Exit Kingdom (7 page)

May God grant you life, the robed woman says and gives the brothers an expansive smile.

You talk? Moses
says, and the woman glances quickly at Ignatius, who nods forgivingly.

She has had trouble taking to the vow, Ignatius explains. She does her best – especially around the others – but it’s possible that silence is anathema to her nature.

We are all bound to fall in some way, the woman says. Otherwise how would we know rising? My particular dereliction is the spoken word.

It’s okay,
Abraham says. We’ve seen worse derelictions, haven’t we, Mose?

Moses ignores his brother and turns to the woman.

What title was that the friar gave you?

She is a canoness, Ignatius explains before the woman has a chance to speak. She serves the church, though she has taken no vow.

The woman lowers her eyes to the ground she walks upon, as though in deference or shame. Still, Moses
knows shame, knows regret, and what he reads in the woman’s movements is something
different entirely.

Not that title, Moses says. You called her something else.

Vestal, says Ignatius.

Like in vestal virgin?

What kind of virgin’s a vestal virgin? Abraham asks.

Come this way, Ignatius says. Right up here.

They are climbing a small hill behind the mission, and near the
top they arrive at a flat area bordered by high jagged rock formations that create an unclimbable wall. At the base of the rock
wall is a grotto where the rock recedes under a half-moon overhang creating a low, shallow dell like the mouth of a troll. In the shallow cavern is something that looks like a white marble
sarcophagus – and across the mouth of the opening is a long iron gate held in place
by two marble columns on either end. Strung between the bars of the gate and along the filigreed wrought
iron at the top, there are garlands of flowers gone dead and dry long ago.

What is it? Moses asks.

It was built as a shrine to the Blessed Virgin, Ignatius explains. Look.

He points up to a cavity higher in the rockface, and inside there’s a small statue of the Virgin Mary like
the one in the mission church below.

As they approach the grotto, Moses sees two other recumbent figures behind the gate. One is another virgin statue – this one broken at the base and knocked to the ground. The other is the
body of a man, prostrate and half hidden by the marble shrine. It is only when they are at the gate, Abraham gripping the bars, that the body of the man begins to move,
slowly and with great effort
using the shrine to hoist itself first to its knees and then to its feet.

Who is that? Moses asks.

His name is Perry. Douglas Perry. He died five months ago.

What’re you keepin him penned up for? Abraham asks.

We’re not keeping him. When he got sick and knew his end was near, he came out here to die. We didn’t think it was our right to question his
final resting place.

As they watch, the dead man lumbers over to the gates and reaches his arm through to the watchers, who back away just out of his grasp. His skin is dark and leathered, burned from the sun, his
eyes milky white, his hair pebbly with blown dirt. Otherwise his body is intact – as though he will simply shrivel up and blow away as a dried husk or as the petals of the dead
flowers wound
through the gate.

Maybe he has obligated himself as the custodian of our shrine, Ignatius says. I like to think so.

What do you want to show us? Moses asks. He is made uneasy by the odd assortment of things – the broken Virgin, the raisin-headed slug, the maw-like cavern, the redheaded Vestal. He wishes
to be away from this place.

Without responding, the monk Ignatius
moves to the right end of the gate, where there is a hinged door shut with a chain and lock. He uses a key to undo the lock and slides the chain away.

Both Todd brothers ready their weapons and aim them at Douglas Perry, who begins to move slowly towards the door in the gate, clutching at each metal bar as he goes.

What’re you doin? Abraham says.

But Ignatius ignores him and turns
instead to the Vestal.

Amata, if you please, he says and gestures with an open palm for her to step into the gated grotto.

No, huh-uh, Abraham says. I ain’t here for no perverted sacrifices.

Moses rushes forwards and gets between the girl and the door in the gate. Meanwhile, Douglas Perry moves closer.

Wait, Ignatius says.

I’m gonna kill this thing, Abraham says and aims his
rifle at the slug’s head.

Please wait, Ignatius says. He won’t hurt her.

That thing ain’t your parishioner any more, friar, Moses says. It don’t discriminate between holy and un.

