by Trevor Hoyle
‘Not my saviour if I don’t believe in him.’
‘Is that so?’ Graye hissed, his mouth a snarling black maw. ‘Perhaps the time has come to put your unbelief to the test.’ He came round the desk, beckoning to her with a peremptory hand. After a moment, Mara BeCalla got up and, more curious than fearful, she slowly followed him to the slanting wall of glass. Night pressed against the building, broken only by the distant hazy smudge of light and the wavering stars above.
‘Look.’
She strained to see what he was pointing at, his long, bony arm raised towards the heavens. Staring until her eyes started to ache, she searched the void of the night sky, finding nothing. ‘What am I supposed to be –’
‘Out there.’
There was only a vast expanse of starlit emptiness. But then something flickered in the far distance – a flash of blue sheet lightning. It lasted an instant and was gone. She heard Graye intoning deep and sombre within his chest, like a bell tolling under the sea. The blue lightning flared again, brighter this time. Mara BeCalla involuntarily sucked in a sharp breath. Illuminated by the crackling glow, an immensely high column of granite soared upward to the stars. Its sides were smooth and polished, reflecting the flashes of lightning, and in the blue glow she saw a domed roof of glass radiating beams of light like a ghostly lighthouse of the future, warning spaceships of the earth’s presence.
Under his breath, Graye was mumbling over and over, ‘Our Saviour and Redeemer Kersh, watch over us, we beseech you…’
On the edge of the parapet the tiny figure of a man was leaning on the granite balustrade, gazing off into the distance. He seemed oblivious to their scrutiny, to anything below, alone and remote at the peak of his high tower. With a lazy sweep of his hand he brushed back a strand of lank, thinning hair, then picked up a glass and took a long drink. He did everything as if eternity stretched before him. As if, Mara BeCalla thought, he had all the time in the world.
Graye’s eyes were closed, his head uplifted, his breathing harsh in his flared nostrils.
Standing beside him, Mara BeCalla felt a shiver crawl down her spine. She had underestimated him after all, the power he wielded. Graye had cast a hypnotic influence over her, projected this hallucinatory vision into her mind. It was the only rational explanation for what she was seeing. In reality there was no granite tower rising to dizzying heights in the night sky. There was no man up there on the balcony, calmly sipping a drink and gazing off into the distance. It was all a trick, she insisted to herself just a damn clever trick…
Even so, Mara BeCalla felt her heart pounding. She could use a drink herself right this minute. This image of a man in a tower – why did it fill her with such dread and apprehension? Was it a memory? A long-forgotten fear buried deep in her past that was reaching out to reclaim her?
‘Does the light of truth shine upon you?’ Graye asked in a sibilant whisper. ‘Do not resist; let it enter, my child.’
The light of truth? What truth was that?
Staring up at the man in the tower, Mara BeCalla felt dazed, her senses befuddled. Another image shimmered in front of her, obscuring her vision. It was unmistakably the same man. But here he was behind a sheet of glass or plastic, lounging back in a chair, dragging deeply on a cigarette. There was a mocking sneer on his lips, and he slowly winked an eye that was milkily opaque.
Nice, honey. Touch yourself. Know what I mean?
Hearing these words in her mind, Mara BeCalla underwent the experience of being transformed into another body, another time and place, another existence entirely. She knew she was in a state prison, visiting a convicted killer on Death Row. It was hot, and she could feel the torpid movement of air stirred by the fans above. The man was watching her face through the plastic screen as he did something to himself – devouring her expression with greedy lust as he made her do something to herself. In this different existence Mara BeCalla felt her body respond to her own fingers, the sudden rush of hot juices sending a quiver through her thighs and stomach, followed by the long slow release as she drifted into a pleasant languor.
Not a dream or hallucination or hypnotic trance; Mara BeCalla was convinced of that. The experience had happened for real. The man was Frank Kersh, serving his final days in Angola State Penitentiary. And the woman was…
The woman was May-Beth Gaskins of Dubach, Louisiana.
