The Twins of Noremway Parish (10 page)

And suddenly, the three demons grabbed hold of him and thrust him outwards toward the entangled being. He could see it more clearly now than before, and it could see him, and it knew that it had the wrong person. This was not Decon Mangler, Friar of Noremway Parish. This was another man entirely–a man with a black heart, a black soul.

Darkness enshrouded both of them, wrapping them together in a confining intimacy. What happened next was lost to the oblivion of the dark.

Chapter 6

Early the next morning, Teret put the final touches on her lessons for the day. She was exhausted. When Nora Plague, Bart’s young daughter, entered the schoolroom—just off of the worship hall—Teret’s heart lightened up. Nora was always a pleasure.

“
Trippin’ today, Sister Finley?” Nora said with a smile. Her big white teeth shone brilliantly in the morning light. Her long hair was the blondest Teret had ever seen.

“
Trippin’ per my usual duty, Nora,” Teret said and smiled back.

“
Aw, Sister Teret, why you always gotta be trippin’?” Nora responded, and they both laughed. This was an inside joke that started between Teret and Decon, but then grew to include Plague, and inevitably his daughter. This came from Rita’s statement that Teret must be “trippin.” “Why you always gotta be trippin?” Decon had said after that. Thirteen years it had been…and now the joke was passed down to seven year-old Nora Plague.

As the rest of the kids marched in single-file, Teret attempted to keep her spirits up. Nora certainly helped, but after the events of the night before, including a night full of bad memories, she had trouble gathering the energy to be happy.

Nevertheless, she greeted them at the door as if nothing was amiss. As the kids took their seats and opened their textbooks, she began quizzing them about Earth’s history. “Come on, you must know the history of your home, right?” she prodded with fake cheer. Her goal was to appear upbeat no matter how much of an act she had to put on.

In times immemorial, the sun had burned with a peaceful light. Oceans covered three quarters of the planet. Green grass instead of the dry sand coated the ground, and tall trees filled the landscape with lush forests in which animals of all types thrived. Peace, prosperity, and love reigned throughout the land. “Earth was once a paradise,” she said.

“
Then what happened?” a student in the front asked.

“
The Darkness came, burning the land asunder, boiling the streams and rivers, vaporizing the oceans, and bringing forth evil. But Ragas saved us.”

“
What is the Darkness?”

“
No one knows for sure. Some say the environment became polluted, others say maybe it was the sun. Some say the Darkness comes from another world: a world like our own but evil, pure evil. Others say the Darkness is a natural result of the world growing old and passing on just like our grandparents. Either way, droughts and famines overtook the land. Water became scarce. Ragas defeated the Darkness and banished it from Noremway Parish.

“
When the Darkness first arrived, Ragas traveled Earth. He saw pain and suffering wherever he went. There were many people who had far more than they could ever need, while others had far less than the minimum to survive. Ragas taught that we must all work together if we are going to survive. So we pooled our resources into small communities that we call parishes. There were two groups of them: the Inner-Crescent and the Outer-Crescent. There is nothing but desert wastelands in between. Ragas founded Noremway Parish, an Inner-Crescent parish. When the Outer-Crescent fell, we thought all was lost, but Ragas stood and defended the Inner-Crescent.”

A boy sitting in front raised his hand, “My father says Ragas was a liar and that the world was never green and beautiful. He says Ragas just went out in the desert and got heatstroke and dehydrated, and hallucinated and wrote down his crazy visions. And the Darkness is a lie, a myth; just a legend that only the weak and simple believe in. And he says that Ragas made a lot of money off his book by telling people it was a true story.”

Teret got this sort of thing a lot, and brushed it off as nothing but the usual conspiracy theory.
If you give in to it and defend the truth, you are doing nothing but giving credibility to these ridiculous notions.
So she moved on without comment.

“
Alright class, open your books to Chapter 5. This is where Ragas describes his meeting with who he called ‘the Angel of Mercy.’ She was a stunningly beautiful woman who had a tremendous impact on him. She cared for him in a time of need. She gave him his sense of right and wrong. Without her, he would never have grown to be the great person that he was to become.”

The kids began reading their texts as instructed. Johan Fidler leafed through the pages, not really reading it. He usually came to class in torn pants, a dirty shirt, and sand caked into his skin. Teret could be a better mother to this boy than Hannah Fidler could ever be. Despite smiling politely at her whenever they crossed paths during the cathedral services or at the market, she felt a jealousy growing with intensity each year that she grew closer to the end of her own fertile years. Even though she couldn’t
legally
have children, the fact that she physically could was a small comfort. There would come a time when she wouldn’t even have that.

She had been so happy for the Watermans when they found out they were pregnant. Lynn had been creeping up on the end of fertility as well, and it was fantastic that they were finally having a child, someone to replace them when they grew old and passed on from this place; to care for them in old age–a person to carry on their legacy.

She became a parochial vicar so that she could share all the history to which she experienced such a deep connection. This Angel of Mercy had been, above all, a teacher. Despite this desire, as a child, she had always wanted to get married and have children, but as the parochial vicar of Noremway Parish, marriage and childbearing were avenues she could never travel. It was part of the tradition in the parish from long ago. Parochial vicars must be pure women, like the angel. She loved the responsibility of a parochial vicar, but longing for a man’s embrace at times filled her with regret. Did she choose the right path? The maternal desire for a child broke her heart.

“
Sister Teret?” the dirty-blond child in the front asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“
Sorry, Johan, I was thinking about how lucky your parents are to have a boy like you.”

“
I’m lucky to have you as my teacher,” he said with a smile.

“
Thank you, Johan. That means a lot.”

