Chapter 17 – Brother Willow
During the course of a long, tiring day, we locate and bury another ten dead bodies. That leaves a lot of House members still unaccounted for. Flynn can’t be found, and he’d been outside at the time of the attack. I desperately want to find him.
Uncle Rooster is still unconscious when night comes. His condition appears to be stable, which we’re thankful for. I start to believe that maybe he will pull through. I haven’t much hope left in me, but it forces me to carry on.
I arrive back early from gathering firewood to find Rooster’s eyes glaring at me in the dark. There is nobody else about and the sight causes me to drop my branches in surprise.
“Uncle?” I whisper.
He shushes me, and I run to him, almost falling over in my haste. I kneel down by him and take his hand. He coughs and then he offers me a big smile.
“How are you feeling?” I ask him.
“Where are the others?” he wonders. He sounds suspicious.
“We’re out collecting firewood but they should be back soon.” He shushes me again, and I start to feel that something is very wrong. He’s never acted like this before.
“What’s wrong?”
He says, voice trembling, “Something terrible happened.”
I sigh. He’s obviously taken a very bad knock to the head. I know it could be worse, but Uncle Rooster has a very distinct personality.
“The gods destroyed the House,” I say sadly. “There was nothing any of us could do about it.”
“I haven’t lost my mind,” Rooster snaps angrily. “I know what happened. It was what happened before the gods arrived that was terrible. I was in a state because Rosa had stayed behind with Phylida to help tend to Harold and so, when I awoke in the middle of the night to find she still hadn’t come back yet, I got up and headed for the infirmary to see what was going on.”
He starts to cry. All I can do is squeeze his hand to reassure him that I’m here for him and wait for him to continue.
“When I got there I found Phylida and Harold dead. They’d had their throats slit and left to bleed all over the floor. You should’ve seen all the blood.”
He has to be wrong. If there was a dispute, we solved it. Nothing had ever gotten that far before. But Rooster is scared, his eyes glazed over with a fear I’ve never seen on him.
“Is Rosa alright?” I ask.
“She wasn’t there,” he answers. “I rushed out to find her and then we heard the gods and the glass shattered and from then on it’s really a huge blur. I was sucked into the ground, I think.”
I tell him he had been, and he starts crying again. His two oldest friends have been butchered and his betrothed has gone missing. I know Rosa is most likely dead but don’t dare to voice my suspicions.
“Phylida was my first crush,” Rooster admits. “I loved her so much and then she married someone else. I never told her.”
Uncle Rooster coughs and winces in agony. Fresh blood oozes down his side to congeal in the dirt.
“I know who did it, though,” says Rooster.
I look into his eyes as his lips tremble and I ask, “Who?”
“I just don’t know why,” says Rooster. “It doesn’t make any sense. I was just going back in with the others to help before the House collapsed. I saw him catch up to Rosa, who was just making her way to freedom. He grabbed her by her hair, her lovely red hair, and pulled her back and slashed her throat open like she was a pig being slaughtered for meat. I looked into his eyes and he grinned as my love’s blood gushed over his hand. We wanted a baby, you know...
“I was so close, I could touch her hand, but by then the ground was quaking and I hit my head and...Why did he do it? Harold told me his suspicions but... here, take this and don’t tell a soul about it.”
His hand shoves something surreptitiously into my jacket pocket. I’m about to ask him whom the murderer is when something hard smashes into the back of my head. I go backwards into the dirt and look up to find the heel of a thick black boot about to come down onto my face. I grab the ankle of my attacker and twist, causing them to fall onto me.
It’s my father.
“Father?” I exclaim. He elbows me in the nose, then jumps to his feet and brings his boot back onto my head again. I feel dazed. The pain I experience trebles when he strikes me again with his foot, this time against the broken bone in my arm. I clearly hear more bones crack.
“What did he tell you?” Father demands. His tone is different. He now sounds pitiless and cruel, and it terrifies me more than the warring gods.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Rooster pleads. He is weeping openly now. “He knows nothing.”
Father kicks me in the stomach as I try to stand, and I stumble back again. I just can’t seem to stand up, I’m so dizzy and in so much pain, but I need to get up. I need to help Uncle Rooster.
“Leave him alone, please” Rooster begs. “I didn’t tell him anything, I swear to you. Leave him be!”
“I know you didn’t tell him anything,” says Father, grinning. “But you know something that could destroy the gods, so that makes you expendable.”
“Zach, no!” Rooster cries.
Father pulls a sharp serrated knife out from a side pocket. It’s covered in wet blood and gore. He advances on Rooster and, as I finally manage to get myself to my feet, ignoring the bottomless pain coming from my broken arm, Father slams the knife into my uncle’s throat. Blood gurgles out of his mouth for a second, and his body gives a violent spasm, before his eyes shut.
