The Theocracy - The Blackened Cross - 4. Chapter 4

Four days ago...

When he was a boy, Brad loved to draw. It was the first thing he could remember loving to do. He remembered the moment he realized you could make anything so long as you had the color in your hand. With yellow you could make the sun, with blue the ocean. He’d been four or five then, crouching on the floor in the bedroom while his parents screamed hateful things at each other in the living room.

This same thought came back to haunt him as an adult with a slight update: with ink you could draw anything. Buildings, spires, a city. You could give it shape, give it a name. Make it yours.

He’d been drawing all morning. What started out as simple lines and curves turned into large monoliths and sprawling streets that crisscrossed in some places and veered away in others. The lines that ended abruptly at the edge of the page resumed on the next page, pinned in place so that the two edges connected. The simple shapes became more defined, more detailed the more he drew. What might initially seem like random black blotches became the shadows that gave the structures he drew their three-dimensional shape. Elaborate tunnels twisted into canals. Human bodies hung from hooks and pulleys, painting the architecture red with their viscera. One could stare at his masterpiece for several minutes and continue to pick out numerous details, each segment revealing a new part of the narrative, exploring a new sector of the city.

Drawing is great. You’re good at it, but it’s not enough.

“Stop,” he said to his empty office. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He drew with a frantic, manic energy. The charcoal felt greasy in his hands, the sweat oozing from his pores turning it into tar. If only he could somehow climb into the paper, into the city of Inferno itself.

Not enough, not enough, not enough…

“I said fuck off, Mom and Dad,” he muttered, hunkered protectively over the latest installment in his growing masterpiece.

His cell phone rang.

Cursing, he dropped what remained of the nub of charcoal he’d been using. It wasn’t Jaffe - I called in today, told Pamela I wasn’t feeling well; Mother knows it’s time I start cashing in some of that PTO - and it wasn’t Heidi - she won’t be back from her Pilates class with Maggie for another hour. It took him a moment to realize he didn’t recognize the number at all, though it did have a Roc City area code. The call was coming to his work phone and he could only think of a few people who had this particular number.

“Hello?” he said in a shaky voice. He felt the nerves in his feet bunch up. Earlier the room had felt like a sauna, his skin perspiring with the effort to get the image of Inferno inscribed on the back of his eyeballs out on paper; now he was shivering, pecs hard against the sweat-soaked cotton of his tank top. His balls shriveled up, turning into raisins. He recognized the feeling from when he’d first picked up the Zippo. The Zippo that was now tucked away safely in the safe in the basement like a murder weapon.

The line crackled in his ear. Chimney elevator music popped through and then turned back to static, the connection dropped.

You’re losing your fucking mind, Anderson, he told himself. Ever since the day you found the lighter you’ve been hearing and seeing shit. Heidi keeps telling you to see a doctor…

“Mr. Anderson,” a voice croaked on the phone.

The phone slipped from his fingers like water. Bits of plastic went everywhere the second it made contact with the floor. The damned thing landed face up, the screen a blackened web of cracks. There goes another two hundred dollars flashed through his mind in an offhanded sort of way. Another voice told him the voice he’d heard had been nothing more than a prank call. If it was something else, a force from the Void reaching out to play with his mind, then this meant he was dealing with an issue simple elbow grease and money could not fix. Such issues had a tendency to spread like a plague, affecting those around you. The next thing one knew there was a quarantine situation on hand and Theocracy agents were on the scene.

My career would be ruined. What would Heidi and Little Annie do? Good Mother Sophia, help us…And here he was praying, he’d let himself become so spooked.

“This is not a fucking dream, Mr. Anderson,” the voice on the phone said with real vehemence. The voice of a man, stained with cancer from years of smoking. “You know that already, you just don’t know how to let shit go. Quit wastin’ time and pull the panties out of your ass. Chokmah chose you.”

“Why did he choose me?” Brad asked in a choked voice. It occurred to him, looking down at the ground, that the phone should not be working. The square battery rested at the toe of his shoe.

The voice chuckled. There was nothing friendly in the sound. “Beats me, kiddo. Maybe one day you’ll get to ask him. First, let me ask you this: Do you want to join The Sacred Brotherhood of the Blackened Cross?”

To Brad Anderson this was like being asked if he wanted to meet Harrison Ford, the man who embodied Han Solo. “Yes,” he whispered. Tears of joy graced his cheeks.

“Good,” the voice on the phone said with an audible grin. “Before we continue this conversation there’s something I need you to do for me first.”

The voice gave him his task.

“What’s your name?” Brad asked the voice.

The voice took a long time answering. Then it said, “You can call me Leonidas.”

