"Who is this?" Letitia said.
"Who's asking?" said the man who had answered her son's phone.
"I want to speak to Chesney," she said.
"Who doesn't?" said the unknown man. He had an overly self-satisfied manner of speaking acquired by those who were trained in schools that fed new stock into the ranks of radio and television commentators. Now he said, "Are you calling on behalf of Billy Lee Hardacre?"
"I am calling," Letitia said, "on behalf of no one but myself!"
"The caller ID says you're calling from Billy Lee Hardacre's phone." There was a pause, then the voice said, with a rising pitch of excitement, "Wait a minute, are you the older woman who's shacked up–"
"How dare you!" Letitia pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it as if it had suddenly transmogrified into a scorpion and stung her. "My husband and I are duly married according to the rites of–"
"We've checked. There's no marriage license, no registration." Letitia made sounds, but none of them were actual words. Then the man said, "But we don't need to go into that on-air. It's a side issue. Especially if you tell us where Jesus is hiding out." There was a pause, during which Letitia's pulse was loud in her own ear. "Come on, lady," the man said, "we don't have all day."
She hung up. She sat in the breakfast nook for a long moment, her vision focused inward on scenes that, if ever reproduced on film, would require a stronger rating than PG-13. Then she gathered herself together and made her way to her husband's study, entering without knocking.
Billy Lee was at his desk, his fingers on his laptop's keyboard. The big-screen television was also on and he was dividing his attention between the two. On the larger display, a vast crowd was surging through a great plaza ringed by classical buildings. The image switched to a close-up of people straining at a barricade, shouting the same word over and over. A commentator's voice was saying, "…and here at the Vatican, a crowd estimated at well over a hundred thousand is chanting, 'Parousia, parousia!' – that's the technical term for the Second Coming – and demanding that the Pope come out and speak to them."
The image switched to another crowd, this one with angry faces and shaking fists. "Meanwhile, in Cairo," said the voiceover, "the Grand Mufti has summoned leading scholars of the Muslim world to a convocation at the Mosque of–"
Hardacre killed the sound. "It's happening all over the world," he said. "And all because of the Bruster thing. Look." He turned the laptop so she could see its screen. She saw the casting out of the clawed demon. "YouTube," Billy Lee said, "it's gone mega-viral. See the counter here?" – his finger touched a multidigited number on he screen – "It's had two hundred and thirty million hits. Google's crashed twice, just trying to handle the traffic."
Letitia said, "I want to talk to Chesney and Melda."
"Call 'em up." Hardacre's eyes went back to the big screen. Another mob. This one seemed to be turning over taxis in Times Square.
"I can't," she said. "They've gone into hiding. After you set the media on them."
Billy Lee shrugged but didn't take his eyes off the television. "I needed Josh to be out of the way for a while. I figured that would do it." Now something he was seeing must have given him an inspiration. He touched a key on the laptop and a word processing file came up, filling the screen with text. He began to type.
Letitia felt an impulse to close the computer on her husband's key-rattling fingers. She resisted it and said, "I want you to help me."
Billy Lee didn't look up. "Me? How?"
"The angel. Summon the Throne."
The man typed a few more words, moved the cursor back and added a couple more. "Is that a good idea?"
"Yes."
He typed another line, backspaced out the last word and put in another one. "I don't think so."
For Letitia, the enthrallment phase was definitely dwindling. "Do it," she said. "Please."
"Why?"
"I'm trying to decide what to do. I want their help."
"There's nothing to do," he said, eyes still on the laptop screen, fingers still on the keyboard. "It's the end of the world."
She waited. He went back to typing. "You're not going to do it?" she said.
"Do what?"
She left the study, went into the foyer. Outside, she could hear the buzz of conversation, the more distant sound of hymn-singing. The media were still encamped between the front door and the gate, and the fields beyond were becoming a revivalist's version of Woodstock. She could not leave. The moment she opened the door, she'd be mobbed.
She stood in the middle of the great hall, thinking. For the first time since the doctor had told her she was pregnant, she felt cornered. She hadn't liked it then, and liked it even less now. She sorted through the options, not liking any of them. Then she settled on the least evil.
"Xaphan!" she said. "I summon you!"
Nothing happened.
"I don't have time for this!" she said. "You come here right now!"
A faint whiff of sulfur and cigar smoke touched her nose. She turned and saw the diminutive demon hovering in the air so that its eyes were level with hers. The Havana in one small fist poked in her direction. "I don't work for you," the fiend said. "You summon me, I can demand your soul."
"Pish," she said, "and tush. Where's my son?"
"I don't gotta tell you nuttin'."
"True. And next time I see him I'll tell him to cut off the rum and cigars."
"He don't listen to you, toots. I seen that plenty."
"You want to take that chance?"