I can only stare as my father casually pulls out the knife he has just murdered his own brother with. He wipes the blood off on his jacket, the jacket Rooster had found for him in an abandoned house. With a glint in his eye he turns back to face me.
None of this is real. I have to be underground still, my mind playing tricks on me.
“He was wrong,” says Father coldly.
I can’t ask him what he’s wrong about. My lips refuse to move. There are no words to express how I feel. I want this to be the mad delusion of a man buried alive but the pain I feel is as real as the clouds in the sky. Father has murdered Uncle Rooster in cold blood.
“My name isn’t Zach,” says Father. “It’s Brother Willow. Zachary Casper is such an offensive name, though I suppose it did suit HIM.”
He’s making no sense. I try to ask him what he’s talking about, wonder whether he’s gone insane from grief, but I still can’t manage to say a word. I think I know it’s real, that Father isn’t mad at all, even though he does appear to be talking to himself rather than me.
“You will be one of us,” Father tells me.
“I’m already one of you,” I say, confused. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you acting like this?”
Father ignores me and goes on. “You are strong, both intellectually and physically, though a bit naive. That will change.”
I wonder where Brian and Lottie are. A part of me wants them to come and wake me up from this nightmare. Father won’t hurt them too, will he? They’re hardly more than children. I’m hardly more than a child, even though I’m supposed to be an adult now.
“Why are you gawping like that?” Father snaps. He charges forward and backhands me across the face.
“STOP!” I scream. I can taste blood in my mouth. I feel a tooth fall loose. All I want to do is to hit Father back until he bleeds too but I can’t. He’s my father.
“You’re thinking there has to be some explanation for this, aren’t you?” says Father as I crawl slowly backwards away from him. Each time I put pressure on my broken arm more pain shoots through me. I feel weak and pathetic. I feel like I’m being hunted. “There is an explanation, but I’m not going to give it to you. I’ve observed you enough over the years to realize you can work it out on your own if you think hard.”
“Father, please,” I beg, holding my hands out to stop him. He just bats them aside and hits me in the face again.
“Use that brai
n of yours!” he roars. “Tell me!”
“Father...” I begin, but he hits me again, harder this time, enough to make my nose bleed, enough to make me cry.
“I can continue hitting you until your skull cracks,” says Father. “Tell me what I am.”
I do as I’m ordered, desperately scared and fearing that he will split open my skull just to teach me a lesson. I piece together all the bits of information he has given me in the last five minutes and compare it to things I already know. It’s quite obvious. The total shift in personality, calling himself Brother Willow, and the way he speaks of the gods, Harold’s bitter memories of what had happened to his son. There is only one explanation that fits and the thought of it causes my stomach to boil. I feel such anger I could kill something, and my rage takes me to the night I’d beaten up Flynn. I could’ve killed him then, too.
“The Order of Power did something to Father’s brain to turn him into you,” I say, the words like ash on my tongue. “They do things like that, according to Harold. Father’s dead, isn’t he?”
I can deal with Father going insane from grief but this is something totally different. I beg for it not to be true.
“Your Father is dead,” he says smugly. “When my personality fully took over just yesterday so I could slice up all those heretics the person you called Zachary Casper ceased to exist.”
“No!”
“This is my body now.”
You can’t get rid of a personality like Zachary Casper. I know there has to be traces of him in there somewhere. There just had to be. Otherwise, I’d have to accept that Father really is gone.
Brother Willow smiles. “Don’t cry for him, Ben Casper. Mourning the dead is an ineffectual pastime. Your father was a heretic and he, like his stupid god slayer friends, deserved to die.”
“Phylida was a doctor, she helped people!” I shout. “All she did was help people! There wasn’t a bad bone in her body! And Harold, he was a good man. What you did to them, and to Rooster and Rosa, is monstrous and evil.”
“It was something they deserved because they betrayed the gods by conspiring to kill them.” Brother Willow held his dirt-encrusted hands towards the sky. “Serving the gods is something to be proud of. Loving the gods is something to cherish!”
I spit on the ground. “That’s what I think of your gods.”
He stamps his foot down on my broken arm and I howl in pain. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
“Make yourself proud and join us!”
“You’re going to take me whether I agree or not,” I snarl.
He punches me in the face, whips out his knife, and holds it to my throat. “Yes, I will. We need all the members we can get these days. For some reason, the populace’s faith and love for the gods is almost non-existent.”
“They destroy! How can you love something that destroys?”
“They are the gods,” says Brother Willow, seemingly genuinely confused about my comments. “We are here to serve them, to love them, and to worship them. We are not here to question them.”
“Then what’s the point of living and worshipping them if they can just come down and kill us any time they want?”
“They are gods. We are not here to question them.”
“Is that your answer for everything?”
