Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  “The mark of the Beast,” Dorothy Huff intoned.

  A dampish, musty smell emanated from the garment. It took several seconds for Molly to make the connection. Beasts—Samuel Mordecai talked a lot about beasts. What was it he’d said? Something about being helpless and wrapped in the mantle of the Beast. My God. Was he referring to this, to being a baby wrapped in this gaudy garment and put out to die? She had assumed it was metaphorical talk, images from Revelation, but it was literal. She thought about a little boy whose only connection with the mother who gave him birth was this. Her heart was thudding.

  “When did Donnie Ray first see this, Mrs. Huff?” And then she asked a question she should have asked the first time she was here. “And when did he learn about the details of his abandonment and adoption?”

  “Well, let me see.” Dorothy Huff stuck her bottom lip out, an affectation Molly now recognized as a pose of trying to remember. “Everybody says you should tell children they been adopted early on. So I told Donnie Ray, oh, maybe when he was two or three. You know, when he could understand.”

  “Two or three?” Molly repeated.

  “Yes, ma’am. And I showed him this. Had to warn him. You know, while there was still time.”

  “Warn him?”

  “Yes.” She shook the kimono in front of Molly’s face. “About the Beast and how careful he had to be to overcome this evil sign, this early influence.”

  “Early influence?”

  She looked at Molly with exasperation, as if she were a very slow child. “Well, you can see what with starting out life like this, marked in this terrible way, it was important for him to be careful. So when he was bad, I’d have to show him this to remind him of his inheritance. I had to warn him. Children are forgetful, so I had to do it often.”

  Molly didn’t know if she could bear to hear more, but she said, “You’d warn him about this robe?”

  “The image of the Beast, Mrs. Cates. That great dragon who waits to devour children at the moment of birth, the ancient serpent who leads the whole world astray. The Book of Revelation. You not being a Christian woman, I suppose you don’t know much about them things, but the boy was born under the image of the Beast, and he needed special handling.”

  Molly knew she should follow up, ask about the special handling, but she didn’t think she could take it right now. “Mrs. Huff, if I’m very careful, could I take this with me? I’ll get it back to you with the file in a few days.”

  “Well …”

  “It could be important for helping the children at Jezreel.”

  “Take it, then.” She flapped a hand. “This has just wore me out. I was just fixing to lay down for a nap.”

  “Of course. I won’t keep you. Thanks for your help, Mrs. Huff.”

  Molly left the house with the box under her arm.

  Out on the highway, she checked to be sure her Fuzzbuster was working. Then she rolled down the windows and pushed the speedometer up to seventy. She turned on her new Rolling Stones tape with the volume at full blast—ungodly, satanic music to drive out the smell of Dorothy Huff’s house, she thought, as the hot wind blew through the cab and whipped her hair wildly around her head.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  “To do whatsoever is needed to help You shut down the world and this evil generation, even if it goes against all commonly held ideas of what is good and what is not good.”

  SAMUEL MORDECAI, PROPHET’S PLEDGE FROM HEAVEN IN EARTH VATIC GOSPEL OF THE JEZREELITE

  Josh was wheezing, curled tight against Kim, who had her cheek pressed against his damp head. “Tell me if you want to be alone, Josh,” she was saying. “I know when it’s bad, you don’t like anyone to be too close.”

  “It’s okay,” he gasped between wheezes. “It’s okay now.”

  The wheezing had begun in earnest right after he’d eaten his cereal and milk. It wasn’t good for Josh to drink milk, but it was all they’d been getting, so there was no choice. Josh had explained to Walter early on that milk made more mucus and that at home he drank it only occasionally. Walter had explained this to Martin and begged him to bring Josh something different. But Martin ignored the request.

  It was always Martin who brought their meals, never anyone else. Twice a day he’d drop down the hole, reach up, and lift a cardboard carton down. One meal, the first of the day, was invariably cereal and milk. Sometimes the second meal was cereal and milk, too. But every second or third day the carton held peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread and milk. Once a week they got a banana or an apple. They always had a jug of water that sat on the driver’s seat and each of them had a plastic cup. And that was it for food and drink. For forty-seven days, it had sustained life, but they were all ready to scream from the boredom.

