The day was pregnant with killing, the anticipation, the promise of something dreaded, desired, and necessary. Before the day was over, he knew that he would kill several more times. He had known that from the moment he’d risen this morning. The difference was, he now knew the identity of his next victim.
Gideon turned to Israel. “Come on. We have an appointment to keep at the temple.”
#
Jacob’s sister sat at the front of the Telestial Room, which represented the “lone and dreary world” into which Adam and Eve had been driven after having eaten the forbidden fruit. The walls were painted with scenes of Noah’s Ark and the flooding of the earth. The first time through, Jacob had fixed on the scene of people drowning as the flood waters climbed. He saw Eliza studying it now.
People climbed upon each other, wild-eyed with fear. A woman held her child above her head as the waters licked her face. Another woman tried to keep her children above water while two men used their heads as stepping stools to reach higher ground. Bodies floated face-down. The serenity on the faces of the chosen and their animals, loading onto the ark, presented a sharp contrast to the terror of those God would drown.
God is merciful. He is also terrible.
Later, they would move to the Terrestial Room, and finally to the Celestial Room where the endowment ended as the initiate passed through the veil and into the presence of the Lord.
Jacob, playing Adam, prayed, “Oh God, hear the words of my mouth.”
Stephen Paul came on stage as Lucifer. “I hear you. What is it you want?”
Jacob looked toward him in feigned suspicion. “Who are you?”
“I am the god of this world.”
The initial part of the endowment was a rough retelling of the creation story of Genesis. Elohim (the Father), Jehovah (the son), and Michael created the Earth. Michael became Adam. Elohim and Jehovah created Eve from Adam’s rib. Lucifer arrived to tempt Adam and Eve, who Elohim and Jehovah then drove from the Garden and into the Lone and Dreary World.
The participants covenanted to obey the Law of Obedience, wherein men promised to obey the Lord and women promised to obey their husbands. In Eliza’s case, this meant her future husband. The Law of Sacrifice followed:
“We covenant to sacrifice all that we possess, even our own lives if necessary, in sustaining and defending the kingdom of God.”
The endowment moved to the rituals of the lower, or Aaronic Priesthood, which would be followed by the rituals of the higher, Melchizedek Priesthood. They represented higher and lower states of spiritual awakening. Stephen Paul, now playing Peter, instructed Jacob, as Adam, in how to put on the robes of the Aaronic Priesthood, and in the first token of the Aaronic Priesthood, its name, and sign. Stephen Paul’s brother, Aaron Young, filled in the other roles when three men were required on stage.
The name of the first token was the new name that Eliza had been given in the washings and anointings. The sign was a handshake with thumbs over knuckles. And then the penalty, for those who might be tempted to violate the covenants they had made in the temple.
“We, and each of us, covenant and promise that we will not reveal any of the secrets of this, the First Token of the Aaronic Priesthood, with its accompanying name, sign, and penalty. Should we do so, we agree that our throats be cut from ear to ear and our tongues torn out by their roots.”
The tokens, names, and signs were the meat of the endowment. Jacob took them as symbolic; he didn’t think angels would ask for secret handshakes and whispered signs and countersigns when you died and if you had a crappy memory then, oops, you’d be consigned to a lower kingdom. But why take blood oaths to protect a secret with only symbolic meaning? God knew that someone had taken them seriously.
Amanda Kimball.
They had cut her throat and torn out her tongue. But why? Was it for discovering that they had murdered the gentiles? For then threatening to go to the police? And he couldn’t wrap his mind around the original crime itself: the brutal murder of a woman and her unborn child. Why?
Jacob thought about what his father had said. The Quorum of the Twelve had wrestled for many years with the inherent flaw of any breeding program involving a small population. It didn’t matter that they doubled their population every twenty years and that they might some day number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Take Golden Retrievers. Inbred with others descended from the same pedigree, it didn’t matter that there were millions of them. They still suffered from hip dysplasia, vision problems, and epilepsy because they didn’t have enough genetic diversity.
