“I just showed him something he wasn’t ready to see, and I doubt he’ll be back.” Coyote offered a slight shake of the head. “Please understand this is new to me, and I’m still learning. I truly didn’t know he would react so negatively.”
I struggled to write down as much as I could. Was that guy a plant, paid by Coyote to do what he just did? It seemed the only real explanation to me. But how did he throw up on command? How was he able to seem so completely terrified? I wished Emma were here; I felt an overwhelming need to talk to her.
“I haven’t spoken to God, in case that’s what you’re wondering. I’m not sure at all there is a God. I haven’t spoken to anyone except myself, a side of me that waited inside an untapped part of my brain my whole life. We all have it.” His words were slowly paced, his rhythm almost hypnotic. No one said anything. No one objected to what had just happened. No one else left the room. “Think of your brain as a tunnel, and your life of learning a slow dig through it, scooping out spoonfuls of dirt as the tunnel slowly expands. Far down your path, beyond miles of coarse dirt and rock, lies an opening. A chamber.” He paused for a sip of water, and I could discern the faintest beads of sweat on his forehead. “Inside this chamber are things almost inconceivable, treasures nearly beyond comprehension. Most people dig and scoop their entire lives and never come close to this chamber. I, however, broke through that final wall two months ago, and Jacob soon after. I can show each and every one of you how to reach it.”
I transcribed this whole speech, my pen writing as fast as my hand would allow. I could feel the air around me still even more, as if I were the only one in the darkened theater.
“But I won’t.”
I looked up and saw Coyote smile.
“I don’t want all of you, and I don’t need all of you,” he continued.
I saw a few people to my left exchange glances. I would call them confused, but I don’t think that word does it justice.
“I don’t want to start a cult. I want to start a church. A church of people who believe in themselves more than anything else, and have the ability to do exactly that. I want to share what I’ve learned, because I believe the . . . the revelation both Jacob and I have discovered is a key to advancing humankind.” Another smile, this one with a painful wince. “I know that’s an arrogant statement, but it’s true. Do I think we’re the only ones in the world who have discovered this? No, of course not. But we’ve discovered it for a reason, and we must use our new knowledge with responsibility. I must seek those who can be trusted with this new knowledge. These new powers.”
“What powers?”
The voice came from my left. It was the man I had spotted at the beginning of the evening—the only other one I could see who was also taking notes.
Coyote looked down at him, his gaze cutting a jagged swatch through the struggling light.
“Are you a reporter?”
“No.”
“Yet you’re taking notes.”
“As is he,” the man said, pointing to me. I was suddenly conscious of a room full of eyes on me.
“He is my secretary,” Coyote said. “His job is to record all of this.”
“For what purpose?”
I could see Coyote calculating.
“For me.”
Now everyone was eyeing the man, waiting to hear what he would ask next. The people immediately around him shifted their bodies away from him, as if any moment Coyote would make his head explode.
“I want to know about the powers,” he said.
“You want them, don’t you?”
“I suppose I would want to know what they are first.”
Coyote turned his back on us, took a few steps away on the stage, and turned around again. He brought the microphone up very close to his mouth, so his voice was gravelly and distorted. He was pushing his luck here with his showmanship, but he hadn’t yet turned into a carnival barker.
“I will show you something,” Coyote said. “I will show all of you, because unopened minds need a push. A nudge. Something to get them prepared for further levels of advancement. Without that stimulus, those minds never grow. But I will only show you once. That is all. Afterwards, many of you won’t accept what you have seen. But some of you, maybe even just one or two, will believe and will have taken the first small step to revelation. You are the people I am interested in.”
With that, Coyote looked up and gave a nod to the projection room. I turned and looked up, seeing Jacob’s face only for a moment before it disappeared back into the darkness of the small room.
The red velvet curtain behind Coyote began to rise, looking like a wall of lava creeping back up into the mouth of a volcano. When the curtain completed its journey, the projector from Jacob’s lair shot out a bright white beam, illuminating the screen behind Coyote.
Coyote didn’t turn to watch. Instead, he watched us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
A crisp image came to life on the screen. It was the cover of the New York Times, dated back in January, during the time Coyote and Jacob had been missing. Slowly, the shaky camera zoomed out from the paper and pointed up to the man holding it. Coyote’s face filled the screen, his cheeks and chin coated in a week-old beard. He looked both exhausted and elated. He was outside somewhere. A forest.
I realized they had shot this during their ten-day exodus. They must have purchased a video camera along the way because I had never seen either Jacob or Coyote with one in the apartment. Jacob, it seemed, was the cameraman for this production.
“This is because people need proof,” the Coyote on the video announced. I could see the frost of his words ghost around him as he spoke. “Dismiss it if you want. Believe it if you want. All I ask is you open your minds and your eyes, and you take in what is possible.” With that, Coyote gave a brief nod to the camera, telling Jacob that he was ready. Jacob zoomed out a bit more and panned the camera a few degrees to the right, revealing a large tree in the foreground. It was large and old, rising at least forty feet out of the ground.
