Yep, that was Mom, all right.
The sun bled into Red Peak’s crown. The final test awaited. Angela had told her to be ready to run. Beth shivered. She didn’t want a nail in her foot. Her parents were suffering, and she hated the idea of leaving them uncared for, even a single night. She still wasn’t even sure Daddy and Angela were right.
Mom shuffled across the ground in silent determination. Beth guessed the only thing keeping her on her feet was her faith.
In the mess hall, the congregation sat in an exhausted silence at their tables. Almost all missed parts of themselves. A hand, a foot, an eye. Faces pale or feverish. The wounds wept and emitted a sour, rotten stench.
Beth helped her parents sit with David’s family. Angela caught her eye and nodded. David stared at his lap and breathed in shallow gasps, ready to bolt at the slightest provocation. Beth glanced at what was left of their mother’s face and turned away in horror.
Flanked by the elders, Jeremiah Peale rose from his seat. His trademark grin had departed long ago, his hair a tangled mess on his forehead. “Brothers and sisters, friends of the Spirit, I welcome you to our last supper.”
The Family stirred at these words. Beth and Angela exchanged a wide-eyed glance. The elders stood to serve the day’s meal.
“We have taken a long, hard journey together,” he boomed. “I look around this room, I see so many good people, so much sacrifice and strength. Your faith fills me with awe. I have spoken to the Spirit, and it is pleased. The time has come for you to claim your heavenly prize. You did it. I love you all so much.”
The congregation broke into smiles. Many wept.
“All along, we weren’t waiting for God,” he went on. “He was waiting for us. After supper, you will go to the Temple, shed your mortal coil, and ascend.”
“It’s happening,” Daddy murmured. “They’re going to kill us.”
“You have purified yourselves for the ascension. All except me. You may have wondered how I would repent for my great sin. You may have wondered what I would sacrifice. You may have wondered if I was shirking my duty. There is no need to wonder any longer. The Spirit told me how I am to atone for my sin.”
Tears streamed down the man’s broad face.
Even from where she sat, Beth could see the man shaking.
“I’m not coming with you,” he said. “Like Moses, who led the chosen people to the Promised Land, only to be denied himself. This is to be my punishment for my lack of faith. Tonight, I will enter the black sea, but I will not reach the other side.”
Wails filled the room.
“Do not cry for me! I will obey the Spirit now as I did then. When we suffer, we do it with joy. We obey. After supper, I will make the last climb up the holy mountain. I need three strong men to help me. Who will help their pastor?”
Nobody answered.
Everyone wanted to help, but they knew what he was asking.
“Please,” he said.
He needed three men to help him die.
At last, Mr. Sumner stood. “I’ll go with you, Reverend.”
Jeremiah offered a weak smile. “Thank you, Phil. And bless you.”
A plate clattered in front of Beth. A handful of cold ravioli. She swept her fork from the table and wolfed it down, finishing by licking the plate clean.
Her mother pushed her own meal toward Beth, who didn’t want to take it but did. She devoured that meager portion too, unable to control herself. Then her father’s, while Daddy rubbed her back and watched her eat with a pained smile.
“You’ll need your strength,” he murmured in her ear. “You’ll know what to do. When you get the chance to go, you take it. You run and don’t stop running.”
Beth nodded, but he was wrong. She wasn’t at all sure what she would do.
Jeremiah’s voice cracked with emotion as he thanked his last volunteer. “I love you all. Because of you, I will enter paradise in your hearts. Pray for me then as you do now. I have two more tasks, and then my ministry is complete.”
He hauled a bucket in front of the nearest table and bent down. Soaking a sponge, he began to wash his weeping congregants’ feet.
This was his goodbye.
Beth cried and couldn’t stop, even when it was her turn, as he gently washed her feet for her last walk to the Temple.
She put her hands on his head. “I love you, Reverend.”
Insane or not, she did.
He smiled and moved on to Deacon, who lunged at him for a hug.
The rest played out like a familiar dream. The Reverend left with three strong men to make his final climb up the finished stairs. Hammering rang through the night, followed by a distant scream carried on the wind. A crimson glow appeared like a signal along Red Peak’s summit. Shepherd Wright led the congregation to the Temple, where they accepted the blood of Christ.
Then almost everyone she knew died.
The Family of the Living Spirit fell where they stood, thudding to the floor to convulse in agony as the cyanide crushed their organs. The air filled with choking, breathless gasps. Mr. Preston exploded with vomit and pitched forward. Mrs. Chapman lay in the aisle, mouth foaming, slapping and kicking at the floor as the poison squeezed her life from her. Mrs. Blanchard bolted to slam her face into a wall.
“Now,” her father said. “Run as fast as you can.”
His last words.
Mom put her arm around Beth’s shoulders and hugged her as Daddy fell, thrashing and keening through clenched teeth. Her hand settled on the back of Beth’s neck. Her grip tightened.
Beth gasped. “I love you Mom please don’t I’ll be good I promise I’ll be good I don’t want to die—”
Mom raised the knife to deliver her to Heaven.
“Don’t.” Beth struggled, but Mom but wouldn’t let go of the tight hold she had on her neck. “Please, don’t.”
