Apocalypse of Jude

Mae hears in Paul’s voice, someone kind and beneficent.

“Is it true then? That my father holds the office of priest?”

Paul nods gravely at her, and she stamps her foot in a moment of tempestuous fury, controlling a growl on her voice.

“Then let Jude kill him. This is driving me crazy. What should I do? I think I should rush out of here and walk in the street with my hair done so, tricked out with all its flowers. Maybe then they’ll see they’re driving me mad.”

He rests against a column holding up the roof.

“Your father’s right you know. About all those things that people want. A club house with hot water for tea at ten. A closed golf cart in the afternoon in case it rains, and instead, a game of chess.”

“Well, he’s just gathering a dying breed of people into his huddle.”

Her voice is now grumpy.

“I know. You’re right.”

She feels the weight of his statement.

“But this place is not going to be an upper middle-class haven for long. Times, they are a changing. And when the time comes you’re going to be amazed, because this whole system looks indestructible doesn’t it? Like it’s just going to roll right on over us. But people like you and me, we have the real power backing us, and after the rites tonight, the system will slowly become ours, and these wretched fools trying to hold onto their town will be in our hands. Then we will shove the meaninglessness of their obsolete faith in their faces. We will scare them with the prospects of the moors and barbarians ransacking them. So shocked, so petrified will they be that they will look to us for new meaning. And they will find us, Mae. You and me. And those who don’t like it, will die.”

The way his eyes penetrate her, the vehemence of his voice, and his mention of the rite gives way to the preternatural fear in her again, rising the fine hairs that follow the curvature of her spine upwards. But the madness grabbing her rebels, sending an excited shiver down through her nerve ends. Then he simply turns and fades away.

By the time she has returned to her table, her blood is pushing in its silent stream an agitated state of growing wildness. She forces her eyes out to the ocean to try still her own turbulent will, but merely sees candles reflecting back at her, making it hard to see the black ocean beyond.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 48