by Trevor Hoyle
Cawdor read it through, and then read it again, shaking his head as he did so because at first his brain refused to take in the meaning. And then, when he did finally understand, carried on shaking his head with a creeping numbness of disbelief.
The neat, rounded handwriting in blue felt-tip dissolved into a blurred scrawl on the white sheet of paper. He crumpled it in his fist and leant against the counter, where he had found the note the minute he walked into the kitchen, folded and propped conspicuously dead centre next to the spice shelf.
With a dulled gaze, Cawdor read the time on the wall clock: a little after seven-fifteen. Their flight would have arrived in Fort Lauderdale earlier that day, around two o’clock in the afternoon, while he was at the office. When had all this been planned? Sarah had said nothing to him at breakfast about the invitation. But she must have known then that she and Daniella were flying out of JFK later in the morning. Of course, he realised, he was being stupid; the note told him in so many words why she had kept it from him: ‘I’ve made another decision without consulting you.’
Bars of gold and black were imprinted on his face from the light of the evening sun streaming in through the Venetian blind. A bird twittered out in the garden, and was answered by another. The trees and bushes were a luxuriant dark green in the deepening twilight. Everything around him seemed peaceful and quiet, normal and comfortingly suburban… and yet the paper scrunched up in his fist made a mockery of it all. Wrenched normality out of shape, gave it the dark twisted form of nightmare.
The evening before, at Gil Gribble’s apartment, Cawdor had at last glimpsed, so he thought, a chink of daylight, the promise of renewed hope. Something about Doctor Khuman had inspired in him the belief that help was at hand. All day at the office he had been carried along on a wave of optimism, his spirits uplifted, thinking that he might now have the chance to unravel the hopeless tangle of dream and reality, to finally restore his life to what it had been, one of reassuring domestic normality.
He’d been a naive fool. The note in his clenched hand killed that dead. Snuffed out any glimmer of hope.
The agony that pierced him most fiercely was the dread feeling that Sarah was drifting further and further away from him – as if obscured in a fog, beyond his grasp no matter how hard he strained to reach out to her. A kind of insidious evil had entered into his wife and taken possession of her. What on earth was the nature of this influence the Beamers were able to exert over people? Through the ‘presence’ of Messiah Wilde they had the power to infiltrate the minds and hearts of millions and win them over as converts to the cause.
But what cause? What purpose did it serve? Were not the Beamers just another crackpot cult trading on the fears and anxieties of the gullible? Their sole motivation to use the power of mass media to accumulate wealth? That was what – in his ignorance, Cawdor now realised – he had believed, and had stupidly dismissed them as being of no consequence.
He opened the wadded ball of paper and smoothed out its wrinkled surface. ‘Please don’t, I beg you, do anything to spoil this for Daniella and me. I’ll never forgive you. I hope and pray that one day you’ll receive the Message, and with it will come true understanding.’
Reading again the words of the postscript made his limbs turn to water. A deadening sense of helplessness and impotence overcame Jeff Cawdor, as if the lifeforce had been siphoned out of him. ‘I’ll never forgive you’, his wife had written, as stark a warning not to interefere as she was capable of delivering.
Was there nothing he could do? Nothing at all?
Abruptly, Cawdor left the kitchen and went up the stairs and entered his workroom. His red leather-bound address book was on the desk. He opened it, and from the clear plastic compartment inside the cover took out the card given to him by Doctor Khuman. He closed the address book and placed the card on top. He sat down at the desk and reached for the phone.
* * *
Pacing the executive suite, Mara BeCalla spun round on her stiletto heels, spots of colour burning beneath her high cheekbones. ‘We had a deal, Mr Graye.’ She pointed a scarlet fingernail at him. ‘Now I find out you’re bringing some woman in from nowhere and promising her celebrity status on The Lovebeams Show. Promoting her in place of me, goddamnit! And I don’t like that.’
Graye sat behind the long, polished, teakwood desk. The beams of twin tracklights angled from above made a death’s head of the narrow skull and its cavernous eye sockets.
