Chapter 9: Miracles
Kurt and Grace walked into the courtroom amid the throng of the other spectators, and found seats close to the back of the room. The press were at the very back, taping the entire trial for the local news and court channels on cable. She barely had time to settle and compose herself before the bailiffs walked in leading the five prisoners between them.
Grace's fingers tightened around the small Bible she carried for comfort and around the rosary Kurt had given her. Kurt saw the movement and reached over to grip her hand comfortingly. She squeezed his hand back, and calmed down, sitting straighter. They wouldn't recognize her in the sea of faces at the back of the courtroom, anyway. She had the hood of a sweatshirt pulled over her head; she didn't want them to know she was here until she wanted them to know she was there.
The courtroom rose for the judge to enter, and then sat back down. The day's proceedings went on without a hitch, until Joseph Borden went up on the stand to deliver testimony.
"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" the bailiff intoned. Joseph Borden raised his hand and swore himself to truth.
And proceeded to lie completely and thoroughly. He told the court and the cameras that he had never tried to pass himself off as a priest, that he had been asked to join the council of elders because the Council was actually a group of secular leaders. He had never claimed to be a spiritual leader. No, he'd never told anyone he was God, that he committed atrocities in the name of God, and the people who had survived the fire were sadly mistaken, having been led astray by the police who had told them what to say. He told them that the compound had been a group of peaceful, like-minded people who loved God and nature, and that the fire was an accident, an act of God, and he and the ten others had been spared the flames because they still believed in God and did not follow the Satan-worshipping ways that the rest of the cult had begun to follow in their last days. And Grace couldn't take it anymore.
"You lie!" she cried suddenly, starting out of her seat. "You lie! How can you stand there and tell lies when you are sworn to the truth!?"
Joseph Borden shook his head, "I am not lying! They began to follow Satan during their last few days, and I an the others were spared…" And he stopped speaking as Grace threw the hood back and pushed her hair back from her face.
"Do you remember me?" she demanded, looking at him squarely. "Do you remember me? I'm Grace. It's been two years since I last saw you, Father Borden. The last time I saw you, you were standing over me as I lay staked to the ground and you were whipping my eyes!"
The cameras turned to focus on her, and Kurt sat back down as Grace walked out into the aisle between the seats and approached the barrier that separated the floor from the seats. "You have always passed yourself off as a priest, Father Borden. You told us, all of us, that you spoke to God personally, that he told you what to do and how to do it. When I began to show signs of my mutation, you singled me out. You told everyone that I had been possessed by the devil, and that God had told you I had to be cleansed. You had me beaten and starved, and thrown into a pit for weeks until my body regressed its mutation because I had to survive! Then you had me crucified until I nearly died! You have never tried to humble yourself; you have never truly followed God! You have always followed your own ambition, you wanted total control of our community, and you wanted to be our god!
"You took us children away from their parents, and forced us to forget them. If we cried for our mothers, you beat us. Do you remember Enoch, Father Borden? He was four when you brought him to the children's dorm, and he refused to forget his mother. He cried 'Mama' for three weeks. You took him out of the dorm and tied him down to the punishment cross…a four year old!…and you beat him until he was black and blue from his neck to his heels. And he finally stopped crying for Mama and just screamed. We had to watch that. And you took him down, and took him away, and we never saw him again. Did you tell anyone what you did with Enoch? Because he told me what you did with him. You murdered him. You took him outside and strangled him, killed him, and buried him in an unmarked grave in the backyard. He might have been dead, but his ghost cried out to me from his grave! Did you ever tell his parents what happened to him?"
Joseph Borden was pale. "I never did any of those things. Look at her, she must be crazy. Who ever heard of someone who can hear dead people?" but he was pale around his lips, and his hands were clenched into fists.
"I am lying? I am crazy?" Grace unzipped the hooded sweatshirt and slid it off her shoulders. She had worn only a bra underneath her shirt, and the scars on her shoulders, back, arms, and chest were visible, as was the seamed white scar where her shattered ribs had been removed. She shrugged off the rest of the shirt and held her arms up, and everyone saw the deep indentations in the flesh over her wrists. "See that? That is where you drove the first wooden spike into my wrist. And this is where you put the other one in. See these scars? These are from the whipping you gave me, with a whip made of rusted wire, before you nailed me to that cross by my hands and feet. See this white scar on my collarbone? That's from the rocks and stones the boys threw at me, the rocks you gathered and placed in their hands, the stones you told them to throw while I gasped and screamed in pain on the cross. Shall I show you the scars on my feet from the nailed board you put in the bottom of the Pit and made me stand on for a week? I am not crazy, Father Borden…Mr. Borden…you are."
Grace stalked past the barrier, the entire courtroom too shocked to do anything to stop her, and she stood squarely in front of him in the witness box. "I don't remember my parents. Who were my parents, Mr. Borden? Did you tell them that the beatings, the crucifixion, the Pit, were all necessary to drive Satan out of me? Did they agree? Or did they fight you, struggle against you, and did you kill them because they didn't see things your way?" She paused, leaned in closer to him. Or did you kidnap me from my rightful parents, like you kidnapped Katherine Mason and renamed her Keturah so her parents wouldn't find her? Do they know what happened to her? Or are they still wondering what happened to their pretty little golden-haired girl? Still wondering if her body lies somewhere out in the wilderness where she wandered off the trail?"
