by Alex Grecian
He dropped down and walked around the block, looking for a break in the fence. The wooden privacy fence was succeeded after a few feet by a wrought-iron railing with a locked gate. There were doors behind the gate at either end of a short walkway that ran parallel to the fence. Travis presumed the more modest entrance might lead to a church office, adjacent to the sanctuary. Across from it were big double doors, taller and wider and more ornate, with small stained glass inlays. He walked past the church and kept going to the end of the block. The road curved to the right, and the houses on both sides of the street were connected by the same cedar fence that surrounded the church. Many of the homes had been refurbished with gray aluminum siding and storm windows, giving them a uniform facade despite radically different architectural touches. Some of the homes might have been there for a hundred years or more, unique and dignified, before being slathered over with suburban banality. There was a moving van in front of one house, but there were no movers to be seen, nobody outside. The front door of the house was closed and curtains were drawn over the windows. Travis made note of the address as he passed it: 437.
Small signs were posted every few feet that said PROPERTY UNDER 24-HOUR VIDEO SURVEILLANCE. Travis waved at one of the signs and kept going. He didn’t see any cameras. A wide alley between the church and the first row of houses was lined with garbage cans and protected by a padlocked gate. The fence was visible here and there, a blank connective tissue, for at least three blocks in every direction, and Travis’s feet were wet and cold by the time he got all the way back around to where his Jeep was parked. He was afraid his boots were ruined.
It appeared to him that the church had purchased every house and lot nearby and then continued to expand, encroaching on the neighborhood like a virus. A plague of Purity.
It took Travis twenty seconds to pick the lock on the iron gate. He waited a moment to see if anyone would come out of the church and shoo him away, then he slipped inside and closed the gate behind him. He bypassed the public entrance and went through into the wide courtyard next to the tennis court. There was a path butted up against the church wall, and he walked parallel to it in the grass. The fence was buttressed on the inside surface by thick iron bars bracketed to the wood. A backup generator sat silent, and Travis traced cables from it back to the church. He tried the door of the first small outbuilding he came to, expecting it to be locked, and he was not disappointed. He made his way around to the back of the building and looked through a greasy little window that faced the fence. Inside were two sets of bunk beds, a small table with a hot plate, and a mini-fridge under a shelf that held slim battered paperbacks with titles like Your Enemy Wears a Badge, The Slave Mentality, and Tame the Mongrel. The thin blankets on three of the beds were mussed and stained. Travis glanced through the windows of some of the other sheds without seeing anything different, then walked past a big double garage that looked as new and prefab as the outbuildings and followed the fence around to where the alley led into a small parking lot.
The only thing that seemed out of place was a dirty white semitrailer truck parked in the far corner of the lot, well hidden by the high fence. There was nothing painted on either side of the trailer, no logo or even an advertisement for the church. There was a half-inch gap between the big doors at the back and a lingering scent of sweat and old food that he hoped wasn’t coming from him. He jiggled the handle, but it was locked. He wondered why anyone would bother locking a truck when it was parked in a secured private lot.
Tucked away out of sight next to the trailer was an old green Volkswagen minibus with bright red spots scattered across its sides like spattered blood. It looked like something a clown might drive on a dare. Travis cupped his hands and tried to look inside, but the windows were tinted black. He wrote down the license numbers of both vehicles, then crossed the lot back to the church, aware that he was now being observed.
As he drew near the grand stone building, he could hear voices chanting something unintelligible. They stopped and a man’s voice shouted something, then the voices started up again in response to the man. The sounds were coming from somewhere low to the ground, behind the heavy shrubbery that ringed the foundation. Travis guessed there was a basement conference room hosting a meeting, but he couldn’t tell how many people were down there.
The double doors opened inward as he reached them.
“Welcome, friend.” A middle-aged man stood blinking at him from the warmth of the vestibule. His thin blond hair fell across his face, and he held his free arm up as if warding off the outside atmosphere. He was tall and wide and bore a passing resemblance to Sheriff Goodman around the eyes and mouth. But where the sheriff was rough-hewn and tanned, this man was pale and precise in his movements.
Travis smiled at him. “Is this a bad time?”
“No, my friend, it’s never a bad time to embrace the Word.” The man stepped back and waved his arm across the threshold. “Did someone leave the gate open?”
“Apparently so,” Travis said.
“Well, now you’re here, please come in.”
Travis stepped inside and wrinkled his nose at the smell. It was a strange mixture of must and body odor, like a high school dance held in a tomb. He stamped his feet on the mat.
“Seems quiet,” Travis said.
“It’s Thanksgiving,” the man said. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Today?”
“Tomorrow. Most of our parishioners have gone home.”
“This is not their home?” Travis thought of the outbuildings inside the fence and all the bigger houses surrounding the church that fronted the street.
“In the larger sense it is, but they’ve gone out to spread the Word.”
“And what is the word?”
“Welcome,” the man said. “The Word is welcome.”
