Prospero's Half-Life (27 page)

This pattern
repeated itself down the line. Each of the white robes stepped
forward with a gun, placed it against the back of the head, and
executed one of the prisoners. The line of Richard’s fellow
conspirators diminished in ritual fashion, and Richard began to
feel a hard knot of queasiness grip the empty bile of his stomach.
At last the line of white robed men finished and there was only
Chris left, kneeling alone on the far end of the stage. The man had
not moved throughout the entire ordeal, from what Richard had
observed. Bentley held his hands up and spoke again.

“
Brothers and sisters! The death of Brother Jacob has left a
vacancy on our holiest of councils. Yet, even through our newfound
grief, the Lord has planted the seeds of strength. For when it was
discovered that our late, lamented fellow was murdered on that
fateful night, he was to only be the first of two. That other,
brothers and sisters, is a man whom I have known from the first
moment that the Lord brought him into our path”.

Richard looked
up intently, his eyes burning. A chill ran down his spine; it felt
like a finger bone running raw down his exposed vertebrae.

“
Brothers and sisters, he is a man whom has rejected temptation
in everything, a man in whom the Lord has seen fit to bless a
silver tongue in His service. This is a man whom I had previously
sought guidance from the Lord on, to bring him into our holy
councils and thereby gain his wisdom and insight. The Lord saw fit
to give us Brother Jacob instead, although He called poor Jacob
home so shortly after”.

Richard shook,
not caring who saw him. One of the white-robed men walked towards
him, a wide, sarcastic grin plastered across his old-boy golfer’s
face. In the man’s outstretched hand he held a police .40, held by
the grip with the muzzle pointed downwards. Richard had a wild
vision of grabbing the gun and using it to blow the shit-eating
bastard’s head off in spectacularly messy fashion. In reality, he
simply took the gun, kept his face composed, and waited.

“
He is a man whom the Lord himself has called a
saint-in-waiting! God has called you, Brother Isaiah! God wishes
you to be an integral piece in His great plan! Step forward and
send this deluded sinner into His everlasting love!”

Richard walked
forward uncertainly, feeling a sudden shyness break over him. He
had never been good with public performance, and he was not
entirely sure if he had any sort of control over this situation at
all. He simply stepped forward until he was standing behind Chris.
Chris did not move, to look around at him or otherwise. There was a
deep silence from the crowd.

“
Seal this pact between yourself and the Lord, Brother Isaiah!
Send this sinner to his final judgement and take your place at my
side as a fellow shepherd of our mutual flock!”

Richard felt
like laughing and the idea was so absurd he ended up crying
instead. He grinned, sobbed, and tried to keep it quiet. Tears ran
thick rivulets down his cheeks. He extended his hand and was not
surprised to see it trembling severely. He locked his wrist and
steadied his hand through sheer force of will. He pressed the
muzzle of the gun to the back of Chris’ head, feeling the
resistance of the man’s skull impede it. Still the man did not
move. Richard rested the muzzle against the dense mass of Chris’
hair. He closed his eyes. The room was completely silent. He
refused to look. In his mind’s eye he could see the entire
gymnasium staring at him, analyzing him, weighing him. Waiting upon
him. Stringing him up in judgement. He tried to imagine Chris’
face. He found that he couldn’t. He’d blurred the man’s face out of
his mind completely. He realized then that he’d already made his
decision. He swallowed hard, mouthed a mute apology, and squeezed
the trigger hesitantly. The viper in his hand jumped and spat. The
report was very loud.

TEN

Being a member
of the white-robed inner elite of the community was, if anything,
even more nerve-wracking than being a member of a conspiracy
dedicated to standing against it. Richard would often look back
during this period of his life to the time even a few weeks before
and feel envious of that Richard.

He was in the
inner council but none of the other council members trusted him.
The caveat to this, the sole thing that protected his life, was the
support that he had from Brother Bentley himself. The man ruled
over the white robes with an iron fist and Richard was first
amongst all of them in their estimation. Richard did what he could
to cultivate this; he stepped up the god rhetoric in his speech and
drew on all of the skills he’d cultivated as a sales manager in his
previous life. God was the product this time around, that was the
only difference to him. The religious pepper he spiced his
conversations with seemed to grind itself out of his mind with
smooth ease. He found a thick, expensive-looking bible and read it
feverishly, memorizing passages to make himself sound as biblically
learned as he possibly could. He had never read the book before,
and found himself entranced with some of the stories; they had been
internalized by so many other storytellers over the centuries that
it was as though reading them were like slipping on a well-worn,
favourite pair of jeans. He was too much of a hard-headed realist
to consider taking any of it for fact, but he was very interested
in some of what the New Testament said between the lines. Upon
reflection, he realized that most of the people who had professed
to follow in Christ’s teachings were apparently completely clueless
as to what he’d said and done. Brother Bentley and his cult were,
of course, no exception. Richard thought that Bentley himself
likely believed in what he was saying and attempting to do, but
also knew that the cognitive dissonance required to marry his
actions with biblical scripture meant that the man was in all
likelihood insane.

This was not
the only clue that Richard had to Bentley’s madness. Once he was
forced to spend nearly every day in the man’s presence, he realized
that it was actually quite easy to tell. The Bentley that appeared
before the public and the Bentley that stewed in private were two
very different individuals. The public Bentley was calm, confident,
and a sweeping orator. He was a man of vision, mad though it might
seem, and could impart that vision in such a way that it had held
the community together in those early days before the man had
forged his own private army to keep order. The private Bentley was
an incoherent, mumbling mess, a man given to hour-long rants that
made less and less sense as Richard got to know him better. He
would start off his speeches to his inner council with clarity, but
would quickly descend into strange, fragmented sentences that made
reference to people and places that Richard was only vaguely sure
might have once existed. At times he would end his speeches with
five or ten minutes of pure gibberish. His fellow white-robes would
praise this as speech granted directly from God, but they would
look at each other with pained expressions as they did so. From his
position as an outsider, Richard saw that the other white-robes
shared a great number of these pained expressions amongst
themselves.

