“You said she’s there. She made it across the black sea.”
“As promised. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.” His smile returned. “She’s waiting for you, boy. She misses you.”
Deacon pictured his mother playing an organ in a green meadow awash in bright Technicolor sunlight. The entire Family was there, dressed in shining white and waving their arms as they sang about the glory of the Lord.
“It’s not like that,” Peale said. “Not even close.”
“Show me. Please. I want to see.”
“You wouldn’t understand it even if I was willing to do that. You wouldn’t even survive it. Your mind wouldn’t.”
Deacon shifted his feet, restless. “Can I at least see Mom? Talk to her?”
The grin evaporated in an instant. “You know there’s only one way. You have to sacrifice to gain eternity. I give, you give. What they call a covenant.”
“You want me to suffer,” he said. “What would I have to do, exactly?”
The Reverend guffawed. “Good Lord, haven’t you suffered enough already? There’s only one thing left for you and your friends. You have to shuck your mortal coil. You must shed time itself.”
Deacon turned from the edge. “Why are you doing this?”
“Another thing I shouldn’t have to spell out for you. You know why.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“We’re like two peas in a pod, you and me. If I were to make you in my image, wouldn’t that make me Father? Does a father not want love as much as the son?”
“If you’re the real God, did you create us?”
“Think about it, Deacon.”
Whether the entity had created his flesh out of nothing didn’t matter. In every way, it had shaped Deacon’s life and made him who he was now.
“But why suffering and death, though?” he asked. “How is that love?”
“What better way to prove love than to face the unknown on faith?” Peale shrugged his broad shoulders. “Anyway, they came looking for a shortcut to paradise. The only way to gain it was to shed their flesh and worldly desires.”
“Shed,” Deacon echoed with disgust. “They killed themselves. They chopped off parts of themselves. They murdered the ones who didn’t want to go.”
“It’s like killing during war. It isn’t bad if it’s done with a loving heart.”
“It was bad for me.” Deacon turned back toward the clouds, knowing it was his only way out. Either way, it seemed, he’d be facing the unknown.
The fog or the black sea.
The endless wandering of his old life, or the chance for a new life rejoined with the Family.
All it took was an ultimate act of faith. Faith in something he couldn’t see or understand with his mortal brain, something that if he even got to see, he couldn’t tell was real or just another illusion, like the Jeremiah who stood before him.
“So what are you, boy?” the Reverend said. “Wheat or chaff?”
“You want me to die.”
“I want you to choose.” The grin returned full force. “And you won’t die. You will become. Amen.”
Deacon wondered what the others thought of what the entity was offering.
What choice Beth would make.
27
DIE
The world disappeared in fire. Beth cried out in the blinding glare.
A voice spoke from the flames. “I waited so long for you, honey.”
“Daddy?” She raised her hand to shield her eyes. “Daddy! Is that you?”
The light began to dim. Beth wiped at her watery eyes, struggling with sight. A vague shape formed in the fire, dancing in it.
A second voice spoke.
“He wants you to know he was wrong. He never should have told you to run. None of it was your fault.”
The voice tore a sob from her. “Mom?”
“She wants you to know she should have stopped talking long enough to listen to you,” her father said.
As the glare continued to fade, the shape crystallized, still dancing.
Beth screamed.
The giant mouth stretched into a smile, flames pouring between massive lips.
“Do not be afraid,” it said in her parents’ voices.
She took another step back, her hand still raised as if this could protect her. “Are you real, or in my head?”
“Yes.”
“Both?”
“I am here. You also created me, so we can finally talk.”
“But is it really you, Mom?”
“No,” her mother said.
Her father added, “And yes.”
“I am the Living Spirit—”
“Which you seek, and—”
“I manifested as your—”
“Mind wished, as the—”
“People you love, as the—”
“Voice that must—”
“Break the—”
“Long—”
“Silence.”
Another sob shook her, and then she was crying, joy and mourning and horror and catharsis all mixed together. Real or not, she didn’t care.
Her hand dropped to her side. “It’s good to hear your voices.”
A chorus poured from the mouth. “Don’t cry for them, Beth. Rejoice.”
She heard them all talking now—Reverend Peale, Josh, Wyatt, Emily, Mrs. Young, Mrs. Chapman, Freddie Shaw, Shepherd Wright, Anna Tibbs, Mrs. Blanchard, and all the rest, speaking in unison.
They said, “The Family wants you to come home.”
“Where are you?” Beth said and shook her head, knowing she was talking to the entity, not the real Family. “Where are they?”
“Behold…”
The bright, rust-colored sky faded to total night. Gasping, she raised her arms again to protect herself. This wasn’t night but a complete and terrifying emptiness, a black void that stretched on forever, infinity itself.
The black sea.
She pictured it filled with cosmic leviathans, eager to consume helpless souls, but this was only her imagination. The truth of its utter emptiness was far worse. Gazing into the endless void’s depths, she fell from a terrifying height into herself, fragile flesh and blood, tiny and insignificant as a mote of dust. Everything she’d done or would ever do, every frustration and joy, every love and hate, every dream and memory, the dark revealed as meaningless illusion and worse, delusion.
