“Yes, I was just about to go. I think my alarm clock broke.”
Father John’s face was puffy, as if he hadn’t gotten much sleep himself, and perhaps that was the reason behind his short temper this morning. “Or perhaps you’ve been up all night watching those shows of yours,” he said in a voice that suggested he might have spat, were they outside.
“No, I—”
“Don’t you lie to me. I sometimes see light in your window past midnight. Shall I remind you that your access to the television and DVDs is conditional? I only agreed for you to have it because you aren’t allowed outside the grounds on your own, and therefore don’t have company your own age. But if it overshadows any other activity and replaces God in your life, those privileges will be taken away. Am I making myself clear?”
Gabriel’s mouth dried, because his life without the peek at the society outside would have been even more insular. “It’s never—”
“God never intended for us to create all those distractions. We were meant to make advancements in medicine, feed the poor, and what did we do? Create endless forms of entertainment that muddle our fragile minds, luring them away from what really matters. You can find anything out there, even footage of torture and illicit contact between people. Society might have allowed this progressive corruption of minds, but I will not let someone to stray under my roof.”
Gabriel’s shoulders ached from tension, but when he said nothing, Father John adjusted his cassock and patted his arm. “Go to Dr. Rogers’ office. He is surely waiting already.” And after delivering that new punch of guilt, he walked off.
Gabriel closed the door and scrambled to dress as fast as possible. His damp hair wouldn’t listen to a comb, and he took too much time to find his shoes, but his mind raked through the fake memories of the morning as he tried to establish whether he’d even been out of the apartment. He’d talked to Mrs. Knight first thing in the morning, so maybe she’d be able to tell him if she’d seen him in the garden or if he’d dreamed that up too. But what were the odds of him hallucinating Mr. Watson’s demise on the very day the man disappeared?
Small.
Painfully improbable. Especially that Watson, for all his faults, was reliable when it came to work.
Did this mean that— that—
Had Gabriel’s mind created Abaddon to relieve the guilt of murdering the cook?
He barged into the bathroom to wash his face, but his heart sank when he picked up the T-shirt he’d worn in the dream. It had dark stains and smelled of bleach. In panic, he stuffed it to the bottom of his laundry hamper. Could he have lost his mind again after missing just one dose of pills?
With his heart rattling like a rat in a cage, Gabriel ran over to the bed where he’d disposed of his medication in the morning. He dropped to the floor with a knife in hand and patted the dusty wood until he found the crack where he’d pushed the pills in. Frantic, he dug around in it with the knife, worried he might crumble the meds if he wasn’t careful. He exhaled and pressed his sweaty forehead to the floor in relief when two precious red drops emerged from the dark crevice whole. He cleaned them with a bit of spit and swallowed, but his mind refused to acknowledge that he could have hurt the cook.
Thin and frail as he was, how would he have moved a man as substantial as Mr. Watson?
He’d read that some people exhibited unnatural strength in moments of dramatic need, but he couldn’t remember any such thing occurring. He and Abaddon carried Watson’s lifeless body in a tablecloth down to the furnace, but that didn’t even skirt the territory of inhuman power.
The question burning in his brain was whether it actually happened. Mr. Watson could have also suffered some kind of accident, and Gabriel’s dream/hallucination happened to coincide with it.
Either way, he must have showered because the dampness in his sheets didn’t lie.
Children’s voices made him look out of the window as he hurried down the corridor adorned with reliefs staring at him with their plaster eyes. The building used to be one of the Benson family’s many residences, and since this wing didn’t need adapting for the children, original decor, fashionable over a hundred years ago, had been left as it was.
After the incident that turned his life into agony, Gabriel had been isolated from the other children. How pathetic was it for him to be jealous of other orphans just because they got to spend time together? No wonder he imagined a beefy angel whisking him away from his loneliness and solving all his troubles.
But why would his brain suggest killing Mr. Watson in the first place? Why the creepy tattoos on Abaddon? Dirt in his hair? Could his mind have added such details to make the delusion more compelling?