The demon studied her, its huge round eyes closing to slits. It seemed to be weighing things up, then it lifted its shoulders briefly and said, "Just this once. He's in the garden."
She looked towards the rear of the big house. "What, you mean outside? Here?"
"Not that garden. The–"
"Never mind," she said. "Take me to him, now!"
The fiend bridled, then its eyebrows raised thoughtfully, and in a moment they were passing through a gray nothingness. A moment later, they emerged into a place of sweet, perfumed air borne on the softest of breezes, a low-key paradise of rustling leaves and nodding blossoms. A great tree soared above them and Letitia's feet were sunk into the softest, greenest sward of grass she had ever known.
But they weren't the only things sunk into the emerald turf. So were the naked buttocks of Melda McCann. And sunk into Melda's upturned softest parts was Letitia Arnstruther's son Chesney, his own narrow rump rising and falling with a speed and an athletic certitude that took his mother by surprise.
Then, of course, came the shock. She involuntarily shouted out his name. So, at that moment, by coincidence, did Melda. The young man obviously hearkened to one and not the other, because his cadence increased in both alacrity and power, and matters went swiftly on to their inevitable conclusion.
Voicing a single syllable, Letitia turned away, to find herself being regarded with satisfaction by a sabertoothed, weasel-headed creature in a suit left over from an Edward G. Robinson gangster film. The demon tapped ash from the tip of his cigar, winked one oversized eye, and said, "You asked for it."
FOURTEEN
Hardacre finished polishing the draft, saved the file and got himself another Scotch. It had taken even less time than he'd thought, because he found he'd been able to lift segments from the Book of Chesney and adapt them to the new gospel. That was good, he thought, because the hyperactive news cycle had to be continually fed new material to spin and regurgitate, and the prophet's casting out of Bruster's demons had just about worn out its allotted time upon the stage. The cable news channels had already gone through the "what happened?" stage as well as "how did you feel when it happened?", and now they were well into "what does it mean?" Soon, they would move on to the "what next?" phase, and if they were not handed something fresh to beat to death, they would start looking around for a blonde woman gone mysteriously missing or, failing that, a shark attack.
Fortunately, Billy Lee had just the
thing to keep the wheel turning. He closed the word-processing software on his laptop and activated the movie-maker program. Several files were listed as recently accessed. He put the cursor on one and opened it. Joshua bar Yusuf's face appeared, overlaid by a box with a sideways-pointing arrow in it. Hardacre clicked on the arrow and the prophet began to speak.
"Back then, I came to deliver a simple message: these are the end times. The kingdom is at hand. Make yourselves ready. Turn away from the world. Turn to the Lord and to each other. And do not be afraid. All shall be made new."
The preacher used the program's tools to trim the first two words from the prophet's statement. Then he saved the amended version of the clip and went to the internet. He found the page he had created on a social networking site the day before, but had not activated. He uploaded the file and went through the procedure to put the page out onto the web. Then he went to his desktop system and used it to access the clip he had just posted. And there it was.
Hardacre picked up his laptop, disconnected it from its power lead and went out into the foyer, his hard-heeled boots clicking on the marble floor. He opened the front door and was immediately met by a rush of lenses and microphones.
"Have you heard from Jesus?" was the first question. "Where is he?" followed soon on its heels.
Billy Lee held up one hand for silence and the laptop to get their attention. "The prophet," he said, "has posted a message on the internet." He reeled off the web address of the social networking page and watched as reporters tucked their microphones under their arms, worked their phones and PDAs and found the clip. There was a furious flurry of fingers and thumbs as every one of them forwarded the page to their production centers. Then the microphones and lenses came back to Hardacre.
"What does he mean?"
"It couldn't be more simple," said the preacher. "These are the end times, he said."
"The end of the world?" said a too-handsome man with perfect teeth and sculpted hair. His manner was light and skeptical, but underneath the professionalism Hardacre heard fear.
"Ding!" said Billy Lee. He turned to go, then paused as if remembering something before turning back. "Also," he said, "in the next little while, the prophet will release a text, a new book of the Gospel. It will replace the Book of Revelation."
"When?"
"What's in the text?"
"Where can we get it?"
Hardacre stilled them with another upraised hand. He enjoyed the way they quieted. "It will be uploaded onto the internet," he said. "Watch the same site as where you saw the prophet's message."
He turned and went inside, ignoring a storm of questions that broke harmlessly on his back. As he closed the door he was thinking: and away we go.
G.O.O., said the text message on Captain Denby's phone. He was downtown in a cafe he sometimes visited at lunch. The place never drew many cops – the proprietor didn't believe in feeding anyone for free – and the policeman valued the opportunity to get away from shop talk and read the sports pages in the morning paper. He also liked the pastrami on black rye.
