What Became Of My Dear Sister

Justice, my sister, ran away from home when she was eighteen years of age, or so for many years I thought.

My parents were vague on the cause of her disappearance, and all matters pertaining to my sibling, come to that.

“A saint,” was all my father would say of her. “She was a saint in the eyes of God.”

“An angel,” my mother would insist. “That’s all you need to know.”

They would admit no fault in her absence, and yet I sensed something false in their praise and winced to hear it from such bitter mouths as theirs.

I’d feared both of my parents for as long as I could recall, which is a pitiful sort of existence for a child to know. They belonged to some evangelical religion that devoured them through its miserable hold, being that their conduct in all things was not as individuals, but as the mortal enactors of their severe and joyless faith.

I feared to trespass their rules or express any complaint lest they, by force, grind it out. The house was perpetually cold, a temple of gruelling worship in which toys, or television, or casual literature were forbidden, each room instead committed to such quantities of religious paraphernalia that there was scarce space in them to move.

I knew from savage paragraphs of my parents’ beloved texts that all suffering was holy, and corporal punishment just one means of pain listed among them. To be spared other agonies was a gift rarely granted, only the act of killing forbidden; the only reason my parents had never once raised a hand to me by my recollection was that being a mute, shy, and anxious child I had given them no true cause.

So it was that I did not ask about my sister, only imagined a thousand configurations of destiny that might well have befallen her.

After years of pure behaviour she had trespassed, I suspected, had disobeyed a curfew, tasted alcohol, or exalted in the touch of men. My mother would wash her hands and rock with mumbled prayer at the rare utterance of her name alone: in this way I knew my sisters’ failure as it was written in the law of my parents’ holy works.

They had put Justice out on the street, perhaps, or else she had run from them, leaving me, a boy of then just six alone in the harsh church that was our house.

By the end of the following decade I was desperate to join my sister in the world beyond, but having never been permitted to work by my parents or been given sufficient allowance to hide away I was jailed there, groomed to be the prophet of their faith.

I took to pacing the house in obsessive repetition by habit, particularly when my parents absented themselves to proselytise in the poor quarters of the city in which they felt the Word was most needed.

Sometimes I stood at the thin, high windows of that hideous abode and considered leaping to a sinful death on the grey street below, but thoughts of my sister prevented me, for I had hopes still of meeting her again.

I envisioned her coiled like an ammonite in the sheathe of an old sleeping bag, somewhere, or against the back of a faceless lover in an apartment beyond our parents’ reaches. Dancing on a stage under lights like gasoline on a black road in all their lurid colours—

So many images of Justice I conceived of, some of them happy, others lonely glances of the fringes to which my mother and father had thrust her in their rejection. But not once in my grim musings did I suppose that she was dead.

I knew there was some possibility of it—perhaps my father had struck her down in a holy rage, or she had seized in the grasp of drugged overdose in the infected womb of the city, or starved there.

Yet my parents’ belief that it was a sin to outright take a life was so strong that I could not conceive of them having any hand in it, and for reasons inexplicable I was certain that no other death had claimed her.

That Justice had disappeared led me to think that I too may likewise fade from view, however. My parents’ obsession with me standing as some great example of their religion disturbed me in its fervour; my name was often uttered in their prayers, my photograph placed beneath the shrine of crosses they knelt to where other families observed the glass face of a machine.

They had no reason to think I did not share in their delusion, for through fear I’d clasp my hands and mouth to God as they did, and so I seemed devout. But I had no want of their baleful religion of self-abasement, and as the months went on and my fixation with my sister’s vanishing expanded I at last dared to ask my mother if Justice had always been as saintly as they claimed.

“She was,” my mother insisted. “Our good girl, that she was. But we had a fear she’d change, when she got older. She was always having notions of leaving us… well, we prayed on it, and God saw fit to make a saint of her so all she’d be remembered for was the good she’d done, and not the sins that might have come after. Fire and brimstone licks us all around the ankles, child, but through His love we’re saved.”

She touched my cheek with one cool hand, and I cringed from the zeal in that caress, the look in her eyes that was a blindness in the seeing of what was not there.

“You’re so like her, you know,” my mother said. “You’re good. A credit to your faith.”

“I’m not,” I signed, but as always she misread the frustration in my gestures and took me gently by the hand.

“Oh, love. You don’t have to speak for people to hear the Word. You’re enough.”

It was the kindest sentiment my mother had ever expressed to me, and in other circumstances I might have taken comfort in it, but being that I was no believer it only drove my fear and melancholy deeper into me.

Once my mother had gone out into the city with her pamphlets, my father presumably with her, I resumed my wandering of the house again, thinking of Justice, whose face I knew better from photographs than from the tatters I had left of memory.

A soft, pale face she’d had, like the bead of a pearl rosary, eyes like the glow that accompanied sirens in the night; she looked as my mother had done when she was young, before the whittling of the Order had made a haggard branch of her. I wondered if Justice had gone that way, and if I, too, would be incised merely by proximity to my parents’ beliefs.

By the time my pacing led me to the top of the house I again felt the call of those tall windows, so ensnared was I by the terror of my fate that this seemed my only egress. It was as I stood pressed to their murky glass that I became aware of distant music above me, much like the recordings my mother would play while kneeling to her shrine of saints.

