Revival (35 page)

“Actually, there are several things.” He ticked them off on the gnarled fingers of his right hand. “Eat. Sleep. Work hard to regain your strength. Can you do those things?”

“Yes. I will. And I'm never going to touch another cigarette.”

He waved this away. “You won't want to. Will she, Jamie?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Miss Knowlton?”

She jerked as if he'd pinched her bottom.

“Astrid must engage a physical therapist, or you must engage one on her behalf. The sooner she gets out of that damn wheelchair, the better. Am I right? Am I cooking with gas, as we used to say?”

“Yes, Pastor Danny.”

He frowned, but didn't correct her. “There's something else you fine ladies can do for me, and it's extremely important:
leave my name out of this
. I have a great deal of work to do in the coming months, and the last thing I need is to have hordes of sick people coming up here in hopes of being cured. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Astrid said.

Jenny nodded without looking up.

“Astrid, when you see your doctor and he expresses amazement, as he certainly will, all you'll tell him is that you prayed for a remission and your prayers were answered. His own belief—or lack of it—in the efficacy of prayer won't matter; either way, he'll be forced to accept the evidence of his MRI pictures. Not to mention your happy smiling face. Your happy and
healthy
smiling face.”

“Yes, that's fine. Whatever you want.”

“Let me roll you back to the suite,” Jenny said. “If we're going to leave, I better pack.” Subtext:
Get me out of here
. On that, she and Charlie Jacobs were thinking alike; they were cooking with gas.

“All right.” Astrid looked at me shyly. “Jamie, would you bring me a Coke? I'd like to speak to you.”

“Sure.”

Jacobs watched Jenny trundle Astrid across the empty restaurant and toward the far door. When they were gone, he turned to me. “So. We have a bargain?”

“Yes.”

“And you won't DS on me?”

DS. Carny-speak for
down south
, meaning to pull stakes and disappear.

“No, Charlie. I won't DS on you.”

“That's fine, then.” He was looking at the doorway through which the women had gone. “Miss Knowlton doesn't like me much now that I've left Team Jesus, does she?”

“Scared of you is what she is.”

He shrugged it off. Like his smile, the shrug was mostly one-sided. “Ten years ago, I couldn't have cured our Miss Soderberg. Perhaps not even five. But things are moving fast, now. By this summer . . .”

“By this summer, what?”

“Who knows?” he said. “Who knows?”

You do
, I thought.
You do, Charlie.

 • • •

“Watch this, Jamie,” Astrid said
when I arrived with her soft drink.

She got out of the wheelchair and tottered three steps to the chair by her bedroom window. She held on to it for balance while she turned herself around, and collapsed into it with a sigh of relief and pleasure.

“Not much, I know—”

“Are you kidding? It's amazing.” I handed her an ice-choked glass of Coca-Cola. I had even stuck a piece of lime on the rim for good luck. “And you'll be able to do more each day.”

We had the room to ourselves. Jenny had excused herself to finish packing, although it looked to me as if the job was already done. Astrid's coat was laid out on the bed.

“I think I owe you as much as I owe Mr. Jacobs.”

“That's not true.”

“Don't lie, Jamie, your nose will grow and the bees will sting your knees. He must get thousands of letters begging for cures, even now. I don't think he picked mine out of the pile by accident. Were you the one in charge of reading them?”

“Nope, that was Al Stamper, your friend Jenny's old fave. Charlie got in touch with me later.”

“And you came,” she said. “After all these years, you came. Why?”

“Because I had to. I can't explain any better than that, except there was a time when you meant the world to me.”

“You didn't promise him anything? There was no . . . what do they call it . . . quid pro quo?”

“Not a single one.” I said it without missing a beat. During my years as an addict, I'd become an accomplished liar, and the sad truth is that sort of skill sticks with you.

“Walk over here. Stand close to me.”

I did. With no hesitation or embarrassment, she put her hand on the front of my jeans. “You were gentle with this,” she said. “Many boys wouldn't have been. You had no experience, but you knew how to be kind. You meant the world to me, too.” She dropped her hand and looked at me out of eyes no longer dull and preoccupied with her own pain. Now they were full of vitality. Also worry. “You
did
promise. I know you did. I won't ask what, but if you ever loved me, be careful of him. I owe him my life, and I feel awful saying this, but I believe he's dangerous. And I think you believe that, too.”

