‘Jody!’ The thin woman turned him away from Donnell, and by way of apology smiled and said, ‘Praise the Lord!’ Her hair was piled up in a bouffant style, which accentuated her scrawniness, and her gray dress hung loosely and looked to be full of sticks and air.
‘Praise the Lord,’ muttered Donnell, struck by the woman’s sincerity, her lack of pose, especially in relation to the fraudulence of Papa Salvatino; his face was a road map of creepy delights and indulgences, and masked an unaspiring soul who had discovered a trick by which he might prosper. The nature of the trick was beyond Donnell’s power to discern, but no doubt it was the cause of the anticipation he read from the shadowy faces bobbing in the aisle below.
The music lapsed into a suspenseful noodling on the organ, and Jocundra leaned close, her face drawn and worried. ‘Don’t let him touch your glasses,’ she whispered. She pointed to the rear flap of the tent, which was lashed partway open behind the drum kit, and he nodded.
‘What’s ailin’ you tonight, Sister Rita.’ Papa clipped the microphone to a stand and approached. ‘You look healthier than me!’
‘Oh, Papa!’ Sister Rita wiggled her hips seductively. ‘You know I got the worst kind of heart trouble.’
Papa laughed. ‘No need to get specific, sister,’ he said. ‘Jesus understands full well the problems of a widow woman.’ He placed his hands palms inward above her head and began to knead the air, hooking his fingers, shaping an invisible substance.
Astounded, Donnell recognized the motions to be the same as he had used to disrupt the lock on the gate at Shadows. He brought Sister Rita’s magnetic field into focus, and saw that Papa was inducing the fiery arcs to flow inward toward a point at the top of her head; and as they flowed, they ceased flickering in and out, brightened and thickened into a cage of incandescent wires. Her back arched. Her arms stiffened, her fingers splayed. The rolls of fat rippled beneath her dress. And then, as all the arcs flowed inward, a brilliant flash enveloped her body, as if the gate to a burning white heaven had opened and shut inside her. In Donnell’s eyes she existed momentarily as a pillar of pale shimmering energy. He felt the discharge on every inch of his skin, a tingling which faded with the same rapidity as the flash.
Sister Rita wailed and staggered to one side. His smile unflagging, the gray-haired usher led her toward the stairs, and the band launched into a triumphant blare. Fervent shouts erupted from the crowd.
‘PRAISE JESUS!’ Papa bawled into the mike. ‘I’M STOKED FULL OF GOD’S LOVE TONIGHT!’
But if Papa were truly a conduit for the Holy Spirit, then the Spirit must consist of a jolt of electromagnetism channelled into the brain reward centers. That, thought Donnell, would be how Magnusson would have interpreted the event. Papa Salvatino must be psychically gifted, and in effect was serving his flock as a prostitute, bestowing powerful orgasms and passing them off as divine visitations. Donnell glanced down at Sister Rita. She was sprawled in her chair, gasping, her legs spread and her skirt ridden up over swollen knees; an elderly woman leaned over her from the row behind and was fanning her with a newspaper.
The music lapsed once more, the crowd stilled, and Papa began working on the hydrocephalic. The thin woman closed her eyes and lifted her arms overhead, praying silently, the ligature of her neck standing out in cables with the ferocity of her devotion. Things were not going as well as they had for Sister Rita. Papa’s eyes were nearly crossed with the strain, sweat beaded his forehead, and the hydrocephalic’s head was sunk grimacing on his chest. His field was more complex than Sister Rita’s, hundreds of arcs, all of them fine and frayed, woven eratically in a pattern similar to a spiderweb. Instead of slowly fading and rematerializing, they popped in and out with magical quickness. Whenever Papa touched them, they flared and sputtered like rotten fuses. The thing to do, thought Donnell, would be to meld the arcs together, to simplify the pattern; but Papa was doggedly trying to guide them inward, and by doing so he was causing them to fray and divide further. A bubble of spittle burst on the boy’s lips, and he moaned. The crowd was growing murmurous, and the organist was running out of fills, unable to build to a climax.
