Wish I could get her on the phone. Any new info she could give me might help with breaking Sister Light away from the Church of the Nomad World.
I’d need it, too, because my read on Sister Light was that she was more a true believer than a lost soul. That’s important to know because you have to have an approach. The lost ones are beyond conversations. They are terrified of finding out that they’re wrong. So much so that they'll hurt themselves rather than face the truth. Buddy of mine had to call parents once to tell them their daughter slashed her own throat when she spotted the pick-up team coming to take her home.
Imagine that.
Fifteen-year-old girl who’d rather take a pair of fabric scissors to her throat instead of going back to whatever hell she’d fled. Whether their problems are real or imagined, kids like that are sometimes too far gone.
Not everyone can be saved. The people here at the Church should understand that. They believe only their initiates are going to hitch a ride on Nibiru. The rest of the unworthy or unrepentant will become stardust.
Stardust.
Sounds better than saying we’ll all burn in hellfire, which is what most of these nutbags say.
Stardust doesn’t actually sound that bad.
Stardust.
Star stuff.
I spotted her five minutes after I climbed the wall. Sitting on a bench by herself. No watchdogs.
Sister Light.
She was five foot nothing. A slip of a thing, with pale hair and paler skin, and eyes the color of summer grass. Not especially pretty. Not ugly. No curves, but a good face and kind eyes.
Intelligent eyes.
She was sitting on a stone bench in a little grove of foxtail palms and oversized succulents. A small water feature burbled quietly and I think there was even a butterfly. You could have sold a photo of that moment to any calendar company.
All around the grove was a geometric pattern of white rectangular four-by-seven foot stones. They fanned out from where she sat like playing cards. Four or five of them, covering several acres of cool green grass
The girl was wearing a white dress with a pale blue gardening apron. White gloves tucked into the apron tie. Her head was covered with the requisite blue scarf that every woman in the Church wore. The men all wore blue baseball caps with circles embroidered on them. Symbolic of the nomad world, I supposed.
I’d come dressed for the part. White painter’s pants, white shirt, blue cap.
Stun gun tucked into the waistband of my pants, hidden by the shirt. Syringe with a strong but safe tranquilizer. A lead-weighted sap if things got weird. A cell phone with booster chip so I could talk to Rosie, Lee or, at need, my backup. Three guys in a van parked around the corner. Three very tough guys who have done this before. Guys who are not as nice as I am, and I’m not that nice.
As I approached she set down the water bottle she’d been drinking from and watched with quiet grace as I approached.
She smiled at me. “You’re here to take me back, aren’t you?”
-4-
I slowed my approach and stopped at the edge of the little grove.
“What do you mean, sister?” I asked, pitching my voice so it was soft. The smile I wore was full of lots of white teeth. Very wholesome.
She shook her head.
“You’re not one of us,” she said.
“I’m new.”
“No, you’re not.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
The girl looked at me with eyes that were a lot older than eighteen. Very bright lights in those eyes. It made me want to smile for real.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“No, I mean . . . what’s your name?”
“Oh. John Poe.”
“Poe? Like the writer.”
“Like that.”
“Nice. I read some of his stuff in school. The one about the cat, and the one about the guy’s heart under the floorboards.”
“Scary stuff.”
“I thought they were sad. Those poor people were so lost.”
I said nothing.
She nodded to the empty end of the bench. “It’s okay for you to sit down.”
I sat, making sure that I didn’t sit too close. Invading her little envelope of subjective distance was not a good opening move. But I also didn’t sit too far away. I didn’t want to give her a wall of distance either. You have to know how to play it.
We watched a couple of mourning doves waddle around poking at the grass.
“My parents sent you,” she said, making it a statement rather than a question.
“They care about you.”
Her reply to that was a small, thin smile.
“They want to know you’re okay,” I said.
“Do you really believe that?”
“Of course. They’re your parents.”
She studied my face. “You don’t look that naïve, Mr. Poe.”
And you don’t sound like an eighteen-year-old, I thought.
Aloud I said, “If that’s something you’d like to talk about, we can. But is here the best place?”
“It’s safer.”
“Safer for whom?”
“For me,” she said. “Look, I understand how this is supposed to work. You come on very passive and friendly and helpful and you find a way to talk me into leaving the grounds with you. To have a chat at a diner or something like that. Then once we’re off the church grounds, you grab me and take me to my parents.”
“You make it sound like an abduction. All I want to do is bring you home.”
“No. You want to take me to where my parents live.” She patted the bench. “This is home, Mr. Poe.” She gestured to the lush foliage around us. “And this.” And finally she touched her chest over her heart. “And this.”
“Okay, I get that. Our home is where we are. Our home is our skin and our perceptions. That’s nice in the abstract, but it isn’t where your family is. They’re at your family home, and they’re waiting for you.”