Not as accomplished at lying as I'd thought, then. Or perhaps it was just that she saw more now that she was
cured
.

“Astrid, you have nothing to worry about.”

“I wonder . . . could I have a kiss, Jamie? While we're alone? I know I'm not much to look at, but . . .”

I dropped to one knee—again feeling like a swain in a romance—and kissed her. No, she wasn't much to look at, but compared to how she'd looked that morning, she was a knockout. Still—it was only skin against skin, that kiss. There were no embers in the ashes. For me, at least. But we were tied together, just the same. Jacobs was the knot.

She stroked the back of my head. “Still such wonderful hair, going white or not. Life leaves us so little, but it's left you that. Goodbye, Jamie. And thank you.”

 • • •

On my way out,
I stopped to talk briefly to Jenny. Mostly I wanted to know if she lived close enough to Astrid to monitor her progress.

She smiled. “Astrid and I are divorce buddies. Have been since I moved to Rockland and started working at the hospital there. Ten years ago, that was. When she got sick, I moved in with her.”

I gave her my cell number, and the number at Wolfjaw. “There may be aftereffects.”

She nodded. “Pastor Danny filled me in. Mr. Jacobs, I mean. It's hard for me to get used to calling him that. He said she might be prone to sleepwalking until her brainwaves re-regulate themselves. Four to six months, he said. I've seen that behavior in people who overdo stuff like Ambien and Lunesta.”

“Yes, that's the most likely.” Although there was also dirt-eating, compulsive walking, Tourette's syndrome, kleptomania, and Hugh Yates's prismatics. So far as I knew, Ambien didn't cause any of those things. “But if there's anything else . . .
call
.”

“How worried are you?” she asked. “Tell me what to expect.”

“I don't really know, and she'll probably be fine.” Most of them were, after all, at least according to Jacobs. And as little as I trusted him, I had to count on that, because it was too late to do anything else. The thing was done.

Jenny stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “She's
better
. That's God's grace, Jamie, no matter what Mr. Jacobs may think now that he's fallen away. Without it—without
him
—she would have been dead in six weeks.”

 • • •

Astrid rode down the handicapped ramp
in her wheelchair, but got into Jenny's Subaru on her own. Jacobs closed her door. She reached through the open window, grasped one of his hands in both of her own, and thanked him again.

“It was my pleasure,” he said. “Just remember your promise.” He pulled his hand free so he could put a finger to her lips. “Mum's the word.”

I bent down and kissed her forehead. “Eat,” I said. “Rest. Do therapy. And enjoy your life.”

“Roger, Captain,” she said. She looked past me, saw Jacobs slowly climbing the steps to the porch, then met my eyes and repeated what she'd said earlier. “
Be careful
.”

“Don't worry.”

“But I will.” Her eyes on mine, full of grave concern. She was getting old now, as I was, but with the disease banished from her body, I could see the girl who had stood in front of the stage with Hattie, Carol, and Suzanne, the four of them shaking their moneymakers while Chrome Roses played “Knock on Wood” or “Nutbush City Limits.” The girl I had kissed under the fire escape. “I
will
worry.”

I rejoined Charlie Jacobs on the porch, and we watched Jenny Knowlton's trim little Outback roll down the road that led to the gate. It had been a fine melt-day, and the snow had pulled back, revealing grass that was already turning green.
Poor man's fertilizer
, I thought.
That's what we used to call it
.

“Will those women keep their mouths shut?” Jacobs asked.

“Yes.” Maybe not forever, but until his work was done, if he was as close to finished as he claimed. “They promised.”

“And you, Jamie? Will you keep your promise?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to satisfy him. “Stay the night, why don't you?”

I shook my head. “I booked a room at Embassy Suites. I've got an early flight.”

And I can't wait to get away from this place, just as I couldn't wait to get away from The Latches
.

I didn't say this, but I'm sure he knew it.

“Fine. Just be ready when I call.”

“What do you need, Charlie? A written statement? I said I'll come, and I will.”

“Good. We've been bouncing off each other like a couple of billiard balls for most of our lives, but that's almost over. By the end of July—mid-August at the latest—we'll be finished with each other.”

