The service began with chimes, then the Prelude: "All Glory Be to God on High." A smiling usher with a boutonniere handed Sherard a hymnal. He wasn't the only standee; there were other late arrivals, but plenty of room remained for them in the wide aisle behind the last row of seats. Ushers were quietly setting out folding chairs. Sherard looked up and spotted Bertie at the far end of the curved balcony. She was in the front row, singing along with everyone else but scanning the congregation both visually and with all of her senses that lay beyond the fifth.
He tried to do his part, keeping an eye on latecomers, no idea what or whom to expect. Young couple with a toddler, all of them blond as butter cookies and the mother pregnant again. Teenagers: black, white, and Asian. Tall balding young man pushing a bewigged woman with a sideways lean in her wheelchair. She seemed folded into a secret drowse. A couple of middle-aged gays in Prada suits, good tans. A fat man with speckled eyes and a disdainful crimp to his mouth. His wife was thin, nervous, and kept a balled handkerchief close to her nose, sneezing like a cat.
During the Associate Pastor's welcome and announcements there appeared a slender woman in her thirties. Black hair in a psyche knot, pinstriped pants suit, rimless glasses with octagonal tinted lenses. She looked at Sherard as soon as she entered. When he looked back at her she smiled, not really interested, picked up a hymnal, and sat on the edge of one of the folding chairs next to the motionless woman in the wheelchair. The tall man standing behind the wheelchair looked straight at the outsized suspended body of Christ, the pierced wrists and ankles, the uplifted eyes. Still turning almost imperceptibly above the worshipers seated in the first few rows before the altar.
Sherard found Eden again. Her head was still bowed. He looked for Bertie. She had moved from her seat in the balcony; he couldn't find her. That troubled him. He resisted an ominous impulse of panic.
The Hymn of Praise was "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing."
While the congregation was singing Sherard got that panicky feeling againâa sense of dissociation from the sanctuary and the people around him. He felt as if his brain had been pried open and something dark had slipped inside, like a black cat easing through a door space. Entering him. Making itself at home, looking curiously around with a low satisfied purring. Groping his mind with a paw as if it were teasing a mouse it had found. The mouse quivering, numb with terror.
So it's Eden Waring, is it? That's a bonus. You just wait right there, big boy.
He had lost touch with his body. As easily as he might move a pawn on a chessboard he was pushed back two feet and pinned to the wall behind him. Helpless. He could move his head a little, move his eyes. Breathe. His vision lacked color and depth. His ears seemed to be plugged.
The woman who had lately come into the sanctuary was standing next to him, hymnal in hand. She had joined in the singing. He could barely hear the words from her lips, but another voice was clear in his mind, a husky contralto. Her voice, he supposed, but not the first voice he had heard, saying
So it's Eden
. . . That had been the voice of a much older woman. Reedy, a slight quaver to it.
Why don't I just take that gun you're carrying, Tom?
Not that he could do anything about it. The flap of her black shoulder bag was open. She held the hymnal where it blocked the view of the usher standing a few feet away, lifted the Glock by the butt and dropped it into her large purse.
Sherard looked past her to the other latecomers at the back of the sanctuary: the blond young couple withtheir child, the teenagers, the ancient nearly comatose woman in the wheelchair who appeared to be a victim of a wasting disease. The gay couple. The fat man. His thin wife who seemed allergic to everything, including her husband. The tall balding young man dutifully attending the wheelchair-bound woman. A grandson, nephew perhapsâno, actually he wasn't related to her at all. They only worked together.
And as Sherard realized this, Big Baldy turned his head for a curious glance at him.
Catch that? He read me. Latent ability, perhaps.
Then another, fourth voice in his captive mind, as all of their headsâall except for the blond couple's two-year-old toddler, who was snoozing in his daddy's armsâturned briefly toward him:
Everybody's a latent, Franc. Shut up and concentrate. Help Mae out. She's having a tough time. The girl's resisting.
