I will not let them down.
As I make my way back through the gloom of the orphanage toward the dorm, there is a conflicting storm brewing within me. An inner struggle between light and dark, each vying for authority, for command.
I climb the gloomy stairs, enter the long, unlit hallway. Wary of shadows.
I step faster.
Ahead, I focus on the thin bar of light beneath the closed dormitory doors. As I get closer, I hear muted voices, and take comfort in the idea of being back with the other orphans. I place a hand on the cool handle and pause, thinking about my conversation with Andrew, the struggle between light and dark. If embracing the light makes me a man of faith, what would embracing the dark make me?
The answer is simple.
Just a man.
I push inward on the heavy door. Orange lantern light floods through the opening. Someone calls out my name, and I smile.
Let the darkness come.
Part Three
The Storm
31
I’M CHOKING.
The smoke is thick and black. The heat all around is so intense that it feels as if my skin is being cooked, my insides boiled.
No one is screaming because everyone is dead. My mother. My father.
I should have climbed out my own bedroom window when I had the chance, but I had to see Mother’s face one more time.
Now I sit with her corpse, her heavy, limp head cradled in my lap, in order to say goodbye. I stroke her hair; tell her I love her . . .
But I take too much time.
When I finally leave her （gently resting her head on the wood-planked floor） and stand up, it’s into a cloud of heated, swirling gray ash. I instinctively inhale, and the hot smoke burns my throat like acid.
Hacking, I drop back to the floor and begin to crawl. My vision is blurred with tears, the air opaque. I don’t know if I’m going toward the front door or deeper into the house. In mere minutes, the entire structure has gone up in flames.
With reaching hands I grip a doorframe. I crawl through to more smoke and even more intense heat. Not the front door, then. Not escape. No, this is my parent’s room. Still, there’s hope. There is a large window in here that’s easily opened. Mother always joked about the devil crawling through it at night to darken her dreams.
I keep crawling forward until I find the wall, place my hands on it, begin moving down toward the window. I know I’m in the right place because my parents’ bed is behind me, and the window is set in the wall next to it.
I don’t want to stand again, so I lift my hands as I move on my knees along the wall. Searching for the window frame, for the glass, for fresh air.
I search further and further . . . until I reach the corner of the room.
I’ve passed it.
Impossible!
I’m crying now, and it’s getting harder to breathe. The flames must have seen me come in here because they’ve followed me—giddy and murderous—through the open door. As they climb the walls I hear their laughter.
Taunting me. Mocking me.
They leap to the bed in a furious arc and begin to feast on the handmade quilt, the cotton sheets. The stuffed mattress.
The back of my shirt catches fire and I jump to my feet, holding my breath, slapping the wooden wall in search of a window I cannot find. That, perhaps, no longer exists.
My hair is on fire. My scalp burns and sizzles. I begin to scream as I smell myself cook—my eyeballs pop and liquify, my charred skin peels away. I collapse, and the fire eats me to the bones . . . .
*
When I wake, my breathing is fast, my throat bone dry. I’ve kicked my bedding completely off my cot and I’m drenched in sweat. I take long, deep breaths, relishing the cool air. The life of it.
The dormitory is dark, but the silver moonlight coming through the windows give the room a soft, hazy glow.
“Bad dream?”
I gasp, twist over in my bed to see Simon right next to me.
Standing over my bed.
He looks down at me, head cocked slightly to one side. His face is a deep shadow. An abyss.
I swallow and nod. “The usual,” I say.
My history of nightmares is well-known by the others; they are something I’ve been afflicted with since the day my parents died. It was a serious concern for the priests when I first arrived, but gradually my night terrors became accepted, and now not even the other orphans pay it much mind when I wake up screaming, clutching at my throat, or cursing at a nighttime visitor whose face I can never recall.
His cool hand touches my forehead, then strokes my damp hair. “You want a glass of water? I’ll fetch it for you.”
I would like nothing more . . . but I have no intent to ask anything of Simon. He isn’t the friend I remember. Truthfully, he sickens me. The touch of his cold hand on my head makes my skin crawl. “I’m fine,” I say, trying to keep the repulsion from my voice. “Go back to bed.”
Simon takes a step backward, and the void of his face brightens when struck by moonlight. What my mother used to call the light of the dead.
“You’ve always been good to me, Peter,” he says. His voice is not a whisper, but he speaks quietly, the words meant only for me. “I won’t forget that.”
I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.
Simon turns to the window, stares out into the night.
My breath catches when I see a shadow cross his face, as if something broke the flow of moonlight through the window. Something passing by outside—quickly, silently, in the night.
I want to speak, to yell in alarm, to question what I think I saw . . . but the words won’t come. I’m frozen. I’m terrified.
Simon, perhaps sensing my fear, turns and smiles down at me.
His teeth are silver, his eyes black buttons.
“Goodnight, Peter,” he says. “Sweet dreams.”
32
ANDREW SITS JUST BEHIND, AND TO THE LEFT OF, THE altar. On the altar’s opposite side, also seated, are Father White and Brother Johnson. Poole’s chair, next to Andrew, is currently empty. Poole himself stands at the small lectern, contemplating the upturned faces of the orphans.
“As believers in God,” he intones solemnly, “we do not fear Death’s sting. Like birth, it is but part of life, a gift from Jesus Christ, and the beginning of our eternal . . .”
Andrew’s mind drifts. He’s scattered, exhausted. His thoughts are fragmented, stormy, his attention frail. Anxious and seeking distraction, he shifts his eyes to the altar. They’d covered it with a red tapestry, one that had previously hung in the foyer but was moved, many years ago, to storage when the upper story and stairwell were added on. The retired decoration was large, old, and dusty. It apparently depicted The Last Supper, or possibly a hunting scene; it was hard to say, the once-vibrant colors having long-since faded to blurs. In addition, mice and insects had been at the tapestry while it sat in storage, and the fabric was now badly frayed. It should have been thrown out long ago, Andrew thinks, along with the rest of the artifacts stored in the church’s oversized closet of spiritual junk.
The altar needed to be covered, however, so the antiquated wall-hanging came in handy, after all.
Despite the servants’ best efforts, supervised by Poole himself, they simply could not get all the blood out of the altar’s light-toned wood, or the porous floorboards. Even after several hours of scrubbing and washing, the stains still looked ghastly, a sharp reminder of what lay there only a day ago; of what was hung from the cross that still loomed over his shoulder—a symbol of man’s salvation now degraded to a glorified meat hook. He shudders at the thought, uncrosses and re-crosses his legs, and tries to focus on Poole’s sermon.