He was right about that. God help him, he was.

Always assuming He's there, of course.

 • • •

Even with a change of planes
in Cincinnati, I was back in Denver the next day before 1 PM—when it comes to time travel, nothing beats flying west in a jet plane. I woke up my phone and saw I had two messages. The first was from Jenny. She said that she had locked the door of Astrid's bedroom last night before turning in herself, but there hadn't been a peep from the baby monitor, and when she got up at six-thirty, Astrid was still conked out.

“When she got up, she ate a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast. And the way she looks . . . I have to keep telling myself it's not some kind of illusion.”

That was the good message. The bad one was from Brianna Donlin—now Brianna Donlin-Hughes. She'd left it only minutes before my United flight touched down. “Robert Rivard is dead, Jamie. I don't know the details.” But by that evening, she'd gotten them.

A nurse had told Bree that most people who went into Gad's Ridge never came out, and that was certainly true of the boy Pastor Danny had healed of his muscular dystrophy. They found him in his room, dangling from a noose he'd made from a pair of bluejeans. He left a note that said,
I can't stop seeing the damned. The line stretches forever
.

XII

Forbidden Books. My Maine Vacation. The Sad Story of Mary Fay. The Coming of the Storm.

About six weeks later
I got an email from my old research partner.

To: Jamie

From: Bree

Subject: FYI

After you were at Jacobs's place in upstate New York, you said in an email that he mentioned a book called
De Vermis Mysteriis
. The name stuck in my head, probably because I took just enough Latin in high school to know that's
The Mysteries of the Worm
in plain English. I guess research into All Things Jacobs is a hard habit to break, because I looked into it. Without telling my husband, I should add, as he believes I have put All Things Jacobs behind me.

Anyway, this is pretty heavy stuff. According to the Catholic Church,
De Vermis Mysteriis
is one of half a dozen
so-called Forbidden Books. Taken as a group, they are
known as “grimoires.” The other five are
The Book of Apollonius
(he was a doctor at the time of Christ),
The Book of Albertus Magnus
(spells, talismans, speaking to the
dead),
Lemegeton
and
Clavicula Salomonis
(supposedly written by King Solomon), and
The Grimoire of Picatrix
. That last one, along with
De Vermis Mysteriis
, was supposedly the basis of H. P. Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, called
The Necronomicon
.

Editions are available of all the Forbidden Books EXCEPT FOR
De Vermis Mysteriis
. According to Wikipedia, secret emissaries of the Catholic Church (paging Dan Brown) had burned all but six or seven copies of
De Vermis
by the turn of the 20th century. (BTW, the Pope's army now refuses to acknowledge such a book ever existed.) The others have dropped out of sight, and are presumed to be destroyed or held by private collectors.

Jamie, all the Forbidden Books deal with POWER, and how to obtain it by means that combine alchemy (which we now call “science”), mathematics, and certain nasty occult rituals. All of it is probably bullshit, but it makes me uneasy—you told me Jacobs has spent his life studying electrical phenomena, and based on his healing successes, I have to think he may have gotten hold of a power that's pretty awesome. Which makes me think of the old proverb: “He who takes a tiger by the tail dare not let go.”

A couple of other things for you to think about.

One: Up until the mid-seventeenth century, Catholics known to be studying
potestas magnum universum
(the force that powers the universe) were liable to excommunication.

Two: Wikipedia claims—although without verifying references, I must add—that the couplet most people remember from Lovecraft's fictional
Necronomicon
was stolen from a copy of
De Vermis
which Lovecraft had access to (he certainly never owned one, he was too poor to purchase such a rarity). This is the couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.” That gave me nightmares. I'm not kidding.

Sometimes you called Charles Daniel Jacobs “my old fifth business.” I hope you are done with him at last, Jamie. Once upon a time I would have laughed at all this, but once upon a time I thought miracle cures at revival meetings were bullshit.

Give me a call someday, would you? Let me know All Things Jacobs are behind you.

Affectionately, as always,

Bree

I printed this out and read it over twice. Then I googled
De Vermis Mysteriis
and found everything Bree had told me in her email, along with one thing she hadn't. In an antiquarian book-blog called
Dark Tomes of Magick & Spells
, someone called Ludvig Prinn's suppressed grimoire “the most dangerous book ever written.”

