“No.” She was paler than usual, and white-blonde Britt had been pale as milk—and smooth as cream—all over, to begin with. But she said, “I’ll do it.”
“Thanks. There isn’t time to explain why, but it would be difficult for me to handle. One more thing, Lula. None of this may be necessary, but it might—we’ll know damned soon. When you’ve got the Cad started, don’t wait around for me unless it’s obvious to you there’s no need to hurry.”
She said, “You think they’re going to light out after us, don’t you?”
“It’s possible. Festus is really pouring it to them, and—well, it’s quite possible.”
“You suppose if they grabbed us they’d, like, mess us up pretty good?”
“Not if they stopped to think about it. But once they start running—if any of them do—it isn’t likely they’ll be doing much thinking. It isn’t likely they’ll be doing any.”
“You’re not going to come arong after us?” Yumiko asked sweetly.
“Beats the herr out of me, dear. Don’t think I wouldn’t like to, and I say that sincerely to every one of you lovelies. But I shall simply go where the spirit moves me, and where that may be I know not.”
Silence.
“Any questions?”
There weren’t any.
I’d been keeping an eye on Dina most of the time, and I got an extremely queer feeling when I saw her suddenly push the door shut and lock it, then spin around and come tearing down the aisle. Ah, she was a lovely sight, erotic poetry in a kind of mellifluous motion, but I couldn’t give that moment the concentration, much less the appreciation, it deserved.
The other gals moved aside to let Dina through, and she pounded and bounced and quivered deliciously to a stop inches from me. Panting, staring up at my face with those luminous brown eyes now not merely huge but enormous, she gasped, “They’re going freaky!”
“Are they moving up toward the church?”
“No, not—yet. But they were waving their arms and making a lot of noise and … well, one of them fell down. And then in a few seconds two more, one right after the other. As if they’d fainted. Only the first one, an old man in front where I could see him, shook and rolled and kicked and … do you know what it means?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “I fear I do. We won’t dwell on it But … I don’t consider such conniptions encouraging.”
I felt suddenly tired. And my skin, which had seemed to become cool when we all heard that last blood-chilling sound, was still cool, was cold. I brushed moisture from my forehead and upper lip, sucked in a deep breath.
Then I looked at the girls. “That’s it, except for this. In case we get separated for … a while, you’ve got to know about a few things. And people, including Dave Cassiday.”
I told the tale fast. In thirty seconds they knew all the essential facts even though there wasn’t time to include any of the reasons or explanations. But I made sure each of them realized how important it was to get the info to Emmanuel Bruno.
And even as I spoke I realized, very clearly, that what I was telling them was—from a legal standpoint—merely hearsay evidence, of little if any value. Whether I liked it or not, I was the only man on the planet with firsthand knowledge and evidence sufficient to ruin Cassiday, the only man who could prove what Dave had done and was planning to do. Well, the next few minutes would undoubtedly determine who was ruined: Dave Cassiday—or me.
I didn’t pause to think about that but went ahead, “So on your marks, gals, at the back door. And when I yell go, you go!”
There was a little verbal bubbling and some fluttering, then short and shapely Ronnie said plaintively, “I’ll probably be last up that damned hill. Hell, I run like a girl.”
“Give thanks to God. But that reminds me,” I told them all, “it may or may not get squeaky out there for you, scampering up the hill, but if it’ll make you feel any better I’ll be doing my damnedest to make sure all the bugging eyes bug me and me alone until you’re well on your way. Or at least for as long as I can hack it. I won’t try to explain right now, but I know every eye out there will be on me for a while. So you can at least count on a good head start.”
Dina, still short of breath—but nothing else she needed—said, “Shell, if you’re going out there with all those nuts, you must be crazy yourself.”
“That’s my only chance—I intend to fight fire with fire.”
“You’re really going outside, where they are?” Emilie asked.
“Of course. The best defense is a good offense, right? Well, if I wait for them to attack me, they’ll have the advantage.”
Then Lula, each soft word wrapped in hot goose down: “Shell, honey … don’t you go out there and get yourself killed.”
