The Devil's Wife, page 17
Nina kneels beside her cubby and grabs her knapsack. Everything important, everything the nuns have allowed her to keep- her daily missal, her Bible, an earring she found in the garden, a pair of jeans, a sweater, and a map of the world. This is all she needs, and the blessing of Jesus of course, and the girl in her dreams.
“ Take me with you, please.”
Nina swings around, startled. Sarah, fully dressed, stares at her, wide eyed.
“Shh… Get back in bed.”
Sarah whispers,” please take me with you.”
"I'm just going to the bathroom.”
"No you're not.”
"Yes, I am.”
“I’ll wake-up the whole room if you won’t take me,” Sarah says in a louder voice.
"Shush! I don't have time for this.”
"I know! Just take me with you. It will be easier.”
“Shhh…Ok…Ok…Just get your coat and be very quiet about it.”
Soundlessly, she puts her coat on. They pause before opening the door, and bow to the wooden crucifix on the wall. “ May, the Lord be with us,” Nina whispers.
Outside in the garden the air is as cold as winter glass. They hurry through the shadows to a foggy circle of lamplight. Nina puts her hands deep in the pockets of her parka. Sarah holds tightly to her elbow. The milk cows are shuffling in the barn, the chickens rustling in the shed, deer snorting in the tall grass, a small creature - a mole, maybe or a mouse - scurrying along the top of the wall. Sarah inhales the dusty woodstove smoke, and grins up at the star studded night. Oh, the night! She has not been out in it since the accident. A train echoes throughout the river valley below, its whistle blaring upward to the sky, like a celebration ringing in their own secret holiday.
Suddenly, a shaft of light spreads across the garden as a door from the convent opens. Nina and Sarah bend low, leaping over the garden rows. Nina can picture Sister Arthur's furious green eyes, her fists on her huge hips. Where do you think you’re going? I know where you’re going and it's NOT the nice place!
Nina pulls Sarah along the wall until she finds the opening and together they slip through the bricks to the other side. They run as fast as they can. The night is bright; the grass high, cutting across their faces. They do not stop nor can they. It is like a riptide pulling them downward.
In the distance, below the steep incline, the stone cottage emits smoke from its chimney. The girls run halfway down the hill towards it, and then duck behind a tree. They peek out at the convent above looming like an old, disgruntled giant. Fluttering up on the hill next to it are the shadowy figures of three nuns, their habits blowing out around them, the sound of their voices sifting down to Nina and Sarah.
“ We’ll wait for them to go back in,” Nina says softly to Sarah.
Plumes of misted breath roll out from their open mouths. The night fades to a thin sad gray.
“ You think they’ll put our faces on a milk carton?” Sarah whispers.
“ No.”
“ Why not?”
“ Because they have too much to hide.”
The sky begins to blacken, and from the west, a low rumbling echoes across the winter night.
“ What’s that sound?” Sarah clutches onto Nina’s shoulder.
“ Nothing.” Nina looks up the hill. The nuns are gone. “ We better get going.”
The rumbling comes again.
“ That’s thunder.”
“ It’s nothing- just a tree falling somewhere. Something stupid like that. Let’s start walking.”
“ That was thunder,” Sarah says.
“ Don’t be silly. It doesn’t thunder in the winter.”
A fine, dry snow swirls and briefly hangs suspended above them as the wind seems to hold its breath.
“ See," Nina says,” it’s just some snow.”
Lightning flashes- the snow flickering in the inconsistent light transforms their faces into haunted masks. They look at each other and scream.
“Ahhhhhh.”
Nina starts to run, turns, goes back to grab Sarah’s hand.
By the time they reach the cottage the hard driving snow is drifting against the house, the boughs of the pine trees bending against the wind. Nina finds a basement window and pushes it open.
“ We can stay here till it stops.”
Sarah looks down through the casement window and at the dark basement below.
She shakes her head. “ I don’t think so.” She backs away until she is under the swaying pines.
Lightning flares again. Brilliant bolts sear the darkness; eerie silhouettes leap and writhe around them.
Sarah runs to the open window.
“ Ok. How do I get down?”
“ Just jump!”
Sarah hesitates until another thunderclap comes from the sky shaking the ground beneath them. She lets go, falls downward.
Nina lands beside Sarah on the basement floor. Sarah whimpers from the cold. Nina takes Sarah’s wool scarf, winds it tightly around Sarah's neck, carefully crossing the ends over her chest, and then wraps her arms around her.
“ Are you warmer, now?”
“ It’s a little better. Thank you.”
All color burns out of the night leaving only the blazing sky, the sparkling white of the snow, lightening, and the ink black shadows projected on the basement walls.
“ Is this what Sister Arthur means by God’s wrath?” Sarah asks.
It surprises Nina that Sarah even knows what the word wrath means. She, on the other hand, is gripped by a different conviction, that the storm has some special meaning for her; a sign, an omen that will be revealed not by Sister Arthur’s furious God, but by the little girl in her dreams.
“ Sister Arthur uses God’s wrath, because she wants us to feel guilty. Why would God want to scare us?”