He closed the phone. He could already hear sirens. "General Order One" was code for the response to a major emergency. The last event to have triggered a "goober" was the flood of 2004, when the river had burst its banks and inundated the low-lying streets below Jackson Avenue. Today's goober meant that, as of immediately, all leave was canceled, every off-duty cop was to report in forthwith, and everyone was to wear the uniform, even those who normally worked in plainclothes. Even those who were on special detached duty, Denby wondered?
He was still staring at his phone. Now he dialed dispatch. "It's Denby," he said. "What's all the rumpus?"
He recognized the voice of the normally imperturbable sergeant who answered. Denby had never before heard the man sound rattled. "End of the world, captain," was all he said, then the line went dead.
Something had happened. Denby looked at the newspaper beneath the remains of his sandwich. He'd glanced at a front-page headline about a prophet claiming to be Jesus who had caused some Sunday talk-show bloviator to throw a fit on the air. Now he looked at the weather report to see if heavy rain was expected in the hilly country in which the city's river had its wellsprings. He saw nothing.
His uniform was in a locker at Police Central. He left money beside the crust of his sandwich and stepped outside. A cab was idling at the curb, the driver sipping coffee from a paper cup. Denby opened the rear door, showed his badge to the pair of eyes that went to the rear-view mirror and said, "Police Central, emergency."
The cabbie said something the captain didn't catch, but that was probably the direct opposite of an enthusiastic cheer, and put the car into gear, still sipping on his coffee.
"You hear this?" he said, his head indicating the dashboard radio.
It was two male voices, talking fast, stepping on each other's words. "Turn it up," Denby said.
It was something to do with the stock market, he gathered after a few seconds listening to the panicky gabble. Maybe another one of those glitches that happened when computers were programmed to buy or sell if they noted particular changes in the ebb and flow of the market. Whatever the cause, the Dow Jones Index had apparently dropped two thousand points in twenty minutes and the plunge hadn't hit bottom yet. If anything, the gabblers were telling each other, not to mention the many thousands of others listening in, the sell-off was accelerating.
"End of the fucking world," said the cabbie. "Who needs a stock market now?" He took another sip, looked at the cup with distaste, and dumped its contents out his window.
A squad car, its blues and twos going full-tilt, sped past them, took a corner on two wheels, and disappeared in the direction of Civic Plaza. Denby said, "Change of plan. Follow that guy. And move it."
The driver killed the radio and hit the gas, and then the horn as they rounded the corner, scattering pedestrians. Less than two minutes later, they pulled up behind the police car, a block-and-a-half from the big city square. That was as close as either vehicle was going to get; the street was jammed with stopped vehicles, some of them driverless, abandoned. A few others still had people in them, including members of that hopeful tribe who believe that, when all else fails, blowing a horn might somehow achieve a useful result.
Denby got out of the cab. The cabbie turned to look out through the rear window. There were already three cars in line behind him, two of them belonging to horn-believers. Denby showed the drivers his badge and said, "Shut up," then listened. He could hear crowd noises up ahead, and what sounded like singing. He went toward it.
Civic Plaza was already half-filled and the empty half would not remain that way for long. People were coming from every street that fed into the great open space, mostly downtown office workers, but Denby saw shoppers and teenagers and the social detritus that lived on the streets after everybody else went home for the night. They were moving toward the east end of the plaza, to where the broad steps leading up to the pillars of the Justice Center were thronged by what looked to be a mass choir – no, the captain thought, several different choirs, elbowing each other for space – all singing, swaying, and hand-clapping their way through some old-timey hymn.
Above and behind the singers, someone had erected a giant screen, the kind they used at music festivals and political conventions. Denby recalled seeing a bulletin that said Civic Plaza would be the venue for an open-air concert some evening this week. But this wasn't it. This was noon and somebody must have decided to put the screen to another use: right now it was showing a news channel.
The policeman pushed his way through the crowd. Despite the massed singers' energy, this didn't feel like a religious celebration. The people standing in the plaza mostly weren't clapping or singing along. The deeper Denby pushed into them, the more he smelled a combined odor of the sweat of many – and not the good sweat of heat and muscular motion; the policeman recognized the smell of fear.
He moved around a portly executive in a business suit, putting h
is hand on the man's upper arm to ease by. The fat man jerked and spun toward him, his face pale and sheened in greasy sweat, his eyes too wide. "Police," Denby said, showing his gold badge.
Neither the word nor the shield had the desired effect. The man struck out at the captain, the swipe more like an ineffectual spasm than a coordinated strike, and Denby fended him off and kept moving. He kept looking up at the steps and the screen, expecting to see someone who had the look of being in charge – maybe some preacher – but no one came forward to still the choirs and take the crowd in hand.
A man next to him swore bitterly. The captain looked his way, saw that he was another downtown business type. He had buds in his ear, the wires leading to a device in his pocket. Now he put a finger to one of the buds, the better to hear over the singing.
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