The Otherworld

by Mercedes Lackey

  "It was I who ordered them," boomed the voice of the Black Thing, unexpectedly, startling them all. "Holiest Brother Joseph was reluctant, but I showed him the way, the way—"

  "The way to acquire the money we needed without hurting innocent children," Brother Joseph took up smoothly, when the voice faltered.

  "Well, I guess it's all right, then," Bill said, looking relieved, and glancing out of the corner of his eye at Jamie-in-the-chair, nervously. "If the Holy Fire ordered it."

  "That will be all, then, soldiers of faith," Brother Joseph said in his old, commanding tone of voice. "You have your marching orders. Tomorrow you will be assigned and go forth to implement them, in the name of the Holy Fire."

  The guards herded the last of the Chosen Ones out, leaving Brother Joseph alone with Jamie. And the Black Thing. And Sarah—but he didn't know she was there.

  Brother Joseph turned to Jamie-in-the-chair, with a terrible, burning hunger in his eyes, a hunger that looked as though it could have devoured the world and not been satisfied.

  "Tell me," he ordered, in a harsh voice. "Tell me about the End. Tell me about my part in it."

  The voice began again; more of the same kind of stuff it had told the crowd at the beginning, but more personal this time. About how Brother Joseph was the One True Prophet of the age, how he would lead the Chosen Ones in a purge of all that was evil on earth, until there was no one left but his own followers. How he would be made World President for Life in the ruins of the UN Building; how he would oversee the building of the Promised Heavenly Kingdom On Earth.

  There was a lot of that stuff, and Brother Joseph just ate it up. And Jamie faded and faded—

  Finally even the hunger in Brother Joseph's eyes seemed sated. The voice stopped when Jamie was like one of the transparent fish he'd seen in the aquarium at school, or like a boy made out of glass.

  And so dizzy he couldn't even think.

  "Blessed be the Holy Fire," Brother Joseph said, standing up straight and making a bow that was half adoration and half dismissal. "Blessed be the Sacred Flame. I thank you in the Name of God, and in the Name of Jesus—"

  The Black Thing started to dissolve from Jamie-in-the-chair, pulling out of him, and Sarah let go of the silver cord. She stayed protectively between it and him, though; until it went into that door in the air—

  The door in the air shut—and another kind of door opened behind it. And the Black Thing somehow dissolved into the flag.

  Or the flagpole—

  That was the first time Jamie had ever seen that—at least, that he remembered. But then, a lot had been different tonight. He'd never been shoved out of his body, either. He turned to Sarah, suddenly desperate to ask her questions—

  But Brother Joseph clapped his hands three times—and suddenly he was back in the chair, in his body, and as nauseated and dizzy as he had ever been in his life.

  His gorge rose, and he couldn't help himself or control it anymore. As Brother Joseph released his arms from the straps, he aimed as best he could and made Brother Joseph's white shoes not so white.

  * * *

  After Brother Joseph had Jamie taken away, the preacher retired to his private quarters. Exhausted, he stood in the clothes closet that was as long as a hallway, the aroma of cut pine overpowering in the bright fluorescents. The evening's events swirled in his mind like a lazy tornado, and he knew he was on an emotional roller coaster, swaying between doubt and conviction; as soon as he thought that the Sacred Fire had turned against him, he saw that it was, indeed, still in his court, shucking and jiving to mark his way to the top, spewing the useful information like a self-digging gold mine.

  Hanging from brass rods were a hundred or so suits, worth anywhere from two hundred to a thousand dollars each, wearing a thin plastic wrap from the dry cleaners, each embodying its own, distinctive memory. Brother Joseph often surveyed his collection of expensive clothing in times of turmoil and change, to remind himself of the tribulations and triumphs that had already taken place. The suits reassured him and quelled his doubts, reminding him that he still held power, that his gifts were infinite.

