THE CONKWRIGHT BITCH. She would ruin everything.
Amos Flesher paced his quarters. His heart bappity-bapped in his chest. Every so often, he slammed his fist into his palm. The meaty slap of skin was soothing.
To hurt is to love.
Who had said that? One of the nuns at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage? He had been left on its steps as a toddler. It happened a lot in that city. A city of whores. Amos barely remembered his mother. His father was unknown—but Amos knew he must have been a great man. A man of God who had been called away to follow the same voice that Amos himself could hear.
Amos had lived at the orphanage for sixteen years. His was the longest residency in its history. The goal was to have every child adopted into a God-fearing family. But Amos never was. He would spend a few weeks with a family, but they always sent him back. One time, he had overheard his prospective mother and father whispering with the nuns.
Peculiar boy. Strange tendencies.
All the other boys and girls got adopted. Even the dwarfs and the ones with harelips and the ugly specimens with IQs no bigger than their belt size. They were shipped off to families who lived in sparkling houses overlooking the bay. Amos stayed at the orphanage with the nuns and the pea green floor tiles.
The nuns became his surrogate mothers. None of them took a shine to Amos—they treated him as a burden once it became clear he would never get adopted. But one of them, Sister Muriel, saw it as her duty to teach him the wages of sin. And the wage was high, oh yes. Your immortal soul.
Prurient desires are the devil rapping at the door to your soul, she said to him. If you give in, boy, you let Satan trip-trap in on his cloven hooves.
She meted out discipline for lustful behavior. It happened a lot with the older boys and girls. If Sister Muriel found out that a boy had been fiddling with his dirty stick or a girl with her pink button—and Sister Muriel had an unerring way of knowing this—those transgressions would be met with lashes.
Sister Muriel’s discipline did not extend to the encephalitic or soft-brained orphans—God’s children, as they were known—who were kept in a separate ward. Those unlucky souls should be allowed to act on the impulses other boys and girls must stifle, she reasoned. Amos had not seen it that way at all. All vice was an affront to the Lord, was it not? And if those imbecilic simpletons could not check their acts of self-gratification, why should they escape punishment? It wasn’t fair.
Once he turned twelve, the nuns began to assign duties to Amos so he could make himself useful. One of those duties was to preside over God’s children during naptime. Many of them had to be strapped down so they didn’t hurt themselves—some of them shook so badly that the bonds actually helped them sleep: they would struggle uselessly for a few minutes, then fall into an exhausted slumber.
Amos would walk the rows of cots in his crepe-soled slippers, same as the nuns wore. They made no noise on the tiles. Sunlight streamed into the ward, honey gold on all those terrible misshapen bodies.
One of God’s children, a boy named Finn, rarely slept. He had a head like a pumpkin, his features stretched across that bulging canvas. He was thirteen or fourteen, nobody knew for sure, and nearly blind. During naptime, he would work at his wrist straps until he popped one hand loose. That hand would immediately go to his crotch. He masturbated furiously. His erection was a permanent fixture. All day, that fleshy spike in his drawers. Sometimes he would orgasm without even touching himself. He could bring himself to climax with the workings of his mushy mind alone.
Amos wondered what Finn thought about. Girls? Boys? Maybe just the pressure of his hand on his penis? Finn only produced guttural groans and blabbers, so it was impossible to say. But Amos didn’t like it. Finn strained against his straps so diligently that his wrists were forever scabbed. The nuns had to change the bloody linens every day. Finn ought to be taught a lesson.
Amos knew every crevice of the orphanage, and stole a pin from the nuns’ sewing room. He didn’t consider it stealing, though, because he was doing the Lord’s work.
That afternoon during naptime, he crouched beside Finn’s bed.
“Stop your fiddling, Finn,” he whispered, liking the way the order rolled off his tongue. His voice had already developed a rich tenor. “Or else.”
Finn just grunted and continued to work at his straps. His erection tented the soft material of his sleeping gown.
