by Ted White
A raw-looking youth looked up from behind a desk half-hidden by consoles. “What can I do you for?” he asked, grinning.
“I’m looking for a group of people,” I said. “I thought somebody here might know of them.”
“You’re an easterner, aren’t’cha?” he said.
I nodded.
“Thought so. Who you looking for?”
“Group calls itself ‘the Church of the Brotherhood of Life,’” I replied. “Saw something about them on 3-D last night.”
“Come all the way out here to join up, did’ja?”
“You know where I can find them?”
“Yeah, you just—wait a minute. Got a fire to take care of.”
Something had lit up on his console; I couldn’t see it from where I was standing. His hands flew over the keys of the console with practiced fluidity, faster than I could follow. There was a traditional blast from a siren somewhere outside and above us, and then I heard the shriek of turbines revving up.
“You wanta’ watch?” the kid asked. “Come on over here.” I followed him over to a bank of screens which were apparently monitors. He punched a couple of buttons and several screens came alive.
One showed the interior of a garage. Just as I’d realized what I was looking at, the picture zoomed up on the garage entrance and swerved out onto the street. I thought I recognized the car parked at the opposite curb, and I turned to look out the front window of the fire-control office just as a big red truck swung past, obliterating in a mass of articulated machinery every view but that of its side. The other screens showed bits of sky and trees, a blur of shop-fronts and sidestreets, and even the pavement of the street flashing by. It was obvious that all the broadcasts originated from the big truck.
The kid gestured at the screens. “This is just for my amusement, really. So’s I won’t get too bored in here.”
“They monitor the firefighters?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking, they do,” he agreed. “Whole truck is remote-controlled by our boys up in Ukiah at Fire-Control Central for this area.”
We watched the monitors as the big robotruck careened along some back road toward a reported fire. “Uh, listen.…” I said. “Any chance you could tell me—?”
“Oh yeah—that church group,” he said. His eyes never left the monitors. He had a greedy expression on his face. “You go on through town—north, that is—on the old road, the street out front, you know? About two miles out you’ll see this big old house up on a hill; that’s it.”
“Any way I can know for certain that’s the house when I see it?”
“Only one around for miles that old, that big,” he said. “Can’t miss it. Local landmark. Old Benford House—ask anybody.”
I thanked him and went out. The last I saw, in one final glance over my shoulder, he was still plastered to those monitors. Have a nice fire, I thought, as I climbed back into my car.
Chapter Twelve
He was right, I didn’t miss it. The house belonged to another century. Vast, rambling, many-winged, it was a monument to some long-dead owner’s vast ambition and lamentable taste. It stuck up on the hillside like a sore thumb.
I had to park the car down on the road; there was only a narrow, winding white gravel pathway leading up the hill.
Someone had recently planted shrubs along the path, and some were late-bloomers, showing tiny star-like blossoms. The path twisted back and forth among these shrubs, forcing one to a slower pace and probably adding 50 percent to the length of the hike. The sun had broken through the overcast and the back of my shoulders grew hot. Small insects, no doubt attracted by my sweat, buzzed around my head and kept striking my face and neck. I slapped at them, but I without diminishing their number greatly.
“Hello, there.”
I raised my eyes from the path and saw a young man sitting on a bench that had been placed among the shrubbery. He was small, features close-set, hair very dark and skin quite light. He returned my stare and as our eyes locked I felt my old atavistic hair-bristling response. This man was one of them. It was there in the way he held himself, the way he spoke, the way his eyes rested so calmly, so certainly on mine.
“I’m here looking for a couple of people I know,” I said. He smiled and rose to his feet and I wondered why I had immediately felt so defensive in his presence.
“Certainly,” he said. “Won’t you come up to the house?
I’m sure they would be pleased to see you.” He didn’t ask me who I had meant.
