The Revelation

by Bentley Little

  A few minutes later, he pulled off on the small dirt road that led to their house. Marina came out of the kitchen as the Jeep rolled to a stop. The air was still slightly chilly from the recent rain, and she walked toward him slowly, avoiding the puddles in the drive, her hands buried deep in her jeans pockets for warmth. She kissed him lightly on the mouth, and he put his arm around her as they walked toward the house. "The sheriff called," she said. "I tried calling the warehouse around lunchtime to let you know, but no one answered. I called Connie, and she said that you and Brad were in town somewhere."

  "Did he say what it was about?"

  "No. He just said to have you call him back as soon as possible."

  Gordon was silent for a moment. "They caught Brother Elias this morning," he said. "I saw it. They found him preaching in front of Valley National."

  Marina stopped walking. "Why didn't he tell me?"

  Gordon shrugged. "I guess he didn't want to worry you or anything. I

  don't really know."

  "But I'm the one who's going to have to sign the complaint."

  "You're right." They walked into the kitchen and Gordon grabbed an apple from the wire fruit basket on the counter next to the sink. "Do you want to go down there?"

  Marina shivered, remembering the strange black eyes that had held her spellbound. "I don't know. I don't think I want to see him."

  "You don't have to see him to swear out a complaint." Gordon walked out into the living room and headed toward the back of the house. "I have to go to the bathroom. After I'm finished, we'll go."

  Marina moved into the living room and stood in front of the screen door, staring outside. The storm had died, but a new one was brewing on top of the Rim. There was a flash of lightning, and she blinked her eyes, not believing what she had seen.

  Gordon put a hand on her shoulder, and she jumped. "Jesus! Don't scare me like that."

  He grinned. "Sorry."

  She pointed toward the top of the Rim. "Look up there," she said.

  "Watch that lightning."

  Gordon followed her finger. "I don't see anything."

  "Just keep watching."

  He stood there for a moment, staring. "That's weird," he said finally.

  "It's red."

  Gordon was right. Marina did not have to see Brother Elias to sign a complaint. She simply filled out the form the sheriff gave her and signed her name at the bottom. Jim looked over the form and nodded.

  "Fine," he said. He handed it to Rita for processing.

  Although Marina had not mentioned the kitten, she was somewhat cold to the sheriff, and Gordon was happy when the complaint had been signed and it was time for them to leave. It had been a somewhat awkward situation. They were about to step out the door, when he heard the sheriff loudly clear his throat behind them. He turned around.

  "Could I speak to you for a moment?" Jim asked. "In private?"

  Gordon looked at Marina. "I'll wait in the car," she said flatly. She walked out the door without even glancing at the sheriff.

  Jim smiled. "Still mad at me, huh?"

  "Well, you know--"

  "Happens all the time," the sheriff said, waving his hand dismissively.

  "Don't worry about it." He opened the small gate next to the front desk and motioned for Gordon to follow him back to his office.

  "What is it?" Gordon asked when they were alone.

  "It's Brother Elias. Tell me what you think of him."

  Gordon shrugged. "I don't know. I only met him that one time. I thought he was crazy. Marina thinks he's crazy."

  "He didn't .. . scare you?"

  Gordon looked at the sheriff. "What are you getting at?"

  Jim chewed on his upper lip for a moment, thinking. "Okay," he said.

  "I don't want you to breathe a word of this to anyone."

  "You know I won't."

  "He's been around town here for a couple days now, preaching."

  He paused. "Predicting. He predicted those church fires, and he said he didn't have anything to do with them starting, and I believe him."

  Gordon remained silent.

  "And he talked about my great-grandfather as if he knew him. I've been thinking about this all day, going over it in my head, and I don't see how he could know anything about my great-grandfather. Not realistically." He looked at Gordon. "To be honest, he scares the shit out of me. I've gone back there a couple of times today, to check on him, and each time I do he's always staring at me, waiting for me, as if he knows when I'm coming. It gives me the creeps. There's no logical connection other than the fires, but I think he's involved in all this. It's nothing that'll hold up in court, but .. he trailed off. "I think I'm going to ask Father Andrews to come here and look at him, see what he thinks."

  "What other predictions has he made?" Gordon asked.

  The sheriff shook his head. "I don't know. Something about flies, an earthquake, different colored lightning--"

  "Red?" Gordon asked.

  The sheriff nodded, looking at him. "Yes."

  "Look outside," Gordon said. He found that his hands were trembling.

  Jim moved over to the window, glancing out at the town. His eye was captured by the building storm on the Rim. He saw a flash of red lightning, and he paled. He turned back to Gordon. "How long has this been going on?"

  "I don't know. We just noticed it about a half hour ago."

  "Do you think its some type of legitimate weather disturbance? I mean, do you think he could have known about it ahead of time?"

  Gordon shook his head. "I don't know."

  The two men stared at each other. "Do you want to see him?" the sheriff asked finally.

  "Not now," Gordon said. "Right now I just want to take Marina home and forget about this whole damn thing."

