Prophet (8 page)

He stood silently, cautiously, and listened some more.

Now, beyond those immediate voices, he could hear throngs of other anguished cries, and beyond those . . . far beyond those, still more, blending together in a long, ceaseless moan like a mournful wind, like a distant, whispering ocean.

His heart began to race. His muscles tensed, ready to run. This was getting to him. He was afraid. Fear, real fear, was creeping up on him. Up to this moment he had no idea there was anything to be afraid of,
but now it hit him:
I’m right in the middle of something. There’s something dreadful happening out here, and I don’t know what it is, and it’s harming a lot of people, which means it can harm me too.

He looked all around, up the street and down, up into the utility wires and tree limbs, the windows of the apartments, the lights of the city. He saw nothing strange, nothing sinister or threatening. That only made the whole experience more sinister, more dreadful.

The sound continued. He felt he could talk out loud and not be heard over it.

Enough. He was sold. He believed it. He ducked behind a utility pole for safety from whatever was going on out there and banged out the newsroom number on the cellular phone.

“Hi. This is John Barrett. Got a story breaking here. Let me talk to Owen.”

He sold Owen on the idea. NewsSix had a cameraman on call. They would send him over. John would do the stand-up, reporting the story himself.

Then, having called the station, John called the police and reported a strange disturbance.

Then he looked himself over. Brother. He couldn’t do a stand-up in a T-shirt! He ran back into the building, up the stairs, back into his apartment, breathing hard and starting to sweat. He stripped off the T-shirt, wiped his sweating body down with a damp washcloth, then groped through his closet, finally settling on a casual shirt he would wear open at the collar, and a red windbreaker.

As he pulled the shirt on, he rehearsed. “The evening quiet was broken tonight as a major disturbance erupted in this Baker Hill neighborhood . . . uh . . . the peace of this Baker Hill neighborhood was disturbed tonight . . . abruptly disturbed . . .”

Looking in the mirror, he wiped the sweat from his face, ran a comb through his hair, even checked his teeth for leftover salad.
Yeah, good, good.
This would look like a remote, on-the-scene, spur-of-the-moment stand-up.

He grabbed the ringing cellular phone off the bed. It bleeped and he dropped it, startled, then picked it up again.

“Yeah?”

“John, this is Benny. I’m pulling out of my garage. I need to verify
where you are.”

Benny was the on-call cameraman for this week. He drove home after work in one of the NewsSix camera cars so he’d be ready to cover any fast-breaking story on a moment’s notice. Now he was rolling and calling John on his car phone.

John gave him the address and directions as he scurried out the door, down the hall, down the stairs—he almost lost contact with Benny while in the stairwell—and back outside onto the sidewalk.

A squad car had just gone by and was moving slowly down the block, apparently looking for the trouble. Sure. They had to be as perplexed as John was. With all these voices wailing on every side, where do you even start to check it out? They’ll be calling in backups for sure.

John had to make sure he got these guys on camera, got reactions from them, information on what was happening. He stepped into the street and waved his arms, shouting. “Hey! Hey, back here! John Barrett . . . NewsSix!”

The car’s brake lights came on. It came to a stop, then reversed, backing up the street toward him. John shot a quick glance up the street. Nuts! Benny wasn’t too far away, but it was all happening too fast. They weren’t going to get it on camera.

The squad car backed to a stop just opposite John, and an officer rolled his window down. “Hello. Did you call the police?”

John looked both ways and then dashed across the street. “Yeah. Hi . . . John Barrett, NewsSix. This all started up about . . .” He checked his watch. “. . . fifteen minutes ago. I haven’t been able to pinpoint the source of the problem . . . Maybe you can get a better handle on it.”

The officer looked at his partner, then back at John. Then both got out of the car.

“You’re with the press?”

“Right. I anchor the news on Channel 6. I’ve got a cameraman on the way, and we’re going to be covering this.”

“So what’s the problem?”

John could still hear the weeping and wailing up and down the block and beyond. He threw up his hands. “Beats me. I haven’t the slightest idea what this is all about. I’ve never encountered anything like it.”

The officer was getting just a little impatient. “Like what?”

John was puzzled by the officer’s inaction. “Well . . . there’s got to be a reason for all this noise.”

The other officer had come around the car and now both were facing him.

“Do you have some ID?”

John took only a moment to realize he didn’t. “Oh, well, no, I’m just wearing my sweatpants . . . I don’t have my wallet on me.”

Just then Benny pulled up in the NewsSix camera car, a little white fastback with NewsSix and the station’s call letters emblazoned in big red letters on the side.

“Oh,” John said, relieved. “Here’s Benny Hake, our cameraman. Maybe we can get some reaction from you after you’ve gotten to the bottom of all this.”

Benny’s arrival seemed to authenticate John’s claims about himself. The officers let the ID question go for the moment, but the officer pressed him. “Mr. Barrett, we need to know the nature of the disturbance. What’s the problem? Where is it?”

Benny flipped open the back of the car and started pulling out the camera equipment.

John was unsure of what the officer wanted to know. What more did he need to know, for crying out loud? “Um . . . well, all this started up about fifteen minutes ago—”

“What started up?” the officer demanded.

“Well . . . all these voices . . .” Right about then, a suspicion crept into John’s mind that he didn’t want to entertain.

“What voices, Mr. Barrett?”

The suspicion became stronger.

Benny had the camera, the tripod, and a rack of camera lights ready to go, carrying them braced against his shoulder as he approached. “Hey, John, where’s the best place to set up?”

John looked around, aware of the police officers.
Better not block the street
, he thought. “Oh, how about there on the sidewalk? We can get a good shot of the street behind me and the squad car.”

