The Stars Have Gone
1. REVELATION 6:13
‘The stars in the sky fell to the earth like unripe figs shaken loose from the tree in a strong wind.’
——
Juliette Gagnon-Lafortune kneels on the chapel floor, her knees grinding into the salt spread there like gravel. Beside her, Sophie whispers her prayers soft and steady, lips brushing the edge of her rosary. Juliette doesn’t bother. Her lips move, but there is no sound. She’s too busy counting the cracks in the wood beam overhead. If she focuses enough, the pain dulls to something she can pocket away.
Sister Marguerite paces the aisle, cane clicking against the stone floor. Every so often it taps against a back or shoulder, not hard enough to bruise but sharp enough to sting. “Straight backs. Eyes forward. You are in the Lord’s house,” she hisses, her voice like iron nails.
Antoine Brossard snorts under his breath. Juliette doesn’t dare look, but she hears it, the muffled laugh trying to crawl out of him with delicious irony. A second later comes the crack of cane on bone, and he groans in pain, smile fading quickly. Hair unruly like weeds and freckles dotting over his entire body, he looks uneven at the best of times, as if he was born to irritate authority.
Juliette can’t help but admire his courage; he has the gall to smile, day after day in this hellish boarding school. Like him and many here, she is a ‘troubled’ child to straighten out where God pays the most attention.
The cold eats through the chapel walls. It is always cold here. Even when the fires are stoked, the stone seems to breathe ice. Juliette flexes her fingers inside her sleeves, feeling the wool scrape her skin. She thinks of home, of the bright streets and her parents’ apartment smelling of coffee and cigarettes, and then she shuts the thought down before it can warm her. Home is gone. She and Sophie are here, and here is forever.
When it looks like Sister Marguerite is too focused on another crop of children, Juliette whispers to her twin sister. “I’m sorry you had to get in trouble because of me.”
Sophie’s prayer slows a moment, then comes to a full stop. “I don’t accept your apology, but I appreciate it,” she whispers before returning to cleansing her sins of association.
Juliette and Sophie are twins, but they are oh, so different.
The former deals with the idea of her parents despising her enough to send her to this place with silent rage. She is a tea kettle, lid clamped down tight and steam building in the dark, but the temperature never reaches the point of boiling. It is all barely contained so, so tightly in this lost child desperate for any measure of control in her terrifying life, and thus, she copes with words under her breath the Sisters cannot hear. She is the silent rebellion to Antoine’s boisterous resistance, even if she wishes she was more.
Sophie is softer. More feminine, longer brown hair, a little taller, and a gentle way about her that would have made her a golden child of the faith had she not been Juliette’s twin. She folds herself into prayer like a blanket, writes her parents letters every night in hopes that they will one day come get her. She is good, she says. She has taken God into her life and reimagined herself as a child of his creed. So why don’t they ever answer her letters?
Prayer lasts for another twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of kneeling in salt until Juliette’s knees feel flayed raw, twenty minutes of Marguerite’s voice booming like a funeral bell, twenty minutes of Sophie whispering so fast her words melt into a single thread of sound. When the dismissal finally comes, it’s like someone opening a window in a suffocating room. The children rise stiffly, some rubbing their joints, others bowing their heads low as if they’d been lifted closer to Heaven by the pain.
Juliette holds out a hand toward Antoine for a moment, but as always, it falls to her side and her mouth remains shut. She thinks herself a coward and grinds her teeth before turning to her sister. Children put to the Act of Contrition always have to skip dinner, so they would be sleeping on empty stomachs tonight.
All she had done was ‘forget’ the words to the Apostle’s Creed—not that she actually misremembered. Juliette remembers every word of every prayer as if it is branded onto her very soul, and she despises God for it. He is real, and he despises her. She is tar to His pure flawlessness, a mark the Sisters cannot scrub away.
