The Acolyte (35 page)

“You’re not staying,” she said. So she knew, somehow.

“I’m not. That’s true.”

Newbarr was right about the whole “look them in the eye” bit. It was rough.

“Where are you going?”

“Oh,” I said breezily, “Here, there, everywhere.”

We twiddled our toes. Water boatmen skimmed across our ankles. And I thought:
What if I didn’t?
Thought:
What if I stayed?

The notion came to me, insupportable in a thousand ways, that we could plant a garden. Tomatoes, potatoes, peas in the soil feathering the water. The future seemed unshackled in a way it had never been—a new optimism percolated through me.

I nodded at Frog. “You going to let him go?”

“I think he’d rather go with you,” she said. “See whatever you’re going to see.”

“I’ll take him, then.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Take him? Or go?”

“Go.”

She rested her head on my shoulder. The pressure of that girl’s head on my shoulder—satori, was what Hindus called it. Happiness.

“Come on.” I gave her my hand. “Let’s say goodbye.”

We walked to the van. Mom was with Newbarr; she cradled The One Child, who snoozed in her arms.

“I have to take him with me, Mom.”

“You’re leaving?”

“We have things to do.”

“Things.” The One Child slipped out of her arms into mine. “What things?”

“I won’t be long. I’ll be back.”

She said, “No, you won’t.”

I nodded. “You’re right, Mom. I won’t.”

I belted The One Child into the passenger seat, which I’d gotten out of the van. I took Frog’s aquarium from Amira.

“I suppose this is what you consider bravery,” said Mom.

Was I being brave? Don’t know I’d ever been. Struck me that all possible paths had winnowed to a single thread. Bravery had fuck all to do with it now.

Article VI:
He is Nailed to the Cross

Church

The road bent and wound and occasionally it rose up over the hood as we hit uphill grades only to bottom away at the crest. The sun streamed through the windshield. I looked at The One Child: face gone red—how often had his skin met the sun? I pulled over, located the Quint’s fire-eaten duster and tucked it around the sun visor as a makeshift curtain.

We hit a stretch that cut through an apple orchard. The road was petalled with a layer of blossoms that the van’s tires stirred into a strange blizzard; they blew through the cab, white petals beyond numbering soft against our skin, the smell of fruit and the vague drone of honeybees, The One Child laughing then sputtering on blossoms.

A spire stabbed into the sky off to the east: the spire of a country church. I turned onto the broken laneway leading there. A one-room church. Flaking clapboards, windblown shingles. I set the van’s brake and checked the gas gauge: near empty. A car was parked outside the church. Good luck for me. Someone up there was looking out for us.

I got out to inspect the car. Newish but dust-covered. A make I’d never seen: Peugeot. Sleek, sporty. I ran my fingers over the lion insignia on its hood, wondering what sort of self-respecting clergyman would drive a car such as this.

Beyond the church was a stream connecting to a lake; that sheen of water, breathless and unmoving, was indistinguishable from the sky above.

I unbuckled The One Child, collected Frog, and rapped on the church doors.

“Hello? Hello?”

Nobody answered. I toed the door open. A fire had scorched the left half of the interior; the blackness ended at the midpoint of the church in almost a straight line. Above the sacristy, direct centre of the church, hung a crucifix. A wooden Jesus impaled upon it. Half-burnt, half whole. The legs were broken off raggedly at the hip.

The One Child’s working eye oriented on that crucifix. He began to cry—or sing, I guess. A Pavlovian response.

The song opened into the vestibule and pealed off the fire-darkened wood. A family of mudlarks darted between the rafters on knife-edged wings and out the belfry. I walked out the vestry into a thicket. Willows and mulberry trees. I continued down a grassy knoll to a sandy strip fringing the river. I arranged The One Child on a sandbar and left Frog to watch over him. Back across the thicket to the van.

There was a red toolbox in the back of the van. It held the items that Rockwell told me I’d need. I guess he knew, too. Seemed everyone knew but me. I hefted the box. Rolling metallic noises. I snapped the catches and lifted the lid.

A grey brick of plastique. A battery pack. A roll of duct tape. A red-buttoned plunger.

Thousands of shiny metal ball bearings.

I refastened the catches and carted the toolbox to the sandbar. The stream flowed softly by the shore and quickened toward its deep blue middle. Sun plated the quiet surface of the lake beyond, so searingly incandescent it was as though the topmost layer of the sun had been peeled off and laid flaming upon it.

I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my socks. I removed my trousers and knelt in the water with the toolbox near at hand. . . .

Water ran through my hands, cold and clean. I pushed a ball bearing between my lips. A sharp metallic sting down to the root of my tongue. I cupped a handful of water, sipped, swallowed.

Don’t know how long I knelt there. Time scalloped. I phased in and out. Ball bearings went down four or five at a time. I retched. Rivulets of drool plastered my shirt. Spitting, drinking, swallowing. . .

. . . My gut sloshed. My centre of balance swung off-kilter. I felt an urgent pressure on my bladder. I fished myself out of my underwear and, still kneeling, and urinated downstream.

Particles of sunlight angled and bent in the water. My memories bent with them. A few lonely bearings rolled about the toolbox by the time I stood. Knees popping, legs quaking: I’d gained many pounds.

