Glossolalia

Julian Moss has always smiled. On stage. In photographs. In victory, and once, just once, in grief, at his mother’s funeral, the corners of his mouth twitching upward like it was a nervous tic he couldn’t unlearn. He smiles because the world smiles back. Because it’s easy for him.

He smiles at me now, as the May air hums between us, muggy warmth and the premonition of rain rippling throughout the courtyard. He wears James Miller’s blazer, the same way he always has since Halvorsen gifted the uniforms of the first Head Boy and Girl of St Anne’s to us in October half term. It fits him like a glove, like the tailor who had made it had seen 136 years into the future and sewn every stitch to follow his body. Mary’s is still loose on me. But that’s Julian. He has the look, you know? The gentle nobility of a boy you’d name a statue after. The kind they put on brochures. A saint. A saviour.

He looks at me, eyes bright with the kind of belief that only boys like him are allowed to hold. My job is -has always been- to keep it burning.

“Are you ready?” I ask, jogging the rucksack on my back. It’s weighty. The tome is still in there.

He nods and smiles again. “I think so.”

I smile back. “Good.”

He holds the door of the chapel open for me, and I mock curtsy as I duck inside. Doing it here holds no real significance, it’s just the only building that's unlocked to students after lights out. I sort of resent it sometimes; it feels so fucking melodramatic, speaking to the pith of the school, the truth, the living, breathing heart that beats in sync with mine in the house of a false god. The metaphor writes itself. That’s no fun.

It is cooler here, though - if this place is a refuge from anything, then it is from the cloying humidity of late spring. The walls exhale a breeze across the cobbled floor, and the dying sun splits the colours of saints through the windows and onto the walls. Julian’s hands are shaking. I joke, tell him its not that cold, and he doesn't react. Doesn't look at me. I don’t think he believes me yet - that we are ready, despite what Mr Laird–Bernard–told us. I thought he might’ve started to when we took Hannah - that the thing underneath the floorboards needs more than hollow incantation, symbolic re-enactments of tradition. It feeds on sacrifice.

It didn’t have to be, all this. It didn’t have to be purely symbolic. We could do something with it - the power, real power that lives in the flesh of the stone walls here. That’s what I told him. We didn’t have to do it the way Mr Laird and Mr Halvorsen wanted. They were cowards. Sacrifice, the way it wanted came from the Langue alone, and we were the new prophets.

Julian pulls the tome from the rucksack with reverence. His thumb lingers on the cover, tracing the gilded edges. He doesn’t flinch when the graphemes on the front rearrange and shift and scream. That’s always been his strength: he believes.

“Do you want to go over it again?” I ask. He’s only meant to speak the first section. Any more and he will become before we planned.

He shakes his head. “I practiced. Alone. Every night this week.”

“Did it speak to you?” I ask.

He hesitates, just for a moment too long.

“Not in words,” he says.

Wrong answer. I placate and nod anyway.

He smiles, and carries the tome with him. He doesn’t stand at the altar. He stands in the aisle, facing West, towards the courtyard, veined in creeping ivy. The blue glass of Mother Mary’s dress casts a sun-tinged green light that shines and dances off Julian’s dark skin like a river, from his head to the floor in front of him.

“Just like I did last week. The last thirty lines,” I remind him, adjusting my face. It’s that hopeful, sorrowful, mournful expression Mrs Purnell taught me how to do for Tiresias in Antigone. I was so good, they let me play him. It was a standing ovation performance. You watch. You let the softness of focusing on no particular thing seep into your face, your eyes, your mouth - let it relax and wash over you. As if watching a sleeping child. Or a burial. I feel I am watching both.

I kneel behind him, and as I turn West I catch sight of Jesus’ tortured face in my periphery, nailed up above the altar. God, I said I hated it. How dare they build monuments to such a futile fucking death. He died for nothing. Saved no one.

That doesn’t matter now. What matters is this. Julian.

