Caleb nodded mutely at the solemn verdict. More of the world was dead to them every year, with this simple marking out. Television, Catholics, Jews, Islamists, evolutionists, fornicators, his teachers, his fellow students, Caleb’s mother—all dead.
“We’ll go spread the word down here, today,” he announced, tracing an arrow across the map, like the scythe of a conquering army, into the Hollows.
A maze of steep hills, canyons and cul-de-sacs that seemed to twist on forever, the Hollows was mercifully out of their territory. Caleb truly pitied whoever had to walk it every Saturday. “Isn’t that someone else’s route, Father?”
“No, son,” Jubal answered, “not for a long time. The church gave up on it years ago. I’ve heard…” he clammed up, then leaked a little smile, as he knowingly sinned. He wanted so badly to excite his son that he gossiped. “I heard once that a couple of missionaries even quit the church after walking the Hollows. Nobody ever knew why—”
“What happened to them, Father?”
“They left the church, Caleb. Their faith was broken. We never saw them again—”
They set out from the park and plunged into the eucalyptus-shadows of the Hollows. Though the shade was a blessing, the heat was, if anything, even thicker, a syrupy membrane pregnant with thirsty mosquitoes. Caleb marched on behind his father, who consulted his pocket Bible in preparation for the first house.
No one answered the first door, or the second, or the third. Oh, they were home, and made no secret of it. TV’s blared cartoon and baseball noises, but no suspicious phantoms darkened the fisheye lens set into each door, no children peeked at them out the mail slots.
Father knocked louder at the fourth house, and made Caleb ring the doorbell. At the fifth house, he knocked and read from his Bible in a braying shout, like a battlefield chaplain saying mass over artillery strikes. Inside, someone laughed, and a lawnmower started up in the backyard. Caleb backed off the porch and called, “Come on, Father,” wanting to add, We’re dead to them.
Caleb’s father was apoplectic, face mottled with red rage, jaw muscles working like fists in his mouth. Caleb began to worry that if anyone ever did answer their door, he was going to pummel them with his tiny Bible. It went on like this until the bottom of the next cul-de-sac.
Jubal Gibbons stood in the middle of the dead end street, ringed by haphazardly parked cars and overflowing recycling bins, looking up at the brutally blue sky like he was daring lightning to strike him down. The look on his face made Caleb shy away to the curb. “Father, come out of the street. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea—”
“A few more, then we’ll turn back,” Jubal finally said, as if he were relaying a message from on high that he didn’t particularly care for. He crossed to the sidewalk and went up the crushed gravel path of the house at the end.
It was a swaybacked two-story villa with Spanish colonial trappings, cracked pink adobe walls and red tile peeking out through lush tufts of glossy green-black ivy. Eucalyptus and willow trees vied with rampant stands of bamboo and pampas grass for dominance over the front yard, flanked the sprawling house to climb the hills and join an unruly backyard wilderness. Caleb heard birds—not the croaking crows that had driven every other flying creature from the suburbs, but a lively symphony of mating calls and twittering sirens that drowned out the other muted sounds of the neighborhood.
Caleb approached the house with a new spring in his stride, but he stopped dead when he came up to Father at the porch, his Bible and pamphlets held out in a rare and terrifying gesture. “You do this one, son.”
Fresh waves of sweat oozed out of Caleb’s armpits and stung his eyes and acne. He hadn’t been entrusted with the duty in weeks, and hadn’t missed it. The prospect of leading the charge into a stranger’s home, a gangly thirteen year old swimming in the kind of cheap suit poor kids got buried in, and trying to seize their souls and turn them to Glory, made him hate himself for being too weak to tell Father what he really believed. “Yes, sir. Um, and if there’s nobody home?”
“Keep going ‘til you get one, son.” Father rapped on the front door and stepped behind Caleb.
The door opened just a crack and a single eye regarded him. “Good morning,” he stumbled. “Um… isn’t it a lovely day?”
“You look hot,” said a woman’s voice, low and knowing.
