Last Breath

17

H e stood in the shadows and watched the house. Though tall, he was more boy than man, with long, gangly arms and legs, and just the barest bit of stubble on his face. He held his breath when the front door opened unexpectedly and the tall, dark-haired man with the dangerous eyes came down the steps and set off down the path that led farther into the campus.

Was anyone inside with the woman? He wasn’t sure.

He wished he’d arrived sooner. He wished there were more eyes to watch all the places that needed watching.

He wished he was back home with his friends, playing soccer in the fields and huddling together on the hillside at night, sharing cigarettes and telling lies and listening to Western music on the radio.

Most of all, he wished he could be anywhere but here, hiding amid the thick growth of evergreens outside this house where the woman lived.

But he’d taken an oath, hadn’t he? He’d stood between his father and his brother, there on the hillside overlooking the valley where it was said an earthquake had swallowed up an entire city.

He thought of his trips to Istanbul and to Cairo. On their way to America, they had stopped in that most wondrous of cities, London. How could the earth open up wide enough to swallow an entire city? How was it possible that the earth could eat whole buildings and leave nothing in their place?

But that’s what his father had said between the loud racking coughs that had brought him back from wherever he’d been for much of the boys’ life. For the past several years, after the sickness had taken hold of their father’s lungs, it had been his brother who’d disappeared for months at a time, coming home for a few weeks here and there. Four weeks ago, his brother had returned, and had gone directly into their father’s room, where they’d talked long into the night.

Then, on the night before his brother was to leave again, they’d taken him up into the hills where they told him they would teach him how to pray. There, where the sacred city had stood, they would all pray. The boy had looked down but saw nothing but rock and desert below.

The prayers had been most strange, had made no sense to him, and seemed to go on forever. When he opened an eye to peek-from boredom more than curiosity-his father and brother were both kneeling in the dirt, their arms outstretched toward the heavens, with tears on their faces.

That had been about the scariest thing he’d ever seen.

Scarier even than the words they were chanting and the oath they made him repeat. I am gallas, and the priestess I obey. The faithful remember…

He had no idea what the words really meant until he came to this place and the priestess told him what he must do. Now, she had been scary. Beyond scary.

After that, his nightmare really began.

Even now, his mouth filled with bile just thinking of it. At night he dreamed that the eyes of the dead followed him, and every morning he awoke with the scent of blood in his nostrils. And always, always, his hands felt the slick warm liquid that had poured over them…

“Why?” he’d pleaded with his brother. “Why?”

“Because the goddess demands it.”

How long ago had it been-a week? less?-that he’d held the woman’s head in his hands while his brother had carved out her tongue? And then the man, the woman’s husband, whose eyes had gone wild with madness as he helplessly watched his wife’s agony.

His hands had shaken but he’d done what he’d been told to do. He’d followed orders like a zombie, unable to really see, to feel, to think.

The man-boy hiding in the evergreens began to sweat. He tried to will the horrific images from his mind’s eye, but they were always there now.

And there’d been the other one, the man who lived alone in the fine stone house, the man whose dog had chased him, had bitten his arm. He rubbed the place where the dog’s teeth had sunken into his flesh, felt the scabs that had formed. All things considered, after what he’d helped his brother to do, he couldn’t be angry with the dog.

The image of that man stayed with him, day and night.

His stomach turned, remembering.

How was it his brother could be so unaffected by what they had done?

“The goddess demands it, little brother. The priestess has told me so.”

He loved his father and wished to honor him. He’d taken his father’s place as a gallas as he’d been told he must do. But deep down inside, he wished he could run, wished he could just disappear and never see his brother or the priestess again.

But of course, no matter where he went, they would find him. The gallas always did.