“That is usually a good word.”
“If it falls on the right ears.”
Travis looked around him. There were pews against two of the walls and a stained glass window that depicted Isaac lying on an altar, his father brandishing a knife above him. “You saw me with your cameras out there?”
“We have eyes everywhere.”
Travis nodded, but he didn’t believe the man had been watching the cameras, if there were cameras. If so, he would have come out to greet Travis as soon as he breached the fence. The myth of video surveillance might be nearly as good as actual cameras, yet cheaper and easier to maintain.
“We must protect everything we are and everything we have from the baser elements of this world,” the man said.
“And what about the trailer you have out there? Are you protecting whatever is in it?”
“There’s not much in the trailer,” the man said. “Just some banners, our tents, and some equipment. The valuable stuff is in here.”
“Protected by more than cameras, I presume.”
The man shrugged.
“The sheds?”
“Our youth group raises money for the church by doing yard work around the town, Dr. Roan.”
If so, Travis thought, the youth group was forced to pick grass and leaves by hand, since there was no room in those sheds for any lawn equipment. “You know me?”
“You’re Dr. Travis Roan. I’m Deacon Heinrich Goodman. I’m the director of this place.” His brown shirt was unbuttoned too far down his pale chest.
“Goodman? The son of Rudy Goodman? The brother of Kurt?”
“He was once my brother. No more.”
“No more? What happened?”
Heinrich Goodman smiled like a snake in a hamster cage. “Would you like to take a quick look around the place?” He walked ahead and Travis tagged along, his hands clasped behind his back. He felt like whistling to ward off evil spirits.
“You seem like a man of the world, Dr. Roan,” Heinrich said. “I hope our little church doesn’t disappoint you.”
“I will try not to track any of the outside world on your carpets.”
Heinrich turned and squinted
at him. “Don’t worry about that. We have it cleaned weekly. Every Monday morning, like clockwork.”
They were in a wood-paneled hallway with plush red carpeting. The walls were lined with portraits of major donors to the church coffers, all of them old white men. Travis recognized one of the faces. The brass plaque under his photograph read JOSEPH ODEK. Travis stopped and sucked air in through his clenched teeth.
“What’s that?” Heinrich turned back again, a concerned look on his face.
“Nothing, Mr. Goodman. I suppose I am surprised by how big this place is.”
“Wait until you see the nave. We spared no expense in renovating it the second time.”
The final two portraits at the end of the hall were separated from the others and dwarfed them in size. They were mounted in elaborate gold-leaf frames and depicted a pair of middle-aged men in 1970s fashions: wide collars, facial hair, heavy black glasses. Like Odek, each of them was identified by a discreet brass plaque. Travis paused to study the photo of Reverend Rudy Goodman. He had a thick salt-and-pepper beard and his head was bald, but his eyes blazed with righteous authority. The man next to him was named Jacob Meyer. Travis had never heard of him, but he inspected the photo carefully. Meyer projected a different sort of personality. There was something pleasant about his toothy smile, and the laugh lines around his eyes made him look like he had just told a dirty joke, whispered so the nearby wives and kids wouldn’t hear. Travis wondered if one of the two men was a Nazi in hiding. They were both roughly the right age for it.
Heinrich stopped in front of huge double doors with his hand on the push bar. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Travis said. “You mentioned you had to renovate again. Why?”
“That would have been after the second lightning strike in 2004.”
“You were struck by lightning twice?”
“I wasn’t. My father was. The hand of our Lord reached down from the heavens to anoint him.”
“Reached down through the roof?”
“What could stop it?”
“Not the roof, I suppose.”
“No, sir. When the Lord has something to say, He comes right out and says it.”
“But only to your father, right?”
“He’s the chosen one.”
“Is he still alive, your father?”
Heinrich nodded gravely. “Yes, but his health has suffered in recent years. His seizures have come back and increased in severity.” He looked away when he said it, and his cheek twitched. Travis hoped for his sake that he didn’t play poker. “I’m afraid he won’t be able to see you.”
“Pity.”
Heinrich pushed the doors open, and Travis followed the red carpet through to a cavernous room with exposed rafters high above and purple windows along the walls on either side. There was a wide main aisle leading up to the sanctuary and two narrower aisles on each side, bordered by pews. Travis estimated five hundred people could comfortably sit through a service there—maybe the entire population of Paradise Flats—but at the moment there was only a single figure hunched over in a pew at the front. The church didn’t look quite like anything Travis had seen before. The stained glass windows told a story, from the back of the nave to the front: a man on fire was surrounded by what seemed to be dots of energy, then the man was laying his hands on a wailing woman with a hunchback, and in the third window the woman was in the cloud of dots and had lost her hump. There were more pictures in more windows, but Travis’s eye was drawn to the chancel. There was a podium with track lighting above it and a huge round window in the back wall high above the altar that depicted a thunderstorm in progress. Where he expected to see a cross there was a stylized lightning bolt, bright gold, its wicked tip piercing the altar, its top intersecting with the stained glass tempest above.