Amos pulled the pin out of his sock, where he’d put it for safekeeping. It was three inches long. He pushed it through Finn’s gown until the tip dimpled Finn’s skin. Finn grunted quizzically. Amos pushed harder. The pin broke Finn’s flesh, skewering a half-inch into his thigh. Finn moaned. He seemed to enjoy it. Interested, Amos pushed harder. Finn made a noise that could only be interpreted as one of ecstasy. He never stopped trying to get out of his restraints. How very odd.
For the next few days, Amos stuck Finn with that pin during naptime. He stuck a few of the other children, too—none of the ones who could talk, however. Their reactions were more in line with Amos’s assumptions: inarticulate screeches of pain. But Finn liked it. He loved the pain. It made him feel more alive, maybe, or it deepened the pleasure he was already experiencing. That, too, was a sin. And Amos was participating in it. But he was learning some very important things.
Before that week was out, the nuns noticed the bloody pricks up and down Finn’s torso. Bedbugs were suspected. The mattresses had to be fumigated. But Sister Muriel gave Amos the stink eye, and he was taken off naptime duty. Sensing he would be questioned, he dropped the pin down the playground storm drain.
The experience taught Amos this: he enjoyed being in charge. He had never had that agency in his life. And it stood to reason that people liked to be dominated. Not just morons like Finn—regular everyday folks. They needed to be told what to do and how to act. But you couldn’t just stride up and start bossing them around. You needed to get ahold of the whip hand somehow. People knew that they were sinful and licentious. Finn showed it plainly, but most people wore a mask. Under that mask were all the depraved, malignant elements of their souls. They wanted to be punished, because after punishment comes forgiveness.
And if Amos were to punish those people as he saw fit, well, it was a punishment that God would surely smile upon.
To hurt is to love, he now thought as he restlessly paced his quarters. The Conkwright bitch. Bitch, BITCH. Speaking out against him. She wanted to flee like a chicken-gutted weakling, shrieking for help. It would ruin everything. He didn’t want his flock to think about the outside world; it should not be acknowledged except as the seat of sin. He had placed blinders over their eyes and now one of them was trying to rip those blinders off.
Eli. Stupid child. Run off into the woods. He would come back; he would be fine; why wouldn’t he be? Children had run away from the orphanage all the time. Hopped the fence and vamoosed. If they never returned, it wasn’t necessarily because calamity had befallen them. It was because they didn’t want to come back. But Eli had no choice. His family was at Little Heaven. His God was here.
Amos would set everything to rights tomorrow. He would call the flock in from the woods whether or not the boy had been found. He would speechify to them until he saw that stunned, goatlike gloss touch their eyes again—a look he first became familiar with years ago, preaching atop a soapbox in Haight-Ashbury, amassing a small throng of worshippers. He’d soon gathered enough to start his own ministry. He understood the keys that opened the locks to human nature better than any head-shrinker. Those keys were labeled Vice, Punishment, Forgiveness. That last key was the crucial one. If you withheld it, banishing unbelievers from not only the Kingdom of Heaven but also the earthbound circle of fellowship they had come to know . . . that was the worst thing they could possibly imagine. It kept them at heel.
Amos stopped before the window. Night had drawn down on Little Heaven, but the security lamps burned. He stared at his church, topped with that mighty crucifix.
He stood, transfixed, listening to the Voice.
It came to Amos every night. God’s Voice—whom else could it belong to? He let it settle into his bones, soothing him. The Voice had already warned there would come a dissent. Amos had known this before the first fence post went up at Little Heaven. It was why he had hired Cyril and Virgil, whose acquaintance had been made through unsavory but needful methods.
Any flock could stray, despite the best efforts of its shepherd. That was why a smart shepherd trained a few ill-tempered dogs to keep the sheep in line.
He would weather this storm. He would cast out the irritants and prevail. He must. God had a plan for him. He felt it gathering in the deepest recesses of his mind: that other voice whispering to him, using words he could not make out. A low continuous drone like the massing of flies over rotted offal. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
He retreated to his bed, where he lay stiff as a rod. Without being aware of it, he began to knead his groin. He opened the night table and pulled out the long sharp pin that lay beside his Bible.
Release, he thought. By God, release.