This Present Darkness

by Frank E. Peretti

  Marshall leaned back against the bars and kept right on thinking. “That would sure explain a lot of things. But what about Sandy? Do you suppose that she—she’s …?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but it could be.”

  “What I talked to yesterday … that wasn’t her. She was just crazy; you wouldn’t have believed it.” He caught himself. “Aw, then again, you probably would.”

  Hank was excited. “But don’t you see what’s happened? It’s a miracle of God, Marshall. All along, you were looking into all this racketeering and intrigue, and wondering how these things could be happening so smoothly and so forcefully, especially in the individual lives of so many people. Well, now you have your ‘how.’ And now that you’ve told me what you’ve found out and all that you’ve been through, I have my ‘why.’ All this time I’ve been encountering demonic powers in this town, but I never really knew just what they were up to. Now I know. It has to be the Lord who brought us together.”

  Marshall gave Hank a wry smile. “So where do we go from here, Preacher? They’ve locked us in, they haven’t allowed us any communication with our families, friends, lawyers, or anyone. I have a feeling that our constitutional rights aren’t going to have much to do with it at this juncture.”

  Now Hank leaned back against the cold concrete wall and thought about it. “That part only God knows. But I have a very strong feeling that He got us into this, and that He also has a plan for getting us out.”

  “If we must talk about strong feelings,” Marshall countered, “I have some pretty strong feelings that they just want us out of the way while they finish once and for all what they’ve started. It’s going to be interesting to see what’s left of the town, our jobs, our homes, our families, and everything else we treasured once we get out of here. If we get out of here.”

  “Well, have faith. God’s in control here.”

  “Yehhh, I just hope He hasn’t dropped the ball.”

  AS THE TWO women sat there in the straw, in the dark, Bernice tried to explain everything to Susan: her battered face, her cracked rib, what she and Marshall had been through, and the death of Kevin Weed.

  Susan digested it all for a moment, and then said, “It’s Kaseph’s way. It’s the Society’s way. I should have known better than to have brought Kevin into it.”

  “Don’t—don’t blame yourself. All of us are in this thing whether we really want to be or not.”

  Susan forced herself to be unemotional and calculating. “You’re right … at least for now. Someday soon I’ll sit down and really think about it, and I’ll weep over that man.” She stood up. “But right now there’s too much to do and too little time. Do you think you can walk?”

  “No, but that hasn’t stopped me so far.”

  “My car is rented, and I have too many important materials in it to leave it sitting out there. Come on.”

  With careful and very quiet, well-picked steps, Susan and Bernice made their way to the big barn door. It was very quiet out there.

  “Want to go for it?” Susan asked.

  “Sure,” said Bernice, “let’s do it.”

  They started back across the expansive field toward the road where Susan had left her car, using one tree that jutted up against the starry sky as their heading. As they crossed the field again, Bernice noted how much shorter the trip seemed now that she was not fleeing for her life.

  Susan led the way to where her car was parked. She had pulled it off the road a little way and nestled it in among some trees. She began fumbling in her pocket for the keys.

  “Susan!” said a voice from the woods.

  The two of them froze.

  “Susan Jacobson?” came the voice again.

  Susan whispered excitedly. “I don’t believe it!”

  Bernice answered, “I don’t believe it either!”

  “Kevin?”

  Some bushes began to move and swish, and then a man stepped out of the woods. There was no mistaking that lanky frame and that lazy walk.

  “Kevin Weed?” Bernice had to ask again.

  “Bernice Krueger!” said Kevin. “You made it. Aw, that’s great!”

  After a short moment of speechless amazement and surprise, the embraces came automatically.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Susan.

  They piled into her car and put some miles between themselves and Baker.

  “I got a motel room in Orting, up north of Windsor,” said Susan. “We can go there.”

  It was okay with Bernice and Kevin.

  Bernice said very happily, “Kevin, you’ve just made a liar out of me! I thought for sure you were dead.”

