You will see, deceivers. You will see what you have wrought, all of you.
He closed his eyes, becoming peaceful. “Could I detach myself? Of course, yes. I could detach myself from all of you. Why not?” He shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no-no-NO! I never detach myself from any of your troubles. I’ve always taken your troubles right on my shoulders. And I’m not going to change that now.”
The eyes of his congregation shone up wetly at him. A powerful loathing ripped through his guts at the sight of their cringing, craven need, their faces looking like a bunch of stepped-on dog turds.
“You must wonder where I’ve been these last hours. Well, I’m gonna tell you. Last night, at my lowest point, I heard a Voice,” he said. “It was not the voice of the Lord. It was unspeakably cold. Cruel. I followed that Voice out into the woods.”
A low murmur flooded through the congregation.
“Was I scared, Brothers and Sisters? Yes. Did I go anyway? Yes. To protect you. My children.” He let this sink in. “I walked in a daze. I came to a small clearing. A creature stood there. A figure of pure darkness.”
The current of unease rippling through the congregation intensified. Amos let their fear ferment and ripen. He savored the dread that sat plainly on their faces—the sniveling children’s faces most especially.
“Its smell washed over me. The stink of corpses in a charnel house. It spoke. Never have I heard its equal. Scabrous, sharp as a razor. It hurt just to listen to it. I asked it what it wanted. It lifted one hand and pointed. But not at me. Oh no.”
Amos let it sit. He withheld it. Tension mounted inside the packed chapel.
“Who?” said Doc Lewis in wretched agony. “Who does it want?”
Amos pitched his voice at the perfect octave: almost a whisper, but still loud enough that the peanut gallery could hear.
“The children. It wants your children.”
The congregation erupted. Mothers threw their arms around their snot-nosed offspring. Grown men whimpered in their seats like petrified infants.
“It wants your babies, mothers. It wants your sons and daughters. It wants to take them into the woods and”—the mildest of shrugs—“engage in deviltry.”
“You can’t let it take the children!” someone shrieked.
“What did they ever do?” shouted Brother Conkwright.
“The sins of the father…” the Reverend gravely intoned.
They were whipped into a frenzy. Bug-eyed and quivering, all of them. The children were blubbering in their mothers’ arms. Oh, how perfectly fitting, thought Amos.
“It asked for the children,” Amos went on over their donkey-like bleats. “It said that if we gave them to it, the rest of us would be spared.”
A collective wail went up, shuddering the roof beams. Amos laid his head down. To the congregants, it might have looked as though their prophet had become overwhelmed. But he was smiling, and he couldn’t let them see it. His body shook. Was he crying? No, he was laughing, hard enough to shed tears.
He raised his head. Tears of mirth stained his cheeks, but his buffoonish congregants surely mistook them for those of sorrow. He set his face in an expression of sadness… Slowly, he let it change into one of steely resolve.
“Do you think I accepted its terms? Would I not have been justified, considering your venomous behavior towards your loving prophet? Or should I turn the other cheek, as our Lord commands? Well…? Well?”
They goggled at him, expecting something. Watery eyes, drool-wet lips. They revolted him. He might as well have been sermonizing to a writhing mass of maggots.
“Brothers and Sisters, I quaked. My soul was at stake. But I stared right back at that foul thing and I said, No!” He thumped his fist on the pulpit. “NO! No, you will not take our children! NO! NO! I will not let you have them, demon from below!”
His people broke into rousing applause, clapping so hard Amos was sure they’d break their spastic hands.
“Praise be!” someone shouted.
“Shelter us in your arms!” cried someone else.
“NO, demon, you won’t win this battle!” Amos thundered. “For we have the Lord Almighty on our side! He is watching from His heavenly seat, and He will not let an abomination such as you take our most treasured prize!”
“We raise our hands to the Lord!” Maude Redhill screamed, her thick suety face awash with tears. “Daddy, we love you!”
“We will fight you on the battlements, hell spawn!” Amos said.
“Hallelujah!” the congregation responded.
“We will fight you on the plains!”
“Praise our prophet!”
Amos shushed them. “Say. Say. Say peace, my children.”
“Peace,” they intoned.
“And finally the hell beast said, I will have them! Then it was gone, leaving a sour note of brimstone. I then returned to Little Heaven. My task was clear.”
The lips of a worshipper in the third row moved in a silent plea: Help us, prophet. Amos could scarcely recall the man’s name. Earl something-or-other. Earl or Merle. Earl or Merle was stumpy, with a prematurely bald, ovoid head. Earl the Pearl. Amos did not care about Earl. Earl was weak. They were all weak. They were broken and expected him to fix them. They were human trash. Wasted lives, wastes of skin. He was everything to them, and they meant nothing to him. There was not a thing worth harvesting from them anymore.
And so, the field had to be razed. In a way, what was about to happen would be the best thing for them all.
He gripped the pulpit. “What are you without me?”
He needed to hear them say it.
“Nothing,” said Reggie Longpre, his voice clear as a bell.
“Nothing,” went the echo.
Amos said, “Without me, what meaning would your lives have?”
“None at all,” spoke the people of Little Heaven.
“That’s right. I’m the best thing you’ll ever have.”
Wild applause. Nell Conkwright shouted, “Thank you for everything, prophet! You are the only. The only. I am sorry for my trespasses.”
“Sit down and be quiet,” he told them all coldly. They sat at once, like some sentient organism of wretched servility.
Amos signaled to Virgil, who wheeled in a cart from the vestry. On it sat a stack of plastic cups and two jugs of liquid, one red and the other purple.
VIRGIL HAD USED a lot of sugar. An entire bag, holy jeez. The Reverend said it needed to be real sweet.
Why so goddamn sugary? Virgil wondered. He didn’t ask. Followers did as they were told. Virgil had followed Cyril for years, and when Cy up and vanished, well, the Reverend was right there to fill the gap. And the good Rev—who was used to telling his followers what to do—never bothered to tell Virgil what he’d mixed into the Kool-Aid after Virgil had made it.
Virgil used to drink the stuff as a kid. It was all his mother could afford. She mixed it so weak that it didn’t quite cover the sulfur taste of the well water. Redneck lemonade, she called it. Virgil and his brothers and sisters would sit on the porch, guzzling watery cherry Kool-Aid until the skin above their top lips was stained pink.
He’d dumped in double the amount of sugar the recipe called for. The Reverend gave it a taste and said, “More.” Eventually it stopped dissolving—no matter how much Virgil stirred, the sugar crystals just sat at the bottom of the jugs like beach sand. The Reverend took the jug into the vestry and closed the door. When he came out, it looked the same, but there was a slight chemical odor to the Kool-Aid.