Page 50 of The Unweaver

Groaning, he rolled his head away. “Speak for your fuckin’ self.”

Chapter 13. Baptism in the Summer Rain

ASister was screaming.

The nightmare from Cora’s childhood flashed across her sleeping mind’s eye with the disjointed surrealism of a dream.

The nun’s screams echoed through the drafty, stone corridors of the Sacred Heart orphanage, rousing children from their slumber. Cora cracked open the door and saw Sister Jessica, eyes wild and habit askew, running down the corridor.

“Help!” the nun cried. “For the love of God,help!”

The orphans exchanged whispers in the hectic uncertainty of the Sister’s wake. Nightgown-clad nuns appeared, hefting a body-shaped lump wrapped in a sheet down the corridor. Rosary beads clutched in a man’s fist peeked from underneath.

Something about the body beckoned Cora. Without thinking, she reached out as it passed. Darkness reached back.

Hands of unfeeling shadow enveloped and consumed her, and she sank into their embrace. Her sense of self was severed like a broken spine. She felt nothing. She had no body to feel with.

Slap, slap, slap, echoed a wet sound, followed by grunts and moans.

With a disembodied weightlessness, she drifted towards the noises. The horror unfolded slowly. In the center of a crimson room writhed a fleshy mass of bodies pulsating like a maggot.

Through the tangle of limbs, she saw vulgarities her nine-year-old mind couldn’t begin to comprehend. Women atop men. Men mounting other men. And children—

This must be Hell, she thought with mute terror.But if they warned me so much about it, why are they all here?For there in the mass was Father Hoyt, and Sister Jessica, and priests and orphans she’d dined with only hours before.

Slap, slap, slap.

Sister Jessica was astride Father Hoyt. Naked and gyrating, her saggy breasts bounced like empty wineskins. The priest’s cry of pleasure crunched into a shout of pain. He clutched his hands over his heart, tearing off the rosary beads, and Cora could feel the crushing pain in his chest like an elephant on her own sternum. He gasped for air and—

She was wrenched out of Hell as the priest’s body continued down the corridor. Baffled, she stared at her hand and the retreating web of black veins.

The briefest touch for the briefest moment and she had glimpsed into Hell, revealing a morbid insight she struggled to comprehend.

“How’d he croak?” asked an orphan.

“A heart attack,” Sister Jessica sniffled, bringing up the rear of the nun’s grave procession. “Father Hoyt, Lord bless him, has died peacefully in his sleep.”

A lie. He’d died not in his sleep, but in the saddle with Sister Jessica. The same nun who had lashed Cora raw for lying last week.

She dared not speak the truth. They already thought her eternally damned, and this descent into Hell, however brief,would remove all doubt. She’d heard the nun’s whispers from dark alcoves.

Abomination, they called her.

Sister Joan had labeled her so from the moment Cora was born at the Catholic charitable hospital. The nun had helped deliver twins to a mother little more than a child herself. The girl hadn’t given her name, the father’s name, or the babies’ names. She died before the younger twin was born.

A mercy, Sister Joan declared it. Cora hadn’t understood then, how death could be the merciful end of a tragedy. A girl that young hadn’t chosen motherhood for herself.

The first twin, a healthy boy, was delivered before the mother bled out. After an hour, the nurse deemed the second twin a stillborn. How could it not be? Breech, strangled by the umbilical cord, and bleeding its own mother out from within.

A dead baby in a dead womb.

They cut it out as an adornment for the mother’s arms when they buried her in a nameless grave. Better than a coffin birth, they told themselves.

Sister Joan nearly dropped the baby when it let out an ear-piercing cry. The little girl, purple and wriggling, was alive. Not by a miracle, Sister Joan whispered to the others, but by the Devil himself, for the girl surely bore the mark of Satan—a scar over her navel, white flesh puckered in a whorl of thorns, where she’d drained the life from her mother.

After glimpsing into Hell, Cora now knew the nuns had been right.Abominationmight as well be branded on her forehead.

Cora wished Teddy was still there. But they’d sent him away months ago, after he’d told them what Father Hoyt did behind the pews when the church doors closed, and the votive candles were extinguished overnight to save money. She had written letters to Teddy’s new foster home without reply. As the silence lengthened, her thoughts often strayed to him. Was he warm,safe, fed? Did he suffer these same hellish visions? Had he found their father yet?

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