‘Is that a threat I hear, Miss BeCalla?’ His voice had a flat, metallic quality, as if issuing from some cold soulless machine. ‘Your position within Grace MediaCorp is entirely dependent on my prerogative. You would be wise to remember that, and also not to abuse the privilege you have been granted.’
Mara BeCalla faced him, hands on hips. ‘What privilege?’ she demanded, green eyes blazing. ‘From how I look at it, this Cawdor woman is the one getting all the privileges around here. You pluck her out of total obscurity – from some crummy radio phone-in out in the sticks – and give her a shot on prime-time global TV. I’ll tell you this, Mr Graye, it’s very plain and simple what I’m asking for. What you promised me.’
Graye was silent for a moment. His black eyes glittered with an icy malevolence. Mara BeCalla didn’t unde restimate his power she was both afraid of and fascinated by it. But she didn’t intend to let his power intimidate her, or cheat her of what had been agreed between them.
The thin pale hand motioned to her. ‘Calm yourself and sit down, Miss BeCalla –’
‘I don’t feel calm.’
‘You will,’ Graye assured her, ‘when you have listened to what I am about to say.’
Mara BeCalla sank back in the chrome and steerhide chair in front of the desk. Her body remained tense, and her eyes still smouldered. Beyond the slanting wall of tinted glass, way off in the distance, a smudge of light that was Fort Lauderdale glowed like a small silver coin. Through the vaulted apex of the pyramid, stars glimmered and winked in the warm winds blowing off the ocean. The faint whine of jet engines could be heard as an airliner made its final approach to Miami Airport.
‘Have you never wondered why the influence of the Beamers is so powerful, Miss BeCalla? So pervasive? How we are able to make thousands of new converts every day?’
Mara BeCalla said dryly, ‘I assumed it had something to do with the truckloads of melibrium you distribute free to kids in colleges, schools and youth organisations. The stuff looks and tastes like candy, but its effect is more pernicious than tooth decay.’
‘No, no – in that you are mistaken. Melibrium eases the path to enlightenment. Makes young minds more receptive to new thoughts and ideas. Simply a means to an end.’
‘As well as relaxing their sexual inhibitions,’ Mara BeCalla said with a sardonic smile.
Graye ignored that. ‘The reason is simple. We inhabit a world made in the image of our Saviour and Redeemer. It is Kersh who creates everything around us. Through His influence, our Message falls upon fertile and receptive ground. He is everywhere and in everything, the vital lifeforce, as universal as the air we breathe.’
‘But this woman,’ Mara BeCalla broke in. ‘Why her? What does she have to offer?’
‘As with millions of others,’ Graye went on, curbing her impatience with a raised palm, ‘Sarah Cawdor and her daughter are not immune to the influence exerted over this world by our Saviour and Redeemer. It serves His purpose that they shall be brought into the fold. You have to understand, Miss BeCalla, why it is absolutely necessary to bring them here.’ He leant forward, the words a rasping whisper in his throat. ‘We must have this woman and her child in our power. Only then can we repeat the cycle of events begun centuries ago. And if we do that – as we must – then Cawdor is lost. He will be trapped for ever in the same endlessly repeating circle of events. Unable to disrupt it; unable to change it.’
‘I find it hard to believe that one man could threaten the mighty Grace MediaCorp empire.’ Mara BeCalla’s gently mocking tone made Graye
bristle.
‘The danger from Cawdor lies in the distant past – that he dared once to challenge our sacred creed. For that blasphemy he was punished and made to pay dearly. We dealt with his slut of a wife and bastard child and had him chained in the bilges among the rats and the slime where he belonged.’
Graye’s fists were clenched on the desktop like knobs of bone. His gaunt face, bleached of all colour, was bathed in a mist of sweat.
The intensity of his hatred shocked Mara BeCalla. She struggled to grasp what drove such naked passion. The danger lies in the distant past? How could something from long ago possibly affect what was happening today? The past was … well, past. The living present here and now; the future an unknowable mystery yet to be revealed. And why was Graye so obsessed with vengeance on a man who had been defeated?
She said, ‘He blasphemed against your religion and was punished for it, so where’s the danger? What’s happened has happened. The past is dead and buried.’
