Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  Looking around at this church sometimes, Henry was surprised at how well it had all gone. He could remember getting his call—lying in the back bedroom of a trailer just outside Greensboro, staring at the ceiling and thinking he ought to kill himself, he really ought to, because he’d been out of work for eight months and what was coming up looked like more of the same. His wife had left him and taken their one-year-old daughter with her. His parents hadn’t talked to him since 1976. He could hear the voice now as clearly as he had heard it then—first as a tickle and a whisper in his ear; then growing stronger and deeper and more definite. He could see the face of Christ as clearly as he had seen it then, too. He knew it was the real Christ because it didn’t look like the face of any other Christ he’d ever seen. It wasn’t a long-suffering mask of self-pity. It wasn’t a blank stare under a halo of gold. It was the gnarled, broad-boned face of a Middle Eastern Jew, with dark hair going to gray and a film of sweat along the line of the jaw. The face had filled up every molecule of air in that back bedroom. It had lifted him off the bed and into space. He had felt as if he were floating in water. And water, he knew, was what he needed.

  Washed in the blood of the lamb.

  Baptized in the Holy Spirit.

  Born again.

  Now he wiped sweat off his own jaw and surveyed this big open room one more time. His wife, Janet, was seeing to a couple of little old ladies back near the literature rack by the center doors. There were many more people here than actually belonged to the church. There were many more people here than attended services on Sunday, al­though Henry got a pretty good crowd. He filled all four thousand three hundred fifty seats more often than not. There were people downstairs in the basement and parceled out in the classrooms in the Sunday School wing. There were black people as well as white people, too. It was in­credible to Henry how many of his neighbors lived in what were not much better than shanties. Of course, they didn’t look like shanties. They looked like new brick ranches and builder’s colonials. The problem was, they hadn’t been built very well. The Lord only knew how many of those things were going to be washed out in this hurricane.

  Janet raised her head for a moment and looked in his direction. Henry motioned to her. He remembered getting her back, after she had left, after he had been born again. He remembered sitting on the bottom step of the porch steps of her mother’s house in Charleston, twisting his baseball hat in his hands, telling her what he would do if she would only give him one more chance. He still had that baseball hat, up in his bedroom sock drawer. It had a Yan­kees logo on it, as if, along with everything else he’d done wrong, he’d decided to be a traitor to the south.

  Janet was a small, thin woman with lots of pale blond hair and very big blue eyes. Henry had always been glad that she didn’t have that taste for makeup that so many born-again southern women had.

  “What is it?” she asked him, when she reached him. “I’m dead on my feet. The old ladies are frantic.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “No,” Janet agreed. “Not surprising. Bobby just brought in the Michaelses. He’s having a very bad day.”

  “Bad bad?”

  “Bad enough that I was thinking we might have to restrain him.”

  Henry rubbed the flat of his palm against the back of his neck. “Did you ever get in touch with David Sandler? I tried myself a couple of minutes ago, but the phones are out.”

  “The phones were out when I tried, too. Maybe it’s just as well.”

  “Why?”

  Janet shrugged. “He is an atheist, Henry. He’s a very effective atheist.”

  “So?”

  “So, you’ve got a church full of old people, not very well-educated old people. Half of them think that this hur­ricane is being caused by the Devil. They’ve told me so.”

  “I think this hurricane is being caused by the Devil,” Henry said. “In a way.”

  “With the old ladies, there’s no ‘in a way’ about it.” Janet was firm. “I don’t think I could live like that, Henry. Afraid every minute that any little thing that went wrong was the wrath of God. Afraid of Hell and trying to pretend I wasn’t afraid of it.”

  “That’s why we try to teach them to know that they’re saved. To really know it. If they really know they’re saved, they have nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t seem to work, does it? Not with a lot of them. You talk about the love of God and it makes me feel—inspired. But then I look out at the congre­gation and I see all those closed faces, and all that fear. Why is there so much fear?”

  Henry thought about growing up, about walking to Mass along a dusty highway, about shoes with holes in them and a nun who told him that wearing shoes like that to Mass showed disrespect to the Lord.

  “They’ve never had much of anything, most of these people,” he told his wife. “They’re always on the verge of losing what little they’ve managed to put aside. They aren’t respected. The regular churches don’t want them. Nobody on earth wants them but us.”

  “I wonder if that’s true anymore,” Janet said. “The regular churches don’t seem to be doing very well.”

  “It’s hard to do well as a Christian church when you don’t even believe Christ rose from the dead. Do we know about the Harrows, Janet? Have they got a safe place to be?”

  “I talked to Lisa Harrow right before the storm started. They were going in to the high school. I was sur­prised she didn’t say they were going up to that camp.”

  Henry laughed. “I don’t think even Stephen Harrow would push it that far. I’m sorry you couldn’t find David Sandler, though. Atheist or no atheist. Living out on the beach like that. Remember what happened at Nag’s Head.”