“Dear, why would I do a dumb thing like that?”
She had leaned a bit closer to me as she spoke, and her right breast brushed against my arm. “Hrrum,” I said. “Lula, I’m going to be in enough trouble when I confront those suspicious cats … as it is.” It was still brushing. I gazed down at her warm, firm, brown breast. “As it … was.” She smiled, moved back slightly.
I turned, slapped the nearest gal firmly on her fanny, and shouted, “On your way! Skedaddle! Get your sweet.… Sorry, Britt. Little goof there.”
“Id’s all right.”
“The other gals skedaddle. You get to stay with me.”
“Ain’t I the luggy one?”
“Britt, this is no time for dumb Swedish wisecracks. Or any other kind of—in fact, this is no time for—Kids, I am now convinced Divine Providence has been watching over us. True, we’ve got the right place for it. And this is Sunday. But even Divine Providence must get fed up after a while. For, as the old Wise Men have wisely told us, ‘As it is above, so it is below,’ and if that is true …”
I looked around at all the girls, taking what might be my last look at them—what might be my last look at girls—and concluded, “Skip it. So much for the Wise Men. Let’s go.”
The lasses ambled toward the back of the church. I said to Britt, “Get up there by the doors, honey. Join you in a minute.” Then I turned and followed the girls past the hanging curtains into the gloomier rear of the building, walking speedily and passing a couple of them on the way. The concealed jumble—concealed, at least, from anyone who might sit on those backless benches—was the same as it had been last night: huddled chairs, circular stairway rising, table with uneven stacks of black books upon it. Nearer, against the wall, was the ten-foot-high crucifix, its spiked base resting on the floor and top against the wall, only one arm of the cross touching the wood behind it, and nailed to the cross the carved-wood corpse, Christ, crucified in effigy, for perhaps the ten-billionth time.
For a few moments I stood before it thinking, not for the first time, that to anyone who had never heard of Christ or Christianity—who didn’t know he was gazing upon something warm, beautiful, and inspiring—this broken man nailed in bloody agony on a wooden cross would seem a terrible symbol of brutality and violence, torture and death, a constant reminder of pain, sorrow, failure, a degrading depiction of man’s savage inhumanity to man. Almost surely he would suspect that constant contemplation of such a symbol might require or in time produce a state of mind bordering on the pathological. And unquestionably, it would be difficult if not impossible for him to believe that it represented the virtue, invincibility, and splendor of any man who ever lived or god who died, and he would surely adjudge you mad as a hatter if you told him it was—a billion times multiplied, worshipped, revered—the centuries-old and supreme symbol of Christian hope, optimism, gentleness, goodness and beauty and truth.
I glanced over my shoulder. The girls were moving like bright shadows through the dimness. Lula was already at the half-open door, the eight others sort of floating toward her. I watched them all for a few seconds, watched the dull gleam of their swinging thighs, sensuous swaying of hips, gazed at smoothness of back and limb, swoop of waist, plump roundness and firm line and lust
rous curve, admired their splendid nakedness, let my eyes linger a last moment on the sweet, reviled flesh.…
Then I turned my back on all that, and took up the cross.
24
The big crucifix weighed maybe eighty pounds, and by the time I’d labored up that horrendously long aisle, I was kind of tilted over and grunting a bit.
Britt said, “What in the world … what’s that?”
“This is—well, it’s just to use in case of an emergency. Like, when there’s a fire and you break the little glass window—”
There was one hell of a noise outside. From the same place and people, of course, but strangely different from their last effort. Still blood-bleaching, needless to say, but now more like a shout rising from the Coliseum when the game was over and the last gladiator had suddenly stopped wiggling. It was as if something had just ended … or was just beginning.
“Get that door open. Quick.”
Britt turned the key, pushed against the golden handle. When the door was open only inches I glimpsed the mass of men and women a couple of hundred feet away—but narrowing the distance. They were finally moving. Toward the church. Starting to run up the grass.
