She Walks in Shadows (31 page)

“I’m very impressed with the new young priest. Jonah, is it? It’s a very intelligent choice on the part of the Council to add him to the roster.”

“How so?”

I never considered that there was anything strategic about the priests that were chosen for sermons.

“He’s going to draw more people to church, obviously. He’s young, good-looking. You should have seen all of the women that were flirting with him on the way out. Even married ones!”

She’s scandalized.

It makes sense, I suppose. If the women were filling up the church, then their children would follow. I remember Erica Francis’ words and a violent shiver moves up my spine.

Monday is a gray day with a white sky and nothing but crows move in the trees. I can smell the rain that’s coming. I put on a thick, white Rogue t-shirt underneath my school uniform’s sky-blue blouse. I pick my silver necklace from my own statue of Marchosias. It’s coiled around her neck and draped over her wings. She sits on her haunches and peers ahead, as if suspicious of what the future could bring. I uncoil the silver from around her and clasp it around my neck.

The pendants are a gold wishbone, a wolf’s head, and a heavy locket with a crescent moon on it. I let it hang outside of my blouse and slip gold bangles on my wrists.

School itself is a blur. I sit with my friends Katie and Salazal during lunch. I don’t discuss Marchosias with them. Instead, I nod and smile at the stories they tell about their boyfriends, concerns over exams, things that in all fairness, I should be concerned about, as well. Whatever the cost, I know: Marchosias has to stay.

My blood runs cold, and then boiling hot, as I see Brother Jonah walk in through the cafeteria’s double doors. He’s wearing blue jeans and a dark burgundy polo shirt. I stare at him helplessly as he walks in with Brothers Peter and Saul at his side. They’re laughing about something and I feel that he’s detected my gaze. I duck my head when he turns to look in my direction.

I count to ten before I look up again and my stomach drops in horror. He’s looking straight at me, unsmiling. I look away first, my ears burning. I feel his gaze on me until well after I’ve left the cafeteria, finished eighth period, and am making my way to the rectory office to look at the schedule.

Marchosias’ shrine is on the list in need of cleaning. I sigh in relief. It means there have been a number of offerings made, which bodes well for her and her popularity. I sign my name next to Marchosias’ slot as caretaker, giving Susan the secretary an exhausted smile. I walk down to the basement where the lockers are. St. Magdalena’s is more open than other churches to keeping its doors open after hours, sometimes well into the night, allowing us volunteers free rein of the grounds while we work. I slam the locker door, tying my apron on. It has a tag with the word ‘Volunteer’ and my name on it.

I walk down the silent and dark hallway, hands in my pockets, challenging myself to not fear the dark. The church is transformed after hours. It’s all dark except for the candles flickering from the altars, a few wall lamps that are lit so we can see. Outside of those spheres of light, the darkness swarms heavy, and this place of worship and safety suddenly seems sinister. I grab the metal pail at the head of the stairs and make my way over the sea of silent marble to Marchosias’ shrine.

I can smell the blood biscuits going stale, some meat that’s beginning to go bad. I light the match and touch its flame to the wall torque, lowering the stained glass covering the torque so the light is dimmed to a purplish, pinkish glow.

It settles around the shrine and around her body. Her belly is rounded beneath her flowing robe, her hands settled around the soft mound. Her wolf grin is pleasant in the glow of the shrine. Her penitents this week are putting me to work tonight; her offerings are raw steaks, already beginning to turn black, some breads and pastries.

The goblet is filled with milk, some of it sloshed out of the cup and onto the stone beneath. I dump the food into the pail, using a piece of biscuit to clean off each plate. It makes a wet sound that slightly disgusts me when it hits the rest of the food in the pail. I pull my rubber gloves out of my apron, making my way with a full pail back into the basement, this time turning left where I turned right previously to go to the lockers.

The dark hallway leads to several doors, but the one I’m looking for is to my right. The courtyard is dark and silent. I bite the handle of my flashlight between my teeth directing the light towards the compost pile. Flower beds rise and fall on every side of me. I pull open the gate and it creaks, leading me into the wilder parts of the garden. Where the things that rot go. The compost pile is in the center of the clearing, a large wooden fence built all around it. I make my way to the fence and climb up on the lowest rung. I turn the pail upside down, dumping the food in. There are maggots as long as my fingers wriggling in the soil. There are so many that it looks as if the soil itself is moving, heaving up and down. Breathing. Sacrifice taking on new life.