Travis pointed. “The lightning that struck your father?”
Heinrich tipped his head. “When the Lord blessed Reverend Rudy, He also saw fit to clear this church of the sinners who were using it. The building became available to us. The lightning was a sign pointing the way.”
“What do the dots mean?”
“More signs and symbols.”
“Purity First,” Travis said.
“It’s an acronym. Power, Unity, Rebirth, Investment, and so on.”
“Truth? Is that what the T stands for?”
“No,” Heinrich said. “ ‘Treat others as they deserve to be treated.’ ”
“A bit like the Golden Rule. But not quite, is it?”
“It’s something my father always said. It became a tenet of the church. Who knows how these things come to be or what they originally meant. Words have a power of their own without needing any greater meaning.”
“I see.” Travis felt that words ought to mean something, or else why say them? And he was sure the fifth tenet of Purity First meant exactly what it seemed to. But he said, “What would I find behind that door?” and pointed at the archway behind the altar.
“Oh, I’m afraid we aren’t prepared for a full tour today. Tell me, though, would you be our guest for a very special Thanksgiving celebration tomorrow? It would be my honor.”
“You said most of your parishioners were away for the holiday. What kind of celebration do you have planned?”
“Many of our people are away at the moment, yes. But there are those who don’t have homes or families or are unable to travel. Some have special duties to attend to and we couldn’t spare them. There’s Kenny, you see.” Heinrich pointed to the hunched person in the front pew. “We invite these friends to our family dinner here at the church. In the basement.”
“The basement?”
“Yes, there’s a community space down there and a small kitchen. There’s a shuffleboard court, too, if you know how to play, but I’m afraid I don’t. It doesn’t get a lot of use.”
“I have never played, either,” Travis said. He wandered down the aisle and stopped next to the pew where the man sat. “Your name is Kenny?”
The man stared straight ahead at the altar without acknowledging Travis’s presence. Travis moved between Kenny and the altar and looked down at him. Kenny was perhaps sixty years old, with a large nose and dark deep-set eyes. Drool cascaded off his chin, soaking his sweater, which looked like it had been put on backward and inside out. Kenny’s eyes were glazed, and there was a curved scar that arced up over his temple where no hair grew.
Travis felt his skin crawling and his hands automatically clenched into fists. The shape of Kenny’s scar didn’t look accidental. Someone had hurt the poor man, had taken his soul from him and left his body to inhabit the church.
Heinrich joined Travis and smiled at him. “I’m afraid Kenny doesn’t speak much.”
Travis swallowed his anger and put his hands in his pockets. “What happened to him?”
“He is one of the Lord’s special creatures. It makes him happy to gaze on the lightning. We keep the nave open for him around the clock, since he wanders in at odd hours.”
Travis looked up again at the dazzling lightning bolt that split the altar in two. He wondered if it was solid gold or plated. “Well, thank you for the kind dinner invitation,” he said. “May I think it over?”
“Of course,” Heinrich said. He pulled out a wallet and removed his card, handed it over to Travis. “Here. My private number is the one at the bottom. Call me up by tomorrow morning, would you? One way or the other, so I know how many to expect around the table.”
“Thank you.” Travis glanced down at the card before tucking it away in the breast pocket of his jacket. It was plain white with black type across six red dots. “I will show myself out. You need not trouble yourself.”
“As you wish.”
“Kenny, it was good to meet you,” Travis said, but there was no response.
Travis walked up the red carpet without looking back to see if Heinrich was following him. When he got to the double doors, he shut them behind him. Alone in the hallway, he took out his phone and snapped a pict
ure of each of the church elders’ portraits. He took one of Joseph Odek, too. Then he put his phone away and walked quickly out of Purity First and into the bracing autumn air.
He looked around, trying again to locate the cameras. The sound of a metal door scraping against concrete caught his attention and he poked his head around the corner. A large man in a denim shirt strode quickly across the basketball court to the parking lot. A moment later, Travis heard a vehicle door creak open, then slam shut, and an engine roared to life.
Travis sprinted down the path and around the corner in time to see the semitrailer truck bounce out of the alley and down the street, knocking over a garbage bin along the way.
“Where is he going in such a hurry?” Travis looked at the rows of matching houses, but there was no one around to respond.
6
Heinrich bounded down the stairs three at a time and crossed the shuffleboard court. He entered the communal hall and glanced at the closed door next to the kitchen, the door that led to his father’s workshop, before turning to look at his people. They stopped chatting and looked back at him, waiting. There were more than twenty of them now, in matching brown shirts, handpicked from the Purity First congregation. They were the most devoted to the cause, their Lord’s army. Heinrich thought about the bags he had packed and waiting nearby, and he wondered what would become of this little army after he left them. They were enthusiastic, but they required a firm hand.
“It has begun,” he said. “Today an emissary has come to us, dressed all in gray to symbolize the mixing of our races.”