For a moment Marion wondered if he was going to tell them about Daniel. Then Peter continued, “But compared to yours, they are nothing.
“We need water now, my friends. Our host; Mr. Vernon, tells us his water system can’t function because Fountain Creek is running low—mainly because of the strain our needs have placed on it.
“But we must do something before anyone starts getting sick. Evacuating, even if we begin immediately, will take some time, and panic or fighting isn’t going to make it any easier—I think you all know that.”
Isolated voices cried out for help, pleading on behalf of friends and family. Their words drifted up to the stage on broken butterfly wings. Marion sensed desperation festering in the crowd; they were starting to give off the first traces of the stench of the loss of faith.
“With the Creator’s help, we can help ourselves. That has been my message to you for many months, and now we have the chance to prove it, to make it work.”
In the wings, Sammy moved close to Marion. “What’s happening, honey? What’s he gonna do?”
“Sammy, be quiet, okay?”
“Because we can make anything happen in our lives if we really want it bad enough,” said Peter. He was standing still, facing the immense ocean of flesh. No posturing or pacing. No dramatics or body language, just some straight talk. Marion wondered if it would be enough.
“All right, my friends, let’s get started,” continued Peter. “Join hands with the people next to you. It might be difficult if you’re holding children, but I want everybody to do their best. I want us all connected. I want us all to be part of a much larger thing.” He clasped his own hands and waited.
“Are we all connected?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the crowd, grunting like a tired beast.
“Good. Now I want everyone to close their eyes. I want everyone to think of a river. A raging river, full of white-capped spray and sun-splashed pools. I want you all to imagine that this river is deep. And clear. And cold.
“Can you see it?”
Again the huge mass grunted its assent. The sound, almost frightening to Marion, sounded like some massive, monstrous creature. She looked out at the crowd; their eyes were closed, they all held one another, swaying ever so slightly to some metaphysical rhythm. She was stunned by the sight, by the knowledge that he had such power over them.
“This river is rushing toward us now,” Peter continued, his voice a seductive, electronically-modulated whisper. “It is coming together in our lives because it is coming together in our minds. And our minds are thinking as one mind. We share that single image, that single need. Do you feel it?”
“Yesssss,” hissed the beast.
“Bring the river to us,” said Peter as he raised his arms toward the crowd. “Bring it down from the icy mountaintops. Bring the cold clear river to the banks of the ranch. Bring It Down!”
He paused and the entire crowd-mass seemed to lean forward and then catch itself as though it had been using his words for support. Marion watched as though through an insulated glass bubble. Whatever he was doing to them had not affected her. She felt oddly disconnected from what she knew was a powerful phenomenon that raged about her. Was he doing it consciously? Purposely excluding her from the experience? Punishing her?
No. She was certain it was nothing like that. Maybe she’d gotten so close to him, so intimate with him, that she had become immune to his influence. It was a startling thought.
“Do you feel it coming?” he whispered across the grazing land. The phalanx of speakers gave his hushed voice soft power. And then gradually growing in volume and resonance, he shouted: “Bring it down…bring it down…BRING IT DOWN! BRING DOWN THE RIVER NOW!”
The air above the pasture seemed to buckle and snap. In the far distance, beyond the peaks of the mountains, a rolling clap of thunder split the sky, shuddered the earth. Looking up, Marion could see nothing but the deep blue, largely indifferent sky. But she could feel a change in the air. Oh yes. Definitely a change.
She sensed a great roaring going on just beyond the range of human hearing. Like the air surrounding columns of high-voltage power lines, the atmosphere felt poised, waiting…
But for what?
The crowd swayed and rippled, still moving as one single being. Joined physically, and probably in some way mentally, like a gigantic hive, the audience slouched closer to its critical mass. The sky lowered and darkened; flashes of heat lightning capered across the horizon. A windstorm rose as if out of the cracks in the earth.
Marion felt the stage begin to tremble. The tiny, febrile vibrations felt at first like the beats of a million, embryonic hearts, in perfect synch with itself.