I turn away from the mound before I feel the retch forming in my mouth, walking back the way I came. I am cleaning the goblets and silver offering plates in the kitchen when I hear Erica’s laugh. I turn off the water and listen. I shut off the kitchen light and stand very still. She wasn’t on the list of volunteers for the night. Her laugh is mingled with someone else’s. It’s low, seductive, and the man is aroused. I can taste it in the way he breathes in before he speaks. His laugh is a galaxy of blue with specks of darker blue in nimbus clouds. Hers is the white of winter, a cold slash in the dark. It’s Jonah. And Erica. I close my eyes and my soapy hand closes around the moon locket hanging from my neck.

“Come on,” she croons. I can see their bodies framing the doorway to the Paula shrine. Goddess of the light. I watch as Erica caresses the side of Jonah’s face, watch the way his body sags toward hers.

Thief.

“That Marchosias shrine is in the best spot in the church. Paula deserves it more.” She places a kiss by the side of his mouth. “Think about it. All that rotting meat and food in the best place in the church? Paula demands sweet things, perfumes and incense.”

Jonah is uncomfortable, but he doesn’t move away when her mouth finds his. As he is a priest of the blood gods, I can imagine his discomfort at the way Erica has framed her argument.

“Marchosias is a great goddess. She belongs in that shrine and she has followers, even a priestess in the making.” My heart catches in my throat at his words.

Erica sucks air between her teeth. “Do you mean that puny Sorha? If that’s the priestess that Marchosias chose, then I can see why she’s going to lose that shrine before she can even be dedicated.” Jonah moves away from Erica, but she doesn’t seem worried.

“You like her. I can tell. She has that old quality to her. Like you.” Erica presses her palm to Jonah’s chest. “But you know how we operate. We’ll see who wins the spoils of war.”

She enters the shrine as Jonah walks away from her. I turn on the kitchen light, turning the water on again. The silence in my mind is deafening. I finish washing and drying the plates, bringing them up the stairs with me. The church is quiet as I make my way to my shrine. I put away the dishes, finish cleaning the stone beneath Marchosias’ feet. Gone is the contented look. Now her head is lowered, her muzzle furled, revealing sharp teeth. I tip some of the jasmine oil over her head and on her feet. It fills the shrine with its aroma.

“Well, that’s a change.” I whirl around and Erica is at the entrance to the shrine, her long, dark hair in a low ponytail. Her dark eyes look over Marchosias and there is almost a tinge of envy in them. “If only most of her offerings smelled as good as that oil.”

I say nothing and continue to wipe down with the oily rag. She moves into the shrine, kicking the pail at the foot of the statue.

“You should stop.” My voice is clear, strong. Every cell in my body is vibrating to some distant hum. I feel it radiating from the statue, inside of me. “Please stop,” I say again.

I’m not sure if it’s the ‘Please’, but suddenly, Erica is in my face, her long finger in between my eyes.

“You have no business being a priestess! You and this abomination have no place here. She’ll be out of here before the end of the month and you with her. There isn’t another church giving the cult of the Fallen a chance.”

Her smile is sharp.

I know she isn’t lying. I know the power that she and others hold in the church. I move faster than I feel. I pick up the ceremonial blade, slashing it across her throat as arterial blood sprays me in the face. I wind my arm back, bringing it forward with all the force I can summon, finally burying the blade in her stomach.

Her face is a mask of confusion but only for a few moments. I drag her by the hair and place her bleeding neck at the statue’s feet. There is so much blood that it pools around the statue, dripping down the altar, all over the shrine floor. The blood creeps along the marble, turning the green lake black.

When the pools of blood stop moving, I hoist the body on my back, carrying it out into the garden. With a shovel, I make a place for her beneath the mountains of maggots, and watch as the moving earth and garbage cover up her limp body. There is no trace of blood in Marchosias’ shrine the next day. Erica’s body is not found and Paula’s shrine is destroyed that same night. The goddess is found crumbled, teeth marks along her white neck, her eyes hollowed out. When I look at Brother Jonah now, as helplessly as ever, I don’t look away when our eyes meet. My ears and lips burn, but I don’t look away.

