John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

It put me in the first good mood I had known since imprisonment.

At about the time when the moon came up, my mood rose even higher. I realized what it was Miss Daw had told me. She had given me the secrets of all the powers that kept us here. She had told me who stopped whom.

Well, that thought was pleasant enough to allow me to fall asleep. I had not slept a full night in a long time.

Miss Daw did get permission to take me to Chapel in the morning. She brought my Sunday uniform on a hanger. Dr. Fell came by, once I was dressed, to help escort me.

Miss Daw unlocked the chain from the ring at my neck and then toyed with the key and lock under my ear (where I could not see) for several moments.

She said to Fell, “Grendel altered reality. I cannot get the collar off. Can you dissolve it?”

His third eye opened in his forehead, glistening and metal-blue. I saw it only inches away.

It seemed to consist of nested concentric spheres of semi-transparent substance, hard and shining. There was something like a pupil, or at least an aperture, one in each sphere. By lining up the different pupils in the different spheres he seemed to get a stronger or weaker ray. When enough apertures opened, I could see down a tiny well of clear holes, to a hidden spark of incandescence at the center, a starlike pinpoint of fuel in the tiniest, innermost chamber. Perhaps the different spheres had differing filters or augmentations for different effects. It did not look organic at all. It was clearly a machine thing; hard, finely-tooled, insensitive.

He said, “It has clearly shrunk somewhat, and seems to be made of a lighter, more bluish-white metal. The atomic latticework has been replaced with continuous substance. It is the Aristotelian paradigm, and outside of my competence. It is no longer made of iron, but of a ratio of earth essences with fire essences. I can remove it, but it might hurt the girl.”

The center of his eye turned red and an aiming beam came out. The various apertures began to slide together. I smelled ozone…

“Um!” I said, “It’s OK! It doesn’t hurt! Really!”

With a dizzying, chameleon eye-like optic motion, Dr. Fell rotated certain middle spheres to thicken the number of layers blocking the inner chamber. The metal eye dimmed, as if idling on standby. “Move your hands out of the way, girl.”

Miss Daw said, “Where is Mrs. Wren?”

Dr. Fell frowned slightly. By some intuition, I knew that he did not like to hear her saying, in front of me, any hint of whose power stopped whose. He said curtly, “She is unavailable at this time.”

That was what Dr. Fell usually said when Mrs. Wren was drunk.

Fell said, “Should I continue? You have primary responsibility for this subject.”

Miss Daw said, “It is unforgivable that a girl should be forced to wear such a cruel thing in the House of the Lord.”

I admired her for saying that.

“…What would people think?”

My admiration dimmed.

Fell said, “Is that permission to proceed…?” His eye lit up again.

I screamed and jumped back (hey, it was really, really nice not to have that big chain hanging there). “Get a hacksaw! Don’t let him blow my head off!”

Miss Daw said, “Let us not alarm the child, Ananias.” She looked pensive, and said, half to herself, “It does seem much smaller than before. Perhaps people will think it is jewelry.”

No one else was there. Not Victor, not Colin, not Quentin, not Vanity. This one week I had gone longer without seeing them than I had my whole life previously.

Even the other members of the staff and administration were not there. I was hoping to see Taffy ap Cymru, and blackmail him into letting me go, or getting a message to his boss, Hermes. But the Chapel was deserted except for the vicar, the altar boy, and us.

Miss Daw sat on my right side, her beautiful face glowing as if with an inner light. Dr. Fell on my left. Fell had an indifference to religion that went beyond contempt. During the service he sat with a checkbook and a pocket calculator, doing sums.

Our services were given by a vicar named Dr. Foster, a tall, dim-eyed, white-haired man, thin as a rail, who muttered and murmured mildly for his sermons, and who managed to make even the most interesting Bible stories into boring digressions into abstract theology or Trinitarian speculations. He was the only person I knew who used the word “consubstantiality.” At other times, instead of Bible lessons, his sermons somehow led down twisting paths to end up as descriptions of the metaphysical disputes he had against his friend, the Rev. James Spensley, from Mumbles, who was a Wesleyan; or the Rev. Price, from the Dissenter’s Church at Llangennith, who dared to be, of all things, a Calvinist.

I owe much of my agnosticism to Dr. Foster and his somnolent, sonorous sermons.

As horrible as this sounds, it was not until that day that I ever thought to wonder what denomination we were. I had always assumed we were High Church because our ceremonies were elaborate and beautiful. But were we? We said our Sunday prayers in English, from the Common Book, so I knew that we were not Roman Catholics (or “Reprobate Papists” as Dr. Foster liked to call them). Although Vanity and I had, when we were young, said our prayers at night in Latin.

Or, at least, we had been saying something in Latin. Maybe Mrs. Wren (who was, after all—let’s face it—a witch) was not telling us true prayers.

Our Chapel had both icons and stained glass windows, so I knew we weren’t Lutherans, and we had saints, but we were instructed to revere them without prayer to them per se. And Miss Daw and I went to the altar rail to kneel and accept the Host, which Dr. Foster blessed, and an altar boy, whose name was Jack Jingle, held the salver beneath my lips as I knelt and took the wafer.

Dr. Foster, as sometimes happened, stood at the lectern, blinking, having forgotten what part of the ceremony he was in. Miss Daw and I continued to kneel at the rail, and she took the opportunity to lower her eyes in silent prayer.

I wondered what would happen if I ran up to Dr. Foster or Jack the altar boy and begged for sanctuary, like Esmeralda in Notre Dame de Paris .

I looked over at Jack speculatively. He looked younger than me, and he always had, a boy who had not yet grown hair. I am no judge of ages. Eight? Ten? Six? He was young. In his hands he held the silver plate that carried the Host, and he was looking at Dr. Foster with some worry, and polishing the salver with his long, flowing robe sleeve.

I was reminded of something Quentin once told me. He said that the purpose of holding a mirrored surface beneath the mouth of someone taking Communion was to discover whether any vampires had infiltrated into the body of the Holy Church. The altar boys were supposed to pour the Holy Wine over their head, should that happen, whereupon it would instantly turn into the blood of Christ, and burn the vampire to a crisp. That was Quentin’s theory.

Once, long ago, after services, I had asked Dr. Foster about the question of vampires. He blinked at me and told me the essence of the wine was transfigured, but not transubstantiated, while remaining substantially the same, and that it was done by the grace of Christ, rather than by the authority of the priest.

I could not imagine Foster being able to understand that I was a prisoner.

I could imagine, very clearly, if Foster did get the idea that I was in trouble, demanding an explanation from Dr. Fell, or calling for him to bring a telephone (at once!) so that he could summon the police. I could also imagine Dr. Fell, a bored look in his thin, gray face, opening his third eye and burning Foster to a crisp. Or—why be so crude?—stunning him with a jolt and injecting him with something to erase short-term memory.