Another blast of wind slams into the cottage, rattles the loose panes of the basement window, and whistles down the furnace’s chimney. The two girls huddle tightly together. Their exhausted bodies press against the damp stone wall.
“ Can we pray?” Sarah whispers.
Nina clears her throat.
“ Our Father who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name,
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done in earth
As it is in heaven…"
Above their heads deep inside the hole in the wall, the thing moves noiselessly towards them. Delicately, methodically it runs its razor-like claws over decayed rats, squirrels, a dead cat, until it comes to the soft, rotting flesh of a human head- Rob Welles. With its front claws it shreds the flesh from around his brows, and then in machinelike efficiency scoops the tongue out of his mouth and sucks it down like it is a roasted red pepper. The thing brushes the yellowing swirling curls aside and continues eating.
"And forgive us our trespassers
As we forgive them that trespass against us.”
Nina’s voice begins to fade as she and Sarah drift into sleep.
The fragrance of death fills the thing’s lungs until it smells something new, something live. It creeps closer to the opening to see what is out there.
Chapter Two
The sound of the chapel bell is a shrill torture to Mother Mary Grace. Every ding and every dong reverberating through her head like a knife through her ears. Perhaps the casings need oiling. Long ago her father had told her that church bells had the power to calm the tempests, protect children from lightening, keep away sickness, and drive the demons out of the air.
All the nuns descend the shallow staircase leading to the chapel- each genuflecting before the altar. As Mother Mary Grace leads the way, a fly lands on her forehead. The cool flickering of its wings beats against her temple, and summons voices - voices of old friends, little children she once played with long ago.
You go first, squeeze its eyeballs out, they shriek in unison as she holds on to the frog. Squeeze its tummy Mary Grace, puhleeze, they implore. She presses both her thumbs into the frog’s stomach until its guts shoot out of its mouth and its eyeballs pop out of its sockets. Ewwww, they scream. Gross, they snicker. It’s Becky Stallworth that rats on her. It’s Becky that gets her sent to the principal’s office. It’s Becky, that white trash slut. She is probably living in some shitty track house now, knocked up dozens of times, with a hoard of snot nosed grandchildren hanging on each sagging tit.
She would like to squeeze Becky’s fat tummy till her eyeballs pop out.
The fly leaves her forehead and buzzes into the open space of the vestibule. Mother Mary Grace shakes her head to rid herself of the memories and tries to focus on the problem of the runaways. What should she tell her congregation?
Recently, she has begun to view her life as a movie even though she hasn’t seen one in over forty years. It seems to always be a depressing one; right now it is a Biblical melodrama starring Charlton Heston as God. For the hundredth time the same old story line. God cast in the role of the all-knowing continually upset parent. And because of this, (the Sisters of Passion) need to atone for the sins of mankind. The fact that these young girls, these runaways, might freeze to death will somehow be an example and indeed a justification of how much the Sisters have failed Him.
She bites her tongue, resisting this line of thought. She looks over at the faces of the nuns then up at the fly now buzzing around the large stained-glass window near the ceiling- a colorful depiction of Christ’s body being lowered into his Mother’s arms.
She stands at the pulpit looking out over her Sisters, takes a deep breath, raises her chin, and speaks.
“I know we all have questions as to what has happened this evening. We must only think about this- compared to the One, who created the universe, we must remember we are all His children. Just because we do not understand what happens to us does not mean God does not understand. Now, as was reported to me by Sister Arthur, two of our little ones are missing-”
The fly on the stained-glass window buzzes louder, spinning on its back, tapping its little feet against the face of the Virgin. It is distracting Mother Mary Grace. She tries not to look at it.
Instead she thinks back more than forty years before to a fly buzzing around her grandmother’s television set.
It was Christmas Eve, the Apollo 8 astronauts about to broadcast live pictures as they orbited the moon. Her dying grandmother lies in bed, a bluish light from the television set casting the room into an eerie glow. It felt to the young Sister Mary Grace like a grotto carved out of an iceberg. She wasn’t sure her grandmother could even see the images much less understand what was happening.
Her sister, Rachel, and Rachel's 6 year old daughter, Celeste, were there as well.
The screen got fuzzy, then sharpened to reveal a colorless, scarred moonscape. When the astronauts pointed their camera up away from the lunar horizon and toward the earth, they abandoned their usual technical language in favor of the poetry of Genesis. “ And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you-all of you on the good earth.”
The fly in that moment walked across the television screen.
"Look Nana, there's a fly on the moon," Celeste said in her high pitched voice.
Staring now up at the fly doing dive bombs into the stained-glass, Mother Mary Grace looks down at the Sisters, and thinks their habits could easily double as space suits.
She gazes transfixed at the image of Christ in his mother’s arms and feels certain the entire glass mural is swaying. She tries to pretend it is just a movie and nothing really is moving. Or maybe not. Maybe it is swaying and there will be no prayer she can perform that will prevent the chapel’s imminent demise.
