Escaping the Cult: One cult, two stories of survival

Isaiah stared straight at me, not changing his grip on Vincent. Vincent’s face was turning red and blotchy, the fear in his eyes now replaced by total panic.

‘I said put my brother down!’ The words spilled out with a force I didn’t know I possessed.

Isaiah curled his lip in my direction. For a moment I thought he was going to kill me too. He dropped Vincent to the floor and walked into the house.

Vincent curled up, choking and gasping for breath. I lay with him, holding him and trying to calm him with my own breaths. Eventually his breathing slowed back to normal.

‘I thought I was dead,’ he said, his shoulders shaking with little sobs. ‘My eyes went black.’

I sat him up and put my arm around him. We stayed there, not moving, until he felt ready to walk. I looked over at the monkey. It stared at us, wide-eyed and immobile. I think it too was stunned at what it had just witnessed. I swear it flashed Vincent a look of sympathy.

When we got back inside Isaiah was all smiles.

‘Good work today, soldiers. Good work. Go get your shower. MCs’ dinner at 1900 hours.’

Usually after survival training sessions Isaiah liked his ‘crew’ of MCs to have dinner together. ‘A crew that fights together eats together,’ he insisted. He could say that all he liked but I had no intention of fighting alongside Isaiah. When the time came my family would fight and die right next to each other. No way was I staying in his crew. And if he tried to stop me he would get one of my thunderbolts.

Isaiah’s wife was Aunty Rebecca; she was as bonkers as her husband. Their sons Sean, Seamus and Seafra often got to choose the food we ate at crew dinners. Not that there was much choice – rice with lentils or rice with eggs.

They always asked their mother to make scrambled eggs. It was a total mystery to me, because Aunty Rebecca’s scrambled eggs were a congealed, slimy mess. It was made worse by the fact all our food was bought in bulk, so very often the eggs were on the point of turning bad. It was like trying to eat putrid egg snot.

I did wonder if the boys only pretended to like her eggs because they knew we hated them so much. Aunty Rebecca took our refusal to eat as a personal insult. Wearing a hurt expression, she folded her arms and stood over us.

‘Now I made these eggs for you naughty children and you don’t even have the decency to enjoy it. Well, God be told, I never saw two more ungrateful wretches in all my life.’

Vincent and I tried everything we could think of to avoid eating them, stuffing our cheeks with the vile slime and spitting it out once we had been dismissed from the table. But that tactic meant putting the horrible stuff in your mouth in the first place. And Rebecca soon figured out what we were doing – her fat fingers would tug at the corner of our mouths and then we’d be forced to swallow the contents of our bulging cheeks.

Other times we would ‘accidentally’ spill our eggs on the floor – a self-defeating exercise because, if we were caught, whatever had fallen on the floor was shovelled back onto our plates by Aunty Rebecca, bits of grit, dirt and hair making it even more inedible.

The next time we came to the table, however, we had a plan.

Vincent and I smiled at Rebecca as we sat down and said grace.

‘Thank you, Jesus. Lord, we pray that you bless this food that you have provided for us. Help us to be thankful for it and bless and keep all our family worldwide. Praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus. We love you, Jesus.’

She watched us like a hawk as we picked up our spoons.

Isaiah was busy fussing over his boys. ‘God sent me a vision last night, boys. Glorious it was.’ Sean, Seamus and Seafra nodded as they slurped on their eggs.

Rebecca turned her attention to the conversation. She loved hearing Isaiah’s revelations, particularly when it came to the wonderful plans God had ordained for her three boys.

‘He told me, you boys, that he has plans for you in the End Time Army.’ He paused, looking to see he had the full attention of his wife and sons.

This was the moment Vincent and I had been waiting for. While the others were listening to Isaiah’s vision, we set about spooning the vile eggs into our pockets. Earlier that day we’d stolen some empty food bags from the pantry. Now these same bags lined our pockets, to prevent the eggs from oozing through our shorts.

‘Jesus appeared in a blinding light, boys. Wonderful. What a thing to behold.’

I thought it was wonderful too. Isaiah was looking to heaven, recounting his vision, while Rebecca and the boys were fixated on him.