Mom didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer.
Gunshots roared outside.
“I’m begging you, Mom. Please stop. Please. I don’t want this.”
The blaze in her mother’s eyes clouded, turned to love and something else, disappointment. Hand trembling, she lowered the knife.
Then swept it across her own throat.
Hot blood sprayed across Beth’s face, and she lunged forward to hug her mother, screaming for help.
Beth collapsed with her to the floor, Mom’s body like a blanket. Blood seeped into Beth’s ears, muting the final agonizing, strangled cries of the Family of the Living Spirit.
She blanked out.
She had no idea how long she lay there. Covered by her mother, there was no need to ever move again.
After a while, a pair of boots thudded on the floorboards. A gun banged, impossibly loud. Then more steps, followed by another shot.
At last, the gun banged a final time, and a body toppled to the floor.
Silence returned, deafening from the ring in her ears.
More time passed, but Beth didn’t sleep nor was she fully awake, instead caught suspended in time, unable to face the past or the future. Frozen like the dead around her.
Her mother stirred.
Mom?
The body trembled until it was shaking, as if seized by the Spirit one last time.
Mom was alive.
The weight lifted from Beth as the body began to rise. She gaped in terror and awe as her mother hovered above her, long hair streaming down, eyes closed in beatific sleep, the deep slash along her throat winking and dripping.
Beth rose to her knees and wiped blood from her eyes. All around her, the bodies of the Family ascended in a blinding red light throbbing through the windows.
Slowly, she reached for her mother. “Mom?”
The Temple shook as the horn blasted the Judgment.
Beth cried out, her voice lost in the roar.
The end of the world.
Eyes fixed in sightless stares or closed as if in sleep, hands splayed or waving, bodies arched or curled or floating face down, the Family of the Living Spirit bobbed in
the air for one final moment.
Then they hurtled crashing through pews and spinning through space to burst through the window and disappear in the night.
Beth emerged from her trance shaking. “Oh, God. Oh my God.”
James handed her his wineglass. “Drink some of this.”
She was in Santa Barbara. This was her condo. She was nearly thirty years old, a clinical psychologist with a budding, successful practice. For fifteen years, she’d repressed what had happened at the Temple and with meticulous care built a life on top of it, one in which she had control and rarely looked back at her beginning.
It was all a lie.
She gulped the wine and came up for air with a gasp. “Do you know?”
“You talked the entire time,” James said. “The mystery does not want to come out. You substituted a very real ascension for what happened. An incredibly vivid hallucination. Fascinating.”
“Fascinating,” she muttered, a dull echo.
“Your mother took her own life instead of yours. In the end, she just couldn’t do it. Her faith so strong she finished the job on herself, her maternal instinct so strong she couldn’t hurt you. That had an incredible impact on you.”
“Impact.” She chewed on the word and tasted ash.
He jumped to his feet, pacing. “We have two choices, Beth. We can keep digging until the truth breaks through the fantasy, or we can grind down the fantasy at the edges by trying to interpret it. What do you think?”
“What do I think?”
James stopped and peered at her through his glasses. “I need to hear from you how you’d like to proceed. Personally, I recommend another dig.”
She stared at him. “You want me to proceed.”
“Yes.” Studying her blank expression, he seemed less certain now. “I assume you’re still committed to your treatment?”
Beth wagged her head as she stood and looked around again at her condo. Clean and antiseptic. Calming art on the walls, the furniture arranged for feng shui. Everything in its proper place.
“Hey, talk to me. Are you okay?”
The wineglass snapped in her grip. The bulb and stem shattered on the floor. She gazed in fascination as wine and blood mixed together in her palm.
“I’ll get you…” He took a step toward the kitchen but stopped. “Beth, I need to know if you’re all right.”
Outside, the lights of Santa Barbara glittered in front of a horizon black with dark mountains. She caught her reflection in the glass, ethereal as a ghost, as she crossed to her bookshelves. Wine and blood dripped from her fist.
The blood of Christ. The Reverend’s voice now. Shed for you.
Books crammed the shelves, venerable tomes that together provided an evolving instruction manual for the mechanics and malfunctions of the human mind. A defective mind that created the universe by perceiving it.
Beth gripped a handful of this knowledge and flung it to the floor.
“Liars,” she said.
“What?”
Reaching behind the row of books, she swept it all in a crash of paper. “Lies. All of it. Bullshit and lies.”
He raised his hands in a defensive posture. “You’re scaring me, Beth.”
She straightened her back. “James. James? Listen to me.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“I am upset by what I saw, and I need to act out.”
“Yes, but we should—”
“No,” she said. “We shouldn’t. I need to be alone so I can come to terms with what I experienced. Then I will phone you next week to discuss treatment options.”
James eyed her warily. “That sounds reasonable.”
“Because it is. Now please leave so I can process my feelings in a safe environment.”
“You’ll call me next week?”
“Absolutely. This was a breakthrough. I’ll consider the options you outlined.”
“Okay.” He pulled on his coat and hesitated. “Your hand…”
“I’ll be fine, James. Good night. Thank you for everything.”
