The Visitation

by Frank Peretti

  When I was within two blocks of the flatbed, Justin Cantwell’s eyes locked on me with radar precision and remained there. I stared right back and kept rolling, not straying from the center line. After one block for each of us, his truck and my Trooper came bumper to bumper in the middle of the street, and Cantwell’s parade came to a halt.

  Matt Kiley leaned on the horn. I put my gearshift in park. I had the Messiah of Antioch’s undivided attention and I was going to seize the moment. I wanted him to read in my eyes that he no longer had advantage. I’d been to Texas, and now I knew him the same as he knew me.

  I understood those scars he was trying to show off. I could clearly imagine the fence in his back yard on that blistering day in Texas. I could see how the galvanized spikes went through those arms and into the fence rail, and how they tore his flesh as he struggled. I could imagine the pain, the terror, the horrible bewilderment of a fifteen-year-old accused of being “full of the devil,” an embarrassment that needed to be corralled.

  I understood, and I wanted him to know.

  He knew, all right. He turned away quickly, but I caught it in those crazed eyes, in that sweating, wild-haired visage backlit by orange fire. I had breached his mystique, and by doing so, deflected his power. That could make me his closest confidant—or his most dangerous enemy.

  Enough. I turned my eyes away and searched for Michael. He was standing beside my rig, staring as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. I lowered the power window on his side. “Michael, hop in.”

  He came closer, looking at me puzzled.

  “I’m Travis Jordan. I know your mom.”

  That turned a light on. “Oh.”

  “Climb in.”

  He climbed in.

  A loaf of bread landed on my hood. I saw other loaves flying through the air, bounding off the big truck, bouncing off my rig. The loaf on my hood had been bitten into, and now green worms were crawling out of the bite.

  So, Justin’s product quality had gone south and people were finding out. I knew that would be the script from now on. It was time to get out of there.

  I slammed the Trooper into reverse and left Cantwell with his public. At the first cross street, I got off the highway just as Brett Henchle and Mark Peterson came on the scene in Antioch’s two squad cars, sirens wailing and lights flashing. Was that Norman Dillard in the back of Car One?

  In my mirror, I could see Antioch’s two fire trucks arriving on the scene, and two volunteer firemen raced by me in their private vehicles. Crossing Elm Street, I stopped to let an ambulance roll by with its lights flashing. I found out later it was carrying Rod Stanton.

  The folks along Myrtle Street were out in their yards, clustering with their neighbors, looking up at the black plume of smoke rising only blocks away. I kept driving toward my place, glad it was as far away from the war zone as a home in Antioch could be.

  I noticed Michael was fighting back tears. When he lost it completely, I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Michael, let me tell you about the time I took a trip to Minneapolis.”

  JIM BAYLOR peeked out from the alley near Florence Lynch’s boutique. The fire trucks were getting water on the blaze. Brett Henchle and one of his deputies were fanning out, night sticks in hand and whistles in their mouths. Loot thudded, crashed, plopped, and tinkled to the street as the looters emptied their hands and ran for cover. The two scrapping christs suddenly found they had something in common—their fear of cops—and slunk off in different directions. Jim tried to see Dee through all the smoke, steam, and confusion, and finally spotted her.

  No, no, no! She was joining up with that crowd of Nichols Nuts around Brandon Nichols’s big truck! They were clambering onto the truck as Nichols and anyone else already aboard reached down to pull them up. They were clearing out, and Dee was going with them!

  Jim ran out of hiding. “DEE!”

  She didn’t hear him. Maybe she was ignoring him.

  “DEE!!”

  A gray-haired executive in lemon yellow shorts offered his hand and pulled her up.

  Jim broke into a run. He couldn’t let her go with this bunch. “DEE! Wait a minute! Stop!”

  Nichols banged on the roof of the truck cab and Matt Kiley got rolling, turning off at the closest cross street and roaring away from the trouble.

  Jim almost tripped over his gun lying on the sidewalk. He checked which way the cops were looking, timed his move carefully, and recovered it. It was empty now, but he could remedy that. He tucked the gun in his belt, draped his shirttail over it, and got out of there.

