The Calling: A Supernatural Thriller

by Robert Swartwood

  “Hello, Christopher,” he said. His voice didn’t sound the same as it had two days ago in church; now it sounded faint, nervous, almost strained. He opened the door. “You might as well come inside. We have a lot to talk about.”

  • • •

  THE INTERIOR OF the RV was small and tight, much like my grandmother’s own trailer. Behind the two front seats were a couch and chair. A table rested against the refrigerator, which stood directly across from the sink and stove. Back farther were the bathroom and bedroom, but neither of those rooms concerned me as I sat on the couch. I could only imagine all the places Moses and Joey had driven in this thing, all the trailer parks just like this one they’d stayed in for a night or two before moving on.

  Except now it was just Moses.

  Would always be Moses.

  He pulled a fifth of Captain Morgan’s from a cabinet above the sink, then two small glasses from another cabinet. They were from Sesame Street, one showing Big Bird, the other Ernie. When Moses turned and handed me the Ernie glass, he noticed the look I was giving him and asked, “You don’t drink?”

  “No, it’s not that,” I said. “I just never thought I’d be drinking with a preacher is all.”

  He smiled as he poured. “If it eases your conscience any, I consider myself more of a teacher than a preacher.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “A preacher is somebody who tells you what’s true. A teacher is somebody who shows you why it’s true.”

  He finished pouring himself a glass, then placed the bottle on the small table—what probably passed for a coffee table in Winnebago territory—between us. A book lay there face-up. From where I sat it was turned away, forcing me to read the letters of its title and author upside down. Moses must have noticed my eyes scanning the cover, because he said, “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Have you ever read it?”

  I looked up, startled like a kid caught reading his old man’s Playboy, and shook my head.

  Moses took a sip of his drink. “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Eighteen.”

  He nodded, the number not surprising him at all—and even then it didn’t occur to me that he already knew everything there was to know about my life, that these questions were merely asked to loosen me up. “Yeah, I don’t think they teach this one in high schools. At least not yet. Damn shame, too, because it’s a great book. I actually read it to Joey—excluding some parts—when he was six. After that he managed to go through it twice himself.”

  “What is it about?”

  “Finding one’s identity. Ellison wrote it with the Harlem Renaissance in mind, bringing voices to the blacks. But the story itself ... it could stand for anyone who doesn’t know who they are just yet.” He paused, seemed to shrug, and said, “My wife majored in English for two years. Loved the stuff. Made me read most of what she had to in her classes so that we could always have something to talk about. Guess it rubbed off on me.”

  I smiled but said nothing, just sat there with the glass resting in my lap. Finally I said, “I’m sorry for what happened.”

  “So am I.”

  I took a swallow and winced at the burn. “Before I saw him today, you said something to me. You said Joey told you about me even before you both came here. Even before he met me. How is that ... how’s that possible?”

  Moses stared down at his glass and swirled it around. He took another swallow and said, “Before we get too deep into this, I was wondering if you could answer me something.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  I opened my mouth but then shut it. Just sat there, staring down at my drink, at the dark golden liquid.

  “I take it from your silence you do.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If you didn’t believe in God at all, you wouldn’t have hesitated.”

  “No, I do believe in God. I believe he’s absent. Indifferent. Lazy. Pick an adjective.”

  “And you believe God is this way because ...”

  “He doesn’t do shit.”

  “Man acts, God reacts.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning God isn’t going to save the world on his own. If that were the case, why would he need us? Our purpose here on this earth is to serve him. And when we do that, God rewards us.” He downed his glass, set it on the table. “Now what about the devil?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you believe in him?”

  Not hesitating this time, I said, “My mom thought a demon once tried to kill me.”

  “How so?”

  I told him the story, and when I was finished he said, “Do you think it was a demon?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “It could have been. Or you could just have simply had some kind of temporary asphyxiation.” Moses leaned forward, produced a pack of smokes from under the table. “Joey never liked it when I smoked. I’d been so good about it for the longest time, but now ... well, as you can imagine it’s been a pretty stressful week. Would you care for one?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay,” Moses said after he had his cigarette lit, “before we start, I figure it might be a good idea to tell you a little about myself. Just the basics. I was born in Riverdale, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. My dad was a cokehead, my mom was around so he could beat her and screw her whenever he wanted. He beat me too, sometimes really bad, and one time he even raped me. So I ran away from home. This was about when I was thirteen. I went up to Atlanta and was living on the streets. I got heavily into drugs. Mostly cocaine, but some heroin too. Actually, it got so bad I would do anything to score a hit. Anything. I’m not proud about most of the things I’ve done in my life, but I will take responsibility for them. I’ve mugged people for money. I once nearly beat a man to death. I was way out of control, and by all rights, I should have died out there on those streets.”

  He leaned forward, stubbed his cigarette out, and lit another one. “But God saved me.”

