Chapter Twenty–Four
“I TAKE IT BACK! I TAKE it back!”
Like a drowning man swallowing what he knows to be his last breath on this earth, Lucas called out for forgiveness in the still voice of a child. Dreams and visions and nightmares danced like mad little gnomes before his eyes. His world turned and he could not stop it.
He saw an old, old woman, bound to a stool, her legs kicking over the depths of an unforgiving river. He saw his shipmates, comrades in cannibalism, bursting into the ship’s hold, damning him both with eye and tongue for his double sin. Doubled, because cursed is he who slays a boy and doubly cursed when the boy was his lover.
He saw his father – a sad shaken man having just received word of Lucas’s second damning shame, taking his final walk into the quiet lake below