His lips part and I brace - bow my head, place my hands against the cold cobbles of the floor, and feel the blood pulse through my fingertips against them. His blazer rustles as he opens the book. I think I’m smiling now, thinking of him, his strong shoulders that fill out the sleeves of a uniform that was far too boxy for him in Year Seven. I exhale, whisper the syllables quietly to myself behind him - the way they should be. They hum in the back of my throat and taste like wine and rust and rosemary, nettles and sage and thyme and smoke in my mouth. Delicious and faint and a brilliant distraction from Julian’s disgusting pronunciation. It’s crude, bastardizing. Offensively terrible.

And then I hear it.

The snap. The wet, sinewy crack of tongue tearing away from its mandible. Silence. The thud of flesh hitting stone. Then a sob-scream. Silence again.

“Marla?” He whispers, shaking and ragged. I don’t look up. “Marlie?”

I flinch.

“I can’t see.” It’s quiet. Small. Pathetic.

I rise, and circle around to see him, my shoes clicking against the stone floor. I was right - his jaw is ripped clean off the skull, connected only in the confines of his skin. And so, it dangles in a gaping, gasping grin. I cradle his head gently and kiss his cheek like instinct. Like an apology for a fact you know can't be changed. Like he did when I failed Chemistry in Year Ten, just before he stole us a bottle of wine from the cellars.

I lean closer to him, and my plait falls, landing heavy onto his stomach. His hand moves slightly and he rubs the ribbon between his fingers.

“You said you believed, Jules.”

He’s crying now, properly crying from hollowed eyes, though the sound is gurgling, roiling in his throat, mixing with blood and regret and fear. It all soaks through and bubbles over, foaming from his mouth, staining my skirt in dark, wet patches.

“I did. I do.”

“Maybe,” I say, gently, “it doesn’t want belief. Maybe it wants obedience.”

“I don’t want to do this anymore, Marlie. I’m scared.” He grabs on to my plait and I recoil. He undoes the bow, ribbon falling and gathering in his grip. The white satin falls limp across his body.

I didn’t think he’d say that. Its mercy was a blessing - it had every right to kill him. It’s given him a second chance and he, what, wants to throw it away over a minor dislocation? He’s been chosen.

I won’t let him reject that. I speak the Langue, the true Langue, withholding the final word until he knows.

“Yes, you do, Julian. Yes you do. You got me this far. Thank you. But you can’t come with me.” I wipe the blood from his cheek, dragging my nail down the line of his jaw, collecting it like ink. He gasps and stutters and tries to scream - but I hold his jaw still. Mouth open. Let his blood fall from my finger onto his tongue. He chokes. Julian Moss is a lot of things. He was hopeful. He was proud. He thought this would make him immortal.

And he was a coward.

He thought this was about being special. About being chosen. About being loved by something older than love. But this power doesn’t choose. It consumes. It doesn’t honour the pure or the good or the smiling. It honours the devoted.

I speak the last word.

Something in the walls recoils, something old and seething. Julian had rejected it. Denied the gift. Spat out the ritual, even as it fed on his body that twitched and convulsed. And in that instant, I think it loved him more than it ever loved me. It was in his blood, spilling out into the halls of the chapel from his mouth, heart, liver. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t supposed to become one with the walls - he wasn’t worthy.

It can't choose the both of us.

It has to choose me if I want it to work. If he wants it to work.

He cries out for me, for Marlie, like a child, blood slicking his teeth, painting his chin. There was something so soft in his vacated eyes. Like he was sorry. Like he was begging. Like he still believed I would help him up. I couldn’t.

It’s me. It’s always been me. Alone.

I drag him to the nearest pew and unbutton his blazer as he tries to claw at me, weakly. He moans. I think he knows. He knows that in the inner pocket of Mary Brown’s blazer lies the letter opener I swiped from Dr Kumar’s desk during the only detention I've ever gotten. He knows - even if he can’t see - that I’m holding it now, silver metal slick against my sweating palms. I think he senses me raise it.

I know he feels me bring it down.

I pin a note to the door as I lock it on my way out.

“Due to ongoing pest control measures, the chapel will be closed until the end of term. Please use the East Wing Auditorium for all religious services and assemblies, with the clearance of the music department. A 24-hour-access prayer room has been opened on the Walton Jenkins corridor for quiet student reflection. Thank you for your cooperation.”

- Mr Halvorsen”