With journeyman force, the statue swung down hard, driving the spike through Samuel’s feet.
Samuel jerked violently, nearly bucking Gamble from his chest. He did not scream; only a deep gurgling sound rose from his throat, and once again the kaleidoscope of fabric designs burgeoned in the corners of his vision, then engulfed him.
The shroud fit comfortably; was tailor-made.
He’d nearly bitten his tongue clean through, and it was all he could do to swallow the blood fast enough to keep from choking.
The train was coming. It was close.
Sweet Jesus!
“It stinks in here,” the statue said.
“Hey, the man just shit his pants,” Gamble replied. “Show some respect.”
“Oh, so he did. Can we hang the pontiff next?”
“Whoa, you’re getting way ahead of yourself, big guy,” Gamble said. “We still have Mormon country to get through first.” He shook his head. “Do you know how many Joseph Smiths there are in the Salt Lake City white pages? It’s gonna take us forever to find the right one.”
“Fuck it,” said the statue. “Then let’s just do ’em all.”
Gamble smiled. “I think this could be the start of a bee-u-tee-ful friendship.”
He lifted himself from Samuel’s chest, then lit a cigarette.
Samuel heard the sloshing of gasoline before he felt its wetness on his legs, before he was overwhelmed by its vinegar-like fumes. Grimacing, he moved his head from side to side, for the vapors were, among other things, stinging his eyes and making it even harder to breathe. He caught the watery glimpses of a red plastic container, and the wooden hands that were waving it over him.
The statue then emptied the remaining fuel on Samuel’s face and chest.
Gamble smiled proudly. “He’s a peach, ain’t he?” Then he removed his yellow hat and placed it next to Samuel’s head. Folding a hand over his heart, he said, “The last fireman of station number 7734, signing off.”
“They’re coming for you,” Samuel managed feebly.
Gamble stared repugnantly at the cigarette caught between his fingers, then coughed for dramatic effect. Seeming to ignore Samuel’s comment, he said, “You know what, padre? These things’ll kill ya.”
For the last time, Samuel whispered, “I’m not a priest.”
“No,” Gamble agreed. “And you weren’t a very good deacon, either.” Then he flicked the cigarette to the ground.
Samuel’s head lolled to one side, and the last thing he saw beyond the flames brought a triumphant smile to his face. There upon the ceiling of St. Patrick’s Church was a sign. A glorious portent.
Only eight angels remained.
The multi-winged seraph and its mighty sword were gone.
Fire roared around him, but he felt no pain. Then, on his very last breath, a rocket train coasted into the station.
“All aboard!” shouted a black man holding a pocket watch.
Samuel turned. Sitting on a steel bench was an old woman layered in tattered clothing. Her face was withered and drawn, and the few remaining teeth she had were probably not viable. She was shoeless and smelled like hot pitch and urine.
The bag lady held out both of her trembling hands. “Got any spare faith on ya, mister?”
Samuel reached into his pockets and—much to his astonishment—pulled out gobs of the stuff.
He handed her all he had. “Is this enough?”
She cackled. “Surprise! Ya don’t need faith to ride these rails, deacon. Never did. But it’s ok, all the same.”
Samuel turned to the black porter. “Where does this train go?”
“Where would you like it to go, sir?”
“Home,” he said, tears rimming his eyes.
The porter nodded. “It goes there.”
Samuel turned around to wave goodbye to the bag lady, but the woman was gone. Instead, in her place on the bench sat a beautiful little girl, smiling back at him.
In her lap rested a gleaming sword, much longer than herself.
“What’s your name, honey?” he said.
“Amy.”
“Goodbye, Amy,” he said, then boarded the train.
10.
Having to cook dinner for more mouths than she was accustomed, and at an hour that was normally her bedtime, Joan nonetheless prepared a bountiful spread. And in impressive time. Of course, she had help from Patricia, Juanita, and Rachel. And even Kathy, who’d turned out to be quite helpful.
Chris, showing some rather uncharacteristic behavior of late, had even offered his services. He was quickly shooed away, but thanked all the same.
