by Bryan, JL
“Oh, Mali? That’s in...” Cassidy struggled to remember.
“West Africa, on the southern edge of the Sahara.”
“Wow.” Cassidy was surprised to hear all of this. “You don’t really have an accent, though. You sound like you’re from Iowa.”
“Wherever I go, I mimic the language just as I hear it,” Ibis said. “So I absorb accents and inflections along with the words.”
“You must be really good at that.”
“I must be.” They reached the edge of the park where they’d started.
“We’re done.” Cassidy sighed in relief, ready to plop into a chair and stay there for about ten hours.
“Another lap around the park?” Ibis asked.
“You’re kidding. How about lunch?” Cassidy had some fresh cash from the previous night. She’d had a couple of customers, including the fitness-center girl, who still wanted the hummingbird, but wanted to move it far inward from her hip, close to her pubic area, as “a surprise when I take my panties off.” Cassidy had tried to keep herself between the girl and curious male customers who just happened to drift by for a closer look.
“Good food is an important part of healing, too,” Ibis said.
“Let me shower and we’ll go to Ali Baba’s. It’s right around the corner. It’s not Moroccan, but it’s Middle Eastern. They have amazing black bean hummus...everything’s good there.”
“I’m sold.”
They crossed the street to her house. Inside, Allie was awake in the living room working on a sculpture for her Art Institute class, dressed in a baggy t-shirt and boxer shorts swiped from one of her boyfriends, neither of whom were around at the moment.
Cassie introduced them to each other.
“What are you making?” Ibis asked Allie.
“It’s a holiday tree. It’s not done, but...” Allie gestured at it and shrugged.
It was a plastic Christmas tree, about three feet high, hung with handmade decorations. Four strands of lights blinked on and off in sequence—a red and green strand for Christmas, then a row of glowing Easter bunnies, a row of glowing American flags, a row of bright little jack-o’-lanterns.
The ornaments were spheres that were disproportionately large on the small tree, with windows cut out to reveal small dioramas inside. In one sphere painted like an Easter egg, the window was shaped like a large crack. Inside, a fuzzy Easter Bunny with wild eyes packed razor blades and dynamite into pastel eggs. The next ornament held a plastic Santa and eight tiny reindeer flying against a starry backdrop. On closer inspection, Santa aimed a shotgun over the bow of his sleigh, and the head of one reindeer head was exploding in a glob of blood-red clay. Another showed a blood-spattered zombie Uncle Sam at a flag-draped podium, with the words WE WANT YOU...TO DIE painted in blood on the wall behind him.
“This is cool,” Cassidy said. “Looks like a lot of work.”
“I made my boyfriends do the boring stuff,” Allie said. “I just did the important stuff, like coming up with the ideas.”
“Why such a small tree?” Ibis asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, that’s just what Whitley found at the hobby store. A full-size would be huge, wouldn’t it?”
“Then nobody could miss it,” Ibis said.
“Yeah, at the student exhibit!” Allie lit up and began dialing her phone.
“You could put presents underneath it, too,” Cassidy said. “Little freaky toys or whatever—”
“Shut up, that’s brilliant!” Allie snapped. Into her phone, she said, “Whitley, I need a full-size plastic tree...like seven or eight feet...I know it’s July, just find one! Ugh!” Allie hung up.
“I’ll be right back,” Cassidy told Ibis.
She climbed the stairs, trying not to depend too much on the railing, and walked into her bathroom to shower off her sweat. In the steam, she finally had a moment to think, and realized she was enjoying her day with Ibis more than she’d expected, and he was certainly more mysterious and worldly than she’d imagined. He almost seemed like a different person from the one she’d met at the hospital.
Her stomach growled, and she thought of baba ghanoush and fresh-baked pita bread.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Peyton rode in the passenger seat of Reese’s enormous black Range Rover on Sunday morning, dressed in a black suit, hold the tie—he hated ties. He’d even shaved and let Reese sculpt his hair with gel for the occasion.
