The Revelation

by Bentley Little

  "That's true."

  "It's not as if you have a million other things to follow up on."

  "All right," he said. "I'll look into it."

  "Thank you." She settled back into his arms. They were silent for a few moments. "What was your dream about, anyway?"

  He shook his head. "Nothing." "Are you sure you don't want to talk about it?"

  "I'm sure."

  Fifteen minutes later Annette was asleep, her mouth open, snoring softly. Carefully, slowly, so as not to disturb her, Jim crept out from under the covers and walked on tiptoe down the hall to the family room. He was awake already, he might as well call the office and see if Judson or Pete had come up with anything. He picked up the phone and automatically dialed the number. Pete answered. "Hello.

  Sheriff's Office. Pete King speaking."

  Jim smiled at the young deputy's formal Jack Webb voice. "What's up?"

  "Oh, hi Sheriff." His voice relaxed for a moment then grew tense. "Is there anything wrong?"

  "No. I was just up and I figured I'd call, see what's happening."

  "Not much, really." There was a pause. "Something did come over the wire, though. I thought you might be interested so I put it on your desk. Two churches in Phoenix were vandalized the same way ours were, blood smeared all over them, words written and everything."

  Jim's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Really?"

  "Yeah. I thought maybe the person who did it up here had moved on down to Phoenix, so I put the wire copy on your desk. I figured you'd want to check on it."

  "Definitely. Thanks, Pete." Jim finished the conversation with a list of office questions he knew by rote, but he did not pay attention to the answers. So the same thing had happened in Phoenix. This really made it a candidate for the state police. Identical crimes in two jurisdictions were automatically investigated by the state men anyway.

  He felt relieved that he would be getting some help on this, that he could give up some of the responsibility he had been shouldering single-handedly up until now, but he felt guilty about abandoning his own investigation, about not following up on his own train of thought, not acting on what he knew to be the real facts, or the truth behind the facts. He felt, in some way, as though he was deserting Don, as though the boy had died needlessly, uselessly.

  But all deaths are needless, he reasoned. All deaths are useless.

  But he was pushing everything under the carpet, whitewashing it, not trying to find out the real reasons behind all this.

  Don would be ashamed of him.

  He was a coward.

  "Is that all, Sheriff?" Pete's voice sounded anxious to get off the line.

  "Yeah," Jim said. "That's it. I'll see you in the morning." He hung up the phone and stared out the family-room window at the darkened house on the acre lot across the street. He imagined he could hear the river, though it flowed through the opposite end of town. So what if Don Wilson wouldn't approve of his actions? He didn't even know the boy. He only met him the one time and talked to him once after that over the phone. What did he owe him?

  He walked slowly down the hall and peeked into Justin's and Suzonne'srooms before going back to bed, checking on them to make sure they were all right. He crawled carefully into bed next to Annette and lay awake for a while, staring at the dark ceiling, listening, thinking.

  Finally he fell asleep.

  He had nightmares.

  Father Donald Andrews took the small teapot off the stove and poured half a cup of Earl Grey into his ceramic mug. The oldErron Garner record playing on the stereo in the living room suddenly got stuck, the same three notes repeating over and over again, and the reverend put his tea down on the counter, rushing out into the other room. He lifted the stereo's dust cover and pressed down on the needle with his forefinger. The song skipped over the rough section andErron resumed playing "Afternoon of an Elf." He went back into the kitchen to get his tea.

  When the bishop had ordered him to take over the congregation in Randall until Father Selway returned or a new reverend was permanently assigned, Andrews had jumped at the chance. For a relative novice, who had until now assisted other priests, the opportunity to preside over an entire congregation, even for only a short while, was a major coup.

  And when the bishop had offered to let him stay inSelway's house, he had gratefully accepted. The church owned the home and would allow him to stay rent free, thus saving him money on lodgings.

  But he had been here for four days now and, truth to tell, he did not like the house. Father Selway had disappeared and his entire family had been murdered--that in itself was enough to start someone thinking unpleasant thoughts in the dead of night. But aside from that, below all that, there was something wrong. The house gave off--what did they used to call it in the sixties?--bad vibes.

  It was not a friendly house.

  Andrews carried his cup into the living room and turned the record up a little louder before settling down into his chair, hoping to drown out the subtle creaks and cracks made nightly by the old house. The reverend was by no means an easily frightened man, but he had joined the church precisely because he had known, had realized, that there was such a thing as good and such a thing as evil, that these were not nebulous concepts dreamed up by philosophers and religious prophets but were actual concrete realities, facts of life.

  And this house was not good.

  Andrews considered himself "sensitive" to auras, to feelings, to "vibes." Perhaps he was a trifle psychic. He wasn't sure. But he had always had bad feelings about certain spots and certain people and good feelings about others. Once, as a college student traveling through Germany, he had been unable to enter a restaurant. The restaurant was a popular spot on a guided tour, but the wave of nausea, fear, and revulsion that had swept through him upon nearing its door had been too strong to allow him to enter. He had learned later that hundreds of gypsies had been murdered in the building in the first wave of killings prior to the outbreak of World War II.

