Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  He clucked his tongue. “You know better than that. You appear to be the only journalist in the country who’s met and interviewed Samuel Mordecai. The only one. You have a relationship with him—”

  “Richard,” she interrupted, “Mordecai’s not someone you have a relationship with. Unless you’re willing to sit for five hours at a stretch and listen to his harangues.”

  “But you did talk to him—for several hours and—”

  “Several hours that were the worst of my life. And I include, for comparative purposes, the time the anesthetic wore off while I was having knee surgery and the time I went to divorce court.”

  Dutton laughed. “Okay. But you’ve already done the painful part here. You did the interview; you might as well get something out of it. And, Molly, the fact that you hated him from the start, that you saw through him, gives you—”

  “Richard!” Molly had been trying to treat it lightly, but now she lost all pretense at humor. “Richard, you don’t get it. I did see through him. I knew he was fanatical, and dangerous. I even suspected crimes were going on out there. When I left, I felt … contaminated. And what did I do? I went to the sheriff, that bumbling old Bradford County sheriff, and told him I thought Samuel Mordecai and the Hearth Jezreelites were evil and might be breaking some laws. I told him I’d felt threatened.

  “He asked how they’d threatened me, and I said Mordecai had lectured and bullied me. The sheriff said it sounded like what Reverend Willard did to him every Sunday at First Baptist. Not pleasant, but not exactly against the law.

  “He patted me on the head and said, ‘Now go on home, little lady, and leave this to me. I’ll check those folks out for you, sure enough, yes, ma’am.’ So I went home, good little lady that I am, and proceeded to write the story, because I had a deadline and, of course, that’s the main thing—meeting deadline, right?”

  “That’s what we do, Molly. There’s no dishonor there. As for your other actions, they were blameless. You did what any good citizen would: You told the appropriate law-enforcement officials about your suspicions, right? What more can you expect of yourself?”

  Molly groaned. The subject of Samuel Mordecai had been a sore one from the moment she met him two years earlier, and in the weeks since the school bus hijacking, it had become so agonizing that she tried not to think about him. But Mordecai was everywhere—his face, his name, his words, assaulted her from every television screen, every radio, every newspaper. It was impossible to ignore him.

  Now, against her will, she saw his image: Samuel Mordecai, born Donnie Ray Grimes, standing in front of her, running his long, graceful fingers through his sun-streaked blond curls as he ranted about computers and calamity, beasts and apocalypse. It was an interview from the lowest reaches of hell. She had not gotten him to answer a single question. He just opened his mouth and started preaching, preaching and strutting, as if that was what she had come for. He gushed words at her nonstop, incoherently, ungrammatically, spewing them all over her. She made one or two feeble attempts to stop him, but on he raved. She had felt trapped and abused and mesmerized by the droning male voice that had kept her pinned to her chair far past the time she should have gotten up and walked out. There were things about that interview that still haunted her, things she had never told anyone. Finally, after enduring two hours of it, she had pushed her way out of the room and driven away from Jezreel convinced the man was dangerous.

  “Molly,” Richard said, “Molly, when your boss asks you a civil question, it’s customary to answer him. I asked you what more could you expect of yourself?”

  “Nothing. You’re right, Richard. Apparently nothing more could be expected.”

  “Good. Now here’s a problem: I get a dozen calls a day from editors and writers around the country who read your cult story and want to talk with you. They tell me they’ve tried to reach you, but you won’t return their calls.”

  She had been afraid this was coming. “I know. I’m sorry about that, but I’ve been busy. And I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I can see that. And if you want, I’ll continue to field the calls so you can work. Now, I know this is distasteful, but I’d like to encourage you to go ahead and write this story. Most of your homework for it is already done. All you need to do, really, is trot out your old interview tapes and listen to them in light of what’s happened. You know how that works. You’ll get interested again, in spite of your reluctance right now. You’ll get caught up. You’ll find some quotes and material you didn’t use the first time. You can show how prophetic you were. You can follow the news as it breaks. Hell, you’re doing it anyway. So just watch whatever is going to happen out there in the next five days, and write your story. You don’t even need to go to Jezreel if you don’t want to. I hear it’s a madhouse, anyway. Just watch it all on CNN. You can do it without breaking a sweat.”