Benny started setting up the camera. The officers were looking all around and exchanging glances with each other. They were also exchanging low mutters.

One officer asked, “Are you hearing voices, Mr. Barrett?”

John hesitated. The question was sensible, but he suddenly had the feeling he was being asked if he were crazy. Now that suspicion he’d been trying to resist came flooding in:
They don’t hear the voices.

Impossible. Of course they do.

“You’re kidding . . .”

“We haven’t done any kidding so far,” said the officer.

“You don’t . . .” John looked up and down the street. He noticed the voices were beginning to fade now. “You don’t . . . hear any voices?”

The two officers looked at each other, their arms crossed, then looked back at him with poker faces. “No, sir. We don’t hear anything.”

“You don’t hear . . . people crying for help, anything like that?”

“No, sir.”

John couldn’t believe it. It just wouldn’t sink in. He turned to Benny. “Benny, you hear all the crying people, right?”

Benny looked out from behind his camera’s eyepiece. “What’s that?”

“You hear all the people crying?”

Benny repeated the question to make sure he’d heard it right. “Do I hear all the people crying?”

John was desperate. “Yes.”

“What people?”

“You don’t hear anything?”

The officer asked, “Have you been using any drugs tonight, Mr. Barrett?”

Oh no. This couldn’t be happening. “Well . . . no. I don’t use drugs at all.”

“Do you live around here?”

“Well, yes, that’s my apartment right up there.”

The officers turned to Benny. “Sir? Could you come here please?”

Benny left the camera and walked over to the squad car.

“Now . . . you know this guy, right?” the officer asked.

“Sure,” said Benny.

“He’s hearing voices.”

Benny thought that over and then asked John, “You hearing voices, John?”

John listened, just to be sure. The voices were gone. The street was quiet. He was afraid to answer.

“Are you hearing voices, Mr. Barrett?” the officer asked.

John shook his head. He was too troubled to speak.

“You’re not hearing voices?”

“Not now,” he muttered.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I . . . I heard them. I could hear them even after you got here, but now I don’t hear them anymore.”

“And you haven’t used any drugs lately?”

John was horrified at the only explanation that came to his mind. “I . . . I used drugs in college. I was into LSD back then. But that was years ago.” He was starting to shake.

“Well,” said the other officer, “it sounds like you’re hallucinating.”

John was troubled, mortified. He felt absolutely naked standing there.

“You okay, John?” Benny asked.

John couldn’t answer. He didn’t want to admit anything.

Finally he said, “I guess there isn’t anything happening then. Sorry.”

The officer asked, “That’s your apartment up there?”

“Yes.”

“Then if I were you, I’d get off the street and back inside. Go to bed. Sleep it off.”

“I haven’t used any drugs!” John protested, resenting the insinuation.

“Could be an LSD flashback,” said Benny. “I’ve heard that people get those sometimes.”

“I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before . . .”

“Let’s call it a night, guys,” said the officer. “Benny, can you take care of him, make sure he gets inside?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“All right.” The officer nodded to his partner, and they got back in the car.

While John and Benny stood there, Benny feeling bewildered and John feeling stupid, the police drove off.

John looked up and down the street, at all the windows in all the homes and apartments. Everything was quiet. Wherever those voices came from, they were gone now. Just gone. Simple as that.

“It was weird, Benny,” he said. “I mean, it was absolutely real. I was
convinced something was going on here. I wouldn’t have called the station if I wasn’t convinced.”

Benny gathered up the camera and headed back for his car. “Yeah, well . . . it’s pretty weird all right.”

“Sorry to bother you.”

“Well, I’m getting paid for this, so I guess I don’t mind.”

“Okay. Okay. Uh, say, Benny, could you give me some time to work this thing out? I mean, let
me
tell Ben about this. I’ll get to a doctor, find out what’s going on . . .”

“Hey, don’t worry. You can tell the boss about it if you want—it’s none of my business.”

“Thanks.”

Benny finished loading the car, said good night, and drove off, leaving John standing there, a lone figure under a streetlamp. The street was quiet again. John paused to take one more look up and down the street and then stood very still, not breathing, just listening.

There was no sound but the sound of the city. The fear had not left him. He hurried inside, up the stairs, down the hall, and back into his apartment, not resting, not pausing until he had locked and bolted the door and checked every room.

Then he found a spot on the couch, his back against the wall, the whole living room visible, and tried to calm down. It would end up taking half the night.

CHAPTER 4

ED LAKE AND
Martin Devin had their meeting, first thing in the morning in Devin’s big office—it used to be Lake’s—with the big oak door closed. It didn’t last long, perhaps fifteen minutes. Then, without a word of good-bye, and with most of the governor’s staff oblivious to what had happened, Lake hurried down the long, paneled hall, past all the well-lit, touched-up portraits of past governors hanging on the walls, and out into the daylight, never to return. No one took much notice of it. It was typical for Devin or Lake to be out of the office on business for whole days at a time. It was also typical for them to have heated discussions and for one of them—usually Lake—to walk out.

The governor dropped in on Devin not long after that. “So how did it go?”

Devin smiled and gave a little shrug, sitting behind his big new desk. “Oh, not altogether pleasant, but I would say we reached a very clear understanding.”

BARRETT PLUMBING AND
Fixtures was a wholesale business in an old warehouse in The City’s south end, a semi-sagging building with peeling blue paint and windmill vents along the roof ridge that whirled and squeaked the same tune all day long. Every once in a while a jet would tiptoe right over the roof on final approach to the airport, and a salesman on the phone would have to ask the caller to say something
again. John Barrett Sr. had run this business for the past thirty years, knew everybody who was anybody in plumbing, and could talk sinks, faucets, showers, toilets, rubber washers, and compression fittings with the best of them.