Where is God now when you need him most? Off in the corner sulking- the offended parent who continually needs to be flattered and mollified- and those ungrateful children of his - humans - who spoil the world for everyone and everything by having once chosen curiosity over obedience. Why should human’s naughtiness have surprised God? Why the hell did he give humans curiosity and free will if he had not intended for them to use it? Of course the little ones wanted out. No wonder they ran away. Didn’t all of them want their freedom?
She gazes out over the nuns faces again. Their cheeks and eyes painted with the light from the stained-glass window. All her astronauts ready for their flight. The glass sways again- the mother’s arms clasping tighter around her dead son’s waist- his open wound oozing blood.
“So to the crew of Apollo 8 I’d like to wish you Merry Christmas.” She looks at the startled nuns faces staring up at her and hears Charlton Heston’s booming voice.
Ten…nine…
The fly bangs against Christ’s face. Lightning flashes, crackles and dances over the glass. The illumination strikes its own path, bending around corners, filling the vestry and pews with a stark purple, orange brilliance. Her astronauts hold on to their seats.
Eight…seven…six…
Thunder echoes above, snow slashes the stained-glass window in sheets, the wind shaking the building to its core. The astronauts, the nuns, look up at the ceiling like nervous statues.
Five…four…
Something is moving in the air above them. The stained-glass buckles and heaves like a tectonic shift in an earthquake.
Three…two…
A blinding flash of lightning.
One!
The stained-glass splits, careening downward on the nuns.
The fly grows into a large dark winged figure and soars through the opening into the night sky.
Claps of thunder reverberate through the chapel roof, rattling the sacred statues below. From the widening hole in the wall, a violent gust of snow and wind sweeps down to the vestry extinguishing all the candles and capsizing the tabernacle.
The stained-glass window is cracked right down the center separating the grieving Virgin Mother from her crucified Son. The intricate patterns of glass hold the fraying strips of lead together momentarily as they hang in the breeze.
Agnes wants to warn Theresa to get out of the way, but instead finds herself rooted to her seat staring up at the dazzling wall of color as it dislodges from its frame and tumbles downward.
The glass falls in pieces over the pews where the nuns sit. Most of the sister’s manage to duck down between the wooden seats. The thud as it hits- the shattering of the glass, the shards splintering like shrapnel over them, sends shrieks and cries across the room.
Agnes is the only one that does not scream- the only one for that matter who does not move. Her eyes remain fixed on the opening in the wall and the winged figure in the sky.
The lightning plays itself out and the chapel plunges into darkness.
“Is this an earthquake?” Agnes hears someone whisper.
The fragile twisted glass frame clangs against the pew. She reaches her hands up to feel its jagged contour. When it remains where it is, she knows it is safe to move.
Whimpers fill the room. There is the crunch of glass underfoot as the nuns begin to walk towards the exit. Agnes makes her way to the bank of votive candles, finds a match underneath and lights one.
“ Thank God, it wasn’t the Big One,” Sister Arthur says.
Sister Agnes looks around the room; the statues, the altar, pieces of glass everywhere. No, this is not the Big One. Perhaps this is not even a major seismic event. What she saw in the sky is way more threatening than tectonic plates chafing against one another.
“Are you alright?” Theresa asks as Agnes picks shavings of glass from Theresa’s forehead.
“ I’m fine, stay still.” With steady precision she removes the slivers from Theresa’s face.
“ Did you see it?”
“ See what?”
“ The creature in the sky with wings. Did you see it?”
Chapter Three
Usually she dreams in black and white but this one is in vivid color. There’s a Merry-Go-Round and the horses are painted a bright red, orange and purple. The chariots are golden and she is riding the biggest, whitest horse with wings as wide as a heron’s. Her friend sits right in back of her holding on to her hair as they swerve and careen from cloud to cloud.
When she starts to wake, she struggles against it, trying to stay in this fantastic dream.
There is an odd sound coming from somewhere she cannot identify.
She tells herself it is only the sound of the carousel in her dream. Or maybe it is just the” whoosh” of the horse she is flying. There is nothing to be scared of. She opens one eye and looks around the room.
The memory from the night before comes rushing in - how brilliant the sky was, the sudden storm, finding this basement for shelter, and Sarah who insisted on tagging along. She reaches around to feel for Sarah, but nothing is there. She squints into the impenetrable shadows, cocks her head and listens.
A rustling moaning sound disturbs the stillness.
“ Sarah, is that you?”
A vague hissing, scrapping noise follows the moan. The room is pitch-black. Above her a window covered by snow provides little relief from the damp gloomy darkness of the basement.
“ Sarah!” she yells. “ Sarah!”
Nina takes a deep breath, composing herself. It is stupid to scream again. What if there are people in the house and they hear her? What if Sarah is just playing a trick on her and hiding in some corner? Six year olds could be such colossal pains.
“ Sarah, stop fooling around. I know you’re here. This is no longer funny.”
A dry, desiccated sound, like old withered leaves crunching under the weight of something crawls nearer.
“ Ok…I’m laughing. You got me. Game over. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
The muted echo of her own forced laughter comes back to her.
“Sarah, you’re scaring the heck out of me. Please stop this. Please.”