  “I’m alive for now,” Kevin said, not sounding too sure about anything.

  “But your truck went into the river!”

  “Yeah, I know. Some jerk stole it and crashed it. Somebody was trying to kill me.”

  He realized he didn’t make much sense, so he started over. “Hey, I was on my way to meet you at the bridge like you said. I stopped at The Evergreen to have a few, and I bet some guy slipped me a mickey—you know, put something in my beer. I mean, I got stoned.

  “I was driving down the road to meet up with you, and I was really spacing out, so I pulled over at Tucker’s Burgers to throw up or get a drink of water or go to the bathroom or something. I fell asleep in the men’s room, man, and I must have slept there all night. I woke up this morning and went outside and my truck was gone. I didn’t know what happened to it until I read about it in the paper. They must still be searching the river for my body.”

  “It’s obvious Kaseph and his Network have us all marked,” said Susan, “but … I think somebody’s looking out for us. Kevin, something very similar happened to me: I ran away from Kaseph’s ranch on foot, and the only reason I got away was because all the security personnel went chasing somebody else who was trying to get away in one of the big moving vans. Now who in their right mind would try that, and at just that precise moment?”

  Bernice added, “And I still haven’t figured out who in the world that Betsy was.”

  Susan had been formulating her theory for days. “I think we’d better start thinking about God.”

  “God?”

  “And angels,” Susan added. She quickly recounted the details of her escape, and concluded, “Listen, somebody came into that room. I know it.”

  Kevin piped up, “Hey, like maybe it was an angel that stole my truck.”

  And then Bernice recalled, “You know, there was something about Betsy. It made me just cry. I’ve never run into anything like that before.”

  Susan touched her hand. “Well, it looks like we’re all running into something, so whatever we do we’d better pay attention.”

  The car continued to speed along back roads, taking a slightly roundabout route toward the little resort town of Orting.

  LIKE TWO COMRADES-IN-ARMS, Marshall and Hank were beginning to feel they had known each other all their lives.

  “I like your kind of faith,” Marshall said. “It’s no wonder they’ve tried so hard to get you out of that church.” He chuckled a little. “Boy, you must feel like the Alamo! You’re the only thing standing between the Devil and the rest of the town.”

  Hank smiled weakly. “I’m not much, believe me. But I’m not the only one. There are saints out there, Marshall, people praying for us. Sooner or later something’s going to break. God won’t let Satan have this town that easy!”

  Marshall pointed his finger at Hank, even shook it a little. “See there? I like that kind of faith. Good and straight, laid right on the line.” He shook his head. “Sheesh! How long has it been since I’ve heard it come across like that?”

  Hank seasoned his words with salt, but he knew the time had come to say it. “Well, Marshall, since we’re talking so straight here, right on the line, what do you say we talk about you? You know, there could be some more reasons God put us in this cell together.”

  Marshall was not defensive at all, but smiling and r
eady to listen. “What are we going to do, talk about the fate of my eternal soul?”

  Hank smiled back. “That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about.”

  They talked about sin, that aggravating and destructive tendency of man to stray from God and choose his own way, always to his own hurt. That brought them around to Marshall’s family again, and how so many attitudes and actions were the direct result of that basic, human self-will and rebellion against God.

  Marshall shook his head as he saw things in this light. “Hey, our family never did know God. We only went through the motions. No wonder Sandy wouldn’t buy it!”

  Then Hank talked about Jesus, and showed Marshall that this Man whose name was so casually thrown around and even trampled upon in the world was far more than just a religious symbol, a lofty untouchable personality in a stained-glass window. He was the very real, very alive, very personal Son of God, and He could be the personal Lord and Savior of anyone who asked Him to be.

  “I never thought I’d be lying here listening to this,” Marshall said suddenly. “You’re really hitting me where it hurts, you know that?”

  “Well,” said Hank, “why do you suppose that is? Where’s the pain coming from?”