…

“I always wanted a dog, but never really got the chance to get one,” he told the pock-marked volunteer. An hour later he found himself cruising past the farmland outside the choked streets of Roc City, heading towards the Anderson birthplace of Tootulu. As a teenager up until his college days he’d told himself he would move far away from the small town he’d always hated, but as it turned out moving to the city was far enough. The only times Daniel and Martha Anderson had ever ventured into the city was the wedding, the day little Annie was born and her birthdays.

Leading the newly claimed beagle into the trees behind his parent’s house, he recalled that what he’d told the shelter volunteer had been true: he had always wanted a dog. Once he’d been brave enough to ask Martha Anderson this question and he’d never ask again. You know what he would do to that dog, she’d said, shooting a look at her husband’s turned back. It was the only time she ever dared to look at him directly, even when he was old and slow with arthritis.

The deeper he went into the trees the more the aroma of the trees and dampened earth pulled at him. Once upon a time these woods had been his church, a place he could go to commit his sins in private. He would go in deep enough where no one could see the smoke; when he reached the cairns he’d built for the forest souls he’d sacrificed in affectation to Chokmah. It seemed in the twenty years since he’d walked down the winding paths that led through the trees like veins that the woods had not changed at all. The trees still stood in their same position; the autumn leaves came together to form a carpet of fire that crackled beneath his feet.

He took his time finding his way back to his church: the cabin his grandfather had built when Daniel Anderson had been a child. The trees around it were overgrown, the windows dusty. Here the shadows were long and murky, the border between reality and a demimonde. Sylvester the beagle snuffed at the leaves. After days of being stuck in a cage that smelled of hot dog piss, his doggy senses were probably on overdrive.

In his pocket the lighter glowed. It, too, remembered this place with a particular fondness. So much happened here. So much will happen again.

The key into the cabin was under the threadbare doormat just as he knew it would be. He smiled at the tree-shaped air freshener that dangled from the key ring. He raised it to his nose, a superstition remembered from a long-ago age. He closed his eyes and inhaled. He could still smell the pine; it was faint but there.

The hinges groaned in protest. The first wedge of light kissed the shadows inside the cabin. Already he could smell the dust, the cobwebs, and tobacco. He could hear Daniel Anderson’s loud guffaws as he slapped playing cards on the kitchen table while Kenny Rogers and Barbara Mandrell played on the boombox that stood vigil from the window. The subject of Brad joining his father and the boys from the factory for late night card games at the cabin was one of the few times Brad’s mother had spoken out against his father. As with any other protest, Martha had come around to see things differently soon enough.

The place was dusty and needed airing out, but for tonight it would serve his purposes. While Sylvester gnawed happily on the pig ear Brad had picked up from PetSmart, he went out back to the shed to juice up the generator and grab what he needed. He laid the tools out on a blue tarp where they would be dry in case it started raining.

The chime of his phone startled him from his stupor.

It was Heidi with a text: How does takeout sound for dinner? I really don’t feel like cooking tonight :(.

Brad felt a throb of annoyance. What he wanted for dinner was the last thing on his mind right now. He hovered undecidedly on the back step. Except for the dog, he might as well have been the last man on earth. Suddenly his life in the house on the cul-de-sac seemed so far away. That throb of annoyance slowly simmered into guilt and lethargy.

What am I doing here? Why am I out here in Tootulu, in my dad’s farm, with a random dog I just adopted from the shelter? I should be getting ready to leave the office at work, about to return home from my family…

For a wonderful dizzying moment, it seemed the spell he found himself under would break. His awareness was restored. He remembered the last time he felt this sense of restoration: the day after he’d been attacked on the church, when Heidi held him. He found himself clawing back towards the memory, towards the light. This was wrong. This was all so very wrong. The dog shouldn’t be there, and neither should he.

The lighter glowed in his hand, warm to the touch.

He didn’t remember reaching into his pocket to pull it out, but it was there.

Its warmth gave him strength where he was weak.

It offered him words encouragement, drowning out the whispers of doubt: You know what you need to do. You know what your purpose is. All it takes is a single spark to light a flame...

The lighter went back in his pocket where it was safe, where he could still feeling beat like a heart against his thigh. “C’mon, Sly,” he said. Already he had a nickname for the animal. The little boy who’d always wanted a dog but never got to have one that still lived deep down inside began to sob quietly. “We must all make sacrifices,” he said as the dog bounded happily over to him.

“Ready to go for another walk?” he asked the beagle in a child’s voice. “Yeah, I got a nice surprise for you.”

One last trek through the dandelion field before the lamb was led to the slaughter.