In humans, inbreeding also involved cognitive deficiencies, which was the antithesis of what the church elders sought to accomplish.
That they should breed themselves like animals filled him with disgust. Golden Retrievers. Is that all we are?
Well, not exactly. Unlike a purebred animal, the stock could be improved by bringing in outside females. Some members of the Quorum of the Twelve had driven down that road before being turned aside by other, more practical voices.
The Jupiter Medallion.
The thought came unbidden to his mind and he almost dismissed it. But he could see it in his mind, now, the picture of the wall where someone had painted its symbols in the blood of a murdered baby and her mother.
And suddenly, everything came into focus. He knew what had happened, and why.
Chapter Twenty-One:
I am God.
Enoch stood on the far side of the veil in the Celestial Room of the temple. Stephen Paul Young would present Jacob and Eliza at the veil. Enoch would bring them through, acting as proxy for the Lord.
“God,” Enoch whispered to himself. It was half prayer, half affirmation of his role in the endowment.
He would tell Jacob everything he knew. It started with Elder Kimball, Elder of Israel and ended with his son, Gideon. Elder Kimball laundered money in Las Vegas, stole tithing from the church. He had bribed doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Spied on people. Blackmailed. And he had given Gideon free rein to kidnap, murder, and intimidate.
Enoch would greet his brother through the veil and here, in the Celestial Room, he would tell Jacob everything. And then Jacob would do everything in his power to destroy Elder Kimball, no matter what damage he might inflict on the church.
But Enoch had to do it. He’d stood at the point of murdering an innocent woman. And he’d known that his actions were not of God.
Enoch wore temple white, pilfered from the changing room. Over this he wore his robes, his green sash, his cap. It was the clothing of the endowment and of a temple sealing. It was also the clothing they dressed you in at death. So that you would be prepared to give the real God the signs and tokens.
The others did as Enoch had told them. They passed first through the creation, then through the signs and tokens, one by one. The participants spoke in loud voices and he could hear them clearly as they recited their lines even though he couldn’t see them through the veil.
And they reached the Second Token of the Aaronic Priesthood, with its penalty:
“We, and each of us, covenant and promise that we will not reveal any of the secrets of this, the Second Token of the Aaronic Priesthood, with its accompanying name, sign, and penalty. Should we do so, we agree to have our breasts cut open and our hearts and vitals torn out from our body and given to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.”
“An appropriate phrase, don’t you think?”
Even as Enoch turned with heart pounding, a fist crushed him in the solar plexus. He grunted and went down and the three men who’d come in behind him were on top of him.
Gideon Kimball. Israel Young. Eric Froud.
They were too strong. He was stunned from the blow. Within seconds they had him pinned. Eric held his legs, while Israel had his hands around Enoch’s throat. Gideon sat on his chest with a knife in hand. He pressed it against Enoch’s gut.
“Very clever,” Gideon said. “Coming to
the temple. It’s the right place to make peace with the Lord, don’t you think?” The knife pressed harder and Enoch felt it pierce the skin. Only a prick, but the slightest pressure would slide it right in.
How had they found him? Maybe they were on the side of God.
And then he remembered the look on Jennifer Gold’s face. Enoch had stood over her, ready to cut her unborn child from the woman’s womb. No angel had directed those actions. No angel of God.
Israel Young choked Enoch’s air supply. Gideon leaned harder on the knife. It eased slowly in. An eighth of an inch, a quarter.
“One scream,” Israel said. “One single scream and your life will come to an end.” His grip relaxed on Enoch’s throat. Air burned back into his lungs.
He could barely breathe with Israel’s hands around his throat. “Why Jennifer Gold?” he whispered. “Why her?”
“A Jew,” Gideon said. “Native intelligence. And carrying a daughter. What does it matter?”
“Not yours?”
