by Trevor Hoyle
‘Jeff.’ It came out a rusty croak. ‘Jeff, it’s me!’
‘Hello,’ said the blessed familar voice. ‘This is the Cawdor residence. There’s no one here to take your call right now but, if you’d like to leave a message, please do so after the tone. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.’
In an agony of suspense, the breath rasping through her parched lips, Sarah waited for the tone to sound.
It came at last, the long beeping tone, and stopped short in the middle, interrupted by a loud click, as if a plug had been pulled.
The line went dead.
Sarah lay huddled on the crumpled silk sheet, her forehead touching the silent phone, not enough emotion left in her to even cry.
2
Thunderstorms rolling in from the Atlantic meant that the DC-10 was fifteen minutes behind schedule. Eventually it touched down at Miami International at 7:20 p.m. in driving rain that was whipped along the runways by winds gusting up to fifty miles an hour.
Travelling in the forward business-class cabin, Cawdor was one of the first in line as disembarkation began. Unencumbered by any hand luggage, he had only the clothes he stood up in, which was how he had departed the Troth Foundation a few minutes after one-thirty that afternoon.
It had seemed to Cawdor – standing in the bleak, cold bathroom on the second floor, the shards of mirror scattered on the black and white tiles around his feet – that the earth was in upheaval. He had to clutch hold of the washbasin to steady himself as the bathroom tilted crazily, and him with it. The black snake of premonition, coiled in his stomach, the one he had felt earlier on the terrace and dismissed, wasn’t a fake after all. Not this time. The danger to Sarah and Daniella was real. He had to act immediately. Clenching his fists to his chest to still their trembling, Cawdor knew this with total certainty. He stood there for a full minute until his breathing was under control. By then the sweat had gone cold on his forehead, and suddenly he felt very calm and committed, resolute and filled with purpose.
Five minutes later he was marching down the staircase, car keys in hand, and, without seeing anyone or even saying goodbye to Doctor Khuman, Cawdor climbed into the Olds and pulled away down the gravel driveway, leaving behind the building with its greystone turrets and miniature towers bathed in warm sunshine.
From the small town of Griffin he had picked up the 1-87 intersection between Glens Falls and Saratoga Springs. Thankfully there had been no hold-ups on the interstate all the way south through New York state. Keeping to a steady 65 miles an hour, and with only a single stop for gas, by four o’clock he was nearing White Plains. There he was faced with a tough choice. JFK or Newark? At the gas stop he should have called to find out which airport had the earliest flight to Miami, and cursed himself for not thinking of it. But Cawdor was loath to delay himself further by stopping again and finding a phone, conscious of the minutes ticking away in his brain like an unexploded bomb. He came to the decision, praying it was the right one, that JFK was the better bet, likely to have more Florida flights, and turned east off 1-87 to join 1-95 a few miles south of New Rochelle.
At this point he was 22 miles from the airport.
Taking the Clearview Expressway toll bridge over the East River, Cawdor followed the parkway past Belmont Park Race Track, avoiding the more direct routes, which he knew from experience would be clogged with traffic, and reached JFK at 4:25 p.m., a few minutes under three hours since leaving the Troth Foundation.
There wasn’t one flight for Miami due to leave shortly – there were two. In his haste Cawdor had nearly purchased a ticket for the first flight out, with BryanAir, when he realised it was via Atlanta and included a thirty-minute stopover. He moved three desks down to the Delta counter and waited impatiently in line, hands clenched, palms clammy, praying there would be seats still available. A family of five was in front of him, and it seemed to take the ticket clerk an eternity to process the father’s request for economy class to Chicago O’Hare, and she could guarantee absolutely, couldn’t she, that they would be serving a vegetarian meal on the plane?