And still more voices, like half a dozen radios playing simultaneously in Sherard's mind.
Penny's right.
All of you, concentrate.
Break her down.
She's the Avatar. All of us together can't sandbag an Avatar. We need to regroup and wait for new instructions.
The old woman's voice.
You are not running this operation, Joel. I am. Let us get a grip, shall we? Thankew.
It's the church. We're no good in a church! The vibes are bad for us. And I'm getting a bitch of a migraine.
Sherard saw the fat man's wife sneeze again. She was miserable. The fat man stared at her, his eyes filled with broken veins.
Should have left you on the team bus, Heidi.
Fuck you, Gordo! I've always pulled my weight.
It's her headband
. Mae came to this conclusion after the hymn and the last reverberations from the organ had ended. The congregation recited the Gloria Patri. Sherard saw no movement in the wheelchair; the old woman's eyes looked vacant, but her voice continued strongly:
She has got something in that headband she's wearing. One of those copper bracelets, p'raps. Copper also blocks thought transmission. I'm simply unable to bang my way through it.
The woman standing next to Sherard had a suggestion.
Speaking of bangingâ
That would be on your mind, Roxanne.
Up yours, fudge-packer. I've got Tommy's Glock. Suppose I hand it back to him, march him down the aisle, and have him blow her head off.
We haven't clearance to kill an Avatar!
Mae responded crossly.
But you've given me an idea. If we are unable to get into her head, then we shall get to the girl through her heart. Mr. Sherard! Have you heard me? Merely nod. Good. Now Roxanne is going to relax her pinch sufficiently for you to walk down to where the girl is sitting. You are to bring her back up here. Then we all will leave quietly together. Oh, yes. She will do it, ducky. Otherwise I promise that the Second Coming will cause enormous havoc in the first couple of rows.
Sherard looked at the hanging Jesus. Even with his constricted mental and visual capacity he could tell that the crucifix had begun to revolve more quickly on the cable that anchored it to steel roof beams. Together the martyred figure with its crown of thorns and the twenty-foot cross, both carved from solid wood, must have weighed nearly half a ton.
Unexpectedly he felt his feet under him again. He was given a slight forward push, almost stumbled but kept himself from falling by leaning on his cane. The rest of the congregation was engaged in silent prayer, all heads bowed, eyes closed. He looked up again at the crucified Christ. Revolving faster now. The stark tormented eyes, each the size of a turkey's egg, whipped around and around until the motion blurred into a surrealistic stare. A few worshipers looked up and gasped.
Sherard heard sardonic laughter in his mind from the MMF delegation behind his back.
Better hurry, Tom.
Roxanne still had a telepathic grip on him, just in case, but some of his mind was functioning lucidly again. He could walk, his vision had cleared. His hearing was sharper. Underlying their laughter he detected urgency, even fear.
MORG Mind-Fuckers. Bad Souls, Bertie had called them. The condemned of heaven. In God's house, which they had dishonored by entering, the only strength the Mind-Fuckers possessed lay in their numbers.
Whirling Jesus had almost everyone's attention as Sherard increased his pace down the aisle. Eden was half out of her seat, looking up. Then she turned quickly, eyes sweeping his face. She seemed to grasp most of what was happening.
Bring her to us!
Eden stepped out into the aisle. Many in the congregation were standing. A few were screaming as the Pastor came forward, Bible in hand, gesturing for them to be calm. The organist began to play, for reasons known only to him, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The organ went haywire, pipes emitting terrible shrieks and groans that caused the worshipers to hold their ears in pain.
Bring her!
Eden reached out, touched Tom's forehead. Her eyes flashed; her mouth was set in an angry line. She glared at the MMF arrayed at the back of the sanctuary. They were moments away from pandemonium.
"Tom, give me your cane!"
