It started to descend around the little girl.
Casey looked up. Jeff saw the hoop's reflection, bright in her teary eyes.
The blazing ring dropped to the ground, surrounding the little girl, enclosing her like the magic circle of a satanic magician. She screamed.
"Stop it!" Casey cried. "Leave her alone. She tried to help me. She doesn't understandâ"
"QUIET!" McCurdy roared. "She's bad. She's useless."
Then the circle rose again, leaving a scorched ring in the wet gravel. As it passed over the little girl a second time, she seemed to catch fire. Searing threads of glowing silver encircled her body, wrapping her almost completely in a luminous cocoon. She screamed and bucked as the fiery strands sank, one after another, into her flesh. Her arms flattened against her sides, her fingers melted into her thighs as if she were made of molten wax. Her thrashing legs jerked straight, fused together. Jeff thought he could see motion beneath her rippling skin. Bones warping and re-forming. Muscles repositioning. The rigid line of her spine softened. Her shoulders slackened, her neck retracted into her torso.
Before his eyes, Jeffrey Chandler saw a little girl transformed into a four-foot white worm with a human head. The body twitched like a landed fish.
The light was gone.
Jeff sat on the ground beside his daughter. Rain beat around them. He felt empty of emotion; terror filled the void. He didn't know what to say or do. His mind threw useless explanations at him: a trick, a drug, hypnosis.
Something bright tore across the sky. A fireball of dazzling brilliance. Thunder crashed in its wake.
McCurdy didn't seem to notice. He spoke softly, sympathetically. "I know how you feel," he said. "You are overcome. There's no precedent for this in your experience. I understand that, Jeffrey. It is always this way when God reveals his power to man."
Jeff held his sobbing daughter. "Casey, Casey," he cooed. He didn't know what else to do. If he did nothing he would go mad. McCurdy's raving frightened him, but nowhere near as much as the demonstration he had just witnessed.
McCurdy went on. "Soon both of you will change, too. Oh, it'll be nothing quite so . . . physical. You'll be like me. You'll be one with the Light. Before, when I was merely a man, I could close my eyes and see a darkness blacker than any night. Now, I see nothing but the Light, everything is illuminated. At all times. Even when my eyes are closed.
"Soon, Jeffrey, soon the Light will be yours to control, to command. We can send it out to shine on whomever we please. We can use it to show people what no one else can see. We can use it to create. Or, when it's essential, we can destroy."
Jeff thought of Karen. Though he'd never wish her into this mad situation, she'd know how to deal with McCurdy's insanity.
Then a terrifying thought occurred to him: Was it really insanity?
The mind-numbing demonstration suggested part of McCurdy's ravings were on the level. God, he didn't know. He just didn't know. Fear immobilized him, made it impossible to think. Suddenly Jeff was thick-tongued; speaking was an effort.
"Ss-Skipp, listen. It's something about that computer. You're too involved with it. Too wrapped up. You believe it's capable of things it simply cannot do. You thinkâ"
"It can do them! It can do what I tell it to do! Are you too feebleminded to believe your own eyes? Do I have to give you another demonstration?" McCurdy stomped over to them, towering above Casey and Jeff.
The sky brightened behind him with a slash of lightning.
In a moment McCurdy's angry face softened, he bent down to where he could look Jeff in the eye.
"Try to see it like this. The computer is for reference. Just that. It is no more magical than a library in a priest's home. It gives us access to more information than any one man could acquire in a hundred lifetimes. Somehow, through the goodness of the Lord, I am linked with that infinite body of knowledge." He chuckled. "You might say I'm a remote work station with a direct line to all the learning of the past. Think of it, Jeffrey! At no time in the past has man ever been able to come so close to God."
"But, Skipp, can't you see you're hurting people? Look what you did to that little girl. And Casey. Look at her! Would God wantâ"
"How dare you suggest what God wants? You don't know what God wants, Jeffrey. So you must believe me. That little girl was nothing. She was an animal without a soul. God doesn't care about her. The soulless ones are here to serve. To use and to serve. To become examples."
"No!"
"Jeffrey, accept it." Then in the most companionable of tones, "You are one of the select. And I must help you to understand that. Before today, man's lifetime has never been long enough to attain a true union with the divine. Think of all who have tried, think of the different pathways they took to discover the truth. Imagine the generations of psychics, occultists, magicians and mediums, Egyptian priests, African shamans, Indian medicine men.
"And think of our Christian holy men, the saints and martyrs of the Christian Church, each struggling through a lifetime of self-denial and discipline. And in the end, each gained no more than a fragment of the wisdom and the power. Maybe enough to tempt, but never enough to satisfy. Only enough to inspire other searchers, but that's all.
"Perhaps the lucky among them died possessing just one infinitesimal morsel of truth, a single tiny grain of sand out of all the beaches and deserts of the world."
Thunder crashed.
"But each did an important job, don't you see? Each played a minuscule but essential role in the acquisition of that boundless knowledge and awareness for which I am now the overseer.
"And that's my contribution, Jeffrey, you see? The computer. The synthesis. It was I who enabled. I made it all possible. So in a senseâalthough none of them ever came to know itâthey were all working for me. For thousands of years they've been working for me. Exploring, meditating, searching, researching, all the time acquiring data that only now can be processed. They were working for me just as you are working for me. Just as everyone will happily work for a man who can perform miracles in the service of the Lord."
"Butâ"
"How? Is that what you want to know? I am in a psychic link with the computer. I control it from wherever I am. I no longer need the keyboard." McCurdy touched his index finger to his forehead. "It's all in here. My gift from God. It's like magic, Jeffrey, but it's miracles." McCurdy's lunatic expression was illuminated in a strobe of lightning.
Rain splattered down unrelenting. Bright comets zipped across the black sky.
