Blood of the Faithful

by Michael Wallace

  Smoot seemed to notice the flickering lights at the same time. He used his cane to lever himself to a standing position, but carried it under his arm as he made for the switches. Out in the hall, they briefly turned on one more light so they could find the box and flip the breaker, and they left through the front door without locking it. There was no need.

  Ezekiel caught his father’s arm. “I need to show you something before we go home.”

  “Brother Jacob was uncomfortable,” Smoot said. “He wasn’t repelled.”

  “And what would possibly make him uncomfortable?”

  “I was uncomfortable at first too. The Lord’s house is a house of order. When the spirit seizes an entire congregation of saints, it looks like chaos, bedlam. I had to surrender to the spirit to understand it. Jacob hasn’t done that yet.”

  “Did you see the look on his face?” Ezekiel asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Disgust and fear.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why would the prophet be disgusted and afraid?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m getting sick and tired of this,” Smoot growled. “Stop hinting around like a gossipy old woman. Say what you mean or shut your mouth and leave off with your apostasy once and for all.”

  His father’s righteous tone was intimidating. As a boy, Ezekiel would have cowered. Only his older brother, Bill, could stand as a man when Father used his patriarchal tone. But doing so had earned Bill respect in Father’s eyes. And now that Bill was gone, nobody else in the family could do it. It fell on Ezekiel to seize that for himself.

  “Wake up,” Ezekiel said. “You know what I mean. You know it in your heart.”

  “Show respect, boy.”

  “You show respect. I’m the one being led by God. You’re the one fighting the obvious. Why, because of some misguided loyalty to Jacob’s father? Abraham Christianson is dead. His son is leading the church into the gaping jaws of hell.”

  If there was ever a time for Smoot’s anger to explode, this was it, but instead he fell silent. The two men stood a pace distant, studying each other through the near darkness.

  “Good,” Ezekiel said. His heart was pounding. He felt like he was staring down a mountain lion. No time to show fear. “Now listen to me. Brother Jacob was called by the Lord. We all know that. But it’s clear to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see what has happened since then.”

  He paused, waited for his father to again demand answers. But the older man didn’t speak.

  “Jacob is a fallen prophet,” Ezekiel said.

  Smoot let out his breath in a long, drawn-out sigh. “I don’t know. I can’t see it. Why would the Lord let that happen?”

  “Why would the Lord take away Eliza and her gentile husband at this exact moment, if not to get them out of our way?”

  “So, what? So we can remove Brother Jacob from office? What about Brother David?”

  “Jacob’s brother is one of us.”

  “He is?” Father sounded surprised. “What about Sister Miriam? Sister Rebecca?”

  “They’re with us too.”

  “Jacob’s wives?”

  “They won’t like it, but they have no power in the community.”

  Ezekiel was anxious to get his father off the sidewalk and around back of the temple, but his father seemed to have regained his confidence.

  “But Stephen Paul Young does have power, and he’s an ally of Brother Jacob.”

  “He’s with us too,” Ezekiel said.

  “Ha!” Smoot said. “That’s where you’re wrong. I spoke to him this afternoon. He said he was sorry he’d ever gone out to Yellow Flats, that it was a sin to speak about Brother Jacob behind his back. He said if there’s any fault it’s with us, not with Jacob. That we need to stand beside him. So now I know you’ve been shoveling manure this whole time.”

  Ezekiel had been bluffing, and now his father had caught him out. Worried that he was about to lose the argument before he even had a chance to show Father what he’d hidden in Witch’s Warts, he stumbled into an even bigger blunder before he had a chance to think it through.

  “Don’t worry about Stephen Paul. I’ll take care of him.”

  “Take care of him?” Smoot roared. “Why, you little—he’s a good man. If you lay a hand on him, so help me I’ll—”

  “Shh, keep your voice down.”

  “Damn you, I will not. If this were the old days, I’d drive your sorry hide to St. George and dump you in the Walmart parking lot. That would be the end of you. You’d be cast into the Lone and Dreary World. A Lost Boy.”

