Born Again
It was a normal day on the job for Robert Carrington. He was mixing mortar, just as he had done a thousand times before.
“It was just a freak accident,” the reporter said on the six o’clock news.
A young construction worker, Robert Carrington, had been dumping a bag of mortar into a mixing machine when his arm was caught and drawn inside. By the time the paramedics arrived, he was gone.
Miles away, Jerry Connors barely looked up from his prison cot. He was thirty-one and had already spent nineteen years of his life behind bars. Now he was facing twenty-five to life for killing a man in a bar fight.
The news was on the small TV in the corner. Some stupid guy mangled in a mortar mixer. Jerry snorted. That’s exactly why I’d never break my back for scraps, he thought. Better to live hard, my way.
Twenty years later, Joseph walked into Jerry’s cell. Young. New inmate. A kid. He was in for armed robbery. Jerry couldn’t explain it, but he liked the boy. They talked about their crimes and their regrets.
But Joseph always ended their talks the same way.
“I just need to rest.”
It never fit. The words hung strangely in the air.
One night, Jerry woke to Joseph standing over him, whispering repeatedly:
“Be with you as it is with me.”
Jerry shouted at him to stop. Joseph slipped back into his bunk. And by morning… Joseph was dead. He was only twenty-two years old.
The coroner called it– natural causes; that’s all Jerry had heard about it once they wheeled him out.
A couple of years passed by. Jerry got a parole. But he never changed. ten years later at sixty-three, he was on death row for a brutal road-rage killing.
The night before his execution, he dreamed; most were horrifying nightmares. But they weren’t his dreams. They belonged to others. Countless others.
The one that haunted him most came from centuries earlier.
The year was 1523. He was strapped to a wooden board beneath the blade of a guillotine. The executioner leaned down, his voice low and cruel:
“This is the curse that never ends. Until you find one as evil as yourself and speak the words five times—Be with you as it is with me—you will never rest. You will die horribly, again and again.”
The crowd roared. The rope was pulled. And the blade fell.
On the table now, the doctor inserting the tubes, it’s becoming clear to Jerry, he’ll be back, but as what? As whom? He wondered how long it will take, for he has all the memories now, all that came before him. As he slipped away, he could hear it.
The crowd roared. The rope was pulled. And the blade fell.
Darkness.
Then — a newborn’s cry.
A nurse smiled down at the tiny baby in her arms.
“He’s a strong one,” she said. “Already clenching his fists.”
But as she swaddled him, the baby’s eyes opened calmly.
Watching. Waiting.
Somewhere inside, Jerry remembered.
This is the curse that never ends…