The door swung wider, and Caleb stepped back into Father’s shoving hand.
“Do you… Ha-have you… ever heard of the glory of the Word Made Flesh?”
“Why don’t you come in and tell me about it? You and your chaperone…”
Father’s grip on the back of his blazer tightened. “Is the man of the house present, ma’am?”
“No men at all to speak to, in here,” she replied. “Come in, please. I’m very interested in what you have to say about the Bible.”
Slowly, Caleb’s sun-dazzled eyes picked her out of the gloom. She wore a black kimono, and rich, wild whorls of burnished auburn hair tumbled down to her shoulders. She was younger than Father, but would never look older. His eyes roamed crazily over her body, voluptuous curves straining at loosely tied silk, the fluid poise of her stance in the doorway, the delicious, mischievous grin when he finally met her stare and retreated to study her doormat.
He knew of girls like this from school, but women like this had been dead to him all his life. He’d always been told that sin killed them before they could become mothers and spread their taint.
Caleb wondered what Father was doing behind him. A rough, rigid hand still held him leashed, but he neither pulled nor pushed. “Maybe we could come back at a more appropriate time, ma’am.”
She reached out and took Caleb’s hand. Her skin was pale cream, so soft and smooth you could swim in it. When her hand touched his, he had to restrain his other hand from going for her. Boiling blood flushed his sin-hungry body, draining out of his head.
He didn’t notice the furniture or the décor as it slipped past. Blotchy planes of black and green were all he could register. His eyes never adjusted to the dark, as if the sight of her leeched away the background. His head swiveled idiotically to keep her in sight as Father steered him into a living room and onto a couch soft as quicksand. The woman followed them in, offering coffee, tea, soda pop…
“Just a glass of water, ma’am, if you please,” Father said.
“And for you, young man?”
Father replied for him, “We’ll share, thank you.”
“Fine, I’ll be right back.” She vanished through the kitchen door.
Father whispered out the side of his mouth, “What was that, son?”
Caleb couldn’t turn to look at his father. “What, Father?”
“You raped that woman with your eyes. There you’ll be before God at your judgment, facing up to what you just did. Just you tell her about the Word, and we’ll get on to the next house.”
Caleb swallowed a knot of fear that his father would demand that he show her. He was not ready for that, did not ever want to be. “Why did we come in, then, Father? Why don’t we just leave? Is she worth saving, if it damns us?”
“Mind your mouth, boy. Your faith is hanging by a thread, don’t think I can’t see that. You’d better step up, before even I can’t save you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This whore has something south of the soul on her mind at the moment, but we’re going to show her the true face of God in the Word. Are we going to save her, son?”
Show her. Oh, God. The social worker hardly ever checked him for marks, anymore… “Yes, sir.”
She came back in and offered the glass to Caleb, smiling at his father. “If he’s going to be doing all the talking,” she said.
Caleb tried to force a smile, took the water to drown it. Thunderclouds gathered over Father’s head.
She sat on the couch beside Caleb, taking care to loosen the belt of her kimono. “So tell me about your religion, hon.”
“Well, the Bible you may have read tells us how God cr
eated the earth and man, and how man sinned against God and fell from grace, but up until now, you haven’t heard the whole story. You haven’t heard the Good News.”
“Oh, I haven’t?”
“No, ma’am, there’s more to it, but for a long time, the book of the Bible that told it has been left out by unscrupulous worldly powers concerned for their own gain.”
“You mean the Gnostic Gospels, or the Apocrypha?”
He was stunned. Looking to Father, who also studied the woman with new eyes, he managed, “Yes, that’s right, but the book I speak of is still buried in secrecy.”
“And what does this book say, that’s so controversial?”
“I’m glad you asked,” he said, though he wasn’t. “In brief, what it teaches is the nature of man’s relationship with God. In the age of miracles, God was without, and visited those whom He would command to serve Him, or to bear witness to His divine works. Yet the age of miracles is long gone with the New Testament and the rebirth of Jesus. Where has God gone?
