Cult (6 page)

“When we split…. You shattered me, Nay. You really did.”

“You seem to have recovered.” She hadn't meant to sound as bitchy as she did.

“I did. I really did. Took years. God. I nearly went crazy. But don't think I ever forgot the hurt.” He got up and, for a moment, she thought he was coming toward her. But he had only risen to pour another drink for them both. She declined hers with a shake of her head and he went back to the bed, bashing the pillows again.

“Maybe Charlotte saw that in me. I can see her giving me up. But not her child, not our Kevin. It's against nature to give up your child.”

Against nature?
She couldn't believe he said that. She felt her body begin to tremble, forcing away the memory of her own dead fetus.
Child!
The word was being jammed into her mind. Thankfully, he had turned his face away, burying it in the smashed pillows, his shoulders shaking. Thinking it would shut him away, she closed her eyes and, for a moment, she lost all sense of time and place. When she opened her eyes again, he was blinking away tears. A large moist spot had formed on the pillowcase. He finished his drink.

Suddenly, he came toward her now, kneeling beside her.

“Come on, Nay. What do you truly think? Do you think I share the blame?”

Does he really want me to answer that?

When she did not answer, his head toppled in her lap, and she felt the heat of him in the center of her, then the moisture of more tears soaking through her dress. Reaching out, she slid her fingers through his hair, caressing the tight softness of it, pressing him against her. Great sobs convulsed him and she buried her lips in his hair.

“I'm afraid,” he whispered when the quake within him ended. Still, she held him. Another woman's man.

“She's not dead,” she whispered. Inexplicably, he forced a smile as he rubbed his face dry.

“One of the people I visited had lost a daughter to the Glories,” he said, his voice hoarse, then clearing. “Never got her out. I went to their house and spoke to both them the mother and the father. They were devastated. Couldn't even muster a brave front. They had pictures of the daughter everywhere. I had to see them all. They even showed me her room and a ruler nailed to the wall that marked how high she had grown from time to time. It was awful. I don't know why, but I opened a drawer in her room. It was empty.” He shook his head. “You discover you're only a tiny link in a long chain of terror. You know what the mother said?” He didn't wait for an answer. “‘Mourn your wife.'”

He stood up, taking deep breaths.

“I will not mourn her,” he declared. “She is not dead. I'm going to save her. I don't know how… but I'm going to save her.” Again, he faltered, struggling for control. She sensed that he was searching inside of himself for all the courage he could find. “I'm going to get my wife back.” He raised his eyes to hers and found them. She saw his fear, his pleading. “I don't know how I can do it alone,” he whispered.

She wanted to hesitate, to mull over the idea in her mind. But his passionate resolve, his ordeal and struggle were reminiscent of all of the people and causes she stood up for. It spoke to her.

“You won't be alone, Barney.”

Sheriff T. Clausen Moore tapped his warm plastic phone, still moist with his palm print. He had been thankful for the interruption. Exposure to this kind of anguish had a near-toxic effect on him.

The man before him looked slightly yellowed, soiled by desperation. He knew the look. He had seen it many times before, especially back in Appalachia, from where he and Gladys had fled years ago. It still lived inside of him, the memory of those mountain people, cast into hopelessness by events beyond their forgotten world. He had also seen it here, on the faces of these crushed and grieving people searching for their lost loved ones. Beside the gloomy man sat a woman. She appeared cooler, more in control. Studying the pad on his desk, he refreshed his mind with the man's name.

“It's private property, Mr. Harrigan. You can't enter it without an invitation. And you can't break in or forcibly enter and bring anyone out. Could be a kidnapping rap, a hostage rap. Be surprised what these guys can cook up. The people must come out only of their own free will.”

In the long pause of uncertainty that always followed, he sighed and pictured what he had seen many times, hoping it would not trigger the depressing images stored in his mind. Glassy-eyed young people, exhausted, some barely coherent, herded like sheep.

He was also sparing loved ones the pain of it. He knew the scam, but there wasn't anything he could do about it except warn people to keep away. Hell, he'd fought them as hard as he knew how. And had lost. Sometimes he felt he would drown in the ocean of tears that had been shed at the other side of his desk. It didn't matter. His words would always have to be the same.

“It's a bona fide tax exempt religion, approved by the high offices of the United States government. I do not represent anyone but the people of this county. The law is the law.”

He was not able to tell them that in the beginning, he had tried to do something about it. Hadn't he told Gladys that something suspicious and wrong was going down at the camp?
Something damned sinister
.

“You mean voodoo?” she had asked.

“Maybe,” he had answered.

“They're raising a whole fucking army of zombies,” he would tell Gladys. “If Father Glory said go kill your mother, they'd do it. If Father Glory said go rape your sister, they'd do it.”

“Tee, you're exaggerating,” she would respond.

“It's my gut talking.”

