The Killing Room

SIXTY-TWO

When Christ appeared on Patmos, an island off the coast of Greece, he sent his disciple John to visit the seven churches in Asia, and said:

‘Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamos, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.’

Seven churches. She is the last.

Ruby sits in the final pew at St Gedeon’s, the same place her boy sat so many years ago. In her hand is a birth certificate, dotted with blood and tears. Now they would know his name.

Gedeon Mark Longstreet.

He would no longer be The Boy in the Red Coat. He would no longer be a cipher. When he died that day, in that clinic in Doylestown, she had spirited his small body away, and come to Philadelphia. She brought him to this church, the namesake of his patron saint.

She sat in the dark that night, sewing together the coat made from the Preacher’s vestment, the item Carson Tatum had gotten for her, vowing to one day return. She had specifically asked for the red vestment, the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Her lifeblood spreads on her white raiment. In the gloom of this final dusk she sees the men, guns raised, slowly approaching. They will never reach her. She glances down, at the bullet wound in her chest.

It is time.

Mary Elizabeth Longstreet closes her eyes and, like her son surely had so many years earlier, feels a peace blossom within her, and thus blessed, steps into the beyond.