All Seeing Eye (24 page)

“I’m Miz Susannah. This is my place. Can I help you gentlemen? You boys need some rooms?”

A curious voice came from behind the screen
door. There was also a mop of tightly curled silver hair, amber-brown eyes magnified by thick glasses, skin as dark as aged mahogany, and a smile as cheerful as an entire field of those front-yard daisies.

“Ma’am.” Hector moved in to distract her while I stripped off my glove and put a casual hand against the wood of the house. It was painted a brilliant blue, the pure color of a summer sky. It was the color of a kid’s playhouse, not what you would put on a real house, but it worked. It was nice. It made me think of a childhood I’d never had—candy apples and fresh white sheets drying in a spring breeze, barking dogs and sleeping cats, lemonade and new clothes for school. The American dream. I hadn’t had it, but it was right there. Year after year, happy people came and went, and the house was always that candy apple, sweet on sweet with every bite.

Until I took a bite of 1853.

It hadn’t been a chunk of firewood. It had been an axe handle. But it had done the job. First, dear old Dad. Dear old tightfisted Dad who never gave a nickel when a penny would do. And Mother, who whined and whined until you thought you’d go deaf from her pathetic bleats. She was the one who’d gone deaf, though—deaf, dumb, and blind, and no whining bitch deserved it more. The satisfaction that had come from beating her gray head over and over and over—

With the taste of a savage contentment not my
own still in my mouth, I pulled my hand back and put my glove back on with quick, methodical movements. “Bingo. Can we go now?”

Fujiwara’s soft, faintly accented voice asked politely, “You actually did see it? You know it was murder even though no bodies were recovered?”

“I saw it. And you people didn’t include what kind of farm it was in the file. It was a pig farm. He fed Mom and Pop to the pigs. Twenty minutes later, they were being digested. The perfect crime.” I amended, “For a drunken idiot.”

Miz Susannah remained behind her screen door, her mouth a perfect O, showing a good dental plan and sturdy dental adhesive. Then she croaked like an unsettled crow, “You … you boys want some lemonade … and cookies?” She started to close the main door. “For the road?”

Fujiwara brightened. “I would very much like some lemonade.”

Thackery gave him a withering glare, then turned to clatter down the porch stairs and back to the second car.

“No lemonade for you, Fuji,” I said sympathetically, because I wouldn’t have minded some lemonade and cookies, either. But when I turned back to see what my chances were, Miz Susannah seemed to have had enough of our weirdness and slammed the thick wooden door behind the screen. I heard a bolt slide into place.

Making friends wherever we went.

Two days, ten misses, and one hit later, I was standing at Job’s Quarry, my hand wrapped around Charlie’s keys.

It was Job as in the biblical Job. The preacher had been Brother Job, and the town was the Trials as in the trials of Job. 1840. It hadn’t been much of a town or much of a cult. Ten gullible families and a scattering of tents that would do them until cabins could be built. But purification came first. You had to prove yourself righteous enough to receive God’s word through Brother Job and to live in the Trials under the same prosperity the original Job had come to know once God and Satan had stopped dicking around with his life, killing his family, and giving him boils and leprosy to see just how far faith would go.

Show me a horror movie that equals that, and I’ll pay you fifty bucks.

Ten families plus Brother Job’s disciples came to about eighty people raising the canvas town of the Trials. At the end, there was only one to abandon it.

Job left the bloated, floating bodies of the faithful—and they were faithful, suicidally faithful—and wandered through the woods, shouting to heaven of his trust in the Almighty. He stayed faithful, too, despite the loss of all of his followers, despite the hunger, the coming winter chill. The walking, raving embodiment of faith … right up to when he ended up as a bear’s last snack before hibernation. When those jaws fastened around his neck, ripping and crushing, that faith vanished like a magician’s rabbit.

The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

Then again, who’s to say the hungry bear didn’t get
its
prayer answered?

I stopped staring at the blazing orange water and turned my head to see Fujiwara eating a sausage-and-biscuit sandwich he must’ve brought from the cafeteria. “They put blood in their biscuits.”

He gaped at me. “Ex-excuse me?”

“Job’s followers. As the wine was the blood of Jesus, Job followed in his footsteps and sliced his arm every morning when the women made biscuits. Drip drip.” I smiled cheerfully. “Smart for a psycho. He combined the blood and body, wine and host into one. Thrifty bastard.”

Fuji dropped the sandwich onto the ground and hurried to Thackery’s side thirty feet down the quarry beach. The machine to enhance Charlie’s energy and pull him through the ether to dissipate was still at what they considered the best bet: Cannibal
Caverns. But Thackery wanted to see me at work if, by random chance, Charlie tried to come through here. At least, that’s what he said, but I saw something needful behind his blank face. There was something more to wanting to watch me work, not that Thackery was sharing the why of it. I’d find out sooner or later, one way or the other.

“Why did you do that to Fuji? He’s harmless.” The question broke into my thoughts and held exasperation, if not much surprise.

“Because, Hector, he feels sorry for me being dragged into this by blackmail but has his nose up Thackery’s ass anyway. He doesn’t have a brother to free, like you. He
does
have a shred of conscience but no excuse for ignoring it. Besides, and this goes for all of you, if you’re going to benefit from what I can do, you should get to experience some of the downside. Although, trust me, hearing about it sure as hell isn’t the same as living it.” I gave Hector a sideways glance. “If I could give this
gift
to you and spend the rest of my life digging ditches, then maybe I would get a little God in my life, because it’d be a damn miracle.”

“You might get part of your wish.” Hector folded his arms as he kept his eyes on the still water. “This is one of the few sites rumored to show a genuine ether recording of the event. People throughout the years claimed to have seen Brother Job at work, always as the sun sets.”

