powerful
'Jesus wants to meet you.'
A thrill of excitement shot-through her, but she was aware of another feeling, a feeling of apprehension some where deep inside her.
The necklace suddenly seemed very important.
'He wants you to deliver the sacrifice.'
Corrie's hands were trembling, and her mouth was dry.
'He wants me to deliver the sacrifice?' The preacher stood. 'Yes.'
'I'm honored,' she said.
'Follow me.' Corrie followed him outside into the drizzle, around the side of the building to the locked door of the first addition. Wheeler withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, pulling it open.
They walked into the addition. Like the outside, the inside of the building was painted black. She would have thought that extra lights would be installed to compensate for the darkness, but the illumination in here was purposefully dim, the primitive bulbs a soft yellowish white. In the murky shadowed corner, she saw figures moving, and she heard the sound of sawing. Construction, as always, was continuing.
She followed the preacher through another set of doors and down an unlit hallway. There were windows here, but they were of the darkest stained glass---navy blue and crimsonmand let in very little light.
Then they were in the chapel.
Corrie had wondered why sermons had been held outside for the past two Sundays, and she'd assumed that it was because of the construction and remodeling that were taking place in the chapel.
She saw now that that was not the reason at all. Wheeler stood just inside the doorway, beaming proudly, staring at her, gauging her reaction. Corrie looked into the chapel, awed, impressed, and, above all, enraptured. The church she had known was gone. There was no floor, only board paths over dirt that led toward three huge holes in the ground. Each hole was approximately the size of her bedroom and partially ringed by a small group of men and women. Piles of trash stood behind each group. Wooden bridges, apparently made from the backs of pews, stretched over the tops of the holes. The altar was still in place, but there were bodies lying atop it, leaning against the pulpit, placed in the choir cubicles. The bodies were all mummified, and although they appeared to be ancient, she thought she recognized some of the faces. The windows had all been painted black.
And it was beautiful. 'Come with me,' Wheeler said, and she followed him into the chapel.
She stared at the people standing next to the openings in the earth.
These, she assumed, were part of the, church's inner circle, those parishioners who had been with the preacher from the beginning and whom he knew to be loyal. Among the first group she recognized Bill Covey.
And Tammette Walker from the bank. Some of the others looked familiarmshe'd seen them in church or around town--but she could not put names to the faces.
She wonder, when these people had come in here. how. She did been in the office since eight this morning and had heard or seen nothing, no one going in or out.
They reached the first hole, and she saw that what she had at first taken for trash was actually a collection of small trees and shrubs.
Next to the shrubs were coffee cans, filled with what looked like ultra-black and unusually large coffee beans.
Wheeler noticed the direction of her gaze. 'Insects,' he explained.
'Snacks for the Savior.'
She nodded, looked toward the other openings. Dead animals--cats and dogs and mice and rabbits were piled next to the second hole.
The nude, unmoving forms of two women, a man, and a child were lying behind the third group of people, the child lying lengthwise across the buttocks of the women.
Corrie returned her attention to the first hole. It was the bugs and plants that struck her as the most peculiar, and although she knew that she should be shocked by all of this, particularly by the people, she was acutely aware of the fact that she was not. Her thoughts felt strangely slow, her brain numb. '
Covey smiled at her. 'We proffer our offerings to the Lord, and He looks upon us with favor. Are you to deliver the sacrifice today?'
'Yes,' Wheeler answered for her. 'Where is the infant Corrie looked into the opening. The hole did not continue straight down, as she'd assumed, but sloped, curved, turned into a tunnel some fifteen feet below the rim. It was dark but not black; there was a hazy glow coming from somewhere beneath the earth.
One of the women from the group by the third hole, an old lady Corrie did not know, brought forth a baby and handed it to the preacher. The baby was dead, its tiny eyes staring blindly at nothing as its head flopped from side to side on its too small neck. It had been a boy before the castration.
Covey and another man walked into the gloom beyond the other side of the opening. They returned with a heavy retractable metal construction ladder. Holding the ladder by the top rung, they placed it over the hole. The other sections scoped downward, clanking into place as the ladder expanded. The bottom of the ladder reached the bottom of the hole, or the point where the hole began to curve, and the two men leaned the top of the ladder against the side of the dirt.
'Go down,' Wheeler said.
Corrie had always been afraid of heights, had never even liked stairways with gaps between the steps, let alone ladders, but now she had no fear and walked around to the opposite side of the hole, accepting Covey's hand as he assisted her onto the top rung.
She climbed quickly down.
Wheeler came after her, clutching the dead baby in his right hand, holding onto the ladder with his left.
The roof of the tunnel was high, Corrie noticed, and rounded, as though it had been created by the passage of a giant earthworm. The dirt on the floor and roof and sides was smooth. Looking up the way she had come, she could see, around the rim, a ring of joyous faces. They were singing. A hymn. 'Shall We Gather At The River,' it sounded like, although those words did not seem to correspond to what was being sung.
Wheeler reached the bottom and immediately moved away from the ladder.
There was excitement in his step and also fear. 'Jesus is waiting,' he said. He did not even look at Corrie but began walking down the tunnel toward the far end, where a pink glow pulsed faintly.
Corrie followed him. That numb sense of emotional disassociation was still with her, but there was a pleasant glow beneath the numbness, a contentment spreading outward from somewhere deep within her being.
Wheeler turned to look at her, and there was joy in his face, rapture in his eyes. 'Jesus walks these halls,' he said wonderingly. 'He lives here now.'
He lives here now.
The words made her feel warm and tingly inside. They stopped walking.
Corrie estimated that they were now under the building next door to the church. The preacher handed her the dead baby. She took it from him, entranced by the cold rubbery feel of its skin, by the inert heaviness of its form. Wheeler cleared his throat, and when he spoke it was in the strong oratorical tone of his sermons 'We have come to praise Thee, oh Jesus. We have come to pay tribute to the Lord of Hosts.'
There was the sound of wind, but there was no wind, the sound of water but no water, and then, out of the pink glow before them, came Jesus.
He glided rather than walked, moving with a fluid smoothness, and His presence was as awesome as Wheeler had said. More so. He was perfection, divinity in human form, the living embodiment of God.
Corrie fell instinctively to her knees, as did Pastor
Wheeler. Tears of joy slid down her face, but she did not wipe them away, she did not want them to stop. She held forth the body of the infant. Jesus stepped up to her and, with tender fingers, took the baby.
She was nearly blinded by His beauty, by the elegance of His being, nearly stunned into silence, but she man aged to whisper, 'For you.'
Jesus nodded graciously. He held the baby to His lips, bit carefully into it and, with kneading fingers, began to drink.
'Welcome,' Wheeler said, 'to the Kingdom of God.'
Robert walked into his office, tossed his hat at the rack, and missed.
He did not bother to pick it up but sat down, slumping tiredly in his chair.
