She could feel around her the movements of the people. She could feel them tightening around her. She was having a hard time breathing, as if in their movements they had also sucked up the air. She started now to hyperventilate and to fight with every breath for oxygen. They closed in on her and two lifted her beneath the arms and carried her toward the water. She was fighting now, moving arms and legs and she could feel her toes dragging in the sand, cold and wet and heavy.
They went into the water with her and to her side she saw a man begin to pour some dark liquid in among the current. The liquid riding on the surface like an oil and the smell of flowers coming to her but no flowers seen anywhere in the dark flow of the river.
“Now, brothers and sisters, you all know the process and the reasons why. We come here to complete this process and I hold you all responsible to witness and to support the wishes of salvation given to us here tonight. Mary May is a sinner and we will be the hand that cleans her of her sin.”
She felt John’s grip wrap around her neck and she was pushed forward and her head went down within the oily water and then was left there. She struggled, fighting in the inky black. She kicked and fought, but they held her on both sides and she could feel John’s nails digging and holding to her skin.
She came up sputtering. She spit away the water, and she had almost no time to scream. She felt his hands still there behind her and then his voice again. “This one fights against salvation. This one fights to keep her sin. And you see, brothers and sisters, that there is a demon in her. An evil that tries now to evade the good will we give to her, bestowed upon us by The Father. Well, she will learn there is no fighting. She will learn to accept her sin and then in that way lose it. She will learn that my hand and your hands are the tools of the prophet and the prophet’s own extended power.”
He dunked her again, and then held her. She could feel the liquid drift beneath her, she could feel the cold. She did not fight this time, fearing he would not let her back up again. But now, as the seconds ticked by, her body began to convulse and she could not control her own urge to breathe and to free her mouth and nostrils from beneath the liquid. She fought and he held her down below.
She woke in a dark room, gasping for air as if they had drowned her. Which she knew now they had almost done. Her clothes were still damp and she inched forward now, moving across the floor with hands and feet bound, inching toward the light.
JEROME TURNED HIS ANCIENT OLDSMOBILE OFF THE COUNTY road and down the double track that ran atop the bluff. Will had told the pastor all he could think to say, but he knew there were details and minutiae that he simply did not know, and he was realizing even after he’d told his story to Jerome that he had let both Eden’s Gate and The Father blind him. And as they came out along the bluff and saw the lake and the buildings of Eden’s Gate below across scattered stands of forest, Will knew that though he’d found the light to see Eden’s Gate for who they truly were, he was still blind to so much more.
“You tell me where,” Jerome said. “I still think this is craziness and I still think you might be crazy.”
Through the trees, with the Oldsmobile moving, Will saw fleeting glimpses of the buildings. He scanned ahead to plan some course for himself that would bring him down off the bluff and hide him as he went on foot to find Mary May and bring her back. “Go up here a ways and when you find cover stop the car.”
Jerome turned and raised himself up to better see the land below. “That’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“I have the rifle,” Will said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll keep them at a distance.”
Jerome pulled over then brought the car around. There was a grouping of short pine that sprouted from atop a nurse log. Jerome sat there for a little bit, then he cut the engine and looked across at Will. Jerome’s face was completely serious. “You know they have guns, too?”
Will just looked at him and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I heard it’s kind of their thing.”
“That worry you at all?”
“It only worries me if they start using them.”
“I can go with you,” Jerome said. “I certainly could help.”
“You are helping,” Will said. “If she’s down there, if they have her, if we can make it back here, we’re both going to need you ready to get us out of here.”
“Okay,” Jerome said. “Try not to get shot at.”
Will cracked the door then moved to get up and out of the seat. “It’s not like I haven’t been shot at before,” Will said.
“Getting shot at is fine and dandy,” Jerome said. “Getting shot is not. You remember that one and try to make it back here.”
Will closed the door. He carried his rifle and settled his hat down across his head. He had taken his hunting knife from within his bag, and he had loaded up his pockets with the .308 cartridges he’d purchased that same morning. He went down through the trees now and when he came to an opening that looked out toward the lake and Eden’s Gate beyond, he settled in and put the lens on them and watched to see who might be watching back.
SHE THOUGHT THE LIGHT AHEAD WAS DAYLIGHT, BUT THE CLOSER Mary May came to the sliver beneath the door the more she started to doubt that. She lay on the floor and with her hands behind her and her ankles bound she could only see the slightest movement of air there before the door. Bits of dust floated like protozoa in some languid current within the sea.
There was the sound now of echoed footsteps. They kept coming closer as if they were moving down a long and very empty hall. The steps came closer and her eyes bore down on the splinter of light that sat before her and soon she saw the shadow move across the opening then come to a stop in front of her door.
When the door came open the light was blinding and she clenched her eyelids together and tried to turn away. There was little escape to find and she rolled as far as her hands would let her and she lay there and watched the room come into focus. It was a room of standard size and on every wall she saw the writing of the sins. The seven of them repeated hundreds of times, each on a different set of faded, almost wax-looking paper pieces that had been pinned to the wall somehow.
Gluttony.
Lust.
Greed.
Pride.
Envy.
Wrath.
Sloth.
Mary May rolled and stared at them from where she lay, looking every scrawled word over. The papers jagged and misshapen where they were not pinned. She kept looking at them and then, startled and in a rush, she realized what the smell of this room had been. The metallic, almost vinegary tang of skins stretched one end to the other and pinned by the hundreds across the wall. Dark to light like every color of the human body.
“You shouldn’t worry,” Drew said. He stood at the door looking in. He waited as her eyes adjusted and her vision cleared.
She rolled now and looked to where he stood and she saw his eyes running over the walls then dropping to where she lay.
“In the wilderness after you fled into the forest John had wanted to kill you. He had wanted you to go away, to disappear. I asked him not to kill you. I asked him to spare you as we have been taught to spare all that see the truth.” Drew came forward into the room. He studied one of the skins a little way down the wall, then he turned to her. “This one,” he said, gesturing to the skin. “This one is my own.”
She looked to the wall and read the sin written there, Envy.
“The Father and John helped me to see that I was envious. That I had always been envious and that it would continue unless I accepted myself for who I was. They helped to strengthen me, and in the process they showed me how lost I had truly been.”