by John Crowley
He left his desk and went to lie down. His head was a bread box, his heart was a birdcage. Every page he had written this week he had torn up and thrown away. And as he lay there, from Littleville to the Jambs and Stonykill to Fair Haven and to the old neighborhoods of Cascadia where the Victorian houses stand at the top of steep stairs, the little dead were out in their flocks—all over the eastern standard time zone in fact, and coming out elsewhere successively as night swept westward: some of them being the dead as they have always been seen (vague, sheeted); some of them the old undead, zombies and ghouls and vampires, and some the new undead of science, the Frankensteins and robots and medical disasters. Fictional characters too, heroes and villains both, and costume-ball princesses and consumer products and jokes. Their parents often followed, hovering not too far behind, afraid for their little imps, but not because of the roaming dead whom they might meet, only because of the darkness, the traffic, and maybe the wickedness of the living: and still on this night of this year eighty percent of them believed—according to a recent poll Pierce had read, appalled, astonished—that God had personal care for them, and that they would somehow live on after their deaths, to be rewarded for the good they had done, and punished for the evil.
For another two days Sam stayed linked to her machine, getting more daring with it and trundling it from playroom to bedroom skillfully, Rosie lagging behind; neuro patients came and went from their beds and rooms near hers; her roommate went, and an anxious couple with a newborn came, so stricken that Rosie dared ask them nothing: they were kids themselves almost, standing looking into their baby’s clear plastic box and holding tight to each other as though they stood on a cliff’s edge looking down.
Nothing in the end was learned about Sam; nothing extraordinary. The doctor (still not Dr. Marlborough, who was beginning to seem somewhat fictitious or hallucinatory to Rosie) went over the results with her and showed her that the same anomalies were still present, and no more explainable. He suggested a slight change in her medication. Rosie packed up as soon as he was done and got them out, feeling the place fold up and disappear behind them as they walked (almost ran) down its halls and out.
She stopped to get the dogs out of the kennel in Cascadia, Spofford’s and her own two, they filled up the car with their eagerness and their lolling tongues and odors, making Sam laugh uncontrollably as they poured from back to front over the seat backs. When they got back to Stonykill, Rosie found, amid the spill of mostly inconsequential mail from the Foundation’s big box at the post office, a long envelope she was required to sign for, which turned out to be a notice that the custody hearing was scheduled. Oh well oh well. Lastly there was a small envelope with a small letter in it, written in Spofford’s very small but very legible and open hand. The postmark date was Halloween.
Sam wouldn’t let her stop to read it, insisted on hurrying home—home, home, she said, and each time she said it was like a little theft out of Rosie’s breast. Sam ran inside in delight as soon as Rosie opened the doors, chasing away with the dogs through the rooms, touching the chairbacks and newel posts, the telephone, the hassocks in recognition or reclamation. Home.
Very still + cold here tonite + the dogs keep finding some reason to wake up + bark—you can hear an answer from a ranch miles away. The guy whose house we are in also wakes up in the night + calls out, says he has for years, ever since discharge. Cliff has been spending time with him. Meanwhile odd stuff abounds. No wolves or wolf critters seen, but cattle—this guy claims sheep too, there are different stories—have been found on the prairie dead, with certain parts removed. Not chewed off but neatly excised, like with a scalpel. Lips, udders, nostrils, assholes. Some people say the ground is swirled up around these carcasses like a chopper landed + took off. Other people say burn marks. We’re going north in a few days. We go from ranch to ranch + listen to stories + Cliff talks. These folks are all heavily armed, which scares me more than anything they think they know, or think they’ve seen.
He was thinking of her, he wrote, and of Sam. He said nothing about returning. There was an address on the letter, a Rural Route in a far-Western state. She could write to him. She had no name to give a long-distance operator, no name but his and Cliff’s. She saw her letter making its painful way toward him, trying to hurry, caught in a slurry of others in a distant postal hub, sorted, sorted again. She wondered if she could send a telegram. Was that still possible? Telegrams for urgent news, good or bad. She didn’t think she could, but she picked up the phone book and opened it, Sam looking in and the dogs sniffing the pages, his dogs, needing him too. And it was there, Western Union. The little telegraph form that was their ad here, as it always had been. She called.
Could she send a telegram? Yes certainly.
Taken by surprise, Rosie had to think what message she should send. She thought of her flimsy yellow sheet brought to the door of this far place, the high plains or dark pines, by whom though, how. “Court date set with Mike,” she said. “December 11.” She felt foolish trying to talk in telegraphese. “Need you back then. Really.” She paused, thinking, and was not hurried.
“Say about me,” Sam said.
“Sam’s okay,” Rosie said, and felt a stone, the old familiar stone, form in her throat. “Sam, S-A-M.”
Was that it? she was asked at length. Yes that was it. Her phone number would be billed for this service. Fine. And what was the recipient’s phone number? Rosie didn’t know; there might not even be one. Well without a phone number the message can’t be sent; basically it’s called in by the local Western Union office. A paper copy can be mailed the same day.
