Reborn ac-4

by F. Paul Wilson

"Of course it is! It's a gas!"

  He could tell by their expressions that no one agreed with him, least of all Ma. She looked angry and afraid. Jim had to admit to a certain discomfiture himself. He knew he wasn't the Antichrist. Hell, he'd stopped believing in that sort of dreck back in his days at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion! That didn't mean he liked other people believing he was the devil or whatever.

  But that bit about not having a soul… that was kind of creepy. It showed some pretty original thinking on the part of those nuts out there. Jim wasn't sure he believed in souls, anyway. As far as he could see, you were born, you did your best at what you had to do for as many years as you could, and then you died. That was it. No soul, no heaven, no hell, no limbo, no purgatory.

  But what if there really was such a thing as a soul?

  And what if he didn't have one?

  Despite all his innate skepticism, despite his contempt for religion and mysticism and spiritualism and all the other isms that people used throughout the ages to insulate themselves from the cold, hard realities of existence, he knew deep inside that if such a thing as a soul existed, he wanted one.

  "I've a good mind to call the cops," his mother said. "Have Sergeant Hall come out and tell them all to get lost! That'll end this fiascal!"

  "Fiasco, Ma," he said. "But stay put. I'll scare them off."

  He was besieged by protests from all sides but he ignored them and hurried out the door. This might be fun.

  Behind him, he heard Carol say, "I'm calling the police!"

  12

  "Who's this coming now?" said Mr. Veilleur from beside her in the backseat of Martin's car.

  Grace gasped as she recognized the figure approaching the gate from within. "That's Jim!"

  "The clone? The one they think is this Antichrist?"

  "Yes! Walking right up to them!"

  "Pretty courageous for someone who's supposed to be the 'spawn of the Devil,' don't you think?"

  "I don't know what to think," she said, remembering the smoke rising from Henry's old house, and now this. She felt utterly miserable.

  "You're not alone," Mr. Veilleur said in a gentle voice. "Neither does anyone else."

  13

  "Hi, folks!" Jim said, strolling up to the gate with his hands in his pockets, looking as casual as he could. "What's up?"

  "Who are you?" said the skinny guy who had been talking to Bill earlier. Spano was the name, if Jim correctly remembered what Bill had said.

  "Oh, you know me, don't you, pal? I'm Jim Stevens, alias the Antichrist."

  There were cries of astonishment from the group. Some of them even scuttled away and hid behind others. It was all Jim could do to keep a straight face. Even their leader took a step back. His voice shook as he spoke.

  "You… you admit it?"

  "Sure. I came into the world to really mess it up for you Christian types. You know, spread sin and fear and war and disease and bring on Armageddon. That sort of stuff. But to tell you the truth, I can't find a place to begin."

  "He's mocking us! He's trying to confuse us, trying to make a joke out of this!"

  "A joke? Just look back on the last twelve months, Hatchet Face." Jim was surprised how clearly his mind was working despite the drinks he'd had earlier. "We've had a six-day war in the Middle East that upset the whole balance of power there, a military junta in Greece, martial law in Thailand, more fighting in Cyprus, Palestine, and especially Vietnam, thousands upon thousands of homeless, hungry refugees in Somalia and Jordan and good ol' Vietnam. And over in the Soviet Union they're celebrating fifty years of their revolution which has so far cost the Russian and East European populace something in excess of thirty million lives. Here at home we've got race riots in East Harlem, Roxbury, Newark, Detroit, and lots of other places. The blacks hate the whites, the whites hate the blacks, the shorthairs hate the longhairs, the longhairs hate anybody with a steady job, the Arabs hate the Jews, and the Klan hates everybody. Ever-growing numbers of people are spending their lives stoned on grass or else they're nuking their psyches with LSD. And on top of all that they kicked my dear friend, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell out of Congress! Sheesh! What's left for me to do?"

  Spano's mouth worked spasmodically. "I… I…"

  "Devil of a predicament, isn't it?" Jim said.

  "Do not let yourselves be swayed by the Father of Lies!" Spano cried.