Reese looked gorgeous, he thought, in her long and breezy yellow summer dress, her golden bracelets and black aviator glasses. He normally hated to let women drive him, but he was still waiting on a big payday from the insurance company. The police had tried to hassle him with DUI charges, but his dad’s well-connected lawyer had put a quick end to that.
“Are you nervous?” Reese teased. “You look nervous.”
“No,” he lied. He hoped the place had new answers, some reason for hope that he’d managed to overlook all his life. “I’ve been in churches before, no big deal.”
“You’ve only been to churches for sheep. You’ve never been to one for wolves.” Reese caressed his leg, and he touched the back of her hand. They’d spent an hour or more in his bed the previous night, both of them fully clothed, Reese rubbing herself hard against him, letting him touch her anywhere he wanted, as long as he didn’t try to remove a single article of her clothing, which got him slapped or bitten as punishment. Her movements had grown increasingly sinuous and tempting, and her face had regained the strange look from the cemetery, the cheekbones unnaturally high and sharp, the intense glow in her blue eye.
She’d rubbed him fast and hard through his jeans, and he’d embarrassingly climaxed with his pants still on. All the energy had seemed to drain from his body at once, while Reese’s skin glowed red-hot for an instant.
Reese had kissed him goodnight and gone downstairs to sleep on the couch, leaving him wanting more. As soon as he recovered and got his strength back, he wanted to do it all over again, he’d thought. Maybe with their clothes off this time.
She drove them along Ponce de Leon Boulevard, a broad tree-lined street named for the explorer who had poked around in America for a while, supposedly trying to find the waters of eternal youth and instead dying from a poisoned arrow.
They turned down a narrow side street before reaching downtown Decatur, an old community full of antique houses, enormous trees, and crammed full of churches and colleges. Reese turned again and again, each street growing narrower. She finally turned into a two-lane driveway flanked by rock walls, the steel gates standing open.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Peyton asked.
“Of course I’m sure. I work here!”
Every church they’d passed on the way had clearly been trying to be very visible, with a high steeple facing the road, a generous parking lot, and usually a marquee out front with messages of humor, fear, or inspiration meant to attract new customers. This place, on the other hand, was tucked between narrow residential back streets without so much as a sign to identify it, more like a wealthy private residence than a public house of worship. It was enclosed by the rock wall, which was itself surrounded by high, thorny hedges threaded with poison ivy.
More stone walls flanked the broad driveway, blocking his view to the left and right as Reese drove them inside. Peyton saw no trees or decorative plants, not even a weed poking up through the brick drive. Everything was paved as far as he could see.
They parked in a wide blacktop area in front of a complex of dark wooden buildings with narrow tinted windows. The buildings were each three to five stories high, with sharply slanted roofs that tilted at odd angles. Nothing was symmetrical about the buildings or how they were arranged—it was more like staring into a rat warren, little alleys and walkways twisting out of sight into the shadowy interior.
The central building was clearly the church itself, about five or six stories tall, though it was hard to determine exactly because the church had several high, steep, irregularly angl
ed roofs. The steeple was like a four-sided steel spike rising up through the center of the church, its sharp tip pointed like a threatening weapon at the sky above. Thin streams of black smoke crept up around the steeple.
“Is that some kind of postmodern architectural design?” Peyton asked as he climbed down from the Range Rover.
“I don’t know, maybe.” Reese shrugged, and they crossed the blacktop parking lot, which looked brand new, not a crack in sight. Peyton noticed a Lexus and at least three different models of Porsche, all of them bright and polished. A few other people were ahead of them, approaching the steps to the open front doors of the church, which were heavy slabs held open with lengths of chain. They looked like young professionals in designer suits and dresses.
“What did you say you do here?” Peyton asked Reese.
“I told you, I’m the second executive administrative assistant to the Regional Director of the Southeastern Domain of the Church of First Light. How hard is that to remember?” Reese snickered and took his hand. “I’m so glad you came.”