  Except it wasn’t really God Himself who rescued Moses from the mean streets of Atlanta, but it was through a church, through a reverend who was out late one night and who Moses had attempted to mug. He came up behind the man on the dark street, pulled out his knife and ordered the man to give him all his money. The man just stood there, not saying a word or moving a muscle, and the next thing Moses knew the two of them were surrounded by hundreds of people.

  “I couldn’t see their faces, or even their bodies, but I sensed them there. They were like shadows there in the dark, just these ... these figures. So I started to run away, I started to bolt out of there, when the man told me to stop. He called me back. He said it would be all right. He said I didn’t have to run anymore, that I could change my life around. It was the same stuff I’d been hearing from other priests and pastors and reverends for the last three years I’d been on the street, but there was something in his voice right then, something that told me this time it was true. So I stopped running. I turned around. And the hundreds of people surrounding us were gone. It was just me and him, and he held out his hand to me. I just stared at it for the longest time, not knowing what to do, because you want to know something sad? In the sixteen years I’d been alive, never once had I shaken anybody’s hand.”

  The man took Moses into his home. He fed him, clothed him, taught him how to read and write. Then, one night when Moses had decided enough was enough and was ready to run away, to steal everything he could from the man, the man caught him. Moses was in the man’s study at the time, rifling through the drawers of the desk, when the man stepped in and turned on the light.

  “I expected him to be angry. I expected him to kick me out of his house. But do you know what he did? He actually stepped forward, went to the bookcase, and took down a book from the top shelf. It was one of those trick books, because when he opened it there was a hole inside, containing a thick roll of bills. He pulled the roll out and handed i
t to me. He said, ‘If what I’ve offered you is not good enough, then there’s nothing I can do to help you anymore.’ I didn’t move from where I was behind the desk. Eventually he set the money down on the table beside the door, closed the book and placed it back on the shelf, then left the room.”

  In the end Moses almost took the money and ran. But then he really thought about it. For the past five months the man had been taking better care of Moses than anyone ever had before. He forced Moses to go to church on Sundays, that was true, and he forced him to help clean the church and help out during activities on other days, but he constantly showed Moses respect, acted like they were equals. And the biggest thing to Moses, at least right then, was that first night, after Moses had tried mugging him, the man had actually held out his hand and wouldn’t move it until Moses accepted it and they shook.

  “So to fast forward,” Moses said, “I cleaned up my act. I understood God was real, and that He cared about me, and that it was my purpose to serve Him. So I started to work for the church. Eventually I moved up north, to help out another church in Ohio. And it was there that I met my wife, Sabrina. It was there that ...”

  He paused.

  “But maybe I’m getting a little too ahead of myself. First, if you don’t mind, may I ask what my boy talked to you about today?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I’m sure I know most of it.”

  This wasn’t quite the answer I was expecting, though I realized this entire situation had gone far beyond expectations.

  When Moses saw that I wasn’t going to answer him, he said, “Did he at least tell you who took him?”

  I hesitated again. “He said ... it was an angel.”

  “An angel?”

  “The angel of death.”

  “Did he give a name?”

  I thought for a moment. “Samael.”

  Moses said, “Did you tell the police the angel of death abducted my boy?”

  “No, of course not. That would have sounded ...”

  “Crazy, I know.” Moses forced a smile. “Now do you see why I asked you about whether or not you believe in God and Satan? Because everything you’ve heard from Joey, and everything you’re about to hear from me, is going to sound crazy to you. But I’m asking you to keep an open mind.”

  “You’re going to explain about him, aren’t you?”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “He said that was the first thing I should do. To come and see you so you could explain.”

  “That’s right.” He leaned forward, ignored the pack of smokes this time and poured both me and himself another glass. “Now, where should I begin?”

  Chapter 16

  As almost any self-respecting parent will tell you, all children are gifts from God. Others might disagree, instead explaining how a child’s birth is simply the ongoing development of the Evolutionary Process. And with apologies to Charles Darwin, those latter few must be out of their minds. Because for any father—or any person, for that matter—who has actually been in the delivery room and watched as a woman has given birth, there is absolutely no way they can doubt the existence of God. Even the most hardheaded atheist will think it once, if not for an instant, as he or she witnesses the miracle of life, before continuing to disbelieve the notion of a higher being. Well, okay, that’s all fine and good, but how exactly can two simple cells merge together and, nine months later, produce a living and breathing thing? No, that is why every child is a gift from God, not just a product of millions upon millions of years of evolution.

  For Moses and Sabrina Cunningham, their son was not just a gift from God.

  He was a miracle.

  The reason for this is because after two years of trying for a baby with nothing to show for it, both had gone to the doctor. As it turned out, Moses had a low sperm count and Sabrina’s tubes were damaged. How exactly this happened neither Sabrina nor the doctor had any idea (“He said she had no STDs, which usually causes it,” Moses said), but obviously something had happened, probably when she was very young. There was absolutely no way, barring a miracle, that the two of them would conceive. Had they ever considered adoption?

