Being sent to a convent at twelve.
Only God can save you, you monstrous thing.
Now I was on my hands and knees in the Observatory, the stone freezing cold beneath my shaking palms, the sound of my own shallow breathing echoing around the room. Fear and shame and desperation seized me, a vice, a guillotine, and I found myself begging the Lord’s forgiveness for what I was about to do.
It was the only way. It was the only way. It was the only way.
The abbess had called me into her chambers after Nones. Sister Catherine was in her sixties, brown-eyed and grey-haired, warm yet stern, with absolute authority over her nuns, but still a fraction of the power of a bishop or a priest on account of being a woman. I wondered if it ate at her like it ate at me.
Distantly, as though from underwater, she told me they were concerned about my episodes, about the jaw-snapping violence, and that it was abundantly clear what was going on, and it was not my fault, it truly was not, for the devil can take any one of us, but it was in my best interest – and those of the wider parish – to arrange an exorcism, and it would be held in public, so that tickets might be sold in order to pay the exorcist, who was not cheap and would be travelling all the way from North Yorkshire, and I should be grateful, really, when all was said and done.
And the fear gripped me for real, then, for I’d read stories of exorcisms in my manuscripts, how frightened and tortured and shamed the women were, how none of them ever truly recovered from it, and many were locked away forever, and I knew that it would be futile, because there was no devil in me that was not myself, and anyway, the transformations were getting closer and closer together, and so, when all was said and done, could anybody save me at all?
And that was not the point, really, it was that I did not want this exorcist – this witch doctor, this con artist – to profit from my suffering, the satisfaction of a jeering crowd and ticket-riches, a pamphlet about my agony as though it was cheap entertainment for the masses.
Taking one’s own life was a mortal sin, and I would never make it to heaven if I went through with it, but after everything I had already thought and said and done, I was unlikely to make it anyway.
Wrath is a sin.
I am a sin.
With grim determination I climbed to my feet, doggedly dusted the grime off the heavy black folds of my habit, and took three purposeful strides towards the northernmost arch. I turned and shuffled backwards on to the narrow sill, gripping the carved stone frame with each tired hand.
Father, forgive me.
And then I fell backwards, black fabric flung up all around me in a final, wrathful display.
I fell, and I fell, for what felt like eternity.
The impact never came.
With another sickening jolt, a bang of white pain, I came back to myself in the dorm, lying backwards on the floor as though I’d just pushed myself from the windowsill.
There was a ring of fire around my neck as though I’d been hung by a flaming noose.
I knew before I lifted my hand what I’d find, but it was worse than I could ever have feared.
There were not three rosary rubies in my throat, but dozens and dozens, encasing my entire neck in a single terrible circle.
A voice screamed in my head, shrieking and echoing in every temple and every bone:
Make them pay.