  "Right on," Jim said.

  He wondered if Hanley had envisioned this sort of scene. Maybe that was why he had kept the whole experiment under wraps. Apparently the scientist's instincts had been on target. Jim had spent days hating Roderick Hanley, but now he was having a slow change of heart.

  Besides, I wouldn't be alive without him.

  Maybe he hadn't been such a bad guy, after all.

  "The Antichrist tries to tell us that the evil in the world is not the devil's work!"

  Antichrist! There it was again, and Jim was suddenly angry. As his anger grew, the fears and self-doubt of the past week began to melt away. Who was this pasty-faced twerp to tell him who he was? He would decide who he was! And he was Jim Stevens. So what if he was genetically the same as Roderick Hanley, Ph.D., Nobel laureate? It didn't matter. He wasn't Roderick Hanley—he was someone else. He was his own man and no one—not these religious nut cases or anyone else—was going to hang a sign on him.

  He smiled. Carol had been right all along: Being a clone really didn't matter. As long as Carol stuck by him, he could handle anything. So easy! Why hadn't he seen it himself?

  "Pray!" Spano was saying to his followers. "Close your ears to his lies!"

  Jim was suddenly tired of the game.

  "Get lost," he said. "You're all pretty pathetic. Take off before the cops get here."

  "No!" Spano cried. "We want the police! We want the world to know your name so that Christians everywhere can be warned of who you really are!"

  "Scram!" Jim shouted.

  He was really angry now. He pulled on the gate but it was locked. With a sudden burst of energy, he climbed up the iron pickets to the top of the brick gatepost.

  14

  "Oh, God! What's he doing!" Carol cried at Bill's shoulder as they watched Jim reach the top of the gatepost column.

  Bill had been watching the scene from the front door with Carol and Jim's mother. His palms had grown slick with sweat.

  "He's going to get killed!" Emma said.

  "Bill!" Carol said, her grip tightening on his arm. "Get him down from there! Please!"

  "I'll try."

  He hurried down the driveway. This whole affair was getting out of hand. The best thing was to get Jim back inside and let the police handle it. But he sensed that getting Jim to change course once he was on a roll like this was not going to be easy. A nameless fear quickened his pace, but he sensed that he was already too late.

  15

  Jim sat on the concrete ball atop the column and looked down on the small, uneasy crowd.

  "Come on, folks!" he said, making a shooing motion with his hands. "Get packing! This isn't funny anymore!"

  They recoiled at the sight of his hands.

  "Look!" someone cried. "His palms! The Mark of the Beast!"

  "It's proof!" Spano shouted. "Proof that Satan dwells within!"

  They oohed and aahed and muttered together as they clustered below him. Jim looked at his fuzzy palms.

  The Mark of the Beast? What the hell did that mean?

  Whatever it was, it seemed to frighten them, and maybe that would scare them off.

  "Yes!" he said, rising up, straddling the concrete ball with his ankles and spreading his hands out in front of him. "The Mark of the Beast! And if you don't leave now, all your future children and grandchildren will be born as frogs and crawly things!"

  And then his right foot slipped.

  For an awful, gut-wrenching moment he thought he was going to fall, then his foot found the edge of the capstone again. He thought he was okay, then realized he'd lost his balance.


  He was falling.

  He saw the iron spikes atop the gate rising toward him and thought as clearly as he had ever thought—

  I'm going to die!

  He tried to twist to the side, but it was too late. He managed to swing his head off to the right, but the spikes caught him in the groin, stomach, and chest. There was an instant of blinding agony as the points speared his heart with a tearing, thudding impact, ripping through to his spine and beyond.

  Not yet! Oh, please, not yet! I'm not ready to go!

  He opened his mouth to scream, but he had no air left in his lungs.

  Abruptly the pain was gone as his ruptured spinal cord stopped sending impulses to his brain. A strange, ethereal peace enveloped him. He felt strangely detached from the cries of horror rising all around him.