  The feeling here in Father Selway's house was not quite as strong as it had been in the restaurant, but it was similar.

  Andrews shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Only one light was on in the room--a freestanding lamp between his chair and the couch--and the rest of the room seemed suddenly bathed in shadow, considerably darker than it had been a few moments ago. He had to stop thinking about things like this. He forced his mind to concentrate on something else.

  The sermon he was going to give Sunday. He picked up the black-bound Bible from the small walnut table next to him and opened it to the page he had marked before dinner; a chapter in Job. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw something move, and he looked up. The light was still on in the kitchen and he could see nothing there, but the hallway was completely dark. No lights were on in the back of the house at all.

  He heard a strange shuffling noise from somewhere back in the hallway.

  Andrews jumped slightly, startled, spilling his tea on the Bible lying in his lap. The already thin andtransluscent pages became instantly transparent, backward letters from the next several pages soaking through the words on the open page, blending to form one unreadable black mass.

  Black Mass.

  Stop it, he told himself.

  He was an adult now, not a little child afraid of the dark. And he was a priest, a man of the cloth, a man with the power of the church and the Lord behind him.

  Then why were his muscles tensed? Why was he staring into the dark hallway as if looking for signs of movement? Why was he straining to hear strange sounds over the rhythmic cadences ofEr roll Garner's piano?

  Andrews closed the Bible, folded his hands atop the smooth black surface, shut his eyes and began to pray. "Our Father .. ." His mouth formed the words, but his voice was silent.

  The record ended and there was a sound of tearing paper from one of the back rooms of the house. He could hear it clearly in the sudden stillness.

  Adult or no adult, priest or no priest, he wanted to run. His in
stinct was to throw open the front door, and dash into the street, jump into his car parked next to the curb, take off and spend the night in a nice, clean, modern hotel with well-lit rooms and a peopled lobby. And his instincts were usually good.

  He had not been this scared in years.

  That's why he had to stay.

  Andrews pulled lightly on the chain around his neck and fingered the gold crucifix that hung on the end of the chain. He closed his eyes and again said the Lord's Prayer. When he reached "Deliver us from evil," he said it aloud.

  He opened his eyes and sniffed. There was the smell of something burning--charred flesh?--in the air.

  No, it couldn't be. He was overreacting, making himself hysterical.

  His brain was overloading on imagination. He wasn't approaching this logically, rationally.

  But there was a definite burning smell.

  What was it? Sulfur? Cinders? The fiery pits of hell?

  Nothing. It was nothing. He was just imagining The smoke alarm went off.

  He jumped from his chair this time. The alarm was loud, a piercing shriek that cut through the quiet like a sledgehammer through ice cream and which would have blotted out even the loudest noise.

  Now he was no longer worried about the house's vibes or the strange noises in the dark. Here was something real--a fire. He ran toward the hallway, no longer afraid. He flipped on the hall light as he dashed past it. The smell was horrible, almost an emetic, and it was getting stronger. The air was beginning to cloud up with a thick brown smog like smoke.

  He turned on the light to Father Selway's study and stood for a second in the doorway, trying to see through the thick smoke. His eyes were watering, and when he rubbed them they began to itch. The smoke was definitely coming from within this room, but he could feel no heat and see no flames. The fire had to be small, still controllable. He ran back to the kitchen and grabbed a big metal cooking pot from the cupboard beneath the sink, turning both the hot and cold water on full blast to fill the pot. He left the water on and sprinted back down the hall.

  A bad electrical connection had probably started something on fire. A scrap of paper, perhaps. Or a portion of the rug.

  He ran into the room. There was a small single flame visible through the clouded air and he quickly poured the water onto it. He ran back to the kitchen for more water.

  Three trips later, the fire was out. Andrews, coughing heavily, lurched through the study and opened both windows. He would have to tell the bishop about this. It wasn't serious enough for him to notify the fire department, but the bishop would want to know what happened. He staggered out into the hall and took a deep breath of fresh air, but that only caused a coughing spasm, and he dropped to his knees, almost throwing up. The coughing spell passed, and he stood up.

  His throat felt raw and sore. The smoke had cleared from the study for the most part, and the reverend looked into the room.

  The study was a shambles. All of Father Selway's books, which had been neatly stacked on bookcases against the far wall had been thrown on the floor and were rudely scattered around the edges of the room. It was a miracle that they had not caught fire. In the center of the room, the front and back covers of Father Selway's oversized display Bible, which had been exhibited on a special stand next to his desk, lay skeletally empty, all the pages torn out. The pages themselves had been torn and crumpled and put into a pile. That was what had been burning.

  Andrews stared at the desecrated room in shock. Who had done this? And why? And how? He had been in the house all evening and had heard nothing until five or ten minutes ago, and even that had been barely noticeable.

  He blinked back the tears caused by residual smoke and rubbed his eyes lightly. They watered more. He left his eyes alone and stared at the room. By all rights, the place should have gone up like a torch. Why had there been so little fire damage? He walked toward the desk and picked up one of the remaining pages of the display Bible. It was wet from the water and charred around the edges. It felt slimy to the touch. He held it up close to his face, in order to see it better, then dropped it, gagging.