  If you tried to design a worse situation for a kid like Josh, you couldn’t do it, Walter thought. It had all the ingredients to make him sick: stuffy, bad air, a closed-in space underground, milk and cereal every day, constant stress—not just Samuel Mordecai preaching his blood statues and cataclysm all the time, not just being captives, but living in such close quarters, with all the squabbling and friction among the kids. And, of course, no medication—that was the worst thing. When Josh’s yellow plastic inhaler had run out after the first week, his attacks got more severe and more frequent. In desperation Walter had filled the empty inhaler with water and got Josh to mist that into his throat. At first, the inhaler was probably picking up some residue of the medication, but by now it was straight water. Still, it seemed to give him some relief.

  Now Kim held up the inhaler, which Josh always kept on the seat next to him. “Do you want another puff, Joshy?”

  The boy took the inhaler, held it to his mouth, and pressed. Then he let his head loll back against Kim. She hummed to him softly. She didn’t carry a tune well, but Walter thought the song was that old Cat Stevens song “Morning Has Broken.” The humming seemed to soothe him. By trial and error, Kim and Walter had developed a desperate repertoire of techniques to help Josh through his breathing difficulties. The problem was they had so little to work with.

  In general, they had so little. The first day down here, Martin and another man had come through the bus taking their backpacks, purses, and anything they saw that looked like it might contain dangerous or ungodly items. The only things that got left behind were the few items that happened to be out of their packs and out of sight when the confiscation occurred. And these objects had become intensely precious over the weeks—Brandon’s math book; Sandra’s novel, Stuart Little; Bucky’s Mighty Morphin Power Ranger action figure; Sue Ellen’s string box; Walter’s towel and the pad of paper and pencil he kept under the driver’s seat; Conrad’s pog collection, something Walter had never seen before—little cardboard circles; Heather’s packet of scrunchies for securing hair. Kim’s pink comb with the little mirror on it.

  The kids were amazingly inventive at figuring out ways to amuse themselves, using what they had. They were indeed the television generation; lots of their play revolved about TV shows, acting out Power Ranger scenarios and cartoon characters. One particularly therapeutic activity Walter enjoyed was watching them act out what the Power Rangers would do to the Hearth Jezreelites. Even though television shaped some of their fantasies, it seemed to Walter that when necessity arose, they had all the resourcefulness of frontier kids. They sang, invented games, squabbled, listened to his story, argued about it, and played cat’s cradle and rock, paper, scissors—games he remembered from his childhood. They breathed onto the windows to fog them and played ticktacktoe. They made paper airplanes and triangles and had contests with them, keeping running scores on a sheet of paper that was now solid with numbers. Paper was at a premium. Because Walter was saving the ten sheets left on his pad for an emergency, they talked Brandon out of the index pages in the back of his math book. At first Brandon was scandalized by the suggestion that he tear a page out of a schoolbook, but the kids got Walter to support them in saying this was such a
special situation that the school would be unlikely to punish him for defacing the book.

  This morning, Conrad and Brandon sat in the doorway moving buttons they had torn off their clothes around on a checkerboard Walter had drawn on the cardboard backing from his writing pad. Heather had been braiding Sue Ellen’s long black hair until they’d gotten into a fight over who had left the cup of water in the aisle to get knocked over. Hector and Lucy were playing with Conrad’s pogs. Sandra read her book. When Walter asked her how many times she’d read it, her answer was that it wasn’t the sort of thing you counted.

  Bucky sat perched on the edge of Philip’s seat trying to interest him in talking to his Power Ranger doll. Philip showed no interest in Power Rangers or anything else. He was leaning against the window, his eyes closed. Walter didn’t know what to do about Philip. He hadn’t gotten up from his seat today and he hadn’t eaten his cereal. For at least a week, Walter hadn’t heard him utter a word. He was slipping away, getting dimmer and dimmer. If they were set free today, Walter wondered, would he ever recover? Would any of them?

  When Josh’s wheezing finally eased, he said softly, “Hey, Mr. Demming, let’s hear about Jacksonville.”

