"But he thought he was doing the work of the Lord!" Letitia said.
The demon blew smoke. "Fact is, toots, he didn't care who's work he was doin', long as it was him doin' it." He tapped ash onto the green grass of Eden. "'Nother fact is, you was just the same. We catch more of you wid pride than wid all the other six big ones put together."
"It's not fair," Chesney said.
"Fair ain't the bizness we're in. It went the way it always goes – the preacher sees the action and wants in on it, wants the biggest slice. A demon shows up, offers him help, he don't say, 'Whoa, Nellie, what's the vig?' He just takes it."
"A demon pretending to be an angel," Chesney said.
"We weren't helpin' him carry in the groceries," Xaphan countered. "He wanted help you only get from us, real mess-wid-the-world help. And he never said, 'Wait a minute, what's the price of this?' cause all he cared about was bein' the big cheese, makin' his mark."
It puffed on its cigar and continued, "So the boss says, 'Give him what he wants, it could work to our advantage,' and puts one of the top guys on the job.'
"Top guy?" Chesney said.
"Crocell, a full-weight Dux Asinorum."
Letitia's father had prided himself on his legal Latin. "A Duke of Fools," she translated. "A Duke of Hell."
One of the weasel eyes squinted in her direction, while the black lips spoke around the smoking Havana. "And Hardacre wasn't the only one thought the 'angel' was the cat's pajamas, was he?"
The woman's face fell. "Pride again. I thought myself special because I had a man who spoke with an angel of the Lord."
"Nuttin' special about it," said Xaphan. "Our standard product, right off the line. Foolin' fools. It's what we do."
Melda said, "But this wasn't a standard situation. The Devil wanted Hardacre as an option, in case he really did bring on the end of the world."
"If we're showin' our hands," Xaphan said, "the boss also wanted him to bring you-know-who back from that little place we visited. Figured he might come in handy, too." The fiend smiled. "Tricky business, too, not lettin' that demon-bustin' prophet catch on about Crocell's little act – the duke had to make sure never to touch the preacher or anythin' on the premises, or old Josh would have sniffed it out. He was supposeta think it was me he smelled. Guess it worked."
Chesney frowned. "Never mind the self-congratulation. The situation now is that the Devil's got a connection to Joshua – they're writing a book together – so Hardacre gets the chop. And so does my mother."
"We're innocent," Letitia said. "They tricked us."
"You could argue that in court," said the demon. "Course, it's our court." It puffed the cigar to a brighter glow. "Judge's name is Minos. He's kinda strict."
"But now he doesn't need the preacher," Melda said. "So he could let him and Letitia go."
"No can do," said the fiend. "Like the boss says, we don't make the rules."
"Enough!" said Chesney. "I need to think!"
"It's not your kind of problem," said Letitia. "Let me talk to Billy Lee–"
"No," said Melda, "he won't listen. Besides, Chesney can do this." She put a hand on the young man's arm. "Go on, sweetie, work it through."
Chesney went to the other side of the Tree of Life and sat down cross-legged on the thick, soft turf, his back against the warm, smooth-barked trunk. The light in the Garden of Eden was as pure as it had been that first morning, but it provided no clear pool of illumination for this problem. The nub of it, he posited, was to prevent Hardacre from bringing on the end of the world. Then he thought, no, that's not it. The problem is to keep Mother and Billy Lee out of Hell. Because, having accepted help from a demon, having taken the fruits of the underworld, that's where they were heading.
He remembered Nat Blowdell being whipped through the iron gates of Hell. He couldn't let that happen to his mother, for all the grief she had caused him. But the rules were the rules. Then his mind went to Joshua. Did he really have the authority to forgive sins, the way he was empowered to cast out demons? Or was that a quality that had been tacked on later, after the little man had been transfigured into a deity?
But Chesney couldn't approach the prophet while he was hobnobbing with Lucifer. Let the Devil get one whiff of what the young man wanted and he would do all he could to deny Chesney his wish. Satan had never forgiven – probably never could forgive – the blow that his pride had suffered when a mere human had thrown his kingdom into chaos.
We have to solve this ourselves, he thought. No, I have to solve it. He was one who had started it all, and having read a thousand comix, he knew enough about stories to know that the hero, however flawed a character he might be, has to step up when the situation is at its most perilous and do what needs to be done.
A petal from one of the great tree's blossoms spiraled down and landed on his knee. He could smell its perfume, strong and deeply pheremonic. He looked up and saw the light dappling through the foliage, the long, cylindrical fruit hanging from their stems. And in a moment, he knew. "Thank you," he said. Then he uncrossed his legs and rose, thinking, yes, the hero has to solve the problem – but sometimes the author gives him a little nudge in the right direction.
He reached up into the tree and plucked one of the fruit. It was heavy and warm in his hand, smooth and with the suggestion of veins under the silky, almost translucent skin. A pair of convoluted blossoms, like roses turned in on themselves, clustered at the base of the fruit, where it emerged from the stem.
