Everything that’s happened has brought me here, to this place, with this knife in my hand, and something worth saving.
Someone.
And if it’s a choice twixt her and him, there is no choice, and the army can go sod itself.
And so I’m ready.
As I’ll ever be.
Cuz I know what he wants.
“Come on,” I say, under my breath.
Aaron’s legs appear, then his arms, one carrying the rifle, the other holding his balance against the wall.
And then his face.
His terrible, terrible face.
Half torn away, the gash in his cheek showing his teeth, the hole where his nose used to be open and gaping, making him look barely human.
And he’s smiling.
Which is when I feel all the fear.
“Todd Hewitt,” he says, almost as a greeting.
I raise my voice over the water, willing it not to shake. “You can put the rifle down, Aaron.”
“Oh, can I, now?” he says, eyes widening, taking in Viola behind me. I don’t look back at her but I know she’s facing Aaron, I know she’s giving him all the bravery she’s got.
And that makes me stronger.
“I know what you want,” I say. “I figured it out.”
“Have you, young Todd?” Aaron says and I see he can’t help himself, he looks into my Noise, the little he can hear over the roar.
“She’s not the sacrifice,” I say.
He says nothing, just takes the first steps into the church, eyes glancing up at the cross and the pews and the pulpit.
“And I’m not the sacrifice neither,” I say.
His evil smile draws wider. A new tear opens up at the edge of his gash, blood waving down it in the spray. “A clever mind is a friend of the devil,” he says, which I think is his way of saying I’m right.
I steady my feet and turn with him as he steps round towards the pulpit half of the church, the half nearer the edge.
“It’s you,” I say. “The sacrifice is you.”
And I open my Noise as loud as it’ll go so that both he and Viola can see I’m telling the truth.
Cuz the thing Ben showed me back when I left our farm, the way that a boy in Prentisstown becomes a man, the reason that boys who’ve become men don’t talk to boys who are still boys, the reason that boys who’ve become men are complicit in the crimes of Prentisstown is–
It’s–
And I make myself say it–
It’s by killing another man.
All by theirselves.
All those men who disappeared, who tried to disappear.
They didn’t disappear after all.
Mr Royal, my old schoolteacher, who took to whisky and shot himself, didn’t shoot himself. He was shot by Seb Mundy on his thirteenth birthday, made to stand alone and pull the trigger as the rest of the men of Prentisstown watched. Mr Gault, whose sheep flock we took over when he disappeared two winters ago, only tried to disappear. He was found by Mayor Prentiss running away thru the swamp and Mayor Prentiss was true to his agreement with the law of New World and executed him, only he did it by waiting till Mr Prentiss Jr’s thirteenth birthday and having his son torture Mr Gault to death without the help of no one else.
And so on and so on. Men I knew killed by boys I knew to become men theirselves. If the Mayor’s men had a captured escapee hidden away for a boy’s thirteenth, then fine. If not, they’d just take someone from Prentisstown who they didn’t like and say he disappeared.
One man’s life was given over to a boy to end, all on his own.
A man dies, a man is born.
Everyone complicit. Everyone guilty.
Except me.
“Oh my God,” I hear Viola say.
“But I was gonna be different, wasn’t I?” I say.
“You were the last, Todd Hewitt,” Aaron says. “The final soldier in God’s perfect army.”
“I don’t think God’s got nothing to do with yer army,” I say. “Put down the rifle. I know what I have to do.”
“But are you a messenger, Todd?” he asks, cocking his head, pulling his impossible smile wider. “Or are you a deceiver?”
“Read me,” I say. “Read me if you don’t believe I can do it.”
He’s at the pulpit now, facing me down the centre aisle, reaching out his Noise over the sound of the falls, pushing it towards me, grabbing at what he can, and the sacrifice and God’s perfect work and the martyrdom of the saint I hear.
“Perhaps, young Todd,” he says.
And he sets the rifle down on the pulpit.
I swallow and grip the knife harder.
But he looks over at Viola and laughs a little laugh. “No,” he says. “Little girls will try to take advantage, won’t they?”
And, almost casually, he tosses the rifle off the ledge into the waterfall.
It goes so fast, we don’t even see it disappear.
But it’s gone.
And so there’s just me and Aaron.
And the knife.
He opens his arms and I realize he’s assuming his preacher’s pose, the one from his own pulpit, back in Prentisstown. He leans against the pulpit stone here and holds his palms up and raises his eyes to the white shining roof of water above us.
His lips move silently.
He’s praying.
“Yer mad,” I say.
He looks at me. “I’m blessed.”
“You want me to kill you.”
“Wrong, Todd Hewitt,” he says, taking a step forward down the aisle towards me. “Hate is the key. Hate is the driver. Hate is the fire that purifies the soldier. The soldier must hate.”
He takes another step.
“I don’t want you to kill me,” he says. “I want you to murder me.”
I take a step back.
The smile flickers. “Perhaps the boy promises bigger than he can deliver.”
“Why?” I say, stepping back some more. Viola moves back, too, behind and around me, underneath the carving of New World. “Why are you doing this? What possible sense does this make?”
“God has told me my path,” he says.
“I been here for almost thirteen years,” I say, “and the only thing I ever heard was men.”
“God works thru men,” Aaron says.
“So does evil,” Viola says.
“Ah,” Aaron says. “It speaks. Words of temptayshun to lull–”
“Shut up,” I say. “Don’t you talk to her.”
I’m past the back row of pews now. I move to my right, Aaron follows till we’re moving in a slow circle, Aaron’s hands still out, my knife still up, Viola keeping behind me, the spray covering everything. The room slowly turns around us, the ledge still slippery, the wall of water shining white with the sun.
And the roar, the constant roar.
“You were the final test,” Aaron says. “The last boy. The one that completes us. With you in the army, there’s no weak link. We would be truly blessed. If one of us falls, we all fall, Todd. And all of us have to fall.” He clenches his fists and looks up again. “So we can be reborn! So we can take this cursed world and remake it in–”
“I wouldn’t’ve done it,” I say and he scowls at the interrupshun. “I wouldn’t’ve killed anyone.”
“Ah, yes, Todd Hewitt,” Aaron says. “And that’s why yer so very very special, ain’t ya? The boy who can’t kill.”
I sneak a glance back to Viola, off to my side a little. We’re still going round in the little circle.
And Viola and I are reaching the side with the tunnel in it.
“But God demands a sacrifice,” Aaron’s saying. “God demands a martyr. And who better for the special boy to kill than God’s very own mouthpiece?”
“I don’t think God tells you anything,” I say. “Tho I can believe he wants you dead.”
Aaron’s eyes go so crazy and empty I get a chill. “I’ll be a saint,” he says, a small fire burning in his voice. “It is my destiny.”
He’s reached the end of the aisle and is following us past the last row of benches.
Viola and I are backing up still.
Almost to the tunnel.
“But how to motivate the boy?” Aaron continues, eyes like holes. “How to bring him into manhood?”