  “Oh, no, I can’t.” She held a hand out to him with the palm turned up. “Feel. It makes me sweat just to talk about it.”

  Richard Dutton leaned forward and rested his fingers on her damp palm. Then he looked up at her with interest. “I am amazed,” he said. “I’ve seen you talking to serial rapists and crazed killers without batting an eye. What is it about this that rattles you so much?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, knowing even as she replied that this was only half true. “He’s a lunatic, but, as you say, I’ve known lots of lunatics, and none of them made my hands sweat.” She lowered her voice because she was embarrassed by what she was about to say. “It has to do maybe with a certain power he has. Charisma. Energy. I don’t know. You have to see it.”

  Richard leaned forward, watching her, his small deep-set eyes glowing amber the way they did when he was excited. “Just how crazy do you think Mordecai is, Molly?”

  The image of him pacing the room, shouting and grabbing at his crotch as he preached, flashed before her. “Stark raving bonkers,” she said. “Crazy enough to—” That old feeling of dread and disgust squeezed her stomach. “Crazy enough to do something like what happened in Waco and take those kids with him when he does it.” She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want to have anything more to do with this, Richard. It’s not good for me.”

  Molly turned back to the window and rested her forehead against the cold plate glass. She looked down at the trail that edged Town Lake and the lunch-hour joggers—tiny figures sweating it out in the midday sun so many stories below. So silly, so futile, all that. As if exercising your cardiovascular system would keep calamity at bay, as if the world were a safe place, as if we weren’t all vulnerable at every breath to the random viciousness loose in it.

  “Molly,” Richard’s voice sounded genuinely soft now, “for me this is not really about getting the story covered. Anyone on the staff could do it, and most of them would give their right arm to. But as your editor—and friend—I have a vested interest in your career. There are some realities here I want to point out. Every writer I’m aware of who has written a big breakthrough piece that vaulted her to national attention has been able to do it because of timing. It just happened that the perfect story, the very story that writer had been preparing to write all her life, came along at the exact right time, when she was primed and ready for it. That’s what’s happening here, Molly. Everything you have done up to now has been preparation for this one story. Surely you see that.”

  “Richard—”

  “Just let me finish. Look at the choices you’ve made. You cut your teeth on street crime covering the police beat. When you came to the magazine, you gravitated to the more bizarre and high-profile crimes we tend to take on. You’ve been working a vein, I think—going after that dark strain, that attraction to violence we all feel but don’t like to admit. And your other specialty—and this surprised me at first, when you started to take it on—has been religion, especially our own homegrown religious extremists.”

  He picked up a folded magazine from his stack on the table. “Listen. Some of your best work ha
s been on this subject.” He began to read from the magazine:

  “ ‘These freelance prophets flourish in Texas, as they did centuries ago in Palestine, springing up out of the sun-dried earth like mesquite, tough and tenacious as hell. They preach a gospel heavy on prophecy and apocalypse, spouting the Book of Revelation as if they had drunk it in with their mother’s milk. The intensity of their charisma and their eschatology kindles in their followers a belief so passionate that it sometimes bursts into spontaneous combustion and consumes everything around it. Prophets are as native to Texas as longhorns and Stetsons.’ ”

  Molly had to smile. It was from her piece on Texas cults. Usually it made her uncomfortable to hear something she’d written in the past read aloud, but those words still pleased her.

  Richard slapped the magazine against his knee. “Jezreel and Samuel Mordecai is your story of a lifetime, Molly. You could win a Pulitzer.” He lowered his voice. “You really could. And don’t tell me that doesn’t appeal to you.”