He stepped around to where the others were waiting, his mother and Melda standing in identical postures, arms folded, heads down, but their bodies angled away from each other so that their gazes need not meet. Xaphan was hovering behind them, a fresh tumbler of rum in its hand.
"Let's go," Chesney told it, "all of us, right now."
The demon swallowed the liquor. "Where to?"
"Hardacre's place. The kitchen."
Billy Lee was enjoying himself. He was seated at the desk in his study, where he had polished the new gospel to a high gloss before preparing another video clip of the prophet to upload to the internet, when the moment was right. That wasn't quite yet, although the disruptions were spreading rapidly. A growing fount of trouble in the streets were the tens of millions of Americans who had been assured that, come the time of tribulations, they would be raptured out of the line of fire, so they could watch from comfortable seats in Heaven as their fellow mortals reaped the wages of sin. Now that it appeared that the end of days was just around the corner, and yet here they still were, being jostled by rioters and buffeted by the panic-stricken. They were not taking the disappointment well. They were showing a tendency to set fires and smash windows.
Hardacre was reminded of Nero's burning of Rome, a slum-clearance program that the cithera-strumming emperor had blamed on Christians trying to hurry up the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven. Maybe there had been some truth in the old Roman's allegations. On the flatscreen TV mounted on the wall he saw a middle-aged man in khaki pants and a well-pressed short-sleeve shirt hurl a brick through a plate-glass window – downtown Atlanta, said the crawl underneath the image – then a woman in a flower-print dress followed it with a molotov cocktail. The rioters were turning to shake fists at the sky as the scene cut to another gaggle of talking heads seated around a table in a newsroom.
"Cardinal Walenz," a silver-haired anchor asked an ancient man wearing a black cassock and a red skull-cap, "is this the end of the world as prophesied in the Book of Revelations?"
The churchman leaned back in his chair. His voice was papery thin. "That's 'Revelation,'" he said. "No ess."
The newsman thanked the cardinal for the correction though he didn't seem all that grateful for the information. "But what about it? Is this what's prophesied in the Bible?"
"Have you read the Book of Revelation?"
"I've been a little busy." He waved a piece of paper. "I have a summary here."
"Well," said the cleric, "the Book of Revelation specifies boiling
seas, the moon turned to blood, Christ appearing in the Heavens on his throne, angels from one horizon to the other."
"We're not seeing that, are we?"
"We are not." The cardinal folded his hands together and looked grave. "I don't want to say too much before the Holy Father speaks, but I think it's safe to say that what we're seeing now is the Devil at work in the world."
"The Devil?" The silvery eyebrows climbed toward the silvery hairline.
"None other. And you'll notice that the worst of the disruptions are taking place in the non-Catholic countries."
The newsman checked the screen of a laptop beside him. "There have been serious riots in France and Italy," he said.
"Those hardly qualify as Catholic countries," the cardinal said. "But to return to the question, one thing we have not seen is the rise of the Antichrist – the world leader who leads the faithful astray."
"I thought Hall Bruster had confessed to that."
"Again," said the cleric, "a peak audience of three-anda-half million viewers is hardly world leadership. Mr Bruster is clearly unbalanced."
"But you've seen the clip." The anchor spoke to someone out of shot, "Roll the Bruster clip again." A moment later a window appeared in the corner of Hardacre's television screen, and he saw for the umpteenth time the casting out of the two demons.
"The man with the beard," the newsman said, "is believed by," – he consulted his laptop screen again – "eighty-eight per cent of the American people to be Jesus Christ, returned to Earth."
"Well, he's not," said the cardinal. "He doesn't look like any of his pictures."
The interviewer let that one go by. "And almost eighty per cent believe that by casting two demons out of Hall Bruster, Jesus has vanquished the Antichrist. So the end can now come."
"God," said the cardinal, "does not pay much attention to public opinion polls."
Time, thought Billy Lee. He reached for the wireless computer mouse, moved it and clicked the left button. On the desktop monitor in front of him a blue bar went from left to right. Ten seconds later, the newsman put two fingers to the bud in his ear then interrupted the cardinal to say, "I'm being told that the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre has issued another video statement. Okay, roll it."
Hardacre was looking at himself as he had been fifteen minutes earlier, sitting behind this desk. The video camera that had captured the moment was still mounted on its tripod a few feet away. He had to admit that he looked pretty good.
"Brothers and sisters," his voice said from the television speakers, "the Lord has asked me to deliver unto you his new revelation. He himself has left us again – only temporarily, I can assure you – to do personal battle with Satan the deceiver. Out of that struggle will come a new day for humankind, and a renewal of the world."
He paused to let that sink in, then said, "In the meantime, he has asked me to be his representative on Earth. Together, he and I have written a new gospel – to be called the Book of Jesus – which I will shortly upload to the internet. It will, of course, be available for free.
"The new gospel spells out how the returned Jesus wishes the world to be prepared for his final coming, when he will rule over us for a thousand years. That millennium will be the time of perfecting. None shall die. None shall be prey to sickness, nor shall they want for sustenance or comfort."
