The Acolyte (14 page)

I awoke at the Harbinger’s Harbour motel. The bedside clock read 10:19 a.m. I was scheduled to meet The Prophet before High Mass.

I showered quickly. The water was ice-cold. I stepped shivering from the stall and towelled off.

I sat on the bed and switched on the Republic News Channel. The anchor had a face like a crumpled paper bag.

“Late last night, a freak fire struck a plant where the wildly popular Hallelujah Energy Boost is packaged,” he droned. “The Lord protects The Prophet and his workers; thus, there were no casualties. Faulty wiring was responsible. Followers who have come to rely on The Prophet’s patented energy formula, fear not: to ensure there are no shortages, the base of operations has moved to a temporary facility. Blessed are those who walk with the Lord. Blessed are those who follow His Prophet.”

Faulty wiring was how they had decided to spin it, huh? Jesus wept.

The electrified wrought-iron gates at The Prophet’s compound swung wide. I piloted the car down the crushed gravel lane, recalling that the last time I’d covered this terrain it was to pick up a spoiled young girl whose remains now resided in a Tupperware bin.

The mansion was majestic. Sunlight gilded the marble colonnades and made them shine like covenant silver. But the courtyard fountain was shut off and the water dotted with bright green algae blooms.

A peacock staggered from the honeysuckle. Its plumage was in tatters, tail feathers snapped so when it fanned them the sight was ghastly, like a broken pinwheel.

A robed servant answered my knock. The foyer shone like a Kruggerand mint: everything was gold-flaked, gold-leafed, gold-dusted. Marble staircases descended from either side of the grand entryway, twining together like snakes. Portraits of The Prophet and Immaculate Mother graced each wall; their eyes met in the dead centre of the foyer.

The servant beckoned me down an arched hallway into a regally appointed room dominated by a mahogany dining table.

I sat on a padded leather chair, fidgeting anxiously with the whalebone buttons of my duster. Footsteps echoed on the polished tiles. The door opened with the softest
click
, and I was in the presence of God’s earthly mouthpiece.

“Acolyte Murtag. My blessings be upon you.”

It was him. The Bosom of Love. The Heaven-Sent Hero. The Prophet.

I knelt, head bowed. “Humbled in your presence, Your Grace.”

“Rise up, my son. Sit.”

He was taller than he appeared during sermons—but as my seats were on the second tier of Stadium SuperChurch, I’d never seen him this close. He was dressed in his trademark vanilla sharkskin suit and black spats. He tugged on a pair of latex gloves from a box on the table and took my chin in his hands; tilting my face up to meet his own, he inspected my injuries and with a sigh that turned my insides to hot gelatin.

“You absorbed this trying to protect my daughter?”

Even the whitest of white lies would reduce me to ash. “Some, yes. Others were received as punishment for not protecting her.”

He yanked the gloves off. I couldn’t help but notice he wiped his fingertips with a clean handkerchief, which he then smoothed across his chair before sitting down.

“Chief Exeter told me about your trials,” he said. “Had I known, I would have put a stop to it. But while God’s eyes see everything, mine, alas, do not always. I cannot hold you wholly accountable, as sometimes the Lord chooses to pick a rosebud before it blooms. Tell me what happened, my son. Tell me how.”

I recounted the evening of the bombing, sparing few details. I finished by saying how the bomber materialized out of nowhere, before anyone understood the threat.

“Eve had no conception of the danger she was in. It was merciful. It was . . . quick.”

The Prophet chewed over my story. “The Lord always lived in my daughter’s heart, but too seldom was He reflected in her deeds. What happened was perhaps unavoidable and surely part of the divine plan.”

The Prophet seemed somehow relieved. The perpetual embarrassments Eve had inflicted upon the Divine Family had come to an abrupt and—if my intuition was correct—not totally unwelcome end.

A pair of robed men entered silently and spread documents on the tabletop. One handed The Prophet the official stamp, which he wiped with one of a seemingly endless supply of linen handkerchiefs before pressing it to an inkpad. It was impossible to help noting how tired he appeared: every one of his fifty-seven years. While I still believed he’d outlive Methuselah and fulfill his own prophesy, he looked ancient right now.

