THE OLD NUN WALKED on the dark floor. She usually conducted her night inspection at the wee hours in the orphanage, ever since suffering from insomnia for some time. Her flashlight shone at the rows of beds with sleeping Intersexual boys in the abbey...

Her mind raced in the dark. Her guess had been truthfully accurate, after discovering a particular bed was empty. Sister Lisa Marie whispered, the missing ascetic boy's name softly to herself...

"Doran..."

Mother Superior who was in charge of St. Mary's, was a medical graduate before when she later joined the convent, years before the virus widespread — she had diagnosed Doran's medical symptom as being a sleepwalker — a somnambulist monk-boy — roaming outside their abbey in his sleep...

But, Sister Lisa knew the boy's enigma better — that Doran had never slept on a mattress bed all his life — because he was once imprisoned, and he slept on the cold basement floor of his parent's coal cellar since he was a baby.

The genial nun had also kept many secrets about Doran from others — and she was the only one — that the ostracized boy had trusted, to speak his heart content to, in that orphanage.

Sister Lisa Marie walked outside in the foggy murky grounds, shining her flashlight. She was heading in the dark — towards the silhouette cathedral, behind the blanch moonlight...

She had found the tortured soul of the boy, in the past nights, dozed off on the cold cathedral floor — after saying his daily confessions to his dead mother.

***

The holy altar was lit by a few candles that gave the ceramic statues of the saints over there, an eerie look in the shadows. The scar-faced Doran knelt right in front of the statue of the Madonna holding her child.

He petitioned piously whispers...

"Why Mother, why don't you leave me in peace? Why don't you let me go to sleep at night? I have obeyed the Word of God, and have even said my prayers — but yet, you still keep tormenting me — tell me, Mother, what more do you want from me?"

***

The woman's fist pounded on the padlocked coal cellar door — her long flowing hair swayed over her pale nightgown. She held up an open oil lamp in one hand — since she could not afford the electricity bills, after her husband the Pentecostal evangelist, who died of the cursed virus...

"Wake up, you abomination! Wake up now, you freak!"

"Mother? What is it, Mother?"

The startled half-asleep boy, in the dark, responded from behind the locked door...

"God spoke to me today — and he wants to know what your name is?"

The boy was now confused. "What Mother, what do you mean?"

There was an abhorrence in her pitched voice...

"Your cursed name!

"He wants your name! Now tell me, so that I can tell Him which one of the heathen demons you are!

"So, my God will cast your filth out of my basement! "

"I am not a demon, Mother — I am your son — I am your Doran!"

The odious woman yelled at the closed-door...

"No, I am not your mother — and, my son Doran is dead. You in there, you are the seed of the Devil, who killed all men on earth!" Loathing further in repugnance, she continued in tears...

"You even killed my son — my poor beautiful baby Doran! You are also the Beast who even killed my husband. You are the son of the Devil Himself who has taken everything good away from me — and sooner or later, you will then kill me too!"

A tiny hand of a child covered with coal soot, came out from below the door — the boy was weeping bitterly aloud...

"No, Mother, I am your Doran — and I am not dead."

Her loathing foot stomped on his little fingers — and the child retrieved his twinge hand into the cellar.

"No!"

She objected...

His mother then demanded, in a growling voice...

"Tell me who you are, you Devil! What is your true name, tell me now!!?

"Is it Baal or Molach? Beelzebub, or is it Hadad?

"Reveal your true self, you fallen angel!

"Say it, you, abomination child of Lucifer himself!"

"No! It is Doran, Mother!"

The boy yelled back...

The reply infuriated her further — and she then challenged him...

"No! If you are truly my angelic-son — speak in tongues, so that I can believe you!"

"I can't, I tried so hard, but I can't speak in tongues, Mother!"

The unloved child acknowledged his truth to her, in hot tears.

"Only a child of God will speak in tongues of His Holy angels! Then, you are indeed the filthy spawn of the Devil!"

"That is not true! That is not true!"

The child strived — he then punched hard on the locked door from inside. She too pummeled her fist at the other side, still equally provoked...

"How dare you defy the Command of my God, you filthy beast!"

She remonstrated out, for the boy's now silence...

"Speak, I demand — if you are truly a child of God — speak to me in tongues now, you demon!"

The jaded child broke his silence — he soon parroted back one of his mother's own stinging curses — the only divulging message he had ever heard daily from his mother's tongue since his birth — that he would someday, be condemned into the depth of hell-fire...

"No, I will not speak it — and I hate you too, Mother — I hate you so much, and may the same God that you believe in, He will burn you in hell too!"

"How dare you..." she shrieked...

She snatched the chain that she wore around her neck that bore her husband's crucifix — and also attached was the key to the basement door, where she had imprisoned her freak-son — wanting to open the door and to punish him severely...

Most probably, to kill that diabolic demon-child if she had to, in the Name of her God...

In that haste, it was when her dry, frizzling hair caught fire from the open oil lamp in her other hand. In a sheer panic, she dropped the lamp. It shattered below and the oil splattered and spread — instantly the flames bellowed from the floor, engulfing her diaphanous nightgown...

The screaming woman dropped down on the floor, rolling over to put the flames out. The frightened boy's darting pupils were peering into the crack of the door — seeing his mother now completely burning in flames — the locked-up prisoner could not save his jailor, who was now ablaze...

The woman even refused to cry out his name for help — in her final horrific experience, towards her extinguishing life — yet her progeny was crying out for her — with his scrawny, helpless fingers thrusting out from under the gap of the door...

"No Mother! Mother! No!"

***

Doran wept for his mother's death consistently, ever since the day he came to the orphanage, five years ago. Sister Lisa Marie came over, knelt beside him and hugged him from behind...

"It's okay Doran, it is okay..."

This made him cry even harder and louder because he had not learned what love was — it was all 7 years of pain and suffering that he was fed with, inside that dark basement of his perdition playpen — ever since he was born a freak...

Why hadn't his mother been loving and affectionate — like this affable nun?

His jailor even refused, to her last breath, claiming him to be her son, before succumbing to her own horrendous death...

'Was he really still a demon-like his mother had claimed him to be?

'Did he even curse her to her death?'

The light from the candles glowing around the cathedral made the glacial, marble eyes of the statue of Madonna with her child gleam — peering an ethereal glance at the living soul — kneeling below, weeping loudly with his emotions of sorrows, regrets, confusions — and doubts.