Turned

gaze had once again reduced the chapel to silence, he began to speak in a strong even voice.  When I’d realized that the book that my mother had borne her whole life was central to the worship of the chapel I’d imagined that the services would somehow be akin to those times when my mother, my brother and I had sat on riverbank or inside a mildewed house and read passages to one another but as soon as the preacher’s first word resonated throughout the building those feelings were squashed. My mother had often admonished us to aid others as the good Samaritan did lest we become less than the animals and she’d often spoken of the land promised within her book, a land free of the undead where she would be with her own parents again. There was nothing of my mother’s sprawling wistfulness in his voice, though he quoted the same words he clads them in armor and armed them with swords. I felt as if my mother had been betrayed and my stomach filled with bile at the words.

“The Lord has visited his wrath upon this once prosperous land.  He has culled the greedy and opulent from his creation when they turned their gaze away from him and towards their wealth which they falsely believed to be the work of their own hands. The sinners have been cut down. Many of you may wonder why our Father who loves us would make his beloved children to endure such a severe trial.  Why would he gather us up into his hands only to dangle us over the swirling oblivion of the lake of fire?  I tell you that he has done this to humble us and to plainly present to us our one choice; turn back to his glory or He will cleanse the earth of wickedness.  He already cleansed the earth once with flood.  He promised never again to flood the earth and the Lord is good, he has kept his word, but he will cleanse it again with fire.  We must be like Noah and love the Lord, follow his commandments, and do his great tasks.  Never forget brethren, the Lord is a jealous god.”

As he spoke men and women in the congregation quaked visibly but silently in their pews.  The pastor never acknowledged it.  His steady pace of delivery never faltered though his voice rose and fell in punctuating bursts of volume. As the sermon continued, he began to talk of the Lord’s chosen people, those who would be lifted up to a land of milk and honey, a land unspoiled by the undead. The air felt electric, the congregation grew tenser and more and more men and women began to shake.  I sat stiffly staring at his lips.  Their movement was so restrained and seemed separate from the words that filled the church.  I could see my mother’s lifeless body lying on the sandy riverbank, her face disfigured at my hands, her brains splattered behind her.  I trembled though not in worship but in fear that I had prevented my mother from obtaining the Promised Land, the paradise where she would meet her parents once again.   I muttered to myself a prayer whether to my mother or her God I could not say.  “I had to, I had to. Vampires are excluded from the Promised Land.  I had to save you.”

The sermon continued and no one paid any attention my mutterings. “There are those who do not trust the Lord, my brethren, who cannot wait with patience as He has instructed us.  All things will be done in His time, but they believe themselves to be outside of his plan.  These men strive to build up an earthly kingdom as corrupt and sinful as that which the Lord already struck down.  These men are as haughty as Nimrod and the towers that they erect are as shaky as his tower.  They are built on an unholy alliance between men and the unnatural spawn that prowl the earth in its final days, but the wise build their faith upon the solid rock of the Lord which has smashed every one of the wicked clay kingdoms that have sprouted like fungus on his precious creation.”  The preacher’s eyes lingered on me as they scanned the congregation. They burned as hot as the hell that he preached was my brother’s fate.  I felt small and squalid in his gaze and I flushed with discomfort. My stomach churned as if it were a separate organism struggling to free itself from my body as I wondered if I was condemned for killing my mother.  Had it been the Lord’s plan for her to turn and would I face His wrath for circumventing his will. The preacher’s voice faded away until I could no longer discern his words.  They became the tonal backdrop for my own feverish thoughts crashing over me in waves of increasing strength and frequency.  Had I truly been acting out of mercy or had it been merely a selfish desire to maintain her purity for myself, because I feared vampirism?  I thought of Abdul and his tale of the General’s turning, how the General had wondered at the strength that had been given him.  Would my mother have become something even greater than she already if she were turned?  My brother had obviously made peace with the vamps and used them to his own ends, but he was not a vampire. An image of my mother swirled in my mind of a time when my mother taught us to catch trout from the bottom of shallow streams with our bare hands, a time when she’d been young and vigorous, a beautiful woman with long rich brown hair down to her waist.  Then she became older and slower choosing her words carefully as she tried to convey the majesty of the time before.  Finally, she appeared dead at my hands, buried up to her