The Sacrifice (17 page)

Just as long as he didn’t think any
further than his stomach. And he was having to go carefully there. Unused to such rich
food, and so much of it, his stomach was gurgling and clenching and he was worried that
he might be sick again. That wouldn’t be good, not after everyone here had been so
kind to him.

He was the guest of honour at the feast.

He’d never been a guest of honour
before.

And guests of honour didn’t throw up
all over the table, did they?

He hoped The Kid didn’t mind being
left out. Not being special like Sam. He was sitting on Sam’s right, staring at
his empty plate and fidgeting in his seat. Sam could tell he wasn’t comfortable
here at all. The other people round the
table were making him nervous.
Tish was on Sam’s left and opposite them was the boy in charge, Matt, as well as a
chubby kid called Archie Bishop and the four other boys who’d been with Matt when
Sam arrived. They were younger and didn’t say much, just stared at Matt in awe and
nodded furiously at everything he said.

Sam was worried that their heads might fall
off with all that nodding, because Matt hadn’t shut up since Sam had met him. He
just went on, talking, talking, talking.

Sam had stopped listening a long time ago.
His voice was just a drone, something you had to get used to, like the music and the
smoke. It was just
there
. So that you either learnt to ignore it or you went
mad.

It was hard, though. Sam’s eyes were
still watering from the smoke, and the racket from the kids in the choir stalls
hadn’t stopped since they’d arrived. Whenever one musician got tired,
another took their place. Everybody in the cathedral seemed to be expected to join in.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to. He’d be rubbish. His mum, who’d sang in
a choir and loved music, was always trying to get him to learn an instrument. He’d
started piano lessons, then guitar, trumpet, even drums. But he couldn’t get on
with any of them and hated practising. The thought of having to join the band made him
nervous.

Surely the guest of honour wasn’t
expected to play at his own feast.

No. Sam tried to think about only two
things: the food and his stomach. He didn’t want to think about anything else. He
didn’t want to think about
why
he was the guest of honour. What these
kids wanted from him.

He knew it was something to do with
religion, because that was all Matt talked about. It wasn’t any kind of religion
Sam recognized, though. His family had never been very religious,
but a year before the disaster his parents had announced that they wanted to send Sam to
a different school. A church school.

‘It’s got a very good
reputation,’ his dad had explained. ‘They get far better results than any of
the ordinary primary schools round here. Their Ofsted scores are very high.’

‘And the discipline’s very
good,’ his mother had added. ‘You won’t get bullied there.’

Sam had wanted to explain that he
didn’t get bullied at school, but he knew his mum was convinced that there were
too many rough kids there.

‘But what about my friends?’
he’d asked.

‘You’ll make new
friends.’

Sam hadn’t wanted to make new friends.
He liked the ones he had.

He hadn’t been able to argue his
parents out of it, though. And there was a catch. They would have to start going to
church to convince the vicar they were religious and make sure they could get a place.
So Sam had been dragged over to the church near the school every Sunday. The stories the
vicar told about things happening a long time ago were sometimes quite good. Sam liked
the ones about armies and fighting and swords and spears. Usually, though, he
didn’t understand the stories and couldn’t really see what they had to do
with him. He’d enjoyed some of the hymns, except when his mum sang the ones she
knew too loudly.

Mainly it had been boring, and he would much
rather have been back at home playing on his PlayStation.

He’d often wondered since then what
good any of it had done. His parents were both dead and Sam wasn’t at any kind of
school at all. Maybe Mum and Dad had gone to
heaven. He hoped so. He
preferred to think that they’d gone to a lovely tropical island and were having a
really long holiday. Maybe that was what heaven was like.

Wherever they were, it was probably better
than being here. In the hell that the world had become.

So Sam wasn’t that experienced with
church stuff and religion, but the things that Matt was coming out with were weird. Sam
had tried to concentrate at first, because he was guest of honour, and because of the
other thing … 

The thing he was
really
trying not
to think about.

The
Lamb
thing.

He wished he’d paid more attention
when Ed had told him about Matt, but the thing was, Sam had never expected to actually
meet
him.