The darkness devoured all of it, even the fire. It was nothingness. Annihilation.
Her scream caught in her throat as she began to fall into the void—
“The light, Beth,” the voices called.
The flaming pillar lanced up into the infernal night, where the darkness swallowed it. Then she saw the fire didn’t matter. It was merely pointing the way.
Far off in the void, a single star blazed, an eternal beacon.
“They’re waiting,” the voices said. “Pass through the door, and return to the Family.”
The star opened to another universe of light.
To reach it, all she had to do was ascend.
Her flesh rebelled at the idea of its extinction. Of all grief’s phases over one’s own demise, denial started at birth. Still, she was sick of feeling left behind. Exhausted from the endless silence that had defined her life for fifteen years.
To ascend across the black sea, she’d have to surrender her life. But was this so bad? What was her life worth? It was hardly being used. The idea of dying repelled her while at the same time offering relief. She could just surrender.
“Are they happy?” she said.
“Yes,” the spirit said.
Beth took a ragged breath. “I want to come home.”
“You are welcome, Beth.”
“Welcome.” She laughed as the weight of years of quiet suffering lifted from her heart. “I’m welcome. Yes, I’m ready to go.”
“It has already begun.”
In a blink, Deacon, David, and Angela appeared at her side.
“Be
th,” Deacon yelled. “Thank God, are you—”
Angela raised her Glock and fired at the smiling mouth, emptying the magazine with a long howl of fury.
Beth flinched away from the deafening shots. The great mouth shimmered in the flames, still wearing its patient smile.
Flushed and breathing hard, Angela lowered the smoking gun. “We aren’t toys for you to fucking play with.”
The mouth morphed into the Reverend’s Cheshire cat smile.
“Screw you.” She turned to the others. “Is everybody ready to go? If this thing isn’t going to kill me, I’m getting out of here.”
“If it lets us go,” David said. “Can we just leave?”
Deacon stared at Beth. He gave her a slight nod.
“I think I might stay awhile,” she said.
“Me too,” said Deacon.
Angela wheeled on them. “No. You’re not.”
“If you’re staying, I’m staying,” Deacon told Beth. “I love you. It’s the only thing that’s real to me, the only thing I really have that’s good.”
David gasped. “You’d better think this through—”
“He’s right, Deek,” Beth said. “Don’t do it for me.”
“Oh, I’m going to cross anyway.” Deacon looked up at the bright star in the endless night. “I’d really like to see it. And I want to see Mom and the Rev again.”
Beth smiled at him. “I love you too, Deek. To the end.”
He beamed back. “This is how we can be together.”
“Bullshit.” Angela’s beautiful face had turned scarlet and mean. She reloaded the gun, chambered a round, and aimed it at Deacon. “I said we’re leaving. Now.”
He didn’t flinch, though he was shaking. “Make it quick.”
She lowered the gun. “What?” As if surprised he thought she’d actually make good on her threat. “Please. Don’t do this.”
“Are you really sure?” David said.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take the deal? It’s a good deal.”
“If it’s telling the truth. If any of this is real.”
Deacon sighed. “I’m done with doubt.”
Beth held out her hand. “Give me the gun and go. I’ll do it.”
Crying, Angela shook her head. Josh, her mother, the other kids, even David, she hadn’t been able to protect any of them.
Because, Beth knew, one couldn’t protect people from themselves, not really. After years of self-medicating and maintaining strict control over every aspect of her life, she’d become an expert on the subject.
David said, “I got this, sis. It’s on me.”
For the first time, he was protecting her. Gently, he took the Glock from her hand. Still weeping, she didn’t resist.
“Give it to me, David,” Beth said.
She couldn’t ask Deacon to do it. He looked pale and terrified, barely able to stand up. She wasn’t sure she had the strength to do it either, though she wanted it.
David stared at the gun in his hand. For an alarming moment, Beth thought he might fling it away, into the fire.
He said, “I can do it.”
“It has to be me,” Beth said, though she was crying now too, with relief.
He offered her a weak smile. “You’re my friends. And if I do it, the spirit will let Angela and me go. It’ll let me go back to my family.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry, David. For everything.”
“I want you to tell Mom that Angela and I love and miss her. That we’re sorry. Tell her we understand, and we hope she will too.”
“Josh,” Angela managed through her tears. “Tell him I’ll always love him.”
“Tell Emily. Tell them all.”
“I will,” Beth promised.
David turned toward the apparition, which still waited in the flames. “Suffering for you doesn’t make us love you. Being forced to do things we hate doesn’t make us love you. Killing and dying doesn’t make us love you.”
The entity didn’t reply.
David aimed the gun with trembling hands. “Forgive me.”
Beth closed her eyes. “We’ll see you on the other—”
The horn sounded like the roar of Creation.