“Yeah?” That had been when the baptisms took
place. “Seeing it isn’t the same as feeling it, but I’ll cross my fingers and take what I can get.”

In the very next moment, get it I did.

And a lot more.

I heard one of the soldiers, unarmed as they’d been at the mill, for all the good that had done, yell in shock and fear or a damn good imitation of both. He was standing on the high rock wall on the other side of the quarry, opposite where we stood seventy-five feet down on the narrow strip of gravel and red mud beach. I looked where he was pointing, to see a white blur under the water glowing with the fire of a descending sun. I crouched and put my one ungloved hand fisted around Charlie’s keys against the ground. The blur rose, and the body of a woman surfaced. Her arms were spread, hovering on the top of the water like the wings of a bird. Her hair was black, I knew, although I couldn’t see it. It was covered by a white scarf. A woman’s hair is the jewel of God. Let no man but her husband see it.

“Rachel Adams. She was fifteen.” I knew I said it because I felt my lips move, but I didn’t hear the words. She drowned. Brother Job baptized his followers until their life and their sins fled their bodies. And if God deemed them worthy, he would return that life to them and send the sins to hell. Funny, no one proved quite good enough for God to step in. Job was mighty disappointed.
Mighty
disappointed, as he and his disciples held the men and
women of the Trials under the quarry water. Even more disappointed when he himself held the head of his last disciple under and that man proved too sinful to return as well.

Another body floated up, dark pants, white shirt, open eyes reflecting the bleeding rays of the sun.

“Adam Jacobson. Nineteen years.”

Then another.

“Joseph Bevins. Eight.”

Another.

“Mary Bevins. Five.” She held a doll, a rag doll in a pink dress.

There was more shouting, men who’d seen war horrified by the virtual photo of a long-dead little girl. Only an image out of death’s memory album revealed for a moment, and their brains short-circuited.

Walk a mile in my shoes? They couldn’t walk even a second.

“Mary Bevins. Five,” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the small spot of pink. “Lungs filling with water as she screamed for her mommy.”

Pink doll. Pink shoe. A wide quarry or a narrow well, was there any difference?

Mary Bevins. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, until Brother Job said nursery rhymes were the work of the devil. Mary, Mary, whose mommy was right there, her hand with Brother Job’s, holding her little girl under the water for God.

Mary and Tess. Five years old, screaming to be saved, but no one listened.

The pink patch bobbed in the water. It wasn’t the dress on a doll. It was a shoe, a pink shoe. Tessie’s shoe. The floating form wasn’t a little girl named Mary. It was my sister. It was Tess, and this time I wouldn’t be too late. I lunged into the water after her. I took two long steps and dove into the water. I was with Tess in seconds. I wrapped an arm around her to lift her up, lift her to the air, lift her to life.

My arm passed through her. I tried again with both arms and the same result. I was there, right there, and again I couldn’t save her. Just as I couldn’t all those years ago.

Another set of arms wrapped around me this time, the grip solid and unbreakable.

“It’s not her, Jackson. It’s not Tess.”

I was being yanked back through the water as I fought.

“Shit, I’m a goddamn idiot,” Hector swore savagely at himself. “There was no way I shouldn’t have known this could happen.”

Not Tess.

It couldn’t be Tess.

Tess was gone.

I wasn’t reliving the life of Job. I was reliving my own.

The dying rays of the sun shifted, and I saw my sister change into a girl with soaked brown curls and wide-open gray eyes before she disappeared, leaving only the waves I’d made in her wake. All of the bodies disappeared with her, and that’s when
the yelling turned to screaming. And the screaming turned to gurgling and praises to God on high.

“God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

It echoed over and over again from four different throats as the last ray of sun disappeared under a velvet purple bank of clouds.

“God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

“God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

The echo of four became one wailed litany. “God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

God hadn’t planned on returning those souls to anyone, but it was a little late for that warning.

I spit water and said hoarsely, “Charlie.” I’d dropped his keys in the water, but I didn’t need a reading from them to know what the hell was happening. No one did. We had ten men: Hector, me, Thackery, Fuji, and six soldiers. Brother Job had his disciples to help him conduct the baptisms. Three soldiers were doing their best to drown the other three, and Fujiwara was up to his chest in the water, both arms beneath the surface to his shoulders, and Thackery was nowhere in sight.

And right then, I began to wonder why only those who committed violence and not the victims had their personalities imprinted to be replayed when triggered by Charlie’s attempts to return. Thackery had said that violence frayed the ether. Why that and not fear and terror? Thanks to Boyd, I’d experienced all three, and fear and terror felt just as powerful as dealing out aggression. But I wasn’t
an asshole with a giant brain and a degree in physics like Thackery, so I guessed I’d never know.

“Jackson …”

And maybe I should stop wondering and help save some people from following the fate of the cult of Job. I couldn’t save Tess. Tess wasn’t there. She was long gone, but I could save someone else.

We were in the shallows of the water, and I shook Hector off. “I’m okay. I just … I’m okay now, all right?” I didn’t wait to see if he believed me or not. I went back into the water, heading for the nearest soldier holding his thrashing comrade under for the glory of God. Hector hadn’t come across with a Taser yet, but he had slipped me a nicely illegal pair of gloves before we’d left that morning. These did more than protect me from psychic images. They had lead weights sewn into the knuckles, and they gave a punch an extra snap—which I delivered to the back of the soldier’s neck.

He went limp. I caught his shirt with my other bare hand—reading nothing of consequence—and kept him from sinking while his unwilling come-to-Jesus participant erupted out of the water, coughing and wheezing. He was still expelling quarry water, and his eyes suddenly took on a fanatical glow as he tackled me and the unconscious soldier. “God … accepts—” was all he managed to choke out before the three of us ended up buried in what could have been our unpleasantly wet grave.