Arin smiled at him with relief. “We were worried about you, boy,” he said.
Wade threw himself into Arin’s arms and cried as he’d never cried before.
“We thought we heard someone knocking, but we didn’t want to open the door until we were sure it wasn’t a trick,” Arin explained to Wade. They were all sitting around a large metal table in what they called the “dining room” of the shelter. In the distance, Wade heard the lowing of cattle, the occasional bleating of sheep, and the chirping of many kinds of birds.
“We waited until night fell and then opened the door,” Muiraq continued. “There you were, all curled up, sleeping so deeply. We pulled you in as quickly as we could and then closed the door again.”
“The door is sealed tight from now on,” Arin said. “You are the last to join us, and only because the Unseen One made it clear to me that you were allowed.”
Wade hung his head low. “I don’t deserve to be here,” he said solemnly. “Why did the Unseen One tell you to let me in?”
“Because of your heart,” Arin replied.
“What about it?”
“Did you not pray to the Unseen One and ask for His forgiveness? Didn’t you ask Him to help you?”
Wade remembered his time in the tower. “Yes, I did.”
“It was more than anyone else in this world did,” Arin said gravely. “So He opened the door to you.”
“But how did you know that?” Wade asked, mystified once again.
Arin shrugged.
“What will happen to the world now?”
“For 40 days and nights, it will go through a terrible upheaval. All living things will die—not only people, but the animals and plants as well. The world will drown in the illness you brought.”
“The illness I brought,” Wade said softly.
“Everything that humanity has trusted in until now will be obliterated: its technology, its knowledge, its lies. After 40 days, my family and I will rise up from the shelter to begin anew. The Unseen One will start pure again what had been corrupted.”
Wade looked puzzled, then asked, “But why aren’t you sick? Why didn’t you catch the disease I brought? You should be afraid now.”
“I told you when you arrived that the Unseen One would protect us. And He has, us and all the animals and other living things here. Whatever illness you brought simply hasn’t affected us.”
Muiraq stood up. “This is enough talk for now,” she announced. “There are chores to do, and then we must eat our dinner. Go on now!” She shooed them all away as if they were birds on a fence.
Later, when Wade was standing near one of the large aquariums, watching the saltwater fish gliding around carelessly, Arin approached him.
“You have something on your mind,” Arin said.
Wade almost asked him how he knew, but he decided it was a mystery he would never understand. So he said directly, “I feel terrible about what happened. I’m responsible for this catastrophe.”
“In what way?” Arin asked.
“I came here and introduced terrible bombs, and worse, I spread a sickness that”—it seemed incredible, but he said it anyway—“that killed everyone. If I hadn’t come, then . . .” He paused and gently bit his lower lip. He was tired of crying and didn’t want to start again.
“There now, stay strong,” Arin said warmly. “Let’s try to untangle this mess you’re in.”
“How?”
“Well, the first thing you should remember is that you didn’t come here on your own. I believe the Unseen One brought you here for a purpose.”
Wade thought about it for a moment. It was true that he hadn’t asked—or done anything—to come to this world. One minute he was in his coal cellar, and the next minute he was here. “That’s right,” he agreed. “But my purpose was to bring sickness and death.”
“Sickness and death, yes. Just as at another time you could have come and brought life and light to our world. But you didn’t. The Unseen One brought you here to convey His justice to an evil world that demanded it.” Arin picked up a broom and leaned on the handle as though it were a staff. “Sooner or later the Unseen One’s promises are always fulfilled, you see. You happened to be the way He fulfilled this promise.”
“It’s still a terrible promise to fulfill.”
“I agree,” he said. “And I don’t suppose you have to like it any more than I liked preaching a message of doom for so many years. Do you think I enjoyed that? I was cut off from my relatives, ostracized by my neighbors, ridiculed in my community. When they weren’t laughing at me, they were cursing me. But that’s the nature of things in this world. The truth will always set us apart. Sometimes that truth soothes and heals, and sometimes it cuts to the marrow. As a result, our service to the Unseen One will always put us at odds with unbelievers. But we have to take our part and do what He wants us to do.”
“But if I hadn’t come . . .”
Arin looked at Wade like a disapproving teacher. “That’s a useless question, now, isn’t it? Granted, you did some foolish things once you got here. But those things played themselves out as they should have. You allowed wicked men to deceive you, and they ultimately paid the price for it.”
Wade considered that notion. “What price did I pay for what I did?” he asked.
“What price do you think you should have paid?”
“I don’t know.”
“Should you have paid more?” Arin stroked his chin in consideration. “Well, now, I believe you’ve suffered as much as you needed to suffer to realize your foolishness. You saw where you went wrong, and you asked the Unseen One to forgive you.”
“Yes.”
“Then what else is there to be said? What else is there to be paid?”
Wade struggled to understand what Arin was saying.
Arin put his arm around Wade’s shoulders, and they began to walk. “I know how you feel, Wade,” Arin said softly. “Deep in your heart, you feel guilty because you’re in this shelter and you don’t think you deserve to be. Am I on the right track?”