  “Father—”

  “No, I won’t listen. I’ve got to take shift at the bunker tonight, and a long ride ahead of me to reach the cliffs. I have no more time for this nonsense.” Smoot turned toward home. “If I were you, I’d fall on my knees tonight and beg the Lord for forgiveness. And thank Him for Brother Jacob, who is a more merciful leader than you deserve.”

  Now terrified, Ezekiel backtracked from his earlier boast. “No, Father, no. That’s not what I meant. I’m not going to hurt Stephen Paul. I’d never do that. I’m going to talk to him. I have information, new information, that will change his mind.”

  Smoot stopped. “What information could you possibly have?” Skepticism dripped from his voice. “This whole business is of the devil.”

  “I don’t expect you to take my word for it. I’ll show you.” Ezekiel nodded toward the temple.

  “If you think I’m going into the temple with you at this hour . . .”

  “Not in the temple, behind it. Witch’s Warts. I need to show you something.”

  Smoot wavered. Ezekiel wanted to push, but didn’t dare. He’d misread his father more than once already in this conversation and didn’t trust himself to get it right this time.

  “Okay,” Smoot said at last. “But this had better be good.”

  Ezekiel set off without waiting for his father to have second thoughts. When he reached the back of the temple, he groped in the shadows until he found the shovel he’d left propped against the back wall. The blade scraped against the foundation stones.

  “What have you got there?”

  “It’s a shovel,” Ezekiel said. “There’s something buried in Witch’s Warts.”

  “I don’t have time for this. I told you, I’ve got to man the north bunker.”

  “It will only take a minute. Trust me.”

  “What is it? A body? Some old bones?” His father sounded nervous. “You know I don’t like to go in there.”

  “Shh. Come on.”

  The stones stood in the darkness like silent sentinels, seeming to frown on the two men as they entered.

  The truth was, Ezekiel didn’t care much for the sandstone labyrinth either. Like many of the other kids of the valley, he’d played around the outskirts as a boy, using a screwdriver to carve his name into a sandstone hoodoo, or scrambling up a hump of red rock after a lizard. One afternoon in spring when he was about nine, he’d found a huge mass of writhing racer snakes retreating into a fissure ahead of the falling sun. He’d been afraid to reach his hands into all those snakes, but he couldn’t let them go either. He ran for his older brother, Bill, who grabbed a bucket, a pair of gloves, and a couple of clothes hangers that they’d bent into hooks as they returned to Witch’s Warts. But when they got back, Ezekiel couldn’t find the spot even though the brothers searched until darkness. Bill accused him of lying, but the younger brother was adamant. He knew what he’d seen.

  Ezekiel hadn’t been dumb enough to venture past the first few rows of stones, but he hadn’t been afraid of Witch’s Warts either. Not like some kids. Then, when he was eleven, there was a terrifying incident with the Kimball boys that put him off the place forever.

  A summer cloudburst had overflowed the banks of Blister Creek and filled the sandy
wash that flowed out of Witch’s Warts on the south end, near the cemetery. The next day, when the temporary stream evaporated, Bill and Ezekiel followed it into the labyrinth to look for quartz crystals and flint arrowheads that sometimes washed out during storms. Once, their cousin had even found a twenty-dollar gold piece from the nineteenth century lying glittering on the surface as if it had fallen from a hole in someone’s pocket only moments earlier.

  Two hundred yards into Witch’s Warts from the south the ground began to rise, and they had to climb a stretch of slickrock to get back to the wash. Eroded potholes in the stone still held several inches of water, and in them they saw hundreds of squirming tadpoles. After a storm, spadefoot toads would drop their eggs in the holes and then the tadpoles would race to turn into toads and bury themselves in the sand before the hot sun evaporated the water and baked them to death. The brothers were squatting over the holes, poking the tadpoles with their fingers, when a shadow fell over them.

  Ezekiel turned, his heart suddenly in his throat. Two other boys stood on the rock ledge above them, where the water had cascaded over the edge to flow into the wash below.