If she were to ever have a man in her life, in a romantic way, she could think of only one man she’d want to be with. And at that moment he burst in through the classroom door.

***

“
Sister Teret, I need you,” Decon Mangler said, rushing into Teret’s classroom. He never usually interrupted her during class, but considering the night before, he figured she’d forgive the intrusion.

“
Alright, boys and girls, I’m going to step out for a second. Continue reading please. What is it, Decon?” she asked.

“
I need your help concerning that Waterman child. It somehow grew into a fully developed child, only it’s like no other child I have ever seen,” he whispered. He wanted to keep his voice low so no student would hear him.

“
What do you mean?”

“
Keep your voice down, please. It’s like the figure on the holy fountain. Only that figure is
gone.
And it’s worse…oh Lord, is it ever. Let’s step outside.” They stepped out together into the dry air. The day was another cloudless one, as was to be expected. “It has two heads, three arms, and three legs. I think it might have tried to become two children, but it didn’t quite make it. I don’t know. It’s just like that fountain! Does that make any sense? Bart’s with him—
them
—right now. And he has no more answers than I do. He’s never seen anything like it.”

“
What?” Teret could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Could the holy water have done it? Or the stoup itself?”

“
I don’t know. I searched all night through every piece of the ancient literature I could find, and I found absolutely no mention of anything like this; nothing about the holy fountain. Holy fountains have no history of this sort of thing. Oh God, Rita Morgan is going to have a field day with this one.”

***

Earlier that morning, Decon and Plague had taken the “twins” (as Plague called them) across the parish to the infirmary, hoping that the screaming aberration would not draw too much attention on the way. The infirmary itself was a somewhat imposing structure, made of a thick, gray brick similar to that imagined of a dungeon. It was nicknamed “Plague’s Lair.” What deep, dark secrets was he hiding in there? “Bartholomew Plague is creating inhuman creatures never even considered by the mind of God,” people would say. He was loath to dispel the rumors. He loved the notoriety.

The twins were wrapped in a blanket as they entered Plague’s Lair. They were awkward to carry, which was why both Decon and Plague handled them, and it must have been most uncomfortable since both heads cried the whole way from the cathedral—a trip of at least half a mile.

“
Laura!” Plague called for his medical assistant. He hadn’t told her of the child yet, and he wouldn’t. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he literally had no idea what he would even say. He decided the best way to do it would just be to show her. A quality of a good medical assistant was to be able to expect the unexpected. “Unexpected” certainly described what they had on (and in) their hands.

How could a child like this survive? Was it a miracle? “Laura!” Plague called again. She immediately rushed into the lobby area where they entered the building.

“
What is it, Bart?” Her eyes immediately went to the bundle between them. “What is
that?
”

“
Not out here. We need to talk in an examination room,” Decon said. “Open the doors for us please.” Of course, no one else in the parish knew about the children. Even if word of the events concerning the Waterman child had travelled throughout the parish, all they would have known is that the child had dissolved in the holy fountain–nothing more. A malevolent event, to be sure, but nothing compared to this.

“
Alright, Bart. What is this?” Laura asked when they were in the examination room. They were in the back of the building, an area that some patients referred to as “the torture chamber.” When they entered, Plague and Decon placed the blanket on the table and unrolled it. Both heads were screaming frantically—throat-tearing screams. One head’s mouth was opened wide, eyes tightly shut. The screams came in torrential, violent outbursts. “I thought Nora had been bad,” Plague said with a short laugh. The other screamed more sporadically. Sometimes it screamed in a silent cry, other times, an ear piercing shriek. And its eyes were wide open the whole time…wide open and moving from side to side, glancing from Plague to Decon and back to Plague.

“
What have we got here?” Laura asked, plugging the buds of her stethoscope in her ears and placing the cold metal to the child’s chest. “This isn’t…” She moved the stethoscope around the child’s chest, and the expression on her face indicated that what she was hearing was unusual. “Bart, you have to take a listen.”

She handed him the stethoscope. “Well, it’s definitely got two hearts, I can tell you that much,” he said. “The lungs? Interesting…I can’t tell. There are at least two fully developed lungs, but it is really hard to tell for sure if there are more. Three legs here, three arms, two heads…”

“
What is this thing?” Decon asked.

***

When class was over for the day, Teret met Decon in the worship hall, and found him looking over the broken stoup. The figure of the children wrapped in angel wings was gone, as if someone had vandalized the statue with a hammer. The floor around it was dark red from the bloody water that had spilled over. The “twins” were still with Plague.

“
What do you think this means?” Teret asked, placing her hand on Decon’s back. She moved it up and down to comfort him. “They still with Plague?” She, of course, was referring to the children, or child, or whatever it was. In a bizarre way, it kind of excited her. Perhaps it was selfish, but with a child of such questionable origins, it could fall on the friar and her to provide care.

“
I have no idea what it means, Teret. I really don’t. The sighting of a two-headed angel was briefly described in some of the more archaic literature, but the same text referred to it as some sort of demon. Any other texts were either ambiguous or silent on the subject.”

“
Either way, it’s a child,” she said. “A child that needs love. Without love, anyone has the capacity to be a devil. That was one of the things the Angel of Mercy taught Ragas.”

“
Agreed.” He stood from his stooped position and turned to face her. He fought the urge to take her in his arms and kiss her. But where he was successful, she was not. As she wrapped her arms over his shoulders, she pressed her mouth against his, giving him a more passionate kiss than he could ever have imagined.

“
What’s next?” he asked when she was done kissing him.

“
Well, Brother Decon, I believe what’s next is the funeral for the mayor and his wife.” Then people started strolling into the cathedral, almost catching a glimpse of the forbidden act that had passed between the friar and the parochial vicar.