  MICHAEL CALLED HIS MOTHER from my place to tell her he was okay and with me, and then we sat at my kitchen table eating microwave pizza. I recounted my story about Minneapolis and then, for good measure, told him about my Nechville trip. Hearing my accounts brought him as much enjoyment as a stomach cramp, but it was medicine he needed at the time, and he hung on every word. I threw in some sweetener as often as I could, telling him in dozens of ways that there really was a Savior—he just wasn’t Justin Cantwell. For one thing, Justin Cantwell was too small. The real Jesus was greater than the best show any man could put on. He was greater than any building you could put him in or any tradition you could wrap around him or any expectations you could impose on him. Throughout my life, in a variety of ways, I’d tried to do all four of those things, but now I was learning—again—that it’s only when you’re willing to know him on his terms, for who he is, that you really start to know him at all.

  I could see some light bulbs coming on in his head. They were dim, but they were coming on. I was thankful just to have him in my house, quiet and sitting still, so I could work him through all this. When the daylight began to fade, I checked the clock on the wall. Kyle was due at any time, and we still needed a map. “Michael, I need to ask you a favor.”

  By now he was ready to tackle the job as a moral duty. “Here’s the ranch house,” he explained as he drew, “and the main driveway. But you can’t go in that way if you don’t want to be discovered. The spring development is in the willow draw, way up in back. . . .”

  IT TOOK BOTH COPS to contain Don Anderson’s one-man war against the great technology takeover. He thought the handcuffs held a personal grudge against him. The squad car meant to slam his leg in the door. The speed radar was aiming at him—he could feel it homogenizing his brain.

  Mark found one fleeting moment when either Don’s head, arm, or leg wasn’t protruding and got the door shut. “Whew! What’s gotten into him, anyway?”

  Brett was somber, staring as the crazed appliance dealer screamed and pounded against the car window. “He has a bad case of Brandon Nichols—just like the whole town.”

  Mark surveyed the damaged storefronts and littered streets. They wouldn’t know the extent of the fire damage until the flames were out and the smoke cleared. “Guess the honeymoon’s over.” Then he had to ask, “But what about your leg? I mean . . .”

  “I’m taking it back.” Brett felt his leg, then flexed his knee. “It’s just about normal—I mean, the way it was before Nichols messed with it—and it can stay that way.” Don was still hollering, something about the squad car having indigestion in its fuel line. “You’d better get Don to the clinic. He needs a shot or something. I’ll lock up the window peeper—and then I’m gonna call the county sheriff and get us some help.”

  MICHAEL SKETCHED EVERYTHING OUT, showing me how the “willow draw” was a small valley between rows of hills two miles north of the ranch house. The hills could be seen from the house, he said, but not the valley between them. Cantwell could have been doing most anything up there without being discovered.

  Hopefully, Kyle and I would have the same advantage.

  The disadvantage was the ranch’s backhoe. Michael couldn’t be sure where it was.

  “The last time I saw it, it was in the low red barn, but the tractor might not have the backhoe attachment on it. They don’t have that hooked up when they’re stacking hay.”

&n
bsp; “Oh brother.”

  “But here’s the other way to get in . . .”

  He went to the opposite edge of the paper. “Figure on about six miles across here—” He drew the north highway, then a road entering the ranch from the north side. “There’s a gate, but you can just open it. Make sure you close it behind you, or the cattle will get out. Then you follow this road . . .”

  The road penetrated vast rangeland, then forked: The north fork led into the hills and the willow draw between them. The south fork led back to the house.

  “What are the chances of navigating that road in the dark?”

  Michael seemed hesitant to answer. “Physically speaking?”

  I knew more was coming. “Right.”

  “There’s nothing out there to bump into, except maybe a cow. There, uh, there might be another problem, though.”

  “Go ahead.”

