“Are you sure you don’t want me to come along? I could help you keep your temper in check.”
Xavier and Helena were standing at the entrance to the cafeteria with students from grades 9 through 12 streaming past them to eat.
“I’ll be fine. You go eat. I’m more worried about the time. There is no way this will take less than an hour, meaning of course that I’m going to once again be late for class.”
“Well maybe there is something I can do to convince Sister Olivia to give you a pass this one time.”
Helena laughed and began walking away. “Nice try, but that won’t work. You’ll probably just anger her even more. Relax; I’ll be fine. She can’t break me.”
Helena looked at the address above the door and then back at the list the Discipline Committee had given her. This was supposedly the home of the guy that she had knocked out with a strike to the neck. After the injuries he had received, he would be home, but considering the graffiti she had found him doing, it probably wasn’t like he had school to go to anyway. The house wasn’t much, or at least any better or worse than the other pale brick houses lining the street. Above the door was the window to a bedroom, currently open.
Back at the university cafeteria, Xavier sat alone. There was a tray of food in front of him, but he wasn’t eating. He was merely spinning his fork around his thumb, smiling.
Sighing and resigning herself to her fate, Helena stepped off the sidewalk and knocked on the door. She just had to be polite, apologize, and get out of there without snapping. How hard could it be?
Xavier continued to spin his fork, while under his breath, he whispered something in a continuous prayer. Throughout the room, students grimaced as their food lost all taste and became like ashes in their mouth.
No one came to the door, so Helena knocked again. Damn it, could someone please answer?! A hiss drew her eyes downward, where a stray cat stepped out of the nearby alley and hissed at her. Rome was full of them, considered by many a nuisance. Helena normally would try to pet them whenever she could, but the way this cat was staring at her sent a shiver up her spine. It looked both fearful and enraged, crouched with its hair on end and a low growl in its throat. Without her hearing, there was the sound of wood creaking above her.
Xavier began to chuckle to himself, his small laughs interrupting the white noise he was seemingly muttering, but not stopping it. Across the cafeteria, random students were standing up, claiming that they were feeling sick and needed to go the infirmary. Finally, the fork he had been spinning around his thumb slipped free of his fingers and fell with a loud clatter.
About to knock a third time, Helena was sent tumbling the ground by something heavy slamming down onto the top of her head with tremendous force. She fell on her back, her vision blurred, her mind spinning, and her skull somehow both numb and racked with pain. As she hit the ground, something else landed on her, something hot and wet, like a giant pot of spaghetti had just been dumped on her. At her feet, the sound of something metal striking the stone ground rang out. Wincing in pain, Helena slowly sat up, waiting for the throbbing in her head to dull before opening her eyes. At last, she gazed around to see whatever it was that had struck her. The sight that met her pierced her heart like the Lance of Longinus stabbing Christ.
The young man from that morning was hanging above her, having jumped from the second story with a noose around his neck and hit her. It was more than that; there was a massive cut going down his torso with most of innards missing, as if he had undergone an autopsy. The sound of metal on stone she had heard was the knife he used to cut himself open slipping out of his hand when he reached the end of the line. With a waterfall of blood pouring from his open chest, realization struck Helena and she looked down at herself. The young man’s organs had spilled out of him when the rope snapped tight, either ripped free from the inertia or severed when he gutted himself. Her white blouse was completely red with the boy’s blood, sitting in her lap were his stomach and liver, and draped across her head like cobwebs were his intestines.
At that moment, everything became white for Helena, as if she had buried her face in flour. Her mind and all thoughts blurred after that. The only thing she remembered was screaming louder than ever in her life.
The police questioned Helena for several hours after that, but it took time for her to even become responsive, having been completely petrified from what happened to her. Only after she was cleaned off and given a fresh change of clothes did she start talking. The boy who hung himself was not the only casualty. The police found the young man she had kicked propped up in a chair at his stove, having drowned himself in a pot of boiling water. By the time they got there, his face had melted off. As for the boy she had hit with a brick, they were still counting how many times he had stabbed himself, turning his body into a dish sponge and bleeding himself dry.