“What, the baby? No. Samuel Gold’s sperm and Jennifer Gold’s egg. We bring the child back, breed her with our own. It’s called hybridization vigor. It works with plants. It works with cattle. It will work with humans. But what does it matter?” he repeated. “You’re confused, Enoch. Taking these babies. Spreading our own seed. Those are only tactics. Individual battles. It’s the war, Enoch. That’s what matters. You forgot that. And so you forgot where your allegiance lies.”
Gideon claimed that it didn’t matter, but spread throughout the West were hundreds of vials of sperm. Gideon’s seed, much of it. Whatever breeding or random evolutionary mix had formed this monster, it would be spread to hundreds of children. Taking the information fed back by the clinics, the Lost Boys would kidnap some of the girls and return them to Zion. Other children would remain, like sleeper cells to be awakened by a future church fed and nourished on Gideon’s sickness.
“It’s all a lie,” Enoch said. He groaned from the unbearable pain and pressure of the knife pushing into his flesh. “The angel, everything. It’s you, Gideon. It wasn’t even your father. It was all you.”
Gideon leaned closer. “We are who we were born to be,” he whispered. “That’s all. You were ordained by God to fail. I was ordained to lead His kingdom.”
“My brother will stop you.”
Gideon smiled as he drew back. Was that uncertainty behind that smile? The man nodded to Israel and the grip tightened once more about his throat.
“And now, Enoch Christianson,” Gideon said in a low voice, “Having violated thine covenants, thy breast shall be cut open and thine heart and vitals shall be torn from thy body and given to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. May thy soul speed rapidly unto its final reward. Or, in this case, its eternal punishment.”
#
Jacob drew in his breath as the pieces fell into place.
He’d read about the murdered woman, but the gruesome details and the occult-like symbols of the Jupiter Medallion painted on the wall had distracted him. Made him believe, as had the police, that the killers had consumed the woman’s baby in a black mass.
They had not killed the baby. That had been misdirection, and an effective one, aided by the gruesome murder of the baby’s mother. Of course the police would take the note at face value. He had.
But the truth was, the baby had never died. Jacob would consult the article, but certainly the child had been a girl. As would have been the other two children. They had kidnapped the children and brought them to Zion to improve the breeding stock. Instead of adopting the children of drug addicts and prostitutes—as his father had put it—they had kidnapped the daughters of academics and scientists.
He remembered what Fernie had told him. Amanda had disappeared to Denver six months into her pregnancy, just when she’d have started to show through the loose-fitting, ankle-length dresses the women of the church wore. Premature labor, supposedly, requiring bed rest out of sight of her sister wives. And then she’d come back from Denver with a baby.
It was so obvious, now. Sophie Marie didn’t look like a Kimball. Dark, curly hair, a different complexion. They’d said she looked like Amanda’s brother, killed as a child. The human mind searched for patterns and found them where they did not exist. In truth, she was not related to Amanda Kimball in any way.
But how had they convinced Amanda to take the baby? Maybe Elder Kimball had scorned her for being infertile, had threatened her if she didn’t go along with the plan. Or maybe he had told her this was a gift from God. An abandoned child. Infant Moses, found among the bulrushes in a basket.
Whatever the reason, she hadn’t known the horrific truth. Until one day, perhaps when she was in Cedar City with her sister wives, she had seen something on television or caught a glimpse of a magazine. Maybe she had seen the Jupiter Medallion, its symbols marked on the walls of Sophie Marie’s murdered parents’ house. She had thought of her unexpected gift, and the pendant worn around her husband’s neck. Amanda Kimball had done her research.
And there had been similar cases in New Mexico and Los Angeles. Prominent academics who had lost their lives and their infant or unborn daughters. Jacob thought about their names, “Stein, Feldman, Rosenberg.”
