"Mongo, help me," Garth slurred as he suddenly began to stagger.
I felt short of breath, panicky. Garth was about to suffer another seizure, and each time he was in the grip of the terrible electrical and chemical storm taking place inside his body, I feared he was going to die or break his own bones with the uncontrollable, incredibly powerful contractions of his muscles.
Garth swayed, and his entire body began to twitch spasmodically. I put my shoulder against his hip and shoved as hard as I could, pushing him off the road into the orchard; in our time on the road, we had learned that a seizure would pass more quickly if he had some object against which to exert the force.
"Garth, there's a branch over your head!" I shouted, hoping he could hear me through whatever thick mists shrouded his mind whenever he had an attack. "Grab it!"
He didn't respond. As always, he was resisting the attack; his head was thrown back, his teeth were clenched, and low, guttural sounds escaped from deep in his chest and throat. The storm was upon him-every muscle in his body had gone rigid and was twitching. I slapped his right elbow, trying to get it up. The arm jerked and flopped, almost hitting me in the head-then shot up. The other arm whirred like a broken pinwheel until it was stopped by the palm hitting the overhead branch. The fingers of both hands curled over the branch-and stayed there.
There was nothing more I could do except stay out of Garth's way, and I went back out on the road to see if the noises Garth had been making had attracted any attention. The road was empty. Suddenly I heard an explosive crack, then the sound of something heavy falling to the ground. I ran back into the orchard.
Garth was just coming out of the brief period of unconsciousness that always followed his most severe seizures. He was sprawled on the ground, face covered with sweat despite the cool, moist breeze blowing through the trees. Both palms were scraped and bleeding, but there was no sign that the limb, perhaps six inches in diameter, had fallen on him.
"Hey, Godzilla," I said, kneeling beside him and wiping his face and palms with the edge of my robe. "You all right?"
Garth blinked rapidly, then slowly nodded. He rolled away the huge, broken limb, then eased himself up into a sitting position and leaned back against the trunk of the tree. "Sit down a minute, Mongo," he said with a sigh.
"Garth, I'm freezing my ass off and you're going to catch pneumonia. Also, our new friends are waiting for us down the road. I know you're weak now, and I don't want to rush you, but I don't think this is a good time for a chat. We've got to get moving."
"I want you to sit down, Mongo," Garth said evenly. "This is important."
Stepping forward, I grabbed his right wrist with both hands and pulled. The notion that I could pull Garth to his feet against his will was ludicrous, but I was looking to make a point. "Garth, I can't believe you got us this far. They weren't looking for us, which is the break of our lives. That kind of luck isn't going to last. For one thing, we're carrying a whole library on genetics and evolution in the trunk of the car. Leviticus and the others are going to want to know why we're interested in such unholy things-and the answer could come with a phone call at any moment. We have to get in, find the information we're after, and get our asses out of here fast. We may need the minutes we're wasting here."
Garth twisted his wrist free, grabbed my wrist. "We can't outrace a phone call, Mongo. What with all this 'visions of Father' bullshit, Leviticus or somebody else in the commune may already have called the people we're looking for-in which case, an unwelcoming committee is already forming and these minutes won't matter. They matter to me now, because I need to get straight with you."
Not understanding what he meant but responding to the emotion in his voice, I shrugged and sat down on the tree limb.
"I could tell you that I didn't mention the fur growing on my body because I didn't want you to worry," Garth continued in a flat tone as he released my wrist. "That would be a lie. The fact is that I was ashamed and disgusted, and that's why I didn't show you. I was wrong not to tell you. If there's any hope at all of us surviving this Goddamn horror show, there can't be any walls between us. I won't keep secrets from you again."
My response was to slip my right foot out of the sandal. I raised my foot, spread my toes and wiggled my web at him. "Speaking of shameful and disgusting secrets, welcome to the club."