He pushes me onto my back. Something hard pierces into my shoulder and I cry out in pain. Brother Willow laughs as he tosses his knife from hand to hand, like he seems to be contemplating where in my body he would like to stick the blade. The blood on it is still wet; the blood of my family.
“You can fight with me if you want, but it won’t do you any good,” he says. “I’m just a better fighter than you are, and you’re just an injured child who just wants his daddy to come back. I’ll give Zachary Casper some credit, though. He certainly knew how to keep his body trained.”
“I can take you down,” I spit.
Brother Willow shakes his head sadly. “You might. Maybe, if it were just the two of us, but very, very soon it won’t just be the two of us. A full force of Brothers and Sisters are due to arrive to take the survivors back for repurposing any minute. They probably met the pregnant bitch and her husband in the woods and took them down first. That will be exciting! We’ve only ever raised a few Brothers and Sisters from birth before and they always turn out quite excellent! Lottie’s baby will be perfect for us.”
Brother Willow grins wickedly and says, “The man you love shall also make an excellent Brother. I think I’ll make you watch as I murder him.”
“Leave Brian alone,” I stammer. “Just leave him alone.”
He holds out his hand to me. For the briefest of moments, I see my father staring right back at me. There is the same twinkle in the eye that Father gets when he’s being kind. But I’m being stupid. This monster may wear Father’s body but this thing’s depraved personality makes sure I would never mistake the two ever again. I want this creature dead.
I feel underneath me for the stone that is digging into my shoulder and I’m surprised at what I find; it’s an arrow. The dark morning training session seems like an eternity ago now, another lifetime. I try to suppress a grin as I pull it from the earth and stick the razor sharp arrowhead into Brother Willow’s left kneecap. He screams in agony as I jerk the arrow out and thrust it towards his other knee. He kicks at my hand, dislodging the bloody arrow. I jump to my feet and run, ignoring the moans as they pull at my conscience. He’s not Father, I tell myself. Ignore him!
“They’re coming!” he shouts. “There’s nowhere to run!”
I hide behind a pile of rubble that resembles something scarred and ancient, the relics of a thousand year-old dead civilization. Two days ago it had been part of my home, a vibrant House where people worked and lived and loved. Maybe it was even the wall of my quarters, or the floor of the place where my parents raised me. The Glass Palace is nothing but a smoking wreck now.
I sniff and gag. The smell of smoke and charred bodies still clogs the air. I can hear an owl hooting merrily in the distance and up above, the stars twinkle eternally. How can life be so much the same when everything has changed?
Brother Willow’s cries of pain keep going on and on. Perhaps I’d been a little bit too extreme, too violent, in my bid to escape him. It’s not like me to lash out like that. Then again maybe it is. I’d hit Flynn in a reckless manner, which in turn had caused a whole series of events to unfold.
No, I think. I decide I hadn’t been violent. I was only trying to protect Father. I hope Flynn has somehow escaped alive, but I know it’s impossible. I’ll never forget him. Even though I’d done terrible things to him, he’d still had enough courage to shake my hand and make amends with me. He could’ve been a great friend.
“You will be a Brother!” Willow roars. His voice is choked with pain. “You will serve the gods!”
I try to tuck myself up into a tight ball, a sort of fetal position, behind the stones, hoping he can’t see me. I don’t want to be a Brother! The gods are destructive and evil and they need to be stopped. Only Harold had known the specifics, where the God Cannon was. Harold’s dead now, and his secret has gone to the grave with him. What can I do? How can I stop the gods now?
“It is true that I am not spiritually your father,” says Brother Willow. He sounds like he’s controlling his pain now. “I am, however, blood related to you. We could still be father and son after your brain has been repurposed. Would you like that?”
I clench the fist of my good arm. The very thought of calling this monster such a title, the monster that had erased my father, disgusts me.
“This is just silly,” says Brother Willow. “Hide and seek is for children. Come out now, son, your father awaits you.”
My anger surges through me. I scream loudly out of rage and stand up to face the Brother. He is standing not two meters away, grinning at me with a victorious expression on his face. He is ignoring the blood that seeps from the wound on his knee. He just stares. I freez
e.
“You have made a wise decision,” he says.
“I’m going to kill you,” I promise him. “You are not my father and I will kill you.”
“I can hardly walk what with what you did to my knee, but something tells me you won’t kill me.” Brother Willow puts his hands in his pockets and smiles. It’s something which father liked to do when he was thinking about a particularly tricky problem.
He takes out his knife again, lays it on his palm, and holds it out.
“You have my permission to slash my throat,” says Brother Willow.
“What?” I ask.
“You heard me,” says Brother Willow. “Slash my throat or stab me in the heart. I won’t do anything to stop you.”