WHEN SHE QUICKENS

Mary A. Turzillo

AYAHUASCA FELT COLD
stone under her head, back and legs, smelled lilies and corruption, heard bird song, human stirring and animal cries, as if it were dawn. She tried to remember who she was this time. It was always the same in some ways, different in others. Her body this recent time was a woman of 30 years, destroyed by a disease of stomach pain and evil dreams. Her soul, and her formal name, were unchanging: Ayahuasca, Empress of the known world, eternal thread of the world necklace.

This must be death, then. She dimly remembered other deaths and she knew she would live again, and reign again, in a new body. But horrid truths came to her. She began to mourn the life and the body she had just left. And what of her subjects and her friends? Their deaths were more permanent than hers. Even Yaje, her favorite, who wept and swore to follow her to the death house, would be ashes and dust, or the food of worms, all too soon.

She would have cried aloud at the biting cold of the stone, but her throat was paralyzed in death. Her eyes, the eyes of this body, were shut forever and the room in which she lay — the chamber of passing — was so dimly lit she could not see even faint red light through the blood in her lids.

The only warmth she could feel were the two other beings whom she had loved almost as much as Yaje: her yellow hound Burrow and her small gray cat Dark. She tried to stretch her neck to nuzzle Burrow, her toes to feel the silk warmth of Dark, but she could not move. She was, after all, dead.

But she could hear purring and the dog’s soft whimpers. They must certainly realize something awful had happened. Both had stayed faithfully beside her through her illness, through the belly-pains and the evil dreams. And they had followed her, maybe secretly stealing in after the shaman’s acolytes had arranged her on the slab, to keep vigil. Would they recognize her when her soul transmuted? That child was still a baby, though she’d indicated its identity.

She herself had no bodily issue. At least she would be spared seeing her own children grow old when she herself lived in a new body, and in the body after that, and a series of such bodies, each chosen carefully before transfer, unto the end of time. For the scriptures taught the hard truth: When the Empress died a true and permanent death, then the empire itself would fall and all would be mortality and dust.

She waited. Soon, the shaman would start the ceremony to transmute her soul into the chosen unborn girl. She felt cold and sadness but no fear. She had prepared for this passage. She did not remember previous passages as personal experiences but as stories so vivid they brought both tears and the heat of joy.

Flowers: She could smell the flowers and the incense. From memory, she knew the slab on which her swathed body lay was lapis lazuli, the sacred stone. She could feel the presence of her little cat and dog. But were the mourners asleep? She lay unconscious for a length of time, then awoke to a voice she knew and then another voice.

Yaje. Her favorite. She remembered ecstasies, the warm pressure of his kisses on her lips, her belly, her feet. Yaje was speaking. She yearned for him, yearned for the moment she would reveal herself to him in her new body, though that could not be for years, not until the new vessel was grown to be a woman.

Voices. Yaje and the Nai’uchi, the head priest.

“Whom did she choose as her vessel?” Yaje said. “We have to appear to obey her directives.”

Ayahuasca’s love-longing turned to bewilderment.
Appear
to obey? Was this her Yaje, who covered her feet with kisses? Who swore he would go into the shadow world with her to await transplantation to a new body?

“You atheist!” said Nai’uchi. “Ignore her instructions? Then, when she’s transplanted again into a new vessel, she’ll destroy us.”

“Oh, you pretend belief, you old hypocrite. But your eyes lit up like the full moon when we talked of gold and riches coming your way. Come on, you’re already in your vestments. Burn the herbs, say the words, create appearances.”

Nai’uchi said, “I took your offering, but there is no bribe that can make me forget my duties. I won’t taint the transmigration ritual.”

“I can outwait your stubbornness.”

“But the people will not. Listen! They press against the gate, awaiting her resurrection. They scream to know what vessel will hold their ruler. Even in the zoological gardens, there are signs: The snow leopard paces, refusing its meat. The baboons gibber. The snakes are striking at the bars, bloodying their jaws.”