Costume Not Included (30 page)

  Right now, he didn't feel like pursuing the matter. He had work to do. But before he switched his focus back to the incidence of stress-related illnesses among female management and marketing consultants, Chesney realized something else: the image of a trail leading into darkness was a metaphor – the first he'd ever conceived.

  Something is happening to me, he thought. I'm changing. The thought gave him a small frisson of anxiety. But then he thought: Melda will like it. And that was enough. He went back to the numbers, and soon he was at the center of a pool of clear light, listening to the elegant song the statistics sang. He didn't notice himself humming.

 

The phone rang that evening. Melda picked it up and held it out to Chesney. "Your mother," she said.

  If he'd been sitting nearer the phone he would have read the caller ID and not answered. But his girlfriend gave him a meaningful look which he interpreted as
you've got to talk to her,
and he took the phone.

  "Billy Lee wants to see you," Letitia Arnstruther said.

  "I'm not responsible for what happened to that Bruster fellow," Chesney said. "Billy Lee wanted a prophet. I got him one. The rest of it has noth–"

  "You haven't been watching the news, have you?" his mother said.

  Chesney hadn't. He'd come home, had dinner with Melda and Joshua and they had sat around talking about inconsequentials. None of them had watched the news, although the prophet had spent most of the day watching television, clicking the remote from one thing to another; mostly, he had been drawn to old situation comedies and soap operas. He found them more comprehensible than much of what else was on the tube, especially the commercials, and especially the ads for forthcoming movies. He'd turned off the big plasma screen when Melda came home from work.

  "Turn it on now," his mother said.

  "Which news channel?"

  "Any of them."

  The first scene that came into view was the yellowclawed demon hauling its segmented body out of Hall Bruster's grossly stretched throat. Then there was footage from Hardacre's show, with Joshua talking about Heaven.

  "Is that what I look like?" said the prophet. He cupped an ear. "My voice sounds wrong."

  Chesney began an explanation about sound waves heard through the eardrum versus those heard through the maxillary bones behind the ears, but Melda shushed him. The screen was showing the face of Hall Bruster behind a thicket of hands holding microphones. He was wearing a collarless garment of blue cotton. Then the camera pulled back to show him sitting up in a hospital bed, surrounded by reporters.

  "…no question," he was saying, his eyes bright behind the dark-rimmed glasses and with an expression Chesney read as childlike delight on his owly face. "No question at all. I had been in the grip of demons for years and years. They controlled me, spoke through my voice, made me do and say terrible things. Terrible."

  His face was shaded by a deep sadness as he spoke those words. Then, like the sun coming out from behind smog-filled clouds, it lit up again as Bruster said, "And then he came in and – wham! bam! – set me free."

  "When you say, 'he,'" – the voice belonged to one of the off-screen reporters – "for the record, Mr Bruster, who do you mean?"

  The talk-show host looked straight into the camera, his eyes wide behind the spectacle lenses. "I mean Jesus Christ, himself, the son of God."

  "Oh," said Joshua with a sigh, "not again."

  "So you believe," the reporter was saying, nailing it down, "that you have witnessed the second coming of Christ."

  Bruster laughed, and for the first time Chesney had heard the sound come out of the man, there was no harshness in it. It was a peal of pure joy. "Witnessed it?" he said. "I
participated
in it!"

  "So you retract all the things you said about the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre?"

  "Without hesitation; without qualification. Billy Lee was absolutely right. He has brought us the Messiah!"

  "Does that mean," another reporter asked, adopting an ominous tone, "that we have reached the End of Days?"

  Bruster shrugged. "What do I know?" he said. "All I can tell you is that I have been delivered from bondage. I was a slave of Hell, but now I am free!"

  The camera pulled farther back and focused on the reporter who had lowered his voice to ask the final question. He moved away from the scrum until he was in front of a window, then said, "Well, there you have it, Wolf. If it was some kind of a stunt, it was one for the record books."