  It embarrassed Michael to be afraid, but his fear was real, and it showed. “When you’re up at the ranch, you can feel it.” He struggled for words, got flustered, then tried, “Have you ever had somebody sneak up on you from behind, and something told you they were there right before they jumped you? That’s the way it always feels up at the ranch, like somebody’s there, just out of your field of vision. You can turn your head but you still won’t see them. They don’t jump out and scare you or anything, but they’re around. And that’s why . . . Cantwell . . . always seems to know everything. He has other eyes working for him. I used to think they were angels . . .” He stared into space—and maybe some terrifying memories. “I wouldn’t go up there in the dark.”

  A knock at the door made me jump. The door cracked open. “Hello?”

  “Yeah, Kyle, come on in. Michael, have you met Kyle?”

  Kyle strode directly to the kitchen table and gave Michael his best pastor’s handshake. “Praise God! It’s great to see you free of that mess up there!”

  Michael didn’t know how to reply to that, but I just indicated the map he was drawing. “He didn’t actually see them dig the spring, but he knows where it is.”

  “I’ve got two shovels in my car.”

  Grave robbers, I thought grimly. “Uh . . . okay. But what we really need is a backhoe. We aren’t going to have all night.”

  Another knock at the door. “Travis?”

  Jim Baylor! This was no casual visit. Jim was breathing hard, sweating, and agitated, and he was wearing a sidearm. I didn’t even have to guess the source of the trouble before he said it. “He’s got Dee.”

  He told us his story and we told him ours.

  “Hey, I’ve got a backhoe!” he said.

  “I know,” I replied, nodding a strong hint at him.

  By the look in his eye, you’d think I’d invited him to help us sneak under a farmer’s fence to steal some corn.

  Michael did not look so gleeful.

  “Let’s have a word of prayer here,” I suggested, “and then we’ll get started.”

  We gripped hands in a circle and yes, we all prayed.

  I GOT MY CELL PHONE and called Morgan. She was still at the engagement dinner, but would be heading home soon. “Be very careful,” she said. “I want to see you again.”

  “Talk to you soon.” I put the cell phone in my coat pocket.

  BY THE TIME KYLE AND I reached the north gate to the Macon ranch, there was barely enough light to see it. The sun had set, and only a thin band of pink remained on the horizon. Overhead, the sky was shifting from indigo to black and the stars were coming out. Jim Baylor got there five minutes after we did, chugging up the shallow rise in his big dump truck, headlights blazing, his backhoe on a trailer. Michael said he’d rather wait at my place, so it would be the three of us. He was right about the gate, though. All we had to do was swing it open. We moved quickly and got inside the fence before any other traffic came by.

  I felt like I was doing an Isuzu Trooper commercial, taking my trusty rig into the rugged outback over rough roads and uneven terrain and doing it in the dark, no less. Kyle kept studying Michael’s map with a penlight and peering out through the windshield, trying to find the landmarks Michael had noted. The dirt road, still rutted and soft in places, weaved and wound, rose and fell, went on and on. We often passed small, idle bunchings of the Macon herd, resting by the road, grazing in the fields, paying us little mind. Jim stayed right with us, his headlights bright in my mirrors. After five miles I could make out the soft, roundish lines of the hills that sheltered the willow draw.

  We came to the grade, climbed, bumped, and wound our way upward, then dropped into a valley on the other side.

  I saw a distant, vague form in my headlights. “I think I see the dead tree.”

  “Uh . . .” Kyle checked the map. “It should have a feeder on the south side.”

  I slowed and swerved the Trooper that direction. The headlights finally caught a white planked cattle feeder with a dozen head of cattle dozing or munching.

  “Okay,” said Kyle, “straight on for another mile, then left where you see the willow grove.”

  A mile later, we found the grove and turned left. There had been some work here. The road was wider. It had been scraped and spread with coarse gravel. We came to a wide, flat area.

  “Here’s the turnaround,” said Kyle.

  “And there’s the fence,” I said.

  Michael had come through.

  I drove into the turnaround and circled to where I’d be out of Jim’s way. He rolled in, found a good spot, and shut down his engine. When his headlights winked out, the darkness moved in like a presence on every side, heavy and close, almost a liquid we could feel between our fingers. Our flashlight beams seemed pitifully weak in opposing it, like three tiny fireflies in a vast cavern. While Jim set about unchaining his backhoe, Kyle and I went to scout out the gully on the other side of the fence.

