Cult (12 page)

Naomi stood on the bridge, elbows along the handrail, looking downward, her complexion ashen. He walked toward her.

“A can of worms,” he said, searching for an approach that would convey his feelings and mollify her. “I feel awful about this,” he said directly. “They say it's an accident, they have witnesses….”

“Do you think that's the truth?” she asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not. It wasn't your fault,” the Sheriff said. “You did the right thing. So did I. Forget it. This had nothing to do with what you told me.”

“If I hadn't betrayed them would this have happened?”

“They knew.”

“Holmes?”

“I'd bet on it. No one can be trusted around here.”

“Goes for me, too, I guess,” she whispered. “I betrayed them.”

Her self-accusation softened him.

“I wouldn't be that hard on yourself. I told you. It wasn't your fault.”

“I'll have to tell them.”

“I wouldn't. Not now.”

A scream rent the air. Barney had grabbed Holmes and they were scuffling. The Sheriff's men had him quickly in hand, separating them. Two of them held Barney, who futilely resisted his containment, snarling like an animal.

Holmes brushed back his hair and patted his clothes, trying to restore himself to a semblance of his former dignity.

“We made him a substantial settlement,” he said. “It offended him.”

“Blood money. They kill her and want to pay me off.”

“It was very generous. There is still the boy to think of. It's perfectly legal and honorable. A practical consideration that shows the compassion inherent in the principles of the Glorification Church.” His pomposity was galling.

“Bullshit,” Barney snarled, calming. He pointed a finger at Holmes. “We still have our own debt to settle.”

“It's been settled,” Holmes said, showing no sign of nervousness. “A donation to the church. In your late wife's name.”

Barney's tongue seemed to freeze in his throat. His body arched, then collapsed in the men's arms as if all his bones and muscles had turned to jelly. The men dragged him to the Sheriff's car and propped him beside Naomi, who sat impassively beside him. They drove back to his office in silence.

Back at his headquarters, the Sheriff found that O'Hara and Roy were asleep in one of the holding cells. He'd deal with them later.

“There's a motel on my way home,” he said. “We'll talk in the morning.”

He looked at his watch. It was nearly two. He could think of nothing to say to them, no real word of honest comfort. In the brightness of the morning sun, Harrigan would have to face the deep chasm of his lost life, Naomi would have to deal with her oppressive guilt, and he'd have to figure out how to keep his own balance.

What he had done was merely warn them, abort the snatch. A simple phone call.

“We know,” Jeremiah had told him.

“How?”

“We have our sources. We have no intention of being part of this.”

So Holmes, the loyal retainer, had played his own game. Holmes was a whore.

The Sheriff's mind was too fatigued to confront that now. What he needed was Gladys, his rock of reassurance.

He registered them in separate rooms and left them at the motel, relieved of their oppressive silent accusations. Deep in his mind, he sensed some mysterious ordination, as if events had been manipulated by a force determined to bedevil him.

Yet even when he crawled into the warm high bed that he and Gladys had always shared during their married life, he could not fully offer his body to the security of sleep. He knew what he feared most of all.

Gladys stirred beside him. “You okay, Tee?”

“Hell no,” he murmured, reaching out to feel a warm haunch where her nightgown had rolled up. It occurred to him that he was the only one of all the others who had crawled safely back to a warm, familiar nest. He felt heavy, leaden, weighted down by something he could not quite grasp.

More than twenty years ago, they had come away from the dead coal towns of West Virginia. Their escape had been miraculous. For redneck hillbillies they had built a good life here at the country's edge, safe and snug. “Got us our dignity back,” Gladys would say. In poverty and hopelessness, there was no dignity, only despair, reflected in the burned-out Appalachian hills.

Now it had come back to him in a new way, and he could smell the oppressive dust of failure again, a dust as evil as the one from which they had fled. This failure, too, seemed to have come out of the ground, putrefying everything, creating its own empty-eyed army, like the miners he used to see crawling along the old mountain roads.

Sheriff T. Clausen Moore
, he mocked to himself. Once the title had been as royal as a king's. Now the crown's glitter had paled. It had turned out to be nothing more than papier-mâché.

“Could lose my badge,” he whispered to Gladys. Most of all she feared the finances. Often she had said, “No more white bread and lard spread. I'd choke on that, Tee.”

“I'm afraid, Gladys,” he said. “If I let go now, we could be in trouble. Our boys got their dreams.” One of them, Teddy, the oldest, wanted to be a doctor. The others were also developing expensive ambitions.

“Wouldn't sell my soul for myself,” he muttered. Usually, the thought could absolve him from all blame.

“God provides,” Gladys said.

