THE VIGIL

I hope there never is a future anything like the one suggested here but I suspect the current wave of religious terrorists might love it....

It was the kind of day when Father Absolom would rather be dead and in the arms of the merciful saints that controlled his world than feeling the pain of the here and now. Everything had been going wrong right from the twilit dawn, when he had painfully risen from his cot and pulled the horse-hair rags over his abscessed body.

Self-flagellation, he told himself, would have to go by the board today. The pain would be excruciating and he had barely recovered from yesterday morning’s torment. He was reaching that time in a person’s life when death was almost certainly just round the corner and any thought of further debilitating torture was unbearable. So he left the tawse in its drawer and made the sign of the cross towards the statuette of the Virgin. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would double the flagellation, drawing more cleansing blood then ever before. His already mutilated flesh would be ready for it by then.

Then he made his slow and stumbling way into the quadrangle where the novices struggled to stay awake in their crude iron cages, each one far enough from the others for meaningful communication to be impossible. Sometimes a callow lad would cry out in the night, clawing at his own naked body with fingernails that glowed dimly in the pitch dark. There was still a great deal of radiation around, the eerie gleaming remnants of the Greatest War.

Father Absolom faced Caratus in his cage, his feet almost buried in a week’s supply of faeces and his face, all of ten summers old, stained with tears. He would do more weeping before his term was up, thought Father Absolom. It was the kind of penance that prepared a lad for the Priesthood, the only kind. Only when he had suffered to the point of near-death and was carted off to the cells to recover, with hot broth and dried bread twice a day, would he be ready to go out into the world and preach the Holy Word.

“Your suffering is near its end,” he whispered, and failed to notice that Caratus was in exactly the same position as he had been yesterday and that the smell from his cage was that of faeces mixed with putrefying flesh. Caratus had started his vigil well, but had failed to finish it. But then, the vigil was no easy thing and it took a very special lad to complete the fourteen days in the quadrangle cages.

He made his way to the next cage, many paces away from Caratus, and containing more evidence of life. Inside sat Bowman, Father Absolom’s favourite.

“You’re not the kind of lad to give up without a fight,” he murmured, and Bowman smiled imperceptibly. He was hungry and all there was to eat was his own excrement, and eating that was a sin.

“Please…” he whimpered.

“Peace, my lovely child,” groaned Father Absolom, “you will triumph and within days of now wear your own horse-hair vest, bear your own tawse and go forth into the world, preaching to the vagabonds and fools that lurk in their holes in the grey desert, and recruit souls for our Master in Heaven, our loving Master who weeps eternally for our sins…”

“I have not sinned,” whispered Bowman. “My Father, I have never sinned. I know not how to.”

Father Absolom shook his head sadly. “The sooner you get that tawse the better,” he observed. “All men have sinned. It is part and parcel of living. It is impossible, my son, to live and not sin! See, even I sin, look at my penance!” and he raised the hem of his horsehair rags and displayed the marks of the tawse for the novice to see.”

“I don’t want…” whispered Bowman.

“You don’t want, my son?” asked Father Absolom gently.

“I don’t want this life! I want to go out into the desert and find my girl and live with her until the green glow claims me! That is all I want to do! Not stand like this in s**t and breathe the air of death and become a Priest, with no more understanding of the world than an amoeba might have!”

“You see,” muttered Father Absolom, “by your very words you condemn yourself! You are a great sinner, greater than most! You will wait here, my son, and I will fetch my tawse and ease the guilt from your loins!”

With those words Father Absolom staggered off, towards his cell, intent on cleansing the youth. It was his sad purpose, but all mankind had left to offer a harsh deity was blood, so blood it had to be. Blood, that is, and pain.

Before he was half way back to the drawer where the leather tawse was kept he felt a sudden sharp pounding in his chest, a pain the like of which he had never felt before. It creased his aching body, dragged him towards the ground until he could see its gravel reaching for him. He didn’t feel the pain for long, though, for he finally fell to the ground as he staggered, and lay still beneath the dull red sky. Around his motionless form the cages stood tall and proud, their naked inmates weeping or sobbing or dying, and the good world spun on its ancient axis.

And somewhere, in the desert of that strange old world, a c**k crowed three melodic times. And the people struggled on, walking their roads to perdition. And somewhere else another child was born.