The Acolyte Read online

  Praise for Nick Cutter

  “The Troop scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t put it down. This is old-school horror at its best. Not for the faint-hearted, but for the rest of us sick puppies, it’s a perfect gift for a winter night.”

  —Stephen King

  “Lean and crisp and delightfully over-the-top. Think Tales From the Crypt, think early Crichton, think King on coke. . . . Disquieting, disturbing, and it’s also great fun to read.”

  —Scott Smith, author of The Ruins

  “Utterly terrifying.”

  —Clive Barker, creator of Hellraiser

  “A grim microcosm of terror and desperation . . . haunting.”

  —Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author

  “Fans of unflinching bleakness and all-out horror will love this novel. . . . Disturbing.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  The Acolyte © 2015 Nick Cutter

  Cover artwork © 2015 by Erik Mohr

  Cover and interior design by © 2015 by Samantha Beiko

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Distributed in Canada by

  PGC Raincoast Books

  300-76 Stafford Street

  Toronto, ON M6J 2S1

  Phone: (416) 934-9900

  e-mail: [email protected]

  Distributed in the U.S. by

  Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc.

  10150 York Road, Suite 300

  Hunt Valley, MD 21030

  Phone: (443) 318-8500

  e-mail: [email protected]

  Library and Archives Cataloguing Data Available Upon Request

  Cutter, Nick, author

  The Acolyte / Nick Cutter.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77148-328-5 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77148-329-2 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8607.A79A26 2015 C813’.6 C2015-901093-4

  C2015-901094-2

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited by Brett Savory

  Proofread by Sandra Kasturi

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”

  —L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology

  “Tired of lukewarm Christianity?”

  —Evangelical Tract Distributors

  This is the story of Jonah Murtag.

  Jonah was a righteous man, the one blameless man of his time.

  He walked with God.

  I dreamed of a time as a child when I saw a Muslim lit on fire.

  This was back during the Great Purge. Jews and Sikhs and Hindus and the rest booted out of their homes, made to live behind high barbed wire fences. Christian Citizen’s Brigades came together: packs of men with Bibles and baseball bats.

  It was one such pack that descended on the Muslim, who was riding his bicycle outside the newly erected Little Baghdad perimeter. I was six or seven; we were on an elementary school field trip. Our bus driver stopped to root the Brigade members on.

  The Muslim was mentally handicapped. It was difficult to tell at first—mainly it was his sunny smile that persisted while the white men shouted at him. He kept smiling even as a rock pinged off his bike fender.

  The pack circled him. The Muslim’s smile persisted, which seemed to incense them all the more. Someone kicked him off his bike.

  They lashed the man to the frame of his bicycle with old clothesline or something. He moaned and said stuff everyone assumed was Arabic but may well have been gibberish. They dumped a jug of liquid over him: gasoline would seem most logical but I recall the resiny smell and the purple sheen as the sun fell through it, and later realized it was likely turpentine.

  “Not in front of the kids,” one of the men said.

  “Let them watch,” said another. “The same as what’s being done to us by the other side. They need to understand how it is.”

  Someone produced a book of matches. They were lit then tossed at the Muslim’s face. The flames whuffed out before hitting him. The air shimmered above the Muslim’s shoulders: turpentine fumes, everything gone swimmy.

  “This is how they do it, anyway,” one man said to nobody in particular. I remember his hands: the look of bones wrapped in pig leather. “Light themselves up. Part of their religion.”

  As an adult I would understand what he was talking about: the ritual of sati, where an Indian widow immolated herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. But that was a Hindu tradition and this was a Muslim man. Not that I could have said anything then, or that it would have made any difference at all.

  The final match in the book ignited the airborne turpentine particles: a low whuph as a purplish cowl licked to life around the Muslim’s body; in that moment he was beatific.

  The flames robed his arms and legs but the pain hadn’t registered yet—in fact, the man seemed giddy as this weird light blossomed all around him—his hair catching fire. Some of the men looked away as they might from a very sick man. There was no sound at all: not screaming or even the crackle of flames. I remember wondering: Have I gone deaf?

  The Muslim man tried to stand but couldn’t with the ungainly weight of the bicycle lashed to his back. His shoes scuffled the pavement as fine threads of flame licked from the toes, and finally the pain threw him up like a marionette in the hands of a spastic puppeteer—he spun raggedly, confusedly, fire clawing down his throat to ignite the last vestiges of oxygen in his lungs. Teeth of flame spat off the rubber bike tires as they spun on lazy trajectories, two fiery pinwheels. The Muslim man shuffled across the street and ran blindly into the ghetto fence, pedals snagging in the chain links to pin him there, erect, while he burned.

  Article I:

  He Carries His Cross

  “Church and State.

  No Longer Shall the Devout Draw Any Such Distinction

  Henceforth and Forevermore, Be It Known:

  The Church IS the State.”

  —The New Republican Testament, 5th Ed., Preface

  Most Beloved Followers,

  You hold in your hands the doctrine of the Republic in which you live and serve. Its holdings are sacrosanct and immutable.

