The Millennium Blues by James Gunn

Author:James Gunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roca Editorial/Open Road Español
Published: 2000-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

September 24, 2000

Barbara Shepherd

Barbara Shepherd was all tied up. Her arms, stretched above her head, were fastened together at the wrist with rough twine, and her wrists were bound to the handle of a pitchfork whose tines had been driven deep into the dirt floor of the horse stall. Her legs were stretched just as tightly in the other direction, and her ankles, bound together like her wrists, were fastened to the pillar on the other side of the stall.

Isaiah had knotted them with the skill of a farmer used to tying bales of hay. The twine, bristling with coarse, loose fibers, cut into Shepherd's soft skin, and the straw beneath her, odorous with horse urine and dung, was lumpy beneath her back, protected only by the thin flannel of a nightgown.

Isaiah had come for her in the night, creeping into the women's barracks with the grace peculiar to a big man, awakening her with a rough hand over her mouth and a whisper in her ear. “Come!” he said. She had been summoned to the service of God. Mutely she rose and followed him into the chill night, without a robe, without shoes or slippers.

In the months before she had sought out this sanctuary, she had read stories in those scandalous supermarket weeklies about Isaiah's “marriages.” He was, they had said, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the Second Coming, and Prophets were not bound by the rules of lesser men. She had not believed the stories. Recently, however, she had overhead some of the other women mentioning private audiences with the Prophet, and noticed some of the comelier women looking aside and smiling. Even then she had not believed: Isaiah was a man of God, and what need had he of the consolations of the flesh?

But if the stories were true, if this was the contribution she could make to the Prophet, if she could ease for a moment his awesome responsibilities and comfort his terrible encounters with the Almighty, well, she had given herself to lesser men for lesser purposes. Isaiah had promised that his flock would be saved. She believed that Judgment Day would come upon the world within a few months. And in that Judgment Day, she believed, the sins of the flesh would be melted away and they, the Saved, would be reborn as pure spirit.

She had not struggled when he bound her nor even when he swore because she was too short to tie between pillars and he had to substitute the pitchfork, driving it angrily into the earthen floor with all the strength of his massive back and shoulders. If this was his will and his way, her chosen way was to submit without question. But for some minutes now she had heard him digging in the soft dirt in the far corner of the barn, and when he returned with a damp spade in his hand, she would have screamed if he had not silenced her with an upraised hand.

He tossed the spade into the corner of the stall.

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