The Lucifer Gospel

by Paul Christopher

  The first of the huge rollers pulled her down and under in a single, ice-cold moment of absolute terror. As a child she’d once been briefly caught by an undertow in the warm waters off Cancun, but she’d instantly been snatched to safety, plucked out of the water by the strong hand of her ever-vigilant father. There was no one to save her now. The deadly surge grabbed her in its watery fist and pulled her relentlessly toward the bottom.

  Finally she broke free of the wave’s terrible grip and gulped in huge gasping lungfuls of air, retching seawater, feeling the tug of the next wave as she was swept forward and down, with barely enough time to take a breath before the deluge swallowed her again. Once more she was pressed down, thrown onto the reef, the rough sand and coral tearing at her skin, and once more, exhausted, she clawed her way to the surface for another retching breath.

  A third wave took her, but this time instead of coral there was only sand on the sloping bottom, and she barely had to swim at all before she reached the surface. Her feet stumbled and she threw herself forward with the last of her strength, staggering as the sea sucked back from the shore of the tiny island in a rushing rip current, strong enough to bring her to her knees. She crawled, rose to her feet again and plunged on, knees buckling, in despair because she knew in some distant corner of her mind that another wave as strong as the first could still steal her life away with salvation and survival so tantalizingly near.

  She staggered again in the treacherous sand that dragged at her heels and almost toppled her over. She took another step and then another, blinking in the slanting, blinding rain. Ahead, farther up the strip of shining beach, was a darker line of a few trees, fan palms and coconuts, their trunks bent away from the howling wind and the lashing rain, unripe fruit torn away, crashing away in the teeth of the storm like cannonballs. Finn’s breath came in ragged gasps and her legs were like deadweights, but at least she was free of the mad, clutching surf that broke behind her now like crashing thunder.

  Struggling higher up the sandy slope she finally reached a point above the wrack and turned back to the sea, sinking down exhausted to her knees. The straps of her one-piece swimsuit were torn. She was still badly frightened, but wept with relief as she stared into the shrieking nightmare of the rising hurricane. She was alive.

  Through the rain she could see the heaving broken line of frothing white that marked the reef, but nothing more. True to his word, Adamson had run before the wind and disappeared. Suddenly she felt something touch her shoulder and she turned, screaming. She whirled, heart in her throat. It was Hilts, a gash on his forehead streaming blood, his hair plastered down, grinning like a lunatic. He had survived as well.

  “Misery acquaints man with strange bedfellows!” he said, yelling happily into her ear.

  “What are you talking about!?”

  “Adamson’s not the only one who can quote things!” Hilts yelled. “How about:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.”

  “The Bible?” asked Finn.

  “Shakespeare,” said Hilts. “Miss Slynn’s grade-nine English class. The Tempest. Had to learn the whole damn play. First time it’s ever come in handy.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Come on,” he said. “Even Caliban knew to get in out of the storm.”

  34

  Finn woke to the terrible, windborne crying of the gulls and the savage echo of broken surf pounding on the reef. She vaguely recalled the night before in brief images and sensations: the pressure of the mounting wind, the monstrous sounds of nature unleashed, the harsh, pervasive slanting rain so powerful at times it almost stole her breath. The sound of water swirling at her feet. The knowledge that there was no hope left.

  Instead of hope there had been the fickle randomness of storms. Late in the night and early the following day the wind had veered a mere two points in a new direction, the hurricane had shifted its wheeling carnage overhead and slipped away, and finally the waters had receded. In the cold lens of the NOAA cameras roughly twenty-three thousand miles overhead, the pinwheel of the hurricane cloud began to shred and tear.

  Opening her eyes, it took her a moment to realize that she was lying just inside the entrance to the abandoned hut next to the lighthouse. The dead cat was gone and so was most of the litter. The cat’s ghost still occupied the hut with its musky, dead animal odor. The strap on her bathing suit had been repaired with a neat reef knot. There was no sign of Hilts. Finn suddenly realized that she had a splitting headache. She was also cold.

  Shivering, she sat up. She looked around. Somehow the sheet-metal roof of the hut had managed to stay nailed to the rafters, and it was obvious that Adamson’s prediction about the island being covered by the storm surge had not been borne out because, thankfully, she was high and dry.

  Finn stood up, still groggy, and ducked through the entrance. The sky was hammered blue, the sun a blinding disk as it rose in the east, and the sea was like liquid metal, dark lines of heavy breakers destroying themselves loudly against the line of the invisible reef.

  There was a strange, unpleasant taste in the air, like hot blood on tin or what she imagined death by electrocution would smell like. She made her way down to the spot where the marram grass met the sand and dropped down, hugging her knees as she stared out to sea. She realized that she was both hungry and terribly thirsty. She heard a faint sound and turned; Hilts was approaching from down the beach, hauling what seemed to be their flotation vests behind him.