  The image shifted to a bearded man in a studio backed by a wall of monitors. He said, "I don't know which was the greater miracle, Todd – the casting out of demons or the sight of Hall Bruster praising Billy Lee Hardacre." He looked down, shaking his head, then came back to the camera. "Perhaps it really is the end of the world."

  The image cut back to the reporter in the hospital room. He was half turned, looking out the window, saying into his microphone, "That seems to be the dominant opinion, Wolf, judging by the crowd that's forming outside Our Lady of Mercy Hospital." He stepped aside so his camera operator could move up to the window and angle down for a shot of the parking lot, three stories below.

  At least five hundred people were massed among the scattering of parked cars, most of them looking up at the camera. Some of them carried home-made signs – Chesney read one that said
Repent
in bold red letters; another said
: If nobody's holding this sign, I've just been raptured
. A pair of police squad cars were belatedly arriving, disgorging uniformed officers who fought their way through the mob to reinforce whoever was keeping the crowd from pushing through the ground-floor doors into the building.

  Behind the cops, more people were arriving, including a big yellow ex-school bus that now belonged, according to the black lettering along its side, to Land of Goshen African Baptist Church. From its single door emerged a file of young men and women, all with dark skin and wearing purple robes, who immediately struck up a hymn Chesney remembered from his mother-dominated youth. The strains of
Oh Happy Day
came faintly through the hospital window and were transmitted to the twin speakers of his big-screen TV.

  Now the bearded man was back on screen, and this time the memory cue for Chesney was the location shown on the banks of monitors behind him: the wide front steps of Billy Lee's mansion. The door was closed, but Chesney didn't expect that to remain the case, because obviously the preacher had allowed the media past his iron gates. "We're going live," said the program's host, "to the home of the man who began this unprecedented and bizarre series of events, the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre. He's expected to make a public state–"

  The door opened and Chesney's mother stepped out, wearing an expression the young man had often seen before. It told him that his mother had not altered her jaundiced view of persons employed in the media – "guttersnipes and scoundrels" were her usual epithets – but that today she was compelled by a higher calling to place herself, however reluctantly, in proximity to them. He was sure that an eighteenth-century French countess forced to make her way through a rabble of ill-smelling, manure-smeared peasants would have done so with an identical countenance.

  Another hedge of hands holding microphones appeared before Letitia Arnstruther's face as the reporters rushed up the steps to catch whatever she had to say. Which was, "Get back, all of you!"

  The hedge did not recede, even when the woman folded her arms across her considerable chest and elevated her chin to a devastating angle. Finally, she sniffed a disdainful sniff, and accepted the inevitable. "My husband," she said, then repeated the words as if savoring them: "My husband will make a statement shortly. He will take no questions."

  She hadn't said that she would take no questions, and was immediately bombarded with them. Most of them could be expressed in the two words spoken by a brunette whose hair swept down to become twin sharp points beside her chin, their tips seemingly hard and sharp enough to pierce her flesh if ever she swung her head too briskly to either side: "Where's Jesus?"

  Letitia favored the woman with another look that Chesney remembered, the one that ought to have laid its recipient instantly unconscious, if not actually dead on the spot. "He's not Je–" she managed, in her iciest tone, before the door behind her opened and Billy Lee Hardacre stepped into view.

  He was dressed in his television outfit, with lifts in his boots and the silver mane of expensive acquired hair shining in the lights mounted on the cameras. He patted the air in front of him in a quieting gesture and said, "I have a statement."

  "Where's Jesus?" said the brunette, but Hardacre ignored her.

  "As you know," he said, "for some time now I have been telling you that a prophet would soon arrive. My statements were met with widespread disbelief, even mockery from some figures in the media." He paused and looked around at the throng of reporters. "Maybe from some of you here today."

  Chesney studied his stepfather's face. There was an expression there that he hadn't seen before. He said to Melda, "Does he look all right to you?"