She silently falls into step beside Sophie. They shuffle down the narrow aisle toward the girls’ dormitory wing, the floor cold under their threadbare stockings. The chapel doors slam shut behind them with an uncomfortable scrape. Wind rattles the walls constantly; the storm has been bad as of late and shows no signs of stopping.
Their room isn’t big enough for two growing girls. The walls squeeze close, lined with plaster that flakes if you touch it too hard, the ceiling low enough that Juliette sometimes swears she can hear the rats in the beams. The single bulb overhead sputters and dies more often than it shines, leaving them in the twilight of candlelight half the time. Cold seeps past the walls and the single, tiny window frame.
Juliette grabs her sister’s wrist. They stare each other down for a second, brown eyes glaring. “How long are you going to give me the silent treatment for?”
“How long are you going to shun God for?” Her question is asked innocently in a way Juliette hates, with the perfect amount of desperation to make guilt burrow in her heart like rusted needles. “This is why Mom and Dad—”
She’s heard this a million times, so she interrupts. “Mom and Dad—” she stops herself. The walls are thin here. “Mom and Dad don’t care about us.”
Sophie scoffs with a shake of her head. “I was always good!” She snaps her wrist away from Juliette and begins pacing around the room; wooden planks creak under her feet. “I got good grades, I got home before curfew, I helped Mom with chores and never raised my voice…” tears swell in the corner of her eyes. “I behaved, and you didn’t. If only you didn’t always act out, these last five months wouldn’t have been so awful, Juliette. And maybe—” she stops herself.
Maybe they would not have been sent here to rot like corpses to be forgotten in the ground.
Juliette likes telling herself she has a heart made of stone, but there is nothing that hurts her more than seeing her sister cry. The teen grimaces, teeth grinding together until she slumps on her bed and hugs her knees.
“I’m… sorry.” Sophie hesitates—then slides next to her. “But we’re two halves of the same coin. No matter how well I behave, people always think there’s a bad seed in me if there’s one in you too.” She wraps her arm around her sister. “Please promise me that you won’t act out anymore. I see the way you look at Antoine. He’s a bad influence.”
Juliette curls her toes together. She wants to tell her off and to explain to her that Antoine has more courage than any of the Sisters put together—and even Father Leonard—but she doesn’t want to fight. This room, no matter how awful, is where she can earn respite from Saint-Isidore Academy.
“Sorry, Soph,” she briskly says. “I won’t trouble you.”
“Thank you.” Sophie smiles; it is hollow.
This is a song and dance they always play. Juliette pushes and prods at the Sisters, eventually biting off more than she can chew. Then, with anger sharpened by fear of abandonment that runs as deep as her veins, Sophie blows up at her for getting her in trouble. Juliette deflates for a week or two until the temperature begins to rise anew and she reaches just before the boiling point once more.
Rinse and repeat.
But for now, there is peace.
“Want to play chess?” Sophie asks.
“Mhm.”
Sophie pulls out the board and pieces from under their bed, hidden away from the Sisters’ wary eyes. Neither of the twins are particularly good at the game. They’d found it here the day they settled in, but should it be found, there is no doubt in either of their minds that they’d be caned for letting the devil influence their minds. The thought of it makes Juliette want to puke.
They finish setting up the board and start to play.
“You haven’t written to Mom at all?” Sophie asks as she moves up a pawn.
“I tried. It hurts when I try to.” The game is a mindless affair; they do not know tactics and are self-taught. Juliette enjoys freeing her queen first. “Plus, I’m not so good at writing like you are.”
“Pay attention in class. Girls have to know how to write too.”
That is what their mother has always said, that a good wife should know how to read and write to help her husband with homely affairs. To Juliette, the thought that she’d just be given away to some man sickens her, let alone the thought of putting out a child into the world. She doesn’t know how it happens, but pregnancy terrifies her all the same. Being a wife is getting your wings clipped.
“I do know,” she finally answers. “I’m just not perfect at it.”
Sophie playfully smirks. “Is that attitude I hear, dear Juliette?”