No foul play was suspected in the deaths; at least no evidence could support it. Everything pointed to suicide, regardless of how outrageous it was. Once they were certain they had gotten everything out of her, they released Helena into the custody of the school. As expected, she didn’t attend any classes for the rest of the day, merely going to her room and never leaving her bed. At least she was protected from Sister Olivia. No one but the staff knew anything about her presence at the scene, and she prayed it would stay that way.
“Hey, where were you today? You disappeared before lunch and I never saw you again.” Helena’s roommate, Sophie, had just stepped through the door. Helena was pretending to be asleep, keeping her back to her friend. Sophie shrugged and began to get ready for bed. “Hmm, must be sick…”
Back in the homeroom, Xavier was kneeling with his nose two inches from the wall, enduring his detention. As Sister Olivia had ordered him, he was wearing short pants. His punishment was to kneel for an hour with frozen peas beneath him, digging into his skin until he bled. It was one of the favorite methods of punishment by nuns. Regardless of the ticks of the clock, he showed no pain, and unbeknownst to Sister Olivia, he felt none.
“So, have you learned your lesson yet? Rule breaking will not be tolerated in this school, especially by me. If you are late, you will suffer.”
“Suffer?” Xavier turned his head to her, a gleam to his eyes that she had never seen to before. His lips curled back, revealing his bleach-white teeth. “You have no idea what suffering is,” he laughed.
In the hours that passed, Helena waited for sleep to come, but it never did. She didn’t quite expect it to, of course, after the day she had. She had gone the whole day without eating, but she wasn’t sure she would ever have an appetite for the rest of her life. She swore she could still smell it on her hair, the smell of blood and entrails, no matter how hard she had scrubbed in the shower. At 1:00 am, she finally sat up, unable to stay in that bed any longer. On the other side of the room, Sophie was sleeping peacefully, even snoring.
Being as quiet as she could, Helena got dressed and left their room. Students weren’t allowed to wander the dorms at night unless they had to go to the bathroom, but at this hour, who was going to stop her? With her eyes long-since adjusted to the dark, she made her way out of the dorms and into the cool night. Crossing the campus and sneaking through two other buildings, she at last reached the place she wanted to go: the university church. It had been built when the school first came to be, and since then, had gone through renovation after renovation to try and accommodate the always-growing student body. Every Sunday, students had to be organized in shifts with sermons going on late into the night.
Reaching the front door, she silently thanked God when she pulled on the handle and felt no restraints. Trying to keep the hinges from squeaking, she opened it just wide enough to slide in and closed it behind her. The vast church was dead silent and still, barely lit by the moon and stars shining through the glass, though in a way, that made it even more beautiful. The air rich with the smell of bible pages and incense long-since burned, she wiped some holy water on her forehead from the nearby basin and walked down the long aisle.
Coming out past the pews, she knelt before the giant cross on the back wall, the statue of Jesus looking down at her while she clutched her own crucifix. “Lord, please, if you can hear me, I need your help now more than ever. I… I don’t what to do. I thought I had prepared myself for violence in order to join the Swiss Guard, but after today… please… give me strength.”
“He won’t answer you.”
For the second time, Helena felt a blade pierce her heart, this one colder than the icicles that would hang outside her window in Ireland during the winter. She turned around, seeing Xavier moving down the aisle towards her.
“Xavier, what are you doing here?”
“Following you. It seems I went a little too far when I crushed those three insects.”
His voice was different from before. It was much deeper but very dry and even soft with certain words. It barely sounded human, and there was a force behind it, one that weighed down on Helena in way she had never before experienced. She wanted to step back but found her feet seemingly glued to the floor.
“You? You killed them?! H-how? Why?!”
“I told you, didn’t I? I wanted to do something to convince Sister Olivia to spare you punishment. I’d say I did better than expected, considering I was alone at detention tonight.
Tell me, how does feel to pray for something and be ignored? How does it feel to beg for something from God and have your desperation go unanswered? I just don’t understand why you humans cling to hope when you have no reason to have it in the first place.” He reached out and caressed her cheek. “I guarantee you, here in this “house of God”, there is no one else here but me. God is not listening to you.”
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