  "He looks," she said, "like he's as batty as a bipolar bedbug. But I think we'd better listen to this."

  Hardacre had been itemizing some of the things that had been said about him, and the media personalities who had said them. Hall Bruster came in for special mention, but so did the man with the neatly trimmed beard standing in front of the banks of monitors. Chesney was impressed at the power of Hardacre's memory, which apparently gave the preacher total recall of every unkind cut and the ability to reproduce them with the same fidelity to accuracy that Letitia had demanded of her son when she used to make him recite an entire psalm, of her choosing, before letting him taste a first bite of dinner.

  Now Hardacre was finally moving however. "Yesterday," he said, "the whole world witnessed my complete vindication. He who had mocked me loudest and longest was revealed to have himself been for many years in thrall to the forces of darkness."

  He paused as if to savor the thought of Hall Bruster under the demon's lash, then said, "There can be no further question about the identity of the prophet I have brought before you. He is, indeed, the Jesus of the Gospels. And, as prophesied, he has come back."

  "Where is he?" said a reporter, while another said, "Bring him out, Billy Lee!"

  Hardacre said nothing until the silence was restored. "The question now," he said, "is what does it mean? Why has he come? What will happen next?"

  He looked around with a showman's air, until finally one of the reporters said, "Well, what does it mean?"

  The preacher showed the camera a wide smile. "It means," he said, "just what it's supposed to mean – the end of the world."

  Behind him, Chesney saw his mother's face set itself into a frown that was even deeper than usual. Then his attention was drawn to the other people in his own living room as Melda responded to Hardacre's announcement by bursting out with, "Oh, Jeez! Tell me he didn't say that!"

  The prophet himself rose from the couch and said, "He said it, but he shouldn't have."

  "What kind of game is he playing?" Melda said, then turned back to the screen and said, "Wait a sec, what did he just say?"

  Hardacre was looking straight at them from the screen, having chosen to speak into the camera of the cable news network they were tuned to. "I'll repeat that," he said. Then he carefully enunciated an address, complete with apartment number.

  It was Chesney's address.

  "We've got to get out of here," said Melda. "And right now."

  Chesney said, "Xaphan!"

  The demon appeared, a smoking cigar sticking out of the side of its muzzle. Joshua gave the fiend a hard look but the weasel-headed creature drew itself up to its full semi-height and said, "Don't look at me. I just do what I'm told."

  "We've got to go somewhere and hide," Chesney said. The nearest TV broadcast center was only blocks away. It could not more than minutes before the first camera crew came knocking on his door.

  "You can't take him to Hell," Xaphan said. "Last time he showed up there, he made a real mess of the files."

  "He'll be recognized anywhere we go," Chesney said.

  "Maybe some remote cabin?" Melda said. "Or a desert island? Just until we figure out what to do."

  Joshua said to the demon, "It was you who brought me out of Nazareth, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah. What of it?"

  "Where did you get that power?"

  The padded shoulders shrugged. "I dunno." A stubby thumb gestured at Chesney. "I operate on his will."

  "But not his power," said the prophet, "because he doesn't have that much." Xaphan, inspecting his spats, said nothing. "Come on," said the bearded man, "out with it."

  "Aw, lay off!" said the demon.

  "I can compel you," Joshua said. "You know I can."

  The fiend looked to Chesney. "You gonna let him push me around like this?"

  The young man said, "I want to hear the answer."

  The weasel jaws clamped around the cigar. The huge eyes became slits as it looked from Chesney to the prophet. "You know the answer," it said.

  "Where is he?" Joshua said.

  "Away. And I'm not supposed to disturb him."

  "But not so long ago you were passing on a message that he wants to see me. Now, where is he?"

  "That place," said the demon. "Where it all started."

  "What place?" Chesney said, but the prophet was already telling the demon to take them there. The padded shoulders shrugged again, just as they heard a knock on the door that led to the hallway. A gleam of bright light showed all around the portal, as someone on the other side aimed a television camera at it.