28
FORGIVE
David clung to his sister as the shofar’s blast ripped through them in powerful and convulsive waves of force, threatening to hurl them from the mountain. He screamed into the tumult, unable to hear his own voice.
His friends were flying.
Framed by cascading sheets of fire, they jerked and rolled in the air, limbs twirling. Together, they pirouetted in spirals around the flaming geyser, up and up and up, rising and dancing and tumbling until he lost sight of them.
Then they flared out of existence.
The horn stopped. The fire died in a flurry of sparks that one by one winked out. Darkness returned to Red Peak as if a cosmic curtain had closed.
Angela shuddered and released him. “It’s over. Oh God, it’s done.”
Only the altar and cross remained in utter stillness.
David held the gun. He stared at it vacantly, still dazed by the awful horn that even now purred in unsettling vibrations in his core, like the echo of a sonic boom. He hadn’t fired it. As his finger tensed against the trigger, his friends had vaulted into the air.
He’d passed his test, and for it, the entity had spared him the pain of murder. Abraham’s knife had been stilled, but he’d lost Isaac anyway.
“I’m still not sure that really happened,” she said.
When they were kids, Deacon once told him the divine defied human comprehension. After seeing the supernatural firsthand, David still believed that to be true. For the rest of his days, he’d struggle to grasp what he’d experienced.
He understood the choices he’d made, however.
“This is yours.” He extended the gun toward her.
She took her service weapon, felt its familiar grip, and holstered it. “Thanks.”
“Are you okay?”
Angela shook her head. “What do you think?”
He looked up at the night sky, which now flared with not one but millions of stars. “Do you think…?”
“They got what they wanted.”
They’d gone to a better place, where their souls would at last find peace. They’d reached their loved ones at last. They’d tell his mother she was remembered and loved by her children. They’d tell Emily he was sorry.
Like his sister, he chose to believe it.
“They wanted to be there more than they wanted to be here,” she added. “In a way, I can’t blame them.”
“You could have gone too, you know. If you wanted.”
“No. I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Angela’s face returned to the stubborn, angry scowl he knew all too well. “Because we deserved better. What about you? Why did you stay?”
For the man who liked a way out, it was the ultimate exit, but he’d chosen a different, more difficult road.
“Let’s go home,” David said.
Together, the last living survivors of the Family of the Living Spirit threaded the mountain in reverse, navigating the stairway by starlight. They didn’t talk the entire way down, too exhausted to speak, their thoughts and feelings too big to put into words. At the bottom, they stumbled through the ruins. They ignored the derelict Temple and shacks, as the buildings no longer had any power over them. The car sat where they’d left it, substantial and normal and promising a return to reality.
David sank into the seat behind the wheel and started the engine, ready to put Red Peak behind him for good. He drove until the mountain disappeared in his rearview. He no longer feared it, its grip on him gone. There was nothing to run from anymore.
He drove into Bakersfield, his car low on gas and his body running on fumes. He found a parking place in the lot of Angela’s motel and cut the engine.
She went on gaping out the windshield as she had the entire drive down fr
om Medford. “Did that really happen?”
David thought about it. The more distance he gained from it in time and miles, the more like a dream it seemed. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t trust anything as real anymore. A part of him feared he was still on the mountain, imagining all this. His friends were gone, of that he was absolutely certain. Other than that, he wasn’t sure. Anything else was an act of faith.
Outside, the sun blazed on the car and motel. A maid with a cleaning cart knocked on one of the blue doors and went into the room.
Angela nodded, as if he’d said all that could be said. “I’m going home.”
“I’ll call you soon.” A promise he intended to keep.
“Okay.” She opened the door.
“Wait.” He tightened his grip on the wheel. “I’m sorry. About Mom.”
She rested her hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I wasn’t as strong as you. I put myself first—”
“David. It wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry for ever making you think it was.”
He sighed as his final burden slipped away. He let go of the wheel and rested his hands on his lap. “Thank you.”
Angela said nothing.
He added, “You may not know this, but you did save me. You saved all of us. I love you, sis.”
“I love you, too.” She smirked as she got out of the car. “You little shit.”
Once she’d gone, he began to feel shaky. Now that he was alone, the shock set in. He gritted his teeth through a wave of nausea and restarted the car, driving on autopilot. The world around him pulsed in sunshine and bright colors, still insubstantial. How could all this exist in the same world as the thing at Red Peak?
After missing his turn onto the road to Fresno, he knew where he was going. David drove into the cemetery parking lot and parked facing the rows of tombstones, where Emily’s body rested.
Finally, he allowed himself to mourn.
He wept for Emily, Deacon and Beth, his mother, and the Family. He recalled the old pastor’s comforting platitudes at Emily’s funeral, which didn’t seem so empty now but instead the only truths that mattered. One cried not because loved ones were dead but because they were gone. The loss hurt because their lives had touched his life, either in some small way or by completely transforming it.
The Children of Red Peak Page 30