Wade nodded.
“You think that maybe if you suffered more, you might feel less guilty. Is that the idea?”
Wade didn’t reply, but he knew it was so.
“Then listen to me and listen closely,” Arin went on. “There’s no amount of suffering you can do to deserve the love of the Unseen One. He saved you because of your repentant heart—because you realized there was nothing more you could do. You had to give up and ask for His help. That’s as much as any of us can do. The truth of the matter is that none of us deserve to be saved. We should all be outside, dying with the rest.”
“But you’re all so good and wise and—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Arin corrected him. “We’re men and women, flesh and blood, as prone to disobedience as anyone. The only thing we did was to listen to the Unseen One when no one else would.”
Wade didn’t know what to say.
Arin smiled. “You think about it for a while. Maybe it’ll make sense one day. Meanwhile . . .” Arin handed Wade a feed pouch. “I want you to go over and see that the horses get their dinner. You can start with Bethel. The feed is in that long box against the wall.”
Wade looked at Arin curiously. It seemed like a strange turn to their conversation.
“Go on,” Arin said. “Just put the pouch over her mouth and the strap over the top of her head. But be careful. She does bite.” In the dim light, Wade thought Arin looked a little sad, but he couldn’t imagine why.
Wade went over to the feed box and filled the pouch with oats. He then went to Bethel’s stall, hesitating at the door.
Arin was still watching him. “Go on,” he said again.
Wade shrugged and stepped into the stall. It was dark. “Bethel?” he called out. He spotted her toward the rear. He approached her slowly so as not to scare her, then put the feed pouch up to her mouth. She began to eat. He then reached up to put the strap over the top of her head. “The
re you go,” he said and turned back to the door.
Something crunched under his feet.
“What is that?” he asked and lifted his foot to look. He lost his balance and fell over on his side. Embarrassed, he laughed to himself and said, “You’re such a clumsy oaf.”
“What did you say?” a woman asked.
Wade replied, “I said I’m such a clumsy oaf.” And then he realized that the woman was his mother and he wasn’t in the stable with Bethel at all. He was lying in his bed—his own bed—in his own home in his own world.
Wade looked at his mother, his face wide open with surprise. “Mom?” he said.
Her eyes were moist. She’d been crying. “Hello, son,” she replied.
“What happened?” he croaked and started to sit up. He felt too weak, though, and decided to stay where he was.
“You’ve had a terrible relapse,” she answered. “A high fever. I was worried sick. I knew I shouldn’t have let you out of bed. You never should have been down in the coal cellar.”
“How long?” His throat was dry; he was dying of thirst.
“Since this morning,” she replied. “I got the telegram and went down to tell you about it, but you were unconscious in the coal cellar. The doctor said you must have fainted from trying to fill the bucket.” She began to cry again. “I shouldn’t have let you do that.”
Wade patted his mother’s hand. “It’s okay, Mom. I feel a little weak, but I’m all right. I had the strangest dream, though.”
“You rest while I get you some soup. Then you can tell me all about it.” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue, then walked to the door.
Wade suddenly realized something she’d said. “Mom—”
“Yes, son?”
“What telegram? Is there news about Dad?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the folded yellow sheet of paper. “There’s news,” she said and started to cry all over again.
Wade held his breath.
She composed herself and continued, “Your father is alive and well, Wade! He had to parachute out of his plane and wound up breaking his leg in the jungle, miles and miles from anywhere. Some island natives have been sheltering him until they could find help. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Relief washed over him. “Yeah, it’s great.”
She came back over to the bed and hugged her son tight, then made a fuss for crying so much and went out to make him some soup.
“Sheltered,” he said softly to himself and stretched long and hard. “What a dream!”
Only after he’d finished his soup did he remember the top secret atomic bomb plans. He searched his robe and under his pajamas, then noticed that he was wearing a different pair. His mother had changed his clothes.
“You had coal dust all over your other pair of pajamas,” she said when he asked her about it. “And they were soaking wet from your fever.”
“What did you do with the papers I had?” he asked hesitantly.
“What papers?”
“I had some papers tucked under my pajama top, with drawings and a lot of writing.”
“You didn’t have any papers,” she said.
“How about down in the coal cellar?” he persisted.
She looked at him impatiently. “You didn’t have any papers, I’m telling you. I would have seen them. Were they school papers?”
“No.”
“Then you must have left them somewhere else, because they’re not around here.”
Suddenly he remembered the exact moment when he had handed them over to Dr. Lyst.
And he wondered.
MARUS MANUSCRIPT 3
THE CHRONICLES OF INTERCESSION
ANNISON’S RISK
Manuscript date: September 18, 1927
Ready or not, here I come!” a child’s voice called out from somewhere behind the shed.
Madina Nicholaivitch giggled and scrambled to find a hiding place. She’d already hidden once behind the well and once in the garage, and now she had to think of somewhere little Johnny Ziegler wouldn’t think to find her.
Johnny shouted, excitement in his voice, “I’m coming, Maddy!”
