This Present Darkness (7 page)

Brummel was getting impatient. “Hank, learn from the last pastor. He made the same mistake. Look what happened to him.”

“I did learn from him. I learned that all I have to do is give up, bag it, bury the truth in a drawer somewhere so it won’t offend anybody. Then I’ll be fine, everybody will like me, and we’ll all be one happy family again. Apparently Jesus was misguided. He could have kept a lot of friends by wilting and just playing politics.”

“But you want to be crucified!”

“I want to save souls, I want to convict sinners, I want to help newborn believers grow up in the truth. If I don’t do that, I’ll have a lot more to fear than you and the rest of the board.”

“I don’t call that love, Hank.”

“I love you all, Alf. That’s why I give you your medicine, and that goes especially for Lou.”

Brummel pulled a big gun. “Hank, have you considered that he could sue you?”

There was a pause at the other end.

Finally Hank answered, “No.”

“He could sue you for damages, slander, defamation of character, mental anguish, who knows what else?”

Hank drew a deep breath and called on the Lord for patience and wisdom.

“You see the problem?” he said finally. “Too many people don’t know—or don’t want to know—what the truth is anymore. We don’t stand for something, so we fall for anything, and now guys like Lou get themselves into a fog where they can hurt their own families, start their own gossip, ruin their own reputations, make themselves miserable in their sin … and then look for someone else to blame! Just who’s doing what to whom?”

Brummel only sighed. “We’ll talk it all out Friday night. You
will
be there?”

“Yes, I will. I’ll be counseling somebody and then I’ll go in for the meeting. Ever done any counseling?”

“No.”

“It gives you a real respect for the truth when you have to help clean up lives that have been based on a lie. Think about it.”

“Hank, I have other people’s wishes to think about.”

Brummel hung up loudly and wiped the sweat from his palms.

COULD ANYONE HAVE
seen him, the initial impression would not have been so much his reptilian, warted appearance as the way his figure seemed to absorb light and not return it, as if he were more a shadow than an object, a strange, animated hole in space. But this little spirit was invisible to the eyes of men, unseen and immaterial, drifting over the town, banking one way and then the other, guided by will and not wind, his swirling wings quivering in a grayish blur as they propelled him.

He was like a high-strung little gargoyle, his hide a slimy, bottomless black, his body thin and spiderlike: half humanoid, half animal, totally demon. Two huge yellow cat-eyes bulged out of his face, darting to and fro, peering, searching. His breath came in short, sulfurous gasps, visible as glowing yellow vapor.

He was carefully watching and following his charge, the driver of a brown Buick moving through the streets of Ashton far below.

Marshall got out of the
Clarion
office just a little early that day. After all the morning’s confusion it was a surprise to find Tuesday’s
Clarion
already off to the printer and the staff gearing up for Friday. A small-town paper was just about the right pace … perhaps he
could
get to know his daughter again.

Sandy. Yes sir, a beautiful redhead, their only child. She had nothing but potential, but had spent most of her childhood with an overtime
mother and a hardly-there father. Marshall was successful in New York, all right, at just about everything except being the kind of father Sandy needed. She had always let him know about it, too, but as Kate said, the two of them were too much alike; her cries for love and attention always came out like stabs, and Marshall gave her attention all right, like dogs give to cats.

No more fights, he kept telling himself, no more picking and scratching and hurting. Let her talk, let her spill how she feels, and don’t be harsh with her. Love her for who she is, let her be herself, don’t try to corral her.

It was crazy how his love for her kept coming out like spite, with anger and cutting words. He knew he was only reaching for her, trying to bring her back. It just never worked. Ah well, Hogan, try, try again, and don’t blow it this time.

