DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

he pressed his back against the door, as he heard the revelry going on in his chapel, he realized that he was afraid to do so.

There was a furious knocking on the door behind him, a powerful pounding he could feel in his bones.

“I got a big prick for you, preacher!”

He bit his lip, said nothing.

He had been in here now for over two hours. He’d heard screams of pain, cries of pleasure, drunken laughter. There’d been things knocked over, items smashed, windows broken. And through it all, the music, that horribly repetitive rap music, blaring from the front of the church, covering the softer sounds, obscuring the louder ones, making everything chaotic and unintelligible and even more frightening.

And then, all of a sudden… he heard them leave. The music stopped, the laughter faded, the cries died down, and they were walking, running, staggering, crawling outside. He heard the big doors open, heard the slurred conversations retreating. He wanted to peek through the curtains, through the window, to make sure that what he was hearing was actually occurring, to make sure that they were really leaving, but he was afraid to check, afraid even to move, and it was over an hour later when he finally got up the courage to open his office door and peek into his chapel to see the damage.

41

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Penelope stood in the center of the meadow, screaming at her mothers as they bent over Dion, smearing him with blood and fat from the gutted bodies of the policemen. Her mothers were obviously very drunk, but the intoxication seemed to flow in waves: they were crazy, frenzied and chaotically wild, one moment; sober, organized, and intensely serious the next. It seemed almost as though they were possessed.

Possessed.

Could that be what was going on here?

Penelope didn’t think so. Whatever unnaturalness was at the root of all this, it was nothing new, nothing alien, nothing from the outside.

It came from her mothers.

“Leave him alone!” she screamed.

Mother Janine looked over at her, laughed manically. “He’s got a nice dick here! Get it while it’s hot!”

Mother Felice slapped her face.

The others laughed. Mother Janine laughed too, but she reached out and grabbed a handful of the wine-stained tunic that Mother Felice was still wearing and ripped it off.

Mother Sheila picked up a handful of blood and fat and threw it at Mother Felice.

“Stop it!” Penelope screamed. She looked from one mother to another. She was scared and confused, and she wanted more than anything else to run, to escape, to get as far away from here as quickly as possible. But where would she run to? Where would she go? The police? That’s where she should go, she knew. Two policemen were dead and eviscerated, killed by her mothers. And God knew how many other people they’d murdered.

Her father.

But she could not bring herself to turn traitor, to turn her mothers in.

She wanted to stop them, maybe even wanted to kill them, but at the same time she wanted to protect them from anyone else who might try to intervene.

Whatever happened, it had to stay within the family.

Which meant that if someone was going to do something, it would have to be her.

Her mothers were still playing in the blood, and all of her instincts were telling her to get out of here, to flee the meadow, to get back to lights, streets, buildings, cars, civilization, to save herself.

Everything she’d ever learned, thought, or believed was telling her to get help. But she realized that she could not do that. Not to her mothers.

Besides, she couldn’t leave Dion.

Dion.

He was screaming, fighting, struggling against the drunken women holding him down and smearing him with blood. As Mother Felice broke away from the others and started toward her across the meadow, she could see Mother Janine stroking his penis, massaging it with blood.

He was hard.

Penelope felt sickened. She walked toward Mother Felice. The two of them stopped less than a foot from each other. Her mother smiled, and there was both sadness and triumph in the look. “So now you know,” her mother said.

“Know what?”

“What we are. What you are.”

She was even more confused than before. And more frightened. What she was?

She suddenly realized that she was not as shocked by all of this as she should have been, not as disgusted as she would have expected to be. It was horrifying, yes, and obviously disgusting, but her reactions were intellectual, not emotional, a recognition of the response the scene would have provoked in other people, not the response that was actually evoked within her. She was reacting to this the way she thought she should react, not the way she really felt.

The fear was definitely there, but it was not a physical fear, not a fear of what might happen to her. It was more a fear of recognition, a realization that these were her mothers and that she was their daughter, that she was one of them.

Anger. That was her overriding emotion. Anger at what they were doing to Dion, at what they were putting him through. It was a focused anger, though, a localized anger, and she wondered if she would have reacted this way if it had been someone else. Did she even give a damn about the dead policemen?

No.

It was only because it was Dion.

She smelled the wine, smelled the blood, and the mingled scent appealed to her.

She looked at her mother. “What are we?”

“Maenads,” her mother said.

Maenads. She knew the word. The madwomen who had worshiped Dionysus in Greek mythology. Women crazed with wine and sexual ecstasy, responsible for brutally killing Pentheus and ripping Orpheus limb from limb in a wild orgy of blood. Representatives of chaos in the otherwise orderly world of the Greek gods. The dark side of ancient religion.

But maenads weren’t real. They were mythological figures. Fictional characters.

Weren’t they?

“We have always existed,” Mother Felice said gently, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. Penelope was acutely aware