Fury and the Power

by Farris, John

  THE FURY AND THE POWER

  By John Farris

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 Penny Dreadful, LLC

  Copy-edited by: Kurt M. Criscione

  Cover design by: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  John Lee Farris (born 1936) is an American writer, known largely for his work in the southern Gothic genre. He was born 1936 in Jefferson City, Missouri, to parents John Linder Farris (1909–1982) and Eleanor Carter Farris (1905–1984). Raised in Tennessee, he graduated from Central High School in Memphis and attended Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis. His first wife, Kathleen, was the mother of Julie Marie, John, and Jeff Farris; his second wife, Mary Ann Pasante, was the mother of Peter John ("P.J.") Farris.

  Apart from his vast body of fiction, his work on motion picture screenplays includes adaptations of his own books (i.e., The Fury), original scripts, and adaptations of the works of others (such as Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man). He wrote and directed the film Dear Dead Delilah in 1973. He has had several plays produced off-Broadway, and also paints and writes poetry. At various times he has made his home in New York, southern California and Puerto Rico; he now lives near Atlanta, Georgia.

  Author's Website – Furies & Fiends

  Other John Farris books currently available or coming soon from Crossroad Press:

  All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

  Catacombs

  Dragonfly

  Fiends

  King Windom

  Minotaur

  Nightfall

  Phantom Nights

  Sacrifice

  Sharp Practice

  Shatter

  Solar Eclipse

  Son of the Endless Night

  Soon She Will Be Gone

  The Axeman Cometh

  The Captors

  The Fury

  The Fury and the Power

  The Fury and the Terror

  The Ransome Women

  Unearthly (formerly titled The Unwanted)

  When Michael Calls

  Wildwood

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  For David Schow

  Thanks, David

  The story of the lion that attacked an elephant and paid for it I've adapted from a similar anecdote in Katy Payne's very good book Silent Thunder, recommended not only for its wealth of information about elephant families and social groups, but because it is wonderfully written.

  The aphorist Lewis Gruvver is quoting on page 64 is the early Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria.

  PART ONE

  MONTH OF THE BLOOD MOON

  WHEN ITS TIME HAS ARRIVED,

  THE PREY COMES TO THE HUNTER.

  —PERSIAN PROVERB

  Chapter 1

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  OCTOBER 9

  8.44 P.M. EDT

  Just before his throat was torn out by a husky teenage boy he had never seen before, the Reverend Pledger Lee Skeldon had been distracted from the task of his lifetime—wresting souls from the wiles of the devil and delivering them to the lamb of God—by the face of a quietly ecstatic, weeping girl in the crowd of mostly young people filling a carpeted space in front of the arena's temporary stage. Waiting, like all of the others, for the touch of the evangelist's hand and, perhaps, a personal message at this time of their rebirth in Christ Jesus.

  Fifteen thousand souls. Dating couples, pensioners, drifters off the street, bus loads from tiny communities as far away as Arkansas or the hollows of Appalachia. Admission free.

  The arena lights were purposely low. A follow spot channeled Pledger Lee's own presence. There still were streams of people in the aisles above him, coming down to the arena floor in response to his call. He looked up for a few moments, closed his eyes. He had poured himself out to them and now stood emptied to the naive, fevered emotions they returned to him. His pulses tingled. His heart quaked from their heat.

  When again he looked down and directly into the face of the girl, he was certain that he was seeing Pearl Lee, his youngest daughter.

  That would have been a miracle to reckon with: Pearl Lee had been lost to the family for more than two years. She had drowned while on a kayaking trip with other Teen-Lifers on North Georgia's Ocoee River. Six hours had passed before her body, wedged upside down by the gushing weight of the water and deep between boulders in a narrow chute of the river, could be recovered.

  Pearl Lee was buried in the hilltop cemetery beside the Baptist church in Georgia's Blue Ridge country where Pledger, when he was little more than a child, had received his call to preach. Therefore her weeping appearance before him on this night, flesh and blood though she seemed to be, was an illusion, a trick of his wearied mind.

  Pledger Lee was finishing a demanding schedule with this final meeting of his Christian Triumph Revival Crusade at Philips Arena, and he was exhausted. Yes—an illusion, an apparition produced by the sharp-edged grief he'd thought was also buried in the density of time behind him. Yet as he reached out to her, oblivious of the young man moving in close to him on his left side, another thought transfixed the evangelist: perhaps this was the work of the Evil One traditional theology identified as Satan, but whom Pledger Lee knew by another name.

  The young man who attacked and killed the evangelist was Jimmy Nixon, sixteen, of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Lived there with his divorced mother, a travel agent, and two younger siblings. Jimmy was, as the subsequent police investigation made clear, known for his cheerful disposition and athletic ability. Didn't drink, didn't do drugs. He had never been much of a churchgoer, so it had been something of a surprise to his mom when Jimmy mentioned after dinner that he was going to drive downtown, alone, to take in a revival meeting.

