The daily ritual of sorting the mail and dividing the spoil meant that Wynter was now spending quite a bit of time in the office, and inevitably there came the point at which I had to introduce him to Trev. My cousin put on a performance which under other circumstances would have embarrassed me to death.
“Forsake your worldly ways,” he said to Wynter, ignoring his outstretched hand. “The emissaries from the Kingdom of Orion are coming. They’ll be here soon.”
“Is that a fact?” Wynter winked at me. “How soon?”
“Real soon.” Trev spoke with priestly assurance. “The Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse has decreed it.”
“Yes, but how soon?”
Trev stared upwards for a moment, apparently seeking guidance from a light fixture in the ceiling. “Ten o’clock Thursday morning.”
“That’s nice,” Wynter chuckled. “He’ll be just in time for coffee.”
Trev gave him a look of mingled disdain and pity, turned on his heel and strode out of the office. He slammed the door so hard the pressure wave almost made my ears pop.
“You were right about that guy,” Wynter said, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and making an idiot face. Perhaps I had some remnant of family feeling for Trev, but Wynter’s remark and the way he delivered it annoyed me. Also there had been a strange glint in Trev’s baby blue eyes, a hint of intensity I had never seen before which made me wonder what was going on inside his head.
“You shouldn’t have pinned him down to an exact time like that,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of popping his bubble.”
Wynter shrugged carelessly. “Relax, Desmond. Nobody can pop that kind of bubble.”
For some reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on the comment gave me a chilly feeling, as though somebody had opened a door nearby and admitted a coiling snake of cold air.
By the time we got near the final greatly reduced stakes, Wynter and I had settled into a routine. Every morning about nine we picked up the mail, took it into my office, locked the door and began the pleasurable task of opening the envelopes and sorting and dividing the money. Had we used the simplified scheme there would have been very little mail to deal with at that stage, but Wynter’s idea for ‘reviving’ clients who had been given only one loser was still yielding fair returns, and Thursday morning produced sizable stacks of money, postal drafts and letters of worshipful gratitude.
“This is okay, but I’m packing it in tomorrow,” Wynter announced, polishing his steel rims with a tissue. “It’s vacation time and I can feel Rio calling. You should pull out as well.”
“Expecting trouble?”
He tapped a pile of letters. “Some of the people who went down are a bit churned up about it, but I don’t think they’re a real threat. The ones I’m worried about are the characters who want to come round here and kiss your cousin’s feet. They could descend on us at any time – and that’s something I hadn’t planned for.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “Perhaps I ought to…’
I never got round to finishing the sentence because at that moment I became aware of something very odd that was taking place right before my eyes. My desk faces the door of the office, only a few paces from it, and from where I sat I could see with perfect crystal clarity that the aluminium shootbolt was sliding back – all by itself! I had fitted that bolt personally and knew there was no way of moving it from the far side of the door, so the sight of it quietly slipping back through its guides did peculiar things to my stomach. Wynter noticed the startled expression on my face, but before I could say anything to him the door was flung open and Trev came striding into the room. He was wearing his best Orion T-shirt, the one on which he had sewed the gold epaulettes, and was brandishing his UFO detector.
“The appointed hour is nigh,” he boomed. “It’s almost ten o’clock, and time for you to repent and… and…” His voice faltered as his gaze was drawn towards the desk and took in the heaps of envelopes, letters and money.
“Why didn’t you lock the door?” Wynter said accusingly.
“I did,” I whispered, but there was no time to explain about the self-propelled bolt for Trev was advancing on me with anger and reproach in his eyes. He looked bigger than ever, oddly majestic.
“Des, Des,” he said, eyes burning me like blue lasers, “why have you committed this terrible sin? You gave me your word.”
“This isn’t what it looks like,” I replied hurriedly, trying to calm him down. “Ralph and I have started this little mail order business. It’s nothing to do with the horses. We sell… we sell…”
“Bibles,” Wynter put in.
I nodded emphatically. “Bibles.”
A story like that would have satisfied the old familiar Trev, but this new and rather disquieting one snatched up a handful of letters and subjected them to intense scrutiny. “You’re lying to me, Des,” he said. “You’ve been lying to me all along. These people believe in me, and you’ve been lying to me all along. These people believe in me, and you’ve been taking money from them. I’m disappointed in you.”
“I’ve had enough of this crap.” Wynter stood up and motioned for me to do the same. “Let’s throw the clown out of here.”
“Good idea,” I said, suddenly realizing how dumb I had been to let somebody like Trev knock me off balance. Wynter and I were closing in on him when the second very strange thing occurred.
“Do not move!” Trev commanded, raising his UFO detector as though it were some kind of talisman, and on the instant of his speaking I was gripped by a sudden and complete paralysis. Unable to believe what was taking place, I frantically willed myself to move forward and nothing happened – I was frozen into the immobility of a statue. Wynter was similarly petrified, locked in midstride, and judging by the expression on his face he was very unhappy about it.
For a moment Trev seemed almost as surprised as we were. His gaze shuttled between our faces and the UFO detector a few times, and I saw a look of wondering surmise appear in his eyes. He raised the detector again and, with his lips working silently, pointed it at one of my filing cabinets. The cabinet immediately turned into a stack of Blissfizz crates.
“It has happened,” Trev breathed. “It’s all coming to pass. The Supreme Nizam is rewarding the faithful.” A faint halo sprang into being around his head as he waved the modified telescope again and turned the money on my desk into a small heap of withered leaves. Wynter gave a strangled moan.
At that point the evidence in favour of Trev’s weird theories about the Kingdom of Orion was becoming pretty convincing, but in spite of everything I still couldn’t accept them. Fantastic things, miraculous things, were happening all round me – but there had to be a better explanation than that the Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse was dropping in to visit my simple-minded cousin. I sometimes get flashes of intuition, and at that moment my mind suddenly seized on the last word Trev had uttered – faithful. Faith, somebody once said, can move mountains. Trev had always had faith, lots of it, but not enough to make any difference to anything in the material world, so the inference was that he had obtained reinforcements. And I – God help me – had been instrumental in bringing up those reinforcements.
Thanks to my trickery and manipulation of him, Trev was genuinely convinced he could predict the future, and furthermore there were many people throughout the country who also believed in him because they had had incontrovertible ‘proof’ of his powers. Wynter had stressed the religious element in the make-up of the compulsive gambler, and indeed we had relied on it to make the scheme work. I have never been mystically inclined, but in the moment of stress I could see clearly that the faith and fervour of our remaining clients was forming a reservoir of psychic power which Trev could tap at will. He had become a miracle-worker. In a way it was almost surprising that his transformation had not occurred at an earlier stage in the game, but perhaps the mental force of 5,000 people who are fairly well convinced of something is less than that of fifty who are total believers.