Garth looked at the web, then suddenly burst into laughter. He pushed my foot away from his face, leaned over and put both his hands on my shoulders. "Well, our friend Jake never promised a rose garden when he shot us full of that shit, did he?"
"Now that you mention it, I don't recall that he did."
Garth rose to his feet, grabbed the collar of my robe, and pulled me to mine. "Come on, Brother Boris. It's time to work some more miracles."
The cusps of day-dusk, and the aura just before sunrise-were the most dangerous times for me, periods of a half hour to forty-five minutes when I was almost totally blind; there was enough sunlight to inflict pain on my uncovered eyes, but not enough to penetrate the smoked glasses. Now it was dusk, and I was content to close my eyes and traipse along on Garth's arm.
"Slowly turning into a beastie is a bitch, isn't it?" Garth said drily.
"What the hell are you complaining about? At least you seem to be staying with the mammals. I seem to be slipping off to join the reptiles."
"It's your sneaky, slimy nature, Mongo."
"Another crack like that and I'll pull your fucking fur."
"How's your nose?"
"One hell of a lot prettier than yours."
"Seriously. Do you notice anything different about your sense of smell?"
"No. Do you?"
"I've got another flash for you. Besides providing me with a built-in fur coat, that shit Bolesh gave us has been working overtime on my olfactory nerve. With this new schnoz, I'll go one-on-one with any bloodhound. It turns out that the world is really a pretty smelly place. Right now I can smell apples on the trees, as well as those rotting on the ground. I can smell leaves, wood, dirt."
I stopped walking, pushed the smoked glasses down on the bridge of my nose, and squinted up at the red-haloed figure of my brother. "Back there, you said you knew Leviticus was going to let us in because- "
"I could smell it," Garth interrupted, pushing the glasses back up on my nose and pulling me along. "Don't do that again. You're supposed to be blind, remember?"
"Jesus, you were serious, weren't you?"
"Yep. No joke. I seem to be able to smell emotions-at least I have to believe they're emotions; the odors come and go quickly, and I've noticed a correspondence with people's behavior."
"Pheromones?"
"Must be. Different emotions, it seems, smell differently."
"What the hell did you smell on Leviticus?"
"Religious ecstasy."
"How would you know what religious ecstasy smells like?"
"Certainly not from sniffing around you," Garth replied drily. "Your problem is that you don't understand religion, or religious people. Deep down, you think that people who say they believe in a deity, or miracles, are just funning you. They're not. You let me handle these people, Mongo."
"I am letting you handle them. You didn't answer my question."
"I picked up the scent from the two boys and the girl when I first told them that we'd come to join the commune; at the time I didn't know what it was. At first, Leviticus just smelled of suspicion and hostility-until I told him about the vision of Father. Then he smelled like the others. These people believe in magic; they believe that it will literally rain cats and dogs if God, or Father, wants it to. They were looking for a miracle, so I gave them one. As you see, a miracle is as good as a password any day."
"What does religious ecstasy smell like?"
Garth thought about it. "Turnips," he said at last.
"I'm sorry I asked."
"They believe that Father sent us here for some purpose."
"What purpose?"
Garth laughed.
"How the hell should I know? You think I talk to Father?"
"That's great material, Garth; I love it. I can't wait to see what miracle you conjure up to stop a bullet."
"This miracle comes with a strictly limited guarantee; one phone call to or from either of the Loges, and it's canceled."
"Meaning we're canceled. With some luck, we may have a few hours. I'll go out tonight and poke around. All we need is one clue to the whereabouts of the Loges, and we'll be gone before dawn."
"We also have to get our clothes and the car back. I doubt we'll get very far on foot, dressed in sandals and green robes."
"I wonder where the hell Lippitt is?"
"He's probably dead," Garth said distantly. "Regardless of the reasons he gave for taking off on his own, he took the heat off us-and he knew what he was doing. As you know, Lippitt was never one of my favorite people-but the man had guts."
"He also saved our lives. I'm not so sure he's dead."