Papa withdrew his hands, spread his arms, and addressed the darkness at the tent top, his lips moving, apparently praying, but his gaze darted back and forth between the crowd and the thin woman.
A feeling of revulsion had been building inside Donnell, a feeling bred by the stink of the tent, the raucous music, the slack-jawed faces, but most of all by Papa Salvatino: this big yellow rat standing on its hind legs and mocking the puny idea which sustained his followers in their fear. With a rush of animosity, and with only a trace of amazement at his own incaution, Donnell stepped forward, hooked his cane onto his elbow, and placed his hands above the boy’s head. The fiery arcs tugged at his fingers, and he let them guide his movements. Two of the arcs materialized close together, and he urged them to merge into a single bright stream, setting it coursing inward toward the boy’s scalp, a spot to which it seemed to gravitate naturally. As more and more of the arcs were joined, the boy’s great head wobbled up. He smiled dazedly and lifted his arms and waggled his fingers, as if in parody of the thin woman’s charismatic salute. Dimly, Donnell was aware of Jocundra beside him, of marveling shouts from the crowd. And then a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, spinning him around.
‘Blasphemer!’ shouted Papa, clutching a fistful of Donnell’s shirt; his cheeks were mottled with rage. He drove his fist into Donnell’s forehead.
Donnell fell against the drum kit, cracking his head on the cymbal stand. His sunglasses had snapped in the middle, and one piece dangled from his ear. He did not lose consciousness, but everything had gone black and he was afraid he had been blinded. Footsteps pounded the boards, screams, and a man’s voice nearby said, ‘Oh God, lookit his eyes!’ He groped for his cane, feeling terribly exposed and helpless, and then he saw his cane outlined in glowing silver a few feet away, lying across a silver sketch of planks and nails. He looked up. The tent had been magicked into a cavernous black drape ornamented with silver arabesques and folds, furnished with silver-limned chairs, and congregated by ebony demons. Prisms whirled inside the bodies of most, masked the faces of others with glittering analogues of human features; and in the case of two, no, three, one standing where Papa Salvatino had been, the prisms flowed through an intricate circuitry, seeming to illuminate the patterns of their nerves and muscles, forming into molten droplets at their fingertips and detonating in needle-thin beams of iridescent light, which spat throughout the crowd. Yet for all their fearsome appearance, the majority of them edged away from the stage, huddling together, afraid. Curious, Donnell held up his hand to his face, but saw nothing, not even the outline of his fingers.
Jocundra, a gemmy mask overlaying her features, knelt beside him and pressed the cane into his hand. The instant she touched him, his vision normalized and his head began to throb. She pulled him upright. The band had fled, and Papa Salvatino was halfway down the steps of the stage.
‘Abomination!’ he said, but his voice quavered, and the crowd did not respond. They crushed back against the tent walls, on the verge of panicked flight. Most were hidden by the darkness, but Donnell could see those in the front rank and was fascinated by what he saw.
They were more alien to him now than their previous appearance of ebony flesh and jeweled expressions had been. Lumpy and malformed; protruding bellies, gaping mouths, drooping breasts; clad in all manner of dull cloth; they might have been a faded mural commemorating the mediocrity and impermanence of their lives. Wizened faces topped by frumpy hats; dewy, pubescent faces waxed to a hard gloss with makeup; plump, choleric faces. And each of these faces was puckered or puffed up around a black seed of fear. As he looked them over one by one, bits of intelligence lodged in his thoughts, and he knew them for bad-tempered old men, vapid old women, thankless children, shrewish wives, brutal husbands. But the complications of their lives were only a facade erected to conceal the black ground which bubbled them up. He took a step forward. Jocundra tried to drag him toward the rear flap of the tent, but he shook her off and limped to the front of the stage. Papa backed along the aisle.