I promise you, he says. He won’t hurt her. Amata, please.

He turns to the redhead with a look of longing.

Then she, the Vestal, produces a look of utmost peacefulness and brilliance – like a stage
angel backlit with spotlights.

It’s all right, she says to Moses, putting her hand on the hand that holds the pistol and lowering it for him. He won’t hurt me. It’s all right. I’ll show you.

Moses does not trust her – trust isn’t what’s behind it. But the strange woman has a desire to prove herself at the mouth of death, and that’s something Moses respects.
He will come between her and
him who would make her a victim, but he is not one to come between any woman and the mode of life or of death she chooses for herself. He will not be held arbiter of
such things, and he steps aside.

What’re you doin, Mose? Abraham asks, the rifle still aimed at the slug’s head.

Let it happen, Moses says. It’s her own say-so.

So Abraham follows his brother’s lead. The Vestal Amata
steps into the grotto, and Ignatius closes the door behind her and locks it again.

And that’s when Moses Todd sees something he has never seen before in all his travels across the wide and fissured country.

The Vestal Amata steps towards the dead man Douglas Perry. She comes within two feet of him and offers herself to him, spreading her arms wide, palms up to the sky, head
lowered
in submission. The slug turns his gaze upon her, and for a moment everything stops. The two stand together, a wretched tableau, ancient beast and virgin sacrifice, devil and canoness, displayed
behind black bars strung through with dead flowers, under the stony proscenium of the grotto. There they stand, like statues in a museum diorama – or a new station of the cross: holy horror
rendered paralysed and dumb.

The slug looks at the Vestal, his eyes cloudy and curious. He seems confused by her presence, by the aggression with which she offers herself up to him. An embarrassment of riches for the
cannibal dead. But his confusion quickly transforms to something else – and something else besides hunger too. For a moment it looks like deference – Moses believes for a
second that he
sees obeisance in the way Douglas Perry’s eyes drop to the hard-packed earth at the feet of the redheaded woman. But then Moses realizes it’s not even that, not even awed respect or
fear but rather just indifference. The slug loses interest. The dead man Douglas Perry looks at the woman as he would with faint curiosity at empty clothes fluttering their sleeves on a clothesline
in the middle of an abandoned yard. A momentary distraction before the resumption of a purposeless wandering.

And so the slug drops his eyes, turns away from the Vestal and takes a few shambling steps in the opposite direction.

What in the holy hell, Abraham exclaims.

What’s the matter with him? Moses asks Ignatius. You trained him? Is that what you did?

Moses has never heard
of such a thing being done, but maybe the monk Ignatius has found a way.

Did you blind him? Moses asks of Ignatius, who stands, smiling proudly. He can’t see her? What did you do?

It isn’t him, Ignatius says finally.

What? What do you mean it ain’t him?

And then, as if illustrating the friar’s point, the slug Douglas Perry takes an interest in Moses himself, reaching at him with
clawing fingers, stretching out one arm in desperate hunger
through the bars.

It isn’t him, Ignatius says again. It’s her.

It was in a travelling sideshow that Ignatius discovered her. It was a mangy troupe of men who passed from place to place, seeking shelter and services in exchange for an
opportunity to view their menagerie of freaks. The troupe travelled in a convoy
of caged vans. They would park the vans in a row and open the back doors of each to reveal a slug or two behind
welded metal bars. These slugs were monstrously transformed – some just remnants of animated bodies, and others surgically altered as if by a mad Frankenstein. There was one creature that was
just a head, suspended in a large fishbowl and swaying back and forth from a harness made
of belts, its mouth opening and closing like a Venus flytrap waiting for something edible to fly into it.
There was a dead woman whose body was gone just below her shoulders, just a head, neck and a pair of arms to drag herself about. Another had an additional head stitched on the shoulder of a body
that had had its arms removed. The two heads gnawed at each other, chewing away the flesh of
the cheeks not in animosity so much as boredom. The arms had been removed, presumably so that the
creature couldn’t simply rip off the added head. One playful van contained a dead child, a young boy dressed in a sailor suit. His cage was filled with severed hands which he chewed like a
dog or gathered into piles or tossed about. One dead woman had multiple rotting breasts sewn all over her torso
in imitation of a nursing sow and, in the same cage, there was a man with multiple
penis lengths sewn together in a row so that he dragged around his penis like a tail, tripping over it with cartoon absurdity.

