“Leave us be! She needs prayer, not your blasphemies!”
“Prayer? I’ll show you—” He made a grab at May’s mother, but several other men converged on the doctor and pulled him away: “Now, Grand, you can’t go forcing your beliefs on her!”
“I’m not treating the mother! This girl will die without treatment. Can’t you see she’s suffocating?”
Derek had been distracted by the commotion. Now he looked back at May, who lay writhing and struggling with her head thrown back, her face darkening, and her mother bent above as if to shield her from the sun. Her mother’s lips were moving very quietly, and there was great concern in her face, but also great calm and certainty. She looked up at Derek suddenly, saw his terror, and took a moment to give him an encouraging smile.
“May needs you to pray for her too, Derek. Come now, won’t you?” She put out her hand to drag him down to his knees.
May’s face was turning purple. He couldn’t believe her own mother could look on calmly at such a time. He watched in disbelief as Dr. Grand was wrestled away from the chaise longue. He looked down on May with the dirt smeared on her swollen lips, her eyes bulging, her fingers digging into her mother’s arms. May, dear May.
“God will heal you, dear,” the woman was saying, stroking May’s hair so mechanically that Derek felt certain her mind had snapped.
This realization freed him somehow; he broke from his own paralysis and ran toward Dr. Grand, whose hand was still outstretched, trying to keep the syringe out of reach of those who restrained him. Derek snatched the syringe and turned back toward May, determined that nothing would stop him, not even her mother.
“There’s no place for fear,” she was saying urgently in May’s ear as he rushed up beside her. May’s lips were blue, hideous blue. Bubbles burst from her mouth in a bloody froth. She was sagging. “There, there.” Softening. “God will make you well.” Sinking back onto the cushion in her mother’s arms, as Derek’s arm fell to his side and he heard the syringe drop, the needle snap. “Our Father who art in Heaven…” May needed prayers now, yes. Prayers to send her on her way.
“No,” he said, frozen there. He could not bear to look at her. His eyes went to the gray monstrosity that rose above the trailer park, rearing up incomplete and never to be finished, its shadow somehow to blame for all this—as much as anything. As much as bees or Christian Science or hypnosis or Derek himself. That shadow where he had gone so furtively, to do what he would never have dared in open light, seducing May to her death, ensuring he would never know if she had loved him or not.
“The ambulance is coming,” someone said.
“No hospitals,” May’s mother said with ruthless consistency. “We don’t need hospitals.”
But the ambulance wouldn’t reach them in time anyway. It was miles off, caught in traffic on the two-lane highway, unable to advance; and so May’s only other possible source of rescue had also been thwarted by the unfinished freeway.
“No,” he said again, louder now, because he could not let his eyes fall. He could not see her again; he had chased that sight from his memory and all this was a terrible lapse, he could not believe he had indulged it so thoroughly after consigning the events of that day to a place in his mind he had taken daily precautions to avoid for more than twenty-five years. He stared at the freeway and refused to see what lay below it, although he knew full well.
But what did Eli know?
He opened his eyes.
The old man sat staring at him, quiet and intent, gripping the arms of his wheelchair. Derek had the impression that somehow Eli had seen all of it, had relived it through him, reading his every thought, every sensation. And then he wondered if Eli might not have deliberately propelled him through the memory, playing it back like a videotape, not for Derek’s benefit but for his own, to see what sort of man he was, exactly how far he could trust him….
Eli nodded. It was like waking from a dream beside your lover and knowing you had shared the dream exactly.
“All right, Derek,” Eli said. “It’s a beginning.”
“What?” Derek felt obliged to plead ignorance, to refuse to honor Mooney’s crazed currency of occult implications. It was impossible, what he’d just thought—impossible that Eli could have witnessed an event from Derek’s past.
“The beginning of purification. But we must do more. We have opened the gate to healing, but you are quite vulnerable now. We must finish up the work before proceeding. Now, I want—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Eli. Honestly.”
He stood up restlessly and began to pace, determined to shake the old man’s psychotic spell. It was time to leave anyway; the hour was much later than he usually stayed. He began to pack his briefcase.
“Don’t run from these things, Derek.” Eli sounded as if he were on the verge of pleading.
Don’t run from you, you mean, Derek thought. But I can’t be your sole entertainment.
“Sorry, Eli, I have to get moving. It’s later than I realized. I have some other obligations tonight.”
“Cancel them, Derek. This is critical. I insist. Too much is at jeopardy here—”
“Oh, come off it, old man,” he said harshly, his tone surprising even to him.
Eli took it like a slap in the face. “I’m serious. I cannot reveal any more to you without being sure of your commitment to the path.”
“How can you doubt it? I’ve sat here day after day, recording every word while you drone on and on. I should think I’ve more than proven my commitment by now.”
Eli took the implied insult without blinking, as if eager to join in battle. “You’ve only proven your commitment to a book,” he said caustically. “And that, only to the extent you can figure out some way to cash in on my madness, as you see it.”
“Oh, Christ,” Derek said.
“You don’t even believe in him,” said Eli, “yet his name comes easily enough to your lips. Is it that way with everything you do?”
Derek said nothing, stung to think that Eli had finally seen through him. His thoughts were in turmoil, because he realized that what was happening now might be permanent. He was turning his back on the old man; he was on the edge of abandoning his project, and it pained him not only because he had believed in the book more than in anything else he’d begun, but also because he had begun to feel friendship for Eli, which it surprised him to admit. Friendship and sympathy and, of course, pity for an old lunatic.
“Like it or not, aware or unaware, you have taken the first step on the path,” Eli said portentously, as he said all things. “You cannot leave it now. Willingly or not, you must travel it to its end. I suggest you master yourself, my friend, or you will be mastered by others. In fact, I hope that you have not already been overmastered. That could even be… Good Lord…. I took you for an ally against evil; but what if you have always been their agent?”
“Don’t be ludicrous.” He said it coldly, but at the same time he was overcome with guilt. His motives were false; he could believe—truly, skeptically, rationally believe—at most one word in ten of Eli’s tales. He was here entirely on a pretense. And yet he had grown fond of the old man, and this admission of mistrust hurt him deeply, though he certainly deserved it.
“I would never do anything to hurt you,” he said as sincerely as he could. “You may not think highly of me, but I’m a peaceful man. I’m certainly not evil. And I think of myself as your friend.”
Eli nodded, his own face full of pain now, tears starting from his eyes. “I know that. Believe me, Derek, I know you far better than you wish. I know you think that much of what I say is nonsense.”