Destroying Angel (21 page)

“How is that even possible?” Eliza asked. “Indonesia is on the other side of the world.”

“The signs of the times,” Miriam said. “The prophecies of Isaiah. ‘Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.’”

“The earth does plenty of funky things that we don’t have to blame on the apocalypse,” Eliza said.

“You sound like Jacob.”

“I’m only saying we shouldn’t assume. Volcanoes blow up—maybe not like this, not every day. But it happens. Most of those dead animals have been there for years, maybe decades. Gas is coming out of the earth again, but you can tell it’s not the first time.”

“Still.”

Krantz grew impatient. “Argue theology later. We’ve got to figure out what to do about Taylor Junior. Do we look for his base or not?”

“That was a big earthquake,” Eliza said in a grim voice. “It might have settled the issue for us.”

He hadn’t thought of that, but she was right. The gases might be pouring into the hideout even now. Still, an underground military facility, hardened against blasts, might be untouched by a quake. Too many variables to consider.

“Whatever we do,” Miriam said, “let’s do it. I can’t stand this sitting around, talking. Remember last time, dinking around in Dark Canyon while Taylor Junior attacked? We saw them drive off. Let’s not have a repeat of the slaughter in Blister Creek.”

“It won’t be a sneak attack this time,” Krantz said. He fished around in his backpack until he found what he was looking for and held it out for them to see. “Because we have a working phone.”

Jacob ran from the bedroom to catch his son. Fernie awoke and called after him in alarm, but he didn’t stop to answer. He took the stairs two at a time. It was black downstairs, but he knew the house by touch and didn’t bother flipping on the light. He threw himself across the front room and was out the door in an instant.

Outside, he stopped and scanned the darkness that lay beyond the porch light. He half expected to see Daniel pacing up and down the sidewalk at the edge of the walk. Sleepwalking, nothing more. Jacob had done it himself as a boy, been caught strolling through the kitchen at night or out the back door.

But the sidewalk was empty and the night silent, except for the chirp of crickets beneath the porch and the bark of a dog that carried through the thin air from near the center of town, several
blocks away. The moaning wind, which had blown with infernal regularity all spring and into summer, lay dormant now.

“Daniel! Where are you?” No answer. “Daniel!”

Jacob froze with indecision. Go back inside and organize a search? Wake his brother David first, and then go after Daniel? Or try to get the boy before he found himself in trouble?

Witch’s Warts.

It came into his mind as if planted there by someone else. In a sense it had been. Grandma Cowley—Henrietta
Rebecca
Cowley, he reminded himself—had sent him a message across time. The evil spirit came from the sandstone labyrinth.

The shadows of Witch’s Warts loomed only a few hundred feet away. Across the street and beyond the temple, it stretched for miles, from the Ghost Cliffs and into the heart of the Blister Creek Valley. In the moonlit shadows it looked like the back of an immense, knob-covered beast rising from the depths of the earth.

He raised his voice. “
Daniel!
”

Toward Main Street, the barking dog lifted its voice in answer, followed by another dog, and then another, each one more distant. Their howls matched his own desperation.

Already he’d wasted valuable seconds. He went on foot, hurrying toward Witch’s Warts.

Stubby, fresh-mown grass around the temple gave way to cool sand beneath his bare feet. The moonlight entered the stone labyrinth at angles. One stretch glowed with a phantom luminescence, the next was so black where the fins came together that he groped through blindly. Something gnarled and dead grabbed at his hand, and he jerked back with a cry, but it was only the branch of a juniper tree.

He called Daniel’s name as he went. To his left he heard a scrape, like toenails on sandstone. He whirled his head and saw a figure crawling spiderlike up a hump of sandstone. He cried out again, but the figure didn’t turn. Jacob stumbled and ran toward the sandstone hump. He hit his toe, which flared with pain, but he only staggered and didn’t stop.

The hump rose steeply from the ground. The sandstone was warm beneath his hands with heat it had retained from the day. As a child he had scrambled up these rocks with all the caution of a lizard, wearing out the seat of his jeans as he half crawled, half slid to the bottom again. But now he felt shaky and afraid as he climbed. Most of the handholds felt strong, but then he’d grab a knob of rock only to have it crumble beneath his fingers and leave him flailing. At last he got up to where it flattened across the top. He picked his way forward as quickly as he dared, wary of hidden sinkholes that could twist his ankle or send him pitching over the edge.

