Free Jago by Kim Newman Page B

the meal. Loving everyone through His words. The memory flashes were brief, and instantly gave way to the dark. When she was away from Beloved for even a few hours, Wendy found it hard to remember His face in detail. In her mind, He receded into His light and became indistinct.
    Upon hearing the announcement, Marie-Laure swallowed a sniffle but did not look up from the carpet. Brother Mick led the girl to her place, touching her intimately in a manner he must think surreptitious. Wendy guessed that he must find it harder than most to forget the flesh…
    Forget the flesh; for Beloved, the flesh is a temple, or else it is nothing… but not as hard as she herself found that forgetting. She knew things about the flesh that most did not. Things as inescapable as the taste of water in her mouth.
    In fire, flesh can blacken and crackle and shrivel from the bone, and flesh can scream…
    There were many unfilled places at High Table this evening, as if the congregation were sundered and lost. With Beloved gone from his proper position at their head, an air of purposelessness had settled. Other absences went unnoticed. Everyone seemed to be sitting alone. Wendy was sitting alone; not only was Derek not in his place to her right, but Susan Ames was off somewhere as usual, ploughing her own peculiar furrow, leaving a vacant chair tucked under the table to her left. Beyond that were others, but she felt nothing in particular for them. The Love could never be constant, as she had imagined it, like a current in the third rail; rather, it ebbed and flowed like a tide, pulled and pushed by His light.
    Marie-Laure sat opposite, between that bubble-headed Sister Karen and the quietly spiky Sister Janet, head down even before Mick began to read, curtains of hair hanging over her cutlery. She was muttering noiselessly, Ophelia trying not to make a scene. Under the table, her hands would be gripped in a prayerful death lock.
    ‘Brothers and Sisters, by the grace of our Beloved Lord and Benefactor,’ began Mick, flatly reading from a handful of stiff cards that he dealt from top to bottom as he worked through the lesson, ‘we break bread and take wine not only for the sustenance of our bodies but also for the fortification of our souls.’
    Mick had been a performance poet before. He read well, but he wasn’t Beloved. Wendy reached into her head and turned down the volume control on her hearing. Mick’s voice faded to a backing track. Without Beloved, the familiar words were as meaningless as the school assemblies she had endured in her early teens, knees aching, head full of boys and pop music. That was more than years ago; that was decades ago. This wasn’t the life she had expected.
    The hall hadn’t been built with electricity in mind. It needed a row of burning candelabra on the table, and candles in sconces in the many corners. The feeble overhead fluorescents barely established twilight, and the freestanding lamps were lost like streetlights in thick fog. With the altar lights off, the darkness was real.
    Wendy’s sphere of concentration shrank. The walls, the altar and the ends of the table were lost to her. Beyond her field, white face-blobs spooned blood-red soup into mouth holes. Their conversations were muffled like the whispers of ghosts. If she looked up from her soup, she wouldn’t be able to see Marie-Laure as any more than an animated sketch.
    She was tired, but she had to go through with the business of eating. If she neglected it, she would die. Although her perception of the world beyond was vague, everything within her reach was spotlit, as super-real as an IMAX image. Her knife and fork shone silver and were warm to her fingers. A herbal vapour rose from the bowl under her face, curling into her nostrils with stinging strength.
    Could she smell meat? Roasted, burned, charred meat? It was impossible; the communal meals were vegetarian. Here, carnivores indulged a secret vice. There were unidentifiable black bits in