The hell he does
, the Sheriff thought. It had taken him years and distance to expel West Virginia's old fire and brimstone of the itinerant preachers who promised salvation for a bowl of soup, performing incantations that would never leave his memory, however hard he had tried to drown them with ridicule.

“Yeah. And if God ain't good, we're all in trouble,” he said, knowing in his heart that Father Glory's sad, dead-eyed kids could not possibly get grace from a loving Lord, if there was one.

“The Harrigan boy all right?” he asked.

“Wants his mom. He woke up and I held him while he cried himself to sleep. Perry said she drowned.”

Perry was his deputy.

“An accident,” he heard himself say.

She turned toward him and started to knead his muscles. Her touch always soothed him. She was a big woman, amply endowed, encased in tight flesh, a warm, soft presence.

“You'll always be my littlest boy,” she told him often. They had known each other since they were kids. Even then, there were no sharp edges to her. “A simple country girl, that's me,” she had said. He had never known another woman, nor had he ever felt the desire to explore.

“Leave all the bad out there, Tee.” Her universe was him and the boys, and he had never let her down. The outside world was ugly, full of predators, killers, thieves, liars. You didn't bring any of that into Gladys' house. Other women had special needs, hidden desires, secret dissatisfactions. Not Gladys. Other men, he had observed, yearned for something different. Not him. When her presence billowed around him, he was snug in a safe harbor.

“What's right for us may not actually be right, Gladys.”

Kneeling over Charlotte, he remembered that he wished he had closed her eyelids, hidden her dead stare. Naomi had blamed herself and he had acquiesced, hid his own guilt.

“Wanna good one, Tee?” Gladys said. “Clear your mind.”

He felt her caresses begin, her tongue sweet and velvet.

“Feel good?”

Anybody took his Gladys away, he'd go through the fires of hell. He imagined his loss. And Harrigan's.

“I can't keep my mind on it, Gladys.”

Gently, he edged her away. There was no way to clear his mind ever again. He had swept the leavings of his rage into some secret vault within himself. There didn't seem to be room for any more of it. He had always known that what they did out there in the camp was against some higher law, some irrevocable law of nature. Some day men would catch on and then a new law would find its way into the books.

It will pass
, he had told himself. But it wasn't passing.
One day, they'll have us all.
He felt himself slipping into the pit of sleep.

In his dream he was wallowing in a gelatinous mass of squid-like eyes, rolling around him, smothering him unblinking, oily with a stench so overwhelmingly foul that it jolted him awake again.

“That was no accident,” he gasped.

“You all right, Tee?”

He reached for the telephone, pressing the pre-programmed number for his office. “Wake O'Hara,” he told the man on duty. “I'm coming over.”

Naomi lay on her belly next to Roy on a high knoll. They had a commanding view of the road, which snaked from the main highway. Roy surveyed the landscape, training the telescopic sight of his rifle on the road, the butt against his cheek, the flat of his large black thumb caressing the sight's metal.

“Lousy sun,” he grumbled.

They were level with its rising face, the big blinding globe rising over the hills, shooting fresh spears of light over the valley. Roy, shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand, squinted ahead.

“We'll get a clear view when they move lower.”

She sensed his enjoyment of the tension. She could tell he liked guns.

Boys like guns
, she observed to herself, her generalizations a strategy to squelch any real analysis, to reverse her traditional thought patterns.
If they're so big on controlling minds, then I'll control mine
, she told herself firmly, shivering in the morning chill. The sun was brightening, but not yet warming.

If they were caught Naomi's police report would include “kidnapping,” and she wondered if she'd be at a loss to adequately explain it.

“You'd have to have lived it,” she told her imaginary interrogator.

She had lived it all right, taken the long journey from reason, to taking action due to guilt, then remorse and contrition. She had deliberately participated in a revolution against her self.

“Your choice,” O'Hara had told her.

“No choice,” she had answered pugnaciously. “Not after last night.”

For the remainder of last night, she had been in her hotel room, naked and lying on her bed, afraid to turn off the light.

The situation was peeling away everything that protected her, layer by later. It had eaten away at her skin, her bones, and now it was tearing at her vital organs, her innards. She accepted the pain of it. Welcomed it, in fact.

What she needed most of all was to face the thing that had attacked her value system, sprung all the circuits. Being in charge of herself was the bedrock of her body, her mind, her being. She knew that a human being had the right to direct his or her own destiny. She had given that up and followed her guilt, and look where that had led her.

She had heard his soft knock and had pulled on a robe and opened the door, without asking who was there. Instead it was O'Hara, leaning against the jamb in his mirrored glasses. He shuffled in and she got back on her bed.

“I thought you were in custody.”

“I was, indeed. Roy and I. We were released under our own recognizance.”