Jeff felt a pressure behind his eyes. It made him fear he was going to cry. He looked down at his daughter's face as she hid her eyes, sobbing against his chest. He looked across the yard at the twitching white monstrosity that moments ago had been a little girl.
And he looked at McCurdy.
"Wh-what do you want with me, Skipp?"
F
ather Sullivan went into the church for a few minutes of prayer while Karen worked with Alton Barnes.
Alone, kneeling before the candlelit altar, the priest's thoughts kept returning to Father Mosely's journal, a journal written on the pages of a Bible, a journal that gave the only insight into horrors the old priest had endured during his final days in Hobston.
A maverick suspicion floated into Sullivan's mind: Was Father Mosely's confrontation with the preternatural a precursor to what was going on at this moment? Could it be that everythingâincluding all the terrors of the last few daysâhad started right here in St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church some ten years ago?
The church quaked under a new assault of thunder. The stained-glass windows glowed rainbow colors as lightning flashed and fireballs flew. Candles in red glass containers flickered, projecting dancing crimson phantoms against the plaster walls. Above Sullivan's head, timbers groaned.
Shifting his weight on his knees, Sullivan rested his forehead on his hand. Even as he concentrated, mouthing the words of a prayer, his mind persistently returned to the cycle of incredible events. And, damn it, he felt as if he'd been hurled right into the center of them. It was as ifâhe had to admit itâthere was some pattern behind it all.
Had some grand design returned him to Mosely's church to battle Mosely's demon? Had he inadvertently followed that closely in the old man's footsteps?
Dear God, deliver us
, he mouthed.
Dear God, protect us.
A banging on the church door startled him. Five heavy thumps, then silence.
Sullivan stood, genuflected, and hurried down the central aisle to the double doors. They were not locked, he knew, and for a moment he wondered if he should lock them. Now.
BAM-BAM-BAM!
He touched the cold metal latch, pulled the heavy door open enough to see a short man in a glistening yellow slicker standing in the rain. Lightning lit the sky behind him.
Without waiting to be asked, the man slipped through the opening and into the church.
"Got a message for the priest," he said. His eyes were wide; he looked distressed.
"I . . . I'm Father Sullivan."
"Name's Boudreau." He ran his tongue around his lips. "Ah fella told me to come in an' see you. . . . Christ, she's really pourin', ain't she?"
"It's an unbelievable storm. Why don't you come into the house, Mr. Boudreau. Take off those wet things and dry off. Can I get you something hot? Coffee, maybe?"
"I dunno." Furtive eyes explored the church interior. "Maybe we oughtta get our talking done first. Somethin' tells me I mighta waited too long as it is."
"Certainly, Mr. Boudreau. You say you have a message for me?"
A moment's hesitation. "Fella says you oughtta go to the mountain."
Sullivan shook his head. "W-what?"
"Don't mean nothin' to me," Mr. Boudreau said. He was slipping out of his wet slicker as he talked. Water dripped to the floor, pooling at the men's feet. "I kinda figured you'd know what it's all about."
Sullivan smiled uncertainly, not knowing what to make of his late-night caller. "Maybe you should start from the beginning, Mr. Boudreau. Who sent you to see me?"
"Think he mighta been an angel," Mr. Boudreau said, and proceeded with the story of Mr. Christopher, the shining man with the golden hair and beard.
Sullivan listened with rapt attention. Not long ago the same story would have sounded incredible to him. Now it had an uncomfortable ring of consistency, if not exactly truth. It was no more strange than the fantastic light show that was going on in the skies. In fact, something told Sullivan the two events might well be related.
"He says to me, 'Ronald, you're the one I want to bring my message to the world.' Says he's got good news and that there's a new time comin'. Then he says, 'Go to church, go find the priest'âmusta meant youâ'and tell the priest to come to the mountain.' That's just what he said. Weird, eh?"
"It is a bit . . . out of the ordinary. You actually saw him disappear? Vanish?"
"There one second. Gone the next. As God is my witness."
Sullivan searched the man's face for a hint of deceit, trickery, or madness. "Tell me something, Mr. Boudreau.
"Yes sir?"
"Why did you come here at this hour? I mean, why here, to the church, rather than to the house? How did you know I was in here?"
"I just done what he told me to do."
"And then he said, 'Come to the mountain'?"
"Yup. Jes' like that."
"Did he say which mountain?"
"He said you'd know, you'd understand."
Sullivan dropped heavily into the nearest pew. Suddenly he realized how weary he was. He'd been watching passively as unbelievable event piled on top of unbelievable event like the performance of a magic show. Which events were true? Which were misleading? Which should he choose to believe?
He closed his eyes, uncertain. Was Mr Boudreau's message some kind of test of his faith?
Of course, such angelic visitations were known to happen. The church was still debating the recent events in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, while other alleged holy visions were reported regularly in the Russian village of Grushevo and various places around the U.S. It sounded so fantastic! Could an angel really have appeared to this man?
An angel . . . ?
If so, then Mr. Boudreau had delivered the answer Karen and Sullivan were searching for: they should go to the mountain where Jeff and his daughter were waiting.
But if the angel were imaginary, or the work of forces other than divine, thenâ
Then what?
Sullivan didn't know. A trap, maybe?
In all his years as a priest and as a psychologist, he had often encountered people with religious delusions, people who heard voices, saw visions, suffered intrusions both demonic and divine. In every case the visions had been psychological aberrations, not genuine religious experiences.
This, however, might be very different. There was no time to test or investigate, but he hoped he had not become too much of a skeptic to recognize the real thing when he saw it. It was a question of faith, after all. Tonight, moments ago, he had asked God for guidance. Mr. Boudreau's arrival was the most prompt answer to a prayer that Sullivan had ever experienced.