Duncan and Rachel had insisted that they be able to show their gratitude, so they’d raided the local grocery and brought back far more food than what the present meal offered, despite Chris’s rumblings that the only perishables left after tomorrow morning worth worrying about would be the human race.
So far, no one from Duncan’s entourage had complained of jet lag. Far from it. The three hours they’d lost might just as well have been three seconds. Everyone seemed to be hooked up to their own IV drip of adrenaline; not so much as to be kept skittish, but enough to remain keenly alert.
Duncan did, however, remind everyone that they would crash, probably hard, and that it was vitally important that they all get at least six hours of sleep.
As Joan said grace, the face in the window stared down at them with a suffering expression. When the prayer was done, it said “Amen” with the rest of them.
Chris, having slightly bowed his head strictly out of courtesy, looked up at the window and said, “We’re agnostics, you idiot.”
“Yes, but two days ago we were atheists,” said the face. “What’s next? John the Baptist dunking our heads under the Ipswich River?”
Ignoring the loquacious window, Chris sucked a dollop of sour cream from his errant thumb. “This is one kick-ass dinner, Grandma.”
“She’s not your grandma,” Patricia pleasantly reminded.
Chris shrugged. “Epic food, though.”
Crumpling real bleu cheese on her salad, Juanita said, “How far is Seattle?”
“Too far,” Duncan grumbled, not looking forward to another airplane ride. Drawing a napkin across his mouth, he said to Joan, “I may have to bum some of those pills of yours for the flight. That, or martini myself into a stupor.”
“Well, why don’t you go with the second option, hon,” Rachel said. “Stick with something you’re completely familiar with.”
Duncan shot her a dirty look, but said nothing.
Reproachfully, Juanita said, “No, no, I mean the miles on the road, how far?”
“Don’t know the miles,” Patricia said, “but it ain’t just a hop and a skip, I can tell ya.”
“Might as well be Bumfucked Egypt,” Chris mumbled to his chicken leg.
Joan dropped her fork. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“My old lady’s dead,” Chris said. He took an enormous bite. “Died fourteen years ago, when I was sixteen. Decided to take a bubble bath with the toaster.” He pulled a piece of gristle from his mouth, and grinned. “Proctor Silex, take me away.”
Patricia threw her napkin on the table. “Well, that settles it. What little appetite I had is history.”
Not quite leering, Duncan said to Chris, “You don’t seem too broken up about it.”
“My old lady hated me,” he said. “But she feared me even more. Thought I was possessed. So, from the time I was, like, six until the day she died, she took me to church every Sunday.” He shook his head, scowling. “She drilled religion into me, pushed it down my throat for so long and so hard that I started believing that there was something wrong with me, too.” He helped himself to a biscuit. “As I got older, I started realizing that the only thing wrong with me was her. And guilt-based religion. Thing was, she was just like me—only a hundred times better.”
“You mean, she had ESP too?” Joan said.
Chris rolled his eyes at th
e term. “Yeah, but she could see far into the future,” he said. “I can only see a few days ahead, a week maybe. Just glimpses, really. But she could see forever—backwards, forwards, and sideways.”
Patricia smiled. “I bet she cleaned up real nice at the office football pool.”
Chris shook his head. “She saw our talents as a curse and was wildly afraid of them. See, when we started going to church, it wasn’t just for me. She wanted deliverance for herself. Not only was she gifted psychically, but she was an addict, hooked on sex the way some people are heroin. Only difference was, she changed her needles frequently. Then, after years of bible sermons, she got really bad, really down on herself, believed she was a witch, or possessed by the devil, or both, until, eventually, she was blowing fuses from Mission Beach all the way to Sea World.”
During the silence that followed, Chris asked Kathy if her chicken leg was for sale. Finding that it wasn’t, he eyed both platters again, but alas...
“We haven’t heard your father mentioned,” Joan said. “Where is he?”
