Escaping the Cult: One cult, two stories of survival. Kristina Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ very special for you to read today.’

      She handed me a large comic book, wrinkling her nose with excitement. The humidity made its greying pulp pages feel slightly moist to touch. I stared at the cover. It had a picture of a pretty young teenage girl with lustrous long black hair in a braid. Aunty Joy began to sound out the title for me.

      ‘He … van … s. Can you say that?’ beamed Joy.

      ‘Hev …’ I stammered, struggling to match the letters she pointed to with the correct sounds.

      The next word was easy. I could guess its meaning from the picture.

      ‘Girl,’ I said triumphantly.

      ‘Well done, Natacha, you clever girl.’

      A thrill ran through me as I looked at the image.

      ‘Do you want to read it together, Natacha?’ she asked.

      I nodded so hard I thought my head might fall off. I rarely got individual adult attention and was determined to milk this for all it was worth. My clammy fingers fumbled with the thin paper as I opened it several pages into the story. A girl dressed in a short white robe was throwing two men backwards as if using magic. Her robe was see-through and her nipples stuck out through her dress. I was a bit fascinated by that because a couple of days earlier a visiting uncle had shown us a poster of another lady with similar sticky-out nipples and told us that nipples were his favourite thing in the world. He had grinned when he told us all little girls would grow up to have sexy nipples like the lady in the picture, too. Anna had whispered to me afterwards that the uncle was naughty to say that to us.

      The men in the picture were dressed in helmets and sinister uniforms with armbands marked 666.

      ‘What’s Heaven’s Girl doing, Aunty Joy?’ I asked, puzzled and happy at the same time.

      Joy laughed and pulled me closer to her.

      ‘She’s using her powers to fight the soldiers of the Antichrist. See, she’s shooting them with lightning. What do you think that word says, Natacha?’

      She pointed to the large graphic letters drawn above the image of the dying men. I shrugged.

      ‘Zap!’ said Joy.

      ‘Zap!’ I repeated back, feeling very pleased with myself. ‘But Aunty Joy, why is she doing that?’

      ‘Because she’s in the End Time Army. You’ve heard your Grandpa David tell us about the End Time Army in his letters, haven’t you?’

      Of course I had. For as long as I could remember it had been drilled into me that I was an elite child soldier in God’s army. Every day we were training and preparing for the End Time war, which would mark the beginning of end of the world. We were told Grandpa (which is what we children were instructed to call our leader, David Berg) had been sent a prophecy directly from God that the war would begin in 1993. My brothers assured me I would be ten by then and definitely old enough to fight.

      Every day we listened to tapes of Grandpa talking to us. He explained how the Antichrist was already living on earth and making his evil plans to destroy the world. He said Europe and America were already under the devil’s control but the system people who lived there didn’t even know it. That’s why they laughed at us. They thought we were crazy but that was because they were the stupid ones.

      Grandpa’s tapes also explained that when the war started, floods and earthquakes would ravage the world and a deep darkness would cover the earth. Joy showed me pictures of what this would look like. It was really sad – there were no flowers and all the buildings had been destroyed. He called this the ‘great tribulation’. At the very end of the war there would be the battle of Armageddon, which is when God would fly down from the sky on his chariot. We would fight by God’s side and die, and then we’d go to live in heaven.

      I couldn’t wait to get to heaven. Art was my favourite lesson because we got to draw heaven with crayons. I especially loved colouring in the outside walls of the heavenly city because they were made of precious stones, like rubies and emeralds, so I got to use lots of different colours. The main city was shaped like a pyramid and right in the middle of it there was a giant crystal skyscraper over 600 metres high. Aunty Joy said that was twice as high as the Empire State Building, which she explained was an important government building in America. Joy said anything wicked men could build God could do twice as well.

      And there wasn’t just one pearly gate like the stupid system people believed, there were twelve – three on each wall.

      People didn’t need to walk anywhere in this magical city, they whizzed through the air instead. And because I was going to be a glorious martyr it that meant my family would get a solid gold house on one of the top levels of the pyramid, areas reserved only for important people like us.

      But absolutely the best bit about the war was that I would have a special superpower. I wanted this more than anything in the entire world. Joy promised us God would give all the children in the End Time Army an individual power when he was ready. But first we had to prove to him how brave and worthy we were.

      I turned another page of the book.

      Heaven’s Girl had been captured and was about to be fed to some lions. She looked really worried and I was scared for her. But as Joy continued to read out loud I worked out that the nasty men had changed their minds about throwing her to the lions because they said they wanted a bite of her themselves instead. That really got me confused. Why would they want to eat her?

      In the drawing on the next page she was being held down by the soldiers. Two of them had her by the ankles, spreading her legs, while a third loosened his belt buckle.

      I suddenly felt very flushed and uncomfortable.

      ‘Aunty Joy, what are those men doing to Heaven’s Girl?’

      I knew what sex looked like – I’d seen the adults do it in their love-up sessions lots and lots of times – but this was different.

      ‘Can’t you see, Natacha, my dear?’ said Joy. ‘Look at what a wonderful example Heaven’s Girl is setting for you. They want to rape her by force, but Grandpa David tells us there is no such thing as rape if we follow the true laws of nature. A woman of the Bible should submit willingly to a man and satisfy him. God created sex and he created a man’s need for sex. He created woman to serve a man’s need. Heaven’s Girl is using this God-given opportunity to share the love of Jesus with these soldiers. She is going to love them so much that she will turn them back to the path of Jesus. She shares her love with a big smile and a song in her heart like all good girls should. Isn’t that a beautiful thing?’

      After Aunty Joy and I finished a few more pages of the book she closed it and promised we’d read some more tomorrow. I didn’t really mind her taking it – that picture had made me feel a bit sick. I couldn’t shake the thought of Heaven’s Girl’s smiling face as the soldiers did things to her. Would I have to do that when I was bigger? Would I be brave enough?

      I began to feel a bit shaky so I tried to think about what always made me feel happy – what superpower was God going to give me? My brothers and I used to argue about it all the time. Was it better to be invisible or be able to run really fast? Did boys get better ones than girls? I bawled my eyes out when my brothers teased me by insisting that they did.

      I was really into the idea of shooting thunderbolts СКАЧАТЬ