“Stop!” he roars, but no one listens. No one cares. All the boys are screaming, from fear or rage he does not know. Most of the boys are fleeing, defending themselves, fighting back, and the rest are attacking. Viciously. Bodies are suddenly moving everywhere at once in a hellish tableau of chaos and murder.
He smells smoke and takes his eyes off the children. He turns around to see flames licking up one of the two large tapestries hanging at the head of the chapel. There are two such tapestries, one hanging on either side of the large wooden cross. The one behind him is a deep violet, bears a gold-stitched crucifix. The other is red, embroidered with the likeness of St. Vincent feeding a fawn.
It is the red one which now burns.
Seconds later, that old, dusty tapestry covering the altar also catches.
It burns like dry kindling.
Two more children run by him. They push past him without thought, without fear, and shove over the second candelabra, its arms also filled with burning candles. It crashes into the altar; the candles jump free and flare against the pine box of Basil’s coffin.
Andrew tries to reach for one of the kids. “Please stop!” he yells frantically. The face that turns to him is not one he recognizes, which doesn’t seem possible. Before he can focus on recalling the name, he feels a stabbing pain in his arm. The boys laugh and leave him, running headlong into the fray. He holds up his arm and sees blood running from his palm, the cut so deep that it flows like spilled wine.
He goes white at the sight of it. Trembling, he slaps his opposite hand over the cut, hoping to staunch the flow. He moans as blood squeezes between clamped fingers, runs down his forearm.
There’s a crash, and he spins to face the chapel.
Boys are fleeing those who wield the weapons. Many congregate behind Johnson at the barred doors. He notices little Thomas hiding beneath a bench, eyes wide with terror and confusion. Some of the boys fight viciously, tearing at each other. Punching, clawing. Pulling the other’s hair. Biting.
Three boys with weapons fall on another against a far wall—pale-haired Aaron, who was always willing to lend a hand with the younger ones. They’re assaulting him mercilessly with simple kitchen knives, stolen from the dining hall. Aaron screams and writhes beneath them, but the other three don’t slow, don’t stop. They stab him again and again.
“No . . .” Andrew moans, feeling faint. “Get away . . .”
But the children are now in full panic, the fervor growing as the room fills with screams, grows thick with smoke.
Poole is screaming at any children close at hand, demanding they STOP! Andrew watches, sickened, as two larger boys rush at Poole and push him backward into the altar, now fully aflame.
Basil’s coffin rocks but does not fall. It blazes atop the table as if it is not an altar at all, but a funeral pyre.
Pressed back against this mass of flame, Poole’s cassock catches fire. Andrew yanks the remaining tapestry from the wall and runs to Poole, throws the violet fabric over his burning body. He stumbles and they both crash to the ground.
There’s an ear-piercing shriek and something punches hard into the side of Andrew’s head. A bright light flashes behind his eyes. The sound of the chaos distorts. His vision goes blurry.
Now he’s being kicked. Punched. He and Poole both. There’s more screaming. He flips over, tries to defend himself, sees nothing but snarling faces. Bloodied weapons clutched in the grips of children, rising and falling against his body.
He doesn’t know what’s happened, has no idea how this came to pass.
He only knows this is the end.
35
“OPEN THESE DOORS YOU LITTLE SHITS!”
Johnson bangs his fists against the doors with every ounce of strength he’s got. Flitting shadows dance through the cracks. He hears the laughter of at least two boys on the other side, the sound only inches away.
When I get out of here, I’m going to scrape the skin off their bones.
Worse than the fear, he can feel hot panic rising in his belly, spreading to his limbs, his mind. The nerve-shredding terror of being trapped.
It is something he’s been afraid of his entire life, ever since childhood, when his mother would lock him inside the closet of their small apartment whenever he’d misbehave. She’d throw him inside, shove a chair beneath the handle, tell him through the thick wood that every minute he wailed and cried and banged his fists against the door was another minute he’d be left inside.
He’d try hard to be quiet, to stop the whimpering, the sniffling. Then he’d hear her nearby, as if she were purposely being sneaky, staying close so she could listen, like a spider with one bent leg poised upon a string of sticky web, waiting for it to shiver.
“I hear you!”
And then he’d start wailing all over again, knowing he was only making it worse for himself. But he was only a tyke, no more than four years old. Most of the time he hadn’t even known what he’d done wrong.
Usually, he would be let out after a few hours. Other times, he’d be pushed inside during the day, then be let out at night. A couple times he slept there until morning.
It was terrifying.
In hindsight, as an older boy, he knew that what he’d hear in the closet was nothing but mice or rats in the walls or under the floorboards. But as a child, he’d hear the scratching at the wood around him and think it was ghosts or ghouls coming to get him. A few times he’d feel the skitter of paws run across his splayed fingers and he’d shriek for mercy. He’d try to stay on his feet all night but grew so tired after a while that he’d be forced to sit and lean, trembling, beneath the shelves of detritus that shared the closet space with him.
Once he’d woken in the dark to feel something crawling in his hair.
Something big.
He’d shrieked and wailed, begged his mother to let him out. Yelled that something was in there with him. Something that he knew, deep in his heart, wanted to nibble at him, gnaw at his cheeks and earlobes, sink tiny teeth into his eyeballs while he slept.
His fear of enclosed spaces, of being entombed, was the primary reason he’d chosen a life sentence of servitude to the church, to Poole, versus another five or six years in prison. Once they’d buried him in that box as punishment—the worst possible thing he could have imagined—he knew he’d never survive. Or, if he did, that he’d lose his sanity, a fate worse than any death.
And now, incredibly, unfathomably, these little pricks have locked him in again.
He will not stand for it.
“Let me out of here you goddamn brats!” he roars, slamming his shoulder into the doors again and again.
Must be something jammed between the handles. Something long and heavy. A shovel, perhaps, he thinks, panting, ignoring the pain in his hands, in the shoulder as he rams it into the doors. Well, I can break a shovel! See if I can’t!
It’s only when he smells the smoke and hears the heightened screams that he finally widens his focus, turns some of his attention back to the room.
“Oh dear Jesus.”
He stares in horror as the front of the chapel burns. Some boys are running. Other boys attacking. Father White lies like a rag doll in the aisle, fresh blood pumping from a wound in his neck, his eyes wide and empty, staring at the ceiling, at nothing. Johnson takes a step forward, uncertain where to start.