The God Project

by John Saul

  JOHN SAUL’S

  THE GOD PROJECT

  “Of his six books, The God Project is by far the best written, the best plotted, and certainly the most entertaining.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Every paranoid twinge … is expertly, shockingly exploited in Saul’s nightmare tale.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “Each chapter leaves you breathless for more … if you’re a patsy for a fast, enjoyable book, you’ll like The God Project. The characters are well defined and carry the action forward at a fast clip. And the ending has a few wonderful twists.”

  —San Diego Tribune

  Saul is “a writer with the touch for raising gooseflesh.”

  —Detroit News

  “Here is the kind of book you can sail through … going faster and faster … tantalizing.”

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  “Saul’s fans will gobble it up and ask for more.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A chilling tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “If you want perfect summer reading, try The God Project.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  By John Saul:

  SUFFER THE CHILDREN***

  PUNISH THE SINNERS***

  CRY FOR THE STRANGERS***

  COMES THE BLIND FURY***

  WHEN THE WIND BLOWS***

  THE GOD PROJECT*

  NATHANIEL*

  BRAINCHILD*

  HELLFIRE*

  THE UNWANTED*

  THE UNLOVED*

  CREATURE*

  SECOND CHILD*

  SLEEPWALK*

  DARKNESS*

  SHADOWS*

  GUARDIAN**

  THE HOMING**

  BLACK LIGHTNING**

  THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES:

  Part 1—AN EYE FOR AN EYE: THE DOLL**

  Part 2—TWIST OF FATE: THE LOCKET**

  Part 3—ASHES TO ASHES: THE DRAGON’S FLAME**

  Part 4—IN THE SHADOW OF EVIL: THE HANDKERCHIEF**

  Part 5—DAY OF RECKONING: THE STEREOSCOPE**

  Part 6—ASYLUM**

  THE PRESENCE**

  THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL**

  And now available

  John Saul’s latest tale of terror

  NIGHTSHADE

  a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010

  * Published by Bantam Books

  ** Published by the Ballantine Publishing Group

  *** Published by Dell Books

  THE GOD PROJECT

  A Bantam Book

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1982 by John Saul.

  Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 82-90289

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording, or by any information

  storage and retrieval system, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76791-2

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  For Sarita,

  and the memory of Leon

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue: Three Years Later

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  SALLY MONTGOMERY LEANED DOWN and kissed her daughter, then tucked the pink crocheted blanket that her mother had made in honor of Julie’s birth—and which Sally hated—around the baby’s shoulders. Julie, six months old, squirmed sleepily, half-opened her eyes, and gurgled.

  “Are you my little angel?” Sally murmured, touching the baby’s tiny nose. Again Julie gurgled, and Sally wiped a speck of saliva from her chin, kissed her once more, then left the bedroom. She had never quite gotten around to converting it into a nursery.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t intended to. Indeed, the room had been planned as a nursery ever since Jason had been born eight years earlier. She and Steve had made elaborate plans, even gone as far as picking out wallpaper and ordering curtains. But Sally Montgomery simply wasn’t the decorating type. Besides, though she had never admitted it to anyone but Steve, the idea of redoing an entire room just for the enjoyment of an infant had always struck her as silly. All it meant was that you had to keep redoing it as the baby grew up.

  In the gloom of the night-light, Sally glanced around the room and decided she had been right. The curtains, though they were blue, were still bright and clean, and the walls, still the same white they had been when she and Steve had bought the house nine years ago, were covered with an array of prints and pictures that any self-respecting baby should enjoy—Mickey Mouse on one wall and Donald Duck opposite him, with a batch of Pooh characters filling up the empty spaces. Even the mobile that turned slowly above Julie’s crib had been chosen as much for the quality of its construction as for its design, though Sally had, almost reluctantly, come to appreciate the abstract forms which the saleslady had assured her would “do wonders for Baby’s imagination.” When they were grown, and had children of their own, she would pull the pictures and the mobile out of the attic and split them between Jason and Julie, who by then would have come to a new appreciation of them.

  Chuckling at what she knew was an overdeveloped sense of practicality, Sally quietly closed the door to the baby’s room and went downstairs. As she passed the door to the master bedroom she paused, listening to Steve’s snoring, and was tempted to forget the report she was working on and crawl into bed with him. But again, the practical side of her came to the fore, and she pulled that door, too, closed and went downstairs.

