Cold Ennaline by RJ Astruc Read Free Book Online Page A

they’re drunk on their love for the god, and I wish—despite my doubts—that I could share their joy. I wish I could want the god to wake. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
    Maybe it’s the coldness in my heart. Maybe I’m immune to the love and works of a god of fecundity.
    I close the window and crawl back to my bunk. I want to pray, but I can’t find the words. I was born into the faith full. I was adopted by a Father of the faith full. Since I was three years old I’ve lived in a temple. The god is my whole life. But I feel evil in the air. I’m sure of it, the way Father Nerve did in the Evans’ house. The closer the god gets, the greater that feeling grows. And I can’t stop thinking about what the twins told me before they left.
    The god will bring nothing but death and destruction.
    If the god wakes it will consume us all….
    It takes me almost an hour to get control of myself. When I’ve stopped crying and shaking, I join the rest of the faith full in the shadow of the ridge.
    It’s where I belong.
     
     
    A STORM comes to the Piedmonts’ property. It starts off as a wind that batters the walls of the ranch and sends the faith full toppling into each other. The smell of rot intensifies, so that every breath feels like swallowing sick. Then the rain comes, big, sweaty drops of water that steam when they hit the ground and leave oily marks on our clothing. If they touch skin they leave a rash.
    Thunder rolls, but there’s no lightning. The sky grows dark, and clouds the color of bruises congregate above the ranch.
    I stand amid the faith full and wait for my god to wake. Mud oozes into my shoes and socks, and my clothes are coated in red dirt. All around me are people I know, some from the temple, some kids from school, people I’ve met in markets or at festivals or in doctors’ waiting rooms. My whole community has come to see the god, to welcome him into the waking world.
    And finally, he arrives.
    We see the hands of the god first, rising above the lip of the ridge.
    They are brown and lumpy and each one is the size of a car. Where the fingers should be are a few dozen tube-like appendages that look like swollen tree roots. The god’s wrists—although it’s hard to tell where the hand ends—are covered in warts and green moss. They push through the ridge, clawing through it, and the smell gets thicker and more intense.
    Then the god’s head emerges from the earth, and we see his face for the first time. Like his hands, his head is gigantic, as big as the temple-barn I grew up in. His skull is a wizened nut at its core, and from it spring a thousand snaking tendrils, pale as worms. Each tendril has at its end a flesh pink flower.
    The god has no nose, no eyes, no mouth, just this cloud of twisting worms that bends and flexes against the wind.
    The god I have worshipped and loved my whole life is a headless giant, half plant, half maggot.
    A monster.
    Looking upon the god, I feel no thrill of devotion. I am here for the god , I tell myself. But in his presence I feel only fear, pure, naked, fear.
    But I’m alone in my terror. The faith full around me start to cry and chant, not prayers but wordless chattering. They stumble toward the god, bleating, and the god, in his infinite majesty, lowers his hands to meet them, to draw them to his body.
    I start to back away. One step, and then another, my feet sinking deep into the mud.
    The god reaches out to his faith full.
    Where the god’s fingers touch, plants grow. A flower bursts out of a woman’s shoulder, its petals springing open to display a yellow heart. Another woman is on all fours as a vine snakes out of her knee and winds its way around her neck and arms, sprouting leaves as it goes. A man in the simple smock of a Father clutches his head and staggers this way and that, until there is a wet, slick sound and a white bud emerges from the back of his skull.
    I see the man’s face before he falls into the mud.
    The man is Father