by Неизвестный
The time of mysteries in the night.
But this was Maywell, New Jersey, in the month of October, the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-seven.
It was also the time and place to climb into a wonderfully cozy curtained bed, curl up, and make sure she dreamed of peaceful voices and not strident ones, of children in candlelight and fabulous tales from long ago, and left the terrors behind.
She did not see Tom, who spent the night curled up on the canopy of her bed. And as he was not a purriiig cat, she didn't hear him either.
She was steeping heavily by the time Robin came into her room. He drew close to the curtained bed, parted the drapes, and peeked inside. When he was certain that she slept, he reached down and laid his hand on her naked breast, feeling its fullness and warmth. He whispered softly to her, an ancient spell:
“I'll come to thee in cat-time I'll come and make thee mine.”
And then, the necessary words uttered, he crept off to his own bed.
Tom watched him go, switched his tail a few times, then settled in for the long night's vigil. In the bed below him, Mandy breathed as softly as a sleeping deer.
Chapter 9
On the night that the demon-sent doctor and the beautiful young witch came, Sister Winifred had been leading what remained of the congregation in “Rock of Ages.” Brother Pierce, winded from his last exhortation, surveyed the crowd. About a third were gone. They loved the Lord, of course, but in the absence of an intense issue their faith waned. They began to worry about money or work or just getting the washing done, and they drifted away.
He loved them so much, each one of them, and longed with all his heart and soul to see them on their way to heaven.
To keep them on the road, there had to be a great question before the congregation, something with drama and importance, that would threaten them, each one, personally, their homes and their children. That was the kind of issue that could be used to reinflame their faith. As they sang he prayed. At once he felt a stirring within himself. When he looked up he was surprised to see the shadow of a cat in the doorway at the back of the church. Cats made him sneeze. He was about to signal the usher to shoo it off when it went of its own accord.
Simon kept the faith of Christ as best he could. Of course, Christ was a long, long time ago. It took a little imagination to believe that the cruelties he had suffered were really enough to wash away the sins of the world. Christian belief was the only thing that Simon had ever found which would hold at bay the fiery wind of guilt that roared day and night through his soul.
He was so sorry for what he had done. A few moments of pleasure, a few moments of anger—then a lifetime of remorse and eternity in hell. He refused to confess himself publicly and to ask God's forgiveness. In part this was because he felt that he deserved hell for what he had done. There was, however, the other possibility, that the whole thing—religion—was a product of the human imagination. If that was the case, he would be confessing and going to jail for the rest of his life for nothing. He was a believer, but he preferred to cut the cards himself.
Tonight Simon felt exceptionally tired. He had been slaving over the leaves all afternoon and now he was working like a dog, trying to get that spark to come into the eyes of his congregation. It wasn't working. He was just losing his magic. Six months ago he'd had this whole town wound around his little finger. Well, not all of it: the old families and the college professors who lived in the elegant houses on Albarts and streets like that weren't interested. If they went to church at all, it was to places like Saint Marks with its dried-up Rector Williams, who looked like he'd been sucked up in a prune-making machine.
Simon got the poor, the welfare cases, the unemployed. Guys who used to work full-time over at the Peconic Quarry, which now ran maybe three shifts a month, others who once moved steel at the now abandoned Mohawk Fabricating Mill. These men had wives and children and souls and hopes, and they weren't getting anywhere. Simon's congregation had numbered two thousand souls at this time last year. Now he had about fourteen hundred, a thousand workers and their families and four hundred Maywell students. His campus ministry worked surprisingly well, perhaps because the Maywell college kids were, in their own way, as much rejects as the steelworkers. These were the kids who hadn't made Princeton by a long distance, who hadn't even made Jersey State.
It had occurred to him to stand up and give them a little hellfire. Guilt was what made them keep coming back. Guilt, or was it hell? Sometimes their eyes really sparked when he described his ideas of hell. From some deep place in himself he knew what it was to burn. As a matter of fact, he was an expert on agony, both physical and spiritual. He could visualize burning flesh, sometimes even smell it as he preached. The trouble with his congregation was that they did not understand hell. It could be as small as a grain of sand, as large as a whole lifetime. And it did not have to be flames; it could be another kind of burning, the blue fire that consumes the spirit.
He knew all of this because he lived with it every day. His greatest secret was this: hell was with and in him. It was here, right now. He carried hell in his pocket.
He could feel it there now, dry and gnarled and unspeakably horrible. Their sins the Lord might forgive. If he could save just one from the torment he was already enduring, there was at least some small sense to his life.
But to do his work he needed their faith. He must kindle and rekindle it, and keep it burning white hot!
Instead he saw it dwindling. Those who came here came more and more out of habit, not because they couldn't stay away. At first they had poured through those doors with eager faces. Then they had come more slowly, then out of duty. Now some of them didn't come at all.
What worked best to keep them was controversy. Simon had first come to Maywell because of the rumors of witches there that had spread through the underground fundamentalist movement.