I picked up Frog’s aquarium and waded out until the current pulled at my heels. The river rushed over the lip to fill the glass, picking Frog up and sluicing him out.

The willful creature swam
against
the flow. For a while the current pinned it in place—those delicate legs kicking, kicking, making no progress—then slowly, achingly, Frog began to ford upriver. I watched it peck along, battling a current that knew nothing of this stubborn creature so hell-bent on defying it.

“I love that frog,” I heard myself say.

It swam into the deeper currents where the patina of riverbed blended into cool blues, moving sideways but never backward.

I clambered back onshore. The One Child hadn’t moved but the sun had; he was once again exposed in its glare. Ants crawled on his face; he huffed but the ants were all over him, his hair, trapped in the fluid leaking out of his eyes. I carried him into shade and brushed the ants off. I retrieved the toolbox. I kneaded plastique and rolled it into a tube. I wadded the explosives around my hips above the hem of my dripping-wet underwear and lashed it in place with strips of duct tape. Slipped into my trousers again. You could hardly see it.

I poked the sharp prongs of the detonation kit through the fabric of my pants pocket and into the greasy explosive. The battery rested easily in the opposite pocket. I tore long strips off the roll of tape and hung them off a willow branch. Then I picked The One Child up and pressed him to my belly. I fastened a strip of duct tape under my armpit and brought it across my chest, across The One Child’s chest, securing the loose end over my hip. The One Child made a quizzical noise.

“Shhhhh,” I told him. “You’re okay.”

Another strip ran from my opposite armpit; a grey X across my front. His body tightened to mine; our breathing fell into sync. By the time I stood to test the strength of my handiwork, my torso was encased in grey tape. The One Child was fastened snugly.

I walked us back to the van. I yanked the Quint’s charred duster off the sun visor and pulled it on. I rolled up the sleeves and fastened the buttons as high as The One Child’s head.

The Peugeot’s door was unlocked. The gas gauge read near full. On a whim I flipped the sun visor down. A pair of keys fell onto the tan leather seat.

An abandoned luxury sedan with a full tank of gas.

Hey, someone up there really
did
like us.

I turned the key and the car rumbled to life.

State of Grace

As we neared our destination I opened my jaws and bit The One Child’s head. He had fallen asleep. I had to wake him. I had to make him sing. The One Child choked in shock and began to bawl. Tears leaked out of the queer placements of his eyes. The sound was Heavenly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I need to hear you. And I need them to hear you, too.”

The song rose up, out the windows in a most mellifluous way, hitting organ-thrumming octaves. The notes went out and out, above the clouds, above the shifting canopy of sky.

Hundred-foot-tall crucifixes lined the road. Their points were adorned with brightly coloured sashes, reds and golds and blues whipping the evening air. Past them but within sight: the lights of Kingdom City. I hit the accelerator and we barrelled into the darkening brink between the crosses.

The One Child and I, two tools of the Republic given an opportunity to do what no tools ever had: to hammer back.

If this isn’t a State of Grace then that state does not exist.

And let me say it now as this no doubt stands as my last chance:

I take it all back.

Every word, every doubt. All of it I take back.

I
believe.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks, first off, to Brett and Sandra and the team at ChiZine for taking on a thorny book like this. They’re a boon to writers and I’m grateful to them.

Second, a debt to James Ellroy, the Demon Dog of crime fiction. I must have glutted on his stuff just before writing this, because there is an attempt in some areas to take on his punchy, snappy, inimitable style. Thankfully I realized that it
is
inimitable, and maintained my own style for the most part. But for the stationhouse scenes and a few others, readers might get an Ellroyian flavour. All honour to the man.

Finally—and this is less an acknowledgement than it is an explanation or perhaps even an attempt at exculpation—a great deal of this book was difficult to write. All books have their tricky scenes or moral underpinnings that give their authors some pause, but I have never written a book so full of hate as this one. Hatred from the perspective of some of these characters towards races, creeds, cultures, and faiths. I guess when you are trying to write a dystopian narrative, you take a look at the current state of things and forecast the most dire possible future should some of those worrisome aspects bear fruit. For me, religion has always held a yin-yang aspect. There is nothing essentially wrong with it, and the idea of needing religion is totally understandable on a human level—as it would be for any species with a finite lifespan. But I find there is a tendency to
use
religion as a tool to manipulate masses of people, and those who are using it do not always have the most honourable of intentions.

This fear informed the writing of
The Acolyte
. And in order for that fear to be sharpest in me as a writer, I felt I needed to go down certain roads, using terms and embracing a state of mind that is reprehensible to me. So yes, not the most enjoyable writing experience, but perhaps a necessary one in this case. Absolutely no offence meant to anyone currently dwelling on the planet earth, or interred beneath its soil.

Yours,
Nick Cutter

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, who has written four books, including
Rust and Bone, The Fighter
, and
Sarah Court
. His work has appeared in
Esquire, GQ, The Cincinnati Review, Salon, The Walrus
, and elsewhere.
Rust and Bone
was made into a film in 2012, starring Marion Cotillard and directed by Jacques Audiard. Under the pseudonym Nick Cutter, he has released two other novels,
The Troop
and
The Deep
.