As I trudged up the gravel path behind my guide, now and then giving my neck a random slap, I asked myself just exactly what I hoped to accomplish by this confrontation. It had been three months since I had last seen Dian and Bjonn, although I’d hounded their trail for days after. I had nothing concrete to say to them, and not much I could threaten them with. What was the point of it all? Was it just that I couldn’t let it go without seeing them again, without talking to them one last time? As we approached the big house I felt the muscles of my stomach tense and a small knot of pain begin to spread through my abdomen.
The young man ushered me in through the door, and a wave of cool darkness washed over me. For a moment I imagined I really stood in an ancient church, a place of vaulting ceilings and stained-glass windows, all silence and majesty. In actuality I was in a vestibule, rich with stained-wood paneling, flanked by massive inward-hinged doors and leading through an archway into a large room.
The room beyond enhanced the feeling. The ceiling was not high, but its white stucco was crossed by heavy beams of dark wood; the walls were wainscoted in more dark paneling, and the windows set above the wainscoting fitted with leaded glass. The floor was bare of furniture, with only a richly hued rug at its center, and few cushions scattered about. Dian was sitting on one of the cushions, facing me. She was the only person in the room.
“Tad,” she exclaimed, executing an intricate maneuver that put her on her feet. She crossed the room toward me—I still stood near the door—her hands extended to me. “How wonderful to see you here,” she said.
I looked around, but the young man who had brought me here had vanished. The room was dry and cool, but I felt sweat running down my back.
Dian’s toga-like robes swirled about her as she moved and she had an ethereal presence, almost as if floating, gliding above the floor. Her hair was its natural color and it formed a halo about her face. Her smile lit her face like a torch.
I couldn’t keep my eyes on her. “Hello, Dian,” I said, moving to one side to evade her touch. “Where’s Bjonn?” I asked. I turned away from her and walked over to a window.
“He’s here,” she said, and her voice lost its first glow of warmth. “Would you like to see him?”
“Yes,” I said, keeping my back to her. I stared through the window, but in my mind I still saw Dian. I wanted to crouch over to diminish the pain in my gut. As I heard her move away, I slipped my hand over my belly. It didn’t help.
No time seemed to pass, but suddenly I was aware that someone had entered the room behind me.
“Tad,” came Bjonn’s resonant voice. “Will you tell us what brings you here?”
I turned at last and saw him in the shadows of the opposite side of the room. Dian stood next to him, her tiny figure somehow no longer dwarfed by his. Bjonn was also in robes.
“I saw you on 3-D,” I said.
“And so—?” he probed gently.
“I came out here to see you,” I said.
“As now you do,” Bjonn replied. “But surely you did not travel all this distance merely to confirm the sight of us you beheld on 3-D?”
“No,” I said, trying to put steel into my voice. “No, I came out here to get a few answers from you.”
“Ah!” he laughed warmly. “Bravely put. I had not expected it. We should be pleased indeed to share our answers with you.”
Something twisted in my stomach and I felt my knees shake. “I think you’re deliberately misunderstanding me,” I told
them. “You’re evading the subject.”
“What subject?” Bjonn asked.
“The subject of—look! Are you aware of the mess your disappearance caused? Why the hell did you run out like that? What led you out here to—to this Godforsaken place?” I waved my hand at the window. “What’re you up to out here?” I felt my voice dissolve and with it some of my anger. “Just tell me what’s going on, will you?”
“Tad—” Dian, solicitously—”is something wrong? You look ill.”
I swayed, dizzily. “I—could you?—an eating cubicle?”
I wasn’t aware of him crossing the room, but suddenly Bjonn was at my side, holding my arm, supporting me. I felt a cold sweat cover my face. “We have no eating cubicles here,” he said.
I fainted.
They revived me only seconds later. I was sitting propped on cushions, Bjonn still holding me. Dian held something sharp and acrid-smelling under my nose.
“There,” she was saying, “does that help? Are you feeling any better?”
“That stuff….” I said. “It gives me … a headache.”
