That set us both to laughing-but it was the laughter of desperate men, or semi-men, trying to fend off despair and tearing memories of a family in Nebraska, people who loved us and whom we might never see or speak to again.
Suddenly Garth stopped laughing and poked me gently in the shoulder. 'All right, Brother Boris,' he continued, 'button up. The wind's blowing in our direction, and the schnoz smells people.'
I buttoned up, moved closer to Garth and gripped his arm more tightly. I was at once thankful and regretful that the time for casual conversation and symptom sharing had passed. In fact, I had one secret left, a symptom I hadn't told Garth about, a feeling that filled me with such terror and a sense of revulsion that I could barely stand to think, much less talk, about it. Images of what I could become, or what I was becoming, constantly threatened to drown me in a sea of horror and disgust.
Three days before, I had awoke in the morning to find that the glands on both sides of my neck had grown painfully swollen. They had remained so, and now each time I swallowed, my saliva left behind the taste of burnt, bittersweet chocolate and produced a numbing, prickly sensation in the tip of my nose.
19
'Can you see yet?' 'A little.'
'Just don't get caught peering over the top of your glasses.' 'I won't.'
The last rays of the setting sun were glancing off the surface of Lake Superior, the relative darkness triggering the infrared receptors in my altered retinas, bathing everything in a shimmering glow that ranged from pale violet to crimson. It was like watching life through a tinted X-ray negative; although I'd been seeing like this for months, I still wasn't used to it. It was positively otherworldly.
But then, I was becoming positively otherworldly.
The site of the commune, which we now approached as we trudged down a long slope, was in a large, grass-covered clearing flanked by orchards and forest on three sides, and Lake Superior to the west. To the north was another large clearing which could have been a cow pasture, but was now empty. In the main clearing were a myriad of garden plots set out in a checkerboard pattern. There were perhaps a dozen buildings constructed of wood and sheets of corrugated steel.
At the end of the road and mouth of the clearing was a large wooden shack, and waiting outside the shack was a reception committee of one. I'd been expecting something a bit more festive, assuming Garth's story had stuck-or disastrous, if it hadn't. I found it a rather murky omen, and it seemed to mean that the others had either not been told about us, or had been instructed to stay away.
The man waiting for us was older than Leviticus, and had thick, dark hair that seemed to explode out of his head in unruly ringlets. His face was gaunt, his eyes haunted, his manner dark and brooding. He wore overalls like the three young people out at the stand, but in addition he wore a gold cross around his neck that looked big enough to ward off a tribe of vampires-which, judging by the uncertain expression on his face as we approached, he may have been expecting.
It had to be Reverend Ezra.
'Father love you, Reverend,' Garth boomed cheerfully as he pulled me to a stop in front of the man. 'I'm Billy Jamison, and this is my brother, Boris.'
The Reverend nervously cleared his throat, tentatively extended a thin, bony hand to Garth; in the light cast by two spotlights over the entrance to the shack, viewed through my smoked glasses, the hand looked skeletal. 'Father love you, Brother Billy and Brother Boris. I'm Reverend Ezra. Uh.. welcome.'
'You can't imagine how happy we are to be here,' Garth said as he pumped the other man's hand. 'Boris and I have been on a very long spiritual journey, and this is the end of the trail.'
'So I've heard,' the Reverend said, obviously uncomfortable. He retrieved his hand from Garth's grasp, glanced at his watch. 'Would you come with me, please? I'd like to see that you're comfortable, and we don't have time to talk now. I'm expecting an important phone call.'
Oh-oh. Suddenly I didn't much care for Garth's description of the commune as the end of the trail.
'Of course,' Garth said easily.
We followed the Reverend along a path to a building that resembled a large quonset hut. Two burly men wearing overalls and uncertain expressions on their faces flanked the entrance. 'Father love you,' Garth said to the two men as we passed between them.
It was a spacious, neatly appointed office with a long, heavy oak desk as the centerpiece. The only items on the desk were a telephone and a large, well-worn Bible. There was a sofa and three straight-backed chairs in addition to the swivel chair behind the desk, two more doors-both closed. Above each door hung a framed painting, one of Jesus, the other of Siegmund Loge. Father.
'I think you'll be warmer here,' the Reverend mumbled, not looking at us. He gestured toward the sofa. 'Please sit down. This shouldn't take long.'
Garth led me over to the sofa, and we both sat down. The Reverend eased himself down into the swivel chair behind the desk, then stared off into space and absently drummed his fingers on the oak. Obviously, we were to wait with him until he got his phone call. I sorely missed the Colt; punching out Reverend Ezra wasn't going to get us past the two men at the door, and it wasn't going to help us find Siegmund Loge.
It was Garth who finally broke the silence. 'Reverend? Is something wrong?'
For a time I wasn't sure he was going to answer. He cast a longing look at the telephone, stared up at the ceiling for almost a minute, then finally looked at us. 'Frankly, I'm not sure what to do,' he said at last.
'Billy?' I said, tugging anxiously at Garth's sleeve. 'Is something the matter? Father said everything would be all right.'
'We did have a vision, Reverend,' Garth intoned ominously. 'Was Father wrong in telling us to come here?'
'Mike told me about your vision and your afflictions,' the Reverend answered in a distinctly nervous tone of voice. 'Would you describe them to me, please?'
He was stalling for time, I thought, waiting for the phone to ring.
Garth launched into his vision patter, embellishing it with a few rhetorical flourishes that included descriptions of flashes of lightning and claps of thunder when Father spoke. Reverend Ezra seemed quite impressed with it all.
He was even more impressed when Garth capped off his performance by opening his robe to the waist.
'The mark of the beast!' the man cried, leaping up out of his chair and making the sign of the cross.
'The mark of Father,' Garth replied evenly as he closed his robe.
'How can I be sure?'
'Who else could wield such power?'
' 'And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth and their armies, gathered together to make war against Him that sat on the Throne, and against His army.'' The Reverend swallowed hard, sank back down into the chair. The blood had drained from his face. 'The two of you have received the mark of the beast,' he added in a barely audible whisper.
His words had triggered long-buried memories; I was a child again, smaller than other children, more frightened than other children. As she did every night, my mother was reading to me from the Bible. I'd always liked Revelations; the apocalyptic visions that spilled forth from the pages had jibed with my childhood anger and sense of injustice, had given me hope that, maybe, one day things would be all right, that one morning I might wake up and find I was no longer a dwarf.
Suddenly I knew who the hundred and forty-four thousand were. 'Wrong beast, Reverend,' I said. 'We are two of the four.'
Garth glanced at me quickly, a confused expression on his face. I continued, ''And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the Mount Sion, and with Him a hundred and forty-four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads.' Billy and I don't have the mark on our foreheads, Reverend, because we
'Mike said you didn't know about the hundred and forty-four thousand!'