And then she could hear it.
“Jesus Christ…what’s that?” Sammy Eisenglass moved past her, along with several musicians and stagehands. They were looking north, toward the foothills beyond the river basin.
The faint drum roll of faraway thunder gave way to the approaching gallop of a million horses, the roar of incoming missiles, the descent of a comet through a hole in the air. The sound rose up in an instant, as if with the flick of a wrist, someone had turned up the gain on an amplifier. The superstructure of the stage shuddered violently as the earth slipped and bucked beneath it. The Arkansas River rose up like an awakened, maddened beast. The noise of its escape was the loudest sound she’d ever heard, and the vibrations from its passing threatened to shake everything into powder. The skyscraper-like towers of speakers on each side of the stage fragmented like toy building blocks, falling in upon themselves, sparking and flashing as wire harnesses ruptured and power lines crackled.
Peter moved back from the edge of the stage; the crowd reeled back to escape the lethal collapse. The spell broken, the thousands of people began moving in different directions.
The river’s thunderous arrival created a back-pressure in the tributaries and irrigation canals, which suddenly erupted in cold, wet roostertails and geysers. In an instant the entire pasture sparkled under the spray and patter of artificial rain. People began dancing, sending up a cascade of cheers which covered the sound of the river like a blanket.
Marion held onto a piece of scaffolding, unable to stop watching the spectacle. Slowly Peter walked to the edge of the stage again, treading carefully amidst the electronic rubble, raising his hands high. The crowd loved him, screamed his name. Smiling, glowing in the fierce blast of their approval, Peter suddenly turned and stared directly at Marion, as though the maneuver had been rehearsed. The intensity of his eyes, his tight-lipped smile, seemed somehow threatening. As though he were sending her a special message: Don’t cross me. I can do anything.
Maybe she had stopped standing in awe of his “miracles,” but what she had just seen defied explanation or belief. There was no belief, only acceptance. A half-million people needed water and he brought them a river.
Incredible.
She wondered if, by luck, anyone had gotten it on tape, and shaken though she was, physically and emotionally, her professional side edged to the fore. Mentally, she began composing the story she would give the networks tonight. It would be a stunner.
“I told you! I told you!” shouted Billy, beaming like a proud father.
“Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ…! Didja see that?” cried Sammy as he ran past her toward Peter, who still stood facing the crowd. Everyone followed Sammy’s lead; in an eye-flash, musicians, roadies, stagehands and techs were all running. They surrounded Peter and lifted him up on their shoulders like a quarterback after the Big Game. Peter welcomed it, gloried in it.
She watched him being buoyed about the stage by the crowd, his dark hair falling over his forehead, his even darker eyes burning with the glow of victory. The word charisma had been invented for people like him. Everybody’s hero.
At that moment, Peter’s gaze met her own and for the instant they remained locked, she knew—with an unnatural clarity—the certainty, that he knew exactly what she was thinking. She could do nothing b
ut turn away, break the contact, try to escape the knowledge that he’d even invaded her thoughts.
What else could he do to her? What was left?
She felt suddenly disoriented, dizzy. What was going on? Holding on to the nearest piece of pipe scaffolding, Marion tried to steady herself. She’d never been one for swoons or faints, but felt on the edge of some kind of collapse. After holding herself up for another minute or so, she began to feel better. A wave of total weakness had passed through her; she could still feel it dopplering away from her like the sound of a passing train’s horn.
Without thinking why, she moved cautiously to the stairs, exiting the heights of the stage. She seemed to be operating in a vacuum. Shaking her head, she tried to clear the feeling. Maybe she should go back to the trailer and rest?
As she reached the bottom step, she became abruptly aware of sound again, the background din of running water, people laughing, shouting. For some reason, the collective voice of the crowd did not sound as jubilant as before.