‘That depends on which past we choose for ourselves,’ Graye took a deep breath and became calmer. ‘The very purpose for which our Saviour and Redeemer Kersh is suspended in the final instant of existence. For it is through Him that we are able to choose our past and keep to the rightful path.’
Staring at him, Mara BeCalla said slowly, ‘Cawdor has the power to alter it in some way – is that what you’re saying? He can –’
‘He can do nothing. He doesn’t know how to even begin.’
‘And he must never find a way.’
‘No.’
‘Which means a way must exist.’ Mara BeCalla stroked her cheek. ‘Somewhere.’ Graye leant back into the padded chair, his eyes hooded and opaque. ‘So what you’re afraid of is that somehow he’ll find a way to get through – to Kersh, is that it? Is that what you fear most, Mr Graye?’
Graye didn’t like to be thought afraid of anything. To admit it outraged every fibre of his being.
He drew himself erect and said, ‘Your mind skims along the surface of a great ocean of ignorance, Miss BeCalla. Cawdor is a threat because long ago he stood against us and was duly punished for his offence. Because of that event long ago he now threatens to stand against us today.’
‘He was punished because he stood against you, and now he stands against you because he was punished,’ Mara BeCalla said, struggling to understand. ‘But that’s a merry-go-round. There can be no winner.’
‘We, the Messengers, are always the winners, never Cawdor, because the threat is always met with due punishment, and thus the circle remains complete and unbroken.’
Mara BeCalla’s eyes widened. ‘His wife… ah yes, I see now.’ She averted her gaze, unable to look directly into the glittering depths of those black sockets. ‘It was all a pretext, inviting Sarah Cawdor to take part in The Lovebeams Show. You wanted her here, so you tempted her with the promise of appearing with Messiah Wilde.’
‘A pretext, yes, and a promise too,’ Graye said in a voice that was throaty and sly. Despite herself, Mara BeCalla glanced sharply at him. He leant slightly to one side. She watched as he touched a control, and a console deck of buttons and tiny glowing lights swung out from a compartment under the desk. At the press of a button the inner wall of inlaid rosewood panelling parted to reveal a large screen. Graye pressed another button and a picture appeared. His thin body subsided into the chair, pinstriped sleeves hanging slackly as he folded his arms, his eyes on the screen.
Mara BeCalla turned to watch. The camera’s view was from high up in a vast chamber, looking down on a circle of figures clad in black robes. Even though their faces were hidden behind black leather masks, with curved slits for eyes, she knew that Graye was one of them, a spotlight making a silvery halo around his domelike head.
As the camera began to move in, another hooded figure, this one robed in white, joined the circle of figures surrounding a rectangular slab of black marble. On the slab was the naked body of a teenage girl, spread-eagled, secured at wrists and ankles by stainless-steel clamps. Her eyes were open but heavy-lidded, the expression in them glazed, as if she was drugged or had just awakened from sedated slumber. But it was her long blonde hair, elaborately braided and trailing down over her white shoulders, that triggered the spark of recognition in Mara BeCalla. For this was the young girl – Josie – she now recalled, whom Messiah Wilde had brought up on stage as the Chosen One.
The scene was in total silence. So at first Mara BeCalla assumed there was no soundtrack accompanying the picture – until the girl’s mouth opened and produced a low shuddering moan that ended in a strangled sob. Josie was staring straight up into the camera lens, her cloudy expression gradually clearing as reality seeped into her brain. Then she whimpered, and her eyes welled with huge brimming tears that leaked down the sides of her face and into her hair.
Mara BeCalla was startled by a movement at the head of the table. It was the pale blur of Graye’s hand as it delved inside his robe and reappeared holding a knife. The blade was two feet in length, its edge honed to razor sharpness, its tip like a dagger’s point. As the knife was raised high in the air, Mara BeCalla instinctively reared back in the chair and turned her head away, but not quickly enough. Her peripheral vision caught the flashing gleam of the blade as it arced downward, and then the sudden spurt as the throat gushed open, covering the white body in a thick red blanket.
She flinched at the sight. Even though she knew it was staged – a clever special effect – it was so horrifyingly realistic that she let out a gasp.