Mad Matt, Ed had called him. And there was
something about a banner, with two boys painted on it. The Lamb and the Goat. Ed had
said that he and The Kid looked a bit like those two boys, and that was why some kids at
the Tower had looked at them funny.

And why Kyle had made a sheep noise.

Well,
all
the kids here looked at
him and The Kid funny. If they looked at all. They were still doing that spooky thing
where they stared at the floor.
So what
if they thought he looked like the
Lamb? If that meant he got feasts like this. The Kid was a bit left out, though. It
obviously wasn’t as good being the Goat.

Sam giggled. It was all quite stupid and it
was clear that The Kid hadn’t listened to
anything
Ed had said. He was
acting as if none of this was anything to do with him. He’d quickly stuffed his
face and now kept muttering to himself and humming little bits of tunes, as if he was
trying to sing along with the crazy music. He refused to join in any
conversations and had turned in on himself. Sam was feeling a little alone and was
really trying to be polite to Mad Matt.

He realized that Matt had asked him
something. He was staring at Sam with his dark-rimmed eyes.

‘Say that again,’ said Sam, and
Matt smiled.

‘Don’t you see?’ he said.
‘Everything that’s happened – the disease, the death, the rise of the
Nephilim, it’s all our fault.’

‘I don’t know what you
mean,’ said Sam. ‘Whose fault?’

‘All of us.’

‘You’re saying the disease is
your fault? How can it be your fault?’

Matt smiled even harder at him, like someone
talking to an idiot. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Not really, no. Nothing’s
obvious. I don’t get it.’

‘Why else would all this be
happening?’ Matt went on. ‘Some people blame scientists, or the army, or
aliens from outer space, but it’s all God’s punishment for how we were
behaving. We weren’t worshipping him properly, not following the true path as
shown to us in the teachings. It’s just like the great flood and all the plagues
before. This is the last plague. Once we have been punished we will be allowed to enter
God’s kingdom here on earth.’

Sam couldn’t follow this. ‘Why
would we need to be punished?’ he asked.

‘For our sins. This is the great
cleansing.’

Sam tried to stop himself laughing. Nobody
said ‘cleansing’, not even in adverts. He turned the strangled laugh into a
cough, a machine-gun burst of harsh barks that hurt his throat. Again Matt smiled at
him. Sam was beginning to be really irritated by his habit of doing this.

‘The revelations were first shown to me
in smoke,’ said Matt. ‘So now we live in the smoke so that we’ll keep
seeing new visions.’

‘But won’t it give you, like,
cancer or something?’

‘No. How could it? We are the chosen
ones. God won’t let any harm come to us.’

‘So none of you ever get
hurt?’

‘Not unless we do something wrong.
Obviously wrongdoers are punished.’

‘OK. Right.’ Sam remembered
learning about witchcraft in history. How in the past if they thought a woman was a
witch they’d throw her in a pond. If she floated she was a witch and would be
burned at the stake. If she sank she wasn’t a witch … and would drown.
Either way the poor woman wound up dead. Even though there never really were any witches
in the first place. Matt’s religion seemed to work the same way. The proof that
you weren’t religious enough was if you were killed. And the proof that you
were
religious enough was if you stayed alive. Matt couldn’t
lose.

‘That’s why we keep the song
going,’ said Matt.

‘What song?’

‘The music you hear is the Great Song;
we started it last summer and we haven’t stopped singing it since. It will go on
until God’s kingdom is established on earth. It’s our way of praising him,
of letting him know our devotion to him. He can hear us.’

‘But you stop to go to sleep,
yeah?’

Again that smile. The shake of the head.
‘No. The song will only end when God is triumphant. “
I heard the voice
of harpers harping with their harps, and they sang as it were a new song before the
throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders, and no man could learn that song
but the hundred and
forty and four thousand, which were redeemed
from the earth.
”’

‘Right,’ said Sam. ‘Yeah.
Um. Can I ask you something, Matt?’

‘Of course.’