  “Good idea,” Kim said.

  “Okay,” Walter said. “How about some story, kids?”

  There was general agreement to have story time. Brandon stood, got some water from the thermos, and wandered to the back.

  The hard-core eight gathered at the front and waited. Walter got a cup of water, too, and hunkered down in the aisle. He waited for the story to come and fill him up. The way he did it was to back up in his mind to the last installment and remember where he’d left Jacksonville. Then it felt like the story was just drawn out of him by the waiting kids. He smiled at them, sitting there waiting for him to start. It occurred to him that he enjoyed storytelling and that he’d never again have an audience as eager as this one.

  “The rain,” he said. “The yellow rain that came so suddenly and then just stopped. As soon as the Tongs ran back to their hootches, it stopped. Just like that. Jacksonville had never seen a rain like that. And it had been such a funny yellowish color. But he was thankful for it. Dr. Mortimer was still alive.

  “But then, sitting alone in the dark, he started feeling sad and hopeless again. Nothing had really changed. Tomorrow the Tongs would just build another fire and there’d be no sudden, miraculous rain to stop it. So what difference did it make? Tonight or tomorrow—it was all the same. He thought about the big Tong warrior laughing and drawing his finger across his throat. He gave up the idea of sleeping and just sat there in his cage, scared and miserable. Waiting to die. In a way that’s what life was, he thought—just waiting to die. Maybe it would be tomorrow when the sun came up, or maybe when the sun went down. But he would die. Jacksonville had never really felt that before: certain that he would die—sometime. It made him wonder what all the effort was for, all this searching, trying to find Dr. Mortimer. It all just ends in a cooking pot, like a carrot or a potato.”

  Walter paused here, alarmed by the dark direction the story had taken. This had started as an action-adventure tale to pass the time. He hadn’t intended to get into all this stuff about death and dying; it had just sneaked in. Maybe it was too much for kids this young, especially kids in this situation. He walked up the aisle so he could look at them up close, see how they were taking it. He looked into the faces of the regulars: Bucky, thumb in mouth, looked in a trance. Kim sat with her legs hugged into her chest, her chin resting on her knees. Her eyes were bright with interest. Lucy was wrapping a curl around her index finger, impatient for him to go on. Josh, Hector, Heather, Conrad, and Sue Ellen all looked interested and not particularly upset. After all, these were kids who had grown up with The Terminator and Nightmare on Elm Street. These were children who had been held hostage in a buried school bus for weeks. A buzzard fretting about death was unlikely to traumatize them any more than they already were.

  He went all the way to the back where Brandon Betts lay on the floor, glowering. Tears were running down Philip’s cheeks. Walter reached out and smoothed down his hair. He climbed up and sat on the back of Philip’s seat so the kids in the front could see him.

  “Jacksonville felt more alone than he had ever felt in his life. He watched the moon rise. It was almost full, and he was glad to have some light for company because he sure hated sitting alone in the dark.

  “Then he heard footsteps. He saw this old Tong woman coming toward his cage. She was really old, with a wrinkled face.

  “She came to his cage and smiled at him. Most of the Tongs have these long pointed teeth, so when they smile it’s scarier than when they don’t. But this woman’s teeth were only a little pointed and they were very white and clean. The wrinkles around her eyes were friendly.

  “But Jacksonville was nervous. The old woman looked friendly, but he’d learned to be careful. She held her hand out to the bars and made a gentle sort of clucking noise like she wanted him to come to her. But he didn’t, because he was afraid. After all, she was a Barbecue Tong. And we know what they’re like.”

  Walter paused to drink some water. He noticed Sandra was actually looking at him. He had suspected she followed the story and just pretended to be reading her book. After all, how many times could you reread Stuart Little?

  He went on: “The woman reached her hand into the pocket of her baggy white shorts, which was what all female Tongs wear, and she pulled something out. It was shiny, like metal. Then she did something that amazed Jacksonville. She stuck her hand right into the cage, between the bars. She didn’t seem afraid that he would hurt her or anything. If he had wanted to, he could have leaned forward and ripped a finger off with his beak, but she didn’t seem worried about that. She dropped the shiny thing she’d taken out of her pocket onto the cage floor. She gave it a little shove toward him and pulled her hand out. Then she looked around again to see if they were still alone.”