Another separate existence flashed before Mara BeCalla’s eyes. She saw herself as in a mirror’s clear reflection: a short and thick-legged girl, verging on plump, with a plain round face and mousy hair that frizzed up in the heat. She saw the single dusty street of Dubach where she had been born and grew up, the bitter taste of failure on her tongue even by the age of seventeen. The dismal prospect of a future that was already charted, settled, done. A dark avenue of closed doors stretching to oblivion.
I can promise you another life, May-Beth, the one you secretly desire.
The voice was that of Preacher, speaking to her in the silver trailer with its tattered posters. No longer was she the beautiful and talented Mara BeCalla, driven by ambition. In her place was that pitiful, dowdy, downtrodden creature, May-Beth Gaskins. She had become that other person, living another existence. The girl she had once been and left behind.
The flickering blue lightning was fading in the night sky. In moments it had vanished. The column of granite and the blazing arc of light radiating from its peak were gone, and Kersh with it. Nothing remained except the field of stars, trembling in the rising currents of warm air.
Mara BeCalla turned her back on the wall of glass. She felt dizzy, and her heart was beating hard and fast. What she had seen out there – or thought she had seen – had not shaken her half as much as the image of Frank Kersh lounging behind the toughened screen in the humid prison visitors’ room with the fans wafting the air overhead. Even more horrifying was the knowledge that came with it. She had escaped from whatever fate had in store for May-Beth Gaskins; she had been given the chance to forge her own destiny as Mara BeCalla. But what had been given could be taken away. Her tenure on the life she had now, in this living minute, was poised in the balance. To stay in the world as Mara BeCalla – or to endure a life sentence in the dumpy body of a plain girl with mousy hair and an empty future.
Her soul shrank from that. It was too horrendous to dwell upon.
She would sooner kill herself than go back.
Turning to Graye, she looked him squarely in the eye. ‘You were right. I know that now because I’ve seen the light of truth.’
Whatever feelings she might harbour, deep down, about Graye and the cult of the Messengers, Mara BeCalla had no other choice than to offer them her total commitment. She had to help them in whatever way she could. Because their failure would plunge her back into that other existence she had glimpsed a moment ago in the spasm of blue lightning as it played about the tower of granite and glass.
Into the abyss of the unthinkable.
6
The peaceful, idyllic view ought to have calmed his nerves and soothed his mind, but something strange was happening. It had started with a tingling sensation in the fingertips of Jeff Cawdor’s left hand which then spread through the hand itself to his wrist. At first he thought it might be the sign of a heart attack, or a warning that he was about to suffer a stroke. But the tingling stayed in his hand, didn’t move any further up his arm.
The Troth Foundation was housed in a rambling, turreted building of weathered grey stone. It was fronted by a flagged terrace at ground level which extended from tall narrow windows to a stone balustrade on which carved lions, unicorns and other heraldic creatures stood guard. They had a spectacular view. Undulating lawns, like folds in green velvet, sloped down to a grove of beech and golden oaks, and the flat gleaming surface of a slow-moving river could be glimpsed between the curving flanks of two hills. The river meandered south through lush meadows and past lightly forested slopes, eventually feeding into Indian Lake, about twelve miles distant.
Cawdor ha
d driven up the previous evening, keeping to 1-87 for most of the 164 miles. Once past Glens Falls he turned east to skirt the northern tip of Lake Luzerne. It was late when he arrived, and Doctor Khuman was not there to greet him. Instead, a middle-aged woman who exuded a delicate sachet fragrance of sandlewood, greying hair coiled into a bun and shrewd brown eyes set in a maze of fine lines – Mrs Brandt as she introduced herself – showed him to his room. There was a cold tray set for him, with cheese and ham, and a large vacuum jug of coffee. Mrs Brandt didn’t apologise for Doctor Khuman’s absence, or even mention him. She wished Cawdor good night and informed him that breakfast would be served any time after eight o’clock.
He had slept surprisingly well. Probably the three-hour drive had tired him out, Cawdor reckoned. He had devoured the bacon and eggs, hash browns, toast, and a bowl of peaches and melon brought to him on a trolley, wondering if it was the country air that had sharpened his appetite. The morning was fresh and pleasantly cool, though he could feel the gathering warmth of the sun right between his shoulder blades.