Clutching his ticket at long last, Cawdor headed for Gate 14, and was ushered through separately with the other business-class passengers. He had missed lunch, and not eaten a bite since, and although he wasn’t remotely hungry he accepted the early dinner tray and made himself finish the turtle soup and took a few mouthfuls of sirloin steak and croquette potatoes before his stomach rebelled. He refused the free alcohol offered him, and drank only sparkling mineral water. In the adjacent seat, a balding man with pouchy eyes saw no good reason to stint himself. After his third bourbon the man tried to strike up a conversation, and wasn’t deterred until Cawdor plumped up the cotton pillow and sank into it with eyes closed. Cawdor had no intention of falling asleep – he didn’t believe himself capable of sleep – but within less than a minute he was so exhausted he had drifted off.
His dreams were filled with guilt.
It had no name or form at first, this guilt,. although Cawdor knew without question that he was the guilty one. He had failed in some vital respect. He had betrayed his family; no, not betrayed them: he had placed them in jeopardy through a stupid and senseless action on his part. But what? In his dream he scurried through dusty hallways and probed empty rooms, searching frantically for an answer. He was to blame all right, but what had he done? Cawdor loved his family too much ever to want to harm them. Saraheda and Daniel were his very life’s blood, more precious to him than –
Saraheda and Daniel. It was his wife and son on board the ship, and the dreadful fate that had befallen them: that’s why he was racked with guilt. And the reason was simple.
Because upright and virtuous Jefferson Cawdor, paragon of courage and high principles, had intervened in a dispute among the brethren of the cult of the Shouters. Leaping into the circle of bobbing heads, he had rescued a young disciple who was being shouted to death. He had stood up to the leader too, that bony, austere figure in a hooded robe who had been grotesquely interfering with a young girl. Had wrestled him to the deck of the sailing ship and threatened to break his neck if the old lecher so much as touched her again. Oh yes. Brave and indomitable Jefferson Cawdor, defender of the weak, champion of the underdog… and look where his self-righteous and vainglorious posturing had landed them! His wife despicably abused, and – with their son – flung over the side, while he himself was shackled and left to rot in the stinking bilges.
Cawdor’s guilt was no longer nameless or formless. It blazed in his mind like a firebrand. For his arrogant belief in the justness of his cause, Saraheda and Daniel had paid the ultimate price.
Not only that: the burning hatred that Cawdor’s intervention had inspired in the religious cult had left a legacy of revenge that had pursued him and his family over two centuries, from that day to this. Just as Saraheda and Daniel had paid a terrible price, so now the same retribution was to be exacted from Sarah and Daniella. The Shouters, or the Messengers as they had become, never forgot, never forgave.
The guilt gave another twist, like a knife in his side. Why hadn’t he made sense of those strange and unsettling dream images of the past before now? Was he just plain dumb? For weeks he had been troubled by them, but he hadn’t understood the stark warning contained in those broken shards that what had happened before was about to happen again. If he hadn’t been so blind and stupid he might have saved his wife and daughter. He ought to have delved deeper and tried to uncover their real meaning. But of course, Cawdor realised, this was precisely the reason he had opened himself up to Doctor Khuman, to help him discover what all this weird stuff meant.
And he had departed the Troth Foundation without a word before any help could be given.
This was part of his guilt-ridden dream too, and as Cawdor awoke in the softly humming cabin he knew the reason why he had to leave so abruptly. The mirror lying in pieces on the bathroom floor was a final warning, and one he couldn’t ignore.
Jeff Cawdor had never been more certain of anythi
ng in his life.
* * *
Striding up the tunnel-like ramp into the terminal building of Miami International, he had to restrain himself from breaking into a run. It was now seven-thirty. How far was Fort Lauderdale – twenty, thirty miles? He could hire a car, ask at the rental desk for directions to the headquarters of Grace MediaCorp, and be there in under an hour, by eight-thirty at the latest. Sarah and Daniella, Cawdor assumed, were at the studio; he couldn’t think where else they might be. Suddenly he was struck by a thought that made him falter in his tracks. This breakneck timetable he was following, calculated to minutes and even seconds, depended on the assumption that The Lovebeams TV show went out live. Maybe it was recorded earlier in the day. By now it could all be over. Did it really matter so much, Cawdor asked himself, that he get to the studio before the show started, whether live or recorded? He didn’t have a reason why this seemed so vitally important; he only knew that the inner momentum directing and driving him to act told him it was.