Her smile was constant and patient. I wanted to break through that level of calm control because that’s where the levers are. Fear is one level. Insecurity, which is a specific kind of fear, is another. There are a lot of them.
“Mr. Poe,” she said before I could reach for one of those levers, “do we have to do this? I mean, I understand that you’re being paid to be here, and maybe there’s a bonus for you to bring me back. I know how Daddy works, and he likes his incentives. I think it’s easier if we can just be honest. You want to earn your paycheck. Daddy and Mommy want me back so they can put me in a hospital, which would make them legal guardians of me and my money. They think I’m nuts and you think I’ve been brainwashed. Is that it? Did I cover all the bases?”
I had to smile. “You’re a sharp kid.”
“I’m almost nineteen, Mr. Poe. I stopped being a kid a while ago.”
“Nineteen is pretty young.”
She shook her head. “Nineteen is as old as I’m ever going to get.”
We sat with that for a moment.
“Go on,” she encouraged, “say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say anything. I just said that I wasn’t going to get any older. That probably sounds suicidal to you. Or fatalistic. Maybe it’s a sign of deep-seated depression. Go on. Make a comment.”
What I said was, “You’re an interesting girl.”
“Person. If you don’t want to call me a ‘woman,’ then call me a person. I’m not a girl.”
“Sorry. But, yes, you’re a very interesting person.”
“Which goes against the ‘type,’ doesn't it?”
“Which type?”
“Well, if I was political, or if this was some kind of radical militant group, then you’d expect me to be more educated. You’d expect me to rattle off a lot of Marxist or pseudo-Marxist tripe. But the Church isn’t radic
al. Not in that way. We don’t care at all about politics. I know I don’t. We’re what people like you would call a ‘doomsday cult.’”
“If that’s the wrong phrase, tell me which one to use.”
She laughed. “No, it’s fine. It’s pretty much true.”
“What’s true?”
“The world’s going to end.”
“Because of Nibiru?”
“Sure.”
“And—what is it, exactly? People can't seem to agree.”
“Well,” she said with a laugh, “it’s not a dwarf brown star.”
“It’s not?”
“You think I don’t know about this. You think I’m a confused little girl in a weirdo cult thinking we’re all going to hitch a ride on a passing planet. You think this is Heaven’s Gate and Nibiru is another Hale-Bopp. That’s what you think.”
Again, she wasn’t framing it as a question.
“Well, let me tell you,” she continued, “what they tell us here in the church. One of the first things they did was to explain how it couldn’t possibly be a brown dwarf because that would mean it was an object bigger than Jupiter. Even in the most extreme orbit, it would have been spotted, and its gravitational pull would have affected every other planet in our solar system.”
I said, “Okay.”
“And if it was a giant planet four times larger than the Earth, which is what a lot of people are saying on the news and on the Net, then if it was coming toward the Earth it would be visible to the naked eye. And that would also warp the orbits of the outer planets. And it can’t have been a planet concealed behind the sun all this time because that would be geometrically impossible.”
“You know your science.”
“They teach us the science here.”
“Oh.”
“That surprises you, doesn't it.”
“I suppose it does. Why do you think they do that?”
“No,” she said, “why do you think they do it? Why teach us about the science?”
“If you want me to be straight with you, then it’s because using the truth is the easiest way to sell a lie. It’s a conman’s trick. It’s no different than a magician letting you look in his hat and up his sleeve before he pulls a rabbit out. They don’t let you look at where he’s keeping the rabbit.”
“That might be true if the church was trying to sell us something. Or sell us on something.”
“You’re saying they’re not?”
“They’re not.”
“So, they have no interest at all in your trust fund?”
“A year ago, maybe,” she said offhand. “Two years ago, definitely. Not anymore.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“Because Nibiru is coming.”
“You said that it wasn’t.”
“No,” she said, “I said that it wasn’t a brown dwarf or a rogue planet.”
“You’re group’s called the Church of the Nomad World. Emphasis on ‘world.’”
“I know. When they started, they were using the rogue world thing in exactly the way you think they still are.”
“Uh huh. And there are YouTube videos of your deacons talking about how the gravity of Nibiru is going to cause the Earth to stop spinning, and that after it leaves the Earth’s rotation will somehow restart.”
“Those videos are old.”
“Six years isn’t that old.”
“Old enough,” she said. “Nobody says that anymore. Not here. Besides, if the world were to somehow stop rotating the core heat would make the oceans boil. And you couldn’t restart rotation again at the same rate of spin. The law of the conservation of angular momentum says it’s impossible.”
“You understand the physics?”
“We all do,” she said, indicating the others who walked or sat in the garden. “We study it.”
Her tone was conversational and calm, her demeanor serene.
“Then what do your people believe?” I asked.
“Nibiru is coming.”
“But—”
“You look confused,” she said.
“I am confused. If it’s not a brown dwarf and it’s not a rogue planet, then what is Nibiru?”