Such a place seemed an ideal mission for a really committed preacher. They needed Christ in Maywell; not the sweet, empty Christ of Catholics and the Presbyterians, but Simon's Christ, a living Christ who would save you right then and there, in front of everybody, if you could feel it deeply enough.
Simon had built his church on the stones of controversy. Issues and public statements of protest had brought his people together, made them see themselves as a separate band, changed them from congregation to band of brothers.
They had collected evil books and records, stealing them from the library, buying them or shoplifting them from the Dalton's and the Record Room. Then they had made a bonfire of them out behind the Tabernacle and burned over four thousand separate items. Chief among these offerings were copies of the works of Constance Collier.
After the burnings Simon had seen an article in the Campus Courier suggesting that Dr. George Walker was engaged in fantastically evil experiments of reviving the dead. To combat this man, Simon had scheduled a ten-week series and thoroughly condemned him. He had even discerned a link between Dr. Walker and Constance Collier. One of Walker's assistants, dark Jeffers, lived on the Collier estate.
The creation of The Christian Faery had been another massive project. The intention had been to replace Collier's demon-inspired Faery with the purified work. Getting godless children's books off the shelves of the library and out of the local bookstore was almost as important as book burning itself.
Constance Collier had reacted with venom.
She was a focus of pagan evil. He had heard rumors of the sinful activities on her estate, rumors having to do with odd sex and the raising of demons with magic rituals. It was impossible to be a witch and not a worshiper of demons.
Now the Courier had carried a story about Amanda Walker and her work illustrating the heathen, paganistic Grimm's fairy tales—for none other than Constance Collier!
Dr. George Walker. Amanda Walker. A witch working for him, she working for a witch—this was a cabal, all of it, a pagan cabal right in the middle of this God-fearing Christian community!
; God-fearing and clean-living. . . but it was no wonder that they were afflicted by pagans and demons, for they were not led by a clean man.
He touched the small bulge in his pocket that was his own personal torment. But tonight the hand was only a hard, dead little knot.
The hymn ended. Brother Pierce cleared his throat.
He didn't know what he would say next. But he trusted in the Lord to help him. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath. His whole being seemed to stir. Out of the comer of his eye he saw the outline of a cat against the stained-glass window nearest his pulpit. It was on the outside, pressing itself against the glass. He did not have time to be angry about it, though, for energy suddenly began pouring through him, coming from above, from below, from everywhere. His body seemed about to burst into tingling life. Then the words appeared, rolling off his tongue as if of their own accord. “There is evil running as a shadow in these bright streets of Maywell. Yes, it even enters here, a place we have tried to make sacred! The evil doctor comes among us with his whore and makes lying accusations.” He pointed upward with his right hand, and felt to his deepest core the warm, the righteous, the sweet presence of the Saviour. By God's grace he felt this, for he could now speak directly to beloved Jesus Christ. “I say to you, Lord, your people are innocent. Yea, even as the Lamb!”
People were suddenly back alive, their faces shining, their eyes quick with excitement. He heard whispers: “He is here, the Lord is here.”
“We can feel it,” he shouted. “O Lord, thank you and praise your holy name.” He smiled a great chasm of a smile. “O Lord, what a night!”
People began to shout. “Praise the Lord!”
But there was another reality in this church, and if he looked past his own joy and faith, he could see it. The ones toward the back of the room were not included in the excitement. They sat, their faces fixed in pious expressions. He knew that they couldn't feel a thing.
He was being prevented from reaching even to the last row in his own church!
He had to find a focus that would mean something to the man sitting in the otherwise empty row at the far back, who was either deep in personal prayer or asleep.
He cooled his throat with the water Winifred kept behind his pulpit in a green plastic pitcher.
His mind fumed morbidly to a vision of the Tabernacle dark and empty, a “For lease” sign on the front door.
A family of four defected from a front row. A front row family and the service not yet ended. So much for his ecstatic moment. He hadn't even inspired the front sitters, beyond a few automatic praise-Gods. The ones leaving didn't so much as look embarrassed.
Fighting himself, he quelled his urge to scream at the defectors, to run after them, it was hard. This church was his life, his first and only success. He had known cold and hunger and despair. The Tabernacle was the only good thing feat had ever come to him. He was a man of many pasts. He had been a nightclub comic in Los Angeles, working the toilets, telling sorry jokes to scabrous drunks for fifty dollars a week. “Little Red Riding Hood gets stopped by the Big Bad Wolf. 'Okay, Little Red,' the wolf says, 'pull down your panties and bend over. You're gonna get it up the ass.' Little Red Riding Hood pulls a .357 Magnum out of her basket. 'The hell I am,' she says, 'you're gonna eat me, just like it says in the story.' ”
Was his problem that they knew, that some of his past somehow clung to him, a stink of cigar smoke and cheap booze, of midnight bus rides and nights in motels without names? Humor. When he got a laugh, it was like a blessing from on high.
There were worse things, though, that clung to him, things far worse than the residue of a few scabrous jokes. During the seventies he had been a social worker for the city of Atlanta, specializing in home placement for unwanted children. There had been trouble, big trouble. She had been a lovely butterfly of a girl, soft and smooth and saucy. Once he had been proud of how he had helped her.