Cawdor checked his watch, overwhelmed by a sickening despair. He wouldn’t get there in time. Eight-thirty, even if he made it, would be too late. He lengthened his stride and broke into a trot, and then he was running through the interminable, endless labyrinth of Miami International Airport to get to the main concourse and the car-rental desk.
3
Tonight he was a dazzling figure dressed all in white: white double-breasted suit, white shirt and a white silk tie, white buckskin shoes with silver buckles. The spotlight followed him across the stage, and so did 2,000 mesmerised pairs of eyes. He carried a hand mike, darting from this person to that along the semicircular row of young people facing the audience, conducting a session of ‘Spirit Talk’, in which they were invited to divulge what difference the Beamers had made to their lives. For some it was a joyous revelation, filled with smiles and laughter; for others a highly charged, traumatic experience that had them hunched over and weeping as they recounted how the Lovebeams had entered into them and transformed the world from a place of misery and doubt into a golden paradise of hope and promise.
‘Tell all the people, Jodie,’ Messiah Wilde encouraged a plump girl with a blotchy, red complexion and lank brown hair sheared off in a fringe just above her glasses, ‘how you felt before you joined the wonderful worldwide kinship of Lovebeamers.’
‘Ah’d no confidence in myself, no self-respec’,’ Jodie said tearfully in a southern accent that almost required an interpreter. ‘I thought I was no-account trash, no friends, nobody’ud pay me no attention, boys especially. I was a loser in all departments. Life weren’t worth the livin’, I tell ya the honest truth.’
‘You were a nail-biter, Jodie.’
Jodie nodded her bowed head.
‘You had bad breath.’
‘At school they all used to say my breath stank.’
‘Like a…’ he prompted.
‘Like a hound dog’s fart.’
‘So what nickname did they give you?’
‘That was it – “Hound Dog’s Fart”,’ Jodie said, her three chins quivering. She wormed a twisted tissue under her glasses to wipe her eyes.
‘Hound Dog’s Fart. Don’t be cruel, you should have told them. Ha ha. But to be fair, Jodie, you weren’t clean in your bodily habits, were you now?’
‘Do I have to – have to say, in front of…’ Jodie’s face crumpled and the tears ran down over her blotchy cheeks.
‘Don’t be a spoilsport, Jodie! You told us back there; you have to tell the people out front, including the millions watching at home. Fair’s fair, you know.’ Messiah Wilde patted her fat white knee.
Jodie mumbled something into her chest.
‘What was that? We didn’t hear.’ He pushed the mike under her chin.
‘I said I didn’t used to always change my underthings, least not every day. When my Daddy run off we was broke, with hardly a cent, and we couldn’t afford to buy new stuff and things –’
‘Washing costs nothing, Jodie. You should always clean up your own mess, especially if others find the stink offensive. Now, shouldn’t you?’
Jodie nodded miserably, her hands grovelling in her lap.
With a wink and a smile, Messiah Wilde bounded up, twirled round and told the audience with a chuckle, ‘You see how unhappy and pathetic Jodie was before? As she said, a loser, pure trash. Take a good hard look at her.’ He pointed back. ‘Life was just one long vale of tears until she tuned in and turned on to the Beamers. Now isn’t that a lesson for all of you out there? I know you’re feeling unhappy and insecure. I know you’re hopeless at relationships, don’t feel attractive to the opposite sex, are worried sick about your appearance and lack of personality and social skills.’
He placed his hand on his heart and looked into the camera with a pained sympathy that was achingly sincere. ‘Me, Messiah Wilde, I know and understand exactly how you’re feeling out there, right this minute.’ His voice went down a key, as he mouthed softly, ‘You can change. I make this promise to you – yes you – here and now. Allow the Lovebeams into your heart and, believe me, you’ll be amazed at the transformation in yourself. You won’t even recognise the creature that was the timid, frightened old you – that’s my vow and pledge to every single one of you.’ He gave a long slow wink, and a sigh like a gently falling wave rolled through the audience. ‘Give it a try. Open up and let the Lovebeams shine in.’