I look at the knife. I imagine it plunging into Brother Willow’s heart or slicing across his throat. To kill him would be as easy as breathing and I’m almost sure that he’d let me do it. He is right, though. The spirit inside may be different, but the flesh is still Zachary Casper. I could take the knife now and end it, but we both know I’m incapable.
“You should be able to do it,” Brother Willow snaps.
“Stop torturing me.”
“I killed your father and you should be able to kill me.”
“Stop!”
He slips the knife back into his pocket and, with a sneer, says, “It seems I was wrong. You are not strong in spirit. You’re pathetic. The sooner we get rid of Ben Casper the better.”
“One day, I will be able to kill you,” I promise him.
“You only had one chance, and that was one minute ago. You’ll never have another.”
I need to run, find somewhere else to hide. I’ve made a mistake in staying so close to the demolished House. I should have just run and kept on running. My broken arm needs to be put into a splint and I need time to recuperate. This man is wrong. I will gather up the courage to kill him and I will do it. To get my revenge, I need to be as far away from here as possible. How can I get past him? He does appear to be partially propping himself up. He won’t be able to chase me with the damage that I’ve done to his knee.
Brother Willow looks at me, and I know he can see that I’m about to take flight. He lunges forward and climbs over the other side of the rubble. My foot catches on something, a metal girder sticking out of some concrete, and I trip and fall headfirst into a pile of blackened boulders. I see stars for a moment as Brother Willow hobbles toward me. I kick out at his injured knee and he screams and goes down on the ground. He appears to be unconscious.
I get up, ready to run, when I hear screaming and shouting. I turn to look at the edges of the forest, seeing lamps of low light bobbing around in the air seemingly of their own volition. That’s when I see several figures emerge, glowing globes affixed to their chests to illuminate their path in the night. Shackled together with metallic manacles like mistreated animals are Brian and Lottie, pushed along by figures that I realize instantly are Brothers of the Order of Power.
“They’re here at last,” says Brother Willow, coming unsteadily to his feet. I ignore him as he moves forward a few paces. I can only look at the expression of defeat on Brian’s face.
Assembling before me is four young men, only a few years older than myself. The last member is a woman, maybe middle aged, with hard, cruel eyes. Each has a meticulously shaved head, even the woman, with a strange symbol tattooed on their scalps in black ink. I think the symbol is supposed to represent the gods. They all wear similar clothing, a pristine white material that is stained and dirty from some sort of fight. The older woman is clean, though her face does sport a vivid purple bruise.
“Sister Faun!” Brother Willow calls. He appears genuinely pleased to see her.
The woman’s wrinkled face creases into a radiant smile as she looks towards the man who has stolen my father’s body. She mutters some instructions I can’t quite hear towards the Brothers, who salute her with respect, before she walks forward. Lottie spits at her feet.
“You murdering pigs,” roars Lottie.
Sister Faun turns her red eyes onto Lottie and slaps her so hard across the face that the force of it almost makes the two of them topple over. Brian struggles in his bonds but one of the Brothers slams him on the back with some sort of wooden club. I wince as the man I think I love crumples to the ground in pain.
“It’s been a while since we’ve met in person, Brother Willow,” Sister Faun greets. “How have you been?”
“I could’ve been in worse bodies,” he answers.
Sister Faun grins. “It’s in quite good shape, for its age.”
“I suppose,” he concedes. “You look good too, for your age.”
As she reaches my father-- Brother Willow -- she embraces him and gives him a long, sensual kiss on the mouth. Brian is bashed a few more times by some of the Brothers.
“You’re late,” he admonishes her. Any undercurrent of flirting is now gone.
“The gods caused more widespread damage than we’d initially realized,” she explains, her tone all-professional once again. “We had a little trouble getting past some of our regular routes.”
“The gods were quite determined.” Brother Willow seems thoughtful. “I’d never seen them so angry before.”
“Who are we to wonder of their moods?”
“But we do wonder.”
Sister Faun’s eyes suddenly zone in on me, and I can’t help but gasp. It hadn’t been a trick of the light after all; the woman’s eyes are completely red, like dye has bled over her corneas. It makes her look positively demonic.
“He looks like you,” she says.
“I look like my father,” I tell her.
We continue to stare at each other, like two stray cats waiting for the opportune moment to pounce. Her eyes, her blood red eyes, seem to want to devour me. I want to pull away. I try desperately to pull away, but I can’t.
“Destroy him,” Sister Faun commands. Her eyelids don’t flicker. “Kill the boy, and create something new.”
“Yes,” says Brother Willow. He briefly looks at me and, even though I can’t keep my gaze away from Sister Faun, I can see from the very corners of my eyes a savage pleasure in her gaze.
Run! I tell myself. Run! Run! Fight them!
Ice-cold fingers caress my chin. It is Sister Faun. I didn’t notice her approach me.
“You won’t miss who you were,” she coos gently. “In fact you’ll not remember him at all.”