  Suddenly Carol's face swam into view, looking up at him with wide, horror-filled eyes. She seemed to be saying his name, but he couldn't hear her. Sound had slipped away. He wanted to tell her he loved her and ask her to forgive him for being such a jerk, but then vision slipped away as well, with thought racing close behind.

  16

  Carol had seen Jim begin to lose balance and was already running for the gate when he tilted forward and fell onto the spikes. A voice she barely recognized as her own was screaming.

  "No—no—NOOOO!"

  Time seemed to slow as she saw the black iron spikes drive into his chest and burst from his back in a spray of red, saw him writhe and twitch, then go limp as bright scarlet blood gushed from his mouth.

  Her legs wanted to collapse under her and her heart wanted her to follow them to the ground and curl her body up into a ball and hide from what she saw. But she had to reach him, had to get him off there.

  Bill was running ahead of her but she passed him and slammed into the gate below Jim, looking up at him, screaming his name over and over in a vain attempt to awaken a spark of life in those glazed, staring blue eyes. She thought she saw his mouth work, trying to say something, then his lips went slack and there was nothing there, nothing at all, and then something warm and wet was on her fingers and she looked and saw his blood running down the fence rail she was gripping and spreading over her hand just like in one of her dreams and her screams became formless wails of horror and loss as Bill dragged her away.

  17

  Grace stared in mute shock at Jim's body impaled on the gate above the scattering forms of the Chosen. This couldn't be happening! She felt her gorge rise at the sight of the blood. He was dead! Dead in an instant! Poor Jim—no one deserved a death like that!

  And Carol! When she saw Carol and heard her screams of anguish, she reached for the door handle. Mr. Veilleur restrained her.

  "You can't help him now," he said in a sad, gentle voice.

  "But Carol—"

  "Do you want her to find out that you came here with her husband's tormentors?"

  She didn't want that—she couldn't bear that!

  Suddenly Martin hurled himself into the driver's seat as another of the Chosen slid in on the passenger side. Without a second's hesitation, he started the car and threw it into gear.

  "Why are you running?" Mr. Veilleur asked.

  "Shut up!" Martin said. "Just shut up! That wasn't our fault! He'd been drinking, you could smell it on him, and he shouldn't have climbed up there! It wasn't our fault, but it could easily be made to look that way, so we've got to get out of here before someone has us arrested!"

  As they pulled away from the shoulder, Grace saw a man standing in the bayberry bushes along the side of the road. She recognized Jonah Stevens. She looked back through the rear window and saw him staring at her. His adopted son had just died horribly but he showed no grief, no horror, no anger. All she saw as she looked into his eyes for that instant was worry—surprise and worry. But that couldn't be. It had to be a trick of the light.

  "I sense the hand of God here," Martin was saying from the front seat. "The Spirit moved us here to bring this about. The Antichrist is dead. He no longer threatens the work of the Spirit. We didn't know this was going to happen, but I believe this was why we were chosen."

  "This isn't the work of the God I praise," Grace said defiantly. "And what will Brother Robert say?"

  Martin threw her a quick, unsettled glance over his shoulder but said nothing.

  Beside her, Mr. Veilleur only shook his head and sighed as he stared out the window.

  18

  "It's all my fault!" Brother Robert said, tugging at his beard. His face was drawn and his shoulders slumped inside his woolen habit. "I should have gone with you!"

  "I don't think it would have changed anything," Martin said. Martin was subdued, no longer the gung-ho commander.

  Grace sat beside him in the barely furnished living room of the brownstone. The rest of the Chosen had gone their separate ways as soon as they had reached the city. The strangely silent Mr. Veilleur had asked to be let off on the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Bridge. Grace had stayed with Martin, hoping to see Brother Robert, hoping to tap into the holy man's reservoir of tranquility.

  What she really wanted was for someone to tell her that this whole day had never happened. But there was no hope of that. And no comfort to be gained from Brother Robert—his tranquility was gone.

  "Don't be so sure of that, Martin," he said, his eyes flashing. "You allowed the people in your charge to become a rabble."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I know you are," Brother Robert said in a softer voice. "And the final responsibility rests with me. I should have been there. A house is in flames and a man is dead, and it's all my fault."

