His anger faded as he faced the trespassers, replaced by a growing fear.
No one spoke.
Smirking, the young woman on the pew moved to the left, straddled the desecrated statue.
She spread open the lips of her vulva and peed.
There were giggles and chuckles that echoed in the silent church, titters that turned into guffaws. The young people were all still staring at him, but in their faces was not the shame at being caught that he'd expected to see, not the guilty acknowledgment of their wrongdoing that he would have thought they'd exhibit, but condescension and a smug, intimidating contempt.
A ponytailed boy swaggered up to the dais, held a bottle out. 'Hey, dude, have some.'
Pastor Robens wanted to smack the bottle out of the boy's hand, wanted to grab him by the collar and shake some sense into him, but he stood meekly aside as the boy took a swig of the wine and turned on the boombox.
The other youngsters started dancing again, passing around their bottles, whooping and hollering. The two young men on the floor were now partially undressed. Against the back wall a girl screamed as a boy began beating her breasts with his fists.
Pastor Robens hurried into his office, shut the door, locked it.
He heard a chorus of laughter from the partyers on the other side.
The ironic thing was that he did want a drink. He had never wanted a drink more in his life. He was trembling, his heart pounding with fear.
He had never encountered anything like this before. He had counseled troubled teens, had even worked for a while in a gang-counseling center in downtown San Francisco. But nothing he had ever experienced had prepared him for this. Emotionally troubled youth and violent fledgling criminals, those he could deal with. Those kids had specific recognizable problems. But that group out there ... Something smashed against the door of this office, and he leaned against it, closing his eyes, offering a quick prayer to God that they wouldn't get in.
There was something wrong with them, something deep and fundamental that went beyond the surface problems caused by family or society or even mental instability, something that he sensed but could not see, something that he only partially understood.
Evil.
Yes, that was it exactly. Evil. These kids were evil. Evil not for what they were doing, not for what they were saying, but for what they were.
He had intended to come in here and call the police, but as he pressed his back against the door, as he heard the revelry going on in his chapel, he realized that he was afraid to do so.
There was a furious knocking on the door behind him, a powerful pounding he could feel in his bones.
'I got a big prick for you, preacher!'
He bit his lip, said nothing.
He had been in here now for over two hours. He'd heard screams of pain, cries of pleasure, drunken laughter. There'd been things knocked over, items smashed, windows broken. And through it all, the music, that horribly repetitive rap music, blaring from the front of the church, covering the softer sounds, obscuring the louder ones, making everything chaotic and unintelligible and even more frightening.
And then, all of a sudden ... he heard them leave. The music stopped, the laughter faded, the cries died down, and they were walking, running, staggering, crawling outside. He heard the big doors open, heard the slurred conversations retreating. He wanted to peek through the curtains, through the window, to make sure that what he was hearing was actually occurring, to make sure that they were really leaving, but he was afraid to check, afraid even to move, and it was over an hour later when he finally got up the courage to open his office door and peek into his chapel to see the damage.
'What do you think you're doing?'
Penelope stood in the center of the meadow, screaming at her mothers as they bent over Dipn, smearing him with blood and fat from the gutted bodies of the policemen. Her mothers were obviously very drunk, but the intoxication seemed to flow in waves: they were crazy, frenzied and chaotically wild, one moment; sober, organized, and intensely serious the next. It seemed almost as though they were possessed.
Possessed.
Could that be what was going on here?
Penelope didn't think so. Whatever unnaturalness was at the root of all this, it was nothing new, nothing alien, nothing from the outside.
It came from her mothers.
'Leave him alone!' she screamed.
Mother Janine looked over at her, laughed manically. 'He's got a nice dick here! Get it while it's hot!'
Mother Felice slapped her face.
The others laughed. Mother Janine laughed too, but she reached out and grabbed a handful of the wine- stained tunic that Mother Felice was still wearing and ripped it off.
Mother Sheila picked up a handful of blood and fat and threw it at Mother Felice.
'Stop it!' Penelope screamed. She looked from one mother to another. She was scared and confused, and she wanted more than anything else to run, to escape, to get as far away from here as quickly as possible. But where would she run to? Where would she go? The police? That's where she should go, she knew. Two policemen were dead and eviscerated, killed by her mothers. And! God knew how many other people they'd murdered.
Her father.
But she could not bring herself to turn traitor, to turn her mothers in.
She wanted to stop them, maybe even wanted to kill them, but at the same time she wanted to protect them from anyone else who might try to intervene.
Whatever happened, it had to stay within the family.
Which meant that if someone was going to do something, it would have to be her.
Her mothers were still playing in the blood, and all of her instincts were telling her to get out of here, to flee the meadow, to get back to lights, streets, buildings, cars, civilization, to save herself.
Everything she'd ever learned, thought, or believed was telling her to get help. But she realized that she could not do that. Not to her mothers.
Besides, she couldn't leave Dion.
Dion.
He was screaming, fighting, struggling against the drunken women holding him down and smearing him with blood. As Mother Felice broke away from the others and started toward her across the meadow, she could see Mother Janine stroking his penis, massaging it with blood.
He was hard.
Penelope felt sickened. She walked toward Mother Felice. The two of them stopped less than a foot from each other. Her mother smiled, and there was both sadness and triumph in the look. 'So now you know,' her mother said.
'Know what?'
'What we are. What you are.'
She was even more confused than before. And more frightened. What she was?
She suddenly realized that she was not as shocked by all of this as she should have been, not as disgusted as she would have expected to be. It was horrifying, yes, and obviously disgusting, but her reactions were intellectual, not emotional, a recognition of the response the scene would have provoked in other people, not the response that was actually evoked within her. She was reacting to this the way she thought she should react, not the way she really felt.
The fear was definitely there, but it was not a physical fear, not a fear of what might happen to her. It was more a fear of recognition, a realization that these were her mothers and that she was their daughter, that she was one of them.
Anger. That was her overriding emotion. Anger at what they were doing to Dion, at what they were putting him through. It was a focused anger, though, a localized anger, and she wondered if she would have reacted this way rf it had been someone else. Did she even give a damn about the dead policemen?
No.