Suddenly the camera wobbled and it became clear Jacob was setting it down on a makeshift tripod. Then Jacob came into view, his clothes tattered and filthy, his skin gray and sallow, his hair showing the believable effect of sleeping outdoors in the dirt. The two men looked at each other, and then Coyote reached out with his right hand, which Jacob grasped.
Then, they closed their eyes.
What happened next did so without much fanfare, which only added to the spectacle. Jacob and Coyote stood there, eyes closed, hands locked, facing that old tree.
The camera started to shake.
Then the tree started to move.
The tree itself—so deeply rooted into the depth of the forest floor—started to shake. Just a little, at first, but within seconds the shaking tuned violent. Birds scattered to the sky as smaller branches snapped and rained to the ground. The rumbling grew, like a thousand buffalo stampeding toward them. Then the earth around the base of the tree heaved upwards and the tree itself—this massive life form, which had probably been growing for decades—began to slowly lift from the ground.
Its tangled roots ripped through the soil and became exposed to sunlight. They looked like an unearthed nest of snakes, white and vulnerable, writhing in protest. Rocks and dirt scattered, and above the din in the video I could hear birds screeching to each other, raising the alarm for something they couldn’t possibly understand. Coyote and Jacob remained completely still.
The tree hovered above the hole beneath it, its roots barely touching the ground, the weight of the tree apparently supported by nothing other than the thoughts of the men standing before it. The tree levitated as Coyote had: impossibly, yet without question. On the video, Coyote gave a nod and opened his eyes. The tree crashed to the earth, where it briefly stood upright before falling backwards, crashing through smaller trees before bringing forth a concussion of soil as it smashed into the forest floor.
Coyote turned to Jacob, who was now bent over
the earth, and asked him if he was okay. Jacob nodded, opened his eyes, and then immediately dropped to his knees and dry heaved, his empty stomach revolting but producing no fruits of its labors. He crawled off-camera.
A tight shot of the fallen tree followed, accompanied by a slow pan out, revealing a profile shot of Coyote, who, on the video, seemed to be something beyond what he once and ever was. His face seemed frozen in time as he stared at something far in the distance, beyond the forest, beyond anything.
The video stopped. The curtain fell almost immediately. Coyote stood there on the stage and looked at us—at me.
I hadn’t taken a single note. The lights in the theater grew but remained dim.
“Underneath your seats are pads of paper and pens,” he said.
There was a ruffle of noise as everyone checked.
“If you’re interested in learning more about what I have learned, I want you to write down your name and phone number on the first sheet.” Coyote paced back and forth on the stage like a caged animal. “On the second sheet, I want you to write down the most terrifying thing you have ever seen. Not in a movie. Real life. Tell me the memory that still haunts you the most.”
He paused, as if considering what to say next.
“I will only choose a handful. You’ll be contacted. Don’t try to contact myself or Jacob directly.”
The lights exploded to full intensity. Without saying anything else, Coyote walked off the stage.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I sat there for a moment and watched. Some people got up and immediately walked out, but I was surprised to see most of them actually writing on the notepads. I reached down and found the pad and pen under my own seat and looked at that top blank page for a moment.
What is the memory that still haunts you?
I knew immediately the answer to that question. But I had never as much as breathed a word of it to anyone, much less written it down. Maybe this is where and when I finally did that, told the world—really, just Coyote—what had happened to me. I wouldn’t sign it; hell, I’d even disguise my handwriting. If I wrote it out, would there be a weight lifted off me?
I stared at the blank pad. I flipped past the first sheet, with no intention of writing my name.
Fuck it, this will be good for me, I thought. If anything real comes out of this bizarre night, let it be this message in a bottle.
I scribbled as fast as I could.
I was molested by my elementary school teacher when I was seven. It happened in the school. The storage closet. The memory that haunts me most is his breath on my neck.
I stared at the words and soaked them in. Seeing them didn’t have the impact I expected. I felt neither better nor worse for having written them. I just felt empty.
I tore the page off, wadded it up, then put it in my coat pocket. On the way out of the theater, I found a trash can full of similar crumpled sheets and added mine to the pile.
Outside, the cold air slapped my face and gave me a rush that I needed after whatever the hell I had just watched in there. I had either watched something truly phenomenal or a very elaborate con job. My gut said the latter, but my desperate hope was for the former. Don’t we all want to be part of something truly special?
“Harden.”
I turned and saw the man who had spoken up in the meeting. He stood in a heavy overcoat still holding onto his notepad and pen. He took a step forward and extended his gloved hand to me.
“Mike Barrillo.”
I shook his hand and said nothing. How did he know my name?
“Wiley is your roommate, correct?”
Again, I didn’t respond. I hadn’t heard anyone say Coyote’s real name in some time.
“Can we talk for a couple of minutes?” he asked.
“About what?”