Everyone called her Maddy now except her grandparents, who still spoke in Russian and called her Dreamy Madina in that tongue. It didn’t matter to them that they’d been living in America for 10 years now. “We will not forsake our traditions, no matter where we live,” Grandma had said.
On the other hand, Maddy’s father, Boris, now refused to speak any Russian. He said he was protesting the Russian Revolution of 1917 that drove them, persecuted and destitute, from their home in St. Petersburg. “We’re in America now,” he stated again and again in his clipped English. “We must speak as Americans.”
“The revolution will not last,” Maddy’s grandpa proclaimed several times a year, especially in October, on the anniversary of the revolution.
“It is now 1927, is it not?” Maddy’s father argued. “They have killed the czar, they have destroyed everything we once held dear, and they are closing our churches. I turn my back on Russia as Russia turned its back on us. We are Americans now.”
So Madina became Maddy and spoke American because she was only two when they came to America. She never really learned Russian anyway, except for odd phrases from her grandparents. Refugees that they were, they’d started off in New York and drifted west to Chicago as opportunities from various friends and relatives presented themselves. Boris had been an accomplished tailor back in St. Petersburg, so his skill was in demand wherever they went. Then they’d heard from a cousin who owned a tailor shop in a small Midwestern town and wanted Boris to join him in the business. They called the firm Nichols Tailor & Clothes, Nichols being the English corruption of their original Russian name, and made clothes for nearly everyone, including the mayor.
Maddy was unaffected by all the changes and upheaval in their lives. She seemed contented and happy regardless of where they were. The world could have been falling apart around her, and she would have carried on in her pleasant, dreamlike way, lost in fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and the many other stories she read at the local library.
She often pretended to be a girl with magical powers in a fairy-tale world. Or she played out a dream she’d been having night after night for the past two weeks. In the dream, she was a lady-in-waiting to a princess with raven black hair and the most beautiful face Maddy had ever seen.
“You must come and help me,” the princess said to her every night in the dream.
“I will,” Maddy replied. And then she would wake up.
She had told her mother about the dream. But her mother smiled indulgently and dismissed it as she had most of Maddy’s fanciful ideas.
Apart from pretending to be in fairy tales, Maddy enjoyed playing games like hide-and-seek with the smaller neighborhood children. Her mother often said that she would be a teacher when she grew up because she loved books and children so much.
Maddy circled their old farm-style house that had been built with several other similar houses on the edge of town. It had gray shingles, off-white shutters, and a long porch along the front. She ducked under the clothesline that stretched from the porch post to a nearby pole. The shirts and underclothes brushed comfortingly against her face, warmed by the sun. She then spied a small break in the trelliswork that encased the underside of the porch. That would be her hiding place, she decided—under the porch.
She pressed a hand down on her thick curly, brown hair to keep it from getting caught on any of the trellis splinters and went only as far under as she dared, to the edge of the shadows. The dirt under her hands and bare legs was cold. She tried not to get any of it on her dark blue peasant dress, which her father had made especially for her. She could smell the damp earth and old wood from the porch. In another part of the garden, she heard her little brother squeal with delight as their mother played with him in the late-summer warmth.
“I’m going to find you,” little Johnny, the boy
from next door, called out.
Maddy held her breath as she saw his legs appear through the diamond shapes of the trellis. He hesitated, but the position of his feet told her that he had his back to the porch. Maybe he wouldn’t see the gap she’d crawled through. He moved farther along, getting closer to the gap, so she moved farther back into the shadows and darkness. The hair on her neck bristled. She’d always worried that a wild animal might have gone under the porch to live, just as their dog Babushka had when she’d given birth to seven puppies last year. But Maddy’s desire to keep Johnny from finding her was greater than her fear, so she went farther in.
The porch, like a large mouth, seemed to swallow her in darkness. The trelliswork, the sunlight, and even Johnny’s legs, now moving to and fro along the porch, faded away as if she’d slowly closed her eyes. But she knew she hadn’t. She held her hand up in front of her face and wiggled her fingers. She could see still them.
Then, from somewhere behind her, a light grew, like the rising of a sun. But it wasn’t yellow like dawn sunlight; it was white and bright, like the sun at noon. She turned to see, wondering where the light had come from. She knew well that there couldn’t be a light farther under the porch, that she would soon reach a dead end at the cement wall of the basement.
As she looked at the light, she began to hear noises as well. At first they were indistinct, but then she recognized them as the sounds of people talking and moving. Maddy wondered if friends from town had come to visit. But the voices were too numerous for a small group of friends. This sounded more like a big crowd. And mixed with the voices were the distinct sounds of horses whinnying and the clip-clop of their hooves and the grating of wagon wheels on a stony street.
Crawling crablike and being careful not to bump her head on the underside of the porch, Maddy moved in the direction of the light and sounds. The noises grew louder, and, once she squinted a little, she could see human and horse legs moving back and forth, plus the distinct outline of wagon wheels.
The Marus Manuscripts Page 29
