He'd been drawing ever since, putting Onto paper every thought that occurred to him, designing doorways and naves, chapels and chambers, altars and pews.
Living quarters for Jesus Christ.
All of which could be constructed within forty days. He wondered what Jesus was going to do when He established His kingdom on earth. Was He going to abolish war and hunger? Was he going to make the world a paradise Was He going to reunite families with their dear departed loved ones? Covey put down his drafting pen. Was He going to resurrect Judith?
No, he thought. Jesus wouldn't do that to him. Not when he was designing His church.
Would He?
Just to be on the safe side, maybe he would try to talk to Jesus when all this was over. Maybe he could ask for a favor. Maybe he could get Jesus to make sure that Judith burned in hell for eternity.
Covey had not yet seen the Savior, but he already knew, that Jesus was nothing like he had imagined. He had bought the Hollywood conception of Christ, had always, seen Him as kind and loving, tolerant and forgiving. But he knew now that Jesus was judgmental and unforgiving: that He was ruthless in His dispensation of power, and although this was not what Covey had expected, it seemed right to him. This was the way it was supposed to be.
Which was why he knew Jesus would understand about Judith.
Covey finished the last of his cold coffee and looke over what he'd drawn. It was a sacrificial altar, a carve and decorated block of stone not unlike those he'd see in Bible movies, where offerings could be made to Jestu Jesus liked sacrifices.
Covey rubbed his tired eyes, looked at the clock, an decided to call it quits for the night. Next to the clock] on top of the television set, was the pickle jar in which he, planned to keep his lizards. He'd caught the first one thi morning in the backyard. It, and another he had caught at noon, were now caged in the jar. He would offer these and the others he intended to catch, to Jesus as a sacrifice Maybe, if he had time, he would even capture some bigg animal.
Maybe that would ensure that Judith would be take care of.
Covey stood up, turned off his desk light and, feelin exhausted but happy, he headed toward his bedroom.
Ginni saw the green sign before she could read the words on it, and she prayed that the number of miles to
Rio Verde would be under twenty.
No such luck.
She sped by the sign and swore softly to herself as she saw that the town was still fifty miles away. She'd promised her sister that she'd be there before noon, and now it looked as though she wouldn't be there until after three.
She put her hand in the ice chest next to her, feeling around, but her fingers encountered only cold water and half-melted ice cubes. She'd finished the last of the Diet Cokes some miles back, and she was thirsty again. The small Hyundai had no air-conditioning, and even with the windows down the desert heat was stifling, the wind which blew against her face warm and hellish.
She also had to go to the bathroom, and she wasn't sure she would be able to wait until she reached the next gas station, the pressure on her bladder was becoming too insistent to ignore. She glanced outside the window at the barren landscape and didn't even see any bushes she could squat behind if worse came to worst. There were only tumbleweeds, cactus, and thin leafless trees. She pressed down on the gas pedal, edging the car up another five miles an hour.
Mary Beth, she knew, was going to be frantic that she was late. Ever since their father had disappeared, her sister had, understandably, been a bundle of nerves tense jumpy, always on edge. Although she had not let Mary Beth know it, Ginni too was worried sick. She had not been surprised when their father disappeared for a few days---it was not as though he hadn't done it before--but when a week had passed, and he hadn't contacted anybody in the family at all, she'd become worried.
Now she was convinced that her sister was right, that something had happened to him. Ahead, on the right, she saw a blue sign, and though it was still too far away for her to make out the words, Ginni knew from experience that the sign announced a rest area coming up. She sighed with relief.
A few miles later, she saw a trio of picnic tables covered by cheap metal awnings and, between them, a low brick building. A bathroom! She pulled into the rest area and parked next to the only other car there, a red Flat Its occupants, a young man wearing a white tennis outfit and his blond girlfriend, were eating at one of the picnic tables.
Ginni fairly ran through the doorway marked WOMEN. The smell hit her the instant she stepped inside, but she didn't care. She saw, in the second before she sat down, that the metal toilet did not have a chemical disposal system but was positioned directly over an open septic tank. Then there was relief, and she closed her eyes gratefully. She heard a loud sickening plop from the tank below. She jumped up, stared into the open hole. It was dark down there, and she could only make out a vague dark lake of human waste. She thought she saw something white swimming through the sludge.
Then her father popped up from the sewage, grinned at her, and resumed swimming in the filth.
The Flat people had been just pulling onto the highway when she ran screaming out of the bathroom. She'd run instinctively after them, but before she had even reached the parking area they were gone.
Now she sat on top of one of the picnic tables, staring at the bathroom. The small tan building looked threatening to her now.
Standing alone in the middle of the desert, the only sign of human encroachment in the flat empty wilderness, the structure seemed out of place, wrong. Ginni took a deep breath. She knew she was just being paranoid. Her perceptions had been altered by what she'd seen in the cavernous hole beneath the toilet.
She shivered. Had she really seen what she'd thought she'd seen? It was so off-the-wall crazy that it did not seem even remotely credible.
