because if the truth ever got out, His plan for the world would be destroyed. But He reveals the Secret to a few people in every age so that it won’t be lost forever. It’s kind of like a covenant.”
I found myself nodding thoughtfully, as though we were discussing steelhead fishing techniques.
“And you’re one of those people?” I prompted.
Sam nodded.
“It all happened that night I dropped that shit on the way back from the bar. Right there in that crummy house in Minneapolis, with you guys snoring your heads off all around. Divine revelation can happen anywhere, I guess, like Jesus being born in a stable. But it wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really saw the significance of the whole thing. Even then I found it hard. I thought I was alone, you see. I thought I was the only person who had ever been granted this terrible vision of the truth. It seemed like a curse which I had to bear on behalf of all mankind.”
He sighed heavily.
“That was before I realized there was a tradition of the Secret stretching back to the beginning of recorded history. It has taken many different forms, but the one which inspired me to start this thing here was the Templars. They had this inner group of twelve Professed Knights who had all been initiated into the Secret. The great task I’ve been entrusted with is to re-create that holy community. I always wanted you to be part of it, Phil, from the very beginning. And now you will.”
He looked out of the window again.
“Let’s go back to the baby that got scalded to death,” he said. “How could God permit such a thing? That’s the question, right? OK, here’s the answer. He didn’t.”
I frowned.
“You mean it never happened?”
Sam leaned forward and fixed me with his intense stare.
We confronted each other in silence. Sam kept staring at me fixedly, as though trying to will me into acquiescence.
“So what was there?” I asked.
“There was something that looked like a baby and sounded like a baby,” he went on in the same hushed undertone. “Only it wasn’t.”
He relaxed now, pulling back and breaking eye contact, as though the critical moment had passed.
“Think of it as a doll,” he said in his normal voice. “The most advanced doll in the world, a million times more realistic than anything you can buy in the shops. It mimics a baby perfectly, but inside it’s empty. It has no thoughts, no feelings, no capacity for joy or suffering. In a word, no soul.”
I tried to look as if all this made perfect sense, but that there were one or two details I hadn’t quite got straightened out.
“But if we have no way of knowing whether other people have feelings or not, then it’s impossible to distinguish the imitation baby from a real one. So the distinction is meaningless.”
Sam sighed and shook his head.
“You’re still thinking logically, Phil! It’s not just that baby we’re talking about here. It’s also the baby’s junkie mother and the abused wife in the apartment next door and the kid knocked down by a hit-and-run in the street outside and the guy dying of cancer in the hospital across town and the family of ten crushed in an earthquake who called for help for five days before dying. It’s every single victim of evil and injustice and catastrophe in the whole world ever since the beginning of time!”
I wondered if Ellie had brought David yet. Perhaps he was even now just a few yards away from me. But Sam had the gun, and I was increasingly convinced that he might be capable of using it. I had to keep him in play, at least for now. On the other hand, I knew he wouldn’t buy it if I just pretended to go along with everything he said. He had to believe he had convinced me intellectually.
“OK, let’s see if I’ve got this,” I said. “Bad stuff appears to happen, but it may not really, because we have no way of knowing whether the people it happens to are real.”
Sam shook his head vigorously.
“We
“But how? You just got through saying there was no way of telling the difference!”
He made an impatient gesture.
“Listen! If God is love, He won’t let anything bad happen to someone real.”
I shrugged.
“So?”
“So if it
He stamped his foot on the floor in delight.
“Get it? It’s so simple, so elegant, as only the truth can be!”
His expression suddenly became deadly serious.
“That’s why the Secret can only be revealed to a few chosen individuals. You understand what it means? It means you can do what the fuck you want! You can beat people, shoot them, burn them, torture them, anything at all! Because if God allows you to do it, the victim was never really there in the first place. He was what Blake calls a specter. An emanation, a mere shadow. ‘Why wilt thou give to her a body whose life is but a shade?’
He broke off, listening. Then he moved back to the window and reached for the binoculars.
“’Course, this is just the bare theory I’m giving you here,” he said. “To become a full initiate, you have to prove your faith in practice. And I have the feeling you might get the chance real soon.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
He adjusted the focus of the binoculars.
“Jesus!”
“What is it?”
He handed me the binoculars without a word. I raised them to my eyes. Over the tops of the trees, a wide swath of the ocean inlet was visible, a choppy sullen gray. Then I spotted the boat bouncing through the waves toward the island. It was painted blue with some kind of white marking on the side, and was smaller and trimmer than the one on which I had arrived. The man at the wheel seemed to be wearing some kind of a uniform. As the boat slowed and turned, making for the pier, I was able to distinguish the marks on the hull, large white letters reading POLICE.
19
The day after she had spoken to Charlie Freeman, Kristine Kjarstad caught the red-eye to Chicago, arriving at five in the morning. Considering the hour, O’Hare was a hive of activity. It had a buzzy, big-city feel in striking contrast to the quiet, deserted spaces of Sea-Tac the night before. Kristine could remember nothing in between except one glimpse of some town on the prairie, lines and clusters of lights like molten plasma showing through cracks in the black surface crust.
She went into a cafe staffed by two male Hispanics sporting huge gilt rings, and ordered a bran muffin and a mug of coffee that would have put the place out of business in a week back in latte-land. Dawn was just breaking, patches of dark blue sky appearing against the lowering clouds. Living in a city defined by hills and water, Kristine had been amazed by the scale and regularity of Chicago as they overflew the vast grid of streets which seemed to stretch away forever, with highways and railroad lines overlaid on it like cross-hatching.
Here at the airport, it paraded its character in a different way, in the sheer variety of the people around, and in the way they presented themselves. Two paunchy men wearing tractor caps and baggy leisure outfits sat opposite two scrawny women in thick-rimmed glasses, stud earrings and floppy pantsuits. Next to them, a group of businessmen in Italian suits were trying unsuccessfully to ignore a woman making a full-frontal fashion statement in a slinky, skin-tight sheath. There was a hip black dude too cool to look at anyone, a slutty woman of about thirty with heavy makeup and come-on hair, a crop-haired guy with tattoos on his arms and macho-military clothing,
