Page 7 of Heartless Heathens
The grin Corvin gave Sonny looked borderline dangerous. They were similar in that sense, the way they could put fear into a stranger with just a glance. It helped when you had tattoos from your throat all the way to your toes. If we weren’t carbon copies of each other, I would have pegged the two of them for brothers instead.
The way both of them had hair as black as the night, though Sonny kept his shorter and draped over his eyes and Corvin kept a neat fade with a long pompador, slicked back but somehow always fucked up from his motorcycle helmet.
“You act like creepy isn’t right up his alley,” Corvin laughed out, slapping Sonny on the back and earning a scowl from him that only made him laugh harder.
“He’s got something that matters to him here. We’re gonna find out what it is,” Sonny said, continuing his inspection. “You didn’t see his face when Felix mentioned this chapel.”
It only took a few steps into the hallway for our suspicions to be confirmed when the bolted steel door came into our sight.
I’d never seen a construction project completed in such a short time, but then again when you had the money to hire the best and the biggest crew, there was a lot that could be done in just four short days. New floors were installed, the broken windows were fixed, and after a coat of paint, the smell of the body of Christ was finally gone from this place.
The smell was probably all the dead rats, but nonetheless, it was definitely rancid and there weren’t enough scented candles to take it away. There were six or seven tiny bedrooms originally and we ended up tearing them down to build three larger ones in their place. The old altar area had become an eat-in kitchen that opened out into the rest of the little chapel. There a TV hung on the wall and soon furniture would arrive to fill in the rest of the space.
Sonny spent the majority of the week sitting on a broken pew, watching everything happen through narrowed eyes, like nothing could have pleased him. It was expensive work between a Monday and a Thursday to micromanage something you had no control over.
It wasn’t the epitome of luxury, but it would help get us through this year. Black marble flooring with silver veins ran along the entire chapel where the rotting oak floors had been removed. Every wall was painted black now, covering the painted imagery of Christ on the way to his crucifixion.
The amount of energy that lingered in a room without dark walls was too much to bear. We picked one shade of black and the contractors seemed relieved about it. Sonny had brought in some oversized canvases depicting different scenes from Dante’s Inferno and they hung high on the walls above the stained glass windows. The paintings had likely been sitting in one of Arlan’s many storage units, waiting for museums to reopen so he could sell them back.
Frollo kept his distance, surely in an attempt to preserve his dignity. Instead, Sister Agnes dropped off our schedules for the fall semester. If Latin at six in the morning wasn’t going to kill me, then the 4 p.m. religious history lecture might. But, if Frollo thought he was getting one over on me by loading my schedule, then he was in for it. I thrived in that sweet spot between busy and overwhelmed.
I preferred it to the quiet screaming that happened in my mind when I was left alone to myself. I’d never been good company. There was nothing worse than sitting with my own thoughts.
No one could hate myself quite like I did.
So I just made sure I was never alone with the bastard. If I laughed loud enough, I wouldn’t be able to hear him tearing me down.
Sonny however, was starting to lose his shit over the iron door. He’d asked Frollo for the key several times throughout the week, but to no avail. Frollo refused to part ways with it, telling us that if we wanted access to the chapel’s storage in the attic, we needed to grant him the time to clear it out.
That wasn’t going to happen.
Sonny had spent the entire week using his shoulder as a battering ram against the steel barricade with no impact on the door itself. Frollo had triggered the security system we’d put into place a few times trying to sneak in, but the construction crew had been hired to work through the night.
Paying them extra to keep Frollo away had been a nonissue.
Still, the contractors couldn’t open the door with the tools they’d brought and said a special tool would be needed to get the door open without damage. So here we were, still waiting for them to come back to deal with it.
“What if we blow it?” I heard Corvin ask.
“Can you get me the sticks?” Sonny asked him.
“Whoa, whoa, you are not gonna blow it. You put dynamite up against that wall you’ll probably send that bell tower crashing down on all our heads.” I rushed into the hall to stop whatever crazy idea they were starting to brew together.
“And?” Sonny asked and I rolled my eyes at him.
“I get that you don’t wanna be here man, but that doesn’t mean you take us out along with the architecture. The term hasn’t even started. We’ll get whatever’s up there soon enough,” I said, clapping my hand over his shoulder before he turned back towards the living room to unpack our new furniture.
“Since when do you give a fuck about architecture?” he asked me with a curious look on his face and I gave him half a smile.
“Someone’s got to, you know books killed buildings, right?” I misquoted some outdated classic and he twisted his face at me like he didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.
Which meant I was probably far off because Sonny had read just about everything.
“Did you get your schedule? Frollo has me taking a five thirty calculus.” Corvin changed the subject.
“Shouldn’t have threatened the man.” Sonny reminded him what got him his class times to begin with, but my twin just shrugged.
“Whatever documents he’s got up there, you think they’re gonna be worth it?” I asked Sonny.