  Marshall took a deep breath as he took the time to think. “I guess from knowing that you’re right, which means I’ve been wrong a long, long time.”

  “Jesus loves you anyway. He knows that’s your problem, and that’s what He died for.”

  “Yeah … right!”

  CHAPTER 35

  THE MOTEL IN Orting was nice, quaint, homey, just like the rest of this town situated along the Judd River on the border of the national forest. It was a stopping place for sportsmen, built and decorated in a pleasing hunt-and-fish, hike-in-the-woods motif.

  Susan wanted no trouble or attention, so she paid for two more occupants for the room that night. They went into the room and pulled the shades.

  They all made a stop in the bathroom, but Bernice remained just a little longer, carefully rewrapping her ribs and then washing her face. She looked herself over in the mirror and touched her bruises very gingerly, whistling at the sight. It could only get better from here.

  In the meantime, Susan had flopped her big suitcase on the bed and opened it up. When Bernice finally came out, Susan took a small book from the suitcase and handed it to her.

  “This is where it started,” she said. “It’s your sister’s diary.”

  Bernice didn’t know what to say. A diamond would not have been a greater treasure. She could only look down at the little blue diary in her hands, a last surviving link with her dead sister, and struggle to believe it was really there. “Where … how did you get this?”

  “Juleen Langstrat made sure no one ever saw it. She had it stolen from Pat’s room and she gave it to Kaseph, from whom I stole it. I became Kaseph’s girl, you know; his Maidservant, he called it. I had regular access to him all the time, and he trusted me. I came across the diary one day while I was straightening up his office, and I recognized it right away because I used to watch Pat write in it almost every night in our dorm room. I sneaked it out, read it, and it woke me up. I used to think Alexander Kaseph was … well, the Messiah, the answer for all mankind, a true prophet of peace and universal brotherhood …”

  Susan made a face like she was getting sick. “Oh, he filled my mind with all that kind of talk, but somewhere deep inside I always had my doubts. That little book right there told me to listen to the doubts and not to him.”

  Bernice thumbed through the pages of the diary. It went back a few years, and seemed very detailed.

  Susan continued, “You may not want to read it just now. When I read that diary … well, it made me sick for days.”

  Bernice wanted the end of the story. “Susan, do you know how my sister really died?”

  Susan said angrily, “Your sister Pat was methodically and viciously done away with by the Universal Consciousness Society, or I should say, the forces behind it. She made the same fatal mistake I’ve seen so many others make: she found out too much about the Society, she showed herself to be an enemy of Alexander Kaseph. Listen, what Kaseph wants, he gets, and he doesn’t care who has to be destroyed, murdered, or mutilated to make sure of it.” She shook her head. “I had to be blind not to have seen it happening to Pat. It was right out of the textbook!”

  “So what about some man named Thomas?”

  Susan answered directly, “Yes, it was Thomas. He was responsible for her death.” Then she added rather cryptically, “But he wasn’t a man.”

  Bernice was slowly catching on to this new game with its very weird rules. “And now you’re going to tell me it wasn’t a woman either.”

  “Pat was taking a psychology class, and one of her requirements was that she be in a subject pool for psychology experiments—it’s in the diary, you’ll read it all. A friend persuaded her to volunteer for an experiment involving relaxation techniques, and it was during that experiment that she had what she called a psychic experience, some kind of insight into a higher world, she called it.

  “I’ll make it short; you can read it for yourself later. She became extremely enamored by the experience and saw no connection between this ‘scientific’ exploration and the ‘mystical’ practices I was into. She kept going back, kept taking part in the experiments, and finally contacted what she called a ‘highly evolved, disembodied human’ from another dimension, a very wise and intelligent being named Thomas.”

  Bernice struggled with what she was hearing, but knew she held the documentation for Susan’s account, her sister’s diary. “So who was this Thomas really? Just a figment of her imagination?”