He made a left turn and could see the college ahead. The Whitmore College campus looked like most American campuses—beautiful, with stately old buildings that made you feel learned just to look at them, wide, neatly-lawned plazas with walkways in carefully laid patterns of brick and stone, landscaping with rocks, greenery, statuary. It was everything a good college should be, right down to the fifteen-minute parking spaces. Marshall parked the Buick and set out in search of Stewart Hall, home of the Psychology Department and Sandy’s last class for the day.

Whitmore was a privately-endowed college, founded by some landholder as a memorial to himself back in the early twenties. From old photos of the place one could discover that some of the red-brick and white-pillared lecture halls were as old as the college itself: monuments of the past and supposedly guardians of the future.

The summertime campus was relatively quiet.

Marshall got directions from a frisbee-throwing sophomore and turned left down an elm-lined street. At the end of the street he found Stewart Hall, an imposing structure patterned after some European cathedral with towers and archways. He pulled open one of the big double doors and found himself in a spacious, echoing hallway. The close of the big door made such a reverberating thunder off the vaulted ceiling and smooth walls that Marshall thought he had disturbed every class on the floor.

But now he was lost. This place had three floors and some thirty classrooms, and he had no idea which one was Sandy’s. He started walking down the hall, trying to keep his heels from tapping too loudly. You couldn’t even get away with a burp in this place.

Sandy was a freshman this year. Their move to Ashton had been just a little late, so she was enrolled in summer classes to catch up, but all in all it had been the right point of transition for her. She was an undeclared major for now, feeling her way and taking prerequisites. Where a class in “Psychology of Self” fit into all that Marshall couldn’t guess, but he and Kate weren’t out to rush her.

From somewhere down the cavernous hall echoed the indistinguishable but well-ordered words of a lecture in progress, a woman’s voice. He decided to check it out. He moved past several classroom doors, their little black numbers steadily decreasing, then a drinking fountain, the restrooms, and a ponderously ascending stone and iron staircase. Finally he began to make out the words of the lecture as he drew near Room 101.

“… so if we settle for a simple ontological formula, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ that should be the end of the question. But
being
does not presuppose
meaning
…”

Yeah, here was more of that college stuff, that funny conglomeration of sixty-four-dollar words which impress people with your academic prowess but can’t get you a paying job. Marshall smirked to himself a little bit. Psychology. If all those shrinks could just agree for a change, it would help. First Sandy blamed her snotty attitude on a violent birth experience, and then what was it? Poor potty training? Her new thing was self-knowledge, self-esteem, identity; she already knew how to be hung up on herself—now they were teaching it to her in college.

He peeked in the door and saw a theater arrangement, with rows of seats built in steadily rising levels toward the back of the room, and the small platform in front with the professor lecturing against a massive blackboard backdrop.

“… and meaning doesn’t necessarily come from thinking, for some have said that the Self is not the Mind at all, and that the Mind actually denies the Self and inhibits Self-Knowledge. …”

Whoosh! For some reason Marshall had expected an older woman,
skinny, her hair in a bun, wearing horn-rimmed glasses with a little beady chain looped around her neck. But this one was a startling surprise, something right out of a lipstick or fashion commercial: long blonde hair, trim figure, deep, dark eyes that twitched a bit but certainly needed no glasses, horn-rimmed or otherwise.

Then Marshall caught the glint of deep red hair, and he saw Sandy sitting toward the front of the hall, listening intently and feverishly scrawling notes. Bingo! That was easy. He decided to slip in quietly and listen to the tail end of the lecture. It might give him some idea of what Sandy was learning and then they’d have something to talk about. He stepped silently through the door, and took one of the empty seats in the back.

Then it happened. Some kind of radar in the professor’s head must have clicked on. She homed in on Marshall sitting there and simply would not look away from him. He had no desire to draw any attention to himself—he was rapidly getting too much of that anyway, from the class—so he said nothing. But the professor seemed to examine him, searching his face as if it were familiar to her, as if she were trying to remember someone she had known before. The look that suddenly crossed her face gave Marshall a chill: she gave him a knifelike gaze, like the eyes of a treed cougar. He began to feel a corresponding defense instinct twisting a knot in his stomach.