“The Sheriff must trust you then.”

“More than you think.”

Slumping in a chair beside the bed, he removed his glasses, as if he were revealing himself. She did not speculate how he got there. Perhaps he was an apparition.

“I know what guilt is,” he said with surprising gentleness. “I've been picking yours up all night.”

“How could you possibly know?” she asked, then nodded. Of course, the Sheriff had told him. It occurred to her suddenly that they were now allied with the Sheriff in some capacity.

“I've got hundreds of dead souls on my conscience. From when I was a Glory.”

“What about dead bodies?” She felt a sudden tremor of fear.

“My contract was to kill minds.”

“The guilt won't go away,” she said.

“It never does.” He paused. “But you might work it through. Make moves. Checkmate it. Like me.”

“You?”

“I told you. I've ruined more lives….” He shook his head and emitted a low, chuckling trill. “I was the best they had. Father Glory's golden boy. I made Jeremiah look like an amateur. I was ‘Zachariah, the prophet of evil.' My hands will never be clean. Never.”

“But how is it possible?” she asked, studying his face.

“You mean how did I get involved in the first place?”

“Isn't that always the key question?”

He averted his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. “You really want to know?”

“Yes. I do.”

“It's not as dramatic as you might think. Actually, the way people fall into this trap is… more or less… the same story.”

“Since I'm in this,” she said, “I am sort of entitled.”

He did not smile. He stood up and turned away, paced for a few moments as if assembling his thoughts, then began to talk.

“Awhile back my parents had died. I lost my job. I had just broken up with my girl. I was lonely, on edge. I felt lousy, rootless. I went to Seattle, roamed around. Did drugs. Got busted. Then these two lovely ladies approached me. Man, they told me I was the greatest thing on wheels. I needed that. I felt like shit. Next thing you know, they were working on my guilt. ‘Your life is shit. Do something worthwhile.' They told me they had this project that helped mankind—fed the poor, healed the sick. ‘Come hear about it,' they urged, throwing this trip on me, this burst of sweet, soothing affection. At the time, that's what I needed most of all. Before I knew it, I was at that camp. Then, pow. I was in it up to my neck.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“At that time you were weak-minded.”

“Yes. The thing is they caught me at just the right moment. Everybody has just the right moment. Especially if they're wandering alone. Alone!” He shook his head. “I used to do it so well. I could pick a good prospect out of a crowd, could smell them out. It gets easy. You look for the open ones, the searchers.”

He shook his head, then started to pace again.

“Hell,” he said turning toward her suddenly. “Aren't we all searching for the same damned thing?”

“Are we?”

She noted that his pose of certainty had disintegrated. Like her, the mask of his convictions had hidden his humanity. Yes, she knew, we are all searchers. But for what? She felt a sudden clarity of insight. It is the search to escape loneliness, to find comfort in living. To be one with the rest of mankind. To be touched by others, recognized, appreciated, loved. The awful reality is that we emerge out of the womb alone. All our lives we must search for the cure for the pain of aloneness. She felt a great rush of emotion as she discovered these thoughts.

“How did you get out?” she asked.

“Roy. I saved his life once. Actually, he was trying to mug me and I decked him. The cops wanted to bring him in. He was a three-time loser and this would have put him away for life. I said it was just a misunderstanding, that he was a buddy of mine. So he owed me this favor. One day, he caught me on the street. Knocked me cold. Then he had me deprogrammed. Simple as that. Big bastard. Just returned the favor. Now we're in it together. Sucked in. Like a whirlpool. That's my life now. Saving others.”

“Who might not really want to be saved.”

“But they do. In their hearts, they're screaming to be let out.”

“Zachariah,” she repeated. “Yeah. Zachariah. He's the one, according to the Glory Bible, ‘The Book of Glory,' that made it with Mary. It's like they ripped out all the pages of the Bible, put it in a shredder, then pieced it back together their own way. Oh, they do have it down. Freedom of religion protected by the Constitution. How about that.” Naomi thought for a moment. “You think he, Father Glory, believes in what he's preaching?”

“Yeah, I think he believes it or has come to believe it. Sometimes people who realize their ambitions or dreams begin to believe that some higher force has guided them to the pinnacle. Who knows? But he has built an organization under the guise of religion and he's figured out a way to get people to believe it implicitly and keep on believing it. His goal is to keep them from not believing, which means he has to keep them in a world in which they, he, the big bastard, holds all the strings. ‘Do as I say and you'll make it to eternal salvation. If not, I'll watch you rot in hell. Scares the shit out of people.

“You sure make it sound creepy, O'Hara.”

“It is creepy.”

“Like I told you. If I really wanted to I could do it to you. Just lend me your head and give me your time.”