If she'd heard about it from some one else or had read of such an occurrence, she would have dismissed it as ludicrous. Even now, her rational mind was telling her that she'd imagined it, her worry and concern having overshadowed her reason. Could her father really be living in a septic tank under a woman's bathroom in the middle of the desert?
No.
But she'd seen him swimming through the shit. He'd grinned at her.
She knew she should get out of here, tell Mary Beth, tell the police, but despite what she'd seen, despite the fear within her, she was still not certain that her father was really down there. How could he be? No human being could live in such an environment. And it didn't make any sense. Why would he disappear from home to live under a toilet?
Ginni pushed herself off the plastic tabletop, pulling her shorts out of the crack of her buttocks. She started walking slowly down the winding cement walkway. She had to make sure. She had to see.
The inside of the bathroom was dark, the only light coming from the diffused rays of the sun through a battered translucent skylight and the open door. Her heart pounding crazily, Ginni approached the toilet. The smell was as bad as before, maybe worse, and she almost gagged.
She forced herself to look into the open septic tank.
"Dad?" she called hesitantly. The lake of filth remained undisturbed.
She cleared her throat. "Dad?"
Her father's head broke through the surface of the effluence, white and grinning.
Ginni backed up, her heart feeling as though it would burst through the walls of her chest. She realized she was screaming, and she forced herself to stop. Gathering her courage, she approached the toilet again, looked down into the opening.
Her father stared up at her, waste dripping down his exposed forehead, brownish liquid running out of his grinning mouth. "Don't come back" he hissed. His voice was cracked and wheezy.
Oinni looked around wildly. What should she do?
Should sheA middle-aged woman weng a fashionable blue business suit stepped into the bathroom. She stared at Ginni, standing over the toilet, looking down, and cleared her throat. "Excuse me," she said awkwardly. "I need to use the facilities."
Ginni whirled on her. "You can't! My father's down there! - :
The woman backed up, a look of startled incomprehension on her face.
She exited quickly, and Ginni looked back down. There was only darkness, only brown.
"Bitch!" her father's voice hissed from somewhere in the septic tank.
Frightened as much by the hatred in that voice as by the circumstances in which they were spoken, she moved hesitantly away from the opening.
An excrement-encrusted hand shot upward from the seat of the toilet.
Ginni made it back to the car and barely managed to lock the doors before fainting.
The hours after she came to were a blur. She remembered being revived by a uniformed police officer--someone had apparently seen her lying slumped over the wheel, unconscious, and had called the police. She remembered telling and retelling her story. She remembered the influx of policemen and sewage workers and, later, the television cameras.
She remembered nothing of the capture, but she remembered Mary Beth.
Mary Beth hugging her and holding her, crying with her, talking for her to the police. Mary Beth taking care of the details and formalities.
And she'd always thought she was the strong one. Ginni stared through the bars as her father paced restlessly back and forth across the cement floor of his cell. She was alone back here except for a uniformed guard. Mary Beth was in the front office, talking to the police chief.
Her father's eyes were bright, alert, and filled with a demented sort of excitement. She could feel the kine dc energy radiating from him.
He stopped pacing, turned to look at her, then rushed the bars, hitting them with his head and grinning. "Bitch!" he screamed.
"Settle down in there," the guard ordered. '
Tears welled in Ginni's eyes--tears of pity for what he had become, tears of loss for what he had once been. The man before her still had her father's form and face, but the words, the movements, the expressions were those of a different person entirely, an alien. A tear escaped, rolling dovna her right cheek, and she wiped it away with a finger. "Why... ?" She swallowed hard, trying to keep her voice steady. "Why did you do this?"
His grin became wider. "I'm a shit. I've always been a shit." He shoved his head in the toilet, swishing it around. Ginni turned away.
She closed her eyes, saw in her mind her father's hand emerging from the septic tank.
She left the detentior area crying, escorted by the guard.
Robert stared hard at the fax machine, still not sure if he should immediately inform the feds about Vigil or if he should wait. They probably knew already, probably had people whose job it was to monitor radio and television newscasts for crime reports, but no one from either the
FBI or the state police had yet contacted him. He was tempted to hold off for a few days wait to fax them the information, but no, he couldn't do that. He thought of
Mary Beth's face when she'd seen her father in the cell: a bleak barren landscape.
She deserved the best men' and resdiees that could be mustered.
Rich walked in, and Robert nodded tiredly at him, moving back behind his desk and sitting down. "How's the news biz?"
"Pretty good. How's law enforcement?"
"Takes it up the ass."
"Different trokes for different folks." : The two of them were silent for a moment. Rober leaned back in his swivel chair, which creaked with a exaggerated opening-door-in-a-haunted-house sound. "You oughta get that thing oiled." "Yeah."
Rich walked over to the fax machine. "I wish I could afford to get myself one of these things."
"It's the FBI's. If it was up to me, it wouldn't be here."
"Have they been able to find anything out?"
Robert shook his head. "Who knows? If they did, I' probably be the last person they'd tell. I'm sure they'r, running everything through their computers and what not, doing whatever it is they do."
Rich leaned against the windowsill, faced his brother. "So what is happening?"
"If I knew, I'd tell you."
"The cemetery made it into the Republic the other day. Did you see that?"