Juliette just sticks out her tongue at her, but secretly feels her tensed shoulders loosen. They’re hungry, miserable, and hurt, but they are back to normal. Her sister might as well be the only person keeping her sane in this purgatory. Should their relationship worsen for longer than a few minutes, Juliette wouldn’t know what to do.
The game continues, Juliette feeling content to sack and trade pieces and Sophie finding a more methodical way to approach the art of chess. She develops her pieces, but she strikes blind across the board. Sophie has, after all, never been taught the game nor seen a guide, yet the illusion of control—that she is not striving blind in the night—keeps her sane, and she wins more often than not.
A knock on the door shatters the little peace they’ve found—both girls regard each other with terror. Juliette throws the board back under the bed as deep as it’ll go, with the cobwebs and the dust and the ants and the rats while Sophie freezes where she sits, eyes huge and wet, as helpless as a fawn caught in the open.
Then, a voice through the door. “Maybe they snuck out or something.”
Juliette’s heart still beats against her chest like a church bell and her head spins as the intensity wanes and she begins to think clearly again. She looks at her sister and chuckles, cold sweat dripping down the side of her head. Sophie laughs too, realizing they’d worried for nothing.
The Sisters don’t knock. There is no privacy to be had here.
While Sophie places a hand on her heart and rubs her neck, Juliette goes to open the door where their two friends—and only friends—await them.
The first, Dominique Côté-Lamarre, blinks at them from behind round glasses that are always slipping down her nose. Her shoulders hunched forward like she’s trying to fold herself into the floorboards, as if she could become invisible. Her hair is black and straight, cut blunt at her shoulders as if someone took a pair of scissors to it without much care. Her face is thin, pale from too many hours indoors, and her left cheek carries a long birthmark that she gets relentlessly made fun of for.
The second is Roxane Boulanger. She’s taller than most of the kids her age and is an intimidating figure to anyone who isn’t an adult in their grade. Rumors say she once bit a nun’s hand clean through the skin during a punishment. Roxane is a fighter, like Antoine, but he remains the sun while her mind is clouded by dark ideas that unsettle even her. Her hair is a tangled curtain of dark coffee brown and her frame is stockier than the average girl’s. The scars that ladder up Roxane’s forearms tell their own story, too neat and too cruel to have come from an ‘accident’ like the Sisters say.
With them, they carry dinner leftovers: a dented tin bowl half-filled with cabbage soup gone lukewarm, the broth thin as dishwater with a film of grease clinging to the top, along with two pieces of hard bread.
“Brother Thomas felt bad for you, so he helped us get you two dinner. You’re hungry, right?” Roxane walks in like she owns the place and sets the two bowls she carries on the meager table. “Sorry we took so long. If we were seen with food this late, we wouldn’t have heard the end of it!”
Dominique shushes her with a slender finger on her mouth. “Quiet,” she whispers. “You have to eat quickly. The Sisters and Brothers making the rounds today are Isabelle, Mathieu, Laurence and Émilie. They’re a lazy bunch, so you’ll have an extra ten minutes to eat. Hurry.”
Here is a strikingly familiar dynamic: two girls, one boisterous and a fighter; the other a quiet child who would rather put her head down. Yet there are some differences as well Juliette has noticed in their short friendship. For one, Dominique is more rebellious than she lets on. The black-haired, petite girl uses her innocence like a weapon to gather information, and the Sisters are none the wiser.
The girls keep the twins company while they eat—Sophie makes sure to make them all pray first, of course. Like everything else here, the food is terrible beyond compare. Tasteless, soggy and just plain depressing to chew on. The bread scrapes the roof of Juliette’s mouth, and the watery broth with pieces of cabbage floating in it just makes her want to retch. At the very least, they should be getting some meat this Saturday.
