Leave your sorrow
Come and join us
Shed those sins,
Fold the joy within…
One time, Macbeth had directed this made-for-TV picture about the crooked evangelist Boyd C. Beresford the Fourth. Spent a whole ten days cruising the Bible Belt, stuff like this churning out of the car-radio, out of hotel-room TV sets, out of mission halls and marquees – until even arid atheism began to look like a safe haven.
So he was not impressed. Not even when they started singing in tongues, because he knew how easy this stuff was to fake, even while you were convincing yourself you weren't faking it. And all the healing that lasted just long enough for the relatives to throw in a two hundred dollar donation. You feeling better, sister? Or maybe your faith isn't yet strong enough for you to be healed?
'Go away. Begone, heathen!'
This real big Born Again Christian on the church door. Stained jeans and a grungy parka. Tattoos on both wrists, one involving what looked like it used to be a swastika on fire before it got reprocessed into a bulky crucifix. Fascist punk finds God. It happened. Classic demonstration of what Cathy had said earlier about one extreme igniting another.
'Listen, I don't plan to cause any trouble,' Macbeth said wisely. 'All I want is to talk to Joel Beard. I would like for you to bring him out here. That too much of a problem?'
Cathy had said, 'Mungo, you have an open, honest face. You've got to get to Jowl, talk some sense into him. Long as you go easy on the casual blasphemy, he has to listen to you – you're not from Bridelow and you're not a woman. Tell him what you like, but get him to evacuate that place. They think they're safe in there… they're just so naive, they're children…'
The big guy with the ex swastika said, 'You got five seconds to get them filthy heathen feet the other side of this sacred threshold.'
Beat up on a pagan for the Lord. Jesus.
'Listen,' Macbeth said urgently. 'Go tell Joel that Pastor Mungo Macbeth of the, uh, East Side Evangelical Mission, would like to speak to him.'
'You're lying,' Swastika said, but with audibly less conviction than a moment ago.
'God will forgive you for that,' Macbeth said. 'Maybe.'
'He's not there,' Swastika blurted out.
'He is everywhere,' said Macbeth.
'No, Joel. I mean Joel. When we got here we couldn't find him. He's vanished.'
'What do you mean, vanished?'
'He's just gone.'
'Well, where'd he go, for Chr… Where might Reverend Beard have gone?'
Flash of fear in the guy's small eyes. 'Why d'you think we're praying so hard?' 'So your friends have returned.'
John stood, bathed in blue light.
The blue was in the old glass around the enormous lantern. Round panes, set in the four exterior walls, were frosted white.
There wasn't much to it; Joel had expected more, perhaps the remains of a clock mechanism, but there was no sign of there ever having been one.
'I knew they would,' Joel said. 'I knew it was impossible for them to forsake their God for very long.'
John smiled, his teeth shining blue.
'Still,' Joel said. 'I won't say I'm not relieved. Shall I go down? Tell them what we are going to do?' He moved towards the top of the stone steps.
'Lord, no.' John's face grew solemn. 'They've fled once.'
'Yes,' Joel said. 'I'm sorry.'
The room was about nine feet square. In any other church it would be the belfry; here it was the lamphouse. The lantern hung from the pinnacle of the roof. It was perhaps five feet in diameter.
There was lead around the rims of the glass circles in the walls, but no remains of numerals; it had clearly never been a clock.
Inside the bluish milky glass set into an old iron frame, he could make out the incandescent shapes of three big electric bulbs.
John said, 'Used to be an oil lamp, you can tell. Big candles before that, probably. A lure for the spirits of the Moss.'
Joel remembered his nightmare in the cellar room, imagining the lantern laying an ice-blue beam over still water.
Channels of rain glistened like icicles on the glass. The light was quite ghastly, dehumanizing. John, with his pale, flat face, looked almost demonic. Joel glanced sharply away, afraid of the illusions this evil light could evoke. Though they'd been up here over half an hour, he became aware for the first time of a small door in the shadows to his left.
'What's in there, do you know?'
'Let's see, shall we?' John moved lightly across the boarded floor, pushed and twisted at a handle. 'No… 'fraid it's locked.'
Joel closed his eyes and listened to the singing. The hymn was trailing into a drone of tongues, male and female voices flowing into a bright river of praise. He tried to let it flow into him.
On all sides of them, up here in the tower, the night sky was roaring with rain.
'How long?'
'Little under ten minutes. Impatient, are we, Joel? Excited?'
'Why can't we just switch it off and go?'
'You see a switch anywhere, m' boy? Be on a circuit. Time switch. Anyway, what good would that do? No. Have to smash it. Violence, I'm afraid. Strength. What you're about, isn't it Joel? Strength. Might. No room for namby-pamby, nancy-boy clerics on the Front Line, mmmm?'
'Yes,' Joel said. 'You're right. I'm ready for that. Midnight, then.' Back at the Rectory, Macbeth said, 'What could happen to those people? Spell this thing out.'
Reaching the front door, he'd heard Cathy, on the hall phone extension, saying, 'I don't know, I'll call you back ' Putting down the phone to let him in.
Now, in the study, sitting on the edge of the piano stool, she said, 'How can I say what could happen? You're nowhere in this game until you accept that nobody can ever say for certain what's going to happen and anyone who thinks he can, or that he can manipulate it, is due for a hell of a shock one day.'
Macbeth said, 'What game?'
'Game?'
'You just said 'in this game'.'
Cathy shrugged. 'Life, I suppose.'
But he wasn't aiming to back off. 'OK, so what's the bottom line? What's the worst thing could happen? Before you answer, bear in mind what I saw in Scotland and that Moira is dead and that I don't believe I have a great deal I care about left to lose.'
Cathy said calmly, 'I've lived in Bridelow all my life. I've acquired knowledge of certain things, OK? And most of today I've been talking very seriously to my father who's had to deal with things most clergymen don't even read about.'
'Sure,' Macbeth said impatiently. 'What's your point?'
'Put it this way, if it was Pop in there, I'd be less worried.'
'So what you're saying is, in the great metaphysical ballpark, these guys are strictly little-league.'
'Let's say they're hardly ready for what they're up against. They create their own universe, you see, these people. In this little universe everything is down to the Will of God and all evil can be defeated fast as a prayer. When real evil shows its hand, it can be so traumatic they'll…'
'Flip?'
'Flip is right,' Cathy said. 'Flip is the least of it.'
