witch fell into a passion, let him fall again into the well, and went away.
How long, Yahweh?
Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, Having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?
TWENTY-TWO
DECEMBER 21, EVENING
THE CHAPEL PERILOUS
OUTSIDE THE TENT, THE NIGHT bellowed. Earthquakes had started right after they had come back from Wylie’s universe and were continuous now, a low shuddering that never stopped. On other parts of the planet, Martin and Trevor knew from reading Wylie’s book, this meant that hell was unfolding. The seraph were racing to sink the great human cities and most of the human lands, and raise the ocean floors that would be their new continents. They had only hours left until the fourteen artificial gateways they had constructed around the world opened wide and a billion hungry seraph came swarming through.
Three times now, the little band had heard the unearthly scream of tornadoes in the sky, then the bone- shaking thudding that followed when they hit and went marching off across the prairie.
Pam and George had had the presence of mind to locate the tent close to the foot of a small hill, meaning that they were unlikely to take a direct hit from a tornado. But if a big one should sweep this clearing—well, then it was over for them.
Thunder snapped, the wind screamed, and Ward and Claire James drummed on their drums. Outriders chuckled and rasped nearby. Martin believed that they probably didn’t even want to attack the tent at this point. They wanted this little band of evolved humans right where they were, because as long as they were here, what problems could they cause?
He and Trevor had almost been drowned when the Hummer passed through the gateway and hit the flood on this side. But the other kids had anticipated what might happen, and were waiting with ropes in the slow water near shore. It had been a near thing, but the both of them had managed to ford the swollen, raging river.
Trevor slept with his head on his dad’s shoulder. Another kid had the other shoulder. Two little ones shared his lap.
And he thought, working in his mind with Pam and George and Mike. The kids were getting expert at this, their minds racing much, much faster than his. The change had affected children and adolescents because their minds were more supple and less informed with the weight of civilized knowledge.
There was a name for the state they were in—many names, in fact. It was called bhodi, satori, many things. But it was not as if the soul was lit from a higher power-enlightened. They weren’t enlightened, they simply were.
Man had left the forests of Eden an animal, but these kids had found their way back, bringing none of the debris of civilization, but all of its compassion, its consciousness of the value of the individual, its ability to balance personal and collective need. They had returned to Eden as true human beings. They understood how to be as lilies of the field. For them, it wasn’t impossible to live in the rain. They had each other. They had love.
But they were still just this tiny, little band in a great and frightened world.
It had been this way, before, he thought, in the lands of southern France and northern Spain thirty thousand years ago, when the spirit had been on the children, and adolescents had begun to paint the walls of caves with the magic animals of the mind.
Pam shook him. She frowned at him.
He’d allowed his mind to drift while they were reading his memories of Wylie’s book.
“See them?” Trevor asked suddenly. His voice was curiously flat, as if he was dreaming.
“Are you asleep, Son?”
“I’m out of my body, and if I keep having to talk, I’m going to be back in, so come out, I need to show you something.”
Pam nodded. They could read the information stored in his brain in peace if he wasn’t there, so he took a deep breath, let it out and with it let his soul out of his body. When he moved out of the tent, he found Trevor and some of the other kids together. The rain whipped through them, the outriders did not react to them. He saw them as their ordinary selves, but knew that this was only his mind filtering their essences into familiar forms. Their bodies were still inside the tent.
Trevor pointed, and he followed the direction. Moving slowly, he tried to clear himself of all expectation, to so empty his mind that the actual appearance of the world over which he was flying would come through.
It was hard, though, in this state, to see anything except what you expected to see, or wanted to. He saw cities brightly lit in the night, Wichita and Kansas City, and the smiling prairie farther on dotted here and there with the lights of smaller communities.
He saw, in other words, a safe world, and so one that was not real. So he told himself, You will close yourself to this. You will blank your mind. And when you look again, you will not see your memories or your hopes, you will see only what is part of the actual, physical world.
He saw Lindy. He was right in front of her and she was still walking, but she was so thin and tired, she looked like she had only a few more steps left in her. Her eyes were glazed as if dead, but still she walked, and not far ahead were lines of fourteen wheelers, Continental Van Lines, Murphy’s Stores, Gap Leaders, an ad-hoc assembly of vehicles. Other wanderers were getting into them and she was eager, he could see it, because it would mean no more walking on her blistered clumps of feet.
Soldiers, some of them in standard issue G.I. uniforms, others thin and sleek, seraph in gleaming black, their hands gloved in white, their heads hidden by visored helmets, were separating the arriving wanderers into two groups. Seraph and human soldiers worked together, and he knew that the human soldiers were themselves wanderers.
There was a crackle, and a group of wanderers who had just been moved into a small field blew apart, their legs, arms, and heads flying in every direction.
Sitting in the back of a nearby pickup was a soldier manning a peculiar, disk-shaped weapon, and he knew what that was, too, because back in the tent Trevor had the smaller one he’d taken from Wylie’s house.
As he watched, more wanderers approached the ruined bodies with knives and saws and began harvesting the meat. The ever-thrifty seraph must be feeding their captives to themselves. It made ugly sense. How could you find a cheaper way to keep them going than that?
He tried to scream at Lindy, but his voice could not be heard by her or anybody else. And look at her poor feet, surely she wouldn’t be set to work, surely they would select her. And his poor Winnie, God only knew what had become of her.
The sorrow was so great, the helplessness almost enough to drive him mad.
A warmth came over him, then, so kind, so surpassing in protective compassion that he allowed himself to hope that at last the deity he had been praying to constantly for all these days had come. But it was not God, it was another soul. He had a sense of a soldier’s heart, determined, disciplined, and a soldier’s face, tight with effort.
When he tried to open himself to this soul, though, the way you do when you are practiced in out-of-body travel—and he was getting somewhat okay at it—the other soul threw up a memory from its childhood, a boy riding a bicycle up a driveway on a summer’s night, a yellow porch light with moths flying around it, an elderly dog standing up on the porch, then coming down to greet the boy, his tail twirling.
Martin recognized it as an attempt to say, in the multilayered language in which soul speaks to soul, that this visitor who was trying to contact him now had been a boy beloved of an old dog. And with the high-speed