  She glanced at the papers covering the desk. Better to get the report done tonight, and have the papers cleared off before Steve came down in the morning and demanded to know why “his” desk was cluttered with “her” things. Years ago she had given up trying to convince him that the desk was “theirs.” Steve had certain territorial ideas. The kitchen, for instance, was hers, even though he was a better cook than she was. The bathrooms were hers, too, while the family room, which by all rights should definitely have been theirs, was his. On the other hand, their bedroom, which they both loved, was hers, while the garage, which neither of them particularly wanted, was his.

  The yard, being apart from the house, had somehow managed to wind up being “theirs,” which meant that whoever complained about it had to do something about it. All in all, Sally decided as she wa
ndered into “her” kitchen and began making a pot of tea, the division of the house and yard had worked out very well, like everything else in their marriage. She stared at the pan of water on the stove and idly wondered if it was true that as long as she watched it, it wouldn’t boil. Then, for her own amusement, she picked up a pencil and began jotting figures on the scratch pad beside the telephone. Figuring the resistance of the metal in the electrical coils, the power of the current, and the volume of water, she came to the conclusion that the water should start boiling in eight minutes, give or take fifteen seconds, whether she watched it or not.

  And that, she thought as the water began bubbling right on time, is the pleasure of having a mathematical mind. She poured the water over the tea bags and carried the pot and a cup back to the desk.

  Much of the clutter was made up of computer printouts, and it was Sally’s job to analyze the program of which the printouts were the results. Somewhere in the program there was a bug, and the college admissions office, which had dreamed up the program in the first place, had asked Sally to find it. The program, designed to review the records of hopeful high school seniors, had disqualified every applicant for the fall semester. When Sally had suggested that perhaps the program was perfect and the applicants simply weren’t qualified, the dean of admissions had been less than amused. Soberly, he had handed Sally the program and the output, and asked her to find the problem by Monday morning.

  And find it she would, for Sally Montgomery, as well as being beautiful, was brainy. Too brainy for her own good, her mother had always told her. Now, as she began analyzing the program in comparison to the printout it had produced, she could almost hear her mother’s voice telling her she shouldn’t be down here working in the middle of the night; she should be upstairs “loving her husband.”

  “You’ll lose him,” Phyllis Paine had told Sally over and over again. “A woman’s place is in the home, loving her husband and her children. It’s not normal for a woman your age to work.”

  “Then why did I go to college?” Sally had countered back in the days before she had given up arguing with her mother.

  “Well, it wasn’t to major in mathematics! I’d always hoped you’d do something with your music. Music is good for a woman, particularly the piano. In my day, all women played the piano.”

  It had gone on for years. Sally had finally stopped trying to explain to her mother that times had changed. She and Steve had agreed from the start that her career was every bit as important as his own. Her mother simply couldn’t understand, and never missed an opportunity to let Sally know that in her opinion—the only one that counted, of course—a woman’s place was in the home. “Maybe it’s all right for women to work down in New York, but in Eastbury, Massachusetts, it just doesn’t look right!”

  And maybe, Sally reflected as she spotted the error in the program and began rewriting the flawed area, she’s right. Maybe we should have gone out to Phoenix last year, and gotten out of this stuffy little town. I could have found a job out there, probably a better one than I have here. But they hadn’t gone. They had agreed that since Sally was happy at the college, and Steve saw a glowing future for both of them in Eastbury’s burgeoning electronics industry, they should stay right where they were, and where they’d always been.

  Until the last few years, Eastbury had been one of those towns in which the older people talked about how good things used to be, and the younger people wondered how they could get out. But then, five years ago, the great change had begun. A change in the tax structure had encouraged fledgling businesses to come to Eastbury. And it had worked. Buildings which had once housed shoe factories and textile mills, then lain empty and crumbling for decades, were bustling once again. People were working—no longer at slave wages on killing shifts, but with flexible hours and premium salaries, creating the electronic miracles that were changing the face of the country.

  Eastbury itself, of course, had not changed much. It was still a small town, its plain façade cheered only by a new civic center which was a clumsy attempt at using new money to create old buildings. What had resulted was a city hall that looked like a bank posing as a colonial mansion, and an elaborately landscaped “town square” entirely fenced in with wrought iron fancy-work. Still, Eastbury was a safe place, small enough so the Montgomerys knew almost everyone in town, yet large enough to support the college that employed Sally.

  The tea was cold, and Sally glanced at the clock, only slightly surprised to see that she’d been working for more than an hour. But the program was done, and Sally was sure that tomorrow morning it would produce the desired printouts. Eastbury College would have a freshman class next year after all.