 • • •

I left my apartment
, walked down the block, and bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time since a brief flirtation with tobacco in college. There was no smoking in my building, so I sat on my steps to light up. I coughed out the first drag, my head swimming, and I thought,
These things would have killed Astrid, if not for Charlie's intervention
.

Yes. Charlie and his miracle cures. Charlie who had a tiger by the tail and didn't
want
to let go.

Something happened
, Astrid had said in my dream, speaking through a grin from which all her former sweetness had departed.
Something happened, and Mother will be here soon
.

Then, later, after Jacobs had shot his secret electricity into her head:
There's a door in the wall. The door is covered with ivy. The ivy is dead. She waits
. And when Jacobs asked who Astrid was talking about:
Not the one
you
want
.

I can break my promise
, I thought, casting the cigarette away.
It wouldn't be the first one
.

True, but not this one. Not this promise.

I went back inside, crushing the pack of cigarettes and tossing it into the trash can beside the mailboxes. Upstairs, I called Bree's cell, prepared to leave a message, but she answered. I thanked her for her email and told her I had no intention of ever seeing Charles Jacobs again. I told this lie without guilt or hesitation. Bree's husband was right; she needed to be finished with All Things Jacobs. And when the time came to go back to Maine and fulfill my promise, I would lie to Hugh Yates for the same reason.

Once upon a time, two teenagers had fallen for each other, and hard, as only teenagers can. A few years later they made love in a ruined cabin while the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed—all very Victoria Holt. In the course of time, Charles Jacobs had saved them both from paying the ultimate price for their addictions. I owed him double. I'm sure you see that, and I could leave it there, but to do so would be to omit a much larger truth:
I was also curious
. God help me, I wanted to watch him lift the lid on Pandora's box and peer inside.

 • • •

“This isn't your lame-ass way
of telling me you want to retire, is it?” Hugh tried to sound as if he was joking, but there was real apprehension in his eyes.

“Not at all. I just want a couple of months off. Maybe only six weeks, if I get bored. I need to reconnect with my family in Maine while I still can. I'm not getting any younger.”

I had no intention of going near my family in Maine. They were too close to Goat Mountain as it was.

“You're a kid,” he said moodily. “Come this fall, I'm going to have a year for every trombone that led the big parade. Mookie pulling the pin this spring was bad enough. If you went for good, I'd probably have to close this place down.”

He heaved a sigh.

“I should have had kids, someone to take over when I'm gone, but does that sort of thing happen? Rarely. When you say you hope they'll pick up the reins of the family business, they say ‘Sorry, Dad, me and that dope-smoking kid you hated me hanging out with in high school are going to California to make surfboards equipped with WiFi.'”

“Now that you've got that out of your system . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, go back to your roots, by all means. Play pat-a-cake with your little niece and help your brother rebuild his latest classic car. You know how summers are here.”

I certainly did: slower than dirt. Summer means full employment even for the shittiest bands, and when bands are playing live music in bars and at four dozen summerfests in Colorado and Utah, they don't buy much recording time.

“George Damon will be in,” I said. “He's come out of retirement in a big way.”

“Yeah,” Hugh said. “The only guy in Colorado who can make ‘I'll Be Seeing You' sound like ‘God Bless America.'”

“Perhaps in the world. Hugh, you haven't had any more of those prismatics, have you?”

He gave me a curious look. “No. What brought
that
on?”

I shrugged.

“I'm fine. Up a couple of times every night to squirt half a teacup of pee, but I guess that's par for the course at my age. Although . . . you want to hear a funny thing? Only to me it's more of a spooky thing.”

I wasn't sure I did, but thought I ought to. It was early June. Jacobs hadn't called yet, but he would. I knew he would.

“I've been having this recurring dream. In it I'm not here at Wolfjaw, I'm in Arvada, in the house where I grew up. Someone starts knocking on the door. Except it's not just knocking, it's
pounding
. I don't want to answer it, because I know it's my mother, and she's dead. Pretty stupid, because she was alive and healthy as a horse back in the Arvada days, but I know it, just the same. I go down the hall, not wanting to, but my feet just keep moving—you know how dreams are. By then she's really whamming on the door, beating on it with both fists, it sounds like, and I'm thinking of this horror story we had to read in English when I was in high school. I think it was called ‘August Heat.'”