Jacob reached the end of the stone without finding Daniel. It was a steep drop to the ground from this side. He turned around, confused, certain he hadn’t missed anything and equally certain there was no other way down.

“Daddy!” a child cried.

And there was Daniel, atop the fin opposite his own. He must have jumped the gap. The empty space between the two stone monoliths was not wide, no more than a few feet across at the narrowest point, but it was deep and black. Jacob and his brothers had regularly jumped such distances as boys, but it now looked like a yawning pit. In his agitated state, in the dark, he was terrified he’d slip and fall thirty, forty feet to the ground.

“Stay there,” Jacob said. “Sit down. Do not move, not one inch. I’m going down and I’ll—”

Daniel screamed. He flailed his arms and fell back into the shadows. For a moment it seemed a man was there, pulling him, throwing him about, and then the boy entered the moonlight again, and it seemed like nothing more than a fit. He staggered near the edge.

“Daniel!”

Jacob backed up to get a running start. His toe throbbed from where he’d stubbed it, and scratches stung his hands and feet. He trembled and felt suddenly weak. It was only a few feet, so narrow that if you were on the ground you’d have to turn sideways to get through. And Daniel had cleared it. He was a child torn by some night terror, so surely Jacob could manage.

Do it!

He ran for the gap. At the last moment he jumped for the fin on the other side.

The darkness yawned and gaped. The fins were the jaws of the beast, and the black gap its mouth. And when he jumped, the gap opened, the distance between the two stones widening. For every foot he cleared through the air, the gap opened two.

He flailed at the air, and then his hands caught the rock on the other side. His fingers sought to dig into the stone. He swung an arm up and got a hand higher. His toes too dug at the rock, fighting to get any sort of leverage. His muscles strained as he pulled himself up.

A hand grabbed his wrist. “No, Daniel!” he gasped. “Let me do it!” But when he raised his eyes, it wasn’t the boy that he saw.

It was a man leering down at him.

Gideon Kimball—Taylor Junior’s cruel older brother. The man who had butchered Jacob’s brother Enoch in the celestial room of the temple, torn out his intestines, and then kidnapped Eliza and fled into Witch’s Warts.

No! You’re dead!

Jacob almost lost his balance. Only a sliver of doubt remained, the impossibility of the situation, the feeling, somewhere in his core, that he’d stumbled into some shared madness inspired by terror. Only that kept him from throwing himself backward to get away from this thing, this man from beyond the grave come back to kill him. He dug in his hands.

The man’s features shifted. It wasn’t Gideon but a man with a shadowed face who wore a white robe and a black apron around his waist that glinted in the moonlight like a sheen of dirty oil floating on a pool of water. The man twisted at Jacob’s wrist to pull his hand off the rock.

“You bastard,” Jacob said through clenched teeth.

His arms and shoulders ached, and he struggled to keep his grip. The man pried one of Jacob’s hands free and then grabbed for the other, but that grip was already failing on its own.

Jacob swung his free arm up and seized the man’s robe where it brushed his bare feet. He got a fistful. And then he let go with his other hand. He would drag his enemy down with him.

The man let out a cry of alarm and rage and grabbed at the edge himself as he fell. Jacob got his other hand around the man’s ankle. He bounced off the sandstone and twisted his body around, pulling and tugging. The other man lost his grip. The two of them fell.

They hit sand. It wasn’t as far or as hard as it might have been, with two men scratching and clawing at the stone as they fell and
with a dune of sand at their feet, but the man landed on top of Jacob and drove the air from his lungs. By the time Jacob recovered, the other man was on top of him, knee at his belly and hands wrapped around his throat.

“You fool, did you think you could defeat me here?” He bore down, choking until Jacob’s lungs screamed for air.

And then Jacob got his elbow up into his opponent’s chin. He forced him back and then wrestled him to the ground. He clawed his thumbs at the man’s eyes, but his enemy had turned slippery. Jacob couldn’t get a grip, and every time he grabbed for hair or ears or throat, the man squirmed free like a wet bar of soap squeezed too tightly.