“Never.”

“Never say never. Some did get away. But you wouldn't. Hell, you're raw meat. A do-gooder. That makes you halfway there. The do-gooders were always the easy ones to turn.”

Despite her doubts, she let his comment pass. Nor did she wish to put it to the test.

“Is it as simple to get them out of it?” she asked.

“Harder out than in. They've been programmed by experts. I've got to crash through the barriers that have been put in place. It takes some doing.” He paused. “The fact is that all of us have been programmed by others to believe what we believe. Even you. You've been programmed to believe that people can't be programmed to do things that are against the grain, against standards of morality and behavior that are, in your mind, compassionate and good. Believe me, your mind is not as open and free as you think it is. Might be some of the things you think are right are bullshit.”

“Maybe. That's why I'd like to keep an open mind about everything.”

“Doesn't seem too open to me.”

“I'm willing to be convinced.”

“Okay. Then come with us, Naomi,” he whispered. “Let me show you.”

“Show me what?”

“We're going to split open Charlotte's sister. And Amos.”

The word choice frightened her. It suggested terrible acts of violence.

“Deprogram,” he said. “An ugly word, I know. I prefer to call what the Glories do deprogramming. What I do is try to bring them back into the real world. That's what we're going to do to Charlotte's sister… Mary, they called her. Her real name, you must know, is Susan. And then Amos.”

“Are you going to get them to consent to this?”

“We're not, Naomi. We're going to take them.”

“Kidnap them.”

“Just as we intended to do with Charlotte.”

She was appalled by his assertion.

“After what we've just been through?”

He observed her for a long moment.

“Do you truly believe that Charlotte died by accident?” It was a question she did not want to confront and her hesitation told him what was self-evident. She hadn't made up her mind.

“Because the testimony of Charlotte's sister and Amos is suspect, and we're entitled to know the absolute truth,” he snapped.

“And if they told us the truth?”

“Happens like that? Not there. Nobody gets up in the middle of the night for something as simple as a walk. Nobody. In that place? And no two witnesses ever tell the same story in exactly the same way. It's an obvious cover-up. You don't know these people. I do….” His words trailed off. “Been there, done that.”

“Murder….” Her voice shut down.

“'Nuff said.”

“You really think that Charlotte….”

“We want the witnesses to tell the truth. We won't be able to get at that until their minds have been released, until they've been deprogrammed.”

“Have you considered the risks, O'Hara?”

“Completely.”

“If things go wrong….”

“I've been given forty-eight hours.”

“Given?”

“Sheriff Moore. He's in on it. He's setting it up.”

“And you trust him?”

“Yes, I trust him,” O'Hara said. “I often get help from the most unlikely of people. It's not uncommon. We were once adversaries, so we know each other. I believe he's fed up with turning a blind eye, not doing his job. In everybody's heart, they know what bad is, and the Sheriff has been suppressing those instincts. He's unwilling to believe them anymore. So he's bet his career on my nose. He's given me forty-eight hours.” He shook his head. “It's a gamble. Forty-eight hours could be too short a time. But I've done it before.”

Still, she caught his uncertainty again. It made him more human than she had imagined he could be.

“Sometimes I can't break through. No matter how hard I try.”

Things were going too far again. Despite the Sheriff's consent O'Hara had invited her to participate in another very illegal act.

“How can you trust me? I've already betrayed you once.”

She hadn't meant to reveal that. He showed no shock at her revelation.

“The Sheriff told you?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Your intuition's wrong, but it probably didn't matter. They apparently knew. My guess is that they didn't want the hassle.”

“Does Barney know about my involvement?”

“He blames himself. Not you.”

“And you? Who do you blame, O'Hara?”

“Them. Always them.”

She began to speak, but O'Hara interrupted her.

“Don't be so hard on yourself, Naomi. Believe me, I know the power of guilt. The trick is to channel it in a positive direction. I'm offering you that chance. It's your call.”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “The risks. For you. If things go wrong, they could put you away and toss the key.”

“What's one more risk?” he said, snickering.

“And Barney?”

“After what they did to his wife, Barney is gung-ho.”

“Will it bother him to have me along?”

“Will it bother you—that's the question.”

“Why do you need me?”

“Good question, Naomi. We need to convince people like you that it is possible to brainwash human beings into mental slavery and force them to do unspeakable acts.”

“People like me?”

“The self-righteous ones who believe in the sanctity of human will, who believe in freedom and morality, who think that every human being is essentially good, the idealists. Without you, we will all eventually lose and the bad guys will get away with murder. So that one day you can help us spread the word about what is really going on.”

“Isn't that a bit strong?”

“What you need is a demonstration.”