They talk in low voices, pieces of conversation meant to keep anyone from hearing through the thin, wooden door. This evening’s punishment, and how their knees still hurt from the sharp shards of salt spread against the floor meant to keep demons at bay. Struggles about homework and an upcoming test about the lives of the Saints that Roxane is struggling to memorize. Rumors about how long the storm might last, how high the snow is piled against the school walls and how the next shipment of schooling supplies and food might be late. That makes Juliette groan—it would mean no good food this Saturday.
For a few, blissful minutes, everything feels comfortable. Through the cold, the horrible treatment afforded to them, the homesickness and everything else this place has thrown at them, it all melts like frost exposed to Spring’s first touch, and all is well.
“We should get going. It’s going to be lights out soon, and I don’t want to be the one kneeling in salt.” Dominique pats down the stiff wool of her long, cream skirt, smoothing wrinkles that will never really come out. Their uniforms are always like this, but she cannot help it.
“Can’t we stay a little longer?” Roxane asks with a pout far too cute for her stature. “We were just starting to have fun.”
Sophie shakes her head. “Now, now, one mustn’t get too greedy, or God…” she trails off, eyes squinting toward the window. Her thin brows knit into a frown. “God…”
“Sophie?” Juliette tilts her head, and looks to the window as well.
There is nothing but endless snow and wind rattling against the glass, attempting to crawl inside and freeze anything that lives as if it too, is alive and hunts. Deeper, if Juliette focuses, is a glimpse of something. The twinkle of a star that breaks through frost and the darkness of night, growing brighter and brighter; it brings such brilliance to the world that night seems to become day and night and day and night again and again for what feels like an eternity.
Sophie’s lips part, rosary clutched tight in her hand. Dominique leans forward, glasses catching the glow, eyes wide as coins. Roxane mutters a curse under her breath, but she doesn’t look away.
Juliette cannot breathe; she cannot comprehend what she is looking at—
An ear-rending sound, indescribable to their mortal ears, shatters the window and creates an earthquake that shakes the entire school. Screams ring out throughout the academy, but none can mask the one they all hear that has broken every bit of glass it could reach. It is a death knell that brings sorrow into the hearts of children and adults alike, one that wrings tears out of them and demands their full attention. It is the sound of mourning, of something vast and holy reaching finality.
It lasts for so long. So, so long. They are frozen here, incapable of thinking until it all stops. The earthquake, the screaming, the flashing lights, and even the storm. Roxane is the first to move. She leans forward and looks out the window, the storm’s end finally exposing the sky, and she stumbles back, falling down with her hands cut apart by the glass littering the floor. With Sophie too busy praying, Dominique is the one who helps her up.
Juliette gulps. Each step she takes forward feels like she carries the weight of the world. She feels sin crawling up her back and gripping her spine.
When one looks up at the night sky, it is a familiar darkness that is spread over the firmament. It is a living blanket, pricked with stars, punctured by the soft glow of the moon. It is the kind of darkness a child can fall asleep under, the kind sailors once trusted to guide them home, the kind that promises the world is vast, but not endless.
When the scared little girl, thirteen years of age and trembling like a leaf, stares up at the sky, it whispers no such promise. The heavens are a ceiling covered in ink, a complete and utter void that howls with the whisper of a dead or dying thing on the horizon that now illuminates this dark world in place of the sun’s light reflecting on the moon. She cannot tell what it is—it looks like a mound of light, roaring and roaring in the distance with the sound of rushing wind that rattles her very bones. She feels the terror of something not meant for human eyes, something that should never have been seen.
Juliette’s cold hand finds her sister’s. They do not say a word. How can they?
All they can do is mourn the stars.
A/N: Here is idea two. This would be the shortest story of the four, and is a very personal story to me and my experience with religion growing up (not that I went through a hellish boarding school set in Quebec in the 1950s, which was basically a Catholic theocracy all but in name). Of course, this story itself would not be against faith of any kind, but in the way people twist it to aim to control. Thank you for Mythix for beta reading this.
Inspirations: Promised Neverland, The Mist, Le Poid de la Neige
Main tags: Horror, Psychological, Survival, Nobledark
Side tags: Drama