"He's an old man, Mongo. How long can he keep running and dodging? The Loges and the Pentagon probably have half the world looking for him."
"You saw what he can do with a shotgun. He's a tough old man."
"No question about that. You know, half the world's going to be looking for us if we manage to pull off this little commune caper. We're going to be up to our asses in alligators."
"Gee whiz, Garth, I'd hate to think we could be in any serious difficulty."
"I wish we could call Mom and Dad, at least let them know we're alive."
"No way. If there's a tap on their phone, it would only cause grief for them and us. Right now, a poll of any reasonable group of men and women would guarantee that we're dead. Let's keep it that way."
"Always the eternal optimist. Listen, brother, I'm counting on my close proximity to you to pull me through this. You've got more lives than a litter of cats."
"The problem is that I'm feeling distinctly reptilian of late."
"I guess there'd be no point in getting in touch with the folks, anyway. I mean, what would we say? Hi, Mom and Dad, we're alive, but we can't come home because we have to catch a crazy before his crazies catch us. Any day now we're likely to turn into a couple of slimy blobs, but not to worry. Oh, and by the way, do you know of anything that will remove fur and webs between the toes?"
That set us both to laughing-but it was the laughter of desperate men, or semi-men, trying to fend off despair and tearing memories of a family in Nebraska, people who loved us and whom we might never see or speak to again.
Suddenly Garth stopped laughing and poked me gently in the shoulder. "All right, Brother Boris," he continued, "button up. The wind's blowing in our direction, and the schnoz smells people."
I buttoned up, moved closer to Garth and gripped his arm more tightly. I was at once thankful and regretful that the time for casual conversation and symptom sharing had passed. In fact, I had one secret left, a symptom I hadn't told Garth about, a feeling that filled me with such terror and a sense of revulsion that I could barely stand to think, much less talk, about it. Images of what I could become, or what I was becoming, constantly threatened to drown me in a sea of horror and disgust.
Three days before, I had awoke in the morning to find that the glands on both sides of my neck had grown painfully swollen. They had remained so, and now each time I swallowed, my saliva left behind the taste of burnt, bittersweet chocolate and produced a numbing, prickly sensation in the tip of my nose.
19
"Can you see yet?" "A little."
"Just don't get caught peering over the top of your glasses." "I won't."
The last rays of the setting sun were glancing off the surface of Lake Superior, the relative darkness triggering the infrared receptors in my altered retinas, bathing everything in a shimmering glow that ranged from pale violet to crimson. It was like watching life through a tinted X-ray negative; although I'd been seeing like this for months, I still wasn't used to it. It was positively otherworldly.
But then, I was becoming positively otherworldly.
The site of the commune, which we now approached as we trudged down a long slope, was in a large, grass-covered clearing flanked by orchards and forest on three sides, and Lake Superior to the west. To the north was another large clearing which could have been a cow pasture, but was now empty. In the main clearing were a myriad of garden plots set out in a checkerboard pattern. There were perhaps a dozen buildings constructed of wood and sheets of corrugated steel.
At the end of the road and mouth of the clearing was a large wooden shack, and waiting outside the shack was a reception committee of one. I'd been expecting something a bit more festive, assuming Garth's story had stuck-or disastrous, if it hadn't. I found it a rather murky omen, and it seemed to mean that the others had either not been told about us, or had been instructed to stay away.
The man waiting for us was older than Leviticus, and had thick, dark hair that seemed to explode out of his head in unruly ringlets. His face was gaunt, his eyes haunted, his manner dark and brooding. He wore overalls like the three young people out at the stand, but in addition he wore a gold cross around his neck that looked big enough to ward off a tribe of vampires-which, judging by the uncertain expression on his face as we approached, he may have been expecting.
It had to be Reverend Ezra.
"Father love you, Reverend," Garth boomed cheerfully as he pulled me to a stop in front of the man. "I'm Billy Jamison, and this is my brother, Boris."