  In his other hand he was dragging the limp body of a large, brownish-gray bird with a long sharp beak and legs like sticks. The front of his once white T-shirt was stained pink with his own blood, and the gash in his forehead had scabbed over in a horrible-looking mass of caked blood and serum. His lips were bruised and covered with a cracked white layer of salt. His eyes looked bloodshot and feverish but he was smiling.

  “Finished your beauty nap?”

  “I’m thirsty,” she said, her voice croaking.

  “Go back to the lighthouse. There’s a few puddles around the base. Drink up now because they’ll evaporate soon enough, and I couldn’t find anything to store water in.” He lifted the dead bird by the neck. “I’m going back to the hut. Start a fire with one of the vest flares. Cook up old Ichabod here. Found him with a broken neck up the beach a ways. We might die of thirst but at least we won’t starve to death while we’re doing it.” He gave her a grin, then plodded up the beach, heading for the hut. Finn climbed to her feet and headed for the lighthouse at the other end of the narrow little spit of land.

  By the time she drank her fill and returned to the hut Hilts had already gathered driftwood and debris and had a blazing fire going, initiated by one of the emergency flares in the dive vests. He was on his knees in the sand in front of the hut, busily gutting the large, heronlike bird with his vest knife. He held up the blood-covered, razor-sharp tool and smiled.

  “Adamson must have thrown the vests in for authenticity.”

  “Maybe he’ll come back to see if we survived,” said Finn. “Did you ever think about that?”

  “Why would he bother?” Hilts said. He scooped the bird’s entrails into his hand, pulled hard, then threw the guts downwind along the sand. The gulls screaming above them in the air dropped out of the sky and began to tear at the offal like vultures.

  “The fact that we survived last night at all is a miracle. We’re not going to last for very long without water. Unless Fidel’s navy finds us or we’re visited by your friendly neighborhood cocaine runner, we’re pretty much screwed.” He found a long piece of driftwood, speared one end into the bird’s stomach cavity, and laid it across the flames. The feathers began to smoke and burn. It smelled horrible.

  “That’s disgusting,” said Finn.

  “That’s lunch,” Hilts a
nswered.

  After the bird had spent almost an hour in the flames, Finn tried the charred sour meat, and after throwing up she returned to the steadily drying puddles that lay around the concrete pad of the lighthouse in a gleaming string of little lakes, fading like mirages as the Caribbean sun rose overhead. She dragged herself back to the fire in front of the hut. The remains of the heron carcass had been discreetly removed. Hilts now had the dive vests laid out on the sand and was picking them over.

  “Six flares, two knives, a reel of safety line we could maybe use for fishing if it wasn’t so big, an aluminum mirror, two personal first aid kits, two dive computers, a Garmin IPX7-Z series submersible GPS unit, and some shark repellant. They always seem to have more useful stuff on those reality TV shows.” He put a hand to his mouth in mock horror, eyes widening. “Could it be that reality TV isn’t real after all?”

  “I’m not quite sure what you’re so happy about.”

  “It’s all relative. We could be dead but we’re not.”

  “But we soon will be by the sound of it.”

  “Maybe the Buff Divers will show up from Katy, Texas, you never know.” He shrugged. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” he added philosophically.

  “The man who said that also said, ’walk sober off; before a sprightlier age comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage,’ ” said Finn.

  “Show-off,” replied Hilts. He squatted in front of his little pile of booty like one of the dealers in the City of the Dead bazaar in Cairo.

  “I’ve never really understood how GPS works,” said Finn, staring at the exotic Garmin unit that looked like an outsized bright yellow cell phone in the pile.

  “It’s pretty simple really,” Hilts explained. “It was originally designed by the military. They shot up twenty-four satellites into stationary orbits around the earth so two of them were always above the horizon anywhere in the world. They had base-station receiving units on the ground that picked up the signals broadcast by the satellites and triangulated off them to give you an exact location. The system was put into use just in time so that our boys didn’t get lost in the Iraqi desert.” He picked up the unit and switched it on. “The ones they have now are a lot more sophisticated. Like little computers. With the right map chip it’s like having an atlas in the palm of your hand. This one has North America and the Caribbean programmed into it.” He looked down at the display. “That’s us: eighteen degrees, fifty-five minutes, sixteen seconds north, sixty-six degrees, fifty-four minutes, twenty-three seconds west.”

  “What did you say?” Finn asked.

  Hilts sighed and repeated himself. “Eighteen degrees, fifty-five minutes, sixteen seconds north, sixty-six degrees, fifty-four minutes, twenty-three seconds west.”

  “That’s it,” she said, nodding.

  “What’s it?”

  “The cards. The way they were arranged on the table in Devereaux’s cabin. The table had the Acosta Lines logo on it, a compass, remember?”

  “A compass rose, right,” he answered, nodding.

  Finn closed her eyes, concentrating.

  “A three, an eight, another three, a pair of twos, and a five to the north. Thirty-eight degrees, thirty-two minutes, twenty-five seconds north.” She paused, trying to remember. “Two eights, a jack, which stands for ten, and a pair of twos on the west side of the table.”