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “That’s the right question.”
“What?”
“That’s the question you should have been asking.”
“Okay, fine, I’m asking it now. What is—?”
“It’s an asteroid,” she said.
“An asteroid.”
“Yes.”
“That you think is going to hit the Earth?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“It’s going to hit the Moon,” she said. “And the Moon will hit the Earth.”
“An asteroid that big and no one’s seen it?”
“Sure they have, Mr. Poe. A lot of people have seen it. Why do you think everyone’s so upset? It’s all over the news, and it’s getting worse. There are all those books about it. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“Talking, sure, but there’s no evidence.”
“There are lots of pictures,” she said, her manner still calm. “But I guess you think they’re all doctored. Solar flares causing images on cameras, that sort of thing.”
“And they disprove those things as fast as they go up.”
“I know. Some of them. Like the one of Nibiru that was on YouTube a few years ago that they said was a Hubble image of the expanding light echo around the star V838 Mon. Yes, most of the images have been discredited. Most, not all. There are a bunch that still get out there, and NASA and the other groups say they’re faked.”
“They are fakes.”
“You say that, but you don’t actually know that, do you?”
I dug my cell phone out of my pocket. “I pretty much do. I have one of the top observational astrophysicists on speed dial. She’s been my information source for this ever since I began looking for you.”
Sister Light nodded. “Okay. Was she at the conference in Toronto?”
I grinned. “You keep up with the news. Yes, she was there.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rose Blum.”
She nodded. “She’s good. I read a couple of her books.”
“You understood her books?”
“Some of it. Not all the math, but enough. She’s right about almost everything.”
“Except Nibiru, is that right?”
“If she says it doesn’t exist, then no. If she told you that there was no dwarf sun or giant planet about to hit the Earth, then she was telling you at least some of the truth. But have you actually asked her if she knows anything about the asteroid heading toward the dark side of the moon?”
“I’m pretty sure she’d have said something,” I said, chuckling.
Sister Light shook her head. “I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t.”
“I could call her.”
She stood up and walked over to one of the stone rectangles set into the grass. I joined her, standing a polite distance to one side. There was writing on the stones which I hadn’t taken note of before. I stepped onto the grass and read what was carved into the closest one.
Myron Alan Freeman.
It took me a moment, but I found the name amid the jumble of information I’d studied about the Church.
Freeman was a deacon, one of forty men and women who helped run the organization.
Below his name was the word: Peace.
I stiffened and cut a look at Sister Light. She nodded to the other stones, and I walked out into the field. Each of them had a name. Some I recognized, others I didn’t. All of them had the word ‘peace’ on them.
My throat went totally dry and I wheeled to face her. My heart was racing. I raised my shirt and gripped the butt of the stun gun.
“What the fuck is this?” I demanded.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like a fucking cemetery.”
She nodded. “That’s what it is.”
I drew my weapon but held it down at my side. “All of them?”
“Yes.”
“Every stone here?”
“Yes.”
“Dead?”
“Yes?”
“Who killed them?”
Her face was sad. “Not everyone wants to wait for it to happen, Mr. Poe.”
“You’re saying they killed themselves?”
“Nobody here commits murder. It’s against our beliefs. Only God has the right to take a human life.”
“God . . . ?”
“The one true God, Mr. Poe. The one who has sent his angel, Nibiru, to end the suffering of all mankind.”
I looked for the crazy. I looked for that spark of madness in her eyes. The religious zeal. The disconnect.
I looked.
And looked.
“We believe,” she said. “We don’t require anyone else to. We don’t proselytize. We’re not looking for new members. We get a lot of them, though. People see the truth, they read through the lies in the media, the lies told by NASA and Homeland and everyone else. They see what’s coming and they know what it means. And they come to us.”
“For what?”
“Some of them want to be loved before it all ends. That’s why I’m here. My parents are so cold, so dismissive. I didn’t leave because I was acting out. I wasn’t going through teenage angst. I came looking for a place to belong so I could wait out the time that we have left among those who don’t judge, don’t hate, don’t want anything from me except whatever love I want to share. I’m only eighteen, Mr. Poe. I’ll be dead within a few months of my nineteenth birthday. I won’t have a future. I won't have a husband or kids or any of that. I have this. This is the only chance I’ll ever have to give love. Here in the Church . . . I have love. I have peace. I have prayer.”
She turned away from the stone markers.
The grave markers.
“I want to live all the way to the end. I don’t want to commit suicide.”
“Why? What do you think is going to happen if this asteroid is real? Will you be transported off to a new world? Will you be elevated to a higher consciousness?”
I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“No,” she said simply. “When Nibiru hits the moon and the moon hits the Earth, I’ll die. It’ll probably hurt. I’ll be scared. Of course I will. But I’ll die here, among my friends, content with the will of God.”
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 33