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” he said with a wan smile. “I will always be thankful to the Lord and the Divine Council for entrusting me with the spiritual health of New Bethlehem, but some days I pine for the open road, the travelling revival show.”

The Prophet’s rise from the revival circuit to New Bethlehem’s highest office had been well documented. Years before the Republican regime he’d toured as a faith healer: he and his wife, Effie—later known as The Immaculate Mother—each driving a van, hauling trailers with the makings to throw up a revival tent. They ministered to the working poor in woebegone burgs and hamlets. The Prophet’s sermons were famously soul-quaking. He cut a swath of religious fervour across all the dark and empty spaces of this land, leaving Followers in his wake.

When word leaked he was in the running for the position of Prophet, opposition was strong. The Divine Council’s usual choices were ex-priests and monsignors; the idea of a scripture-thumping, brimstone-spouting faith healer taking the reins did not sit well with many. Critics claimed there was a healthy dose of the sideshow barker in him: he was a tin-pan man peddling old-time religion. A shark in a sharkskin suit.

Butchers’ daughters and sharecroppers’ wives from the out-of-the-way places he’d ministered had even stepped uneasily forward to tender accusations of a fleshly nature against him; some even had sons who bore a striking resemblance to The Prophet. But since paternity sciences had long gone the way of the Episcopalians, nothing was ever proven.

All criticism ceased once The Prophet took office—largely due to the fact the critics themselves ceased to exist. Ruthlessly, all of them were eventually un-born.

The Prophet smiled at me benevolently and produced a teak smoking pipe from his pocket. He filled the bowl with sweet cherry tobacco, tamped it down, affixed a length of surgical rubber tube to the stem and lit up.

“Different times back then. A different life altogether. We’d roll in during the dead of night, nail up crossbeams and drape a tent over them, stake it all down and shake a bucket of sawdust over the muddy earth—come sunrise we were ready to speak the Lord’s will. Though it may sound blasphemous, tuning in the Lord is like tuning in a radio station: easier to accomplish in wide open spaces.”

He puffed reflectively.

“For a while we toured with a freak show. Dr. Ebenezer Wonderlic’s Not-So-Human Oddities. Wonderlic was no doctor; his Christian name was Roger Cornwall. Ex-con, boozer, a five-time loser whose sole talent was in collecting curious specimens: men with congenital deformities and women with congenital idiocies that were so lonely, so shunned, they grasped at the dubious life preserver he tossed.”

I had no clue why he was being so candid. A knot of unease locked up my gorge: if he was set to dispose of me, he could say whatever he liked.

“These freaks Cornwall assembled were the most benighted bunch you’d ever seen. He had a flair for monikers. Henrietta the Mule-Faced Woman, Dogboy Jones, Francis Rutledge: Heroin Monster, Pliny the Pinhead. He’d lock Dogboy in a cage and let gawkers toss rotten fruit at him for a buck a throw. Other times he’d have Dogboy caper and jig and gurgle and act the fool. Cornwall understood that all spectators wanted was to feel wholly superior: to understand there was a pecking order and that, despite their having a harelip or a clubfoot or rampant hair loss, in the grand order of things they weren’t so bad off. The freaks functioned as a barometer of sorts: they were the lowest, most unlucky and unloved ebb one might descend to. Everyone went home feeling better about themselves because it could be worse, and the proof of that stood before their eyes.

“The mongoloids and mental feebs didn’t understand they were being abused. The ones with mangled bodies but working brains—
they
got it. One night Pliny visited me. Pliny’s head was no bigger than a grapefruit and his features outsized: squeezed onto that tiny head, they gave him the appearance of a too-big baby. He’d come to me for a Divine remedy. I could lay hands upon Pliny so God might bless His defective creation with the forbearance to accept his imperfect nature, but a cure? Not possible. But I also told him this, which I will tell you now: the Lord hovered around the poor souls of Wonderlic’s Not-So-Human Oddities. Never have I felt so strongly the presence of the Lord as I did in those days—His gaze was trained nearby; I needed only direct it my way. And
do
I miss that, my son. That Divine closeness.”

