The Book of Joby (75 page)

“There’s a television executive from Los Angeles staying at my inn this weekend,” Gladys said. “Some friend of Ferristaff’s apparently. He tells me
they’re preparing to film a one-hour special here.” She shook her head sadly. “I still can’t understand how all this happened so quickly—or at all!”

“Ain’t natural. I’ll tell you that,” Franklin grumbled. “Jake can say what he likes. This ain’t just an overcrowded world stumblin’ up against us. There’s gotta be somethin’ behind an invasion like this. Wish I knew what it was, much less how to stop it.”

“Well, between the way Hamilton’s buying up this town, and Ferristaff the woods,” Tom said, “I don’t know how much there’ll be to save soon. I hate to say it, but maybe we should be looking for someplace else to go.”

“Things here that’re awful hard to move,” Franklin said without looking away from the parade. “You know that well as I do, Tom.”

“Yes, I do,” Tom sighed. “But we may have to find some way to move even those, Franklin. Ferristaff’s already started looking north.”

“He won’t find it,” Franklin said. “Never get in on the ground, and we both know what he’ll see from the air.”

“Men like him destroy things they can’t see all the time,” Tom pressed.

“He tries,” Franklin said quietly, “I’ll do things to him personally that’ll make any plans Ms. Greensong’s got seem lovesick.”

A rhythmic thrumming in the distance made them all look up, along with everyone on the street below, as a helicopter appeared above the roofs at Main Street’s far end, and turned in their direction.

“Speakin’ of the devil,” Franklin spat.

“There you go, Mr. Benzick,” Ferristaff said, banking the copter to give his passenger a better view of Main Street. “Not exactly the Macy’s parade.”

“If it were, I wouldn’t be here.” Benzick smiled. “Wish we had cameras down there. This is exactly the kind of stuff we’re going to want for the special.”

“Oh, you’ll have no shortage of quaint spectacle.” Ferristaff grinned. “Not if the Chamber of Commerce has anything to say about it. Anyway, I heard something about a news crew up here today doing some kind of PR section for a Bay Area station. You’ll probably be able to grab some of their footage.” He searched the parade route. “There’s the cameraman, in fact, ogling the latest little thorn in my side.” He nudged the copter forward a few blocks until they were hovering right over Greensong’s little band. “Hello, darlin’!” Ferristaff drawled under his breath as everyone below stared up at them. Green-song shook her fist at him, shouting in obvious rage. One more thing to like about helicopter travel, he realized; couldn’t hear a damn thing from outside
the cockpit. “We’ve probably ruffled enough feathers here.” He grinned. “What next?”

“Well, I’d love a better look at the coastline,” Benzick said. “North this time?”

“No problem.” Ferristaff banked to head back across town.

“I appreciate your taking time to show me around like this,” said Benzick.

“My pleasure,” Ferristaff replied. “Shadwell and I go way back. If you all do this TV special, I hope he’ll get up here himself, and visit me. You tell him I said so.”

“I will.” The young man smiled. “The show’s already been green-lighted actually. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, Mr. Ferristaff, but this little town has become quite the hot ticket. You’d think it was Disneyland and Yellowstone rolled into one, the way people are panicking to vacation here now.” He fell silent, gazing down at flocks of seabirds wheeling about the surf-washed cliffs, amber fields of grass, and wooded knolls farther inland. In diplomatic deference to his host, he said nothing about the wide, muddy tracts of clear-cut scarring numerous slopes east and south of town. “It is beautiful,” he mused. “I still can’t imagine how all this went undiscovered for so long.”

“Well, that might have something to do with Taubolt’s stiff-necked natives,” Ferristaff said dryly. “You say ‘growth’ to them, they think tomatoes and summer squash. Hell, this place has more potential per square acre than Laguna Beach. Every last one of them could be rich for life by now if they had the tiniest bit of business sense. But I’ll tell you, Mr. Benzick, these are the sorriest tribe of backward yokels you will ever meet.” He grinned humorlessly. “Though I can see that might be a source of some delight to your program director.”

“Why antagonize her like that?” Laura asked in disbelief as Ferristaff’s craft veered from its brief pause up the street and headed away from town. “Isn’t she causing him enough trouble without him poking at the wasps’ nest?”

“You’d think,” Joby said, as the distant ruckus subsided, and the parade began to move again. “Though she pokes plenty too. Can’t expect the logging crowd to hug her for it.” It seemed to Joby that there was altogether too much poking going on in Taubolt these days. Even the tourists had changed. Gone were the bemused, accidental visitors that had once wandered so cheerfully in and out of Taubolt’s shops and restaurants. Now, the guests at Gladys’s inn spent half their time complaining. Stressed and disgruntled couples in bright plastic sun hats and plaid Bermuda shorts moaned about the places
they had come from, or irritably listed the ways that Taubolt wasn’t living up to whatever they’d been told by magazines or travel agents, while their tetchy children cried or argued in the background. It all left Joby feeling not just glum, but vaguely anxious.