"I've been too busy to read the newspaper lately. I haven't even gotten to your article yet."
Rich grinned. "You don't have to read it. It was brilliant."
"They think they're going to be able to rebury all of the bodies based on the plot map. Nothing was moved too far."
"Thank God."
Robert cleared his throat. "Did you ever go out there to see--?"
"I didn't look."
Robert focused his attention on a topographical map of the county that hung on the left wall, not wanting to see his brother's face. "I didn't either. But now I think maybe I should've. It just doesn't seem right to me that... I wasn't there. That neither of us were there."
"Morn would've understood....... "Dad wouldn't've." i There was a knock on the door frame. "Am I interrupting anything?" Brad Woods stood in the entryway, holding by his side a manila folder stuffed with papers
Robert shook his head. "Come on . nWoods walked across the worn carpet and dropped the folder on top of Robert's desk. 3 copies of my reports. I already sent copies to the county. I ended up examining eight of the bodies in detail, the ones that appeared to have been specifically, for lack of a better word, operated upon. You were right. The marrow had been removed from several of the corpses, although most of that marrow was already dried.
But I could find no evidence of any surgical procedures, no telling marks upon bone or flesh, no trace of chemical substances that shouldn't be there, no method, no indication even whether this was done by a human or an animal."
Robert sighed, picked up the folder, glanced halfheartedly at the top page and dropped the packet down on his desktop once again.
Woods took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and examined it. "What have you found out? Do you have any idea who could have done this or why?"
"No. I was hoping you'd help me out with that." Woods stopped examining the cigarette and placed it, unlit, in his mouth. He looked from Robert to Rich and began pacing. "What if we really do have a vampire on our hands?"
Rich snorted. "Come on, now. Not you too."
"No. Hear me out. I've been doing a little research on exsanguination techniques, and the way Torres's body and the bodies of those animals were drained was .. . Let's just say it was highly irregular. It also shouldn't have been able to work as it did."
"Brad--"
"I know this is crazy. I understand how you feel. But, medically, this stuff does not happen. And I'll be honest with you. Examining those corpses from the cemetery gave me the creeps. The technical aspects and examination results are in those reports, but what's not in those reports is the weirdness. It just spooked me to work on them. I kept wondering why anyone would suck the dry bone marrow from a corpse."
Robert stood. "Maybe it's a cult. Who the hell knows?" "Exactly.
Who the hell knows? All I'm saying is that right now we need to keep an open mind about this." Woods took the still-unlit cigarette from his mouth and replaced it in his shirt pocket as he stopped pacing.
"What about Vigil? What did County Psych say?"
"The guy's in there right now. I'm just waiting for him to report back." "Who is it?" "Jacobson."
Woods nodded. "He's good. A little flaky, but good. : The county doesn't usually get shrinks of that caliber." ' He moved next to Rich, turned toward Robert. "Can I wait around here until the results come in?"
"Sure. Why not?" /
"What about me?" Rich asked. "Is "" this going to be on or off the record?"
"Your call. I'm not going to tell you what to do."
"That's a first."
Robert picked up a paperclip, threw it at him.
Ten minutes later, the three of them met Dr. Jacobson in the conference room. The psychiatrist, an unusually tall, bald man with earrings in both ears, did not even wait until they were seated. "Are you familiar with the Medusa Syn
drome?"
Robert and Rich looked dumbly at each other. Woods shook his head, since the question was clearly directed to him. "Can't say that I am."
"It is exceedingly rare. It refers to a trauma-induced personality change, or, more specifically, aberrant behavior produced by exposure, to a traumatic incident. What differentiates the Medusa Syndrome from other trauma induced personality disorders is the fact that it is not merely triggered by a single incident but is actually caused by that one-time exposure, the shock is so great that the individual is not able to cope with what he or she has seen, and the defenses of the ego break down completely. The person experiences what might be referred to as a personality restructuring. I've never before come across it myself, but I can tell you this: I've never even read of anything this severe. Mr. vigil's name is going to live in textbooks for years to come. If he survives, if he didn't catch some fatal disease down there, we're going to have ourselves quite a study."
Robert cleared his throat. "Excuse me for asking, but how can you be sure? Maybe Mike--Mr. Vigil--has been crazy all along. Maybe he just snapped."
"I'm not a hundred percent positive. I only met the man today and only examined him for a few hours. But the signs are there. To be honest, we may not be absolutely certain of the diagnosis for some time , to come. But I'll tell you this: There's a high probability that Mr.
Vigil is suffering from the Medusa Syndrome." Jacobson ran his index finger over his top teeth. "You know, I was at the conference where the syndrome was named. I wanted to, . call it the "Tommy Syndrome," after The Who's rock opera because Tommy becomes deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing the murder of his mother's lover by his father. But the other psychiatrists were all quite a bit older and were not even familiar with The Who. I doubt if most of them knew who The Beatles were. Besides, they had to get in the obligatory Greek reference.
Psychiatrists love classical references"
"What about Mr. Vigil?" Robert prodded.
"Well, it's clear that this individual has been severely traumatized.
The Summoning Page 14