“Well if I had a number,” Rosie said, “I could call it myself.” Silence. “I guess forget it then,” she said, and cradled the phone, feeling she had been fooled into thinking a kind of magic that had vanished from the world could still be used. Yellow magic. No, gone, she thought, and sat down on the stairs. The dogs and Sam clustered around her, looking at her and waiting for what she would do next.
8
Above River Street the town of Blackbury Jambs ascends along a number of short streets that traverse back and forth up the heights. Hill Street is the steepest of these, leading up to the Hill Street Church, then tacking off in another direction, having changed its name to Church Street. The Hill Street Church was built in the 1880s by the Original Mission Baptists; when they became extinct, the building (a pretty timbered and shingled church-in-the-wildwood sort of structure) was sold for a dollar to the Reformed E.U.B., though they can’t fill it either and share it now with the Danish Brethren, a small odd sect that holds its weekly services on Saturdays. People, tourists particularly, who don’t know this (despite the sign before the church announcing it) tend to think that surely no one will mind if they park in the church’s lot on the seventh day; and so before services on that day the minister was once again out with some mimeoed notes explaining why this was actually inconvenient for the congregation, and slipping them under the wiper blades of parked cars, some of which looked damn familiar.
“Hello.”
The minister (her name was Rhea Rasmussen) looked up to see a tall man, unshaven or dark-jowled, in a salt-and-pepper overcoat, standing at a distance as though uncertain whether to approach or pass by.
“Hi.”
“You remember me?” Pierce Moffett asked her, and right away she was reminded of the one time they had met—at the funeral of Boney Rasmussen, which she had conducted, or rather at the gathering at Arcady afterward. The two Rasmussens, the quick and the dead, were unrelated, at least not traceably; somewhere far back, no doubt, she’d told Pierce that day.
“You’re up early,” she said, thinking he looked as though he might not yet have slept. “Coming to services?”
“Ha ha,” he said, nodding, oh sure. “Though actually,” he said, taking a step or two closer, “I have a sort of question. Or rather I’d like to have your professional opinion.”
“Yes?” She was a slight woman who appeared tall thoug
h she was not, her eyes of palest northern blue at once calming and unsettling; her age was unguessable, her ash-blond hair turning really ashen but only her hands seeming old, large knuckly and worn.
“Have you heard of this—this group or, well this group I guess, called the Powerhouse?”
She ceased her leafletting. “Yes. I have.”
“Well do you think it’s a. I mean how would you characterize it?”
“Professionally?”
“Well.”
“It’s sort of a churchless church, isn’t it?” she said. “With a sort of Christian Science approach. Really quite small, I think.”
He looked at her, dissatisfied. She went back to work. “Do you know someone who’s involved with them?” she asked.
Pierce shrugged. “I think. Flirting.”
“You think it might be a cult.”
Pierce thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his overcoat. “I just sort of wondered what their tenets are.”
“I’ve left my Mr. Coffee on,” she said. “You want to come in for a minute?”
He followed.
Of course he thought it was a cult. One of those that had been erupting like boils over the nation’s skin lately, nuts and nonentities becoming strong wizards overnight, as though secretly funded by a foreign power; able to send out troops of devotees into the world to sell flowers or candy, which the newspapers said turned them astonishing profits, believe it or not. Lost children were accosted and suborned at airports or bus stations, or in the city slums to which they fled from nice homes in safe places; they were carried off then to be made into junior wizards and witches themselves, some element of personhood extracted from them and replaced with a weird eye-light and a pasted-on smile. Hollowed out, Spofford had said. You could do it to yourself; or you could allow it—you could ask for it—to be done to you.
“Now not every specialized little religious group is a cult,” Rhea Rasmussen said, offering Pierce a small plastic cup of coffee. “They can be swept away, devoted, blind to alternatives; bigoted maybe even, crazy by society’s standards today, and not be in the modern meaning a cult.”
Pierce nodded, uncomforted. Open on the minister’s desk was her Bible, and a dictionary; a clutch of marked-up typewritten sheets; a stack of newsletters. Asking for Your Prayers said the headline atop a column of names.
“Have they forbidden her to see you?” she asked. “Do they make a big point of staying out of the world—keeping members from any contact with friends, families, old associates?”
“I don’t think so, I mean not yet.” Rose Ryder was actually in his house, in his bed, her old associate; not apparently seized or altered, not different at all, awaking this morning to stretch, yawn, and grin, satisfied, her own light in her eyes. “When I was a kid,” he said, “we Catholics weren’t allowed to go into the churches of Protestants, or go to their services. Not even weddings.”
“Well see?” Rhea said. “Biggest cult of all. The difference is, for Catholics there’s a safeguard in all that bureaucracy, all those centuries of working out the canon law and the hierarchy. But just think of how the Romans saw the Christians in the beginning.”
A cult. Mad deniers of state and community. Baby-eaters, family-rejecters, haters of the homely gods. Working magic with the help of demons. Pierce suddenly felt their revulsion as his own.
“Actually a lot of what are now very respectable, even liberal, Christian churches began as cults of a sort,” Rhea said. “Mormons of course: weirder than you’d think, and much feared then. But Quakers too: the Quakers were far from sober originally. Totally rejecting society. George Fox once raised someone from the dead by prayer. So his followers believed.” She sipped. “Not crazy really. Just drunk on God.”