  Jimmy was muscular, carrying 220 pounds on a six-foot frame. Pledger Lee was no lightweight, but he was totally unprepared for a maniacal onslaught. Also unprepared was Smith Ballew, the Christian Triumph Revival's Chief of Security, who, in crowd situations, always positioned himself a couple of feet to the evangelist's right, studying the faces of those within arm's reach. Any public figure attracts head cases, some of whom might be dangerous, but Ballew had seldom encountered problems with the faithful: invariably those who came down to the floor of whatever venue they were in to accept Christ's blood as absolution for their trifling sins were either in a subdued, worshipful mood or tearfully rejoicing, floating free as balloons from sinks of despond.

  There was nothing about Jimmy Nixon (Ballew would recall, when his short-term memory was restored) that agitated his curiosity or put him on alert. Jimmy's rusty hair was quite short, like a number-two buzz, growing in after a ritual head shaving at his high school's football camp in mid-August. A deep summer's tan was only beginning to fade from his skin this second week in October, leaving a dark scatter of freckles and pink peel spots across his snub nose and forehead. Dry-looking lips were slightly parted over white teeth girded in metal braces. His eyes were pale, almost an incandescent blue, and (Ballew realized he should have made more of this passing observation) they had no more expressi
on than the eyes of a well-mounted trophy head in spite of the intense atmosphere following the evangelist's message. (Only Pledger Lee Skeldon knew that he believed very little of what he had been preaching for the last ten years, the myths of a two-thousand-year-old religion, albeit a religion that still satisfied most hungers of the spirit. That was the reason why he was still in the Gospel Game. If he preached what he did know to be the truth about Good and Evil and the potential fate of humanity, he would have been shut up in an asylum long ago. So he had learned to live with his loss of faith and the assumption of a vital duty.)

  Pledger Lee was sixty-five years old, still with an eagle's darkling authority. His long legs were tired, and his knees ached. He wore rimless bifocals. His throat was dry after deliverance of hellfire (in that he certainly could believe, amen). There was a hard pulse in his carotid artery, which lay, as it did in all human beings, less than half an inch below the loose skin and thin flesh of his throat. The pulse may have been visible to the boy who killed him, an irresistible beacon to the metaled teeth.

  Before biting, however, Jimmy Nixon seized the evangelist's trachea with the strong fingers of his right hand, rupturing the larynx even as he was forcing Pledger Lee backward against the hip-high, carpeted edge of the stage. Onstage and close by, two of the evangelist's adult daughters, Penny Lee and Piper Lee, were singing the Christian Triumph Revival's signature hymn ("Praise Jesus, I'm Born Again"), in concert with two of Christian Gospel's most popular male personalities.

  Piper Lee happened to be looking at her father as she paused before resuming harmony; she let out a scream that cut through the hush of the arena like the clang of a fallen bell. Smith Ballew attempted to get a grip on Jimmy Nixon and pull him away from the preacher. It was like trying to budge a steel pillar bolted to the arena floor. The boy reacted by striking Ballew with an elbow between his eyes. Ballew landed, unconscious, on the back of his neck.

  Two more security men lunged through the crowd of seekers, most of whom were stark-still from terror. One of the men leaped on Nixon's broad back as he hunched over his victim. Penny Lee joined her sister in screaming into their open mikes. A prickling current of fear illuminated the body of the congregation. Nearly all of them had a good view of the scuffle below, although it was difficult to comprehend just what was happening.

  Pledger Lee, the upper half of his body jammed against the lip of the stage, looked up through skewed glasses at the faces of his daughters. Stunned by the attack, he knew only that he couldn't breathe. If he'd had a coherent thought at this moment it might have been: I am going to die like the others.

  Whatever his thoughts, recognition flickered in his mind like a will-o'-the-wisp as the boy's face moved to within a couple of inches of his.

  If he was aware of the efforts exerted to pry him loose from Pledger Lee Skeldon, whose gristly windpipe was still locked in his right hand, Jimmy Nixon didn't show it.

  "You know who I am," he said to the evangelist.

  No one else, in the frenzy of the moment, recalled hearing Jimmy speak. Possibly Pledger Lee himself, so close to the eerie deadness of the boy's face, didn't hear him either.

  But he already knew.

  A member of the security detail was flailing at the attacker's shoulders with a telescoping baton. Another worked on Jimmy's waistline and the backs of his knees. It was as if the boy could feel no pain. Didn't know he was squirting urine from wrecked kidneys. Jimmy jerked his right fist sharply, like opening a stuck gate, uprooting the preacher's trachea and stems of bronchi from the lungs. At the same time Jimmy bit deeply into Pledger Lee's throat, severing the flimsy artery. Piper Lee, on her hands and knees a few feet away, fingernails in the carpet as she implored Jimmy to leave her father alone, was splashed by his lifeblood; it covered her face like a shroud.

  Jimmy Nixon was still into Pledger Lee's neck when an arena rent-a-cop imprudently delivered a solid blow to the back of Jimmy's head, driving shards of skull into the hindbrain. Jimmy's body vibrated; he lost his grip on the preacher and was dragged away from him, handcuffed.