When the first parents started to troop in, he had gone with them to the camp, genuinely on the parents' side. Nobody had the right to take away another person's kid. Okay, they were in their twenties, but to him they were still kids. What he got from all this were some real lessons about the law, about what can and cannot be done when these kids were over twenty-one. Occasionally, he got one out when they were underage, but they had become pretty careful about that in the last few years.

He also could not tell them that he had tangled with their lawyers. “That's their right,” lawyers would tell him.

“But they don't think for themselves,” he'd protest.

“You can't prove that. Rights and First Amendment,” they'd tell him. That covered it all, and he wondered if the men who wrote the Constitution ever figured they'd be faced with something like this. Even when he showed them literature where Father Glory, the bastard who ran the camp, said “I am your mind,” the boys from American Civil Liberties Union told him about rights and the First Amendment.

He also couldn't tell them of the deal that he had finally made with the Glories himself.
What was his real name?
Billy Perkins from St. Joseph, Missouri; “Jeremiah” now, the Great Prophet.
A ruthless son of a bitch.
He agreed with Jeremiah to keep the peace within the Sheriff's county. After all, that was his job.

Sherriff Moore agreed to do his best to keep troublemakers away. Parents, brothers, sisters who were taken in by the Glories. Sometimes to salve his much-abused conscience he'd go in and slap them with sanitation violations. They were always filling up their outhouse pits too damned high with shit. Also, parents would come in and say their kids had been drugged. He tried on at least three occasions to find drugs in the camp. Real potential busts. But could you classify sugar as a drug? One thing they had was bales and bales of sugar. And there had been two suspicious drownings in the river that ran through the camp. “Slipping along the bank” was always the reason, and nothing he had tried could waver that explanation. He still had his doubts, but left it alone. Too much hassle involved. It was, he often snickered bitterly to his wife, like shoveling shit against the tide.

Hadn't he really tried at the beginning, interviewing the kids? They sounded like machines, all programmed with the same script.

“Are you here of your own free will?”

“Yes.”

He was always amazed how they'd get the kids to sign over everything they had, bank accounts, cars, clothes, jewelry. If they had trust funds, the Glories would find a way to get that, too.

“Do you realize that you have signed away all your possessions?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“For Father Glory. For salvation in the spirit world.”

“But how do they do it to those kids, Tee?” Gladys had asked maybe a thousand times since the Glories had come in with their permit for the three hundred acre Bobson estate. The records showed that they had bought the farm from the widow Bobson for three times its value, a fact that had a profound effect on local landowners.

The Glories had soon built this complex. It looked like a summer camp, with wooden barracks, a mess hall, meeting rooms and cabins for administration and other uses. In the beginning, the locals had fought it, but in the end it was money talking.

“That price raised the value of our property,” the Bobsons told him, quietly at first, then louder, taking the wind out of the sails of the opposition.
How many years had they been there now?
Ten? Eleven?
God knows how they did it. It wasn't anything he knew about, nor wanted to.

He had seen the busloads of young people come in from Seattle, about fifty miles west. They were a mixed bag, clean-cut, scrubbed and brushed, some with long hair and facial hair. Coming in, they looked like ordinary people. Soon they were trapped, neat little dolls. More like sheep, with Jeremiah as their shepherd.

Often, hysterical parents would get to the camp. It wasn't hard. There were no gates. They didn't need gates. The gates were in the kids' heads. When they got too out of hand, they were forcibly removed by the Sheriff's men, locked in jail until they cooled down, then sent away with a tough warning. This tactic hadn't really satisfied Jeremiah and that oily lawyer Holmes, who always pressed charges. But then, parents rarely came back to face them, and other jurisdictions were reluctant to go through extradition procedures.
The law!
In this case, it seemed he was on the wrong side of it.

“You go near that camp, I'll break your ass,” he had told his own boys. Two were away at college, and the oldest, T. Junior, was working back east. Hell, if it was ever his kids in there, he'd have gone in guns blazing.

His kids had laughed at his warnings. “Pop. You think we're dummies?”

“Don't be smart-asses. It can happen to anyone. I see it every day.”

It had bewildered him at first. Even when he saw the scam in action. A kid, usually in his early twenties, would be picked up on the city streets by members of the opposite sex. They'd invite the kid to any one of the various houses they owned in the city and entice them into a three-day hang-loose adventure in the country, which would inevitably lead to carting him or her off to the camp. The kids must have thought they'd get laid a lot or discover some new kind of thrill. Only natural that kids that age looked for adventures. What they got instead was a good dose of brainwashing. Some thrill.

Sometimes he'd get a call from someone who said he had to get away, but usually by the time he got there, they had changed their mind. Except if he got really sick. They didn't much believe in medical care, except for minor things like bee stings and sunburn. But when a kid got really sick, they let him go. “Lucky bastard,” he'd always say when he'd visit the kid in the county hospital. Of course, he never dare say that publicly. Wouldn't do to rock the boat. Not as long as the voters tolerated the Glories.