On the soundtrack she heard choking and gurgling that died away to a soft, steady glugging, like that of a wine bottle being emptied.
Graye pressed a button and the image snapped off. He touched another and the rosewood panelling slid shut. He turned to Mara BeCalla, waving a hand to the hidden screen.
‘Now I trust you will understand why there is no reason to fear Sarah Cawdor as a rival. The true purpose of our invitation, as you saw, is not to seek the participation of the mother, but of her daughter.’
Mara BeCalla was puzzled. ‘You want her daughter to become the Chosen One?’ She looked in confusion to the panelling. ‘But why her when you have an actress to play the part?’
‘Actress?’ Graye said.
‘That was faked, of course, wasn’t it? Not possibly real…’ She swallowed because her mouth was very dry.
‘There would be no point at all,’ Graye said with a sigh of asperity, ‘if it was faked and not real.’
Mara BeCalla’s face felt numb, as if she had been struck hard.
‘The ceremony performed by the elders of the Temple is sacred to our creed,’ Graye informed her sternly. ‘Our converts would know the difference at once were we to hoodwink them with camera tricks and cheap fakery. We must keep faith with our flock.’
‘You transmit that… “ceremony” over the airwaves?’
‘A live broadcast goes out on a restricted satellite channel available only to our followers. Who of course pay a special rate to gain access to the channel,’ Graye added matter-of-factly.
‘But her family – the parents of that young girl. What can you say to them when she doesn’t return?’
‘Many young people choose to join us of their own free will. Some of them are sent on evangelical missions to all parts of the world. Their activities abroad are recorded on a video, which we send to their family and friends on request, at no charge. The parents of this girl will also receive a video showing her in some country or other – or rather her image digitally enhanced and transposed into a foreign setting. Our technology is state of the art, Miss BeCalla.’
Graye slid the console deck out of sight and stood up, the twin tracklights from above bleaching his face to bone white and black shadow.
‘Your concern about Sarah Cawdor was quite foolish and unnecessary. You have no rival, Miss BeCalla. You are happier now, I trust?’
Happier?
The numbness in her face seemed to have spread throughout her entire body so that Mara Be
Calla was unable to move from the chair. The images on the screen were etched into her brain, as if they had physically scarred the soft tissue. She felt despoiled by them; overwhelmed by revulsion that soured her stomach like acid. Of course she had known – because Graye had explained it to her – that this glass pyramid and its teeming inhabitants served a religious cause. That the purpose of Grace MediaCorp was to spread the Message worldwide and make converts of the millions who tuned in every day to watch Messiah Wilde. And she had known also, or rather sensed, a thrilling kind of dark power that lured and fascinated her.
What she hadn’t guessed at in her wildest dreams was the depths of evil depravity in the black soul of this cult. Yet she had seen the evidence for herself, starkly presented in all its gruesome and gory detail. And the true horror of it was Graye’s blithe assumption that Mara BeCalla would want to take part, to use her striking looks and talent as a TV performer to help him spread the Message and make thousands, perhaps millions, of new converts.
Raising her head, she steeled herself to look straight and unflinchingly into the empty pits of his eyes.
‘I can’t do it. I can’t do as you ask. It’s impossible.’
Graye gazed down at her. To her consternation, he seemed neither angry nor alarmed by this rejection. His silence unnerved her; Mara BeCalla pressed on. ‘I have made it clear to you that I don’t share your beliefs. I have no intention of being converted. I can’t help you, Mr Graye. I take back my word.’
‘I can’t return it to you, Miss BeCalla, because it isn’t mine to give. When you pledged your support, you gave it not to me but to our Saviour and Redeemer Kersh. You are committed –’
‘No, I’m not.’ The revulsion inside her fuelled a steely determination. ‘Not to a mystical nobody who lives in the nether world of your imagining. Forget it, Mr Graye. I’m through and I mean it. You can tell Kersh that for me.’
Graye swayed forward over the desk, a looming shadow. ‘Cleanse your heart of blasphemy, woman! Do not take the name of our Saviour and Redeemer in vain!’