  “Oh, I know. But he’s an intelligent man. He must have sense enough to get out of there and onto some high ground. Especially since he doesn’t believe in life after death. He wouldn’t want to be blotted out forever. I’ve got to go,” Janet said. “I’ve got at least another dozen old ladies to see to. And I’ve got to help cook. Sarah Drake says we’ve got a freezer full of spare ribs left over from the Fourth of July picnic, so we’re going to use those.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “I only hope there’s enough for everybody. I’ve been thinking all morning that the Mormons have a point. Always keeping enough food on hand to last for a year’s siege. We could use that kind of food around here today.”

  “We wouldn’t have had anyplace to keep it.”

  Janet patted his arm and pecked at the air near his cheek. She wasn’t tall enough to kiss him without jumping up to reach him.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said again. “I’ll talk to you later. Are we going to have a service while all this is going on?”

  “I thought I’d wait until it was over. When we know what the extent of the damage is going to be.”

  “Good idea.”

  Janet kissed the air in the direction of his cheek again and then disappeared. Henry caught sight of her a couple of seconds later, her blond head bobbing among the gray ones, moving vigorously where all other movements were halt. Many of the people Henry saw were just what he had told Janet they were: poor and displaced, the sort of people who never seem to have any luck at all. Some of them, though, were an element that had begun to make even Henry uneasy. He believed without question that all people were called to live in Christ, and that God could perform miracles through the power of His Son. He believed with­out question in the reality of inner conversion, too. No mat­ter how evil a man was, he could be born again and become a new creature. He could put on Christ and be forever after­ward good. The Bible, Henry knew, was true down to the last dot and comma. Christ was really and factually born of a virgin in Bethlehem. He really and factually died on the cross, condemned by Pontius Pilate. He really and factually rose from the dead on the third day. He really and factually had called all men and all women to follow him.

  The problem was, some of these people didn’t seem so much intere
sted in following Christ as they were in finding an excuse. They took ideas out of context. The Bible said all homosexuality was an abomination. Henry knew that was true. It was a sinful and disorderly way to live. There was no excuse for it. That wasn’t the same as saying that you should—what?

  Henry was an intelligent man, but he hadn’t been well or even extensively educated. He knew that the Devil was up there, at that camp. He knew that was the only way the camp could exist as long as it had without collapsing under the weight of its own evil. He wondered what David Sand­ler thought about it. Just because you were an atheist didn’t mean you were mired in filth and perversion. And it was filth and perversion, dangerous filth and perversion, it was just that he didn’t want anyone to—what, what, what?

  There was a roll of thunder across the sky. The rain hit the roof in waves. There were no windows in the tabernacle space itself. The walls were made of painted concrete and were blank. They could have been on a submarine.

  Henry made his way across the stage/altar to the doors at the back, where the choir and everybody else came through when they were having services. He went through the choir room with its dressing stalls and its pale blue robes hung on brass wall hooks. He went out another door and into a back hall. Nobody had thought of using these spaces to house people or set up beds. The back hall was absolutely empty.

  At the end of the back hall there was a spiral staircase, leading dangerously upward to the squat square space where the bells were kept. Normally, nobody had to come up here. Everything was done by computer these days. You punched your instructions into the program and the machine took care of the rest. The right bells rang at the right times. The right songs played for the right moments of spiritual uplift and conviction of sin. Sometimes the bells had to be fixed, though. The next time, Henry thought, they would have it all computerized, with hymns on tapes that could be played automatically, with no bells to fix.

  Henry stopped at the landing at the top of the spiral staircase. He searched around in his pockets until he found the big brass ring of church keys. He opened the bell room door and let himself in. It was dark up here and very noisy. There were no real windows in this room, only shutters that had to be screwed off the wall. The shutters were closed now, as they were whenever there was no service going on downstairs.

  Henry put his keys back in his pocket and started to unscrew the set of shutters he was closest to. The bells felt like big hulking things with wills of their own. Henry hadn’t felt this nervous since he was a small boy and be­lieved that a monster lived in his bedroom closet. He got the shutters open just as the wind changed direction in a sudden gust. He got a face full of rain and a head full of thunder, rolling and crashing and hiccuping in bursts. Then the sky was filled with lightning and thunder again. It was only when the flash spots had cleared from his eyes that Henry realized that it wasn’t really dark. The sun was up there somewhere, straining to get through. The world was full of a steady gray glow.

  What Henry had hoped to see was the beach, but he’d made a miscalculation. He’d opened the wrong set of shut­ters. He was looking not eastward, toward sloping ground, but north. The land rose steadily but shallowly and it re­ceded from his vantage point. There was a stand of trees and then, in the distance, the peaked roof of the camp’s main lodge. Camp, Henry thought. Lodge. That place up there wasn’t either thing. It wasn’t even a mansion. It was a palace, and the woman who owned it thought she was a queen.