“All right; we won’t use it any more,” she said, doing something with it that removed the smell. She was using a tone of voice on me which I recognized. My den mothers used to talk that way to me.
“Lean forward,” Bjonn suggested. “Put your head between your knees. It will help.”
“The sun….” I said, doing as he said, “climbing up that hill….”
“I can understand,” he said soothingly. “You’ll get over it.”
But I still felt sick to my stomach.
“Why are you so concerned about us?” Bjonn asked, after I felt well enough to sit up and talk. He sat facing me on another cushion. Dian had disappeared into another room. I’d seen no one else.
“In case you’ve forgotten,” I pointed out, “you’re my responsibility.”
“Nonsense,” he smiled. “I am my own responsibility.”
“It’s my job,” I insisted. “I was responsible for you.”
“I’m afraid,” he countered, “that I have been responsible for you. I apologize to you.”
“Why’d you run away?” I asked.
“We didn’t,” he said.
I sat there and glared at him, while he smiled in return. I wanted to get up and hit him. I’d never hit another man in my adult life. But at the thought the pain in my gut redoubled. I leaned over a little more, clenching my stomach a little tighter, and gritted out:
“Let’s not quibble over words. You ran. You grabbed Dian, made the 21:00 HST to Pacifica, took a tube to Santa Barbara, rented a tandem cycle, and hunted down a man named Linebarger, spent the night as his guests, and the next day the four of you—you, Dian, Linebarger and a girl named Mills—took a tube north, rented a car, and drove it as far as Big Sur, where you turned the car over to a kid named Leroy Tanner, and then you dropped out of sight—the four of you—until now. Until last night. On 3-D. Why? Just tell me that, will you? Let me close the damned books on you, huh? Tell me why!”
He waited me out. Then he nodded, slowly. “You’ve compiled an interesting dossier on our activities, haven’t you? None too detailed, but in keeping with your dark suspicions. ‘On the run,’ I believe you put it. I ‘grabbed’ Dian. We ‘hunted down’ Bob Linebarger and ‘a girl named Mills.’ We ‘dropped out of-sight,’ you say. I can understand why you feel that way, Tad, but it isn’t true. None of it’s true.”
He raised a hand to forestall my angry interjection. “Oh, I’m sure you have the bald facts,” he said. “But a collection of facts is in itself no guarantee of truth. The omission of a fact can certainly cast other facts into a different shade entirely. Would you like the truth?”
‘That’s what I’m here for,” I said flatly. “I see. You think you’re here for the truth. But are you? If it contradicts what you think—what you believe? Will you still want the truth then?”
“Look, Bjonn,” I said. “It would be a pleasure—a distinct pleasure!—to hear just a little straight talk from you. Yes, I’d like the truth!”
“Very well,” he nodded, Buddha-like in the shadows.
“To begin with, Dian and I did not ‘run away,’ as you seem to believe. After Dian had confided to me the truth of your assignment it seemed to us both that the necessity of our mission demanded a less hostile setting. Dian knew that a friend of hers was vacationing in Santa Barbara and we determined to visit her.”
“Her?” I interjected.
“Karilin Mills,” Bjonn said.
“This was in the afternoon of that day,” he continued. “We wanted you to join us, but Dian feared you would not—that you would attempt to stop us if you could. I confess she understood you better than I. It was her plan—it struck me then as a pointless stratagem—to visit her roommate and switch credit cards with her. It would gain us credit, she told me, if you tried to have ours stopped. Which you did.” His gaze seemed accusing.
“She committed a crime,” I said.
“The card she exchanged for her roommate’s was far more valuable than the one she took,” Bjonn replied. “This may be a crime by your standards, but I find your standards irrational.