Not “August Heat,”
I thought.
“The Monkey's Paw.” That's the one with the door-pounding in it.

“I reach for the knob, and then I wake up, all in a sweat. What do you make of that? My subconscious, trying to get me ready for the big exit scene?”

“Maybe,” I agreed, but my head had left the conversation. I was thinking about another door. A small one covered with dead ivy.

 • • •

Jacobs called on July first
. I was in one of the studios, updating the Apple Pro software. When I heard his voice, I sat down in front of the control board and looked through the window into a soundproof rehearsal room that was empty except for a disassembled drumkit.

“The time has almost come for you to keep your promise,” he said. His voice was mushy, as if he'd been drinking, although I'd never seen him take anything stronger than black coffee.

“All right.” My voice was calm enough. Why not? It was the call I had been expecting. “When do you want me to come?”

“Tomorrow. The day after at the latest. I suspect you won't want to stay with me at the resort, at least to start with—”

“You suspect right.”

“—but I'll need you no more than an hour away. When I call, you come.”

That made me think of another spooky story, one titled “Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.”

“All right,” I said. “But Charlie?”

“Yes?”

“You get two months of my time, and that's it. When Labor Day rolls around, we're quits no matter what happens.”

Another pause, but I could hear his breathing. It sounded labored, making me think of how Astrid had sounded in her wheelchair. “That's . . . acceptable.”
Acsheptable
.

“Are you okay?”

“Another stroke, I'm afraid.”
Shtroke
. “My speech isn't as clear as it once was, but I assure you my
mind
is as clear as ever.”

Pastor Danny, heal thyself
, I thought, and not for the first time.

“Bit of news for you, Charlie. Robert Rivard is dead. The boy from Missouri? He hung himself.”

“I'm shorry to hear that.” He didn't sound sorry, and didn't waste time asking for details. “When you arrive, call me and tell me where you are. And remember, no more than an hour away.”

“Okay,” I said, and broke the connection.

I sat there in the unnaturally quiet studio for several minutes, looking at the framed album covers on the walls, then dialed Jenny Knowlton, in Rockland. She answered on the first ring.

“How's our girl doing?” I asked.

“Fine. Putting on weight and walking a mile a day. She looks twenty years younger.”

“No aftereffects?”

“Nothing. No seizures, no sleepwalking, no amnesia. She doesn't remember much about the time we spent at Goat Mountain, but I think that's sort of a blessing, don't you?”

“What about you, Jenny? Are you okay?”

“Fine, but I ought to go. We're awfully busy at the hospital today. Thank God I've got vacation coming up.”

“You won't go off somewhere and leave Astrid alone, will you? Because I don't think that would be a good id—”

“No, no, certainly not!” There was something in her voice. Something nervous. “Jamie, I've got a page. I have to go.”

I sat in front of the darkened control panel. I looked at the album covers—actually CD covers these days, little things the size of postcards. I thought about a time not too long after I'd gotten my first car as a birthday present, that '66 Ford Galaxie. Riding with Norm Irving. Him pestering me to put the pedal to the metal on the two-mile stretch of Route 9 we called the Harlow Straight. So we could see what she'd do, he said. At eighty, the front end began to shimmy, but I didn't want to look like a wuss—at seventeen, not looking like a wuss is very important—so I kept my foot down. At eighty-five the shimmy smoothed out. At ninety, the Galaxie took on a dreamy, dangerous lightness as its contact with the road lessened, and I realized I'd reached the edge of control. Careful not to touch the brake—I knew from my father that could mean disaster at high speed—I let off the gas and the Galaxie began to slow.

I wished I could do that now.

 • • •

The Embassy Suites near the Jetport
had seemed all right when I'd been there the night after Astrid's miracle recovery, so I checked in again. It had crossed my mind to do my waiting at the Castle Rock Inn, but the chances of running into an old acquaintance—Norm Irving, for instance—were too great. If that happened, it would almost certainly get back to my brother Terry. He'd want to know why I was in Maine, and why I wasn't staying with him. Those were questions I didn't want to answer.