“Not a clue,” he said. “Wouldn’t know him from Adam. Mom never told me his name, but she talked about him sometimes. Guess he slapped her around a lot. Real tough guy. He’s better off staying lost, though. I mean, if I ever find him, I’ll do things to his mind...” He didn’t finish, just shook his head. “He just better stay missing is all I gotta say.”
“There are worse ways to die,” Kathy said, rather spiritedly.
Immediately the clinking of silverware and china stopped.
“Honey,” Rachel said, finally breaking the silence, “why would you say a thing like that?”
“The bad man in Seattle,” she said. “He knows.”
Duncan said, “You mean, because of what he did to you?”
“And the others. He knows all about pain. And death.”
Chris shook his head. “Little lady, he’s just a peon. But I think he might be riding the coattails of a far greater adversary: The Collective Unconscious.”
Juanita grumbled something, crossed herself, then speared a baked potato with her fork.
“Ah-oh,” Rachel warned, “I think Doctor Freud just walked in.”
“Not Freud,” Chris rectified, helping himself to another biscuit, “but Doctor Carl Gustav Jung. Dude was brilliant. Way ahead of his time. See, Jung and Freud were buds for awhile, helped bring psychology into the twentieth century. But Jung didn’t agree with Freud’s psychosexual view of the unconscious, among other things, and went his own way. Contrary to Freud’s views, Jung believed that an ‘inner’ event, like a dream or vision, is as much real as the waking world—it’s just that we don’t assign those states the same objective reality that we give ‘outer’ events. You know, like we’re doing now, eating chicken and spuds and pretending that Judeo-Christianity is the only religious truth, that physical reality is the only reality, shit like that. Our minds have become prejudiced. Since around Newton’s time, everything outside Western thought and culture has had to ride in the back of the bus: alchemy, astrology—”
“So, what’s your point?” Patricia said.
“I haven’t made it yet,” Chris said, “so sit tight. Now, Jung said that we have what are called ‘inherent predispositions.’ ‘Deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity,’ he called them. Our psychic inheritance.”
“Archetypes,” Duncan said.
Chris grinned, realizing he had a confidant. “Exactly, dude. Jung also called them Imagos. Dominants. The primordial image. You know, demon, angel, etcetera. Jung saw man’s desire for spirituality—his need to experience ‘the eternal,’ or God—as being an innate archetypal behavior.”
“Innate?” Patricia said, spitefully pinching the tablecloth. “Our belief in God is instinctive, not learned?”
“Sort of. Like, the eternal is pre-existent to consciousness, and is therefore not an invention of consciousness.”
“You seem awfully knowledgeable about these things, Mr. Kaddison,” Joan said, peering concernedly at the young man. “Is psychology a hobby of yours?”
Chris took a drink of milk, then said, “Let’s just say a healthy understanding of the psyche helps me in my travels.”
“It’s all nonsense,” Juanita charged.
“All great truths begin as heresy,” Chris reminded.
“Will you just cut to the chase,” Patricia said. “What does all this pyschobabble have to do with our situation?”
“I’m getting there. Now, Jung called one of his archetypes the ‘Shadow.’ It represents the dark side of the ego, and comes from our pre-human past, when our concerns were limited to survival and reproduction. When we weren’t so self-conscious, shit like that. Tokens of the Shadow include the snake—most notably your Garden of Eden variety, and elves, demons, dragons...Cool thing is, you’ll find all throughout mythology that these shadow symbols often guard the entrances to mounds, caves, pools of water...The collective unconscious. So, basically, when you dream that you’re fighting with the devil, it’s only yourself that you’re fighting with. See, we—”
“The chase!” Patricia demanded.
Chris stiffened in his chair. “Alright, fine. Look, all the archetypes, all the shadow symbols, have merged. They’ve solidified. Like, the collective unconscious isn’t unconscious anymore. It’s become an awesome tulpa.”
“A what?” Joan said.
“A tulpa.” Chris said.
As Chris took a long gulp of milk, Duncan arbitrated. “A tulpa. A materialization of someone’s thoughts. They can take any form: spider, tree, rock, the Bee Gees. It’s rumored they can act independently from their creators, and in some cases survive them.” He guided a toothpick between two molars. “They’re practically domesticated in Tibet.”
