Covey and another man walked into the gloom beyond the other side of the opening. They returned with a heavy retractable metal construction ladder. Holding the ladder by the top rung, they placed it over the hole. The other sections scoped downward, clanking into place as the ladder expanded. The bottom of the ladder reached the bottom of the hole, or the point where the hole began to curve, and the two men leaned the top of the ladder against the side of the dirt.
"Go down," Wheeler said.
Corrie had always been afraid of heights, had never even liked stairways with gaps between the steps, let alone ladders, but now she had no fear and walked around to the opposite side of the hole, accepting Covey's hand as he assisted her onto the top rung.
She climbed quickly down.
Wheeler came after her, clutching the dead baby in his right hand, holding onto the ladder with his left.
The roof of the tunnel was high, Corrie noticed, and rounded, as though it had been created by the passage of a giant earthworm. The dirt on the floor and roof and sides was smooth. Looking up the way she had come, she could see, around the rim, a ring of joyous faces. They were singing. A hymn. "Shall We Gather At The River," it sounded like, although those words did not seem to correspond to what was being sung.
Wheeler reached the bottom and immediately moved away from the ladder.
There was excitement in his step and also fear. "Jesus is waiting," he said. He did not even look at Corrie but began walking down the tunnel toward the far end, where a pink glow pulsed faintly.
Corrie followed him. That numb sense of emotional disassociation was still with her, but there was a pleasant glow beneath the numbness, a contentment spreading outward from somewhere deep within her being.
Wheeler turned to look at her, and there was joy in his face, rapture in his eyes. "Jesus walks these halls," he said wonderingly. "He lives here now."
He lives here now.
The words made her feel warm and tingly inside. They stopped walking.
Corrie estimated that they were now under the building next door to the church. The preacher handed her the dead baby. She took it from him, entranced by the cold rubbery feel of its skin, by the inert heaviness of its form. Wheeler cleared his throat, and when he spoke it was in the strong oratorical tone of his sermons "We have come to praise Thee, oh Jesus. We have come to pay tribute to the Lord of Hosts."
There was the sound of wind, but there was no wind, the sound of water but no water, and then, out of the pink glow before them, came Jesus.
He glided rather than walked, moving with a fluid smoothness, and His presence was as awesome as Wheeler had said. More so. He was perfection, divinity in human form, the living embodiment of God.
Corrie fell instinctively to her knees, as did Pastor
Wheeler. Tears of joy slid down her face, but she did not wipe them away, she did not want them to stop. She held forth the body of the infant. Jesus stepped up to her and, with tender fingers, took the baby.
She was nearly blinded by His beauty, by the elegance of His being, nearly stunned into silence, but she man aged to whisper, "For you."
Jesus nodded graciously. He held the baby to His lips, bit carefully into it and, with kneading fingers, began to drink.
"Welcome," Wheeler said, "to the Kingdom of God."
Robert walked into his office, tossed his hat at the rack, and missed.
He did not bother to pick it up but sat down, slumping tiredly in his chair.
It was then that he noticed what had been left on his desk: a gun, a badge, an ID card, and one sentence on a sheet of yellow legal paper:
"I cannot serve both God and mammon."
It was signed by Jud and dated yesterday.
Robert stormed out of his office, clutching the note in his hand. "What is this shit?" He strode over to Lee Anne desk, waved the paper at her. "Did you see him do this?" She looked up at him, confused.
"Who?"
"Jud." He dropped the note on her desk, watching as she read it. "Did he talk to you about this?"
"No," she said. "Stu?" He turned toward the other officer. "Were you here when Jud put this on my desk?"
Stu shook his head. " "Shit." Robert reached down, grabbed Lee Anne phone, and dialed Jud's number. The line was busy, and he slammed the receiver in its cradle. "Get him for me," he ordered the secretary.
"Keep trying until he answers and patch him through. I want to talk to him."
"Yes, sir." Robert strode angrily back to his office, telling himself to calm down, not to overreact. He walked over to the window, stared out at the highway, trying to figure out why Jud would just quit like this without first talking to him. The two of them had been friends for years, since they'd both been patrolmen, and they'd never, to Robert's knowledge, had a serious falling out. Even if he made up his mind to quit, Jud still should have talked to him.
What the hell was he going to do with one less man and all this crap going down?
Robert glanced toward the fax machine, grateful for once for its presence. The machine, until now an annoyance and a reminder of the FBI's unwanted interference, suddenly represented a link with the outside world, an anchor to reason and reality.
He needed that right now.
He looked out the window again, noticed how few cars were on the highway. Complaints about the church had tapered off the past two days. Complaints about every thing had tapered off. He didn't like that. It wasn't natural. There were bound to be fights somewhere in town, noisy neighbors, illegally parked cars blocking driveways.
Something. But here at the station, normally command central for all town trouble, it seemed as if Rio Verde was deserted. No phones rang; no people came in.
Lee Anne had noticed it too, he knew. As had Stu. Both of them were less talkative than usual, jumpier, more on edge. Stu was on desk duty and was catching up with his paperwork, but there was a strange, almost desperate quality to his typing, Robert thought. Lee Anne had spent half the morning staring at a single article in People magazine.
He was not feeling so hot himself. Last night, he had been awakened long after midnight by the sound of low laughing, a sound that grew quickly in power and volume. He had recognized the distinctive tone and pitch of the laughter and had immediately pulled open his bedroom shades, and he'd seen, standing out in the desert in the moonlight, beneath the thin leafless branches of a palo verde tree, what he was afraid he would see. The Laughing Man.
The figure disappeared the second he laid eyes on it, fading back into the blackness, the laughter dissipating into the sound of a light breeze, but the feeling that the Laughing Man was still out there, watching the house-waitingnmade Robert unable to fall back asleep, and he spent the rest of the night watching old Westerns on TNT, his loaded pistol and a clip of extra ammunition on the end table next to him.
Tonight he was going to have two officers stake out the house, armed with guns and jade, holy water and crucifixes. Maybe then he would be able to get some sleep.
The phone rang, an inside call. He hurried over to his desk, picked up the receiver. "Yes?"
It was Lee Anne "Jud's line isn't busy anymore, but he's not answering. Do you want me to keep trying?"
"Keep trying until you get him."
"Gotcha."
Robert hung up the phone. He sat down in his chair, picked up Jud's badge, hefted it in his hand, then threw it against the wall, where it hit with a disconcertingly tiny thump.
Rich stopped by at lunch to deliver copies of the newspaper, laying a stack on the front counter next to the March of Dimes donation can, and bringing one back to Robert's office. He dropped the paper on the desk and pointed to Sue's story beneath the fold on the front page, to the two-deck headline "Vampires Can Be Killed, Chinese Experts Say."