“This place gets crazier the longer you look at it,” Peyton said. He almost couldn’t focus on it at all, because the strange, steep, irregular angles of the shadowy complex kept tricking his eyes and brain, like some kind of impossible M.C. Escher painting.
“It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?” Reese asked. “The construction’s just been completed. From here, we’ll keep the daughter churches in line all over the Southeast. We have disciples in more cities every month. By the time the messiah is proclaimed, we’ll have an army.”
“When is that supposed to happen?”
“Nobody knows. Only the prophet can say.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as they approached the dark stone slabs of the church’s steps. “But we both know I’m probably the messiah, right?”
“Of course. Or I am,” Peyton replied.
“Seriously, though, I think it’s me. It has to be. Come on.”
They passed through the sharply peaked archway of the front entrance and into a dark antechamber with a low ceiling. All its walls were fully bricked up, admitting no light inside except from the open front doors.
Two young men in suits with golden-spiral pins flanked a pair of black steel double doors at the back of the narrow, stifling room. They peered suspiciously at Peyton.
“Who’s that?” asked one of them, a blond-haired guy who looked no more than sixteen or seventeen.
“He’s with me,” Reese said.
The young doormen waited as if they expected her to say more, but finally shrugged and opened the black double doors.
Reese led him into a narrow stairwell. The steps and walls were polished rock tile, glittering in the light of candles mounted in glass globes along one wall. The glass candle globes were held by wrought-iron Victorian-style fixtures. It looked as though someone had spent a fortune to create an environment that was both cavelike and luxurious—he’d considered that kind of rock tile when remodeling his bathroom, but his dad had declared it too pricey.
Reese’s heels echoed as they descended the stone stairs. Peyton felt nervous, frightened, and curious at the same time. He literally had no idea what lay ahead.
The narrow stairwell widened into a cavernous room shaped like a Greek amphitheater, with a semicircle of tiered seating arranged to face the altar below. The walls, floors, and tiers were all made of the glittering rock tile, and more wrought-iron candle globes were spaced around the curving wall, lighting the room with fire.
The seating on each tier was exactly like that of a luxury movie theater, plushly padded with drop-down arms and even cupholders. The audience area could have seated a couple hundred people comfortably, but more than half the seats were empty. The stone staircase continued down past all the tiers, dividing the congregation in half. To the right sat mostly young professionals like those they’d followed inside. To the left sat mostly teenagers, many of them with an obvious juvenile delinquent look that reminded Peyton of himself in high school. There were very few older people in the congregation, unlike most churches Peyton had seen.
Reese greeted several people as they descended the stairs, but didn’t stop and chat. Reese and Peyton sat in the fourth row from the bottom.
The stairs ended in a stone-tiled depression at the center of the room. A slab of an altar the size of a queen bed occupied the center of the depression, shrouded with heavy scarlet cloth trimmed in gold.
An enormous fireplace stood in the wall at the back of the depression. It was floor level and seven feet high, so a person could have walked right into it. A bonfire roared inside, and an intricate wrought-iron gate stood in front of it as a kind of screen. The fire should have heated the sanctuary to an unbearable temperature, but the air felt cool and crisp. Hidden fans in the chimney must have quietly sucked out the heat as well as the smoke.
The room was quiet except for a few hushed conversations among the congregants, and the stone seemed to absorb their voices. No music played—the only noticeable sound was the endless whoosh of the burning fire.
A few of the younger people cheered and applauded when the preacher arrived. He waved as he descended the stairs toward the pit of the sanctuary, and the fire grew larger and redder as he reached the final step, as though rising to greet him.
The preacher was a young man with close-cropped dark hair and an easy, friendly smile, dressed in a dark suit and a red tie. He was handsome and fit, drawing admiring gazes from the girls and young women of the congregation.
