He began to work again, and she felt him move the needle down then bring it up again as he formed the letter V.
“Sometimes Bliss works to hold you inside your head,” he said. “I’ve seen it do strange things to people. I’ve seen them hallucinate, and to disappear within the high. There is a common experience that they all tell me about afterwards, and that is of them looking up from down below. They are looking down a long path, or they are looking up as if from out of a well and if they can make it to the top they can make it back. But many have said to me they feared they might never make it.” He ran the needle down the V again then brought it back up again. “You will make it, Mary May. I can see that in you. I can see you will be fine. And once you realize your sin. Once you see how it has been brought forth onto your skin, you will understand it better and you will come and ask for it to be severed from the body.”
He bent and pressed the needle into her once again. He had started on the Y. The pain she felt was more acute and she looked around the room now and began to remember the reason she was even kneeling here. Her brother Drew had set this up. She thought of him now. She thought of Will. She wondered where they were. She wondered whether Will was coming for her.
There was pain now like she had not felt before. A dull, almost everlasting pain that seemed to hover across the top of her breast and to slip down and wrap itself around her bones. She turned and looked down on the needle, and she saw the word had taken shape. ENVY. Red and swollen was the word and her own blood rose red from among the black.
“Almost done,” John said. He moved back again and wiped the cloth across her chest. He leaned outward and whistled in self-congratulation at his work. She looked again. The letters were two inches high and they spanned the center of her upper chest.
He wiped her again. Then, after appraising her a moment, he bent and pushed the needle once more across the wording, tracing each letter as he went. Tears were forming in her eyes and now she began to think of her hands and of her feet and there was a desire in her to get away, far, far away from here. Will had told her not to trust John. He had told her she might need to run and to get away. But he had also said he would come for her and she looked now to the door behind which John had placed his stool. The door was open and though she wanted Will and her brother to appear there they did not. She was still watching the hallway beyond when she began to hear the siren. Now, pausing in his work, John’s head turned to better hear the siren, too. He stood and looked about, running his eyes out on the hallway and the place where the siren seemed to grow only louder.
He took a step out, and he was standing there in the hallway now. Mary May looked down at her chest. The letters were bleeding and as she tried to stand she faltered and had to reach a hand out and support herself with the stool. She remembered now about the knife tucked away beneath her calf and she bent and put a hand to the floor and, almost in disbelief, pulled up the knife and held it in her hand.
She could barely get her feet beneath her, but she knew she had to. She had to run. She had to find her brother and she knew now almost without a doubt that whatever Will had tried to do, escape or find her brother, he had failed at one or maybe even both. She put a hand out, tried for balance. John had disappeared, and she looked now to the open door. She tried to get one foot in front of the other, but both her feet seemed to be made of gelatin and her legs felt as wobbly as rubber bands.
It was as she tried to get her feet together that she kicked the vial of powder and saw it roll and then come to a stop at the edge of the room where the wall came down and met the floor. She stumbled toward it. Each movement pulling at her freshly tattooed skin. Her chest from her breasts to her neck felt like it was afire but she kept moving, keeping her eye ahead and on the little vial that now might offer her the only chance she had.
She came to the wall as if she had not expected to come to it so soon. She hit hard and slid, her one open hand bracing for the floor. In her other hand, she held the knife and now as she came to a rest, she moved her fingers outward and found the vial and brought it to her teeth. It was stoppered with a rubber cork and she bit at it then spit the cork away.
The siren was still blaring overhead, but she could hear between its howling roll that there were footsteps coming closer. She pushed herself up, and using the wall to steady herself she came to the door just as John returned.
“Where are you going?” he said. He was smiling, as if this were all some game she’d made for them, the siren blaring and the grin across his face.
The smile ended as soon as he saw the knife she was holding in her hand and, caught off guard, he took a step away. She jumped and landed on him, bringing him to the floor. She held the knife in one unsteady hand. For a moment only she thought to use it. But that moment passed almost as fast as it had come. Instead she bent and with her other hand she dumped the powder out, shaking it over him and across his mouth and nostrils. She watched the capillaries in his eyes bloom and expand, as if a star had burst suddenly into stardust and thrown itself across the sky.
She pushed away and rose now, running on legs that felt like rubber for the doorway far ahead.
WILL HAD TIME ONLY TO REACH THE HOUSE THEN THROW DREW inside before he heard the siren. The whoop of it like some air raid signal Will had only heard long ago as a kid.
He left Drew to sit there with his bound legs across the back hallway floor, his spine against the wall. The house was the same as he had left it, and he crossed now and went again to the window and parted the shades. Out on the road he could see church members moving but they had, at least not yet, figured out which way the threat was coming from. Will turned and looked toward the guards far down at the gate. He saw that two remained and the other two were advancing up the road now, moving toward him.
When Will turned back again, he could see Holly there in the middle of the road. She had likely been the one to sound the alarm and he had to give it to her in some way, she had seen what was going on with him, maybe before Will had seen it himself. Now, as he watched her, he saw her point back to the place she had seen him and Drew last, then she pointed roughly in his direction, signaling which way he’d gone.
“Fuck,” Will said. He let the shades fall and went back through the house and stared down at Drew, and it seemed like Drew was laughing at him. “I’m not dead yet,” Will said.
He took the .38 from his waist, then spun the cylinder and looked in on the bullets. Then he put the gun back in his pants and crossed back through the house. He had seen propane tanks in one place or another on the property. He went to the stove and turned the dial on the range then watched the flame bloom red before turning blue.
He looked around with a wildness and he had to tell himself to calm his nerves and rein himself in a bit. He had to tell himself he was going to get out of here, that it wasn’t over yet. He left the flame going on the range, and he turned and started to go through the cupboards and all the drawers. He knew these people, and he knew their minds, their basic values.
When he came to the emergency candles he brought one up and looked it over, then he bent again and looked some more. When he found the cans of Sterno he set them on the counter. He took one from inside the packaging and pried off the top and looked at the flammable pink gelatin within. Not pausing any more he took a candle and dipped the wick through the flame then brought it to the open sterno. The flame bloomed almost purple. He looked around then brought the Sterno to the bathroom and closed the door.
He came back out of the bathroom and glancing down now he could see Drew’s mood had changed. He was watching Will now with caution. Will took the .38 out again. He flipped the safety off, and he looked from Drew to where the flame still danced atop the range. He was adding time and distance up in his head wondering how they might even make it out of the house, or even up the hill without being shot somewhere along the way.