  These are your laws. The laws God has set down through the Divine Fathers and administered by The Prophet of your city-state. These laws are unbreakable. Whosoever may challenge these laws must be put down and cast aside by all devout and obedient Followers.

  Heathens are encouraged to abandon their retrograde faiths and embrace the healing light and the divine sanctity of this, the perfect and only—

  One True Faith.

  REVISED STATUTES

  Chapter 86

  Police Department of New Bethlehem

  Section 86.420

  Faith Crimes Unit—Duties and Responsibilities.

  1. Acting on orders from the Divine Council at New Kingdom, each Republic city [New Jericho, New Halah, New Bethlehem, New Nazareth, New Beersheba] shall form a Faith Crimes tactical unit, culled from the most skilled or otherwise apt members of
the rank and file. Officers of this unit [hereinafter known as Acolytes] are tasked with:

  (1) Enforcing moral law pursuant with the Biblical doctrines of Judeo-Christianity as revised through The New Republican Testament;

  (2) Searching out and eradicating all non-conforming faiths, their artifacts, sites of worship, and practitioners.

  2. Should the agenda of the rank and file contravene those of the Faith Crimes Unit, or should jurisdictional lines be crossed, the objectives of the Faith Crimes Unit shall take predominance in every circumstance.

  Initiation

  “Tell us, cadet Murtag.”

  Naked. Laid out on a marble slab. Where? A meatpacking plant? Condemned factory? The marble was ice-cold up the knobs of my spine.

  The initiation happened years ago. I am speaking from memory now.

  Men in crimson robes clustered around me. Their faces stared from lush, reddened hoods: my instructors, chiefs, and captains. Though it was pure blasphemy to think it, their faces looked to be poking from the folds of impossibly large and terribly loose vaginas . . . though of course I’d never seen a real vagina. An anatomical diagram, once, in a library book that survived the Great Purge, but never in the flesh, as it were.

  “What is your secret, cadet Murtag? So we can trust you.”

  Hollis, my future chief, was asking the questions. Beyond the ring of hoods stood my fellow top-ranking cadets: Garvey and Cruikshank and Applewhite. All stripped buck naked, hopping foot-to-foot on the stone floor.

  “You will see the banned texts,” Hollis went on. “You will come to know the heathen gospels, the tracts and treatises of their backward faiths. We must trust you’ll not be corrupted, and so—we must trust you.”

  They already knew everything about me. What schools I’d attended, how many shekels in my bank account at First Divinity, what I tithed last year, that I had scarlet fever as a teenager, the high school essay I’d written called “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

  The point was to make me say it. Confession being good for the soul. Confession is good for the soul. God is good. The Prophet is good. The Republic is good.

  Our way of life—good.

  I said, “My mother was given The Cure.”

  “She was an insurrectionist?” said Hollis. “She wished to see the downfall of the Republic?”

  “She said things she shouldn’t have. This was back near the beginning of it all. I repeated those things in school—”

  “Ratted her out?” Hollis grinned. “Your own mother?”

  “No,” I said. “It was accidental. My teacher told someone. She . . . said some foolish things. Had sinful thoughts. One day they came and took her away.”

  Hollis said, “Do you still see her?”

  “Occasionally. Birthdays, Mother’s Day. She doesn’t even recognize me half the time.”

  “Do you hold any lingering animosity toward the Republic for what was done?”

  “No.” And I meant it. “She deserved it.”

  A golden sheet was wrapped round me. All those scarlet-ridged faces stared at me with newfound solidarity. All those grinning vagina-entombed heads.

  I had done it. I was one of them.

  An Acolyte.

  Routine Roundups

  The house is a gabled two-storey with ivy creeping up one side. Near the Stadium SuperChurch but not within the exclusive ring set aside for Ministers and dignitaries. A house you’d peg a Deputy Minister to live in: a hard-charger and his photogenic three-and-a-half kids.

  But this particular gabled two-storey was packed full of homosexuals. We’d known about their cell for a while. They were a harmless passel of nancies. But it was a slow night.

  Angela Doe, Garvey, and I were hunkered in a van idling streetside. Upon the van’s exterior was painted a garish mural featuring Buckles the Birthday Clown. BUCKLES IS A FULLY LICENCED AND REPUBLIC-VETTED ENTERTAINMENT SUBSIDIARY read the small print looping over the wheel wells.

  The house was bugged. The three of us wore headphones. Scratchy voices fed into them:

  Voice 1: “Now look—look. This is about impulse control, okay? Look but don’t touch. Or look but don’t give the impression you want to touch.”

  Voice 2: “But then that’s not impulse control, is it? It’s a mask.”

  [INAUDIBLE CROSSTALK]

  Voice 1: “. . . and in time, that mask can become permanent. Take every impulse, put it behind the mask—the mask becomes you.”

  Garvey’s face pinkened. Especially intolerant of gays, was Garvey.

  “Let’s get in there,” he said darkly.