  "A man?" Martin said. "You said he was the Antichrist."

  "I believe now I was wrong."

  "Please," Grace said. "I don't understand! Why do you think you were wrong?"

  "Because it isn't over," Brother Robert said in a flat voice. "If you'll let yourselves feel the sense of wrongness that drew you to the Chosen, you'll see that it's not gone. In fact, it's stronger now than it was when you left here for Monroe."

  Grace sat statue still and opened herself to the feeling.

  It's still here!

  "God forgive us!" she cried. She buried her face in her hands and began to weep. He was right. Carol's husband was dead, and nothing had changed.

  It wasn't over!

  Seventeen

  Wednesday, March 13

  Bill stood in Tall Oaks Cemetery and said a silent requiem over Jim's coffin. Carol had insisted on a nonreligious ceremony— she'd told him she would have preferred a requiem Mass but said that would have made a mockery of the way Jim felt about religion. Bill had to respect that, but the idea of sending his old friend into the afterlife without a prayer or two was untenable.

  So he stood silently in the morning sunlight among the family and friends clustered around the flower-decked grave. Most of the friends were Carol's, from the hospital. Jim had never been a gregarious sort. He did not make friends easily, and it showed here. He had probably never even met half of the people ringing his coffin.

  Bill shut out the happy chirping of the birds and the sobs of the mourners and recited the prayers from memory. Then he added a personal coda.

  Although he was an unbeliever, Lord, he was a good man. If he was guilty of any sin, it was pride—pride in the supreme ability of the mind You gave him to accomplish anything, to solve all the mysteries of being. As You forgave the doubter, Thomas, who had to put his fingers into Your wounds before he would believe, please so forgive this good and honest man who might have returned to Your fold had he been allowed enough time.

  Bill felt his throat constrict. Enough time… was there ever enough time?

  Carol stood on the far side of the grave, flanked by Jonah and Emma Stevens, watching as each mourner stepped up and dropped a flower on the coffin. Bill had nothing but admiration for the way she had handled herself through the nightmare of the past few days. Disturbingly he found himself drawn more strongly to her than ever. He had taken a brief emer
gency leave from St. Francis to stay at his folks' place here in Monroe and help out in any way he could. Carol had been staying with her in-laws. Her own place was nothing but a burned-out shell after the fire set by the protesters on Sunday, and she hadn't wanted to stay at the mansion.

  She had lost her husband and her home in one afternoon, yet she had been hanging tough through it all. The Stevenses had helped, Bill knew, acting as a buffer between Carol and the world. Jonah was being especially protective. Even Bill had a rough time getting by him to see her. As for reporters, they may as well have been trying to crack Gibraltar with their heads. As a result the papers had been full of wild speculation about what had happened on Sunday.

  Full, that is, until this morning.

  The results of yesterday's New Hampshire primary had pushed Jim's death out of the news, thankfully. The headlines and most of the front page of this morning's Times were devoted to Senator Eugene McCarthy's stunning upset of President Johnson. It was all anyone on TV could talk about.

  It would have been all Bill could talk and think about were it not for Jim's death. Gene McCarthy had succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of his supporters, Bill among them, but it just didn't seem important today. Looking down at Jim's coffin, Bill couldn't imagine what could ever seem important compared to the untimely, senseless death of a friend.

  Carol began to sob. She had held up this far, but now, with Jim poised over the hole that was going to hold him for the rest of time, Bill could see that her control was starting to crack. He wanted to go to her, throw his arms around her and cry with her.

  But now Emma was doing just that. Jonah merely stood there, his face impassive, his hand gripping Carol's elbow.

  Movement off to his right caught Bill's eye. He recognized Carol's Aunt Grace approaching. She had been conspicuous by her absence at the wake the past two days. She stopped at a distance now, lowered her head, and folded her hands in prayer. Her waddling approach and her whole demeanor were so tentative, as if she feared being recognized.