Sam wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pushed
his plate away. If he ate any more he would surely explode. ‘How come you all sort
of seemed to be expecting me?’ he said. ‘As if you knew I was coming
here.’

‘It was foretold.’

‘How could it have been?’

‘It’s God’s
way.’

‘But
I
didn’t even know
I was coming.’

‘Tish knew.’

Sam turned to look at Tish. She was beaming,
her face seeming to glow in the candlelight.

‘How did you know?’ he
asked.

‘It was told to us.’

‘There never was a place near
Trafalgar Square, was there?’ said Sam. ‘You tricked me. This is the temple
you told us about, isn’t it? You planned all along to bring me here.’

‘She was sent to fetch you from the
Tower,’ said Archie Bishop.

‘The whole thing was a lie
then,’ said Sam.

‘Not a lie, no,’ said Matt.

‘Just by saying things you can’t
make them real,’ Sam snapped. ‘You can’t just sit there and say
“It’s not a lie” and that makes it not a lie.’

‘She had to lie to others at the
Tower,’ said Matt, ‘because they were Babylon’s instruments, keeping
you imprisoned there. They were the ones who were
lying
to you. Tish had to
fight their lies with her own ones.’

‘I don’t understand any of this.
How did Tish even know I was there?’ Sam turned to Tish again. ‘Did you have
a vision or something?’

‘We were shown the truth,’ said
Tish. ‘I came to save you and then this morning I signalled the Temple to let them
know I was coming back.’

‘
Hallelujah!
’ said
Matt. ‘
The smoke from her goes up forever and ever
.’

‘The burning car?’ said Sam.

‘It’s how it was all meant to
be,’ said Matt.

Sam didn’t say anything. He was too
angry and frustrated and confused. Tish had lied to him and he’d let Ed down and
he had no idea what these weirdos wanted. He stared at his empty glass wishing they
would all just go away and leave him alone.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Matt
was still going on.

‘A year ago we came here to the Temple
to wait for you,’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting all this time and
finally you have come.’

‘I just don’t get it!’ Sam
shouted, trying to get through to them and make them talk some kind of sense. ‘How
were you shown? What were you shown? Who showed you?’

‘It was all done through his
messenger,’ said Archie Bishop.

‘What, like an angel or
something?’ Sam scoffed. He was light-headed from the food and the smoke and
music. He was still in the dream where nothing fitted together or made sense. If he
stayed too long holed up here in this cathedral he’d go as mental as the cathedral
kids.

Matt didn’t reply to Sam; instead he
signalled to one of
the three younger boys at the table who jumped up
and hurried off into the dark depths of the cathedral.

The Kid leant over and whispered in
Sam’s ear, ‘Listen, shortstuff, I don’t always get things. I take the
wrong end of the stick sometimes. Other times I don’t manage to get hold of either
end of the stick. People say I’m a weirdo from space, but these loons are doing my
nut in. I never did like church monkeys and these guys are church chimps through and
through. They give me the creeps and shivers. First thing in the morning, when we have
stuffed our bellies, we are gone from here. Bottom line, sunshine. I don’t want to
live with monkeys. See you later, crocodile.’

Sam watched as The Kid got up from the table
and wandered over to the choir stalls. How he wished he could go with him, get away from
these ‘church monkeys’, as The Kid had called them, but that would be
rude.

In a little while the boy Matt had sent away
came back. He had someone with him. Tall and fair-haired. His face was bruised. Sam
thought he recognized him, but wasn’t sure where from, and then it hit him.

It was Brendan, the boy who’d been
exiled from the Tower by Jordan Hordern.

‘Hah!’ Sam exclaimed. ‘So
Brendan is God’s messenger?’

‘Yes,’ said Matt. ‘God
arranged for Brendan to be sent here to show us the truth. He told us all about the
Tower, and your arrival, so we sent Tish and the others to fetch you.’

‘And the others got killed. Thanks,
God.’

‘The others must have done something
wrong,’ said Matt. ‘We can’t be sad for them, we can’t mourn
them. They were sinners and they’ve been punished. It seems that only Tish was
pure.’