  “Eighty-eight degrees, ten minutes, twenty-two seconds west,” filled in Hilts, keying the figures into the unit. He stared at Finn. “You’re a genius!”

  Over the water, in the distance, Phil Stubbs was singing about a group of tadpoles celebrating their journey to frogdom, backed up by a chorus of squeaky six-year-old girls telling what da froggies say. Squinting into the sun, Finn saw Tucker Noe’s ancient flatboat appear around the reef, heading past the lighthouse toward them. It looked a little battered by the storm but it was still afloat. Phil’s singing became louder, his strong voice carrying easily across the water to them.

  “Kalik,” said Hilts, pronouncing it like a native and licking his lips.

  “What are the coordinates for?” Finn asked, keeping her eyes on the decrepit old boat just to make sure it was real.

  Hilts looked down at the Garmin unit.

  “They was hoppin’ and skippin’ an jumpin’ an leapin’, come back to the pond, come see,” sang Phil.

  “Rutgers Bluff, Illinois.”

  35

  Rutgers Bluff was located a dozen miles downstream on the Winter River from Fairfield, the county seat. That part of Illinois always had more to do with hillbillies and hicks than Oprah and the Miracle Mile, and if you were looking for a movie to describe it, you’d think of Deliverance, or maybe In Cold Blood. Most of the local population was of German descent and there weren’t many foreigners. You might have been born there and you might have stayed there through no fault of your own, but if you were thinking of opening a convenience store, Wayne County and Rutgers Bluff wouldn’t be your first choice.

  The most common crimes in the county were rape, petty larceny, assault, and car theft, in that order. More people were on the county payroll as police than any other category. Names like Bruner, Ostrander, and Koch were common, and the white squirrel was the county animal, appearing on police patches and the stationery of county departments. No one could remember who Rutger had been but the bluff was still there, a stumpy, tree-covered escarpment that overlooked the river at what the locals called the Third Chute.

  Long ago lumber had been an important part of the Wayne County economy and logs had been sent downstream to the big mills at Parkman. At the big rapids along the course of the Winter River wooden chutes had been built to convey the logs around the turbulent white water. Rutgers Bluff was the third set of these. The Fourth Chute was located two miles downriver at thirty-eight degrees, thirty-two minutes twenty-five seconds north, eighty-eight degrees, ten minutes, twenty-two seconds west, the numbers set out in plastic playing cards by a dead man aboard a sunken cruise ship several thousand miles away to the south a little more than half a century before.

  “This can’t be right,” said Hilts, looking first at the handheld Garmin unit and then at the bruised, desolate scene around them. It was pouring rain and both he and Finn were soaking wet, even though they’d picked up a pair of cheap rubber ponchos and two rain hats at a sporting goods store in Fairfield. They were standing in front of their rental Ford on an old steel bridge across Winter River just above the rapids. From end to end the bridge was no more than fifty feet long and was just barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On one side of the bridge was rough brush country, second-cut old spruce and pine and miles of gray swamp and slash. Directly in front of them was an open meadow beside the river. A tumble-down barn stood on one side of the road and a farmhouse and several outbuildings on the other. A rustic summer-camp-style sign had been erected over a narrow track that led past the farmhouse to the outbuildings. In roughly trimmed pine branches the arching sign read: CAVERNS OF WONDER.

  To the left of the entrance, propped up on the old split-rail fence, was a plywood cut-out of Jesus painted with a yellow halo that looked more like a straw hat and brown sandals that looked vaguely like army boots. A blue-and-white Mary leaned against the other side of the gateway. Apparently the Mother of Christ had been a blonde. The paint looked very old and faded. Below the “of” in Caverns of Wonder another square of plywood had been added that read: “$10.” White on black.

  “This just can’t be right,” Hilts repeated. “ Caverns of Wonder? This is a tourist trap. Or was. It looks deserted.”

  “Do the numbers match?” Finn asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Then this is it.” She nodded toward the plywood Savior. “Jesus of Illinois. Bit too much for coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a joke.”

  “Too many dead bodies to be very funny. And if it is a joke, our friend Adamson is going to be seriously ticked off.”

  “You think he’s figured i
t out?”

  “He had your digital camera. If he hasn’t got it figured by now it won’t be long.”

  They climbed back into the car and drove beneath the arching sign. They parked in an old gravel lot beside what might have once been a snack booth or a gift shop. Behind it was a makeshift row of outhouses. Grass had grown up everywhere. The hinges on the big front flap of the snack booth had rusted through and the flap sagged like old skin. A little to the left on a small rise of land was the farmhouse. The roof sagged and the chimney had collapsed. It was a blind and dead place. The front yard was a sea of brambles, with the wreck of an old truck by the front door, an International Harvester Scout, blue and white and rust. The tires were rotted away and the cracked windshield was covered in bird droppings. Everything was gray in the rain.