By any rational assessment, Joby’s life here had gotten better with each passing year. He had a solid position now in the most idyllic place he could imagine. He was blessed with scores of remarkable friends, and, most wonderfully of all, he had Laura back; a gift he’d never hoped for in the dark years since he’d lost her. And yet, despite all this, there was still some small, hard, fearful knot at the center of him that Taubolt had never managed to reach; some elusive artifact of his unpleasant past. Unable to expunge it, he’d just done his best to ignore it altogether, but it seemed unwilling to ignore him.

To Joby’s carefully concealed dismay, that dark lump had settled very quickly between himself and Laura. A creature filled with light and beauty, she gave him fistfuls of the treasure she contained whenever they were together. But each time he reached inside himself to reciprocate, he found that mute, intractable core of empty darkness where the laughter and delight he longed to give her in return should have been. The closer she came, the more frightened he felt that she would see what sat there inside him, and recoil. For more than a year now, he’d done all he could to keep her near, fearful of losing her again, but unable to let her in. Struggling all the while to find some way past the turmoil that stood between himself and all he most wanted, he feared Laura would not let him hide from her much longer.

“Uh-oh,” Laura teased. “Better get out your can of crystal repellent.”

Abandoning his ruminations, Joby looked up the street to find Molly Redstone, Taubolt’s recently arrived New Age maven, and her circle of disciples, all in flowing gowns and ribbons, gliding toward them to recorded strains of ethereal music under a huge purple banner that read,
HARMONT HOUSE HERALDS THE COMING DAWN
.

Molly had appeared the previous year, insisting that Taubolt sat at the convergence of no less than five geological power vertices, and promptly opened Harmony House, a shop selling every accoutrement required by devotees of alternative health and spirituality. Her weekly meditation and discussion group was very popular among the newer brand of townie now, and her business thrived.

“God will not suffer a witch to live!”
shouted a balding man in white shirt and black trousers standing nearby. Joby felt Laura tense in his arms as the man
leapt into the street, pointing, rod-armed, at Molly.
“A witch is an abomination before the Lord!”

Joby groaned, unable to believe this was happening so soon after Ferristaff’s disruptive appearance. A shocked silence rippled through the sea of bystanders in both directions as Molly and her followers sped their pace in stone-faced silence.

“Behold the whore of Babylon!”
the man shouted.
“It’s no dawn she heralds. It’s the darkness!”
Rushing forward, he tried to grab one of the poles supporting her Harmony House banner, but the woman holding it managed to bang him in the head with it instead, sending him reeling back to the curb, clutching his forehead and looking around as if expecting someone to come to his defense.

“Your god is a bigot, and a murderer of women and children!” one of Molly’s disciples spat scornfully at the man.

Molly stopped her with a glance, and said with a sad smile and a voice pitched to carry, “The enlightened are above such bitterness, Alicia.” She looked theatrically at her wider audience, and added more loudly, “In becoming the enemy, only the enemy is served. Victory lies only in peace. Be peace.” She turned serenely, and moved on, her contingent hurrying after.

“Concubine of the devil!”
the man shouted after her, then fled the street, muttering something about the rejection of prophets in their own land as Joby saw the Heeberville police officers who’d been guarding Greensong and the crowd from each other come running in an attempt to intercept the lunatic.

“Laura, let’s go,” said Joby, as the knot of darkness he’d just been pondering seemed suddenly to squirm and kick inside him like a restless fetus. “This isn’t the kind of celebration I was hoping for.”

The wind brought gusts of parade noise from the other side of town as Swami and Ander helped Father Crombie slowly up the chapel’s back stairs. His hips and knees had grown much worse that winter. Even short walks were a painful labor now.

“Thank you for allowing this, Father,” Swami said apologetically.

“We thought it might be safest while everyone is at the parade,” said Ander.

“It’s like a migraine,” Swami groaned, “the constant press of all their greed and grief and . . . and anger. We wouldn’t’ve bothered you, but we didn’t know where else—”

“Boys,” Crombie interrupted, “there is nothing to explain or apologize for. This is my sacred, and, frankly, most fulfilling task in life. I am well aware of how the particular gifts you two possess must chafe in such troubled times,
and I am deeply gratified to help you bear these burdens in whatever way I can.” After all these years, it still caused Crombie awe that such creatures should require anything from him at all, and pity, now, that they should reach manhood with so few tools, or even language, with which to cope with what had come at last to Taubolt’s doorstep. Crombie took the key from his pocket, and turned it in the back door lock. “Ander, will you go make sure the chapel is empty, and lock the front doors, please?”