  “Of course it does. The prizes are hard cash, and, as usual, I need some.”

  “There could be a book in it, too.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together.

  She sighed. “Yeah, but the problem is I don’t even want to write a postcard about it. Just thinking about it makes me queasy.”

  “Maybe what’s making your stomach queasy and your palms sweaty is something else, Molly.” He lowered his eyes back to the tassels on his loafers. “Maybe it’s fear. You recognize this story as the incredible opportunity it is—I know you do. Maybe it’s that old female bugaboo rearing its ugly head—fear of success.”

  She leaned her shoulder against the window and thought about it. That hot churning in the stomach sure did feel a lot like fear. But success, by almost any definition, was something she had always wanted, wholeheartedly, unabashedly. Fame, money, recognition—she coveted them all. She deserved them and she wanted them. No, it wasn’t success she feared. But she was afraid. She just wasn’t sure what she was afraid of.

  “Once you get going on it, Molly,” Richard said in his most enthusiastic voice, “your old instincts will take over. Trust me.”

  Amazingly, she did trust him. He was a great editor with an unerring instinct for the heart of a story. And he had always had the ability to get her excited about things. Maybe this fear or timidity or repugnance or whatever it was would pass and the old thrill and obsession of pursuing a good story would take over. Maybe this was the story she’d been training for all her life.

  “And, Molly,” he added brightly, “how often do you get the chance to cover Armageddon?”

  She smiled. “Only once. And you’d better meet deadline.”

  “And get paid up front,” he said. “Here’s my suggestion. Do this story. Give it your all, and when it’s over, take a leave for a few months. Start another book, take up golf, go to Paris. But now is the time to do this story.”

  She hesitated. Maybe. Maybe it was the perfect ending to her career in writing crime. “If I do this, Richard, will you help me move on to other subjects? This may sound corny to you, but I really want to do things with more social significance than serial killers and nutty fringe religions.”

  He nodded. “If you still feel that way when you finish this, yes. This piece you suggested”—he looked down at his notes on the table—“these bag ladies. They’ll still be with us next month, won’t they?”

  Molly started to collect her papers from the table and stuff them into her briefcase. She knew he was watching expectantly from under lowered lids, but she didn’t say anything.

  Finally he said, “So, I’ll expect something brilliant on Samuel Mordecai and the Hearth Jezreelites by the twenty-ninth.”

  “Can I have ten pages for the homeless women in July and can I have Henry Iglesias for the photos?”

  “Henry? He costs too much.”

  “That’s because he’s the best. Wait till you see what we come up with, Richard. You’ll love it.”

  He studied her briefly. “Okay,” he said. “Then I can count on you for the Jezreelites?”

  Molly closed her briefcase. “Sure.”

  “You won’t be sorry. This will be a huge story. Catch Mordecai’s grandmother. Let’s see where he grew up. And the bus driver. He’s a Vietnam vet. What’s his story? Maybe you can contrast the two men. Oh,” he added casually, “I had Brenda Natalini start some research for you. It should be on your desk.”

  She turned and looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  “Well,” he said, “I knew you’d want to hit the ground running. And Brenda lucked onto something that might be interesting. Apparently there’s an old Vietnam buddy of Demming’s who lives in town. Maybe you could chat him up, try to get a feel for what Demming is like.”

  “You speak about him in the present tense.”

  Richard looked up at her, surprised. “I don’t think they’re dead. Do you?”

  Molly felt the squeezing in her stomach again. “No.” She started toward the door, then stopped. “I’m interested in getting into the theology behind Mordecai. What he believes is something of a mystery even though he talks about it all the time. Even his followers aren’t sure what the message is. They say it’s brilliant, but they can’t summarize it. I’ve gotten a lead on an apocalyptic scholar who had a run-in with him a few years ago.”

  “Molly! You’ve already started working on it!”

  “Yes. I have actually.” She gave him a smile more full of rue than humor.