Jewish names. That would be no coincidence. The Church of the Anointing was a covenant people, chosen by God and set apart, as He had set apart the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so each member of the church must be adopted into the House of Israel to receive his or her inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom. In the church, this usually meant the House of Ephraim or the House of Manassah. Outside the church, only the House of Judah had the same claim on the Lord.
That they were scientists, high IQ individuals, both mother and father, was similarly no mistake. What better way to improve the intellectual foundations of the church than to adopt—if butchery and kidnapping merited the word adoption—females from a proven genetic heritage?
Jacob knew what they had done. All he needed from Enoch was names.
The time came to present Eliza to the veil. They had to shift their robes from the left to the right side preparatory to receiving the signs and tokens of the Melchizedek Priesthood. They had to form a prayer circle, and then approach the veil to be admitted into the Celestial Room and the symbolic presence of the Lord.
The veil was a sheet that hung between the ceiling and the floor and divided the Terrestial Room from the Celestial. It had holes placed to perform handshakes and other tokens through the veil; these holes matched the signs of the compass and square on the temple garment itself.
Jacob wore a robe that draped over his right shoulder, a sash around his waist and a hat on his head that looked something like a baker’s cap. Everything was white except for the green apron embroidered to look like a cloak of leaves; it represented the apron worn to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness as the Lord drove them from the Garden of Eden.
He stopped Stephen Paul as they made their way to the veil. The man was about to slip through the veil to play the part of the Lord. “I know what I told you,” Jacob said in a low voice. “But I need you to present me at the veil first.”
“But nobody is on the other side.”
“Actually, yes, someone is. My brother. Enoch.”
An immediate frown. “The Lost Boy?” He kept his voice low, but it was angry. “You let an apostate into the temple?”
“He let himself in.” Jacob decided to take a risk. “It’s about Amanda Kimball.”
Stephen Paul’s frown deepened. He’d have heard the same rumors of her murder as everyone else. “Go on.”
The others watched from a few paces back, Aaron Young and Charity with their own frowns.
Jacob whispered, “That’s the real reason I’m in Blister Creek. Brother Joseph himself wanted me. Eliza’s marriage is secondary. And Enoch knows something. He’s going to play the part of the Lord and when we’re inside, he’s going to tell me who killed her. It was the only way he’d cooperate.”
; Stephen Paul stared for a long moment. “You should have told me.”
“I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
“Well, let’s get going then. And you’d better not be lying.”
Jacob approached the veil. He saw nothing moving through the thin fabric. There was nobody on the other side. Had Enoch changed his mind? And then a shadow moved behind the sheet. Stephen Paul approached the veil and gave three raps with a mallet against a carved wooden post.
A muffled voice from the other side: “What is wanted?”
Stephen Paul hesitated, then said, “Adam, having been true and faithful in all things, desires further light and knowledge by conversing with the Lord through the veil.”
“Present him at the veil and his request shall be granted.” His brother spoke so softly that Jacob had to lean forward to hear.
The Lord’s hand—or Enoch’s, in this case—reached through the veil to receive the First Token of the Aaronic Priesthood. Jacob took the offered hand and gave the appropriate sign and its name.
But his mind was racing. The hand presented to him was not Enoch’s.
The light was dim, and had it been the left hand presented to him, or even just a normal handshake, he might not have noticed it. But the first Token of the Aaronic Priesthood involved placing the thumb just so on the recipient’s knuckle. Enoch had broken the thumb on his right hand fly fishing as a boy and the thumb had never been entirely straight ever since. This man’s thumb had no such deformity.
Who was it, then?
They reached the Second Token of the Melchizedek Priesthood, where Jacob reached through the veil to put his left hand on the man’s right shoulder while the man on the other side did the same through an opposite hole. With their right hands, they gripped in a handshake with little fingers interlocked. “Health in the navel, marrow in the bones, strength in the loins and in the sinews,” the man began. Jacob and the other man stood inches apart, locked in this intimate embrace but separated by the fabric of the veil.
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