The voters!
He scoffed. The Glories had become voters. With so many establishing their legal residences at the camp, they were becoming a formidable political force. Soon they would tip the balance.

He'd paid a pretty price, too, for all this aggravation. Just ask Gladys. Many a night, he would wake, sweating and screaming, and she'd have to soothe him like a damned baby to chase away the lingering memory of that fucking nightmare, the one in which all those eyes kept watching him, all those blank dead eyes. He was only the Sheriff, not God.

“Have you called their lawyer for permission to enter the camp?” the Sheriff asked Barney, knowing the answer in advance. Delaying tactics—a favorite ploy of the Glories. The Sheriff had employed it too.

When a distraught relative would call the Glory's office in Seattle, they'd get politely referred to a lawyer who would tell them he would “check.” It was a question of finding out where the person was, he would say. But he'd rarely call back. And if he did there was enough advance notice for them to be prepared.

If the relatives persisted in going beyond just a visit and got their own lawyer, made too much noise, the Glories would hide the person somewhere else, in another camp, or send them to other parts of the country or the world. The threat of making them disappear was usually enough to call off the dogs.

Sometimes, when they felt totally safe about the person in the camp, they might allow a brief meeting, especially if it was a spouse or a sibling. More than one sibling had been captured by the Glories during a rescue attempt. Parents, because they were not part of the peer group and because of their age, weren't nearly as vulnerable.

“Yes,” Barney answered. “I called their office. ‘Brown and Kyler.' I spoke to Bradley Holmes, a senior partner. He made my teeth itch.”

The Sheriff knew what was coming next. He could sympathize with Barney's sense of powerlessness. Even the lawyer's name, Bradley Holmes, was intimidating. Holmes was the embodiment of the establishment. Through Holmes, the Glories had bought legal respectability. He was a whore in pinstripes. Barney had dealt with plenty of those.

“What did he say?” the Sheriff asked.

“He said he'd check with my wife,” Barney said, shaking his head.

“It's a perfectly legitimate answer. It's her decision.” The Sheriff nearly choked on the word “decision.”

“Oh yes,” Barney sneered. “I asked him how long it would take. He said he couldn't tell me. All very calm and measured.” When the Sheriff deliberately showed no reaction, he continued. “I said I had come out at great expense to see my wife, that she had left a young child at home, that she was obviously being held against her will, and that I would be damned if he'd have me standing around cooling my heels until they had checked. What the hell did ‘check' mean?”

“It meant that you could see her when it was appropriate.”

“Appropriate?”

“When she wanted to see you.” He was trying to be diplomatic. “Look, I'm just the Sheriff, the messenger.”

“What you're telling me, then,” Barney said, “is that either I see them on their terms or I don't see them at all.”

“More or less.”

“This is not what I came to you to hear. I came to you for help.”

“Sorry. All I can help you with is advice. I'm just the messenger,” he said.

“It's like you're protecting them,” Barney said, his face tightening.

“I'm not protecting them. I'm enforcing the law.”

“They break up my family and you tell me about the goddamned law.”

“Barney,” Naomi cautioned.

Her rebuke caught him in time and he backed off. The Sheriff was used to it. He wished it would come to an end.

“Have they got armed guards at this camp?” Barney asked.

It was the inevitable question, and the Sheriff was prepared for it. “They don't need them.”

“So if someone attacks them, how do they defend themselves?”

“The fact is, Mr. Harrigan, they just don't need them. They call me. I defend them. That's my job, to defend citizens of this county against potential criminals.” What he didn't tell them was that the camp had a hot line to the Sheriff's office. Usually, though, the Glories were fully able to take care of any wild-eyed relatives that had bluffed their way into the camp.

“We don't really need your help,” Jeremiah had bragged. “But when we do, you'll be summoned.” The Sheriff couldn't help but think about the accidental drownings. They had their own devious ways to get rid of trespassers. Sometimes they said they had no record of the person inquired about. On very rare occasions, they arranged a brief talk with the Glory in question, just enough time for the relatives to get the idea. They were remarkably effective.

“How noble.”

“Yes, it is.”

The Sheriff knew exactly where his reasoning was leading.
Poor bastard.
The smell of desperation oozed out of him, spilling into the room.

“There have been incidents. Don't make another one,” the Sheriff said cautiously.

“People trying to get them out?”

Occasionally, some relatives would try to pull a snatch with a deprogrammer waiting somewhere. The Glories had a helluva nose for that. Usually, when a snatch was tried, it was after the kid had graduated into fund-raising and was plucked off some street corner, but that was always out of his jurisdiction. When they sensed that was about to happen, they usually called him on the hot line and he and his men would rush out to the camp, or the streets where the Glories were fund-raising. A couple of times, they had missed and some kid had been spirited away, but that was rare.