“In the lost Gospel, God speaks to the last prophet and declares his woe at the perpetual fall of mankind. He decries His attempts to purge and purify, to teach His chosen people, and sees no joy left in the world. Unable to die, He enters humankind, into all of us, and loses Himself in His Creation.”
She smiled. “So your book denies the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, and affirms an individual relationship with God, which would make all churches obsolete and false.”
Caleb stuttered and kicked his father’s knee. After a choking moment, Jubal said, “It affirms the divinity of all humankind, because God lives in us, ma’am.”
She purred, deep down in her throat. “Tell me more.”
Eyes on his father again, but he saw no help there. Jubal just stared at the woman. Caleb looked around, disturbed that he still only saw the green-black smear around her. Was there a room here, a space with all the things a living person needed and loved and wanted to show off? Father seemed to be trapped in the same fugue—sunstroke, that’s what it was. He bolted down the last of the water, rebuking himself, but Father didn’t notice. Caleb looked at her.
Her skin shone brighter, beaded with jewels of sweat. When he held the Bible up before his eyes, he saw where she’d touched his hand. It glowed too, but red and ripe, like a hothouse tomato or a blood blister.
“Sit down, Caleb,” Father said. “Tell the woman.”
“Well, what—what,” Caleb stuttered, “what would you like to know?”
“About your God. You say he’s real, and he’s watching.”
“He’s your God, too, ma’am,” Caleb shot back, “He’s the God of the Bible…”
“And stage and screen, I know. But if God resides in us all, why doesn’t he ever speak to us? Why is the world getting worse all the time, if he’s in us? Why would he need a church, or sweet young men like you to spread his word?” “Because He sleeps in us, ma’am, and stirs only in the pure hearts of the faithful. And we have been charged with spreading His word, in preparation for the day when He will awaken in all of us, because we have seen His true face.”
“Can you show me His true face right now? Is there a picture of it in your Bible?”
Caleb almost laughed, until he saw how her eyes baited him. This was not a nice lady, he saw suddenly, but to his shame, not all of his body got the message. He wrapped himself around the Bible to hide his distress, which his cheap polyester slacks were not designed to accommodate. “If I may read from our Gospel,” he mumbled, clawing through the tiny book so that the onionskin pages came apart in his clammy hands.
“You do that, son,” Father muttered dreamily. “Show her.”
As soon as he started to read, Caleb knew something was going wrong. The woman returned Father’s vacant stare with a wide smile, and shifted her body towards him. Caleb dared, on the familiar verses, to flick his eyes up over the book.
Father stared at her, but his hands battled in his lap and his head traced a sleepy, bobbing circle. His lips moved, mouthing something in the spaces between the words of the Lost Gospel. The woman nodded and moved her body some more, caressing her silken thighs.
Caleb read louder and faster, reaching out to take Father’s hand, but it slapped him away, and was too greased with sweat to hold on to. He read faster. He read louder. He made it worse.
“I can show you the face of God,” she hissed. She spread her legs wider, and Father leapt to his feet.
Finally, thank the Lord! Caleb started to climb up from the couch, when he felt dizzy. He barely saw Father fall to his knees before the woman’s yawning legs and cry out in gobbling, glossolalian imprecations to whatever he saw in there, between them.
Caleb, who had grown up too close to his father and the bosom of the church, had no idea what a normal woman’s private parts looked like—he was barely familiar with his own. But he knew that whatever lurked there normally did not exert such monstrous control over a man.
He did not awaken, so much as he was born again.
Into Hell.
Dark, itchy heat, smoke and nausea, like he was shrouded in burning jute. His first thought was, God, we failed you and we died, and we deserve this...
Hands pawed at him, lifted him up and touched his face. Something wrapped around his head was slowly unwound. The blackness took on layers of red. “Oh, God, look to your servant,” he cried out.
“He can’t hear you,” a voice croaked, spit and rot-breath in his face. “He isn’t here.” And Caleb knew he really must be in Hell, for the voice was his father’s.