As he sat there on the terrace, puzzling over what might have caused the tingling in his hand, something welled up inside Cawdor – the same feeling he had had at Gil Gribble’s apartment – like a black snake uncoiling itself in the pit of his stomach.
That first time it had been about Sarah. A dreadful, creeping realisation – conviction in fact – that she was in mortal danger. The feeling took hold of him again, but now it included Daniella too, as well as his wife.
Cawdor shut his eyes and concentrated hard, struggling to give form and meaning to the black snake of panic fear writhing through his guts. No image came to him; no specific danger reared up, full-blown and terrifyingly real, in his mind’s eye. Was it a plane crash? An automobile accident? A building on fire? A street mugging, an attack by a raging psychopath? The various scenarios of injury and harm and death flashed in front of him, but none had validity or gave shape to the crawling panic in his chest. It remained vague and nameless: simple naked fear that something dreadful had happened to Sarah and Daniella. Or was going to happen – he wasn’t clear about that either.
Cawdor opened his eyes. He stared unseeingly at the distant hills. He was remembering what happened last time. How he had driven home recklessly from Gribble’s apartment to find that Sarah was perfectly OK. He had almost killed himself in a car smash for no reason. The terrible apprehension he had felt for her safety and wellbeing was a false alarm, a big fat fake emotion that had him, literally, running scared. The memory of this brought blessed relief, and he felt his body relax. He leant back in the chair, the tension draining out of him, letting his eyes linger over the restful scene.
Don’t let paranoia grab hold, he told himself. Your emotions are all screwed up. That’s why you’re here, seeking help to sort out this mess of confusion. Get a grip on yourself.
Cawdor looked round as a shadow fell across the stone balustrade.
‘Good morning. Mrs Brandt tells me you ate a hearty breakfast. I hope you slept well also.’
Doctor Khuman’s face was very dark against his crisp white coat, which was dazzling in the sunlight. He wore it unbuttoned over a bottle-green shirt with open collar, his hands stuffed casually in his pockets.
‘First off, Doctor Khuman, I want to apologise,’ Cawdor, said, ‘for calling you in a rush yesterday and, well, kinda springing this on you. It wasn’t very considerate of me.’
‘Jeff, I am so pleased you did!’ Doctor Khuman’s shoulders went up. ‘Do please call me Satish. You are most interesting to me, to my line of research. And this is true –’ he held up a slender brown hand ‘– since we spoke the other day I have thought of little else. In truth, nothing else. I asked Annie, after we met, to do some digging in the anthropological library at Columbia, I was so keen to follow it up. I am hoping she will have something to show me very soon, perhaps even today.’
Cawdor was puzzled. ‘Digging for what?’
‘If I knew that, Jeff,’ Doctor Khuman said with a faint smile, ‘there would be no need to search for it.’
‘It’s what’s happening now I need help with, Doctor Khu– Satish. Not something that happened long ago in the past.’
‘To understand the present, we must first understand the process by which it evolved. The past, present and future are indissolubly linked. Except in this particular instance…’ He trailed off, stroking the lean line of his jaw.
‘What?’
‘There appears to have been a dysfunctional element in that process.’ He studied Cawdor intently through his silver-framed glasses. ‘You sense that too, yes? As if events have suddenly and arbitrarily changed course?’
‘If by that you mean I don’t know what the hell’s going on, you’ve hit the nail on the head,’ Cawdor admitted with feeling. ‘The world’s gone haywire. I’ve been married eighteen years and now I find I don’t even know my own wife. Or my daughter. And how come I seem to remember meeting you, one day at my office, and yet you insist we’ve never met before? What I want to know, Satish, is how there can be a memory in my head of something that never happened. Can you explain that?’
Doctor Khuman leant against the balustrade and folded his arms. He said quietly and calmly, ‘Oh yes, I can explain it.’
Cawdor was astonished. ‘You can?’ he said, gaping at him in the sunshine.
Doctor Khuman nodded. ‘The explanation is very simple. You remember it because it did happen.’
‘But… you don’t.’
‘Two versions of events that contradict one another – so which is the “true” one, that’s what you wish to know. Yes?’