  “Would you be so upset,” Doe asked, “if it were a bunch of queer women?”

  Garvey stared at her. “What do you think? Don’t even talk to me about it—don’t put the image in my head.”

  We exited the van. Riot shields and tactical shotguns—check. We crept up to the porch. The door was unlocked. Garvey booted it in anyhow. Pure cowboy.

  “Faith Crimes Officers! On your knees!”

  The homosexuals—I counted eight—were seated in the front room. They were dressed conservatively, button-down shirts and tan slacks: the drab look of husbands and fathers, as I’m sure a few were. For some reason I’d been expecting decadence and debauchery: guys swanning about in pink feather boas while a naked midget tinkled away on a grand piano.

  “Face down,” I said. “You are in direct violation of Republican law.”

  Their leader held up a bunch of silverfish-eaten pamphlets from Exodus International.

  “We’re trying to change,” he pleaded. “We want to cure ourselves.”

  Doe and Garvey started slamming them to the floor and cuffing them with zip-strips.

  I repeated the Republic mandate: “Any Follower who harbours impious thoughts is to report to the nearest conditioning facility to undergo faith counselling—”

  “And then what?” their leader shrieked. “They cut your head open and burn the sin out! They turn you into a vegetable!”

  I headed into the dining room: mattresses butted end-to-end on the hardwood floor. Throw pillows tossed about. Pornographic magazines . . . upon closer inspection, they were just yellowed Sears and Roebuck advertising supplements. The “Summer Fling” editions: chiselled men in swimwear and jockey shorts. One pic showed a shirtless guy fly-fishing in his underwear. Garvey joined me. He picked up a catalogue, and gave the half-naked fly-fisherman a good long gander before flinging it away.

  “Sickos, these guys.”

  I left him to bag up the catalogues. I headed to the van and radioed the meat wagon. When it showed up, we loaded the criminals in. They’d be cooling their heels at the nearest Reconditioning Centre within the week. Or they’d have a Come-To-God moment.

  Night.

  West end of the city now, down along the river: storage barns and flophouses with whitened angles, everyplace looking like a black cardboard cutout. Wind scored the rusted docks and filled my head with the smell of steel.

  “Ten to one we don’t need these suits of armour,” said Garvey, buckling his Kevlar leggings.

  Doe cinched into a bulletproof vest. “What if you hadn’t been armoured up for that Mormon shakedown?”

  A month ago we’d busted a cell of Latter-Day Saints worshiping in an abandoned warehouse. Their sentry had shot Garvey point-blank with 20-gauge wadcut buckshot.

  “Mormons are kooks.” Garvey said, jacking shells into the breech of a Mossberg. “We’re talking about a religion founded by a guy who stuck a glowing pebble in his hat and followed it to some golden plates buried under a tree. Polygamous psychos.”

  I scoped a lit window at the northeast corner. “These guys are kooks, too.”

  “These guys are docile.” Garvey said, wiping down the face-shield of his riot helmet. “Harmless nutbars.”

  Once we were buckled and strap
ped, I knelt in the alleyway. I led the prayer.

  “Lord, we seek your blessing in this enterprise undertaken in your name. For the safety of your vessels, that we possess the courage to complete your good work, we pray to you, O Lord.”

  “Lord, hear our prayer.”

  “For the Divine Fathers at Kingdom City and their humble emissaries here in New Bethlehem, the power to enforce the glory and purity of the One True Faith. We pray to you, O Lord.”

  “Lord, hear our prayer.”

  “Amen.”

  Doe flicked my face-shield down. “The Lord be with you, Acolyte Murtag.”

  “And with you, Acolyte Doe.”

  Garvey said, “What am I, the heathen scourge?”

  Doe sighed. “And also with you, Acolyte Garvey.”

  We stood in the hallway outside the third-floor suite. Voices seeped through the cheap pressboard door:

  “Let’s find another incident you feel you can comfortably face . . . okay, I got a blip there. Backtrack it with me.”

  Garvey mouthed the words: Auditing session. Adrenaline throbbed my veins, a high hat tempo picking the underside of my neck.

  I mouthed Go.

  Garvey trained his shotgun on the doorknob. Blistered metal and wood splinters. I booted the door, snapping the security chain, and we steamrolled in.

  “Faith Crimes! On your knees!”

  A well-lit room. Four folding tables. Eight collapsible chairs. Eight fugitives: six men, two women. Tacked to the wall: a silk-screened portrait of their messiah.

  Milky pale. Toad-faced and onion-eyed. A silk cravat twisted round his neck.

  L. Ron Hubbard.

  Garvey kicked over a table and sent an E-meter flying. A willowy Scientologist stood up. Garvey tagged him with the butt of his shotgun. The Scientologist’s specs snapped over the bridge of his nose and he went down.

  “Everyone on the floor!” he bellowed. “Suck shag!”

  The Scientologists were half-deaf from the shotgun blast and half-hypnotized from their auditing sessions. Doe brought her boot down on an E-meter, which splintered under her foot like a cheap calculator.