Father hovered over him, head cocked pitifully to listen to his son’s breathing. Broken, bloody hands fumbled up and down Caleb’s body. He was blindfolded like Caleb, but two bloody asterisks stained the burlap where his eyes should have been. So none of it was a dream.
It was Hell, only smaller.
He lay on a hot earthen floor, against a mold-encrusted cinderblock wall. In the center of the room, a pit had been dug and filled with glowing coals, and it was by this murky red light that he saw. The opposite wall stood only fifty feet or so away. To his left, fifteen feet above the floor, a door was set into the wall, and brackets from a staircase that had been destroyed to make this ordinary suburban basement into a dungeon.
Caleb looked at the other wall.
A gang of men worked there. Draped in rags and coated with soot, they groaned like the damned. He heard grinding and chipping, and low, rhythmic grunts of torturous toil and sighs of unrequited lust. The men swarmed over the wall like ants dismantling a corpse, and at first Caleb thought they were digging a tunnel. They had no proper tools, only jagged bits of rock and their own fingers.
It was an image of her. From floor to ceiling, they had carved a lovingly detailed idol out of the gray-green stone beneath the house. She stared down on them with the same knowing half-smile with which she had first bewitched Caleb and his father. They had painted her hair red with their own blood, and her eyes gleamed with inlaid quartz crystals and shards of green glass.
The work was very close to completion, and doubly impressive when Caleb observed that the artisans had not an eye between them. She was the last thing they saw before they blinded themselves, and her image lingered in their hearts and spilled out into the walls of their prison, now a temple.
But of course, like the blind men describing the elephant, they had gotten it all wrong. Her nose was a pair of jutting breasts, their succulent tenderness painfully apparent even in the brittle stone. Worse still was the mouth, the smile rendered vertically and smeared liberally with layers of dried blood and hair. Though it bore only incidental resemblance to a mouth, yet it had teeth—row upon row of polished bones jammed between the rosette layers of obscenely exaggerated lips.
“How long have we been here, Father?”
“I don’t know, son. Maybe a few hours, maybe a day… but eternity awaits.”
“But we’re going to get out, right? She’s just a whore—and we can pray for a miracle.”
“We don’t deserve one, son.”
The quavering in his father’s voice provoked him to shout. “Why? We have the Word. We have only to call on Him, and awaken Him from His slumber in our unworthy flesh, and He will lighten our burdens.”
Father swatted the verses out of the air like a noisome odor. “We have failed the Word.”
“But you believed, Father, and I believe. What about us?”
“I believed with all my heart, son, but… I was powerless…”
“But God spoke to you, Dad! He chose you! This is—it has to be a test.”
“We failed, son. This is punishment. I’ll hear no more—”
“What about the Church, Father? They’ll come looking for us, won’t they?” But Caleb knew the answer, and regretted rubbing sand in the old wound. “I mean, even though we’re not really members, anymore—”
“We weren’t cast out, son. The church dissolved. There were never more than twelve of us, anyway, and most of them up and left before you were born. Those stupid damned teenage boys I told you about, they were the last.”
Two slaves turned their eyeless heads toward Father and limped closer. One of them whispered, “Hey, Brother Gibbons, is that you?”
“Who wants to know?” Father demanded.
“Josh Heslop, sir, I was a member of your church, with my mom and stepfather? I used to go around door to door, preaching all that shit you told us? I wanted to thank you, sir, for showing me the way—to Her, I mean. I never would have found my true calling if not for you, and it’s so cool that you’re here, too…”
The young man stood a head taller than Father, and had a beard like a hermit, wraparound shades and matted dreadlocks down to his ass. Beneath years of soot and filth, Caleb made out the rags of black polyester slacks and white Perma-Prest shirt.
Father squirmed and squeezed his temples, scratching under his blood-rusted blindfold. “Joshua Heslop… you and that other boy…”
“Danny Collier. He’s here, too, but he made Her mad, and he’s ashamed of himself, right now.” Josh shook his head in pity. “Hey, do you have anything to eat?”
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 7
