Thread by @JuliusGoat

CHAPEL—1

Father Julius’s purported “miracle,” on the other hand … that’s one reason some people believed he was a holy man, or maybe even a real priest, despite his deviations from expected norms. It happened—if indeed it did happen—the night the old abandoned cathedral burned.

Nobody found out what got the fire started—and, it being in the Island, nobody inspected—but whatever the cause, it burned from the inside and up, its wooden innards consumed, its stone heated to a kiln, its interior converted to a deadly smoker choking those trapped within.

By the time anybody noticed it, it was too late; the flames were already licking the shingles. For there to have been so few fatalities required a miracle.

To a perverse mind, it might almost seem fatalities had been intended.

The diocese had shuttered the place up the year previous, but they didn’t like how many indigent types wound up squatting in there, and the doors had been chained up from the outside not long before the blaze, almost as if …

well.

Now I’m engaging in conjecture not much better than conspiracy theory, and anyway there’s no conspiracy needed to know that a fire starting in Loony Island is going to be a horror.

No volunteers have the resources to fight a blaze like that, and Island folks have learned to expect a practiced lack of urgency from municipal services like fire departments.

It was a terrible blaze, and might even have taken all Checkertown down with it too, if it hadn’t been for this odd fellow in jogging attire, kneeling in classic aspect of prayer—and wouldn’t you know it, within moments there came a rain so hard and so fierce it drowned the fire.

Nearly drowned those nearby, too. I say nearby, and I mean *near*—even though the gutters ran two inches deep up in Checkertown, the factories down at the Island’s southern tip stayed dry as a cracker. It was a downpour as targeted as it was torrential.

Five minutes later—ten at most—the deluge stops. The fire’s out. And here’s this fellow in jogging gear, still kneeling. Up he gets, and who are you, they ask him, and I’m Father Julius, he says, I’m the new priest.

They thought he’d be on his way, but they were wrong about that. He stayed. They never saw the jogging gear again, though.

The next day he was around, wearing the denim vestments that would soon be familiar to the gangs and goons and loons and lads and ladies; familiar as the story that enshrined him ...

... the tale of the cleric who appeared on Loony Island in hour most desperate, the priest who had a direct line to the Big Guy, the holy man who prayed the rain down.

And what did he do once he’d arrived?

He built the damn Neon Chapel himself, by hand.

At first it was just him, living in a tent, then a lean-to, then the small section he had made weather-proof.

Soon enough, people started helping out, hauling the materials that came from trucks.

While he worked the cranes to set the beams, others started layering the bricks. By the time it was done, he had a small team. They stayed, they became in a sense, his disciples. the first brothers and sisters of the Neon Order—though others would join after.

They did every bit except haul the materials—those came from trucks conspicuously fresh-painted over, as if designed to hide corporate logo and affiliation.

You ask me, Finch my dear, that’s the real miracle. A man starting a structure that size by himself, then getting others to want to join such an insane operation? Miracle. But he sure enough did it.

It got people talking; almost afraid to approach him, too. And what did they talk about? They talked about the rain.

Maybe because they really did see a miracle. Maybe because watching someone perform a miracle so tactile as construction in a place so abandoned leant itself to presuming something more mysterious.

How many people might have seen this alleged miracle?

Dozens, certainly. Maybe fifty? A hundred? As many as were awake in the wee hours and interested enough in a fire to see the fuss.

How many people now say they were there? Every resident of Loony Island now makes that claim.

One person I know was there. One person I know for sure, because the night of the fire also just so happens to be the night that one person, doomed within days to be snatched up and thrown into the nearby booby hatch, first arrived at Loony Island.

In fact, though I never have admitted it, the fire happened *because* that person arrived.

That person was me.

-AR Moxon, THE REVISIONARIES bookshop.org/books/the-revi…

Out in paperback 12/1.

Preorder now.

bookshop.org/books/the-revi…