Chapter 11 #3
Samuel twitched as if branded. It was the first touch from another human being since… since Elias in the clearing. Since before the world ended.
The hand was large, heavy, warm. Its warmth was an obscenity against his frozen skin. His flesh crawled and yearned for it in the same instant, a confusing rush of revulsion and primal craving that stole what little breath he had.
“Have you repented, Samuel?”
The Director’s voice was calm. It held no anger, no expectation.
Samuel’s mind scrambled.
Repented?
He had recited the words a thousand times, a million. He had worn a groove in the air with them.
Was that the same?
His thoughts were slow, thick with disuse.
“Yes,” he croaked. It hurt.
The hand on his shoulder didn’t move.
“Have you now seen the error in your ways?”
The error.
The kiss. The softness. The warmth. The feeling of being anchored, of being wanted.
The memory was a shard of glass in the mud of his mind. He saw it. It was the only thing in the cube with any color, any heat. To call it an error felt like a lie so profound it might crack the concrete beneath him.
But the hand was warm. The light was in his eyes. The world outside this cube existed, and it demanded this of him.
“I have,” Samuel whispered. The sound was barely there. Dry as sawdust, gritty with despair.
The Director’s other hand came up to rest on Samuel’s other shoulder.
“Then hear this, and know it is truth,” the Director said, his voice dropping into a familiar, sermonizing rhythm. “‘Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.’”
Worldly sorrow brings death.
Was his sorrow for the kiss worldly? It felt like it was killing him.
Was his sorrow for being here, in this cube, godly? It just felt like death.
The Director gave his shoulders a slight, almost paternal squeeze. “Remember that, Samuel. Your sorrow must be pure. It must be for the sin, not for the consequence. Only then will you be clean.”
The hands lifted. The warmth vanished, leaving his skin screaming into the renewed chill. The light receded as the figure turned. The door slammed shut.
The blackness returned, deeper and more absolute than before, stained with the phantom bloom of the electric light. The silence rushed back in, a roaring in his ears.
Samuel remained kneeling. The new scripture echoed in the newly hollowed-out chamber of his mind, clashing with the old one.
Worldly sorrow brings death.
He opened his mouth. A sound emerged, the only one left to him.
“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me…”
∞∞∞
Present
Worldly sorrow brings death.
Samuel jolted upright in bed; a strangled gasp ripped from his throat. The darkness around him was not the cube’s, but it was just as absolute, just as suffocating for one disoriented, heart-hammering second.
He was drenched. Sweat plastered the old t-shirt he slept in to his chest and back, cold, and clammy as a shroud. His breath sawed in and out, ragged, and too loud. He could feel his own pulse in his temples, a frantic, trapped-bird.
He lifted a trembling hand, touched his face.
Tears.
He was crying.
A wave of nauseous shame followed the realization. He scrambled out of the tangled sheets, the fabric feeling like restraining hands. With a violent motion, he grabbed the hem of the t-shirt and tore it over his head, throwing it to the floor as if it were on fire.
The images from the dream swirled behind his eyes, sharp and sickening. Then they began to change, to melt.
Elias’s green eyes glinting in the moonlight darkened, hardened into the Director’s pitiless gaze. The two faces merged, stretched, becoming one monstrous visage that loomed over him, speaking in a layered voice of gravel and sanctimony.
Worldly sorrow… good boy… brings death…
“No,” he choked out, a desperate denial to the empty room.
He stumbled across the cold floor. His target was the closet. He wrenched the sliding doors open.
He fell in, his back hitting the wall. He pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, making himself small. The solid pressure on three sides was a hideous mockery of the cube, but it was also, perversely, a relief. He had chosen this. He could leave.
But he didn’t. He shivered violently, the cold from the floor seeping into his bones. The tears came harder now, silent, wrenching sobs that shook his frame. He pressed his forehead against his knees, trying to push the images out.
His lips moved again.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God…” he whispered, his voice shattered and childlike. “...and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence…”
He didn’t know how long he sat there. Time, once again, lost its shape. But eventually, the words slurred. The shivering subsided into an occasional tremor. The sheer, mind-numbing fatigue that was his constant companion wrapped around him tighter than any blanket.
His head grew heavy against his knees. The whispered scripture became the breath of sleep.
On the cold closet floor, curled in a ball, Samuel finally slipped away, the taste of psalm on his dry, parted lips.