  Yes, they had in fact considered adoption, but for them it wasn’t a realistic option. At least not at the moment. Sabrina worked as a first grade teacher, Moses as a youth pastor at their church, and for some reason the idea of adopting just didn’t appeal to them. The process itself was what kept them away. They’d heard horror stories from other couples that couldn’t have children and tried adopting, and they just didn’t think they could do the same. One couple in particular had come so close to actually getting a baby, until the mother, a day after giving birth, decided she wanted to keep the baby for her own. The couple had been heartbroken, and both Moses and Sabrina didn’t want to face the same. They were already heartbroken as it was.

  “Then,” Moses said, his voice soft, “just one day Sabrina got pregnant. It was about a year after the doctor told us she would never be able to carry, and we’d given up even trying.”

  Sabrina’s period was late, which was odd of course, but not as odd as the morning sicknesses which immediately followed. Here was a woman Moses had met his first year in Ohio, where he’d come to help build a church, a woman he’d fallen in love with at first sight, and a woman he had promised a life together with love and happiness. And while the love had been there, the happiness had faded away at the news that they would never have children. Except now these strange symptoms were occurring, symptoms that surely couldn’t mean what they thought, and so they went to see the doctor again. He was the same doctor who had told them almost a year ago that sorry, no, you both can’t have kids, I know it’s hard to hear but keep your chins up, there are other people out there worse off than you. Now he ran tests and came back, his head shaking from side to side, and stared up at them with the most perplexed look in his eyes.

  “He told us Sabrina was pregnant, and I swear, something broke inside him. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was doubt, because his science had failed him. He just shook his head, and simply said, ‘It’s a miracle.’ ”

  Yes, it was a miracle; there was no doubt about that in either of their minds. And for the next eight months their lives changed drastically. They’d been in love before but now that love had blossomed even more, had really begun to shine. People who worked with them even commented on their sudden good moods. Moses got a second job working at a local movie theater, since there was no way they would be able to support a child without some extra income. They just had enough to get by as it was, not to mention with another mouth to feed and another body to clothe and another person to love. But neither of them minded. They were up for the challenge and couldn’t wait.

  Except happiness is something that should never be taken for granted. When people are happy they don’t see things as clearly as they should. They see things in a different light, and not in a light that best represents reality. Had both Moses and Sabrina seen things as they had a year before, maybe they might not have been surprised by what happened next.

  “Really, looking back, I wasn’t surprised at all. Everything was just so perfect. And the thing is, besides God, nothing’s perfect. There’s always something that will change, that will falter, that will snap its fingers in front of our faces to wake us up out of the fairy tale we’ve been living in. For us, it was the day Joey was born. The day Sabrina died.”

  Her water broke early that morning, a week before the due date. Moses grabbed the bags they had packed and drove her to the hospital. The entire time he held her hand and told her just how much he loved her, how she meant everything to him, and how everything was going to be okay.

  Once they arrived and got her inside, she was immediately taken away. Moses had been left filling out more forms than he could handle, and before he finished the last one a doctor and nurse approached him. He knew from the moment the doctor’s eyes met his that something was wrong. Some internal swit
ch flicked itself off and his legs lost their strength. He almost fell but managed to hold onto the counter, and just stared back at the doctor. He asked her what it was, and she told him, with only slight hesitation, before saying she was very sorry and then walking away, leaving the nurse to stand by and console him.

  Simply put, there had been some kind of complication. Something that had to do with her damaged Fallopian tubes. The baby had made it but Sabrina had not.

  “I didn’t really even react until the nurse said something to me. The doctor had just told me my wife was dead and I didn’t even blink. But when the nurse asked me if I was okay, I ... I just lost it.” Moses stared down at his drink in front of him. “I started shouting at her, even cursing some. I made quite a scene. The nurse actually looked frightened. The doctor had given me the bad news but I was taking it out on this other woman, calling her a liar right to her face. And she kept repeating the same thing over and over, she kept saying, ‘But your baby is alive.’ And do you want to hear something terrible? At that instant, I hated that baby more than anything in the world. I hated my son because he’d taken my wife away from me.”

  In fact, for the first two days, Moses wanted nothing at all to do with Joey. He didn’t want to hold him, didn’t even want to touch him. He only wanted to be alone. Then finally he went to the maternity ward and stared down at his baby through the glass. His child wasn’t difficult to find, as it was the only black infant among a dozen whites, and Moses simply stared. A part of him had hoped for some kind of reaction at seeing the thing that had caused his wife to die, something that might take his hate away or even increase it. But he felt nothing. Then, as if knowing his father was watching, Joey opened his eyes and looked up at Moses.

  And at that instant everything changed. All the hatred and disgust Moses had felt toward his child suddenly vanished, was suddenly washed away clean. What shone through was love, an undying love that was somehow even stronger than what Moses had felt for his own wife.