  He thought at first it was Jacob Christianson and one of his younger brothers—Enoch or David, probably. But when he stood, shielding his eyes, he saw it was Gideon and Taylor Kimball Junior. A knot of worry worked into his gut.

  Normally Ezekiel felt safe when hanging around his brother. Bill was thirteen, about the age of Taylor Junior, and bigger, but Gideon was older than both and already long and muscular. More a young man than an older boy. But he didn’t act like a man. He was feared as a cruel bully by every kid in the valley except for Jacob Christianson, who was close to the same age and seemed to intimidate Gideon. But Jacob was in Canada that summer, Ezekiel remembered suddenly, working on the Christianson ranch in Alberta.

  “What are you pussies doing?” Gideon said with a sneer. “Jerking off down there?”

  Bill tugged Ezekiel’s elbow. “Come on, let’s go.”

  But before they could get away, the Kimball boys slid down the slickrock to where the Smoot brothers were standing over the potholes.

  “Look what we found,” Taylor Junior said. He held something round and white in his hand.

  It was a human skull.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ezekiel had gaped at the skull in Taylor Junior’s hands. Terrified, yet fascinated at the same time.

  “Where did you get that?” Bill asked, his eyes bugging.

  Gideon grinned. “We found some guy buried in the sand. Rain must’ve washed him out. Some of the body was eaten by animals a long time ago. The rest is like a mummy. Must have been there forever.”

  “Was it an Indian?” Ezekiel asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Gideon said. “Should we show ’em, TJ? I don’t know if they can take it. They look like they might piss their pants already.”

  Gideon took the skull from his brother and thrust it at Ezekiel, its eye sockets staring, as if it would frighten the younger boy. But by now, Ezekiel was more intrigued than anything.

  “Want to see the body?” Taylor Junior asked. “It’s just up there.”

  The thing about the Kimballs was that they weren’t always nasty. Sometimes they did cool stuff too. They built the snow forts in winter, made homemade fireworks, and Gideon had once showed Ezekiel and Bill an abandoned mine in the foothills on the east side of the valley. He claimed it was a diamond mine, and several boys went climbing through the narrow tunnels with flashlights looking for gems. Father later said (after he’d given Ezekiel a belt whipping for going into the dangerous abandoned mine) that it had been a silver mine back in pioneer times, except nobody had found much.

  And the skull tempted him. There was nothing cooler than finding stuff from the old days: a wagon wheel or bleached cow skull in the desert, an Indian pot in a crumbling cliff dwelling, an abandoned cabin. Even discovering a rusting, sandblasted hulk of a long-dead Ford truck made him itch with curiosity.

  “Come on, Zeke,” Bill said. “We gotta get home before supper. It’s just a dumb old skull.”

  “What, are you scared?” Gideon asked with a sneer. “Afraid of ghosts?”

  “I’m going home,” Bill said. “Come on.”

  Without waiting to see if Ezekiel would follow, the older Smoot brother made his way back down toward the wash. Ezekiel was torn. But when he looked at the skull with its gaping, hollow expression, he had to see what the Kimballs had found.

  So instead of doing the sensible thing and going after his brother, he followed Gideon and Taylor Junior and climbed up the fissure. From there, they continued along the wash. The sand was still damp where the encroaching stone fins forced the wash into a narrower, shaded channel, with stone rising twenty or thirty feet on either side to shade it. It was so narrow that the three boys had to pass single file, with Ezekiel taking the lead. At the end it grew so tight that he had to squeeze sideways to get through. The walls were damp and cool. This seemed to be where the wash had originated that later flowed past the cemetery to join Blister Creek.

  When he was able to face forward again, he glanced down to find his footing over a jutting hump of stone and saw, curiously, that there were no other footprints. Nobody had come this way earlier. Where were they taking him?

