Free Cover Him with Darkness by Janine Ashbless Page A

abandoned.
    I made the last and steepest part of the descent on hands and ass, sliding my bruised rear over the rocks one bump at a time, desperately trying to work out where the cliff face to my right ended and the drop began.
    I don’t know how long it took. It felt like forever. By the time I stumbled to my front door I felt utterly exhausted. I crawled into my narrow bed with my clothes still on, not bothering to make up any sheets on the bare mattress. Pulling the faded quilt over my head, I was still sobbing as I lost consciousness.
    When I woke up the next morning, the tears were all gone. In their place was a scarred hollow, cold with guilt.
    I knew what I’d done. I stood face-to-face with it as I looked into the mirror at my wide eyes shadowed with black rings, and my hair hanging loose about my pinched face. I spread my hands across my pale belly, touching the bruises Azazel’s fingers had left upon my hips. He’d kissed those breasts, that stomach, that dark fleece. He’d bitten that swollen mouth, and rooted like an animal between those narrow thighs. Even now my body remembered his, with a mutinous glow I tried to ignore.
    I had betrayed everyone . I had given my love, over years—and my body in a few wild moments—to something whose evil I couldn’t even start to imagine.
    My whole life was a lie.
    How could I confess this enormity to anyone? How would it be possible to even ask for forgiveness? Did God forgive this sort of crime?
    I took my flashlight and went down into the cavern. I’d done a module on demolition at college, and the course had included three years of geology. Father had laid the explosive well, I thought: if it detonated as planned then it should bring the whole hollow in on itself. I took a duffle bag and filled it with the icons and idols from the rock-cut passage until I could only just hoist it onto my back. I wanted to pack Father’s favorite books too, but I couldn’t carry them, so I took the two framed photographs off the kitchen wall.
    I pulled down my father’s copy of the Book of Enoch though, and leafed through it as it lay open on the table. The words were like an accusation aimed straight at me: And Azâzêl taught men to make swords,and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways.
    I put the book back on the shelf. Then I returned to close and bar the blast door in the passage. I set the timer, thumbed the ignition and walked out of the church.
    I was halfway down the two hundred steps when I heard the crack and thud of the explosive. It was more muffled than I’d expected, but after the first detonations the great gruff sound of falling rocks seemed to go on for an age. Tiny pebbles danced as the ground vibrated around my feet.
    I didn’t look back.
    In the village, the dogs that used to follow me about now barked at me and howled in distress. The earthquake the night before had cracked several walls and collapsed the dome on the tower of the church, but at least no one had been hurt. I paid American dollars, the bulk of my own cash, for a beat-up ZaÅ¡tava that must have rolled off the auto-line back when Marshal Tito was in power, along with a tankful of gas.
    That automobile got me all the way to Podgorica, though it shed its exhaust muffler en route.
    I didn’t dare look back. Not once.
    Father had been put in a private room in the hospital, on the same corridor as the chapel so that he might go and pray there when he felt strong enough. The room was bare and ugly, like the rest of the hospital, but it was quiet and I was grateful: the public wards with their