The Wages of Sin…Romans 6:23
The girl knelt at the foot of the cot and clasped her hands. Three weeks she’d stared at nothing but these walls; three weeks she’d been locked up here at the church, in a room without windows that usually held sacramental wine and boxes of cups and plates and coffee urns. Three weeks since her mother brought her here, pushed her out of the car with trembling hands and begged the preacher to save her daughter.
She was sixteen.
I don’t know what’s happening to me. She couldn’t believe God would punish her like this. It was only kissing, she and David were both just kissing, she hadn’t been sinful.
Kissing is sinful. But oh, David wasn’t a sinner. He was good.
She stared at her hands, encased in cheap satin gloves from last year’s spring dance. They were mint green and she remembered how much she loved the color of her dress back then. Now she hated it.
She hated her sick, poisonous body, and the poison she felt seeping into her mind and soul just seemed to follow naturally. She bowed her head over her clasped hands, but none of the words she’d so carefully learned in Sunday school classes came to her. Her throat burned from whatever the preacher had made her drink earlier, and he head felt too heavy for her to hold up.
There was a jug of water on the floor next to her cot, a thin blanket over it, and a bucket and a roll of toilet paper in the corner. The only other thing left in the room was the worn Bible she’d had since she was six, the only thing her father had let her carry out of her house when he’d forced her mother and her into the car and driven them to the church.
Three weeks, and since then she’d seen no one except Father Fallon and his son Tommy. They appeared at the door periodically, the preacher’s once-beloved face now mean and threatening, his son’s twisted with sick delight. Tommy had tried to ask her out for years, but she’d never liked him. And this year David had asked her out instead, David who wasn’t a dumb jock and who wasn’t on the football team but who everyone liked anyway. And Tommy hadn’t bothered her.
Now David was in the hospital, maybe dead, for all she knew, and all because of her. And Tommy…she pulled her shirt tighter around her body and shivered; she was starting to feel chilled. The buttons had been torn off it a while ago and she wished she had something else to wear, but they wouldn’t give her anything. They’d even taken her shoes away when she tried to kick out, to keep them from coming near her. But usually it was hot in this room; she didn’t know why she was so cold.
She raised her head with an effort. It was getting hard to hear, but she thought someone was coming. She turned her head towards the door, feeling as though she was moving in slow motion. “Have you been praying, child?”
She tried to get to her feet, feeling her legs shaking, but had to sink back down. “Yes, Father.”
“Have you repented of your sins? Have you asked God to heal you of this curse?”
They were the same words he always used. She’d tried every possible answer. None of them worked, because the curse hadn’t been lifted. “Please, I’m trying. I’m trying so hard, I swear.” She couldn’t help shrinking back a little, because she knew what would come next. He would make Tommy hold her down, and then his hand would come towards her face, and—
Only Tommy wasn’t there this time. “You get away from me. I want to go home,” she told him.
“It’s all right, Marie.” In her dazed state, it was even more strange to see his face coming towards her, looking so much like the man who’d confirmed her, who she’d thought of as being as safe and as identifiable as her own father. She wanted it to be like that again, wanted nothing more than to go back somehow to that time three weeks ago when her life hadn’t changed forever, when she wasn’t a monster. When he wasn’t, either. “I’m going to take you home.”
Hope rose in her heart. “Mama? Is she here to get me?” Then she saw the rope in his hands and she shook her head, a whimper escaping her. She’d been tied up before; the first week they’d tied her down on the cot, only letting her up to use the bathroom and pray with the pastor. She didn’t want to be tied up again. “Please, don’t—I’m not going to try to get away. I promise.”
“Shh.” His hands took her arms gently but firmly, bringing her wrists together in front of her, and she was too weak and dizzy from the drug he’d given her to resist. “Don’t be afraid.” His voice was so familiar, so soothing, and she couldn’t muster the energy to fight him. He knotted the rope around her wrists, leaving the ends dangling. “It’s all right. Just come upstairs with me and pray at the altar one more time.” He took a blanket from her cot and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Then I want to go home,” she repeated dully. His arm went around her, helping her rise to her feet, and then she was being guided toward the door, out of the room. She was so glad to leave it behind she couldn’t even worry about where he was taking her, why he’d tied her up.
“Yes, Marie. I’ll take you home.”
She didn’t fight as he brought her into the sanctuary and led her to the altar. She knelt down on the cushion he had ready for her and didn’t resist as he fastened her wrists to the railing in front of her. She’d knelt here before, taking communion, every Sunday since she could remember, and all those times blurred in her drugged memory as she heard him move to stand behind her and open the large black Bible he always used to preach from.
“Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the Throne, and to the Lamb…” The man read the words sonorously, but they came without conscious thought. Inside his head his thoughts were churning, in turmoil, even as he spoke the words of spiritual salvation. And she knew those thoughts. That was why he was here, why he was forced into what he had to do. The second woe has passed, and the third is soon to come.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega…” It was too long ago for him to remember the beginning. The holy preacher put his hand out to the congregation, but the hand that fell on the girl’s head was that of a man, a man who pursued a woman into sorceries and immoralities. He shook with temptation, and turned a page.
“…and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.” Then God’s temple in heaven was opened.
It would never be opened for him, ever again. He passed a hand over his sweating forehead and his vision blurred as he looked down on the page, looked for the familiar words that seemed foreign to him now. And another angel, a second, followed them.
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of her impure passion.”
The preacher felt a great lightening of his spirit at those words. That was it. That was the truth. He was only the instrument. It was another who had drunk of that unclean wine, one he was obliged to protect at all costs.
It was for his son. He knew it was too late for himself. He wouldn’t do this to protect himself, not even though the girl might denounce him in front of the entire congregation. She’d never be believed, the town would turn on her as a freak and a danger to them all. But his boy was given over to this thing now, and until she was gone, he would be confused and turn his heart and soul away from the right. I charge you to keep the Commandment unstained and free from reproach until…until…
He reached down and took hold of the girl’s hair, tilting her head back. She was only half-conscious, her eyes glassy, and he closed the book in his hand. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth,” he muttered, and something sparked in the unseeing brown eyes. He could see farther, too, down to her shirt that gaped open at the neck—
“Daddy?”
Fallon let go of the girl and caught his Bible to his chest. “Tommy. You have to leave.”
His son stood behind him, hands thrust in the pockets of his jacket. “I want to be here, daddy.” He took a step closer. “I want to help.”
“This is not for you to see,” the old man insisted, and he moved to block his son’s eyes from the thing he had prepared. “Go.”
Tommy Fallon stared at his father for a moment. What he feared and what he desired were warring for his heart and mind, but in the end, habit won out. It was easier to watch than to act. He dropped his eyes and turned slowly, slouching off towards the back of the church.
The preacher waited only to see the door close behind his son before he whirled, shaking now with the need to finish, now, to have done with it once and for all.
He knew it was right, and just, and necessary, but his hand still shook as he reached into his pocket. His voice, though, rolled out through the sanctuary as it had for thirty years, unceasing, resonant. World without end.
Marie heard its tone, even though she could no longer understand the words. She closed her eyes and tried to pray, but the only words she could think of were from the first childish prayer she’d ever known. Now I lay me down to sleep…
Her head dropped forward onto her bound hands, and she stopped being aware of anything at all except the far-away sound of holy words she could no longer understand.
And outside the church, in the darkness, a solitary figure moved closer to the light.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I told you...slow start. Appreciation of anticipation is a virtue.