He nodded. “Good night.”
The door closed.
With calm, methodical precision, Beth walked along her bookshelves and toppled the rest of the false prophets to the floor.
She’d never call James again. She had no further use for him. The man had achieved a solution to the mystery only to ignore it staring him right in the face, because it didn’t fit his reality.
She’d ignore it no longer. The Reverend had been right all along. The Family had ascended, just as they’d planned. Their faith had taken them all to paradise.
She had to go back to Red Peak, and do it now. Nothing else mattered in this illusion she’d constructed. For fifteen years, the truth had tried to chew its way out of her. On the holy mountain, she’d discover it once and for all.
Beth hadn’t survived the Family of the Living Spirit’s final night.
She might have been left behind.
19
ATONE
Cradling a Nerf football, David walked along the sidewalk with his kids skipping behind him. They needed a little exercise away from their screens. He needed to avoid Claire and the conversation she wanted to have with him.
The sun beat down on Fresno, its heat rippling over the street. Birds and insects hummed in trees and flower beds. Water sprinklers shimmied on lawns dotted with palm trees. Otherwise, the neighborhood was quiet, this being a weekday. He hated being away from his children, but one of the good things about his and Claire’s jobs was when they weren’t traveling, they were home.
As August wore on, the kids had started to go feral after weeks of summer camps and trips to the water park and neighborhood pool, the result of too much of a good thing. They were ready to go back to school and its structured routines. Now they bickered over nothing as usual, simply for the fun of it even though it would likely end in tears. He hoped they’d be better friends later in life, and not end tense phone calls with, You’re all I have left.
As their voices escalated to draw him into their fight, he said, “You know, it doesn’t get any better than this.”
“It’d be way better if Dexter would shut up,” Alyssa muttered.
“Or if you weren’t so stupid,” her brother shot back.
“I’m serious,” David said. “It’s a beautiful day, and we have nothing to do except have some fun. When you’re my age, you’ll remember every bad thing that ever happened to you. Try to remember today.”
“If it’s so good, why do you look so sad?” Alyssa asked him.
“Because the good doesn’t always last.” When he was her age, he’d watched trains disappear into the tunnel at the Tehachapi Loop. “That’s why you should enjoy it.”
“I have a great life, Daddy,” Dexter said.
Alyssa guffawed. “It’d be perfect—”
The boy shot into the park, yelling, “I’m open!”
The park was actually the fenced grounds of a school, which offered its broad lawn and playground to the public. A few small children played on the jungle gyms and swings. David waited for the right moment and then fired the Nerf across the lawn. The football arced into the sun before bouncing off the boy’s face. Arms flailing, Dexter went down in a comical tumble.
After glancing over his son to make sure he was all right, David chuckled. “Catch with your hands next time, Dex.”
Laughing, the kid hurled the ball, which landed near David’s feet. He scooped it up, enjoying himself already. Nothing like some honest exercise to flush the noise out of his head, and he had plenty of noise to clear. The imminent anniversary of the Medford Mystery seemed to loom over him. Then there was Claire’s anger, and his guilt at shutting down when she’d confronted him about the documentary producer’s claim he’d been a member of the Family.
She was mad enough to give him the silent treatment ever since he’d left the hotel. So mad that he’d begun to worry if she’d had enough. When he’d married her, he’d thought that since a
ll his faults were in the open, there wouldn’t be any buyer’s remorse. After all, they’d met in the confessional of group therapy. She’d already known the product was a little broken when she bought it.
He’d been wrong. Marrying someone from his group also meant she was able to describe his faults with laser precision, such as his tendency to avoid stillness and get overwhelmed, which triggered her own resume of wounds, notably her fear of abandonment. He and Claire were experts at criticizing each other and terrible at speaking up for what they wanted.
For years, he’d kept his past and present separate, but that wall was now crumbling. His family had always been a sanctuary from the world. It was the one thing he couldn’t run from.
His son raced across his line of sight. “Hey, Daddy! I’m open!”
David turned to Alyssa and motioned for her to run. “Go long, lady.”
“Can I play on the swings?”
He threw the ball again to Dexter, who caught and spiked it with a whoop. “Of course you can.”
His son threw it back, and they passed it back and forth until he noticed Alyssa was sitting motionless on one of the swings, her back to him.
“I’ll be right back, Dex.”
David jogged over to his daughter, who was texting on her phone, as he’d thought. “Hey. Come and join us.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
He crouched in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
She cast a glum look around the playground. “Everybody here is little. None of my friends are here.”
“When you’re my age, you won’t remember a single minute of your life spent staring at a screen.” He’d gotten her the phone for safety, but her tendency to use it to shut down alarmed him, even more so because he recognized it in himself. “Come on. Give me five minutes.”
David enticed her out onto the lawn and lobbed her the ball to get her engaged.
“Aww,” she said. “Look. We need a new ball.”
Alyssa showed him the canine teeth marks that had scored little chunks out of the soft material. Gunner used to snatch the football up and run off with it.
“That’s why we still have it,” David said. “It reminds us of him. When we play with it, we can think of all the fun we had together.”
The Children of Red Peak Page 24
