“I feel as if my flock would benefit from this message,” Brother Aleister said. “We are all fragile creatures, driven by our hungers in the end. Our world is man eat man, dog eat dog. Capitalism’s screw-like vice over our hearts and minds in this country predicates us to acting as hunters towards those we ought to treat as fellows. Men with minds like psychopaths rise to the top of the incestual dung heap and leverage more and more for themselves while ensuring the downtrodden cannot escape except through their traps.”
“Are you a Communist? You know they’re atheists.” I was being ironic when I said this, and to his credit, Brother Aleister seemed to cotton on.
“No, no communist. I have noble blood—the descendant of Magyar Counts and Romani blood. I am simply old, and when one is old, one has a relatively broader concept of the way reality has been manufactured. Easier to look at the world from a distance than be a part of it, and in the examination, one sees the strings holding the piecework together.”
There was something that hung in the air, the way he said Magyar and Romani…
“We all have to survive, though,” I said. “You know. I was studying the Tao last year for a project. One thing they talk about—it’s acceptance, it’s that part of existence itself is the fact that we have to live off other things. When we benefit, others don’t.”
“Acceptance, then,” Brother Aleister said. “You strike me as a studied woman. You speak of the Tao. A dear friend of mine, Nagi, I believe the two of you would get along very well together. He is a practitioner of the Daoist arts. A very intelligent young man. I may have to introduce you at some point.”
“So tell me about your community here,” I said.
“Parishioners here tend to be downtrodden. Immigrants, mostly—coming to the New World in search of better.”
“In 2020, I would hardly call Chicago the New World.”
“With enough distance, even this planet itself could be considered a New World to someone,” he said. “We give our people hope and moral guidance and instruct them on ways to cohabitate with the more modern inhabitants of our city.”
“So you mainly get a lot of small-town Europeans here.”
“Yes, that’s one way to put it. It’s my calling. Guiding those stuck in their old ways here, to serve a new path forward into the future.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s really neat. So when you say parishioners. I’ve heard there are some gangs that live in the area.”
Brother Aleister’s face became hooded, then. I could see those steel visors close down like a trap, slamming down in her face.
“I don’t know enough about that to speak on it,” he said. “My recommendation might be to avoid looking too deeply into urban legends about the area. The natural human tendency towards distrust of outsiders can often warp perceptions of behaviors and actions.”
“You’re saying that I might have the wrong idea.”
“I think that... It is too easy to hear or see things from the outside and draw incorrect conclusions. This is applicable in many situations, but I think perhaps it’s exceptionally relevant in this case.”
“And you haven’t heard about the Flames of Hell?”
To his credit, his face didn’t flicker.
“I am passingly familiar with them. A local group of loosely connected individuals doing what they feel they must to protect the community.”
“Would you say they have a beneficial effect on the community? I’ve heard there are little to no drug pushers or substance abuse issues in this area, and it’s mostly them running the toxic elements out of the community.”
Brother Aleister nodded.
“They do what they feel is best for the neighborhood. I believe we have had one or two intrusions from outside the community attempting to peddle some brain-altering, blood-souring concoction or another. It is hardly an exaggeration to imagine that the boys in the Flames of Hell ate them alive.”
There was a grim satisfaction to the way he said this that unsettled me.
“I just think it’s an interesting thing. A biker gang not involved with drug running.”
“I think that our astonishment or interest usually comes when things subvert our expectations. Is it that you expect an insular community to be riddled with drug abuse and other inequities?” Brother Aleister’s voice snaked out like a whip, tone cold and cutting and not at all genial like it was before. His face was pointed, eyes shrewd and sharp as he awaited my response.
“Look, I didn’t mean anything bad by that,” I said.
“Let me tell you something,” Brother Aleister said. “In my country, we have stories of a fearful member of a powerful noble family. So great was his respect for the law that he often made examples of interlopers and intruders who were not conscientious of the law of the land. He sat a great golden cup in the midst of the village square, and there it stayed for many a fortnight until a passing fool thought to be smart and remove it from the well. It had served as a community drinking cup, you see, and its theft inconvenienced the entire village. For his theft and his pollution of this community tool, he was strung up, a greased stake shoved vertically through his digestive tract and out his mouth, and there he hung for days as crows feasted on his flesh. Death was an agonizing prospect drawn out over a span of days.”
Again, that blood lust in his voice, the satisfaction in his words as he lingered over the torture. I could see something in his eyes… something that seemed to flicker, some old flame…
“That’s… really gross,” I said.