  There wasn’t much to see. Apparently, this used to be a boggy area filled with weeds and willow saplings. Now it was cleaned and carved out, filled with washed rock, and dammed with pressure treated timbers. A pipe ran out under the dam, with a large gate valve to control flow. It was neat and simple.

  Clean too.

  “What are we looking for?” Kyle asked.

  “A car.”

  “Well, I mean . . . you know, how do we—”

  I was shaking my head. “I don’t know.”

  All we could see in our roving cones of light were the wide, graveled turnaround, the post and wire fence to keep cattle out of the gully, a little bit of bare, brown soil where the gully had been scraped out, and a thin, green mantel of grass just coming up wherever the original soil had been disturbed. One fresh, car-sized hole, recently dug and then covered over, would have been nice.

  Beyond our little circle of light, coyotes yowled and yapped somewhere in the same valley, and shadows, only shadows, provided cover and hiding for any kind of beast or spirit to come close. Was it just Michael’s paranoia creeping into me? No, I had some of my own. I’d dealt with Justin Cantwell myself. I knew what it was to be watched by eyes that were . . . somewhere . . . but not really there.

  CLANG! I jumped.

  It was Jim, dropping a come-along on the deck of his backhoe trailer. He was working efficiently, but for me it wasn’t fast enough.

  I kept my light moving, both to search and to cut through the shadows to make sure they were empty. I could hear Kyle muttering little Pentecostal prayers. It wasn’t paranoia. He was feeling it too.

  Jim started up the backhoe, and its headlights and floodlights chased the shadows from a sizable piece of ground, a precious piece of illumined real estate we could stand and defend. While the engine warmed up and the lights consoled us, he walked along the fence line, eyeing the ground, digging in his heel here and there. “What do you think, Jim?” The sound of my own voice startled me.

  He leaned over the fence at the lower end of the turnaround and pointed his floodlight into the gully. “This here’s fill dirt, fill gravel.” He came to where we stood and s
tudied the dam and catch basin. “Eh, they didn’t work those banks much, just filled in between ’em with the rock. But lower down . . . they put some dirt in there.” He went to his truck and grabbed a shovel from the cab. “Somebody hold my light.”

  I held his flashlight while he went along the fence, stomping the shovel in and spooning up the soil every few feet. “Eh, yeah, you see that? This stuff here is new, it’s fill.” Kyle and I looked at him like two disciples of digging awaiting wisdom from the master. “This shoulder’s new. It’s all fill. Let’s give it a scratch.”

  He climbed into his backhoe and backed up to the lower corner of the turnaround overlooking the gully, his floodlights illuminating the work area. He lowered the first outrigger, a big hydraulic foot to stabilize the machine for digging. The backhoe tilted as the outrigger contacted the ground. He lowered the opposite outrigger. It contacted the ground—

  And kept sinking, breaking through. We heard something crinkle.

  Jim cut the throttle on the backhoe and hopped out. We ran up, our lights searching the broken ground around the foot of the outrigger.

  There was broken glass down there, and beyond that, a dark cavity.

  Kyle had Jim’s shovel. He reached into the hole and scraped out some dirt and gravel. I recognized the chrome around the doorpost and the vinyl roof.

  “That’s it!” My voice squeaked a little, but I hardly noticed.

  Jim said nothing. He just climbed into the cab again, repositioned the machine, gunned the throttle, and started digging. Kyle and I stood as close as safety allowed, our lights and eyes following every scoop of dirt he took from atop and around that car. In no more than ten minutes he’d cleaned out a ditch along the car’s right side.

  Kyle and I jumped in with our shovels to do the delicate unearthing in the wash of his floodlights. Jim’s outrigger had shattered and broken a hole through the front passenger window. We cleared away the dirt and then broke out the rest of the window so we could search the car’s interior with our lights. We saw nothing but the rundown interior—the seats, steering wheel, dashboard, and ashtrays—still coated with brown slime and river mud. It still smelled like the river . . .