  Ezekiel turned to look over his shoulder and saw that he was alone. When had that happened? Gideon and Taylor Junior had entered the fissure too. He’d heard them behind, scraping over rocks and crunching on the sand. Yet at some point they’d turned around and retreated out of sight.

  “Guys?” he called. His voice reverberated hollowly through the narrow stone fissure.

  No doubt they meant to spook him. He was more irritated than anything.

  “It’s not funny. I’ll just go back again. I’m not lost or anything. Guys?”

  Gideon leaned over from on top of one of the stone fins, thirty or forty feet above him. He smirked down at Ezekiel. Gideon must have backed out again, then climbed up the sloping sandstone fin. No doubt Taylor Junior was up there too.

  Ezekiel opened his mouth to say something. But there was something cunning in Gideon’s expression, and he suddenly thought better of mouthing off. Let them have their stupid games. Ezekiel turned around to pick his way back through the fissure.

  He hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he heard the sound of stone scraping stone. He glanced up and what he saw filled him with terror. Gideon and Taylor Junior were heaving their shoulders into a loose piece of sandstone. It was a large hunk about the size of Ezekiel’s slender torso. Before the boy at the bottom had a chance to move, it was falling down on him.

  Ezekiel had no chance to run as the stone plummeted into the fissure. His arms flew over his head in a futile attempt to protect himself, and he waited to be crushed.

  But the rock hadn’t been aimed at his head. Instead, it cracked and boomed as it rattled off the stone fins, then came to a rest wedged into the fissure some ten feet away. Gideon and Taylor Junior laughed above, then they disappeared.

  At first Ezekiel was merely relieved, and determined to get back to his brother as soon as possible. Until he tried to get back down the fissure, when he realized that the wedged stone had blocked his return. He’d have to go around.

  Now furious, biting his lip so he wouldn’t mouth off to the Kimball boys and bring them back to torment him again, Ezekiel made his way to the end in the direction he’d originally been traveling. Once out in the open, he stopped. And stared in dismay.

  The giant stones rubbed one against the next on either side of the passageway, making it impossible to simply go around and return to his starting point. Due to a further quirk of geography, all the fins dove sharply into the ground on this side. He couldn’t climb over the top of them either. Ahead and in front lay a tight, but passable maze of fins, humps, and columns. All of it led deeper into the labyrinth instead of
back toward the cemetery.

  He studied the position of the sun in the sky, trying to figure out his points on the compass, but that left him more confused than ever. He’d have to cut around and see if he could turn himself back toward the wash and the cemetery. It wouldn’t be easy. What if he got lost? He might be out here for hours. No sooner had the thought entered his mind than his mouth felt dry and parched, as if by suggestion.

  Ezekiel decided to go left. Behind a series of short fins and knee-like protrusions the height of a man lay a taller rock formation shaped like a horse head on one end and a double camel hump on the other. The terrain seemed more open in that direction, which he hoped would provide opportunities to find a path back toward the cemetery.

  But when he got around the fin and stone columns, he discovered that the collapsed part between the fins wasn’t a passage, but a fissure about six feet wide and twenty feet deep. The back end of the second camel hump connected with the narrow fins behind it to form a sheer, impassable wall. If he’d had more courage, he’d have taken a running start and leaped the chasm, but the thought of that made his knees shake. Instead, he moved in the shade of the giant horse-head formation, only to come around and find another tight clump of sheer rocks angled in such a way that he’d be funneled farther than ever away from his goal.

  He stood staring, heart pounding. Deeper into the labyrinth, or back the way he came? Seemed there was no choice but to continue. But already he was disoriented and frightened.

  He thought of the skull in Taylor Junior’s hands. Eye sockets gaping, the bone white and bleached by the desert sun, the flesh devoured by wild animals. He pictured himself lying dead on his back, sinking into the sand, eyes staring at the sun while crows landed to tear off his lips and nose with their sharp, gleaming beaks.

  A desperate prayer came to his mind.

  Heavenly Father, please help me get out of here. Please, please, please.

  He hadn’t yet said amen when a voice called through the thin desert air.