In fact, Peyton thought, looking around the room, it seemed that all the people here were young, healthy, and attractive, as though the church did not want the ugly, the overweight, or the handicapped inside its walls. Or the elderly, generally, though there were a few gray heads in the front rows.
The preacher approached the wrought-iron fire grating and bowed to the flames within before turning to face the congregation.
“Welcome,” he said. “I’m happy to tell you that this will be the first service in the sanctuary without the sound of construction work above us. This entire complex is officially complete!”
The congregation applauded and whistled at the news, some stomping their feet as though at a football game.
“I see some new faces out there today,” he continued. “That means some of you are truly advancing your discipleship by reaching out and witnessing—not to everyone, of course, but only to the right people. Give yourselves a round of applause, all of you potential messiahs out there!”
The crowd cheered, clapped, and stomped even louder at this.
“If this is your first time here,” he said, “My name is Steve Gray, and I have the honor of serving at this fantastic new church thanks to our Regional Director himself, William A. Ferguson. Let’s hear some praise for Director Ferguson!”
The crowd cheered yet again as Steve pointed to a balding gray-haired man at one end of the front row, dressed in a black suit and red bow tie. Director Ferguson seemed like nothing special to Peyton, just a bland-looking old executive type who would blend in at the dullest of board meetings. Ferguson lifted a finger and nodded slightly at the acknowledgment.
“Today I want to talk about weakness and strength,” said Steve the preacher, strolling around the front edge of the depression to look closely at the congregation. “That’s the story of everyone’s life, isn’t it? We’re all born weak and helpless. Nobody’s on our side. Who cares about us?”
Peyton noticed a few heads in the audience nodding in agreement.
“Nature doesn’t care about us. It makes us hungry, cold, sick, and old, then it kills us. Along the way, we get to enjoy plenty of suffering thanks to these bodies and their huge capacity for pain. So thanks a lot, nature,” he said sarcastically, drawing laughs.
“Society doesn’t care about us. There are billions of people out there, billions, who would watch you struggle and never help, who would watch you starve and give you nothing, who would not raise a finger if they saw your life was in danger. Th
e world out there is full of people who would lie to you, cheat you, hurt you, and never have a second thought or a moment of remorse about it.”
More heads nodded along. One boy, about fourteen with long green bangs and angry, sullen eyes, gave a thumbs up and muttered, “Fuck, yeah.”
“Our creator doesn’t even care about us,” the preacher said. “Why would he cast us helpless into this ocean of pain if he cared about us? Why not give us a nice fucking place to live instead of this bug-infested shithole where everything sucks and everybody hates us?”
“Yeah!” someone shouted from the audience. Several people clapped. Peyton was so startled to hear the preacher yelling profanity that he laughed out loud, but nobody seemed to mind. Reese smiled at him and took his hand.
“This is wild,” he whispered to Reese.
“All of this can change, though,” the preacher said, looking thoughtful. He didn’t use a microphone or an amplifier system. The acoustics of the amphitheater brought his voice out to everyone as if by magic. “We don’t have to be powerless, and we don’t have to be alone. That power is out there waiting for us to take it. It wants us to take it. We can each be filled with more power than we ever imagined. Fully initiated disciples out there, you know what I’m talking about.”
“Woo-hoo!” Reese called out, which encouraged more people all over the room to clap and whistle.
“When you are initiated, you become one of us forever. It is a bond between spirits that transcends death. You are no longer alone or powerless. We call this process of gaining power and working together by a very special name: discipleship.”
This brought applause from everywhere.
The sermon went on for a few minutes with the same theme—humans are weak, humans can gain power through discipleship. Peyton kept thinking about the dark things he’d seen in the graveyard, and the scattered chorus of the muttering dead. He knew he wasn’t crazy, wouldn’t even entertain the idea. These people had learned to access unseen levels of reality. Peyton had seen it for himself.
He felt tantalized by the idea that some deep mystery remained in the world, far beyond the reach of science, and these people seemed to have the keys to it.