  “I bet it’s a gun,” Bucky said, not removing his thumb from his mouth.

  “No,” Walter said, “actually it’s not.”

  “A knife,” Hector said.

  “Nope. Not a knife either.”

  “Let him tell it,” Lucy whined. “You’re not supposed to interrupt. Go on, Mr. Demming.”

  “I know!” Hector shouted. “A what-do-you-call-it. Galaxy Peace Ray!”

  “No,” said Walter, “but wouldn’t that be nice, so you could shoot the whole village into peacefulness.”

  “Not really,” Hector said, “I’d rather shoot the bastards with an Uzi or a twelve-gauge shotgun.” He laughed.

  “Hector,” Lucy said, “you can’t talk like that. It’s rude.”

  “Why are you such a goody-goody, Lucy? What do you think the thing is?” Hector challenged.

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “A magic charm or something.”

  “No,” Walter said, “it’s not a magic charm. And I bet you’re not any of you going to guess what it is. Keep trying.”

  “A fish,” Heather called out.

  “Dummy,” Conrad said, “it’s metal.”

  “No, it was like metal, silvery-colored,” she shouted back. “Dummy yourself, Conrad.”

  “A hand grenade?” Conrad said.

  “Nope.”

  “A pair of scissors,” Josh said.

  “Nope.”

  “I know! I know!” Kim yelled. “A file, like they use for jail breaks.”

  “Oh, Kim, that’s close,” Walter said. “You’re getting warm.”

  “A file?” Heather said. “What’s that?”

  “Come on, Mr. Demming,” Lucy urged. “Tell the story.”

  “Okay. Well, Jacksonville was curious, too, about what the silvery thing was, but he couldn’t look right away. He was still scared of the old Tong woman. He had to keep his eye on her. She smiled again and—”

  He stopped because the lightbulb started to sway on its cord. As it swayed it flickered off and on. All eyes dart
ed to the door. In the pit, black boots appeared, long legs, and with a thud, the whole man. He burst through the bus door, with more energy than Walter had ever seen. He was wired. His body seemed to vibrate with it. His yellow hair looked electric. “Three more days, little Lambs of God!” He carried no Bible today, but a newspaper. He held it aloft. “Lookee here. The first newspaper we’ve seen at Jezreel in forty-seven days. We got this from them negotiators out there as part of a trade we are working out. We’re going to let your bus driver here talk on the phone tomorrow. The trade is we get to share a little of our message with the world—you’d think they’d beg for that, wouldn’t you? But no, they’re scared to hear it.”

  Walter stood up. He wanted to hear the ground rules for the phone conversation. This time maybe he could do something to improve their situation.

  “Sit down, Mr. Bus Driver,” Samuel Mordecai commanded. “Later. Later, with all your fussing. I’m giving the lesson now.”

  Walter sat.

  Josh began to wheeze, a series of high, desperate gasps. All the kids looked in his direction.

  Samuel Mordecai narrowed his eyes as the wheezing alternated with coughing. “Get it under control, sonny boy. We haven’t any time for this. I thought we’d do our lesson today out of the newspaper because, Lambs, it’s all right here in the news. The signs are all present in this one edition. Look at this: war in Bosnia, war in Haiti, war in Kuwait, war in Rwanda, earthquakes in China and California, AIDS in Mexico and Africa, the European Community, a global economy controlled by computer, the Trilateral Commission, strange sightings in the heavens, debit cards, electronic transfers, movements of troops in the Middle East. Oh, Lambs, nothing is missing, nothing but us. And we will be ready in three days.”

  Josh let out a series of choking coughs. Mordecai talked over them. “ ‘And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.’ Matthew 24:6–7. It’s all here. Lambs, this prophecy for what the world will be like at the end times could be the little summary of the news they do on this very front page. It’s all happening, just like it was prophesied. It’s all accomplished, just waiting for us to play our parts. Rejoice. We are the chosen human agents to—”