some sort of accident?”
Surely it was an accident and not a punishment. These guys were screwed up, but they couldn’t be that screwed up, could they?
Jacob nodded. “That was her penance. She was caught reading a magazine the men accidentally brought down to the shelter. Women are only permitted to read His Word or cookbooks.”
My guts roiled. Holy shit. They fucking chopped fingers off women for reading?
This was way more fucked up than I thought it would be.
I was starting to wonder if any of the men here were actually religious. Did they truly believe in this vengeful, misogynistic higher power of theirs, or did they only pretend to believe so they could exert complete control over the women?