The Reverend nervously cleared his throat, tentatively extended a thin, bony hand to Garth; in the light cast by two spotlights over the entrance to the shack, viewed through my smoked glasses, the hand looked skeletal. "Father love you, Brother Billy and Brother Boris. I'm Reverend Ezra. Uh.. welcome."
"You can't imagine how happy we are to be here," Garth said as he pumped the other man's hand. "Boris and I have been on a very long spiritual journey, and this is the end of the trail."
"So I've heard," the Reverend said, obviously uncomfortable. He retrieved his hand from Garth's grasp, glanced at his watch. "Would you come with me, please? I'd like to see that you're comfortable, and we don't have time to talk now. I'm expecting an important phone call."
Oh-oh. Suddenly I didn't much care for Garth's description of the commune as the end of the trail.
"Of course," Garth said easily.
We followed the Reverend along a path to a building that resembled a large quonset hut. Two burly men wearing overalls and uncertain expressions on their faces flanked the entrance. "Father love you," Garth said to the two men as we passed between them.
It was a spacious, neatly appointed office with a long, heavy oak desk as the centerpiece. The only items on the desk were a telephone and a large, well-worn Bible. There was a sofa and three straight-backed chairs in addition to the swivel chair behind the desk, two more doors-both closed. Above each door hung a framed painting, one of Jesus, the other of Siegmund Loge. Father.
"I think you'll be warmer here," the Reverend mumbled, not looking at us. He gestured toward the sofa. "Please sit down. This shouldn't take long."
Garth led me over to the sofa, and we both sat down. The Reverend eased himself down into the swivel chair behind the desk, then stared off into space and absently drummed his fingers on the oak. Obviously, we were to wait with him until he got his phone call. I sorely missed the Colt; punching out Reverend Ezra wasn't going to get us past the two men at the door, and it wasn't going to help us find Siegmund Loge.
It was Garth who finally broke the silence. "Reverend? Is something wrong?"
For a time I wasn't sure he was going to answer. He cast a longing look at the telephone, stared up at the ceiling for almost a minute, then finally looked at us. "Frankly, I'm not sure what to do," he said at last.
"Billy?" I said, tugging anxiously at Garth's sleeve. "Is something the matter? Father said everything would be all right."
"We did have a vision, Reverend," Garth intoned ominously. "Was Father wrong in telli
ng us to come here?"
"Mike told me about your vision and your afflictions," the Reverend answered in a distinctly nervous tone of voice. "Would you describe them to me, please?"
He was stalling for time, I thought, waiting for the phone to ring.
Garth launched into his vision patter, embellishing it with a few rhetorical flourishes that included descriptions of flashes of lightning and claps of thunder when Father spoke. Reverend Ezra seemed quite impressed with it all.
He was even more impressed when Garth capped off his performance by opening his robe to the waist.
"The mark of the beast!" the man cried, leaping up out of his chair and making the sign of the cross.
"The mark of Father," Garth replied evenly as he closed his robe.
"How can I be sure?"
"Who else could wield such power?"
" 'And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth and their armies, gathered together to make war against Him that sat on the Throne, and against His army.'" The Reverend swallowed hard, sank back down into the chair. The blood had drained from his face. "The two of you have received the mark of the beast," he added in a barely audible whisper.
His words had triggered long-buried memories; I was a child again, smaller than other children, more frightened than other children. As she did every night, my mother was reading to me from the Bible. I'd always liked Revelations; the apocalyptic visions that spilled forth from the pages had jibed with my childhood anger and sense of injustice, had given me hope that, maybe, one day things would be all right, that one morning I might wake up and find I was no longer a dwarf.
Suddenly I knew who the hundred and forty-four thousand were. "Wrong beast, Reverend," I said. "We are two of the four."
Garth glanced at me quickly, a confused expression on his face. I continued, "'And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the Mount Sion, and with Him a hundred and forty-four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads.' Billy and I don't have the mark on our foreheads, Reverend, because we are the forehead-Father's forehead."
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