  She meticulously straightened up the desk, readying it for the onslaught of telephone calls that greeted Steve every morning. Using his talents as a salesman in tandem with the contacts he had made growing up in Eastbury, Steve had turned the town into what he liked to refer to as his “private gold mine.” Mornings he often worked at home, and afternoons he spent either in his office or at the athletic club he had helped found, not out of any great interest in sports, but because he knew the executives of the new companies liked to work in what they called casual surroundings. Steve believed in giving people what they wanted. In turn, they usually gave him what he wanted, which was invariably a small piece of whatever action was about to take place. When asked what he did, Steve usually defined himself as an entrepreneur. In truth, he was a salesman who specialized in putting people together to the benefit of all concerned. Over the years, it had paid handsomely, not only for the Montgomerys, but for the whole town. It had been Steve who had convinced Inter-Technics to donate a main-frame computer to Eastbury that would tie all the town’s small computers together, though Sally had never been convinced that it was one of his better ideas.

  But now Steve was beginning to get bored. During the last few months he had begun to talk about the two of them going into business for themselves. Sally would become an independent consultant, and Steve would sell her services.

  And mother will call him a pimp, Sally thought. She closed the roll-top desk and went into the kitchen. She was about to pour the untouched tea down the drain when she changed her mind and began reheating it. She wasn’t tired, and her work was done, and the children were asleep, and there were no distractions. Tonight would be a good time for her to think over Steve’s idea.

  In many ways, it was appealing. The two of them would be working together—an idea she liked—but it also meant they would be together almost all the time. She wasn’t sure she liked that.

  Was there such a thing as too much togetherness? She had a good marriage, and didn’t want to disturb it. Deep inside, she had a feeling that one of the reasons their marriage was so good was that both of them had interests beyond the marriage. Working together would end that. Suddenly their entire lives would be bound up in their marriage. That could be bad.

  Sally poured herself a cup of the tea, still thinking about the possibilities. And then, in her head, she heard Steve’s voice, and saw his blue eyes smiling at her. “You’ll never know till you try, will you?” he was asking. Alone in the kitchen, Sally laughed softly and made up her mind. No, she said to herself, I won’t. And if it doesn’t work, we can always do something else. She finished the tea, put the cup in the sink, and went upstairs.

  She was about to go into the bedroom when she paused, listening.

  The house was silent, as it always was at that time of night. She listened for a moment, then went on into the bedroom and began undressing. The near-total darkness was broken only by the faint glow of a streetlight half a block away.

  She slipped into bed next to Steve, and his arms came out to hold her. She snuggled in, resting her head on his shoulder, her fingers twining in the mat of blond hair that covered his chest.

  She pressed herself closer to Steve and felt his arm tighten around her. She closed her eyes, ready to drift off to sleep, content in the knowledge that everythin
g was as close to perfect as she could ever have wanted it, despite what her mother might think. It was, after all, her life, and not her mothers.

  And then she was wide-awake again, her eyes open, her body suddenly rigid.

  Had she heard something?

  Maybe she should wake Steve.

  No. Why wake Steve when she was already awake?

  She slipped out of his arms and put on a robe. In the hall she stood still, listening carefully, trying to remember if she had locked the doors earlier.

  She had.

  She could remember it clearly. Right after Steve had gone up to bed, she had gone around the house, throwing the bolts, a habit she had developed during Steve’s time on the road, when she had been alone with Jason for so many nights. The habit had never been broken.

  The silence gathered around her, and she could hear her heart beating in the darkness.

  What was it?

  If there was nothing, what was she afraid of?

  She told herself she was being silly, and turned back to the bedroom.

  Still, the feeling would not go away.

  I’ll look in on the children, she decided.

  She moved down the hall to Jason’s room and opened the door. He was in his bed, the covers twisted around his feet, one arm thrown over the teddy bear he still occasionally slept with. Sally gently freed the covers and tucked her son in. Jason moved in his sleep and turned over. In the dim glow from the window, he looked like a miniature version of his father, his blond hair tangled, his little jaw square, with the same dimple in his chin that Sally had always thought made Steve look sexy. How many hearts are you going to break when you grow up? Sally wondered. She leaned over, and kissed Jason gently.

  “Aw, Mom,” the little boy said.

  Sally pretended to scowl at her son. “You were supposed to be asleep.”

  “I was playin’ possum,” Jason replied. “Is something wrong?”

  “Can’t a mother say good night anymore?” Sally asked.

  “You’re always kissin’ me,” Jason complained.