A bizarre and horrible exhibition of distorted humanity indeed – an antic and fleshy rococo delivered in metal boxes roving across the country. And she was one of them, the redhead,
shut
up in one of the vans with an emaciated slug who showed no interest at all in eating her. They had been wretched cohabitants for nine weeks before the troupe stopped at the mission and Ignatius
found there his holy woman.

It was immediately clear to me, he says, that she is an offering from God Himself. The incarnation of His grace. A breathing, walking end to our suffering.

So he attempted to barter for her, trying to convince the leader of the troupe, a man named Fletcher, to trade her for supplies, shelter, meals, blessings, even some of his congregation willing
to sacrifice themselves for the exchange of this imprisoned seraph. But Fletcher would not have it. The redhead was his prime attraction.

He was a greasy, spotted man with scabs and scars all over
his body. He chewed on his own fingers as though he were himself part slug. But even though he smelled of foulness and pestilence, and
even though he was oozing with abomination, he was among the horrid crew of the living.

She ain’t for sale, padre, Fletcher said. But you can take another glance at her on the house. Or for a sift through your medicine cabinet, I could arrange you a quick
wick-dip in her. I
know you’re a holy man and whatnot, but holy bangin holy’s gotta be a lawful act, don’t it?

So Ignatius cast them out of the mission and told them to move on. But he followed them and, three nights later, when Fletcher and his men were drunk and whoring in a compound near Yuma, he
stole the woman away and brought her back here to stay in the mission with them.

Three
days I waited, Ignatius says. Three days I followed. And when I acted, I left it to look as if she had managed to escape herself. I even had her run for a mile in the opposite direction in
case they followed her tracks, though I don’t think they are hunters by nature. I didn’t want them to trace her back here.

They’ll come back, Moses says. Sooner or later. She’s too valuable to them. Even
if they believe she’s run off, they’ll try this as a place for her to run to.

It’s been four weeks, Ignatius says, and they haven’t come back yet.

Could be they’re tryin other places first. Could be they know that if she’s here she’ll be easy to get. But they’ll be back.

It makes no difference. She won’t be here.

Where’s she gonna be?

With you.

What Ignatius wants is for
Moses to take the Vestal to someone he knows, someone who will know what to do with her, a high priest who oversees the largest citadel still operating in the country
– a haven for the devout, and the devout are populous in these times.

I ain’t an escort by trade, Moses says. You don’t got enough to endow my bounty for that kind of work.

I’m not offering to pay you, Ignatius says.

Then what?

I’m asking for your service.

A favour?

Not a favour. A duty. An obligation has befallen you. These are the things a man of honour does, and I know you to be a man of honour.

You got it wrong. A man of honour I ain’t.

A man with a code then. They are much the same thing when there’s no one around to say which creed is honourable and which isn’t.

It occurs to Moses
that just two days before he was seeking some purpose, some direction to their travel – a simple reason to be going one place as another. In these times, when all places
and people seem distinguished only by the most ephemeral and muzzy of boundaries, when the peaceful walking dead begin to look like the salvationed and the huddled living the damned – then
does a man seek for something beyond
pills and shelter and woman comfort, then does he seek for objective, for vocation.

But my brother, Moses says, holding up the last weak barrier to what he already sees as his given mission.

Your brother isn’t taking her, Ignatius says. You are. You have the capacity to protect her – even from your own blood.

Moses felt himself steeped in blood, all kinds of blood, the family kind
and otherwise.

Where is this citadel? he asks.

And the monk Ignatius responds:

Colorado.

That night, lodged in the stable crib, Moses sees his brother Abraham lying back on his straw bed, scraping at his teeth with a wood splinter. Abraham hums a tune Moses
doesn’t recognize, and Moses wonders how much of his brother’s music is just the creeping harmonic wastage of his own poxy
mind.