“I’m intrigued by your friend.” A decades-old streetlight threw off an orangish glow, the light impeded by an old warehouse that, until recently, housed a nightclub but now sat empty. We stood in the building’s night shadow, which made everything feel even colder.
“Many people are,” I responded, not knowing what else to say.
“How long have you known him?”
“Who are you? And how do you know my name?”
“I need to know more. That’s why I came tonight.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Look, Harden. I’ll give you a little bit of info, if you give me some.”
I paused. “Maybe.”
Barrillo did a quick glance to his right and left. Who was he worried about hearing us?
“I’m not a student,” he said.
“Yeah, I figured.”
“I know. Probably obvious, huh?”
“Are you a reporter?” It wasn’t inconceivable that Tillman’s tiny local paper might bother with a human interest piece on Coyote.
“In a way.” He nodded at the notepad in my hand. “I suppose in the same way you are.”
“I was only there taking notes.”
“So was I. In your case,” he said, pointing a thick finger at me, “you were taking notes for Wiley. In my case, I was taking notes for someone else.”
“Who?”
“Your turn,” he said, shifting his tone. “How long have you known Wiley?”
“Only since last August.”
“And how long have you known Jacob?”
“Couple of years more.”
“And Jacob has known Wiley as long as you?”
“As far as I know.”
His eyes widened a fraction. “Why do you say that? You think it’s possible they’ve known each other longer and kept that a secret from you?”
I didn’t think that at all. Still, I don’t know why I had answered like that. “No,” I said. “But Coyote’s life is built around secrets, so one more wouldn’t surprise me. My turn.”
“All right,” Barrillo said.
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve been asked to collect information on your friend Wiley.”
“You said that already. By whom?”
Even in the shadow of the old theater, I could see Barrillo shifting his eyes back and forth in the dark. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket, and in a momentary rush of senseless panic, I thought he was going to pull a gun on me. Or a knife. But when he held out his hand I saw instead a dark leather billfold. Barrillo flicked it open and extended his arm so his hand trespassed into the streetlight. Something glimmered, and I could see it was a shield of sorts. A badge.
“Harden, I work for the government.”
“Government?” I looked down to the badge, but it had already disappeared back inside Barrillo’s coat pocket.
“I work for the FBI. Desk jockey. Securities fraud. I was pulled out of that for a while to work on this. Wiley caught the attention of somebody high up. It has something to do with his father.”
“What does his father do?”
Barrillo gave me another crooked grin, but not one that gave any sense of comfort.
“He really does keep secrets from you, doesn’t he? Wiley’s father is one of the biggest crooks of his generation.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I didn’t go back home, at least not immediately. I only spent a few more minutes with Barrillo, telling him I didn’t have time to talk, and maybe we could set up another time. Truth was, I freaked out. I mean, I had no idea if the man was even telling me the truth, and if he was, did I really want to chance Coyote walking out of that theater and spotting me talking to an FBI agent, one who was trying to bust his father?
I burrowed my hands in my coat pocket, put my face down out of the direct path of the bitter wind, and went straight to the library where I worked. It was nearly empty. I chatted up Margie who was working and told her I needed to use the LexisNexis database, to which those of us who worked at the reference desk had login access.
I needed to find out about Alastair Martin, Coyote’s father.
The only time Coyote had e
ver mentioned him was when he told us the story about killing that boy in the woods. I barely had an impression about his father other than he seemed nice enough to take his son camping and buy fancy new walkie-talkies from Sharper Image. But I learned much more of him from a two-year-old Business Week profile of the man. He was both new and old money, the old coming from generations of West Virginia coal-mine operations. The new came from speculative venture-capital investments in a variety of start-ups, none of which I had ever heard of. All of the companies had long since folded after being sold by Alastair for high profits based on prospectuses, that, the article insinuated, were nothing more than high-quality fiction.
Another article had the acronym RICO only four words away from Alastair’s name. RICO was the fancy term for racketeering. Racketeering was the fancy term for being mobbed up.
Back in the apartment I wrote and wrote. Neither Coyote nor Jacob had returned, so I locked my bedroom door, sat at my computer, and transcribed all of my notes from the evening, adding to them the detail of the video and also every bit of my conversation with Mike Barrillo. When I was finished, I saved the file under an innocuous name and password-protected it. Then I saved a copy to a floppy drive and placed that under my mattress.
I chanced a call to Emma. It wasn’t likely Coyote was over there, but if he was, I could just say I was looking for him. I had to talk to her, and, in fact, had been wanting to all night but needed to get my thoughts down before I lost the clarity of the evening’s events. She sounded sleepy, and I looked down at the clock on my computer and realized it was after midnight.
“Hi, baby,” she said. With that one word I knew she was alone. “How was it tonight?”
I told her everything, start to finish. When I finished, she asked me a slew of questions about the video and Coyote, none of which I felt I had any kind of good answer to.
Then she asked more about Barrillo. “Do you think he really was an FBI agent?”
“I have no idea. Why would he be someone else?”
Revelation Page 17