Roxanne tried to block him, disconnect mind and body again, but she'd given him a little too much freedom. With an effort Sherard handed the cane to Eden. Instead of taking it she swiftly ran her left hand across the burled ironwood and the gold head of the lion.
"Now give it to them. Give it to them good, Tom!"
She touched his forehead again, banishing Roxanne. Tom felt all of his strength return, flowing into him like a fountainhead. He didn't have to ask Eden what to do. He turned and raised the cane and hurled it through the air over the heads of the congregation, those who had stayed in their seats weeping with hands clenched in prayer.
The cane flew, swooped, and darted, missing innocent heads and bodies. It hovered a few feet in front of the Mind-Fuckers, who backed away or tried to work their own spells, turning the hard wood into splinters or sawdust. Then the lion snarled and the cane began to flail and punish. It cracked heads and bones, chewed ears and noses in attacks too deft to defend against. As the cane did its work driving the Mind-Fuckers from the sanctuary, the crucifix came to a sudden stop in the air and trembled on its cable.
"Come on!" Eden said, pulling Sherard toward an exit at one side of the altar.
"Wait, I don't know where Bertie is!"
"She can take care of herself. I
need
one of them, Tom! Before they all get away."
"Get going, I'll find you."
"Where are youâ"
"I want my cane back. Will it come if I whistle?"
"Goof," Eden said with a fleeting smile, and she disappeared on the run.
W
hen the old woman in the wheelchair saw Eden with Sherard's cane, she recognized the special properties invested in it and came to the conclusion that things were about to go badly. Her decision to do a bunk was also a measure of how much respect she'd gained for Eden Waring in just a short time.
Without waiting for her escort to wheel her out of there, Mae cut in the mental afterburners and willed it to happen. The standard-issue hand-propelled chair did a one-eighty and went flying through the padded doors to the vestibule, picking up speed across the plush carpet while she sat like a mummy in a go-to-meeting silk dress, wighair wisping on her skull in the faint breeze of her passage, the old flesh from hairline to collarbones resembling candle dribble. Only a yellow slit of one eye provided proof that her body was slightly more alive than dead. But her mind didn't have any flies on it.
So they'd underestimated the powers Eden could summon and the others were now paying for it. She heard them bawling and calling for help as the African cane beat them mercilessly. Not for Mae, thankew. Ta-ta, darlings. The younger telepaths
did
require a setback now and then to underscore the seriousness of their education.
Some parishioners were trying to leave the church with Mae. They cluttered the wide entranceway, bleating like lost lambs. All new souls, probably, Mae assumed. Put on a little show for them, they lose what few wits they possess. And they had no regard for an old woman in a wheelchair who needed to get to her invalid coach, her two husky and devoted male nurses, have something intravenously for lunch and put on her thinking cap. She'd seen Eden Waring at work. Quite splendid, actually. But Mae had been around in one guise or another since sorcery was in its infancy. She could show that cocky kid a thing or two.
Just keeping the wheelchair in motion was a severe demand on her resources, and she couldn't manage at the same time the people who stood in her way, unless she chose to drop each in his tracks with no pulse. A crude approach. She did have a scruple or two. Mae decided to get airborne.
No sooner thought than done. Eight feet was enough elevation, she decided; the church doors were a massive fourteen feet in height. In contrast to the hip architecture the church entrance had the traditional shape of a woman's vulva:
enter and be reborn
. Both doors, fortunately, stood open. The wheelchair lifted off the carpet and flew above the heads of parishioners, giving them a more severe fright than they'd received from the whirling crucifix.
Mae exited the church and zoomed straight into the wrathful chi of Bertie Nkambe, who stood with folded arms on the walkway between the borders of late-blooming azaleas.
Mae had intended to bank to the right and land the wheelchair gracefully a block up the street where the invalid coach, double-parked, was waiting for her. Instead Mae discovered that she had no control at all. The attitude of the flying wheelchair had changed; she was headed up. And up, with a whoosh of wind in her partially paralyzed face.