Chloris smiled. “Thank you, I suppose.”
He sipped more soup as he again raised his trembling finger. “Trick.”
“I don’t…”
Everett opened his hand. It resembled the taloned foot of an owl, outstretched to snatch a field mouse and take it away to kill. He leaned toward her, shaking as his strength quickly drained away.
“What is it, dear boy?”
Everett finally reached her. He placed his hand on her throat. His fingertips hooked into her esophagus.
Chloris pried and swatted at his wrist, but her vaunted strength failed. “Nnnnoooo!” she sought to say, but Everett choked harder.
Chloris tried to stand and back away from him, but he held her fast. The room, already dark, faded to a uniform gray.
Then she was falling—backward, onto her butt.
The man had fainted from his own effort.
Chloris ran out of the room, anxious to tell her employer of the danger under his roof, praying he would get the man-demon far enough away from the settlement that it could never find its way back.
* * * *
Conal glanced up at his bed, as was long his habit, to see if Sibil was sleeping.
A year and a half hence, Sibil O’Herlihy, a light sleeper on the best of nights since coming to the new world, would have emitted another uneasy moan as she raised her wispy head to find Conal still at the table with the lamp burning too bright.
Now the bed only lay cold and empty.
It had been over a year since her passing, yet Conal still found himself searching for his wife in dark and quiet moments like this. It was often a brutish place, this so-called new world. Thus, her death the winter before last was not shocking. For someone like Conal, who thought of wives as little more than indentured servants, at best, it wasn’t even all that sorrowful.
Yet her company had been some comfort. Left to himself, Conal had no one to punish for his sins.
Conal had no patience for that piece of the past. For there was more significant history to be recalled.
Meeting with the wealthy Wilcott Bennington and a few others in the back room of a cavernous pub those years past, Conal was one of a few men privy to the Englishman’s explanation, concise yet meticulous, of his evolving beliefs about spirituality, society and destiny. At the time, Conal had neither agreed with nor cared about Bennington’s thoughts, which qualified as blasphemy to many. His interest was in a new beginning or, more accurately, an escape.
In his two short years as a sailor for hire during his adolescence, Conal had lived as carefree a life as there could be. Amassing gambling debts, achieving unwilling sexual conquests and committing theft kept him busier than any honest man. Not surprisingly, vindictive men eventually hired brutal men to find him.
Conal had little religious inclination. But he did have a taste for new experiences. When one of his shipmates, seeking closeness with God, acquired the very mushroom that Saint John the Revelator himself had ingested, Conal reasoned that he could take the fungus and convince God to save him from his past before it caught up with him.
Though reasonably literate, Conal was infected with the impulsiveness and impatience of youth and didn’t bother to read a single verse of the Book of Revelation before indulging. He could not have known that the visions experienced by the exiled scribe, John, did not always amount to blissful communion with Jehovah Himself, but more often resulted in incomprehensible and horrific visions of monsters, suffering and apocalypse.
These were the kind of visions that drove a man either to spiritual asceticism or unbridled hedonism. Only Conal O’Herlihy could find a rationale for both.
Several weeks removed from his first experience with the spotted mushroom, Conal O’Herlihy had become a man of purpose, with an eye toward serving both himself and the god of his visions—regardless of whether that truly was Jehovah, or some other deity—and thus reserving for himself a place at the right hand of…Whomever.
This god, via random followers, whispered to him word of the man organizing a mass exodus to the fabled new world of virgin milk and honey, where debt collectors and angry spouses had no cause to venture.
Bennington had his growing troop of followers, all ripe to be shaped and molded by a strong leader. While the wealthy entrepreneur Bennington would suffice for them in the short term, they would eventually need a man who carried the Wisdom of the Fungus.
This was the Irishman’s quandary. Each of the settler families had received or had read to them a copy of Bennington’s charter. Signing on was the same as acknowledging and accepting his beliefs.
And while Bennington had confided to Conal and other potential community leaders his conclusions that the Christ myth was derived from Saturn, he also made it clear he would not force this belief on any of the settlers. He only hoped he could share and discuss it openly, as everyone could their respective beliefs.
Conal saw his opening when Bennington suggested that he take charge of designing the community’s worship center. In exchange for a claim to the high hill, Conal promised to build it there at the top “as a beacon to all the town.”
The charter simply touted religious freedom, an equal community, a commitment to a shining future of prosperity hewn by the hands of the brave and the daring. Not a word about Saturn worship or anything else that could cast doubt in the settlers’ minds or sway them to upend Bennington.
Bennington’s charter was frustratingly flawless. It promised liberty of religion—and therefrom, a completely unheard-of concept back in England. The document offered nothing that could be counted on to rouse the rabble.
For Conal, an appeal to fundamentalist fears was the only answer.
The corpse of poor Hezekiah Hardison might be the very miracle that would change the landscape for O’Herlihy. He needed only to compose the perfect time and place to reveal it, once a few
