“But let’s just look at the evidence,” he suggested. “Let’s look at Matthew 24:29. ‘Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light…’ And then afterward, in verse 30, the Son of Man appears in the heavens, in clouds of glory, to bring His Kingdom!
“What do you think of that, Mr. Pre-Tribulationist Rapture Wimp!” Frankland realized he was shouting again. “The Tribulation happens first! It’s right there in plain English! And if you don’t believe that, if St. Matthew isn’t good enough for you, let’s look at the Book of Revelation!” The hell with his listeners’ eardrums! What was more important, eardrums or God’s Word?
The Spirit had taken command, as the Spirit so often did. And as the Spirit rolled on, the words flowing from his mouth without his conscious thought, he wondered if his colleague, Dr. Lucius Calhoun of the Pentecostal Church of Rails Bluff, was by any chance listening and resented the characterization of
“rapture wimp.” He hadn’t meant to offend Dr. Calhoun, to whom he sold air time at a bargain rate and with whom he agreed on just about everything but the timing of the Rapture in relationship to the Tribulation, but when the Spirit took hold, Frankland just couldn’t hold back. It was all so obvious.
“The arm of prophecy smiteth the wicked,” he said, “and exalted shall be the prophet among his kind.” In the back of his mind, Frankland wondered if that last phrase was actually in the Bible. The unfortunate truth was that he was not very good at memorization, a fact that put him at a serious disadvantage as a preacher. The stock of biblical quotes he could summon from memory, without the notes he usually kept handy, was not very large.
Perhaps that is why he had not made it to the big time. His Radio Hour of Prophecy did well enough, and he was thankful that he had been allowed to bring people to God in this way, but he had always hoped to graduate to television, to gain the huge audience that worldwide syndication could bring. Yet despite several attempts to make the leap to video, he’d never quite managed it. He looked all right—he was a big sandy-haired man, and his overbite wasn’t too large a problem, even though it did have the tendency to make him look like a chipmunk—but the sad fact was that he and television had somehow never connected.
The closest he’d come had been a three-month stint as a TV preacher in El Dorado, Arkansas, before his move to Rails Bluff. First, the program director had asked him to vary his message a little, to talk about something other than the end of the world. Frankland had tried to comply, but somehow when the Spirit seized him, the Spirit swerved right back to the Apocalypse.
And the other problem was the biblical quotes. “You can’t go on making this stuff up,” the program manager had told him. “People in Arkansas know their Bible.”
It had been useless to explain that it had been the Spirit talking, not Frankland. Who was the program manager to question the words of the Spirit? But Frankland’s Video Half-Hour of Prophecy was canceled anyway.
“The seals produce the trumpets and the trumpets pro-duce the bowls!” he proclaimed. “What could be clearer? What do you have to say to that,” he demanded, “Mr. Roman go-to-confession-once-a-week-and-every thing-will-be-fine Catholic?”
People needed to wake up, that was for sure. The signs were all around. The world was going to come to an end, practically any second, and the people were going to need instruction as to what to do, how to behave.
He didn’t know how long he would be permitted to continue. Once the Tribulation started, the servants of Satan were bound to try to silence him.
“And who is this prince?” he asked. “The prince is the little horn of Daniel! It’s all so clear!” Frankland was ready for the servants of Satan when they came. He had a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun clipped under the desk in the front office. There was a pistol in a drawer here in the studio, and another in his truck.
And, in the concrete bunkers he’d poured for the members of the Tribulation Club on the back of his property, there were a lot more surprises for Satan.
Cases and cases of them.
He brought his hand down on the control panel in front of him, thumping it with his fist as if he were banging a pulpit. Needles leaped on the displays.
“What more do you people need to know?” he demanded.
Charlie sipped at his Cohiba, letting the smoke of the Cuban cigar roll over his tongue. He let the taste soak into his palate for a moment, then tilted his head back and exhaled.
“And the hell of it is,” he said, “we’re going to make a fortune while the economy of the entire world goes straight down the tubes. Firms will go bankrupt. Careers will be wrecked. Millions of people will lose their jobs. We may even see a war or two when economies crash in the Third World.”
“You mean like in Arkansas?” Megan said.
Charlie grinned and sipped his Remy Martin. Under the water of his spa, he slid the bottom of his foot along her smooth bare thigh. She smiled back, then took a taste of her own cigar. They were sitting opposite one another in the spa on Charlie’s second-floor deck, overlooking his yard and pool. Pulsing jets of water massaged their backs, feet, and legs. Wind chimes rang distantly over the throb of the spa’s pumps.
Charlie tilted his head back against the plastic headrest, looked at the few stars visible through high banks of cloud. “There’s a market in everything nowadays,” he said. “Currency, commodities, metals, bonds. There’s a market in markets.” He tilted his head down and looked at her. “With all our short positions, we’ve just placed our bets on the market in catastrophe.”
Megan gave a low laugh. She leaned forward, held out her crystal glass. “Here’s to catastrophe,” she said.
He bent toward her, touched his glass to hers. A crystal chime sang out, hung for several seconds in the air.
Charlie leaned further, pressed his lips to hers. Her lips were moist, tasted of smoke and desire. A throb of pure lust pulsed through his nerves. For a half-second he considered flinging his drink and cigar off the edge of his patio and throwing himself on Megan, but on reflection he decided to wait. Timing, he found, was everything.
He leaned back, let the water jets pulse against his back, sipped again at his drink. Megan rescued a strand of her pinned-up auburn hair that had trailed into the water, then looked back at him with dark eyes.
Charlie adored Megan, and it was because he could look into her and see a reflection of himself. Someone who had come from nowhere—from worse than nowhere—and turned herself into someone else by talent, by energy, and by pure force of will. And the process wasn’t over. Megan was improving her vision of herself all the time.
Charlie loved Megan not for herself, but for her potential.