“Here’s the emergency,” I said. “Shove that damn thing, get it open!” Then I shouted down the aisle to the back of the church, “Lula—GO!”
Britt leaned forward, straining against the heavy door until there was room for me—and my burden—to get through. As I moved past her I said, “Slam the door as soon as I’m out, lock it—lock it—and run like you never ran before.”
It sounded as if she let out a high and tiny scream, but I didn’t look at her. I was starting down the wide pebbled cement steps, when I heard the dull boom as the door thudded shut behind me. That boom seemed to keep on echoing coldly behind my solar plexus as I stumbled down the steps, almost falling but reaching the bottom on my feet, and then it froze in my gut and choked my throat as I lifted my eyes. Because I’d kept my eyes on the steps while going down them, but as I took two struggling strides forward onto the grass I raised my head and saw—racing toward me, still howling and screaming—the Lemmings of the Lord.
They were quite enough to give a man pause even when sitting quietly on their backsides on backless benches, but the sight of them all screaming horrendously and thundering at me, a determinedly unmusical and speedily moving mass composed of a thousand bits and each bit with wide-open mouth—thus presenting the curiously familiar picture of a bellowing monster with a thousand heads and a hole in every head—stopped me. It takes quite a bit to stop me when I’ve made up my mind to do something. It stopped me. It even made me think seriously about changing my mind, now that it was too late.
The sight of that mass of Lemmings had an extraordinarily paralytic effect upon me, true; but the sight of me also affected the Lemmings. I can’t pretend that I was as fearsome a sight to them as they to me; and I have to assume they didn’t see me, or else didn’t know when they saw me that they’d seen me, until I had maneuvered the steps and taken those two strides; but any unbiased observers, none of whom were anywhere about, would have to agree with me that I won the first confrontation hands down, or perhaps more accurately pants down.
Which must prove, just as surely as every stumbling block is a stepping-stone, that what seems a great calamity can be a blessing in disguise; for you cannot appeal to a mob with reason, and I didn’t; and I could not have accomplished more with my pants on, and almost certainly not even half as much, therefore I must be twice as good a man with my pants off; and since I needed to be a genius in order to overpower a thousand Lemmings, it was only by the grace of God that I didn’t have them on, for I certainly wouldn’t have thought of it all by myself.
At any rate, I unquestionably won—won the first moments of the Battle Against the Lemmings, anyhow—for there were a thousand of them to only one of me, and alone I moved them all. Or, rather, unmoved them.
Because that entire crammed-together crowd of male and female fruitcakes—which had surged forward in response to the words of Festus Lemming and was now leaping over the grass in obedience to his swinging hand and arm, his hand and arm swinging as though with that silent command alone he could move the mass toward me, toward the girls, toward the obscenity of nakedness, toward the evil he would have it destroy—stopped.
It didn’t slow, mill, move, gradually settle. Each member of the mob-body stopped moving at virtually the same moment. It was a strange, frightening thing to see. There had been a thousand separate motions blending into the mass that was the body of the Beast, then almost instantly every quiver of that movement ceased, as did the roaring sound. The whole breathing myriad-eyed mass became silent and still.
Still, as the air was still, and quiet. For a little while. A very little while.
Because I saw Festus Lemming, apart from all the rest—separate, but on guard like the shepherd as he watches o’er his woolly-headed flock—turning to point at me, and in the clear sweet silence I heard him cry: “JESUS CHRIST, IT’S SHELL SCOTT!”
And right after that with hardly a stutter, “It—er—ah—he—OH, JESUS, OUR LORD AND SAVIOR—it is he, there, there, the foul and satanic agent of the Antichrist! Yes! THE ANTICHRIST! GOD IN HEAVEN SAVE US FROM HIS EVIL PRESENCE AND—”
Well, I thought, that was a nice thing to tell them.