  He was about to close up the shutters and go down­stairs again—What was he doing here, anyway? What good would it do anybody if he could see David Sandler’s house on the beach?—when he caught a movement on the lodge’s roof. For a moment he thought it was nothing but the storm. Maybe the wind had blown a few of the shingles loose up there. Then he realized that what he was seeing was a woman, walking carefully along the catwalk.

  Dear sweet Lord, Henry thought. His stomach turned over. He wanted to be sick.

  She’s going to fall.

  But she didn’t fall. Whoever it was—not Zhondra Meyer; somebody shorter, somebody heavier—inched along the catwalk with what seemed like studied deliberateness. Henry realized that she had to be holding on to the rail, at the very least. She got to the kink where she would have to turn a corner and stopped. Then she seemed to scrunch into a ball and rock back and forth. A second later, Henry saw that she’d disappeared. She hadn’t fallen. He would have seen that. She had simply disappeared.

  Into where?

  Into what?

  What if witches really did exist, and whoever it was had just taken off, become discorporeal, called on her God the Devil, and been made spirit right in front of Henry’s eyes?

  Henry stepped away from the window and slammed the shutters closed across it. He twisted the first of the screws in so savagely it tore against his hand. He could feel an ooze of blood where the edge of the screw handle had cut into his palm. He put the other three screws in more gently and turned toward the spiral stairs.

  Of course, he told himself, whoever it was probably hadn’t become discorporeal. She had simply lowered her­self through some kind of trap door. If there were ways onto that catwalk there had to be ways off. It would be insane to design the thing any other way.

  Henry let himself back out onto the landing and closed the bell room door behind himself. He got his keys out again and locked up. He couldn’t remember when he had last been this shaken, if he had ever been.

  What was it that Saint Paul had said? The Devil is prowling among you like a raging lion.

  And yes, Henry thought. Yes, he was.

  9

  IN THE END, DAVID Sandler made the kind of decision he had promised himself never to make—based on emo­tion, with all the reason left out. He should have stayed in the beach house. The water was bad, but the house was built on pilings. It was the sturdiest structure on the beach for miles. Instead, he went out onto his deck and looked at the waves coming at him. They were enormous, black and tall and as solid looking as a wall. He kept remembering the television photographs of all those houses on Nag’s Head falling into the sea during the last hurricane. He saw the splintering wood. He saw the cracking porches. He saw them collapsing like sticks into the water.

  Crazy.

  He put on his bright red L.L. Bean rainwear—pants as well as jacket and hood—as if that would make a differ­ence. Then he dug an old silver flask out of the pot cabinet in his kitchen and washed it out with the water he had left standing in the master bath. The flask had belonged to his father. The old man had taken it to football games, back in the days when people actually went to football games, in­stead of watching them on television. David filled the flask from a nearly full bottle of Johnnie Walker Red that sat on a shelf in the living room bar. He almost never drank li­quor. It made his head fuzzy and left him unable to read. At the last moment, he took a long swig out of the bottle itself, before he put the cap back on it and put it back. He wasn’t going to be reading anytime soon. He felt he needed—courage.

  Crazy.

  He went out the front door and stood in the little shel­tered entry. The scene outside was even crazier than the way he was thinking. There were trees down all along the beach road. They were big trees, too. The trees that were still standing were bending almost sideways in the wind. There were power lines down, too, but no live wires touch­ing the ground as far as David could see. A few years ago, there would have been wires everywhere. Now the wires were mostly underground. It was only out here, where the summer people lived, that the power company hadn’t gotten around to the conversion.

  David took the flask out of his back pocket and took a swig. The Scotch burned going down. He thought about going back into the house and forgetting this whole thing. He thought about Nag’s Head again. He put the flask back into his pocket and started off. He was a coward, he real­ized. A coward about water. He hated the thought of him­self drowning in a black and choppy sea.

  As soon as he was out from the shelter o
f the entry, the wind hit him. He felt it like a dozen hands pummeling him. When he hadn’t been subject to it, it had looked fairly far away—up on the road, maybe, high in the trees. Now he realized there was nothing on the beach to save him from it. He turned his back to it and tried to go forward without stumbling.

  The sand was wet and slippery. The little incline up to the boardwalk was impossibly steep. David pushed against it and pushed against it, whatever it was, something coming at him, something strong. He suddenly realized what it was people saw when they thought they saw God. The world around him seemed very much alive to him, full of con­scious intent and purpose. He thought of it as a grinning, angry man, bent on destroying David Sandler in particular, singling him out.

  He got to the boardwalk, scrambling. He stumbled across to the road and then across the road to the start of Beach Street. The houses there hadn’t been as lucky as his own, in spite of the fact that they were farther from the water. Two of them had their roofs blown off. All five of them were missing glass from their windows. These were the houses that belonged to summer people. None of them had been boarded up. David went between two of them, to get out of the worst of the wind. That was when he felt water rising up around his boots. He looked down and saw it snaking up on him. Water from the sea.