Slowly, making sure her dizziness had passed, Marion walked around the stage, toward the audience. When she cleared the pile of rubble beyond the proscenium, she could see the problem immediately. Hundreds of thousands of people were pressing away from the tributaries. Pressing away because the water continued to rise and crest the banks of what had been shallow muddy creeks only minutes before. Huge holes appeared in the crowd as the ground became a quagmire from the overflow and everyone tried to back off from the excess. No longer a celebration, the extra water had doused the party and now threatened to initiate a full-scale panic.
Running back to the steps, Marion raced up the flight two at a time.
“Peter! Peter!” Her voice sounded fragile and impotent against the wall of noise.
He couldn’t hear her. The backstage crew had lowered him to the stage and he was trying to get the sound system working again. Workers were scurrying around the spilled spaghetti bowl of wires and cables, trying to make a magic connection. Peter paced frantically on the edge of the stage with the dead mike in his hand. Without the megawatts, he would never reach the mob again. If he needed their attention and their cooperation to stop what they’d started, he plainly wasn’t going to get it.
From the height of the stage, Marion had a better view of the pasture and the crowd. Despite their efforts, the people could not escape the effects of the river gone crazy. There was no place to run. Thousands of people were beginning to sink into the spongy mud. The outer edges of the crowd had begun to flake off, tatters of people dragging themselves through the mud toward the rear entrance to the ranch and the state highway. Other fragments were spilling past either side of the stage and the trailers toward the higher ground near Vernon’s home. The crowd would gradually, but very slowly, disperse. Sucked down by the quag, the movement of more than a half-million people would take a long, long time.
The river itself had exceeded and obliterated its banks, raging over the land like a maddened beast. The pasture was already changing from mudpit to swamp; soon it would be a seafloor. Hundreds of the thousands in the crowd began to sense the impending flood conditions; panic sparked and jetted amongst them like static electricity. They pushed and brawled with one another, guided by the amoeba-like instincts of a mob, casting off their humanity like a soiled bandage. Bodies were forced down into the mud, never again to surface. Water lapped at everyone’s knees, eddying and swirling with tidal force. Marion wanted to turn away from the growing hysteria, but was riveted by the grotesque spectacle. Some perverse side of her wanted to watch the wretched mass of them gnaw and thrash at one another like rats drowning in storm-washed sewer.
Peter gestured spasmodically at the front of the stage jumping and half-running along the edge of the now-rickety structure. Some roadies jury-rigged the tangle of cables into a fuzzy, feed-backing P.A. Peter’s voice jangled and frizzed from the few remaining speakers like bad reception on a cabbie’s radio.
Marion listened to his broken words as he tried to calm the mob, to rally them, bring them together once again. If he had reached them, regained their symbiosis, the river’s onrush might still become a miracle. But his powers seemed to have deserted him; he couldn’t connect. He stood still, body arched, eyes closed in perfect tension, trying to summon up whatever it was that united him with the cosmos, but nothing happened.
For the first time in his public career, Peter Carenza knew failure.
FORTY-ONE
Rome, Italy—Etienne
* * *
October 24, 1999
Despite the crispness in the air, she wanted to walk in the convent garden. Wrapping her cloak tightly about her throat kept the wind from violating the warmth beneath her robes. The walls of the quadrangle protected her, gave her a feeling of security. It was so good to be away from the infirmary, from the oversolicitous prying of the nurses.
That she’d not been able to contact the Pope had initially depressed her, even though she knew it seemed absurd for a simple, lowly, cloistered nun to wish to see the Holy Father himself. But she gradually grew to accept her defeat, accepting it as the will of the Lord. What had become more difficult to accept was her treatment by her colleagues. The other nuns had isolated her, made her a pariah. If not scorned, she knew she was at least laughed at when doors were closed and voices hushed.
No matter, she thought as she walked down a brick path, under a shedding dogwood tree. She neared the rosebed, the spot where the first vision had touched her.
I can remain strong as long as I bask in the grace of God’s love. I can—
She stopped abruptly, her attention arrested by the sight of a single flower still in bloom despite the weather.
