The Sacrifice

  24

  Sam was sitting wide-eyed at a table that had been set up in the centre of the main aisle in the cathedral. A feast was laid out on the table. There was chicken and rice, tinned vegetables, dried fruit, biscuits, cans of Coke, even chocolate. Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a meal like this. He was drunk on the luxury of it all. Shaking. He still couldn’t quite believe what was going on. He’d stumbled into a strange dream and he had to admit that at this moment it was a very nice one.

  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. Go
d 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.’

  Sam bit his tongue. Tish obviously hadn’t read the bit about not being sad. For the first day at the Tower she’d hardly stopped crying, wailing about her dead friends. Particularly Louise, the girl Ed had accidentally killed. Now here she was, smiling away like she was glad about it, going along with Matt’s craziness.

  Well, whatever Matt said, Tish had lied to him. And now she was lying to Matt. Pretending she was a true believer, a pure nun, pretending she hadn’t been sad, pretending that God had planned it all.

  As far as Sam was concerned, if this was all God’s plan then God had made a right mess of things. He rested his elbows on the table and planted his chin in his hands.

  Let them talk. He wanted to hear the full explanation.

  25

  The Kid was wandering along one of the choir stalls, studying the musicians. They kept their eyes fixed on their instruments. Wouldn’t look at him. One boy was banging an old metal waste bin with a wooden spoon. Another was honking on a saxophone. There was a girl with a cello. Not bad. Not brilliant. Then there was a boy playing a bent and battered cymbal that made a sort of dull, clanking noise. He was hammering it rhythmically with a stick, beating it further out of shape.

  ‘That don’t sound so well, Lionel,’ said The Kid, sticking his fingers in his ears.

  The boy turned his head and stared off into space, dull-eyed, in a trance.

  ‘Let me put it to you, sir,’ said The Kid, ‘that a cymbal should go tingaling. It should clash. It should shimmer. In a nutshell it should shimmy, Jimmy. That cymbal is a dead cymbal. It goes whap. Whap-whap-whap-whap whap … ’

  Getting no response, The Kid moved along to the next musician. A girl with long fair hair who was playing the violin. She had her eyes tightly closed and The Kid could tell that she knew something about her instrument. There was a sweet tone coming out of it.

  ‘That’s cool,’ said The Kid, nodding. ‘You got the music in you. T
he Kid loves music. You’ve played before I’ll warrant.’

  ‘Shhh,’ said the girl, her voice a whisper. ‘I’m not supposed to talk to you.’

  ‘No? You church monkeys are a weird bunch, Yo-Yo.’

  ‘Yo-Yo Ma played the cello,’ said the girl. ‘I play the violin.’

  ‘Who was that other one then? The Chinese fiddler? Vanessa Doodah?’

  ‘Vanessa Mae?’

  ‘That’s her. My granddad said she could play the angels from out of the sky. But I think he just had the hots for her.’

  ‘Shush. Go away. I’m not allowed to talk.’

  ‘What’s your name, Yo-Yo?’

  ‘Charlotte.’

  ‘Hi there, Charlotte. I’m The Kid.’

  ‘I know who you are and I’m not allowed to talk to you. If Matt sees me he’ll punish me.’

  ‘That’s worse than schooldays,’ said The Kid and he whistled. ‘Oh my word, he is strict.’

  ‘He’s the only one that fully understands the word of God,’ said Charlotte, sounding like she was reading it from a book. ‘He gets visions and revelations and he explains them to us. Without him we’d be godless and lost.’

  ‘Yeah? Seems like there’s plenty of other youngers in London who get on just fine and dandy wine without him.’

  ‘That’s what they think.’

  ‘No point in arguing with a church monkey,’ said The Kid. ‘But why the zipperlips?’

  ‘Please. Don’t talk to me.’

  The Kid watched Charlotte’s fingers dancing on the strings of her violin. ‘What grade you at, Yo-Yo?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘That’s good, I think. You’re good. Not like these other monkeys. I reckon their organ-grinder wants his money back. I guess Matt, he’s the organ-grinder here.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You’re not the first, Yo-Yo. Sounds like me and Matt got a lot in common. You don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t know what he’s talking about, but apparently he knows what God is talking about. Everybody’s saying something and I can’t hear a word they’re saying.’