  With no one to support him, Pledger Lee slumped to the floor, hands patting his body down as if he were trying to put out a fire; but it was the storm from his heart blowing unchecked through the rent throat that quickly did him in.

  No one thought to dim the rainbow cross of lights still trained on the evangelist. Or turn off the cameras that were recording his death, the shrieks of those compelled to watch it.

  Chapter 2

  "SHUNGWAYA"

  LAKE NAIVASHA, KENYA

  OCTOBER 10

  0310 HOURS ZULU

  Eden Waring awoke as darkness began to leave the sky, earth's purification ritual, brief quiet time of renewal before the storming of the birds. Hibiscus flowers outside her windows had not yet unfurled in huge crimson splashes against screens fogged by their golden pollen. The short rains from the south hadn't materialized in this autumn of a third drought year, adding to the woes of a nation whose prosperity and infrastructure had been steadily crumbling for two decades.

  There was a morning chill at this altitude in the Great Rift Valley, gusts of wind across the valley floor and the dwindling freshwater lake. On the wind, the primary odors of what remained of primeval East Africa—of herds and their fresh scrape, of sage, resin, jasmine; of wood embers still containing heat from last night's cook fire in the pit outside the kitchen pavilion.

  The estate, now a game reserve, had been established by Tom Sherard's grandfather after the First World War and named by him "Shungwaya," after an ancient, possibly mythical southern Somalian kingdom of great power and prestige.

  Tom and Joseph Nkambe had left before moonrise to destroy a leopard that had killed the ten-year-old daughter of a Masai ranger in Hell's Gate Park. Although there were, as usual, houseguests to be entertained, Eden had been inclined to invite herself to the blind that the men had constructed at some distance from where the leopard was laying up in daylight, a kopje Tom had discovered after days of patient tracking. She was also curious to see the leopard's pug marks although Tom, after looking at one of her careful drawings, had told her the footprint of the leopard was not the mark that had been showing up in her dreams.

  In Africa, Tom's mother had written in one of her journals, treasures that he had generously shared with Eden, there is always too much to see when you are awake. Dreams are the refreshments of the weary eye, as well as the actuality of other layers of existence—fantastic, subtle, strange—here in this valley where human life on earth began.

  His mother, dead at a time when he was barely old enough to remember her. In photographs she had a lanky frame, close-cropped copper-red hair, some cheekbone pitting from acne, a long face, a tentative smile, a gravely inquiring manner. Tom was almost a replica except for complexion and something more aggressive in the hard jaw line, his father's long gaze and weathered durability.

  "What else have you been dreaming about?" Sherard had asked Eden, with a hint of caution—or fear of trespass—in his gray eyes. They'd had four months to get to know each other; still he was not altogether at ease with Eden, daughter of the woman he had loved. Or, more exactly, he was not comfortable with Eden's wild talent and the destiny it proposed.

  You, she might have responded, but she didn't want to attempt an explanation. Her feelings for him were complicated. He was almost her father, although they shared no blood. Under different circumstances—she was willing to acknowledge, but only to herself, this sensual irritant in the heart, like the grain of sand the oyster must make into a pearl—they easily could have been lovers. But it was enough, common sense demanded, that she owed him her life.

  Also Tom belonged to Bertie Nkambe, and Bertie to Tom, as surely as if they were already married. And Bertie, another wild talent, had become Eden's best friend and advisor during Eden's period of recovery and reconciliation with herself at the Naivasha game reserve.

  She still faithfully recorded every dream in her dream book, now volume number seven.
A habit she'd imposed upon herself in childhood, now unbreakable. Hundreds of pages of dreams—mundane, perplexing, and (sometimes) prophetic. Only with Bertie was she willing to share their imagery and symbolism.

  Bertie hadn't read much into the recurring dream of pug marks.

  "Cheetahs, lions, even leopards—you see them almost every day. No wonder you dream about them. So do I, sometimes?"

  "Yeah, but—this cat's different."

  "What does it look like?"

  "I don't know yet. I haven't seen it. I only know that when I do—it'll be different."

  "Well—there's tigers. But there are no tigers in Africa, not in the wild. Maybe two thousand years ago, in an Emir's menagerie."

  "This cat's not in a zoo or in the wild. It's—"

  In my head.

  Sitting up in near-darkness in the four-poster bed draped in blowsy mosquito netting, Eden shuddered. She habitually slept in a man's extra-large flannel shirt, but with that and the down-filled comforter on the bed, still she was cold to the bone. The guest bungalow in which she lived was one of the oldest at Shungwaya, and it lacked central heating. There was in her bedroom an eighteenth-century Austrian ceramic stove, delivered long ago by ox wagon from the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, but sleeping with a mutamayo fire going (from the wood of the wild olive tree) gave her a stuffy nose.

  It wasn't only the chilly dawn that had her shivering. The pug marks that had appeared in her most recent dream had been in an unfamiliar place, not alongside an African streambed or by a salt lick. She had seen these marks very clearly; they glowed in dim light on the marble steps of a staircase. The steps ascended to a gold-toned portal of great age and narrow doors. All of it, the plain gray building, the wide stairs, seemed vaguely to have a religious significance.