Appalachian Galapagos (25 page)

"We must change," said Matthew. "It's almost time."

Matthew moved towards the wall to our left, where twelve chests waited. As had the others like him, he opened one and withdrew two robes. The green one he gave to me.

"Wear this."

The other robe was a patchwork of
golds
and purples and greens. Where mine was tightly spun satin, his was made from a hundred different fabrics. Although gaudy, no one would ever mistake it for finery. It was the robe of a penitent man.

"The green color stands for faith. Purple is for Justice and the gold stands for power. These are the colors of Mardi Gras. These are the colors of God."

As I pulled the robe over my clothes, he reached into the chest and withdrew two more objects. One was a crown of thorns, the other was a gold ceramic mask, blank except for two eye holes. No nose. No mouth. No contoured features. Just blank. This he passed to me.

"Wear it, as I wear my own."

He placed the crown of thorns atop his head and I winced as immediately several trickles of blood began to flow. He merely smiled.

Just as suddenly his smile turned to a frown and a gurgle escaped his throat. From around the warehouse, I saw the same thing happening to the others.

I placed the mask over my face. For a few long seconds, I fought claustrophobia, but there were rules here and if I was going to figure this whole thing out, I would have to play the game.

He jerked me towards the back of the platform where a piece of plywood served as a ramp. Stopping at the third post on the left side, he let me go.

"Bind me," he said, holding out his hands.

After a few false starts, I managed to secure Matthew to the post.

"Now what?"

"We wait, I suppose. I mean I've never really done this before."

"And The Shrove? You trust them?"

"Why not? It's all a matter of degrees," he said. "Who would have ever believed that the death of one man would release the world from sin?" The chains rattled as he brought his hands up to his head. His right scratched hard at the ear. Twin lines of blood appeared.

I grabbed at his wrist to keep him from hurting himself, but he jerked away. His right hand gripped his crown and he pressed it deeply into the flesh.

"They say..." he gasped, "They say it's time."

From where I stood I could see every inch of the room and except for the deep shadows along one wall, there wasn't a place to hide. The harder I stared into those shadows, the more uncomfortable I became. The feeling grew until a buzzing crept into my mind. It felt as if a million ants had moved in. Fighting to ignore the feeling, I stole myself to stare deeper into the darkness. The buzzing increased and my hands flew to my head, then the darkness swirled as something moved within it. For the briefest of moments I could have sworn I saw the tip of a tentacle. Green. The color of faith, I remembered.

"Let me tell you of the smell of leaves burning in winter."

"What?" I staggered and reached out to steady myself. My hand found his chest and came away wet with blood. His face was pinstriped with red.

"The smell of leaves burning in winter. It's why you're here, to listen to my confession."

"Tell me," I said, trying to ignore the darkness.

"I know the smell of leaves burning in winter," he said. "I have awoken to the screams of a child. I know the sounds of flesh burning." He sagged to the floor at my feet. His arms rose in supplication. "Forgive me father, for I have sinned and all my confessions before this are as nothing to what I will tell you now."

The request was unorthodox, but there was no mistaking the suffering underlying his words. I made the sign and knelt beside him, averting my gaze as I placed my ear close.

"Tell me of the smell of leaves burning in winter," I said.

He sighed, the sound of dead leaves rustling along the ground. Like the leaves in my own memory. Mr. Jenks hadn't killed my pet. The sheriff insisted that the dog had been hit by a truck. The old man had placed the body in the leaves so I wouldn't see it. He had been trying to spare me.

"The smell of leaves burning in winter, they smell like death. They smell like the end of existence. The end of hope. God, forgive me. I had no idea. I hadn't a clue."

"Have you ever awoken to the sounds of a child screaming?" I asked.

"It was my son," he said. "The sound of a child screaming is the death of the father. The death of the mother. The end of all hope…multiplied."

From his lowered head ran pinkish drops, blood mixed with salty tears. There was still one more question to ask.

"What is the sound of flesh burning?"

"The end of life itself," he said.

Suddenly cold, he stared at me, his face smeared with tears and blood. He gritted his teeth, the sound like a heavy file against concrete. "I was popular with the children in my school, you see. There was nothing they couldn't ask of me. I was always there for them. For them, yes, but not my son. God knows how long I'd neglected him. God knows the depth of his pain. I've wondered for so long...what if he had come to
me
? What if he had asked
me
for help? Would I have paid attention? Would I have been there for him? Would I have done it differently? Even after all this time, I don't know the answer. I am guilty of the harshest crime. He gave me love. I gave him neglect.

As was my own crime.

"I can only imagine how he felt. When I awoke that winter's morning to the screams of my son burning in the leaf pile...when I ran outside and heard his screams, saw the can of gasoline...when he stopped breathing as his lungs filled with fumes...when his skin...ran."

I knelt with him for a time. The thorns of his crown scraped my cheek. Finally he looked up.