Vincent and I were growing in confidence and speed, emptying our plates as quickly and smoothly as we could, the warm weight on our hips growing with every scoop.

‘Jesus told me you boys will be commanders at Armageddon and you will glorify Jesus and Father David with your courage and bravery!’ Isaiah glowed with his revelation.

‘Praise be to Jesus. That’s amazing. What else did he say about my beautiful boys?’ asked Rebecca, turning back to the onions she was frying.

‘That is really amazing,’ I chimed. ‘Vincent and I have finished our dinner. Thank you, Aunty Rebecca. That was delicious.’

‘Look, we ate it all,’ added Vincent with an exaggerated enthusiasm I thought was sure to give the game away. I shot him a look.

‘May we be excused?’ I asked in my sweetest voice. ‘I want to say some special prayers for my older brother in Victor Camp tonight.’

Aunty Rebecca eyed me suspiciously.

‘Open your mouths. Both of you.’

Our jaws dropped in unison.

Rebecca seemed impressed by my new demure nature.

‘You may leave the table. Please go straight to your dorm now and remain silent until you get there,’ she said, almost happy.

I nodded with a sickly-sweet expression, doing my best impression of Honey, the mean girl who had bullied me in Bangkok.

As we walked down the corridor I felt like leaping into the air and whooping. We had put one over on the nasty old cow. We were learning the art of secret rebellion.

Summer turned into winter, Christmas came, and the New Year with it. Then summer came round again. There was still no sign of the End Time Tribulation and I still couldn’t shoot thunderbolts.

A new sense of paranoia gripped the adults. Dad told me the Antichrist had invented a weapon, something called the Internet.

He was wreaking havoc with it. But it was also an important tool for us. A Shepherd came to install a big computer with a telephone and modem attached to it. We children were not allowed to touch it under any circumstances. If the phone on it rang three times and then hung up the adults would know it meant a message was coming through from HQ. The code was never to answer a phone until the fourth ring just in case. We also had a new warning code for when people went out witnessing. They were to drive up and down the street before coming in; if they saw a white sheet hanging from a bedroom window they knew it meant we had been attacked or raided by the government and they were to flee immediately.

Grandpa sent out a Mo letter informing us the prophecy hadn’t come to pass because God had looked at us and decided we weren’t ready. We had failed him. It would happen, but probably not for another three years. He told us we had better be sure we were ready next time. Isaiah was bitterly annoyed that his sons’ chance of glory had been postponed. He became quieter and less frightening, brooding on his own failure to train his crew to the proper standards and thus displeasing God.

I had a sense something terrible was about to happen. The grown-ups began fasting and praying for days at a time. They sat cross-legged, staring up to heaven as if in a trance or talking in tongues with sweat and tears pouring down their faces as they rocked back and forth.

One autumn morning I woke to the sound of wailing and howling. As we entered the dining hall for breakfast I saw my mother kissing a framed photograph.

‘He was so beautiful,’ she kept repeating. ‘So beautiful. His eyes. Look at the light that shines. So beautiful. What a man. What a gentle spirit.’

She reverently passed the photo to Isaiah next to her as if it was a relic. He gazed adoringly at it, stroking his fingers across the glass. Rebecca took it against her heart, hugging it to her chest.

Some of the others were rolling around on the floor. It was pandemonium. Matt walked over to where Vincent and I stood. ‘It’s Grandpa,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘He’s dead.’

I looked over at the weeping, wailing grown-ups. Rebecca had tears streaming down her red face. She shook her head in sorrow. ‘The King is gone. Oh Lord. Jesus has taken him for an angel. Our King is gone. What will we do now?’ She had the photo in her hand and held it up for us to see. ‘Look, children, look at him. Here he is in all his God-given glory.’

I stared at the black and white image of an old man with a long grey beard. In all these years the only photocopied photos we’d seen had his face obscured by the cartoon lion’s head. It had to be that way because the devil’s soldiers would surely have murdered him if they had known what he looked like.

‘See his beautiful face. Our beautiful King David,’ my mother cried out. ‘I knew he would be beautiful.’