The woman seemed satisfied. She was white and looked to be no more than in her late teens or early twenties. She sat down beside Angelique and said, softly, “Do you remember me, Angelique? Do you know who I am?”
She stared at the other, and tried to speak, but no sound came out. She shook her head negatively.
“You can’t talk to me, for I haven’t had the guts to take the sign upon me, at least not yet. Just look at me and speak slowly, as if you had a voice. I can read lips.”
Who are you? Angelique asked her. What is this all about?
“I—I was Sister Maria Theresa when you knew me.”
Angelique was stunned and stared at the other disbelievingly. You can not be her. She was—old!
“I know. You see, we all have our price, don’t we? Motion, feeling for you, and for me—from menopause to adolescence, physically speaking. Forty-six is a difficult age. They made me seventeen again—seventeen always, they say—in exchange for renouncing my vows and joining them.”
But—you were a nun! In God’s name, how could you do such a thing?
Maria smiled a bit wistfully. “It’s all so simple for you, isn’t it? So cut and dried. Good and evil and that’s that. I don’t put you down for it. They kept you a child, denied you—experience. Not so with me. I was fairly late coming to the Church. Oh, I was born a Catholic and had the usual pressures as a kid and teen, but I was wild. Nobody’s fault, least of all my parents. I fell into a bad crowd in high school—right around seventeen, in fact. I didn’t want to work, didn’t want to grow up, and I wanted independence right then and there. I liked sex. I loved men, and I was in the kind of city that had a lot of them, lots of tourists, too. New Orleans. Wide open. So me and a couple of other girls from good middle class Catholic homes started selling ourselves for pay.”
Had Angelique been able to speak she could not have done so. She simply couldn’t imagine someone doing what Maria described unless forced to it by economic desperation. It was unheard of in the world Angelique had known.
“I know, I know. Welcome to the grown-up world. It wasn’t like you read about it in the books. It was easy. Just look through the papers, see what conventions were in town, go to the right hotels, and you made a pretty good amount of money just letting them make a pass at you. For a while it was fun, but then we got well known to the organized working girls. We were competition. We got threats and they really meant it, and we wound up with a Mac—a pimp—for protection. That’s when it stops being fun. You get a quota, and you suffer if you don’t make the nut. You turn it all over to the Mac and are totally dependent on him for everything. You stop being a person and start being property. Finally you get older and sick and tired of it and you want to quit and they don’t let you. You can’t anyway. Try being property for eighteen years and you realize you don’t even know how to take care of yourself. You start gettin’ bags under your eyes and spotting gray hairs and you know you’re in the home stretch, that you’re gonna be finished, and it’s organized crime and after all that time you know too much and can’t run. Well, I figured out a place to run to and I did.”
Angelique stared at her. You never told me. You never told anyone.
She reached into a small purse, took out a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled deeply. “Would you? Oh, I told the Church, sure. And they took me in, and I went through all the training and took my vows, and then went on and became a nurse—on them. I wanted to try and do a little good with the rest of my life. They stuck me in Quebec because it was a different country and I wasn’t likely to ever run into anybody familiar, and I took a new name and all that. So eight months after I first met you and took on your job, I wound up back in the fire again. These people knew everything about me. They knew things I’d forgotten for years. I put up a fuss at the start, yeah, but when they swore to me that they weren’t going to harm you and could cure you, there wasn’t much else I could do. I never really could be on my own, you know. I sold myself to the Macs, then I went and found the Church to take care of me, then when they couldn’t any more these people made an offer and I sold myself again. I’m not real proud of it, but it’s a fact.”
Angelique’s mind worked on several levels at once. She had a hard time imagining that a nun, any nun, could come from such a background, or, even if so, could have belief so shallow that the vows meant nothing except self-interest. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if even Sister Maria hadn’t been manipulated so that she would be where she was when Angelique’s crisis came.
“You’re shocked,” Maria noted. “You have this high ideal of why folks become priests and nuns and you don’t like it shattered. Well, honey, let me tell you, two-thirds of ’em come into the service for personal rather than religious reasons. Oh, some are real strong and real sincere and stay that way, but most are just people. If I had a buck for every pass ever made at me by some fat, middle-aged priest—and a few nuns, too—I could buy my way out of this. I didn’t take ’em up on it, but I never really was much for the religious stuff. It was just one of the prices you paid. I needed the Church as a protector. I guess maybe that’s why God dropped me right back in the midst of the worst of ’em.”
Angelique looked her squarely in the eyes. Why did you come to me today? she mouthed.
“Oh, I dunno. Guilt, maybe. Maybe I just wanted to make sure you were O.K. I really kind of liked you, you know. Oh, me and the other girls have seen you stretched out dead to the world—we bring that stuff in—but I just wanted to see how you were, that’s all.”
Are you a part of all this in the meadow at nights?
“I been there, but not much. They want the true believers there. They got ways, though, to convert most anybody. You scare somebody completely out of their wits, then make them choose between a slow, tortuous death or giving over their soul to the devil and I don’t know one that wouldn’t take up the chants and offer to sacrifice a pig to old Lucifer. They got it made here, you know. Damndest thing I ever saw. High tech Satanism. I think they fake most of the stuff they do somehow, but they still got the power. They got a lock on this island you can’t believe. It’s kind of like a tropical Nazi Germany except when some outside bigwig comes along and everybody plays normal. They finished off or converted every big shot working at the Institute. They own everybody here, and they got ambitions to own a lot more.”