  Much of his preaching, especially after the founding of the Sacred Heart of the Chosen Ones, incited his crowds to violence. These suits had seen riots and marches and demonstrations against the unholy, and had born witness to his struggle. They felt like faithful supporters, always there when the important things happened; like the protest of the godless Unitarians, who questioned the Bible, slandering its very truth. The demonstration his people staged at the YMCA (so weak was their minister that they couldn't even raise the money to build a decent building!) was a wondrous thing, especially when the riot broke out. Joseph spotted the suit he'd worn that day, a conservative gray Oxford, and gloried in its cleanliness. The bloodstains which once darkened its immaculate surface were now only a memory. His suit, like his ministry, emerged from the wreckage of that incident unblemished. A good lawyer could prove—and disprove—anything.

  At the end of the closet, hidden where only he could find them, were his white Klan robes, where it all began.

  Ah yes, he thought nostalgically, savoring the sudden memory the robes brought. The beginning of my struggle. The end, alas, of my youth. The smell of gasoline and burning wood, the secret meetings, the handshakes, the passwords. The hillsides filled with the faithful, their pointed hoods aimed heavenward, toward God. The sweet hatred that flowed in the gatherings, lubricated with cheap beer and even cheaper whiskey.

  Those were the glorious days.

  He'd joined the KKK as a teenager, and insisted early on that he be permitted to participate in a real nigger lynching, that nothing else would hold his interest. He just wanted to kill niggers. The old-timers, they seemed to find him amusing if overly rambunctious. He had been all of seventeen when he joined. He looked older, and was able to pass as a twenty-year-old, not that it would have mattered if they'd known his true age. The Klan loved new, young blood. His raw hate sustained him for some time, but as he matured, he began to need specific reasons for the hate—he began to doubt, when he saw others his age burning with the same fervor for causes the very opposite of his.

  Justification came bound in faded black leather; the Grand Dragon began quoting scripture. In the light of a burning cross, somewhere on a hillside in Mississippi, he saw the glimmer of his true destiny. The feelings of hate he had for the godless actually had a meaning behind them, reinforcing his beliefs. He could attach names to the things he hated, and they were impressive names, all of them: Satan's spawn, heathens, the non-believers. His soul had swelled with pride. His feelings, after all, were justified. And others enabled him to act them out.

  It was the first time the Bible had any meaning for him, the first time its truth made any sense to him. There is only one right way, and I know what it is. So he had believed, and the Bible provided proof. The Bible was all the justification he needed.

  After all, look at how many people lived by it.

  He thought he had found his place, his kindred. But as the months progressed, he had participated in only two lynchings. Any more, and the FBI will come after us, one of the senior members of their Klan said.

  But Brother Joseph knew it wasn't prudence that had spoken; it had been cowardice. They didn't have the guts, he knew then, and his faith in the Ku Klux Klan faltered.

  By the time he had turned twenty, the Klan began admitting Catholics for the first time in its history, and he realized it was time to leave. They just didn't have it straight, was all. Time to forge a new organization, a new group.

  A . . . church.

  He never attended a formal seminary; he earned his sheepskin through a four-week correspondence course. All he needed was a piece of paper to hang in his "office," to point at when anyone questioned his credentials. He knew it was a facade, but a necessary one needed to carry out his work. He knew the real truth, and in his hands he held the secret to the One True Church. He stumbled across a passage in the Bible, and from this he
produced a name for his movement: The Sacred Heart of the Chosen Ones.

  He studied the Bible night and day, highlighting the passages which lent particular weight to his beliefs. These were the passages he emphasized in his sermons, adding some flourishes of his own.

  He preached hatred. Hate was cleansing; the Sword of the Lord—didn't the Bible speak over and over about the Wrath of God? Hate purified. Hate separated the weak from the strong, the doers from the idle, the pure in spirit from the dissenters, the doubters. Hate separated the men from the boys—and from the women. He knew about women. They were too weak to truly hate. They were inferior to men.

  There were many men who came to him just on that basis alone. And women, too, the real women who liked being told their place and liked a strong man who'd keep them there. Like his own wife, who went where he told her and never lifted her voice or her eyes. . . .