I stared up at the ceiling, momentarily bewildered; only when my eyes touched the outline of the door to the attic did it occur to me that this room which I had never entered was the source of that dark melody. To my knowledge the loft had rarely been used except for storage purposes, and so I’d had no cause or interest to explore it.

Now, attracted by the strain of mysterious song, I went to fetch a broom from a nearby cupboard and prodded the attic door until the ladder descended. At once the yellow glow of candlelight fell upon me, and with it the odours of incense and human habitation such as I had smelled sometimes in the street side gatherings of religious fanatics my parents frequented.

Against my better judgement I followed the lead of my tugging curiosity and climbed the steps up into that skyward quarter. I found myself within a makeshift church, though one characterised by the hoarding mania the rest of the house had fallen prey to.

Pews over spilling with stale cushions bisected the chamber, and clustered pillars of white candles threw up a canopy of shadows from wall to wall.

Underfoot lay handwritten prayers and hymns on yellowed paper, dropped down like summer wasps from their stands, and there were so many plaster sculptures of biblical figures hemmed in about the room that even had I been alone there I would have felt observed by their painted eyes.

Yet I was not alone, for upon entering the attic my gaze was drawn at once to the presence to which that shrine had been erected.

Upon the central altar sat a creature draped in pale fabric such as the saints wore in their portraits, its legs buckled in some weird mode of kneeling like plants grown twisted through disease or want of light. Its arms were bent backwards and vestigial, the fingers conjoined by a trellis of knotted skin; it had been burned, this thing, transformed by fire as my mother had described into a new and holy dread.

But it was only when that being turned its head to me, revealing, untouched, the miracle of beauty in its face that I recognised my sister, and what through an act of brutal ritual she’d become.

I screamed, first through the near thoughtless instinct of horror, then in despair, for even had I the ability to call through words for help I knew our few neighbours would bury themselves in the dark and dust of their homes and so hear nothing, or else tell themselves that they had not.

From some corner of the attic came a shuffling motion, and I pivoted so severely towards it that I near turned my ankle in the debris underfoot.

My father stood behind me, a dishevelled tent of bone and sallow features sunken into his clothes like some dead thing preserved by the sun.

Only his slow movement towards me across that junk room denoted his continued vitality, such as it had been reduced to through the dirge of his life.

“Ah, son,” my father said, and he glanced from me to my sister with the same awful love that had been in my mother’s eyes. “I’ve had my doubts, more than my share, and prayed on them. But I see now your mother was right.”

With shuddering hands I asked, “Right about what?”

As my father answered he wept, his tears like those on the face of Christ.

“In burning your tongue out when you were born. Your mother saved us all from greater suffering that day, and you, boy, most of all.”

*

Through fear of what else might be done to me in reprimand I made a great pretence of understanding my parents’ acts of zealous mutilation, falling to my knees and weeping, grateful for it all, and they, in their madness, believed it of me.

Yet from that day I knew I must alight from that terrible house and from my keepers, and that I must take poor Justice with me.

This did not prove easy, for unless my mother or father attended her I found the door to the attic was locked, their belief in my pious nature never quite so strong as the paranoia that she would be taken from them.

Still, even had they left that room open to me I knew I could not carry my sister from the house alone; though smaller and lighter than I, her new body was so oddly shaped that I wouldn’t have known how best to hold or to transport her without causing her harm or distress.

Her mind, it seemed, had been reduced by pain to something primitive; she could not speak, and though my parents addressed her frequently I saw no comprehension in her stare of what they uttered in her presence.They were glad of that, I’m sure.

A saint, to them, was like an infant, pure of thought, without autonomy, a symbol of all projected upon them by their followers; I wanted better for Justice than that, and so upon returning to school I made haste to communicate in writing of the abuses I had witnessed and those I myself had suffered.

Only my young age and the severity of what had been done to me had rid me of that memory, though through my father’s revelation I seemed to distantly recall it. These details I presented to my teacher, who, though vaguely sceptical, had me remain at school while the police were contacted and dispatched to my house.

Upon their arrival they found the building empty, though with evidence of recent abandonment, the customary disarray further disturbed by the hurried emptying of drawers and wardrobes.

The attic had been similarly gutted, though found there were sheets and blankets stained with blood and other bodily matter that supported my claims strongly enough to spur an immediate investigation.

Why my parents had allowed me to leave their keep if they suspected my betrayal I do not know. Perhaps they realised I would not be so easily subdued as my sister had been, and so seized the chance to fly with her in my absence.

Yet there is some part of me convinced that they had no inkling of my intent to speak out against them until I’d already departed, that they had afterwards received some sign of it, either imagined by them or else spiritually delivered by God or saint.

I may not have followed their religion, but some sediment of its superstition followed me even to foster care, where I should well have been released from its influence.

My restless habit of wandering persisted, also, which in taking me through the city, lost in contemplation of my family’s disappearance, led me to hear amongst the vagrants and the preachers there of a changed branch of their strange sect. The Holy Order of Saint Justice, they called it, my only proof that my parents and sister remained in that place three years after.

I looked for them in the streets and shabby buildings to which their circle was ordinarily drawn, intent on acting as the law had failed to in liberating my sister from them. Each time I imagined I’d uncover her where I sought, set upon some overturned box made an altar, her tortured body and eyes without thought lit by the reeking flame her congregants each prayed by.

Yet in the catacombs we called our city my parents had hidden her too well for me to find, for they had always loved the result of her suffering more than they did Justice and I.