Yes. They killed Greg.
“Oh, yeah? Who told you that?”
She felt a faint stirring of hope. The Dark Man. The first night.
“Well, he’s full of shit. They wish they caught him. Sent their big, lumbering monster or whatever it is after him and he holed up in the church, outlasted it, then made a run for it stealing somebody’s boat. I got that from Red—the town constable. He went through a grilling like you wouldn’t believe after that, but they finally let him go. Fired his ass, of course. He’s now just a common laborer, which is rough at his age, but they got his teenage daughter in their pocket and he’s got to go along. But he was there. Not that they didn’t search like hell for him. Gossip is he holed up someplace for the day, then sailed until he met up with a Guyanan fishing trawler that took him home. Where he went from there is anybody’s guess. They sent out something that he was a Russian agent or something and he’s wanted all over, but if they got him I didn’t hear, and they’re still a little jittery over him. The only one that got away.”
Angelique leaped over and kissed and hugged the surprised woman, and then she broke down in tears. Greg was alive! He got away! Once again she had hope.
“Don’t get your hopes up too high, honey,” Maria said gently. “Don’t expect him to come over the horizon with the Navy and Marines to save the day. He’s a fugitive on the run, was really working for somebody other than the company, and he can only keep alive by staying buried. Knowing what’s going on and convincing anybody else of it is two different things.”
She was right, of course, but Angelique didn’t care. He was alive! And he would do what he could against these monsters! She was sure of that. Perhaps, just perhaps, he would keep at it a little for her, too.
“So—how have you been doing? O.K.?”
I have had to deal with far worse than this, as you know, she responded. Still, I wish I could somehow get away, but it seems impossible. They said I would turn into a vegetable if I left.
“Oh, bullshit!” Maria responded. “Look, they got lots of power. Just look at the two of us now. But it’s not absolute. They got to be there to do something. Oh, they have these little dolls and they can cause you all sorts of problems, but even then they got to be right around you. What you are now is what you’d be if you escaped. A vegetable is what they might do to you if they caught you.”
She was fascinated. You are not fooling me?
“No. They know I’m here—I had to get permission for this—but they don’t care any more what you know. They figure they got it made. So even if you could get away, what would it get you? You don’t have anybody to hide you like MacDonald did. I mean, beg pardon, but anybody who saw you and didn’t know about this stuff would take one look at you and figure you as some poor savage from Haiti or more probably French Guyana. They’d either ship you back there or force you into some kind of labor or domestic service. You can’t talk, can’t write, and there ain’t many lip readers in this part of the world and none but me that would believe you if they could. Even MacDonald wouldn’t recognize you— but these guys would, and they’d be out looking.”
Marie was right, of course, and she knew it, but she also felt she had to do something, regardless of the risks. She looked at the former nun and mouthed. Do you know what they plan to do with me?
“No. Only that you got to be a virgin. Come here. Let me check something. Don’t worry. I’m a nurse, remember.” She leaned over and felt around the inside the vaginal area. ‘ ‘My God! An intact hymen! Girl, you must be the oldest virgin in the world!”
She felt herself flush in embarrassment.
“That’s what is important about you. You got control of the company and all and you are a pure virgin. Put that together with these guys who really control the company and believe in this devil worship. Figure on them doing a number on you at some point. Virgins are supposed to have big magical powers. If they can turn you around to their way of thinking—and, believe me, they can be real persuasive—you’ll be you again, maybe the number two head of the cult or whatever it is. I bet that’s what they’re doing now, setting it all up. Then on one of their big nights, like Halloween or something, they’ll come for you. It might be months, but they’ll start to work on you before that. You remember going out like an animal and killing that guy . . . Don’t look so surprised, we were all there. Well, they can take you a lot lower than that. Drugs, hypnosis, their other crazy powers— they’re like little gods even now.” She sighed. “I wish I knew what to tell you, but I don’t. One thing sure is that they’ll break you. They can break anybody. But if you get away like that, you won’t last as a virgin for ten minutes with that body, and if you’re not a virgin any more they’ll just let you stay like this forever and find another sucker. I mean, remember, if they can change you into that they can sure as hell change some other virgin into you—and they’ll find one eventually.”
That was sombering news. Damned literally if she did nothing, damned to life as someone else with no hope of ever breaking it if she did something, and the clock was most certainly running.
“I got to go,” Maria said. “They get real sticky if you’re too far off your schedule of duties.”
They got up, walked back to the cabin and went inside. Maria went to the supplies and removed an object that almost looked like a dead snake with something tied on to it. “I know this isn’t much, but you never had much practice with your hands. It’s made from local vines, so that spell or whatever it is should let you wear it. Hang it on those gorgeous hips. This little thing on the side holds a gourd; I’ve brought one, hollowed out. If you want to take something to drink with you, wear this, pour it in the gourd, and shove this cork in like this. It isn’t much, but it’s the best I could do.”
Angelique could only wipe away the tears and plead, Please come back soon!
Marie gave her a sad smile. “If they let me, I will.”