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What’re you doin? Abraham says.
But Ignatius ignores him and turns instead to the Vestal.
Amata, if you please, he says and gestures with an open palm for her to step into the gated grotto.
No, huh-uh, Abraham says. I ain’t here for no perverted sacrifices.
Moses rushes forwards and gets between the girl and the door in the gate. Meanwhile, Douglas Perry moves closer.
Wait, Ignatius says.
I’m gonna kill this thing, Abraham says and aims his rifle at the slug’s head.
Please wait, Ignatius says. He won’t hurt her.
That thing ain’t your parishioner any more, friar, Moses says. It don’t discriminate between holy and un.
I promise you, he says. He won’t hurt her. Amata, please.
He turns to the redhead with a look of longing.
Then she, the Vestal, produces a look of utmost peacefulness and brilliance – like a stage angel backlit with spotlights.
It’s all right, she says to Moses, putting her hand on the hand that holds the pistol and lowering it for him. He won’t hurt me. It’s all right. I’ll show you.
Moses does not trust her – trust isn’t what’s behind it. But the strange woman has a desire to prove herself at the mouth of death, and that’s something Moses respects. He will come between her and him who would make her a victim, but he is not one to come between any woman and the mode of life or of death she chooses for herself. He will not be held arbiter of such things, and he steps aside.
What’re you doin, Mose? Abraham asks, the rifle still aimed at the slug’s head.
Let it happen, Moses says. It’s her own say-so.
So Abraham follows his brother’s lead. The Vestal Amata steps into the grotto, and Ignatius closes the door behind her and locks it again.
And that’s when Moses Todd sees something he has never seen before in all his travels across the wide and fissured country.
*
The Vestal Amata steps towards the dead man Douglas Perry. She comes within two feet of him and offers herself to him, spreading her arms wide, palms up to the sky, head lowered in submission. The slug turns his gaze upon her, and for a moment everything stops. The two stand together, a wretched tableau, ancient beast and virgin sacrifice, devil and canoness, displayed behind black bars strung through with dead flowers, under the stony proscenium of the grotto. There they stand, like statues in a museum diorama – or a new station of the cross: holy horror rendered paralysed and dumb.
The slug looks at the Vestal, his eyes cloudy and curious. He seems confused by her presence, by the aggression with which she offers herself up to him. An embarrassment of riches for the cannibal dead. But his confusion quickly transforms to something else – and something else besides hunger too. For a moment it looks like deference – Moses believes for a second that he sees obeisance in the way Douglas Perry’s eyes drop to the hard-packed earth at the feet of the redheaded woman. But then Moses realizes it’s not even that, not even awed respect or fear but rather just indifference. The slug loses interest. The dead man Douglas Perry looks at the woman as he would with faint curiosity at empty clothes fluttering their sleeves on a clothesline in the middle of an abandoned yard. A momentary distraction before the resumption of a purposeless wandering.
And so the slug drops his eyes, turns away from the Vestal and takes a few shambling steps in the opposite direction.
What in the holy hell, Abraham exclaims.
What’s the matter with him? Moses asks Ignatius. You trained him? Is that what you did?
Moses has never heard of such a thing being done, but maybe the monk Ignatius has found a way.
Did you blind him? Moses asks of Ignatius, who stands, smiling proudly. He can’t see her? What did you do?
It isn’t him, Ignatius says finally.
What? What do you mean it ain’t him?
And then, as if illustrating the friar’s point, the slug Douglas Perry takes an interest in Moses himself, reaching at him with clawing fingers, stretching out one arm in desperate hunger through the bars.
It isn’t him, Ignatius says again. It’s her.
*
It was in a travelling sideshow that Ignatius discovered her. It was a mangy troupe of men who passed from place to place, seeking shelter and services in exchange for an opportunity to view their menagerie of freaks. The troupe travelled in a convoy of caged vans. They would park the vans in a row and open the back doors of each to reveal a slug or two behind welded metal bars. These slugs were monstrously transformed – some just remnants of animated bodies, and others surgically altered as if by a mad Frankenstein. There was one creature that was just a head, suspended in a large fishbowl and swaying back and forth from a harness made of belts, its mouth opening and closing like a Venus flytrap waiting for something edible to fly into it. There was a dead woman whose body was gone just below her shoulders, just a head, neck and a pair of arms to drag herself about. Another had an additional head stitched on the shoulder of a body that had had its arms removed. The two heads gnawed at each other, chewing away the flesh of the cheeks not in animosity so much as boredom. The arms had been removed, presumably so that the creature couldn’t simply rip off the added head. One playful van contained a dead child, a young boy dressed in a sailor suit. His cage was filled with severed hands which he chewed like a dog or gathered into piles or tossed about. One dead woman had multiple rotting breasts sewn all over her torso in imitation of a nursing sow and, in the same cage, there was a man with multiple penis lengths sewn together in a row so that he dragged around his penis like a tail, tripping over it with cartoon absurdity.