He paused again, to offer a beatific smile. "Between now and the dawning of that millennium of peace, brothers and sisters, will be a time of building and reorganizing. The world must be made fit for his divine rule.
"We will need to institute new systems of government, new modes of economic life, new relations between man and man, between man and woman, and between man and God. The Book of Jesus, the only gospel authored by the messiah himself, will make plain how those ends are to be achieved."
On the screen, Hardacre folded his hands just the way the cardinal had. "Brothers and sisters," he said, "the new day is almost at hand. Let us join together to help our Lord in his struggle against the Evil One, by making the world a fit place for his victorious return.
"Watch for the Book of Jesus, read its message, and let the Lord's will be done." He gave them another smile of blessing, and the image faded. Then they were back in the newsroom, with the anchor and the cardinal.
"Well," said the prelate, "you were looking for your Antichrist. There he goes."
Hardacre laughed. Outside he could faintly hear a new hubbub among the reporters camped on his lawn. It was probably time to have the police remove them. He reached for the bottle of Scotch then thought better of it. "Shouldn't drink on an empty stomach," he said to himself. It was long past lunchtime. Letitia would have fixed one of his energy drinks for him. And maybe there would be time for a little connubial contact. He went looking for her.
The kitchen was unexpectedly crowded. Beside his wife, her son and the girlfriend were seated around the breakfast nook table. The presence of the weasel-headed demon, hovering over in a corner, explained how they had arrived without having to struggle through the crowds outside. The fiend was subsisting on rum and cigar smoke, as usual, but as Hardacre walked in, Letitia was just pouring all of them some kind of fruit concoction from a pitcher.
"Smoothie, dear?" she said. "There's plenty." He attributed the strained note in her voice to the necessity of having to raise it over the sound of a helicopter racketing low over the roof. Definitely time to have the cops shoo away the media, Hardacre thought.
The copter sounded not only loud but stationary, as if it had set down on the back lawn, but when he looked through the window, Hardacre saw it angling away over the trees at the rear of the property. Meanwhile, Letitia had risen from the table, her eyes bright, a glass of something thick and yellow-colored in her hand. "Here," she said.
He took the glass, sniffed the drink. It had a heady, almost womanly smell to it. He felt a sudden stirring in the front of his pants. "What's in it?"
She spoke in an off-hand tone. "Peaches, papaya, kiwi, ginkgo biloba, a nice ripe mango …"
She knew he liked mango more than any other fruit. And, by God, Billy Lee knew, if ever a man deserved a taste of mango, it was himself, now in his moment of triumph. He raised the glass and took a mouthful. His tastebuds registered shock at a new taste that overpowered the familiar flavors. Then his whole gustatory apparatus gave itself over to ecstasy. He drank the whole thing down and gave a gasp of satisfaction as it settled in his stomach.
She was looking at him differently now. "…and a little something special," she finished.
"What do you mean?"
Chesney was on his feet and coming toward them, a glass full of the fruit concoction in his hand. He gave it to his mother and said, "You'd better drink some, too."
"I suppose I had," she said. She drained her glass. Hardacre saw the same look come over her face as she must be seeing in his. Then her eyes darkened in a way that, over the past few weeks, had become both familiar and welcome. The stirring in his groin became a whirlpool. He heard his own voice sounding thick in his ears. "Upstairs."
"Right away," she breathed, and took his offered hand.
They turned toward the door that led into the hallway. At that moment, they heard a crash from the back of the house. Hardacre had time to think that someone must have kicked in the back door, when Captain Denby appeared in the doorway, his face strained and pale, his eyes glittering.
In his hands was an automatic pistol, dark and angular, its muzzle like the mouth of a tunnel into blackest oblivion. Without a word, he raised it and Billy Lee Hardacre saw flame shoot toward him, twice.
FIFTEEN
The first bullet was like a train smashing into his chest, the second like the train's big brother piling on. Everything slowed down and Billy Lee felt himself floating backward under the double impact, his knees folding. His hand was torn free of Letitia's and he could see her face turning to follow him, the desire that had filled her eyes mutating into shock. He knew somehow that at least one of the bullets had tor
n his heart to pieces and that there would be no recovery. He would continue to drift backward and downward until he landed supine upon the kitchen floor. And then he would die.
He felt his buttocks hit the tiles, then his shoulders, then the back of his head. It seemed ridiculous to him that he felt the pain of the last impact over the incredible fire in his chest. All over the world, because of him, people were walking away from their daily routines to congregate in churches or public squares, or to loot and riot – yet Billy Lee Hardacre's own cranial nerves were staying on the job, faithfully reporting a now entirely irrelevant injury.
Sheesh, he thought, and waited for the blackness to come, followed by the light and the tunnel. Perhaps the Throne would be waiting to escort him into Heaven. He had no doubt that's where he was heading – had he not been doing Heaven's work all this time?
Costume Not Included: To Hell and Back, Book 2 Page 29