  Jim nodded, understanding. "But what if we have an earthquake in the middle of the night?" he said softly.

  "Then I'll hold her even closer. And I'll wait for it to go away."

  "But we can't just ignore it. We can't pretend there's nothing going on."

  "What else can we do?"

  "I'm going to call Father Andrews," Jim said. "He's dealt with this kind of stuff before. We'll see what he has to say about all this.

  Maybe he can make some sense out of what Brother Elias is saying."

  "Are you still having nightmares?" Gordon asked.

  The sheriff nodded. "Of course. You?"

  "Yes. I had a hell of a one last night."

  "What was it about?"

  "I was at the dump, then I was at this place with little white crosses and there was a boy--"

  "Jesus," Jim said. He sat down hard on his chair. "I had the same dream." He stared at Gordon. "You take your wife home," he said.

  "Then you get back here. I'll call Father Andrews. We're going to talk to Brother Elias."

  Gordon nodded silently.

  The sheriff looked at his watch. "It's four right now. Be back here at five-thirty. We're going to get to the bottom of this."

  "Are you sure we want to?" Gordon asked.

  "We have no choice."

  Gordon left the sheriff in his office and walked back toward the front of the building. He nodded politely to Rita as he passed by, then moved through the double glass doors. As he walked across the parking lot toward the car, he couldn't help glancing at the storm on top of the Rim.

  The red lightning was flashing much more often now. And was getting much stronger.

  The day's storm hit earlier than usual, just after twelve, and Father Andrews found himself staring outside for most of the afternoon at the torrents that fell from the gray-black sky, trying to gauge the damage being done to his recently planted seedlings. He stared, almost hypnotized, as the rain fell in never-repeating patterns on the concrete floor of the open patio.

  Another of God's small miracles.

  He turned away from the window and was surprised by the darkness of the house. He walked across the kitchen and switched on the light. The light illuminated
the kitchen but sent the rest of the house and the world outside into further darkness. He found himself, against his will, listening for noises from the back of the house, from Father Selway'sstudy. But there was nothing. He put on some water for tea and sat down at the kitchen table. He picked up the Episcopal Concordance where he had left it. Several of the pages were marked with small bits of paper. Next to the concordance, on the table, was a list he had written. A list of everything the sheriff and Gordon had told him, as well as what he had learned on his own. Most of the things he had written, he knew, would not he found in the Bible. But he hoped to somehow link together what elements he could, to discover some meaning in the emerging patterns.

  He had begun by reading all relevant passages relating to Satan or the devil. Though he had studied all such passages thoroughly in the seminary and knew most of them by heart, he felt it important to double check. Just as he had thought, the passages concentrated on Satan's acts rather than on descriptions of the fallen angel. The only description he could find--and that one an analogy-had been in Revelation. Satan here was described as a dragon and a serpent. Not the traditional cloven-hoofed devil he had been searching for. He had underlined the passage anyway, marking it with a scrap of paper, and had moved on to accounts of dreams and visions, but dreams and visions were so prevalent in the Bible that he had barely begun to scratch the surface before he had had to quit for the evening.

  Now, he picked up the concordance and leafed through it. He happened upon the description of Satan in Revelation and reread the blue underlined verse. His eye moved back to the beginning of the chapter:

  "And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth."

  Father Andrews shivered and put down the book. He knew that the woman was Mary, her son Jesus Christ and the dragon Satan, and he knew the traditional explanation of the symbols, but there was something about the passage that spoke to him, that somehow had a bearing on the disjointed thoughts whirling around in his head. He had no alternative interpretation of the passage, but he had a gut feeling--premonition? insight?--that it related to the situation in Randall.

  The situation in Randall. It was amazing how quickly he had come to believe that there was a "situation" in Randall, that there was something going on which could not be explained away by logic or any of the other placebos of rationality. Something was happening that encompassed all of the recent bizarre occurrences. Something so big that the obvious crimes comprised only a small part of its totality.

  Something entirely unseen and possibly incomprehensible.

  Father Andrews knew that such a line of thinking could not be supported by an objective look at the available facts. But what the mind could deduce and what the mind actually thought were often two different things. And he had always been one to trust his feelings and instincts rather than his rational mind. What he felt and what he sensed were always more important than what he thought. Although a similar leap of faith, a similar trust of feeling rather than fact, was required of anyone practicing a religion, he knew that the bishop would frown upon such a practice from one of his priests. Particularly in regard to an ostensibly secular matter. He smiled as he thought of Jim Weldon's description of the bishop. The sheriff had dismissed him with one short blunt word: "Prick." He wouldn't go quite so far, but he knew that he and Bishop Sinclair did not see eye to eye on many matters.

  Unfortunately. He needed someone to talk to on this matter, someone with more experience, someone he could trust.

  The sheriff . The phone. These thoughts, neither words nor images, forced themselves upon his consciousness, separate but connected. In the split second after his brain received and acknowledged the thoughts, the phone rang, and he knew immediately that it would be the sheriff. He picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

  "Hello, Father? It's me, Jim."