A bizarre and horrible exhibition of distorted humanity indeed – an antic and fleshy rococo delivered in metal boxes roving across the country. And she was one of them, the redhead, shut up in one of the vans with an emaciated slug who showed no interest at all in eating her. They had been wretched cohabitants for nine weeks before the troupe stopped at the mission and Ignatius found there his holy woman.
It was immediately clear to me, he says, that she is an offering from God Himself. The incarnation of His grace. A breathing, walking end to our suffering.
So he attempted to barter for her, trying to convince the leader of the troupe, a man named Fletcher, to trade her for supplies, shelter, meals, blessings, even some of his congregation willing to sacrifice themselves for the exchange of this imprisoned seraph. But Fletcher would not have it. The redhead was his prime attraction.
He was a greasy, spotted man with scabs and scars all over his body. He chewed on his own fingers as though he were himself part slug. But even though he smelled of foulness and pestilence, and even though he was oozing with abomination, he was among the horrid crew of the living.
She ain’t for sale, padre, Fletcher said. But you can take another glance at her on the house. Or for a sift through your medicine cabinet, I could arrange you a quick wick-dip in her. I know you’re a holy man and whatnot, but holy bangin holy’s gotta be a lawful act, don’t it?
So Ignatius cast them out of the mission and told them to move on. But he followed them and, three nights later, when Fletcher and his men were drunk and whoring in a compound near Yuma, he stole the woman away and brought her back here to stay in the mission with them.
Three days I waited, Ignatius says. Three days I followed. And when I acted, I left it to look as if she had managed to escape herself. I even had her run for a mile in the opposite direction in case they followed her tracks, though I don’t think they are hunters by nature. I didn’t want them to trace her back here.
They’ll come back, Moses says. Sooner or later. She’s too valuable to them. Even if they believe she’s run off, they’ll try this as a place for her to run to.
It’s been four weeks, Ignatius says, and they haven’t come back yet.
Could be they’re tryin other places firs
t. Could be they know that if she’s here she’ll be easy to get. But they’ll be back.
It makes no difference. She won’t be here.
Where’s she gonna be?
With you.
What Ignatius wants is for Moses to take the Vestal to someone he knows, someone who will know what to do with her, a high priest who oversees the largest citadel still operating in the country – a haven for the devout, and the devout are populous in these times.
I ain’t an escort by trade, Moses says. You don’t got enough to endow my bounty for that kind of work.
I’m not offering to pay you, Ignatius says.
Then what?
I’m asking for your service.
A favour?
Not a favour. A duty. An obligation has befallen you. These are the things a man of honour does, and I know you to be a man of honour.
You got it wrong. A man of honour I ain’t.
A man with a code then. They are much the same thing when there’s no one around to say which creed is honourable and which isn’t.
It occurs to Moses that just two days before he was seeking some purpose, some direction to their travel – a simple reason to be going one place as another. In these times, when all places and people seem distinguished only by the most ephemeral and muzzy of boundaries, when the peaceful walking dead begin to look like the salvationed and the huddled living the damned – then does a man seek for something beyond pills and shelter and woman comfort, then does he seek for objective, for vocation.
But my brother, Moses says, holding up the last weak barrier to what he already sees as his given mission.
Your brother isn’t taking her, Ignatius says. You are. You have the capacity to protect her – even from your own blood.
Moses felt himself steeped in blood, all kinds of blood, the family kind and otherwise.
Where is this citadel? he asks.
And the monk Ignatius responds:
Colorado.
That night, lodged in the stable crib, Moses sees his brother Abraham lying back on his straw bed, scraping at his teeth with a wood splinter. Abraham hums a tune Moses doesn’t recognize, and Moses wonders how much of his brother’s music is just the creeping harmonic wastage of his own poxy mind.
We’re leavin tomorrow, Moses says.