This also Pierce did not like to hear. Drunk on God. He wondered why he was here, trying to elicit some sort of objective view from someone who was, in some sense, a devotee herself: of the central isolating peculiar antiworld story anyway, the story he had thought himself entirely shet of. An itching trickle of perspiration ran down his arm beneath his coat. “Yours too?” he asked.
“Oh yes. The Danish Brethren? An intransigent bunch of absolutists. Tiny. And—it always happens—made all the tougher by persecution. Nearly wiped out, though. Hated, hated. Hanged and burned.”
“By the Catholics?”
“By the Catholics, by the Lutherans too. Makes you strong, they say: what doesn’t kill you. The odd thing is that we, the Brethren, were always big on tolerance. It was one of the heresies we were accused of. Which we wouldn’t give up.”
Her smile was big, warm, proud. Pierce wanted to return it but found he could not.
“Well tell me this,” she said. “How deeply are you involved with her? I mean is this threatening a long-term relationship?”
“Oh I don’t know,” Pierce said, sure that he blushed or blanched in shame. “I’m mostly just concerned, just very concerned.”
“Hm,” said Rhea. “And do you have an idea of what would have drawn her to this group? Has she been going through a crisis, in her family, her own life?”
Pierce clasped his hands together. “Well she thinks she lost her job.”
“Well have you asked her?” Rhea said. “About her feelings? About what’s wrong?”
Pierce said nothing, knowing nothing. Then: “We’ve talked,” he said. “About God.”
She pondered him. “I think,” she said, “religious feelings frighten some people, or alarm them anyway. Religion seems to many people now to be a bondage in itself, not a freedom; and a deeper bondage than any political kind, because it’s voluntary. Soul bondage. Does that make any sense to you?”
Pierce said nothing.
“We can all understand the elation of winning freedom,” she said. “Breaking bonds: that’s the freedom we know. But there’s also the elation of giving up freedom. Freely giving it up.”
“Uh-huh,” Pierce said. “And is that how you.”
“No. Oh no. I grew up within it. My father was a pastor. So was his father. To me it’s just like the old family kitchen, you know: it’s warmth and safety and familiarity. Odd as it might seem to others.” She looked at a tiny watch on her wrist. “And speaking of which,” she said, “I’ve got to go preach soon.”
Pierce stood. “What’s your text?” he asked.
“‘You are the salt of the earth,’” Rhea said. “‘And if the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?’”
Of course it wasn’t a cult. It was one of those alternative routes to power, or to the mystic understanding that power can be had in different modes: there were dozens of them too now, their subscribers forming of course a large part of his own (putative) readership. And of course she might well accept training in such methods; there were lots of reasons, including the usual ones, and her employer was clear that she would be fired if she didn’t.
Pierce stood before the library on Bridges Street a few minutes before opening time at nine, waiting for the doors to be unlocked by the somewhat flinty-featured but smiling librarian, a silver chain aswing on her glasses, visible to him inside as he no doubt was to her here outside.
“Good morning. Something you need in a hurry?”
“No,” Pierce said. “Where though,” he asked, “is Religion?”
She told him. He went into the odorous stacks.
Was Rose powerless? The powerless tend (he guessed) to believe in those whose power they want to share, surrendering to power being itself a kind of power. He thought of the predators she had flirted with, been subject to: Wesley and the others. He wondered if the feeling was the same. His scrotum tightened.
He had come upon her after she had been through the hands of those men; and he had not asked how he could change things for her, how he could help, what this was in her heart: no that was not what he had asked.
Here was a fat, soberly bound volume, only a few years old, Atlas of American Churches and Religious Organizations, printed in thick plain typ
e that reminded him of schoolbooks. The Powerhouse International: it was in the index, with a page number.
Powerhouse International, The. Founded 1948 by Dr. R. O. Walter (b. 1900) and claiming a membership today (1965) of twenty thousand around the world. The Powerhouse has no churches or formal places of worship, holding Bible study and prayer meetings in homes and other places. Walter, who received his LL.D. from Pikes Peak Theological Seminary in 1932, describes a personal divine revelation when he was thirty-four, after which he developed a theology combining a basic Arianism with ultra-dispensationalism and biblical inerrancy.
Pierce wondered what ultradispensationalism could be. Rhea might know. The arcana of Protestant theology were unknown to him. Arianism he remembered had to do with the nature of Jesus: that he was only human, or not human at all.
Though Dr. Walter retired from active duties in 1960, his interpretations of Bible promises of “gifts of the Spirit” are still communicated in a vigorous mission and outreach program via tapes made by Walter himself. Group training sessions emphasize healing and charismata. A Bible Languages and Translation program has been developed at the Powerhouse World Center in Mexico, Indiana (formerly Unity Christian College).
All right. Okay. Pierce studied these arid sentences, a voyeur at an inadequate keyhole, foot falling asleep as he stood holding the big tome, at once guilty and stirred; then, unsatisfied, he searched the shelf.