“Why, Duncan,” Rachel said, “I’m impressed.”
He shrugged. “I get around.”
Rachel met his smile, then glanced at Patricia. “Yes, I know.”
“Mr. Kaddison,” Joan heroically interjected, “are you suggesting that hell was created in man’s own image?”
“Interesting way of putting it, Grandma. See, there’s this thing I call the Ball of Clay, and I believe it was here long before we humans became sentient. It wasn’t until we started looking into the night sky to ponder our beginnings that we began shaping our gods and their backyards. We slapped it—”
Patricia interrupted, “What do you think this ‘Ball of Clay’ was before man got hold of it?”
Head tipped pensively, he said, “I like to think it’s something left over from creation, maybe. Something...unspent. And I don’t mean creation in the orthodox sense. Anyway, we slapped—”
“Like some kind of live munitions left over from the Big Bang?” Duncan said.
“Well, something like that,” Chris sighed. “Like I was saying, we slapped it—”
“And it has fallen into the hands of a child,” Rachel said, finishing the allegory with barely a hint of mischievousness.
“Hey,” Chris charged, “I don’t make fun when you’re talking.” Offended, he glanced reprovingly around the table. Satisfied that he’d put an end to the antics, he continued. “So, we slapped it on a potter’s wheel and sculpted the characters. For centuries they’ve worn a costume for every nametag. I mean, like, those gods and devils have been indulging us for almost as long as we’ve been indulging them. But now they’ve evolved into something far more radical.”
Patricia looked amused. “Now why would they go and do a thing like that?”
“Because our own concepts don’t define them anymore,” he said. “Now they want to dress themselves, to primp in front of their own mirrors.”
“We left the Petri dish open, in other words,” said Duncan.
Chris nodded. “And now we can’t get the lid back on.”
“I’m still confused,” Rachel said.
“Look,” Chris said, “think of it this way. A long time ago, the mind of man created a simple board game. But now, with the adven
t of technology, we’ve programmed that game into a free-thinking computer, and are about to play our first round.”
“A board game?” Rachel said. “Like Monopoly?”
“Yeah, like Monopoly,” bandied Chris. “But this is the revised edition, babe, and it’s got the Reading Railroad now going to Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck...See, the pieces have turned. They’re no longer content to let our imaginations move them. They’ve become sentient, willful, corporeal. The Madonna statue isn’t confined anymore to just weep and ooze blood. Now she can wear eyeshadow and rouge without the guilt. Like, those archetypes have been gazing up into their night skies for a long time, too, but they’ve got the advantage now because they know who their creators are.”
“Kind of like gods realizing their gods,” Joan said, keeping right along.
“Right,” Chris said. “But do they revere us? Not on your life. All the time they’ve been looking up, it hasn’t been to find redemption—it’s been to find a way out. As we speak, a war is raging, the factions of Good and Evil. And they’re fighting over us, just as we’ve always believed. Just like we’ve always imagined. You might not recognize the scripts anymore, the characters, the battlefields, but it’s happening.” Chris used his napkin for the first time, then said, “Just as surely as our minds made little green apples.”
“Oh, please,” Patricia wheezed.
Duncan said, “So, you’re saying that there really is a God in all His glory, only we created Him and not the other way around?”
Chris’s smile grew wider. “Exactly.”
Rachel said, “What you’re suggesting would have to also say that there were a lot of older gods running the place before Abraham’s God rode into town.”
Chris laughed. “If God’s as jealous as we say He is, think He is, then I doubt that any of the incumbents from, like, Mt. Olympus or anywhere else survived the election.”
“And,” Rachel continued, “He would be an old man with a long white beard, and heaven really would have pearly gates and angels sitting on white, puffy clouds. And hell and its lakes of fire really would be ruled by some pitchfork-wielding demon.”
“In their pre-sentient days, yes,” Chris agreed, “But—”
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