  He claimed credit for the killing of Martin Luther King during an especially rousing sermon before a congregation of a dozen men and twenty elderly women. The next day the FBI came by, asking him to expand on that sermon. Nervously, he explained to them that he meant it in a spiritual sense, that he hadn't pulled the trigger after all. Not really.

  This was back in the sixties, and the ball had barely begun to roll.

  His congregation slowly built to around a hundred, and peaked there for several years. He had masqueraded as a Baptist minister because he'd heard those people could sure fork out the money if you pleaded hard enough. With a minimum of hassle he found the necessary contacts to forge the proper documents to become a "bona fide" Baptist minister. After skimming the till for five years, stashing a good chunk of it in gold and CDs, his credentials came into question when he refused to attend an annual Baptist minister's conference in nearby Atlanta.

  Before the darkness could gather completely he absconded with what he could and assumed a new identity in California, where he took to the airwaves as a radio preacher. As "Father Fact" he had enjoyed a sizable following for close to a year.

  Then, as the spirit moved in him, his sermons took a more radical slant. More and more often, his true feelings began to overcome him in the midst of a sermon, raising the ire of the Federal Communications Commission. Soon "Father Fact" became "Father History," and after several unsuccessful attempts to find similar employment with other stations, he holed up in a cheap hotel in Los Angeles with one hundred thousand dollars in the bank and a fire in his gut.

  At the San Jose Hotel he had a revelation, sent to him directly from God. At first he interpreted the message to mean that he was to become the second Christ. Then, as he mulled it over a bit, he decided instead that it was time to write a book, a manifesto, for his new church. It was time to come out into the open, to preach his new school of thought unfettered by anyone else's rules. The time of hiding behind the "established" order of religion had come to a screeching halt. He started using the name "Brother Joseph," which at first was going be a pseudonym only, since he suspected the authorities in Georgia might still be looking for him. But he liked the sound of it, and it stuck. "Brother Joseph, leader of the Sacred Heart of the Chosen Ones," was a fitting title. But the movement would need a users manual, and over the next fourteen months, with an old Underwood, he hacked out the Manifesto of the Sacred Heart of the Chosen Ones. Editing or retyping, he had decided, would not be necessary. After all, this was the divine word of the Lord; who was he to decide what the Lord wanted left in and what He didn't? Had the Apostles edited the books of the New Testament? Had Moses edited the Ten Commandments? Those were not choices for a mere mortal, he reasoned then and now, so he let the work stand as written.

  Unwilling to trust the task of publishing his holy book to anyone else, the Brother Joseph purchased an old offset press and developing equipment. Stray lumber and cardboard became a darkroom. For weeks, after typing God's Word on nine by eleven rag, he shot the individual pages directly from the single-spaced typewritten sheets.

  The manifesto wasn't simple; Brother Joseph required 1532 pages to explain his leap of intellect, excluding the table of contents and index. On the "reference and bibliography" page the word God appeared seven hundred and seventy-seven times. In all-caps.

  With some basic binding equipment, which was used to make cloth-bound books the old-fashioned way, he went to the next phase of his project. Between inexpensive meals of Discount Dan's macaroni'n'cheese and cold Van de Camps Pork and Beans, selected from his immense survival cache, he lovingly handcrafted each volume. They were easily the size and weight of an unabridged dictionary. On a good day, he could produce three to five books, which were soon given away. The preacher sent the very first volume to the newly elected Ronald Reagan, with a simple note reading: "Have your men read this immediately."

  Six months later he signed and numbered the five hundredth volume. The four hundred ninety-nine volumes preceding it had been given away to Klansmen, defrocked ministers, congressmen, mayors, governors, shriners, a hundred right-wing organizations, and anyone else he thought would be interested. But that day, holding volume number five hundred, Brother Joseph frowned and scratched his head. Despite the address he had clearly printed on the title page, no tithes were pouring in to finance the new movement. Not even a letter or a postcard. Nothing. Although he had close to seventy thousand left in the bank, he didn't want to dip into that yet. He simply couldn't understand the lack of interest. He had thought that by now someone would have seen the wisdom in God's words.