“Is there something you want?” the professor demanded, and all Marshall could see were her two piercing eyes.

“I’m just waiting for my daughter,” he answered and his tone was courteous.

“Would you like to wait outside?” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

And he was out in the hall. He leaned against the wall, staring at the linoleum, his mind spinning, his senses scrambled, his heart pounding. He had no understanding of why he was there, but he was out in the hall. Just like that. How? What happened? Come on, Hogan, stop shaking and
think!

He tried to replay it in his mind, but it came back slowly, stubbornly, like recalling a bad dream. That woman’s eyes! The way they looked told him she somehow knew who he was, even though they had never met—and he had never seen or felt such hate. But it wasn’t just the eyes; it was also the fear; the steadily rising, face-draining, heart-pounding
fear that had crept into him for no reason, with no visible cause. He had been scared half to death … by nothing! It made no sense at all. He had never run or backed down from anything in his life. But now, for the first time in his life …

For the first time? The image of Alf Brummel’s gazing gray eyes flashed across his mind, and the weakness returned. He blinked the image away and took a deep breath. Where was the old Hogan gut strength? Had he left it back in Brummel’s office?

But he had no conclusions, no theories, no explanations, only derision for himself. He muttered, “So I gave in again, like a rotted tree,” and like a rotted tree he leaned against the wall and waited.

In a few minutes the door to the lecture hall burst open and students began to fan outward like bees from a hive. They ignored him so thoroughly that Marshall felt invisible, but that was fine with him for now.

Then came Sandy. He straightened up, walked toward her, started to say hello … and she walked right by! She didn’t pause, smile, return his greeting, anything! He stood there dumbly for a moment, watching her walk down the hall toward the exit.

Then he followed. He wasn’t limping, but for some reason he felt like he was. He wasn’t really dragging his feet, but they felt like lead weights. He saw his daughter go out the door without looking back. The clunk of the big door’s closing echoed through the huge hall with a ponderous, condemning finality, like the crash of a huge gate dividing him forever from the one he loved. He stopped there in the broad hall, numb, helpless, even tottering a little, his big frame looking very small.

Unseen by Marshall, small wisps of sulfurous breath crept along the floor like slow water, along with an unheard scraping and scratching over the tiles.

Like a slimy black leech, the little demon clung to him, its taloned fingers entwining Marshall’s legs like parasitic tendrils, holding him back, poisoning his spirit. The yellow eyes bulged out of the gnarled face, watching him, boring into him.

Marshall was feeling a deep and growing pain, and the little spirit knew it. This man was getting hard to hold down. As Marshall stood there in the big empty hall, the hurt, the love, the desperation began to build inside him; he could feel the tiniest remaining ember of
fight
still
burning. He started for the door.

Move,
Hogan,
move!
That’s your daughter!

With each determined step, the demon was dragged along the floor behind him, its hands still clinging to him, a deeper rage and fury rising in its eyes and the sulfurous vapors chugging out of its nostrils. The wings spread in search of an anchor, any way to hold Marshall back, but they found none.

Sandy, Marshall thought, give your old man a break.

By the time he reached the end of the hall he was nearly into a run. His big hands hit the crash bar on the door and the door flung open, slamming into the doorstop on the outside steps. He ran down the stairs and out onto the pedestrian walkway shaded by the elms. He looked up the street, across the lawn in front of Stewart Hall, down the other way, but she was gone.

The demon gripped him tighter and began to climb and slither upward. Marshall felt the first pangs of despair as he stood there alone.

“I’m over here, Daddy.”

Immediately the demon lost its grip and fell free, snorting with indignation. Marshall spun around and saw Sandy, standing just beside the door he had just burst through, apparently trying to hide from her classmates among the camelia bushes and looking very much like she was about to take him to task. Well, anything was better than losing her, Marshall thought.