It was not
just Bentley’s degrading mental condition that was causing them
concern, either. The conspiracy that Richard had recently been a
part of was considered destroyed, but it still lingered in their
minds. He overheard whispered conversations about members of the
community that the white-robes suspected; none of the names sounded
familiar to Richard, but he knew that it might not mean anything.
The conspiracy could have expanded again, or it could have
collapsed entirely. He had no way of finding out. Carolyn might
have carried information to and from such a group, but she refused
to speak to him. It hurt him more than he would admit to himself;
she was the comfort-mistress and confidant of the white-robes, but
not of Richard. The others would receive whispers in their ears,
slow smiles, and deferential treatment; Richard himself would
receive disgusted looks and frozen body language. The one time that
he had tried to outright speak to her he had received a look of
such pure hatred that he did not try again for a considerable
amount of time.

The paranoia
inside the community was palpable, but the concerns from outside
were even worse. The rumours of a strong power pushing outward from
the west were no longer rumours. Refugees fleeing east had
increased, and since Brantford stood in the center of their path
many of them had been caught up in Bentley’s mad web. There had
been such an influx of people that Bentley had been convinced to do
away with his “temptation test” and accept anyone willing to fall
in line. Many of those who survived that significantly more obvious
test brought along stories that made it appear that things were the
same all over. This power from the west – London, most of them
agreed that it was based out of London – was offering much the
same: either fall in line or fall in the grave. They were
apparently remarkably successful at it, as well; the refugees
showed up from towns that stretched from the coast of Lake Erie to
the Bruce Peninsula.

The
white-robes were too confident about their chances, it seemed to
Richard. They discussed the issue in terms where they were the
clear winner. The large influx of refugees were talked about as
though they were a set of ready-made slaves, already as cowed as
the community had been before Richard’s ascension. They discussed
the western push of this power as though it were something that
could be countered or talked to; they seemed to think that they
were a natural barrier to it. Richard thought that this was far
from being the case, but none of the other apostles had any
interest in what he had to say. They had made it very clear from
the outset that they considered him on the same order as pond scum,
and that he had only achieved his position through luck and
trickery. He had almost informed them cynically that the same could
be said of them, but he held his tongue. He spent most of their
full meetings with a sardonic smile plastered across his face.

Since none of
the other apostles would speak with him, he took to wandering
through the community, observing with mounting dread the steadily
increasing number of grey-robed people that the term embraced.
There were now so many that the Keep could not contain them; they
had begun to populate the old houses around the old school. As a
result there were more people in the streets than there had been
previously; Richard took advantage of the new freedom to wander
between the buildings, quietly taking in all of the changes that
had begun accelerating since his ascension. He had built up an
excuse in his head the first few times, ready to tell anyone who
stopped him that he was inspecting the new dwellings for orthodoxy.
After a while it became pointless and he stopped; no one was going
to stop him. The black robes that dotted the population would
merely look at him and nod. The old members of the community would
refuse to look at him, afraid of attracting his attention. The new
members would stare boldly at him, their worn and drawn faces
glaring at him hungrily.

These new members seemed to be a strange mixture of cynicism,
fear, and defiance. Richard did not blame them in the slightest.
They were all things that he felt in himself, after all. The entire
situation seemed poised to collapse, and he felt that everyone in
the community outside of the council of the apostles could feel it.
As the weeks went on he saw a look in the eyes of even the oldest
members of the community, a look that simply seemed to be
waiting.
The house of cards, once
assembled, is turned over to just such a crowd
he thought, and it frightened him. The slightest breeze would
bring that house down, and then what?

This question,
and others like it, were what drove him to wander the halls of the
Keep and the paths to the new houses like a restless ghost. He
chewed them in his mind like tough steak, worrying at it with
obsessive force. It was during the course of these walks that he
first noticed that Carolyn was showing up along a specific route
every day. He began to follow her, vaguely and at a distance. He
gauged when she left the Keep, and traced her to the outermost of
the houses that they’d reoccupied. He followed her for days,
establishing as precise a pattern as he could. After he felt
confident that he had it plotted out correctly, he waited until a
day when the weather meant that very few people would venture
outside. He watched her leave the Keep, and traced her path by
memory, far enough behind her that she would not see him coming. He
approached the weathered white door set into the front of the house
and tried the door handle. It swung open easily and when Richard
stepped aside he was not obstructed by anyone. It opened onto a
tight kitchen with only one person in it – a startled, frightened
young man holding a glass of artificial juice. Richard glared at
the man and he set the juice down on the counter and ran out of the
kitchen. Richard followed him swiftly.

He came out
into a living room, shabbily appointed and filled with damp
cardboard boxes. There were three people in the room: the man whom
had run from the kitchen; a man with a thin, scraggily beard and
watery brown eyes; and a woman that he recognized from that first
day he had been introduced to the conspiracy. Her face was
frightened but also fierce. She held a heavy-looking piece of pipe
in her hand, hefting it menacingly. He summoned up all of the calm
within him and stared her down. None of them moved. Eventually the
woman lowered the pipe and the man with the scraggily beard lowered
his head.