Especially when every single ding-a-ling was ding-a-linging the same off-key tune on the identical out-of-sight and perhaps even out-of-mind wavelength as were all the other freaks of Festus crushed together in the body of the Beast. Maybe they marched to a different drummer, but all of them marched at the same time in the same place, and the drummer was not even distant because there the sonofabitch stood not fifty feet away, the sly old fox pointing his finger at the gizzard of the goose he had cooked.
I figured there wasn’t much more he could do to ruin me. In fact, I figured there wasn’t much more I could do to ruin me. I didn’t even hear what came after the “AND” in “HIS EVIL PRESENCE AND—” because the rest of Lemming’s words were ripped, shredded, destroyed by a coarse and horrible cough bursting from the huge throat and rising to a snarling shrieking cry, surely the most God-awful and horrifying sound I have ever heard or will ever hear, and the Beast moved. It slid, flowed, surged toward me; and I knew why it moved. I knew without questioning or doubt that it moved to kill. It had the blood smell in its nostrils and the blood thrist—long and well-nourished by Lemming, by all the Lemmings—in its heart, and it moved without any other purpose, without any real purpose at all except blindly, mindlessly, to destroy.
The Lemmings had seen and recognized me but they hadn’t seen, at least not clearly, the cross I carried. I held it parallel to the ground, only its end pointing toward them. So they hadn’t recognized the symbol they revered and adored—and sang at the top of their lungs about. But they damn soon were going to.
They’d picked up speed, were running now. And the unearthly howl no longer swe’led in their throats, they were silent, and somehow because of that silence even more horrifying, as they ran—directly at me.
So I ran, myself—at them.
Only not directly. Toward them, yes, but angling left down the slanting lawn, making them turn, so that while they looked at me their eyes would be aimed away from the hill on my right up which, hopefully, ten naked tomatoes were bounding with astonishing speed. Speed much more astonishing, I decided, than my own, even if many of them had fallen down and were rolling back.
To move like a man shot from a cannon while carrying an eighty-pound cross is not a difficult thing to do, it is impossible; it is much more natural to move like a man shot by a cannon, and that describes quite well what I was doing. Not so the giant fruitcake; it had achieved maximum motility and was rising yeastily up the slope with such speed that in seconds it would reach and presumably digest me.
So I thumped to a staggering halt, gripped the giant crucifix tightly in my hands, and swung it out and up, lifting it as high above my head a
s I could stretch, and then slammed it down on its steel-spike point. The spike sliced into earth and the square wooden base in which it was imbedded thudded solidly against the grass. When I let go of the cross it swayed only slightly, remained upright, outstretched-arms and the figure suspended from them facing—and leaning with the weight of two thousand years upon—the Lemmings of the Lord.
At that moment they were less than fifty feet away. The mass blocked my view of Festus Lemming, but I felt sure he was where he’d been before, standing still, watching, waiting. And if this rabid flock of his would stop for even a few seconds there was a chance I could make him hear me, understand me, and with that booming and long-listened-to voice of his yank them back from the mindlessness in which they now lived and moved, hold them while he herded them back into the fold. If anyone could manage that, anyone at all, it had to be Festus Lemming.
At least, that was the thought in my mind. But it was not there long. Because it wasn’t true, and I knew it wasn’t when I saw the horde of Lemmings still racing toward me and toward the ten-foot-high crucifix between them and me, though I should have known it long and long before. If the presence by proxy of their Master and Teacher, their Savior, their Lord and very God Of All couldn’t yank them back, then their Sainted Most-Holy Pastor didn’t have a prayer. Nor, needless to say, did I. There was no point at all in my yelling at them, and I knew it, but I yelled.
I shouted something or other I don’t remember and then, pointing at the effigy of Jesus—Jesus, not the Christ—at their Savior’s spiritless flesh racked on the Christian cross, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Stop! Stop, you blooming idiots, can’t you see what’s right in front of your eyes?”
They saw. I had known they would; I know they did. Many of the heads moved quickly up and down, many of the wild eyes stared. They saw, and they were aware, they recognized—how could they not?—their long-loved symbol of pain and blood, suffering and death. It slowed them down, a little. But it didn’t stop them. It didn’t even begin to stop them.
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