  It was covered with excrement.

  He looked down at his feet. All of the pages, and all of the other books, had been smeared somehow with human excrement.

  On top of Father Selway's desk was a cross made out of molded feces.

  Andrews fell to his knees and vomited. Convulsively. Uncontrollably.

  He tried to pray, but his mind could not shift its focus from his involuntarily heaving stomach.

  From outside somewhere, through one of the open windows, came something that sounded like a whining high-pitched laugh.

  The morning did not dawn clear and hot like any other. Instead, it was overcast, a low ceiling of continuous cloud blocking out the sun and weaving through the ragged line of tall trees at the top of the Rim. Although it was not drizzling, there was a light mist in the air, and when Gordon peeked through the partially parted bedroom curtains his view was blurred by the running moisture on the plate glass. He reached over and pulled open the wood-framed window, expecting a blast of humid hothouse air, but the light breeze that splattered the thin mist through the screen was cool and comfortable.

  When Marina woke up, she leaned her chin on Gordon's right shoulder, her cheek next to his, and snuggled close against his back. She stared with him out the window, yawning. "Well this is a pleasant surprise."

  He let the two halves of the drapes fall back together. The breeze blew them slightly inward. "The weatherman was wrong again." He fell back on the bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the palms of his hands.

  "So what else is new?"

  Gordon stopped rubbing his eyes and stared up at the ceiling for a minute. "Sandra," he said.

  "What?"

  "We can name the baby Sandra."

  Marina looked at him for a moment then sat up in bed. He looked so calm, so happy lying there that she hated to disturb his mood, but they had to talk this out, they had to discuss the baby sometime. She'd been wanting to bring it up for three days now, and this was a perfect opportunity. She licked her sleep-dried lips, unsure of how to start.

  "We have to talk," she said.

  Her seriousness must have imparted itself to Gordon because he sat up on his elbows and looked at her, his eyes expectant, troubled. "I

  know," he said quietly.

  She put her hands on his, feeling the rough hair on his bony knuckles.

  His hands felt larger than they should, different, and she had to subdue an instinct to pull her own hands away. Her fingers began tracing an outline of his hand. "I'm still scared."

  "I know you are. I am too."

  "It's .. . not right. We don't deserve this." She felt confused.

  Alternately hurt and angry. She knew words could not convey her feelings--she was not articulate enough to be able to voice such subtle, disparate, and deeply conflicting emotions--and it frustrated her. She felt as if she might cry, but she knew that would do no good.

  Gordon brought her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. "I know," he said.

  This was not exactly what she had wanted to talk about, this was not how the conversation was supposed to go. But she couldn't help herself. The emotions flooded over her, the rage, the frustration, an excess of feelings threatening any moment to burst out through the psychological safety valve of tears. "Goddamn it. Why did this have to happen to us? .. . Why does this sort of ... shit . have to happen at all? To anyone?"

  Gordon did not have an answer. He did not even have a good substitute, an adequate reassurance. He simply kissed her hand again, murmuring sympathetically,em pathetically hoping it was enough, knowing it was not.

  "It's ... so ... fucking .. . unfair."

  The sobs came. Tears rolled down her cheeks, silently at first. She closed her eyes tightly, but tears snuck out of them anyway, and her mouth, which had been ready to utter another protest, another complaint, suddenly turned to rubber. She began to cry aloud.


  Primally. Unashamedly.

  He pulled her to him. He kissed her wet cheeks, tasting the clean saltiness of her tears. His hands ran softly through her thick hair, combing it back. His mouth found hers and they kissed, their tongues touching hesitantly at first then actively entwining. The sobs stopped, slowly, and Gordon's hand slid gently under hernightie , between her legs. She was already wet and offered no resistance.

  Soon he was inside her and they were making love. Slowly.

  Languorously.

  They came simultaneously.

  Neither of them spoke for a while afterward, and he stayed on top of her until he fell out. He rolled next to her on the bed and tried to kiss her, but his lips instead became entangled in her hair. She giggled in spite of herself.

  Gordon smiled. "Cheered up?"

  "Against my will."

  "It works every time."

  Marina bit her lower lip and put a finger lightly on his mouth. "We might have killed the symptoms, but the problem's still there. We still have to talk."

  He nodded. "Shoot."

  "What are we going to do?"

  Her voice was completely serious once again, and Gordon sat up, looking into her eyes, trying to gauge her feelings, trying to determine in which direction she was leaning. "I don't know," he said.

  "I know the tests that were supposed to be positive were positive and the tests that were supposed to be negative were negative, but I'm still worried. What if they're wrong? What do we do then?"

  "There's nothing we can do."

  "I'm not sure it's worth the risk. I don't know if I want to take that chance. I'm not sure I'm willing to go through with it because I'm not sure I could handle it if anything went wrong."

  He put his hand in back of her head and leaned toward her, looking into her eyes. "It's going to have to be your decision. And I'll be behind you no matter what you decide. But I think we should see it through.

  The doctors said everything's okay. There's probably a small margin of error there, but not much." He smiled at her. "I think it would be nice to have a little miniature Marina running around here."