Simon Toyne - Solomon Creed

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Cassidy said, stepping over to the wall and flicking a switch. Light faded up, illuminating the fresco in all its dark and terrible detail.

There were many more figures populating the landscape than Solomon had first thought, their black arms and shrunken bodies almost indistinguishable from the land, as if they were made from the earth and still bound to it. The ones with faces had been painted in such realistic detail that Solomon wondered if each had been based on a real person, and what those people had thought when they had seen themselves immortalized as the damned in this macabre landscape. They seethed over the desert, their faces ghostly, their eyes staring up at the too distant heaven. Solomon looked up too and saw something he had missed when the fresco had been sunk in shadow, something written in the sky, black letters on an almost black background.

Each of us runs from the flames of damnation

Only those who face the fire yet still uphold God’s holy laws

Only those who would save others above themselves

Only these can hope to escape the inferno and be lifted unto heaven

The brand on his arm flared in pain again as he read the words, bringing back the feeling he’d first felt back on the road, that he was here for a reason, that there was something particular he had to do.

Only those who would save others … can hope to escape the inferno …

‘I’m here to save him,’ he muttered, his hand rubbing at the burning spot on his arm.

‘Who?’

‘James Coronado.’

Cassidy blinked. ‘You’re … but we just buried him.’

Solomon smiled. ‘I didn’t say it was going to be easy.’

A noise outside made them both turn, a siren howling past, heading somewhere in a hurry. Solomon could smell smoke leaking in through the open door.

The fire.

… Only those who face the fire …

The whole town would be heading to the city limits now, preparing to defend their town from the oncoming threat. Most of them would have known James Coronado. Maybe his widow would be there too.

‘Are you OK?’ Cassidy asked, stepping closer. ‘You seem a little shaken. Maybe you should head to the hospital, get yourself checked over.’

Solomon looked back at his reflection, trapped between the angel and the demon, their painted eyes looking at him as if asking: ‘Which of us are you?’

Let’s find out , Solomon thought, and the pain in his arm flared again.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t need the hospital,’ he said. ‘I need to go back to the fire.’

‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’

Exodus 20:3

Extract from

RICHES AND REDEMPTION

THE MAKING OF A TOWN

The published memoir

of the Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy

I ARRIVED AT FORT TUCSON with the priest’s gold all but spent. To raise more funds – and to my eternal shame – I tried to sell the Bible to an itinerant preacher name of Banks who balked at the size of the book, saying if God had meant him to have such a thing He would have sent it in smaller form. He told me instead of a Jesuit mission south of Tucson where a fine old example of scripture might find a permanent home on some sturdy lectern where no poor soul nor mule would have to carry it more.

I blamed encroaching poverty on my decision to try and part with the Bible, but in truth I could feel the hold it had on me and I was frightened by it. The visions of the white church and the pale Christ on the cross haunted my waking hours now and I feared I might be losing my mind, as the priest had lost his. But setting it down now, it seems clear to me how all of this was God’s design – the priest travelling from Ireland and finding himself in the bed next to mine, the Bible being signed over to me, the gold funding its journey west, and my chance conversation with the preacher who sent me on the path that would lead me to the Jesuit mission and the pale Christ on his burned cross.

We saw the smoke rising in the morning sky a couple of hours after sunrise on the second day. I had joined a cavalry supply train heading south to Fort Huachuca via the trading post where the Jesuit mission was based. We smelled them long before we saw them, poor murdered souls roughly delivered to God at arrow point or at the keen edge of a savage’s knife. The trading post was an inferno, roof timbers sticking up from burning buildings like smoking ribs and a large burning cross standing by a pile of smouldering timbers that had been the Jesuit mission. At first I thought the cross and crucified figure of Christ upon it too large for such a humble chapel. It was only as we drew closer that I saw the truth. The burning man was real.

He blazed like a grotesque torch, all signs of identity razed from him, his head thrown back in agony and fire pouring from his open mouth as if his screams were made of flame.

Captain Smith, the officer in charge, ordered someone to throw a rope round him and drag the cross to the ground and away from sight, but no rope could ever drag the image of that burning man from my memory. I uttered a prayer, commending his immortal soul to God where it would be forever at peace and free from whatever demons had made their evil sport here. And when I finished I heard a murmur of ‘Amens’ around me and realized that my prodigal companions, normally so cavalier and contemptuous of God when in the warm embrace of a bottle or by the light of a campfire, were drawn straight back to His goodness and love when faced with this bleak and terrible example of its opposite.

We set to work smothering the smouldering church with shovels of dirt and I wondered how an all powerful and merciful God could allow such monstrous sport to be visited upon His faithful servants and lay waste to His own house of worship. I could see no purpose in it and wondered if, in the battle between God and the Devil, it was the Devil who had already won. It was only then, in the deepest depths of my doubt, that Christ Himself appeared to me, rising from the ashes of His father’s ruined church to show me the way and the truth.

I saw His face first, shining white against the grey-black ashes. He was staring straight at me with an expression of such agony and anguish that I stumbled back in shock and my boot trod heavy on the charcoaled remains of a roof spar, which levered the thing up further and I saw it entire. It was the Christ crucified, carved from pure white marble and fixed to a cross of hard wood that had been burned by the fire but not destroyed.

I guessed from its position in the ruined church that it must have hung above the altar and I imagined how the Christ must have stared down in lament as flames consumed His father’s house. It was a miracle the cross had survived, a miracle that I had found it, and I recalled the words of the raving priest as he had pressed the Bible into my hands and transferred his mission to me.

– You must carry His word into the wasteland. Carry His word and also carry Him. For He will protect you and lead you to riches beyond your imagining.

And here He was.

I walked into the smoking ruin of the church and took the pale Christ in my arms – His cross now mine, my burden now His. I could feel the trapped heat of the fire radiating out of the solid wood and it felt like the warmth of His love flowing into me and I realized then why God had allowed the savages to slaughter good Christian folk and burn His house to the ground.