Next, the Immaculate Mother breezed in through the half-open door—it was cracked open no more than fifteen inches and it opened not an inch farther with her entry. She wore a violet robe of brocaded satin. Her arms resembled nothing so much as the fetlock bones of a horse skeleton.

“The day’s blessings be upon you, Good Father,” she said to The Prophet.

“And you, Dear Mother,” he replied. “This is the Acolyte who was with Eve on her final night.”

She gave me a long, considering glance.

“Your partner,” she said. “What is her name . . . ?”

“Doe.” I was surprised she’d know anything of her.

“Angela,” the Immaculate Mother said. “Angela Doe, yes. Is she . . . alright?”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s recovered nicely.”

The Immaculate Mother looked genuinely relieved. “That’s wonderful. So important to see those entrusted with the public’s safety are themselves safe.”

Servants entered with plates. Olives, green grapes, sliced cantaloupe and apple. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d tasted fresh food. The Immaculate Mother did not eat a bite: instead she punctured the fruit with one long fingernail and inhaled its scent. She was following her own dictum to “Taste with one’s nose, not one’s mouth.”

The Prophet bit into a cantaloupe slice and tongued the juice dribbling down his chin. To me he said, “I won’t insult your intelligence by rehashing the recent happenings in our fair city. Since, according to Chief Exeter, little progress has been made on securing culprits, the duty now falls to me. I have sat in council with the Lord these past two days and nights, eating naught but bread and drinking naught but lemon water. On the second night God did come to me as a ball of Heavenly light and guided me as to how we shall cure the affliction that has lately plagued our city.”

I pushed my plate aside and leaned across the table, straining toward The Prophet as the Man beckoned me do.

“The Lord directed me to enact the second of the seven deadly plagues, my son. He said it is time to set His works in motion.”

“When did the Lord say to do so, your Grace?”

“Tonight, my son.”

I said: “Who’s heading things up?”

“Exeter and Deacon Hollis both. Apart from the pilots and the Chief, it will be an Acolyte-only affair.”

“Do it for Eve’s sake,” the Immaculate Mother said to me.

A tear rolled down her cheek. It was the most patently fake display I’d ever seen. She was like one of those dolls that ejected a crocodile tear when you squished its stomach.

I said, “Will you prophesize its coming?”

“At today’s sermon, yes.” The Prophet spread his hands to me. “It is God’s will, after all. We are merely providing the lightest push.”

“You’ll advise people to stay indoors and off the street?”

The hue of The Prophet’s eyes darkened the way the sky scudded over before a storm.

“That is nothing at all of your concern, Follower Murtag. What I say or do not say is no less than the Lord Himself has instructed.”

A servant removed me from their presence soon afterwards.

I was led down the hall in a daze. In the foyer sat The One Child’s processional bier; my heart performed a funny little flip-flop at the sight of it.

The bier was an ornate box with royal purple curtains draped down each side. It sat on the tiles, cherub balloons bobbing from the gold-inlaid curtain rods—could The One Child be in there?

The One Child was the greatest mystery and most honored personage in the Republic. No other city boasted anyone quite the same. He or she—the sex of The One Child was unknown; it was deified as a pansexual being—had been born through divine intercession. It lacked a mortal father: its father was
Our Lord and Father
. The Lord had come upon the Immaculate Mother back in the revival show days and sown his flawless seed in her womb. She had woken overcome with hysteria at the painless heat emanating from her belly until the face of the Lord appeared in her morning oatmeal—a manifestation made somehow more reasonable for its curiousness—to assure her it was He who’d planted the seed within her.

The seed had ripened at an unnatural rate and seven months later The One Child entered the world: Republic birthing records indicate it was born at the stroke of midnight on a moonless, starless night. The midwife died during the delivery: an autopsy report showed her eyes had been burned from their sockets and her hands turned into salt.