  She stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. “Richard, if you knew Samuel Mordecai was right and the world really was going to end in five days, would you have come to work today?”

  He looked up at her with narrowed eyes for several seconds before answering. “Hmm, five days. Well, that would mean the May issue would never come out, so there would be no point in planning for it.” He grinned. “And five days wouldn’t give us time to get a special glossy end-of-the-world issue out. But I think I might come in anyway—you know, to talk about it, rant and complain. I’d probably tell everyone to look at the bright side, that at least the apocalypse comes before taxes are due. What about you, Molly?”

  “Well, if the world really was going to end and Samuel Mordecai had predicted it, I guess I’d do exactly what I’m about to do—find out more about him and his message, sniff around the edges of belief the way I tend to do. It reminds me of what someone said should be written over the door of every church.”

  Richard was busy organizing his papers. “And what’s that?” he asked in a bored voice.

  “ ‘Important, if true.’ ”

  He looked up. “Well, if it is true, nonbelievers like ourselves are in deep shit.”

  She left thinking we might all be in deep shit anyway.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  “Religion and insanity occupy adjacent territories in the mind. Historically, cults have kept up a traffic between the two.”

  LANCE MORROW, TIME ESSAYIST ON JONESTOWN

  The radio in her pickup was tuned to NPR, and the subject was the Hearth Jezreelites. Her instinct was to switch it off and drive in silence, but she couldn’t make her hand reach for the button. Instead she clutched the wheel tighter and listened. It had been like that for forty-six days, ever since the bus hijacking. She didn’t want to listen to the radio news updates as she drove around town, but she did. She didn’t want to watch the news on television, but she did—every night, at six and ten, and sometimes in between on CNN. She didn’t want to read about it in the papers, but she did read it, every word in three papers—the Austin American-Patriot, the New York Times, and the Dallas Morning News. Everywhere she went there was a TV or radio blaring and people were talking about it.

  There was no escaping it. Richard was right—fate had come knocking on her door. But right now she felt besieged by it, as though fate were using a battering ram.

  She had first heard about it like this, in her truck, as she headed to the office on the
morning of February 24. A news bulletin came on: A band of religious extremists, a cult, that lived at Jezreel, Texas, thirty miles northeast of Austin, had hijacked a school bus containing seventeen children on their way to the Joseph B. Carruth Elementary School. Molly had felt an instant rush of hot dread. The cult had to be the Hearth Jezreelites, and the leader had to be Samuel Mordecai. She remembered them all too well.

  That evening some of the details had emerged on the news. Eight or nine men with rifles had stopped the bus on a rural road. They had surrounded it and dragged the driver off. Then they had boarded the bus and gone from child to child asking each one his name and age and the ages of his brothers and sisters. Six of the children had then been taken off the bus and told to lie face-down in a field. The other eleven were kept on the bus and the driver was forced to get back on and drive the bus away. The children who were left behind on the road flagged down a motorist. All were badly frightened but uninjured.

  The cult leader had telephoned the Christian radio station KLTX and asked them to tape what he was about to say. First he announced that he had brought the eleven children to his compound near Jezreel, where he and his followers worshiped God and awaited the Apocalypse. In doing this, he was simply following God’s orders. The children’s parents would be upset, he said, but in time they would come to understand the great honor of having their children chosen to advance God’s purpose.

  He said federal agents and local law authorities should know that the second anyone set foot on Jezreelite property the children would be killed. He and his avenger angels were well armed and could repel any attack, but the first thing that would happen in that event would be the immediate destruction of the children and the bus driver.

  He then announced that he, the Prophet Mordecai, was about to deliver the most important news anyone would ever hear: The world was going to end in fifty days, on April 14. There was still time to listen to his message and embrace salvation. For the next hour he delivered a rambling sermon about worldly corruption, the computer as the Beast of Revelation, and biblical prophecies. Over the last forty-five days excerpts from that sermon had been played and replayed hundreds of times around the world.