  Fifteen years and a thousand miles away, Brother Joseph stood in the closet of expensive suits, regarding with a sense of melancholic nostalgia the box of books marked, in purple crayon, "original manifesto." There was only one of the hefty tomes left, and it was stored here. The time would soon come when he would have to publish the full-length manifesto again. With new plates, of course—hell, in fancy, scrolled type, scanned from the original book and set by computer and fed directly into the bowels of his own printers. Now he owned his own little publishing empire. Never again would he have to type a word.

  During the early years of the Chosen Ones, someone convinced him to condense the book a little, to where it was only about eighty pages long. It wasn't even an outline of the original masterwork—it was a mere pamphlet. The decision angered him, but he permitted the sacrilege in order to attract more followers.

  In 1983 Brother Joseph purchased a stolen mailing list from The Right Way, an ultraconservative monthly which featured articles on assault weapons, Israel Identity theory, the Jewish Question, survival tactics, quilting tips and home cooking recipes. With the pilfered list he mailed, at great expense, one hundred thousand copies of the condensed Manifesto. The new edition contained simple instructions on how to start your own Sacred Heart chapter.

  The ruse worked. Almost overnight congregations began to pop up all over the country, mostly in the South and Midwest. Ten in all, in the beginning, and he kept himself busy ministering to each. Money poured in. A few of his larger CDs, left over from his Baptist preaching days, began to mature. In the conservative atmosphere of the Reagan Administration, his church flourished. Congregations swelled. Finally, his message was receiving the attention it deserved. Humanity might survive after all.

  Reluctant to end his brief jaunt down memory lane, Brother Joseph disrobed and hung his latest acquisition, a tailor-made Sacred Heart uniform with all the relevant religious markings, in a separate valet in the closet. The coat alone was a work of art, with Sacred Heart insignia, military decorations of his own creation, gold cord and epaulets. The severe black shirt and white collar gave it a religious look, and despite its Catholic undertones he let the creation stand. It looked more impressive, after all. The entire outfit cost nearly two thousand dollars to have made and it fit perfectly; it was his most treasured possession.

  Nothing too good for the founder of the Sacred Heart, he thought.

  As he selected one of fifteen bathrobes, each a different shade of blue, gray or black, he noticed a plaid suit.
He hadn't worn this one very long because of a certain place in the trousers where it was too tight, but nevertheless, he remembered the circumstance of this particular outfit, and scowled.

  That reporter will never stand on Sacred Ground again, he seethed, tying the robe. He meant to have the suit burned, to erase the bad memories it represented, but had never got around to it. He had worn it once during the early growth of the church, about six years before, when he was attempting one of the first channelings during what he would later call "Praise Meetings."

  There had been a new lamb in the fold, a young man who had been to the meetings for the past three months or so. Brother Joseph had picked him to be the vehicle for the channeling session, and he had agreed. The young man was an admitted Democrat, and that alone should have tipped him off, but in those early days followers were coming out of the woodwork from every conceivable direction, and he hadn't really cared. The "channeling" went well, and the subject had shown every indication of the holy trance. The original plan was to channel John the Baptist, but somewhere it all got sidetracked and the subject recited passages from the Bible, claiming to be one of the twelve disciples. He never said which one, an omission which should have been another clue. The response from the gathering was questionable, but Brother Joseph declared the session a success and adjourned the meeting. The subject vanished soon afterward, and after a cursory asking around, nobody seemed to know who he was.

  The next day, on the front page of the Wichita Eagle, Brother Joseph saw an article prominently displayed in the upper half of the paper. "Eagle Reporter Infiltrates `Channeling Cult,' " read the headlines, and accompanying the article was a photograph of the reporter. He was, indeed, the same subject who had "channeled" the night before.

  Aghast, Brother Joseph read on. The "sting" had taken three months, and while it had been unplanned, the leader of the cult had picked him to be channeled. In detail the reporter described the "high visibility" of firearms and the "gullibility of the audience, who seemed to come from rural, uneducated backgrounds." As the final insulting touch, it seemed that the "scripture" he'd quoted while in the "trance" was all fabricated, but had been accepted as "fact" by Brother Joseph and his followers.