A feeling of déjà vu ripped through her like a gust of arctic air, leaving her knees weak and her spirit shaken. Something compelled her to bend forward and reach for the heavy blossom. As before, it broke loose to fall into her hand. When it touched her palm, she could feel it beating as though it had a heart. In the intricate pattern of the roseate sworl, where she’d once seen beauty and power and the majesty of the Lord, Etienne now saw something more disturbing, unsettling.
Staring into the depths of the flower, she recognized the complex design, the familiar optical illusion. The image shifted and a remembered wave of nausea curled over her—that same hideous sickness burned and clawed in her belly; that same feeling of her skull ballooning up.
Mary! Mother of God!
It was happening again, and she had no power to stop it.
She knew she’d collapsed to her knees; disorientation and the shifting shapes in her vision kept her off balance. A low-pitched, penetrating sound filled her ears, changing into a remembered dull buzz that threatened to mesmerize her. She could do nothing but stare into the center of the flower, watching its color change from a fragile pink to a blood-red stain and then slowly slide into black.
Then the smell of death and corruption returned, the smell of the end of all things, of dread and repulsion. Everything in the garden, in the convent, all that had kept her safe and sane, began expanding, rushing away from her in an eye-blink. Etienne once again twisted on a line above the abyss. Knowing she’d survived this ordeal once before made the experience no less terrifying, no less threatening.
Paralyzed, pinned beneath the force of the coming vision, Etienne had no choice but to surrender to the crushing magma heat and weight of its onslaught.
Gathering force, the images compressed into the darkness and then unfurled like bloodstained banners to slap the face of her consciousness: the waterstorm winds, the white bricks of a bombed hospital, the mountain-strewn wreckage of a jetliner. Like a collage of tom photographs, the pieces of the vision refused to assume order or immediate sense. But the overriding tableau left scorch marks in her memory. The oppressive weight of the pain of others stamped unmalleable marks upon her soul.
All of this flowed from the blackness of the rose. When she stopped fighting it, she could almost see a face within the folds and conv
olutions of the petals. A face familiar and yet totally foreign.
It was the face of all that was malevolent or ever would be. It was the face of whatever waited for all humanity at the end of time.
FORTY-TWO
Vatican City—Lareggia
* * *
October 26, 1999
Paolo Cardinal Lareggia stood at the window of his office. The narthex of Saint Peter’s Basilica dominated the view, but he never grew tired of the Vatican skyline, the color and movement of the Via della Fondamenta. It was a high sky for late autumn, and the sunlight, filtered by the leaded-glass window, felt warm upon his moon face. Sometimes, he wished he could simply put away the mantle of his office, his vows, his obligations, and live out the rest of his days alone in dignified tranquility.
Like most old men, he felt trapped in an aging, useless frame. He grew weary of life, despite his responsibilities and duties. And yet, there was a small part of him—perhaps the part which had, long ago, allowed him to kill a Turkish sailor—which would never go easy into that good night. Heedless of his faith’s tautologies and the miracles of his protégé, he sometimes caught himself wondering what really lay behind the Final Curtain.
As though to remind him that he would soon gain firsthand knowledge of the answer, a twinge of pain stung the left side of his chest and was gone. Had it traced, for an instant, a lightning-like sliver down his left arm?
Turning from the window, Paolo shook his head. He lumbered against gravity, which wanted to yank his enormous bulk to the carpet. Even though he had gained inordinate weight over the years, his legs had remained thin. Now their musculature was crying out against the torture of carrying his bulk. Every step had become a terrible labor, and sooner or later he knew he would crash to the floor. Could he break a hip like that? Or would his extra padding save him?
So be it, he thought. I probably deserve exactly such a fate. It was said that every cleric who truly denied himself the pleasures of the flesh always jumped into bed with another vice. Paolo smiled bitterly. No doubt—food had been his mistress for a long time now. Slowly, he eased himself into his desk chair, feeling the relief spread instantly up his beleaguered legs. The ornate gold-leaf porcelain clock at the corner of his desk ticked past the top of the hour. Francesco was late.
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