Despite the dropping of the charges, he remained the object of persistent suspicion in Atlanta welfare circles. His little twenty-second mistake—not knowing his own strength—had condemned him for all eternity, but it had also kindled in him this fire to save others.
Everybody in the church was watching him. It was up to him to keep them a little longer or let them go. He hated for them to leave on such a dismal note. One little flicker of life, hope springing up, the feeling of Jesus right here in the room, then this emptiness.
His mind flashed to a bright, gleaming image of Amanda Walker. That niece of the doctor's was so perishingly, delicately beautiful. And yet her eyes were full of firmness and intelligence. She was just the kind of woman he dreamed of, as lovely as an opening rose, yet strong enough to take him well in hand. Firmly in hand. When he imagined offering her his guilty heart and asking forgiveness, he felt a shaft of agonized longing in his breast, just as if some demonic arrow had pierced him.
The restlessness in the room was getting worse. What the devil had this service started out about, anyway? He couldn't even remember. To buy a few seconds he took another pull at his water. Sister Winifred minced across from the choir box and refilled it.
Nervously, feeling more and more helpless, he flipped the pages of his Bible. Sometimes this worked. Why had he thought of the woman now? Maybe the Bible would give the answer.
Then he saw a word flashing past, a promising word: harlot. What a friend he had in the Lord! He cried out the passage to which he had been led: “Wherefore, O harlot, hear the word of the Lord: Thus saith the Lord God: Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children!”
He paused. The faces were on him again, the eyes coming back to life. He felt much better. “Well, now, wasn't that some witness! Oh, yes!” His laughter, ironic, angry, crackled through the silent crowd. “The very whore was among us, witnessing to the lies of the demon doctor.” He pointed straight down the empty aisle. “And worse, she is going to the house of the pagan, to help her make more evil books for our children. Mark my words, that beautiful girl bears the mark of the demon upon her white flesh. And I warn you, she is here as an agent of the Dark One, come to spread corruption and confusion among the children!”
There was response then, a little shocked whispering among the older folk. The young people just stared. As good as it had sounded to him, this was obviously not quite right. Something was still missing, the focus, the damned focus. He plunged on. “Is it not our duty to cast the abomination from our midst, to cast out the shadow of evil that so vexes us, that turns the hearts of our children from the service of the Lord? And who is the whore's helper and employer? That woman, oh, yes, the pagan of the hills, none other. Yea, they are the unholy, the denizens come up from the deep. Yea, they are of Leviathan's army, oh, yes!”
Faces hardened. “Praise God!” came the shouts. This was a little better. Just a little.
“So I say to you, evil walks and talks in the form of woman, yea, even a woman dressed in the clothing of a man, in those bottom-wiggler jeans. 'The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, for that is an abomination unto the Lord!' ”
Ah. There was a marked improvement in the interest level. Nobody was leaving now: the room was touched by new energy.
Were they only shocked by his fury, or did they believe the news he brought of the evil among them? He took a drink, stared from face to face. “Repent ye,” he shouted at one, “Repent,” at another—“O Lord, give us strength!”
Instead of blazing up with righteous love, those he had eye contact with glanced away. Despite the improvement he wasn't reaching them realty yet.
He needed a simple, incendiary word that they could rally to, a fiery word that would entangle all three demons in one net of truth.
A glance at his watch told him it was closing in on 10:30. The service had been going on far too long, given the restlessness of the crowd. It was bad psychology to have people feel relief when
the service ended. They ought to be left uplifted and longing for more. “Leave them feeling as children who have just been praised by their fine old father,” a mentor had said. He struggled, he prayed in his heart, but no word came. He would have to drop the matter for the time being and go on to the last part of the service. May the Lord find his word for him.
“So repent you now, good peopie, come forth, come forth and bring your sins before man and God! Come, have no fear of the love of God nor the ears of your brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus wants your sins. So be free with them, and bring them to his Holy Altar!”
He signaled Winifred, who started the organ. The choir hummed obediently along, “Amazing Grace.” Brother Pierce bowed his head.
A tall man stood up from deep kneeling. He wore a gray-striped suit and a vest. He looked much more prosperous than the run of the congregation. As he came forward, Brother Pierce recalled his name: Roland Howeils, chief teller of the Maywell State Bank & Trust. Not a tither. According to Mazie Knowland, who worked at the regional IRS office, Howeils' 1981 income tax return showed $28,000 gross salary. Contribution that year of exactly $600.
What would he repent, this secret miser?
Howeils came to the place appointed for confession and knelt before the congregation. “My name is Roland Howeils.”
“Speak up! If we can't hear you, neither will the Lord!”
“I am Roland Howeils! I have to confess that I have been cruel to my wife, I have shouted, I have taken the name of the Lord in vain, and before God I have struck her.”
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Brother Roland!”
“Praise God, brothers and sisters, forgive me and pray for me. My wife took my son and left my bed and board, because I was hard and full of anger.”
Something struck Brother Pierce as he listened to this man's trouble. Quite often lately members of the congregation had come forward to witness to the breakup of their families.