“FATHER!” The boy kicks and twists. Andrew is surprised to see Brother Johnson, big as an ox, struggling to keep the thin child from tearing free.
Fear gives strength, he thinks. My lesson for this day.
Having had enough, Johnson lifts the boy off the floor and carries him, as he might carry a giant fish plucked from ocean waters—wiggling, fighting, desperate to breathe.
“Please don’t do this!” Bartholomew shrieks, tears wetting his face, his fear palpable.
Andrew hears his own name like an electric shock.
“Father Francis, please!”
For a moment, he debates. He begins to stand. Perhaps this is too far. Perhaps now is the time to . . .
A hand falls on his shoulder, and Poole leans close, his mouth an inch from Andrew’s ear. “Don’t ever question me in front of the boys again. Do you understand?”
Andrew, all thoughts of rebellion quelled, simply nods. His weight drops into the chair, his eyes lower to the table. “Yes, Father.”
The entire room waits in silence as Bartholomew’s heaving cries for help, for mercy, finally leave the hall. The screams continue, for a few more moments, to echo from the foyer, before they finally disappear into the afternoon light, his voice cut off sharply by the closing of the orphanage doors, as if sliced with a knife.
6
“PLEASE, BROTHER JOHNSON!”
Johnson carries the small boy, who’s stronger than he looks, by God. A real pain in the ass is what he is. But he doesn’t take pleasure from this kind of punishment, not for the young ones, especially. Still, without order this place would have fallen apart years ago, and Johnson would have been without a benefactor, left to rot away in a damp, rat-infested prison cell.
He would do what Poole asked of him. Without question, without complaint.
Outside the orphanage, the air is cold, the sky slate. The ground is hard and unyielding beneath his feet as he walks toward a patch of weedy grass between the barn and the narrow dirt lane leading east. Johnson is well aware that the location is strategic—Poole wanted the hole easily viewable from the boy’s dormitory windows. A reminder of what happens if discipline breaks down.
“Please . . .”
The boy’s begging grates on his nerves. He wrenches the child higher, tightens his grip on the thin body flailing against his chest.
“Ow . . .”
Don’t you dare start crying little whelp, or I’ll give you a taste of real pain.
“Brother Johnson, you can’t do this. It’s too cold, Brother Johnson. It’s too cold! I’ll die out here, please. I’ll die!”
Nestled into the ground a few feet ahead lays a broad wooden platform. Built into the platform is a liftable hatch, its opening large enough for a full-sized man. A knotted rope rests coiled like a snake in the weeds beside it. The platform itself is crafted from heavy oak planks. The handle coarse iron.
It had been Johnson, nearly ten years ago now, who had brought the idea—albeit inadvertently—to Poole’s attention. There had been a similar concept at the prison he’d been plucked from, a form of punishment by solitary confinement. Only instead of a cell, the prisoner was taken outside.
And buried.
It had only happened to Johnson once, and once had been enough. Stuck in a pine box, nailed shut while you screamed for mercy, settled three feet beneath the ground. The guards would laugh while they threw dirt over the makeshift coffin. Joked about their questionable memory, hope that they’d “remember where they put ya,” and mockingly hoped that the “air wouldn’t run out before they returned.”
Johnson hadn’t done well in the coffin. Thanks to an overbearing mother, his childhood had carved a deep-rooted fear of enclosed spaces into his psychological makeup, one that had triggered—panic roaring like thunder in his brain, a nerve-frying terror racing through him, a rabid lion broken loose from its cage—when they’d nailed the box shut.
When Johnson told Poole about this particular form of torture handed out to unruly prisoners, the old priest had suggested a similar—though not as psychologically traumatizing—punishment for the children.
Over the next couple weeks, Johnson, along with a few older boys living at St. Vincent’s at the time, dug a trench into the earth the size of two graves side-by-side. When completed, the hole was eight feet deep, six feet long and four feet wide. They’d packed the dirt below until their hands bled, making sure there was no risk of the walls caving inward. Johnson himself built the platform that serves as the roof, the planks now rooted into the earth so fast he doubts they could be removed without first being torn apart with an axe.
The hole served its purpose over the years. And—so far—had been the cause of only one fatality. A young, sickly boy who’d taken ill after a full day and night underground. He died shortly thereafter; his brain boiled by a fever so hot it warmed the room in which they quarantined him. Personally, Johnson hates the damn thing, and rues the day he gave Poole the notion. Being trapped in the dark, in the earth, is a fate much worse than death.
A fact with which he is intimately familiar.
Thankfully, the hole has been used sparingly, transforming into the psychological deterrent it was designed for.
Lately, however, its more practical application has been coming back into regular use.
A shame, he thinks, and drops Bartholomew to his feet, gripping his narrow bicep so tightly that the boy begins whimpering and tugging away from him. No matter, it is almost done.
With his free hand, Johnson kneels and grips the iron handle of the hatch, then yanks upward. The door squeals open on old hinges—need to replace those soon, he thought—and drops heavily with a CLAP as it falls back and away, slapping against the platform.
Johnson gives Bartholomew a hard shake, glares into his face. “You gonna do this easy, or you gonna make it hard?”
Bartholomew stares back at him, eyes wide and full of fear. “I’ll die, Johnson,” he mumbles, as if knowing the words are useless but feeling the need to say them regardless. “Tonight will be the first night of the storm. I’ll die from the cold.”
Johnson tightly squeezes the boy’s arms and drags him toward the opening.
Below lays nothing but dark and cold, the insects who live in the dirt to offer welcome. Johnson kicks the coiled rope through the opening. It unwinds then snags, the top tied off in a heavy, frayed knot to one of the planks. He leans down so his eyes meet the boy’s.
“If I were you, I’d stay on my feet. Keeps the blood flowing.”
He shoves the boy to his knees atop the platform.
He doesn’t move.
“Grab the rope! Get down there, damn you!”
Bartholomew shakes his head. “Please, have mercy,” he says, weeping. “I’m so afraid.”
“Fine,” Johnson says, huffing out a breath, ignoring the cloud of mist it becomes in the cold air. “Hard way it is.” He bends over, grabs the screaming child by a leg and an arm, and pushes him roughly into the hole.
The boy shrieks as if he’s being stabbed, then goes quiet—in the space of a heartbeat and the thump of meat smacking dirt—when he hits the bottom eight feet below.
Johnson quickly grips the heavy rope and pulls it back up. He tosses the loose coils into the grass, then steps onto the creaky platform and lifts the door.