There was a moment’s deathly hush and then the audience responded to the flashing APPLAUSE sign with whoops and screams and wild applause. Smiling ecstatically through her tears, Jodie was applauding as fiercely as anyone. With a graceful wave of his hand, Messiah Wilde skipped upstage and disappeared through a billowing cloud of dry ice, to the accompaniment of a heavy bass-guitar soundtrack.
The stage lights dimmed and a voice over the public-address system announced a twenty-minute intermission while the set was rearranged for the next segment of the show. ‘Messiah Wilde will be right back with you,’ he assured them. ‘And, remember, someone, somewhere out there, is the Chosen One on tonight’s show!’
Sitting beside her, the clean-cut young man leant over and nudged Daniella with his elbow. ‘Hear that? Your star spot’s coming up – twenty minutes and you’re on!’ He grinned across to the young woman in the regulation crisp white blouse and pleated skirt seated on Daniella’s other side, next to the centre aisle. Their eyes met and she nodded. The kid would do just fine, her look said. No tears or tantrums. The clean-cut young man returned her nod and sat back, folding his beefy arms.
Outwardly, Daniella seemed placid enough, her eyes dreamy and faraway, a small expectant smile on her face. During the day she’d taken three (or was it four?) melibrium, fed to her by her chaperones, and she felt slightly adrift from her surroundings, as if all this was happening at one remove. But her excitement was for real, because her mouth was parched dry and every now and then she had to take a huge gulp of air to steady herself. Not long now!
Conscious of this great honour, she was quietly determined not to let anyone down, especially after all the time and care they had taken with her appearance. They had brushed out her long gossamer-fine fair hair and gathered it with a garland of primroses at the nape of her neck. For hours they had worked on her face, reshaped and dyed her eyebrows, tinted her lashes, and applied a smooth coat of very pale make-up so that under the lights she would glow with a soft angelic radiance. Her lips were painted blush pink and lightly glossed. The cream satin dress they had chosen was tightly fitted over her breasts, with a wide oval neckline that barely covered her shoulders, and below the waist it comprised layer upon layer of cream organdie trailing almost to the floor, giving a semitransparent effect that would show the silhouettes of her long legs against the brightly lit backdrop. On her feet she wore satin slippers, rather like ballet pumps, trimmed with artificial primroses.
Looking at herself in the mirror, Daniella had been surprised to find that her final appearance reminded her of a bridesmaid – or even of the bride hers
elf.
She sat up straighter in her seat as the stage lights came back on, heart suddenly thumping like mad, her mother’s absence completely forgotten now. She had asked both her chaperones several times about Sarah, and their replies never varied. Not to worry, her mother would be around somewhere, they assured her with a smile, probably watching from a VIP booth at the back of the studio. And she would be so proud of her little girl, up there in front of millions of people. The main thing to remember, they emphasised, is that this is your moment, so go ahead and enjoy it.
Daniella jumped with shock as the introductory soundtrack of thudding drums and screeching guitars blasted out from the speakers. Rolling clouds of dry ice tumbled in from both sides of the stage. The platform in the centre began slowly to revolve. As the black staircase with its thousands of sparkling lights came into view, a squealing chorus of swooning lovesick cries shrilled through the auditorium.
Daniella’s left wrist was in the tight grip of the young woman, her right in the big freckled hand of the clean-cut young man. He put his lips to her ear.
‘Ready?’
Staring glassy-eyed at the stage, pupils dilated, breathing rapidly through flared nostrils, Daniella jerked her head up and then down again.
Palm trees were thrashing about in the wind whipping fiercely from the ocean. Some of their large green fronds had been torn off and sent whirling across the highway, and one of them plastered itself like a slimy sea creature against the passenger-side window of the Honda Civic. Cawdor had the wipers on fast speed, which was only just enough to give him adequate vision in the deluge of rain slanting in almost horizontally from right to left. A small bonus was that the atrocious conditions had cleared most of the traffic off 1-95. The foolhardy few braving the storm had their headlights on full beam, white fingers of light poking through a dense wall of lashing rain and flying vegetation.