“I’ve seen men die,” he said slowly, “but I never saw what happened to their souls after. I never saw any leave their bodies, that much I know.”
“Where have you seen men die?” Sherm sneered.
“You must be born again,” Martha broke in before Dugan could answer. “You must be washed in the blood of the lamb! Only blood can do it— blood and sacrifice! The blood of the innocent! The blood of the lamb!”
She stared at Benjy, and Sheila stared back in alarm. None of us responded and she fell silent again.
Blood of the innocent lamb. I didn’t like the sound of that, or the way she’d looked at Benjy when she said it.
“What about ghosts?” Sharon asked.
Sherm snickered. “What about them?”
“Aren’t they proof of some kind of an afterlife?”
“Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“No, but just because I haven’t seen one doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in them. I’ve never seen a polar bear either, but I know that they exist. Why can’t the same thing be true for ghosts?
There are enough eyewitness accounts, photographs, even video footage.”
I thought about it for a moment.
“John thought he saw a ghost once, back when we were kids. Or at least he thought he did. Down at the old quarry between Spring Grove and Hanover. We used to go swimming there. Supposedly there’s a town at the bottom of it. The dam burst back in the twenties and the town was just left standing when the waters flooded the mine. A few kids have drowned there over the years too. It’s supposed to be haunted. People say they see white, human-looking shapes down under the water. But I never saw anything.”
“So you don’t believe in them?”
I shook my head.
“No, I guess I don’t. Ghosts or God. It’s all the same thing, isn’t it? Don’t they call him the holy ghost?”
Nobody responded, and I figured they’d finally shut up and quit asking questions. I found myself wondering again if they’d be this nice to me if I wasn’t one of the guys with a gun. After a few minutes, Oscar stirred. His bare chest had goose bumps.
“Personally, I’ve always believed in reincarnation.”
“What’s that?” Sheila asked.
“Reincarnation? It’s the belief that we’ve all had previous lives before this current one we’re living. It’s commonly accepted in many religions— not Christianity of course, or Judaism, but many others.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of that,” Sherm said. “It means like I could have been Billy the Kid or D. B. Cooper in a past life. Wouldn’t that be the bomb?”
“No doubt,” Oscar said with a straight face. If Sherm noticed the underlying sarcasm in his voice, he didn’t let on.
“Edgar Cayce believed in it,” Oscar continued. “He was a great healer, died in 1945. Back then, they called him a ‘psychic healer,’ but today I guess he’d just be considered a homeopathic practitioner. Whatever you want to call him, he definitely left his mark on the world. He used to do readings and stuff and tell people who they were in their past lives. The transcripts of the readings are all on file at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia. There must be thousands of them.”
“Sounds like New Age crap to me,” Dugan grunted. “I never bought in to all that worshipping crystals and singing to the whales crap.”
“Some of that is a little far-fetched,” Oscar admitted, “but a lot more of it has been proven outside the mainstream scientific community.”
“So what were you in a previous life?” Sherm scoffed. “A frog or a slug or some shit like that?”
Oscar’s ears and neck turned red.
“Wait,” Sherm continued, “I know! You were a fucking tapeworm, right? A tapeworm hanging out of a dog’s ass?”
“You can laugh all you want, but I believe in it. I really do. You guys ever hear of Joan Grant?”
We shook our heads in unison.
“Her first book, Winged Pharaoh, came out back in 1937. It took place in ancient Egypt and at the time, the critics hailed it as a brilliant historical novel, because she so realistically captured what it must have been like to live back then. People couldn’t believe how accurate the descriptions were. It was like you were walking through Egypt; the sights, the sounds, the smells. But the thing is, it wasn’t her imagination. Joan Grant had lived it before, as Sekeeta, the daughter of the pharaoh and later on, a priestess-pharaoh herself. She also lived in Egypt decades later as a man named Ra-ab Hotep, and as Ramses II. Besides all of that, she also remembered previous lives in Greece from the second century B.C., in medieval England and in sixteenth-century Italy. She went on to write seven more historical novels, though she called them posthumous autobiographies.”
“And do you really believe in that nonsense?” Dugan arched his eyebrow.
“It’s not nonsense. It’s no more far-fetched than believing in ghosts or in God and the Holy Trinity, is it?”
“Blasphemer!” Martha pointed a crooked finger at him. “See how their evil influence has corrupted you? Now you commit the ultimate sin as well. You blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. Oh, the pits yawn wide for you, young man— for all of you. There must be blood, now. Great quantities of blood. Torrents and rivers and oceans of it. Only blood can wash . . .”
Sherm pointed his gun at her and pulled the hammer back.
“Martha. I’ll say this nice and slowly and I’m only going to say it one more time, so make sure you pay attention. Shut! The! Fuck! Up!”
Her mouth clamped shut and she did as she was told.
“I know what happens when we die,” Benjy piped up.
“Quiet down, baby,” Sheila shushed him.
“No,” Sherm shrugged, “might as well let him go. Shit, everybody else has made a contribution. Let’s hear his.”
Sheila eyed him carefully.
“Seriously,” Sherm said, “I want to hear this. It’s gotta be good, better than fat boy’s or Martha’s ideas at least.”
“Go ahead, Benjy,” I encouraged him.
He nodded.
“When people die, they go into a bright place that leads to another, bigger bright place. The first bright place is supposed to make you feel safe, but it isn’t, because it’s full of the monster people. The monster people are made out of darkness, but they can hide in the light and when they do, you can’t see them. They turn invisible in the light. All you can hear is their voices.”
Sherm jumped, and I wondered what was bothering him.
“If you’ve been bad,” Benjy continued, “the monster people won’t let you go on to the bigger bright place. Instead, they take you with them, to a dark place, and then you can see them. They’re scary-looking and they’re mean. They smell icky and they . . .”
Benjy shuddered and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and went on.
“That’s what happens if you’ve been bad. You don’t get to go to the bright place. You stay in the darkness with the monster people. But if you’ve been good, then Jesus comes, and he rescues you from the monster people, and he takes you to live with him in the bright place. It’s very nice there, and you get to see everybody else who’s died.”
When he’d finished, our reactions were mixed. Sheila and I smiled at each other. Roy, Kim, Sharon, and even Dugan grinned. Sherm clapped his hands in a slow, sarcastic way. Martha stared at Benjy.
“Blood of the lamb,” she muttered over and over again. “Blood of the lamb . . .”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Sheila snapped. “Why can’t you just shut up?”
“I keep saying it because it is true. Only blood will wash this clean now. Innocent blood. As the Lord instructed Abraham, saying to him to make an offering of his son, Isaac, so shall He command us now. The lamb for the offering.”
“I don’t understand what you’re going on about. What are you saying? What do you mean?”
