THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#25)
As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World
How I was displayed to a large group of people at the place called Fillmore
The very next week Martin told me the venue was ready. Travis was expecting us there at midnight—“the holy hour,” he explained as we made our way through pitch-black deserted streets he seemed to know like the back of his hand. We passed alleys lit by bonfires with dark shapes huddled over them. “As long as I’ve got you along I’m not worried,” he joked, then stopped me abruptly at a corner. Torches lit up a building a short way down the block. A long line of people stretched from its entrance along the concrete footway. “We want the back door,” he said, steering me quickly around the corner into a dark alley.
Travis was waiting impatiently in an open doorway halfway down the alley. “You cut it pretty damn short,” he hissed over his shoulder to Martin as he hurried me up a staircase into a room ablaze with candles. Little tables with mirrors attached lined the walls. Plopping me down in the closest chair, Travis whipped out a jar and began smearing white cream on my face. “Hold still!” he cried when I tried to turn my head away. Clamping one hand firmly on my chin, he worked in the cream until it turned my face the color of old bones. Then he took a black pencil and outlined my eyes like a raccoon’s. Fingering my hair disdainfully, he plucked a platinum wig off a stand and fitted it on my head. Martin, lounging in the doorway, seemed to be suppressing laughter, but he quickly turned serious when I asked Travis, “Why are you doing this?”
“There are certain expectations,” he replied, “about what a person returned from the dead looks like.” Draping a cloak made of soft black plush over my shoulders, he pushed past Martin. “Get her in place,” he called from the door. “I’m going to do the intro.”
I fingered the texture of the cloak—I had never worn anything so fine before—as Martin guided me down a dark corridor into a large semicircle of a room. An enormous black curtain hung across the long straight wall. Facing the curtain was a single wooden chair. Next to it was a burning torch, a pail of water, an array of knives of all sizes, and a hammer and tongs. From behind the curtain—there was no wall there, I suddenly realized—came the muffled roar of voices, more than I’d ever heard in one place in my life.
(to be continued tomorrow)