"The Shrove said that our sacrifice will heal the world. It will heal me, they said. We are twelve and twelve makes one and then thirteen ascend."

From somewhere far away a church bell rang, signaling the end to Mardi Gras. As it struck twelve, Lent began.

"The pouch," he said.

I pulled up my robe and fumbled the pouch from my pocket. It took a few moments, but I finally managed to retrieve the pouch. I opened it and stared inside at the ash within, its origin no mystery. His gaze was far away as I reached inside, applied the ash to my fingers and made the sign of the cross upon his forehead.

"Man is dust and from dust you shall return."

He mimicked my movements and made his own sign of the cross upon my forehead. A smile crept along his mouth, then his expression went blank, his gaze once again far away. I didn't dare disturb him, so I closed the pouch and placed it around his neck.

In only minutes, we opened the great doors to the street. Outside, the night was silent. The Feast of the Flesh was over and it was in quiet dark that we twelve confessors grasped the ropes and began pulling the float through the streets.

There would be no crowds for us.

Redemption is a lonely thing, and sacrifice is individual.

I've always had a sexual fascination with the dead.

I first felt it when I was fifteen years old. I was looking through this book on legendary celebrities when I came across a picture of Marilyn Monroe. It was an older picture, taken back when she was Norma Jean. She looked so young and sweet, not yet corrupted by the ugly stench of Hollywood. As I studied her long dead face, I felt an enormous adrenaline-like rush of arousal. To this day I get goose bumps up and down my back whenever I think of that photograph.

At that time in my life, I did not see my arousal as abnormal. After all, who would? Society has long carried on a love affair with the late Ms. Monroe, so my little obsession hardly seemed strange at all.

At around the same time, I did realize I was different than most males my age. Someone would point at a girl who was the universally attractive one of the school, commenting on how bad they wanted to have sex with her, and the things they would do if they were given even minutes alone. I could see what the other boys saw in her, yet when it came to a sexual attraction, I would feel nothing at all. Even though I could appreciate her in a certain aesthetic sense, the actual hormonal aspect seemed to be dead.

Instead, I found myself obsessing over the photographs of long dead starlets. I would place them around my teenage body and then pleasure myself, their black and white faces drifting through my mind like ghosts. There was little guilt on my part at the time, as I did not fully understand my fetish. I did not realize I was attracted to them sexually because they were dead.

I came to
that
realization in my senior year. Growing up in the heart of Georgia was not easy when you were as eccentric as I was especially back in the late eighties. There I was all dressed in black, in a sea of people who considered me an outcast. They weren't all cruel, of course. There was Megan.

Megan Hunter was a girl who was often kind to me. Although I was an outcast, she always went out of her way to treat me like I was no different than anybody else. While the other classmates called me names like
Ichabod
Crane, she told me I was handsome and to shut my ears to such close-mindedness.

Though I found Megan attractive in a visually pleasing sense, sexually she did nothing for me. Near the end of the school year, she gave me her senior photograph and signed it:

"Oliver, you have something special about you. Someday, I know the rest of the world will see it too. Love, Megan."

In the photograph, she was sitting on a porch swing, a single red rose in her hand, her blonde hair sweeping sensually down onto her shoulders.

Two days later she was dead.

She was killed in a car accident along with three other girls. That night, I stared at her photograph, my brain numb from the stunning news of her death. My world had suddenly become surreal; I just could not imagine myself without her company. There were so many things I wanted to share with her. I never really got to tell her just how important she was to me. Megan kept me sane at a time when I needed it most and I will always love her for that.

Later that night, while rubbing my fingers lovingly over her photograph, my perceptions changed. Suddenly, the photograph became sexually arousing to me. A feeling of guilt and fear followed that stimulation, leaving me confused and frightened. I quickly buried the photograph in a book, too afraid to stare any longer. Megan was my friend. It felt profoundly wrong to think of her in such a way.

That was the first time I understood the full extent of my fetish. The realization that I was only attracted to the dead was not an easy one.

Since that day over ten years ago, I have managed to keep my obsession down to an acceptable level. Over the years, I have become quite comfortable with it. After all, I don't actually hurt anyone, so it's a harmless sexual fetish.

As one can imagine, it's a lonely lifestyle to be only attracted to the dead. I never feared my fixation until I met Audrey.

I was sitting on a bench in the park as she moved by. I held my breath, her presence causing an eerie silence as she moved. She seemed to glide by as I watched her in stunned serenity. A brightly colored sundress covered her lithe figure as she moved. She tossed her dark red hair back over her shoulders and then noticed me sitting on the bench.

My body froze under her powerful gaze as if she were a lovely Medusa. I felt a smile push my sharp cheekbones up in my face. She nodded at me and moved up the hill where I was sitting. My heartbeat seemed to be the accompanying noise to her every footstep.

"Hello," she said, offering me one of the most strikingly beautiful smiles I had ever seen.