Grace stood back. "If you think I am lying, Judge, I will give you the location of the missing child Katherine Mason. Her parents were hiking with her when the little girl wandered onto one of the trails we used to get through the forest. Mr. Borden found out from her that she didn't go to church. He called her parents pagans, and said she would not be allowed to go back to them because a pretty little girl like her should be raised in the light of Christ. He brought her to the compound, cut her hair, kept her awake for four days straight until he had her brainwashed to believe her name was Keturah, and forced her to join us. She was unable to adapt to the life we led, she couldn't stop crying for her mother and father, so she was taken away and killed. So were three other children. Enoch was originally Edward Milligan; the child we knew as Issac was originally Adrian Howard; the girl we called Zillah was originally Charlotte Carroll. All the bodies are buried in the back of the compound; I can show you exactly where they are." She fell silent, tears falling down her face.
Mr. Borden rose out of his seat. "Damn you to Hell, you little mutie freak! How dare you betray me like this! God will strike you down himself for this!"
"God showed me the true light, through one of His messengers," Grace said, looking at him through her tears. "The light you gave us was not a light, but the way into darkness and sin. God does not speak to you; He would never have told you that crucifying a sixteen-year-old girl was right. He would never have told you to kill a four-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl, or a three-year old boy. God would never have told you to break up families, would never have told you to torture and kill others. And God would never have told you to rape me when I was fifteen in the so-called Testing Room."
Grace's eyes widened as the pieces clicked together in her head. "That's what the testing room was for, wasn't it? You took pubescent girls there to test their obedience to you by asking them to have sex with you. Most of us were too scared to refuse; but I did. And so you had me punished, claiming I was possessed. You didn't punish me because I was possessed, you punished me because I refused to allow you to use my body."
Joseph Borden looked at the Judge. 'Your Honor, this is crazy, I've never raped her…" and his words trailed off as he saw the judge's face.
"Counsel, approach," the judge beckoned to Borden's lawyer and the states' attorney. "I want this witness's claims investigated. If they prove to be true, which I believe will happen, I want the statement of charges to include murder, rape, kidnapping, and conspiracy to the charges." He looked at Joseph. "And add perjury to those charges. We'll reconvene when the charges have been refilled." He raised his Gavel. "Court will break while these claims are being investigated. In the meantime, Mr. Borden, you and your friends down there are remanded to Riker's Island without bail until we reconvene."
"NO! I'm not going back there!" Joseph Borden lunged out of the witness box. Grace, taken by surprise, had barely started to move when he grabbed her. He hissed, "I'm not going without taking her with me!" and then he burst into flame.
Kurt tried to scramble out of his seat, but time seemed to be moving oh so slowly. The courtroom was filled with the sound of panicked screaming and stampeding feet, and he tried to wade through the tangle of people running for the doors. Grace!" he was crying. "Grace, get away from him! He had never expected that Joseph Borden would be a pyrokinetic mutant. The man would be immune to his own flame, of course, but Grace…
Grace was screaming. And suddenly a wind whipped up inside the courtroom, and for a moment Kurt thought he heard a cacophony of voices in that wind, but he wasn't sure. The wind seemed to converge on that flaming mass in the center of the courtroom, and as suddenly as the flames had sprung up, they died out. Two figures, tangled in each other, fell limply to the floor. Kurt fell to his knees beside Grace. "Oh, God," he whispered. Grace had been wearing nothing but a bra; her skin had been unprotected from the fire that scorched it and left blackened, burned flesh behind. She smelled terrible, and she was unconscious. He bowed over her, sobbing for her. She was dead, she had to be dead. She couldn't have survived the burning of all her skin, and there was so much blood…
"Kurt?" Grace felt his weight on her, but curiously enough, she couldn't feel him against her skin. There seemed to be a covering of something between her and him. "Kurt, I can't breathe with you on me like that."
Kurt stared at her his eyes wide. "Grace? Mein Gott…stay still, they're calling an ambulance…"
"For what? I feel fine." Grace pushed him aside and tried to sit up. There seemed to be a thick black coating on her skin, caked to her skin, and she made a face as she tried to brush it off. "What is all this stuff…" She brushed at it. And then both she and Kurt stared as it flaked off and left…untouched white skin.
Kurt stared, and then almost mechanically he began to brush the rest of the flaky black stuff off. Underneath it Grace's skin was whole, untouched; truly untouched. Even her scars were gone. She was perfect. He took her face in his hands, brushed at her darkened face, and as the black burned skin came free of her face he realized her facial scars were gone too.
"Grace…Grace, your scars…they're gone, they're gone…God took them away…" and then, as He grabbed her to him in a hug, he saw Joseph Borden on the floor just past Grace. And he nudged her. "Look." She looked, and gasped.
His own fire hadn't hurt him; but by some incredible miracle all of Grace's scars had descended on him. His face was seamed with the scars that had disfigured her when she first walked into the courtroom; his shirt had burned away in the fire and his back, chest, shoulders, arms, and hands bore the same marks he had inflicted on her. Except one. His arms didn't show the indentations from her crucifixion, those had disappeared completely. "It's a miracle," Kurt whispered.
"Yes it is," Grace whispered, and they both fell silent for a moment, each thanking God for the miracle Then Kurt reached for the hooded sweatshirt, handed it to her suddenly extremely aware of her uncovered breasts, and said, "Let's go home."