  “Some things you’re just going to have to accept for now,” Susan replied with a sigh. “We’ve talked about God, we’ve toyed with the idea of angels; now let’s try evil angels, evil spirit entities. To the atheistic scientists, they might appear as extraterrestrials, often with their own spaceships; to evolutionists they might claim to be highly evolved beings; to the lonely, they might appear as long-lost relatives speaking from the other side of the grave; Jungian psychologists consider them ‘archetypal images’ dredged from the collective consciousness of the human race.”

  “What?”

  “Hey, listen, whatever description or definition fits, whatever shape, whatever form it takes to win a person’s confidence and appeal to his vanity, that’s the form they take. And they tell the deluded seeker of truth whatever he or she wants to hear until they finally have that person in their complete control.”

  “Like a con game, in other words.”

  “It’s all a con game: Eastern meditation, witchcraft, divination, Science of Mind, psychic healing, holistic education—oh, the list goes on and on—it’s all the same thing, nothing but a ruse to take over people’s minds and spirits, even their bodies.”

  Bernice reviewed memory after memory of their investigation, and Susan’s claims fell right into place.

  Susan continued, “Bernice, we are dealing with a conspiracy of spirit entities. I know Kaseph is crawling with them and takes his orders from them. They do his dirty work. If anyone gets in his way, he has numberless resources in the spiritual realm to clear away the problem in whatever manner is most convenient.”

  Ted Harmel, Bernice thought. The Carluccis. How many others? “You’re not the first person to try to tell me all this.”

  “I hope I’m the last person who will have to.”

  Kevin piped in. “Yeah, I remember how Pat talked about Thomas. He never sounded like he was human. She acted like he was more of a god. She had to ask him before she’d even decide what to eat for breakfast. I—I thought she’d found some guy, you know, some male chauvinist type.”

  Susan eased into the bottom line of the story. “Pat had given her will over to Thomas. It didn’t take long; it usually doesn’t once a person really submits to a spirit’s influence. No doubt he took control of her, then terrified her, then convinced her that—well,
the Hindus call it karma; it’s the delusion that your next life will be better than this one because you’ve earned enough brownie points. In Pat’s case, a self-inflicted death would be nothing more than a way to escape the evil of this lower world and join Thomas in a higher state of existence.”

  Susan gently flipped the pages of the diary still in Bernice’s hands, and found the last entry. “There. The last thing in Pat’s diary is a love letter to Thomas. She planned to join him soon, and she even mentions how she’ll do it.”

  Bernice could feel revulsion at the thought of reading such a letter, but she began to work her way through the last few pages of her sister’s diary. Pat wrote in a style of someone under a very strange, lofty-sounding delusion, but it was clear she was also disoriented by an irrational fear of life itself. Terrible pain and spiritual anguish had taken over her soul, changing her from the happy-go-lucky Patricia Krueger that Bernice had grown up with to a terrified, aimless psychotic completely out of touch with reality.

  Bernice tried to read on, but she began to feel old wounds reopening; emotions that had waited for this very moment of final revelation burst from their hiding places like a river through an opened floodgate. The scrawled and ambling words on the pages blurred behind a sudden cascade of tears, and her whole body began to quake with sobs. All she wanted to do was shut out the world, disregard this gallant woman and this poor, disheveled logger, lie down on the bed, and cry. And she did.

  HANK SLEPT PEACEFULLY on his cot in the cell. Marshall was not sleeping at all. He sat up in the dark, his back against the cold, hard bars of the cell, his head drooping, his hand making nervous little trips around his face.

  He had been shot through the guts. That’s what it felt like. Somewhere he had lost his armor plating, his strength, his strong and tough facade. He had always been Marshall Hogan, the hunter, the hound, the stay-out-of-my-way getter of whatever he wanted, a foe to be reckoned with, a guy who could take care of himself.

  A lump, that’s what he was, and nothing but a fool. This Hank Busche was right. Just look at yourself, Hogan. Don’t worry about God dropping the ball; you dropped it a long time ago. You blew it, man. You thought you had everything under control, and now where’s your family and where are you?