Cawdor nodded, though he wasn’t sure he was ready for an explanation that the Indian regarded as simple and he himself thought of as a logical impossibility, defying common sense.
Doctor Khuman confirmed his fears when he said, ‘Both are true, Jeff Or, to be more precise, both have an equal chance of being true. Neither one is more probable than the other.’
‘Does that mean yes or no?’
‘It means either/or.’
Cawdor’s face was all frown. ‘You’ve lost me.’
Doctor Khuman said gravely, ‘I hope very much we don’t lose you, Jeff’ He blinked his large brown eyes, became abstracted for a moment. ‘Ah yes, yes…’ He fumbled in the pocket of his white coat and took out a Penguin paperback, which he handed to Cawdor. ‘You haven’t read Siddhartha, so you said, and I think you might find it interesting, and – who knows? – enlightening. Remember I spoke to you about it?’
‘That’s one memory we both share, thank God,’ Cawdor said dryly.
‘Yes, the Buddhist vision of the world as a perfect, embracing wholeness, obeying the laws of cause and effect.’ Doctor Khuman pinched together his finger and thumb to form a circle. ‘But somewhere broken in one place, a sort of gap.’ The finger and thumb parted a fraction. ‘In modern terminology, what might be called a–’
‘Dysfunctional element?’
Doctor Khuman smiled. ‘I think perhaps you do understand.’
‘I think I’m beginning to,’ Cawdor said.
They had been treated like royalty from the moment they boarded the plane at JFK: waited on hand and foot in ambassador class, served Cristal champagne in Waterford cut-glass goblets followed by a six-course meal with French wine (a single glass for Daniella, Sarah insisted, let down with mineral water) and afterward relaxed in soft leather seats as wide and deep as armchairs while the three flight attendants fussed around them with pillows, offered magazines, and then hovered attentively to provide whatever service they desired. A bronze-coloured limo with smoked-glass windows had awaited them at Miami Airport, a hood pennant with the Beamers’ crest in gold and black fluttering in the warm breeze. They had been driven straight to the headquarters of Grace MediaCorp north of Fort Lauderdale, which for Sarah was the most amazing building she had ever set eyes on – a pyramid made of glass that flashed the Florida sun in a thousand splintering shafts of light. In th
e rear of the limo, she had reached across and squeezed Daniella’s hand, which was damp with nervous excitement like her own, in spite of the air conditioning. Her daughter’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes unnaturally bright, her chest rising and falling under the pale-lime blouse with its delicate lace neckline and ruched sleeves finished with matching lace trim. Outwardly, Sarah appeared more composed; inwardly, she was churning with the selfsame emotional cauldron. On the plane she had sucked on a melibrium lozenge, slipping it into her mouth as she dabbed her lips with a tissue, but it didn’t seem to have the calming effect she wanted.
Two handsome, tanned, strapping young men in shortsleeved white shirts and slacks with knife-edge creases took them on a conducted tour of the building. Stepping out of the glass-walled elevator at each of the levels, Sarah and her daughter were literally dumbstruck by the scale and complexity of the operation. On every floor, in all four directions to the slanting walls of glass, hundreds of people in cubicle workstations were quietly and diligently getting on with the task of disseminating the Message via every possible medium. It made Sarah feel rather small and humble. Her own radio contribution, of which she’d been so proud, was feeble in comparison, a mere drop in a vast multimedia ocean that spanned the globe.
Sarah remembered growing just a tad impatient at one point. Two hours into the tour she asked one of the tanned young men how soon it would be before they met their host. And what about the broadcast? Shouldn’t she be preparing herself, getting ready to take part? With an easy confident smile that seemed bred into him, the young man answered her questions politely. At the present time, he informed her, Messiah Wilde was busy with rehearsals in the studio. They would meet him later that evening, as soon as the show was over. He told Sarah that she may have misunderstood, because the show she was to participate in was not tonight’s, but tomorrow’s: the schedule had been purposely arranged so that she had time to relax after her flight, and in the morning she could face a fresh start. There wasn’t a thing to fret about, he assured her. Everything had been taken care of, down to the last detail. Everything was perfectly in order.