  The priest felt an icy finger of fear shiver down his back. "I know,"

  he said. "I knew you were going to call before the phone rang."

  The sheriff sounded surprised. "Really?"

  "Just a routine psychic experience." He tried to make his tone light.

  "So why did you call, Sheriff? What can I help you with?"

  "Actually, it's along those lines."

  "What lines?"

  "Psychic lines." The sheriff's voice lost its open, friendly tone.

  It was now very serious, and Father Andrews thought he could detect a slight note of fear in it. "We have someone here, in custody. He's a streetcornerpreacher. We found him preaching in front of the Valley National this morning. A few nights ago, he was out at Gordon's house, scaring the heebie-jeebies out of Gordon's wife."

  "Brother Elias," the priest said.

  The sheriff was silent for a moment. "You know him?" he said finally.

  "No. But I know of him. I've heard a lot of things about him the past couple days."

  "You're going to be hearing a lot more about him. I want you to come down to the station right now. I think you should hear what he has to say."

  "What's this about?"

  "I'd rather not tell you over the phone," the sheriff said hesitantly.

  He's scared, Father Andrews thought. The sheriff is scared. "Okay," he said aloud. "I'll be right over." He told the sheriff good-bye and hung up the phone. He sat unmoving for a few moments, staring at the black receiver, feeling the cold seep into his bones. He had a sudden premonition of death, of destruction.

  Outside, the rain had abated somewhat, the torrential downpour of the early afternoon tapering off to a constant drizzle. The sound of thunder rolled down from the top of the Rim. Father Andrews ran across the yard to his car. He had not brought a raincoat with him to Randall because he had not anticipated the monsoons. It seldom rained in Phoenix during the summer. He hopped in the car and started it up, turning on the windshield wipers. The driver's wiper worked all right, but the passenger blade flopped around with each sweep across the windshield.

  He pulled out of the driveway, driving slow, trying to see through the small curved rectangle of clearness created by the single wiper blade.

  The road curved next to the river, now brown and muddy because of the rain, and crossed the water on the east side of the sawmill. Through the windshield he could see the billowing smoke of the smelter, fighting bravely against the rain. There was a sharp flash of red, and he braked to a stop.

  What was that?

  The flash came again, a crimson light that flashed over everything and turned even the trees a blood red.

  Lightning. It was lightning, and Father Andrews stared out his windshield in wonder. He had never seen red lightning before. There was another flash. And another. And another.

  He took his foot off the brake and started moving again. There was something strange about the colored lightning, something he didn't quite like, something that disturbed him. But he concentrated on the road, not letting his mind dwell on the extraordinarily loud thunder or the lightning flashes that were now almost constant.

  He turned right on Main and headed for the sheriff's office. He parked the car as close as possible to the door and dashed through the open entry way. He stomped the water off his feet and wiped his shoes on the entrance mat, shaking the rain from his hair. He smiled at the pretty receptionist staring at him. "I hate this weather," he said.

  The receptionist smiled back. "We like it around here. The monsoons make things a lot easier for us." She stood up and moved to the counter next to him. "May I help you?"

  "I'm supposed to see Sheriff Weldon. My name's Donald Andrews."
>
  "Father Andrews! The sheriff's been expecting you. Come with me." She pushed through the swinging gate that separated the back of the counter from the front and led the way down a wide corridor. "They're in the conference room." She stopped in front of a door and pushed it open, sticking her head in the room. "Father Andrews is here," she announced. She held the door open to let him in.

  The sheriff stood up from a chair, offering his hand. "I'm glad you're here, father."

  Father Andrews shook his hand, but his attention was focused on the business-suited man sitting on the other side of the table in the center of the room. Brother Elias. He walked forward slowly, looking into the preacher's face. BrotherEllas ' eyes, the pupils glaringly black, stared back unflinchingly.

  The sheriff worked his way around the table and sat next to the preacher. He motioned for Andrews to sit down as well. The priest pulled out a chair opposite the sheriff and sat. He pushed his chair closer to the table. From this vantage point, he could see that Brother Elias' tie clip was a small gold crucifix. His cufflinks were also in the shape of crosses.

  The sheriff took off his hat and placed it on the table in front of him. He cleared his throat loudly and nodded toward Father Andrews.

  "You said you'd heard about Brother Elias," he said. "What exactly have you heard?"

  Father Andrews looked at the preacher. He felt awkward talking about him in the third person, as if he weren't there. "Not much," he admitted. "Rumors."

  "Like what?"

  "Some of my congregation members have been talking about him. They said he's been preaching around town, making predictions --"

  "The predictions," Jim said, nodding. "Have you heard those predictions?"

  Father Andrews shook his head.

  "He predicted that churches would be burned," the sheriff said, his voice low. "And they were burned. He predicted there would be red lightning. And there is red lightning." He paused. "And he predicted there would be an earthquake."

  "And flies," Brother Elias added, smiling slightly.

  "And flies," Jim agreed. He stared at Father Andrews. "What do you make of this?"