“In any case, we next arranged to meet you to ask you to join us. Your answer was to flee in blind panic. Whereupon we simply proceeded without you. We went to Santa Barbara in the manner you discovered, found Miss Mills without difficulty, joined her and her friend, Bob Linebarger, and shared our sacrament with them. Then we spent a peaceful night, arose the next day to travel about the town for a short spell—it seemed a shame not to enjoy so beautiful a place for at least a little while—and then, since that was to be our companions’ last day in Santa Barbara, we simply moved on with them. That had been the reason for our haste, you know; Dian knew they would be moving on the next day and she had no further address for them. We drove up to Big Sur, where Bob had friends, Bob made arrangements to return the car, and we spent the next month in Big Sur, meeting many wonderful people and sharing our life sacrament with them. One of them owned this beautiful old house, and he gave it to us, so we came up here. And here we have been ever since. Never hidden, never ‘out of sight,’ Tad, and never unavailable to those who seek us. To be truthful with you, Tad, I had not expected to see you among them.”
“You were in Big Sur a month, you say,” I repeated, tasting the gall I’d swallowed when Tucker had ignored my suggestion and all but told me I was a fool for thinking they were still there. A full month! We’d have routed them in less than a week. In one part of my mind I was already composing a memo to Tucker, a memo that would resound with the full tones of my indignation.
Bjonn was nodding again. His expression was strangely sad. “That is the truth, Tad. Can you accept it?”
“Accept what?”
“That you have fabricated a pair of fugitives in the dark recesses of your mind, that no one was fleeing you, no one trying to evade you, that we have been in the open all the while.”
“But carefully avoiding the use of your credit, or any other tipoff to your movements, your whereabouts,” I suggested cynically.
He shook his head. “You cut off our credit, Tad. Do you think we had any choice?”
I stood up. The pain had subsided a little. “Who owns this place?” I asked. “Is he here?”
“No,” Bjonn replied. “What do you wish to know?”
“I’m just wondering if he knows what’s going on here.”
“He knows. He is one of us.”
This time I sought out Bjonn’s eyes. They seemed full of pale blue electricity. “One of you,” I repeated. “You haven’t told me about that. About your crazy religion. About the—the difference between you and your, ah, converts and normal people. You haven’t told me the whole truth. You’ve left out a few facts yourself.”
The sadness seemed to fill his eyes and I couldn’t look at him any longer. His voice seemed haunted with melancholy, when he spoke. “Your heart is so filled with hatred, fear and
vituperation, Tad Dameron. Have you no room for your own feelings?”
I looked back at him and smiled, and it was my own smile and not one of his sickly saccharine creations. “Indeed I have, Bjonn, and my feelings have warned me about you from the start.”
He came to his feet then, towering up over me, and I thought he was angry until he spoke.
“I think you’d best go now, Tad,” he said. His voice was very quiet.
“You won’t tell me any more?”
“No.”
“You won’t tell me about this religion gimmick of yours?”
“No. If you were to share our sacrament, you would learn of it. There is no other way. And you are not yet ready.”
“What’s this ‘sacrament?’ What would I have to do?”
“You’d have to eat with us, Tad,” he said, and at that moment it seemed to me that his words were tinged with almost curdling pity.
“A neat trick,” I said. “You’ve all but talked me into it. I’ll say goodbye.” My legs were stiff and aching, and my stomach still uneasy, but I went quickly toward the outer door.
It was a neat trick. He’d trapped my curiosity, built my desire to know, my need to know almost to the point beyond which I would have succumbed. He had almost succeeded in seducing me.
When they’d first put it to me, this idea of sharing a meal together, I’d been purely and simply revolted by it. Now it was no longer a matter of my revulsion to the basic idea—I was more than certain that when Bjonn shared a meal with someone, when he administered his “sacrament,” he was inducing that person into a transformation of some sort. I could not distrust my senses to that extent. I knew that every person Bjonn had touched, he had corrupted into something like himself. And every person he had corrupted had become his follower. It was subtle, insidious. But it was as I’d first believed; he was a point of contagion.