Jacob brought his elbow around and caught the man on the side of the head, then took a knee to the jaw. One moment he was on top, fists free and flailing, and the next he was fighting for his life. At last he got clear and rose to his feet, heaving and shaking with exhaustion. The other man stood a few paces away, still and watching.

“What do you want?” Jacob asked.

“Worship me. Bow before me and thou shalt live. Worship me and I shall place thee at my right side. Thou shalt have kingdoms and principalities. I shall cast thine enemies down, even unto ruin.”

“Who are you?”

“An angel of the Lord.”

“You’re no angel,” Jacob said.

“And you’re no prophet.”

Jacob lifted his arm to the square. “In the name of Jesus Christ,” he began.

The man threw his head back and laughed. “No, Jacob Christianson. That will not work. Maybe for another man, maybe
a man like your father. A man of faith and honor. But you? You can call on your god if you will, piss in the wind of your own doubt.”

Jacob faltered. “Then finish it. If you are so powerful here, come at me. Kill me if you can.”

“We don’t have to be enemies, Jacob.” What was that in his voice, doubt? “But you cannot defeat me here. This is my land, my kingdom. And it is spreading. Soon it will cover the earth, and no man will oppose me or stand in my way.”

“Go!” Jacob said. “If you come back here, whatever and whoever you are, I will find a way to kill you, I swear it.”

He felt suddenly light-headed, and a wave of nausea rolled through his body. He lifted his hand to his head and staggered, then fell in the sand. He couldn’t move, and the dizziness swirled around him. The ground bucked and swayed. Blackness encroached on his mind until he thought he’d pass out—or maybe he
did
pass out for a moment.

“Daddy?”

He opened his eyes to find himself on his back. Daniel looked down at him, the moon over his shoulder. Relief surged through Jacob. He struggled to his knees and grabbed his son in a tight embrace.

“I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry. I didn’t try to—I’m sorry!”

“No, shh.”

“I was scared,” Daniel said. “You were turning on the ground. Are you all right now? Are you having bad dreams?”

Jacob touched the throbbing pain at his head. A bloody lump rose from his crown. “I’m okay now. Let’s go back—Mom will be afraid.”

“Was that an earthquake?” Daniel asked.

“A what?”

“I don’t know, I’m not sure. I was outside. I think I was sleepwalking.”

“You were. But what do you mean, an earthquake?”

“I woke up on top of that big rock and the ground was shaking. You tried to jump across. But the ground was shaking and you tripped and fell.”

“You saw me fall?”

“Yes, you hit your head.”

“An earthquake?”

“The ground was shaking,” Daniel repeated.

Jacob had his doubts. Daniel was in no shape to give a reliable account of what had happened. But then the ground gave a little tremble. An aftershock, nothing strong, or else it was far away. But it was enough. There
had
been an earthquake.

He felt a surge of relief as he realized what must have happened. The earthquake hit as he was jumping. He slipped and fell and then hit his head halfway down and brained himself unconscious. Only the sand kept him from breaking his back too. While he was unconscious, his fevered mind must have crafted a narrative to explain everything. There was no angel.

Except that it all seemed so real—the yawning gap, the angel prying him loose from the rock, the struggle on the ground. He lifted a hand to his throat. Nothing there, no pain or tenderness from where the man tried to choke him to death. His muscles, aching during the struggle, didn’t seem particularly tired. There was only the dull reminder of his stubbed toe, the scraped hands, and the throbbing goose egg.

One thing was for certain. Fernie would be awake and terrified, no doubt raising a search party. Time to get back before they roused the whole valley into a panic. He took Daniel by the arm and led him from Witch’s Warts.

The house was in an uproar when Jacob and Daniel got back. David was on the porch, handing out flashlights and organizing the wives and older children into a search party. Younger children gathered in clumps on the lawn outside the porch, herded by Father’s widows. They chattered about the earthquake that had rolled through town. A few children lay sleeping on the grass, wrapped in blankets.

“Thank heaven,” David said when Jacob and Daniel came up the sidewalk. “Here they are, everyone!”