Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

Gluttony.

Lust.

Greed.

Pride.

Envy.

Wrath.

Sloth.

Mary May rolled and stared at them from where she lay, looking every scrawled word over. The papers jagged and misshapen where they were not pinned. She kept looking at them and then, startled and in a rush, she realized what the smell of this room had been. The metallic, almost vinegary tang of skins stretched one end to the other and pinned by the hundreds across the wall. Dark to light like every color of the human body.

“You shouldn’t worry,” Drew said. He stood at the door looking in. He waited as her eyes adjusted and her vision cleared.

She rolled now and looked to where he stood and she saw his eyes running over the walls then dropping to where she lay.

“In the wilderness after you fled into the forest John had wanted to kill you. He had wanted you to go away, to disappear. I asked him not to kill you. I asked him to spare you as we have been taught to spare all that see the truth.” Drew came forward into the room. He studied one of the skins a little way down the wall, then he turned to her. “This one,” he said, gesturing to the skin. “This one is my own.”

She looked to the wall and read the sin written there, Envy.

“The Father and John helped me to see that I was envious. That I had always been envious and that it would continue unless I accepted myself for who I was. They helped to strengthen me, and in the process they showed me how lost I had truly been.”

“That’s yours?” she asked. She did not understand. She looked at him and then around the room. “What is this?” she asked. “What are those?”

He bent and knelt in front of her. He reached a hand out and touched her neck then ran his fingers down across the sternum of her chest. “They tattoo you right here,” he said. “They look into your soul and they see the sin that you are carrying and they bring it to the surface when they tattoo it across your chest.” He stood again, taking his hand from where it had pressed down on her. “Once you accept your sin, you can then release it.” He hooked a finger up and pulled down the collar of his shirt.

She could see the scar tissue there. Almost as if it were a burn, but she knew it was more than that—that the skin itself had been removed. She looked to the wall again. She looked to the sin that had sat atop her brother’s chest. When she looked back at him, she said, “What have they done to you, Drew? What have you let them do to you? You’re not this man. You’re not the man they think you are.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not that man anymore. You’re right about that.” He took the .38 from behind now and he brought it up and stared down at it like the gun itself were some treasure rescued from the bottom of the sea. “They never treated me like an equal. They never thought I could ever be anything like you, or like him. They always thought I was lesser. They never wanted me. I know that now. I know it was their sin that gave me life and I accepted that. I accepted them for that and for what they did when they gave this life to me. But they, in turn, never accepted me.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Mamma and Daddy loved you. He came up here to get you. He came to get you and bring you back, just as I did. You have to see that there is love there. You have to understand that.”

“No,” Drew said. He brought the gun around. He held it out toward her now, and he reached and pulled her to her knees. “You are the one that doesn’t understand. You are the one who has been marked with sin. Who needed to be cleansed. I am the one who has saved you. I am the one who saves you still.”

She listened to him, but what she heard most distinctly, and what terrified her all the more, was the sound of another set of footsteps now approaching down the long hallway.

WILL HAD COME DOWN THE BLUFF, WORKING ALONG THE SLOPEat an angle. By the time he reached the flatlands near the lake he could see the buildings through the trees and he pictured himself there among them. The trees were patchy in many places and his view looked toward the lake and among the trunks of the trees and though Will was one of them he knew he must be cautious in his approach. He threw himself down among a growth of thick underbrush and glassed the compound.

He had a straight shot to the house where the word SINNER had been written, but in its place now was white paint. He ran his eye across it several times before he was even sure of what he saw. The word was gone. Erased as if it had never been there to see at all.

Using the scope, he viewed the gravel drive then moved the scope along each building. He had little idea where to start or even to guess where he might find Mary May or in what state.

When Will had come to the church twelve years ago, he had come to confess his sins. He had come to speak to The Father and to ask him for his forgiveness. And while Will had always been a believer in the church in town, he had prayed to them and his prayers for peace and for acceptance of the things he’d done, had, in his mind, gone unanswered.

The Father had told him to have faith. He had laid his hands upon Will in a way so different than Will had seen, or felt in town. The Father hugged him and brought him toward him like a brother. Gesturing in that moment to his own brother John, and the eldest among them, Jacob, he had said to Will, “You will be to us a brother, and that bond you share with us will be even stronger than the one we three share even in our blood. You will be family to us and we will care for you as family and you will care for us as family and in this we will take comfort and provide for one another for the rest of time.”

Will had been released and he had stood there with The Father, and with the ten or so followers that soon would grow to become many hundreds. And Will had looked back at him and The Father had said for him to bathe in the water of the river and to immerse himself and wash his sin.

John, himself, had been the one to baptize Will. And afterwards he had said to Will, “Now you must confess. You must confess your sin.”

“But I do not know it,” Will had said.

“You know it. You know it just as you know your own reflection seen—but then forgotten—in the passing of a mirror.”

“I cannot see it,” Will said. “I am lost. I am lost without them, without my wife and without my daughter.”

John had pulled him close just as The Father had, and he had led him to the edge of the river, bringing him to a tranquil eddy where the water sat calm and still. “Now you see the sin inside you,” John had said. “You are a hunter. You are a killer. You are a man of Wrath and not of good. You are here for this very reason. You are here to appease your sin and erase the Wrath that lives within you.”

Will dropped the scope from his eyes. He knew now where they had taken her. He knew now what had been done to her and he feared now he might be too late.

JOHN CRADLED MARY MAY BY THE BACK OF THE HEAD. HE BLEWthe powder upon her, and then he knelt and looked inward on her. It seemed to her that he was looking through her, in through the eyes then out the back. The powder roiled within her like a smoke, pouring past her eyelids and down her throat.

“You only had a taste of the true power of the Bliss in which we bathe the sinners,” John said. “You did not have the chance to see the world in its truest form, stripped naked, and revealed.” He stepped back now and watched her. She was having trouble keeping focus. A cloud was moving across her vision and all she saw had morphed and begun to pull. Still, she was aware that Drew was standing with her, their father’s .38 still held in his hands, the gun barrel pressed upon her skull.