Exit Kingdom

steps aside.
    What’re you doin, Mose? Abraham asks, the rifle still aimed at the slug’s head.
    Let it happen, Moses says. It’s her own say-so.
    So Abraham follows his brother’s lead. The Vestal Amatasteps into the grotto, and Ignatius closes the door behind her and locks it again.
    And that’s when Moses Todd sees something he has never seen before in all his travels across the wide and fissured country.
    *
    The Vestal Amata steps towards the dead man Douglas Perry. She comes within two feet of him and offers herself to him, spreading her arms wide, palms up to the sky, headlowered
in submission. The slug turns his gaze upon her, and for a moment everything stops. The two stand together, a wretched tableau, ancient beast and virgin sacrifice, devil and canoness, displayed
behind black bars strung through with dead flowers, under the stony proscenium of the grotto. There they stand, like statues in a museum diorama – or a new station of the cross: holy horrorrendered paralysed and dumb.
    The slug looks at the Vestal, his eyes cloudy and curious. He seems confused by her presence, by the aggression with which she offers herself up to him. An embarrassment of riches for the
cannibal dead. But his confusion quickly transforms to something else – and something else besides hunger too. For a moment it looks like deference – Moses believes for asecond that he
sees obeisance in the way Douglas Perry’s eyes drop to the hard-packed earth at the feet of the redheaded woman. But then Moses realizes it’s not even that, not even awed respect or
fear but rather just indifference. The slug loses interest. The dead man Douglas Perry looks at the woman as he would with faint curiosity at empty clothes fluttering their sleeves on a clotheslinein the middle of an abandoned yard. A momentary distraction before the resumption of a purposeless wandering.
    And so the slug drops his eyes, turns away from the Vestal and takes a few shambling steps in the opposite direction.
    What in the holy hell, Abraham exclaims.
    What’s the matter with him? Moses asks Ignatius. You trained him? Is that what you did?
    Moses has never heardof such a thing being done, but maybe the monk Ignatius has found a way.
    Did you blind him? Moses asks of Ignatius, who stands, smiling proudly. He can’t see her? What did you do?
    It isn’t him, Ignatius says finally.
    What? What do you mean it ain’t him?
    And then, as if illustrating the friar’s point, the slug Douglas Perry takes an interest in Moses himself, reaching at him withclawing fingers, stretching out one arm in desperate hunger
through the bars.
    It isn’t him, Ignatius says again. It’s her.
    *
    It was in a travelling sideshow that Ignatius discovered her. It was a mangy troupe of men who passed from place to place, seeking shelter and services in exchange for an
opportunity to view their menagerie of freaks. The troupe travelled in a convoyof caged vans. They would park the vans in a row and open the back doors of each to reveal a slug or two behind
welded metal bars. These slugs were monstrously transformed – some just remnants of animated bodies, and others surgically altered as if by a mad Frankenstein. There was one creature that was
just a head, suspended in a large fishbowl and swaying back and forth from a harness madeof belts, its mouth opening and closing like a Venus flytrap waiting for something edible to fly into it.
There was a dead woman whose body was gone just below her shoulders, just a head, neck and a pair of arms to drag herself about. Another had an additional head stitched on the shoulder of a body
that had had its arms removed. The two heads gnawed at each other, chewing away the flesh ofthe cheeks not in animosity so much as boredom. The arms had been removed, presumably so that the
creature couldn’t simply rip off the added head. One playful van contained a dead child, a young boy dressed in a sailor suit. His cage was filled with severed hands which he chewed like a
dog or gathered into piles or tossed about. One dead woman had multiple rotting breasts sewn all over her torsoin imitation of a nursing sow and, in the same cage, there was a man with multiple
penis lengths sewn together in a row so that he dragged around his penis like a tail, tripping over it with cartoon absurdity.
    A bizarre and horrible exhibition of distorted humanity indeed – an antic and fleshy rococo delivered in metal boxes roving across the country. And she