The Book of Joby (92 page)

“Ben!”
he screamed, running toward the church with the hose, but the heat made him pull up short.
“BEN!”
he screamed again. Still clutching the now working hose, he forced himself a few feet nearer, just as Ben came hurtling from the engulfed window with Father Crombie in his arms, both men wreathed in flames

As Ben hit the ground, he rolled himself and his passenger around in frantic, writhing arcs, trying to quench their cloaks of fire. Joby ran farther forward, suddenly heedless of the heat, training his hose as best he could on the moving target until Ben suddenly lay still far enough from the building for Joby to close the distance.

Joby rushed to stand over them with the gushing hose, uttering a wordless shout of terror as he saw how badly burned they were. Father Crombie lay
facedown, his clothes half-gone, his once pale skin angry red and charred to black in places. Ben lay beside him faceup, eyes open, breathing raggedly. His once bronze hair was sooty black and altogether absent from one side of his head. That half of his face was a swollen ruin of blistered meat. Of his shirt, only one sleeve and the shoulders remained. The torso this revealed was a charred and oozing wreck. His jeans were scorched but still intact. His tennis shoes looked melted to his feet.

“Oh God,
help
!” Joby shouted, still dousing them with his pathetic stream of water.
“Ben!”
he sobbed.
“God help me! What do I do?”

“Get help,” Ben rasped, beginning to writhe again. “Hurry,” he groaned.

Joby dropped the hose and ran toward town, wondering why no one had gotten there yet. Couldn’t they see the church was burning? Only then did he see the smoke and flames that billowed up from several more locations around the tiny village.

“This is what I’ve been warning them about!” Agnes shouted into the phone, crouched in her bedroom closet as all hell broke loose outside. “But would anybody listen? Now look! There are buildings burning all over Taubolt! It would be almost satisfying if half of them weren’t mine! Yes! You heard the sirens! Can’t you see the smoke? Well, look outside, for heaven’s sake! Those kids are going to burn this place to the ground, Karl!” She looked annoyed as Karl buzzed nonsense at her from his end of the line. “Of course it’s kids, Karl! What adult could move around so fast? They’re probably riding on those damn skateboards!”

As Basquel soared toward Taubolt’s outskirts, the sight of steam and smoke rising in pale columns over several ruined buildings lifted his spirits even higher, and he picked up speed, eager to wreak still more havoc on the Creator’s offensive little preserve.

News of the Cup’s unexpected departure had sent an almost immobilizing wave of shock through Hell, then a helter-skelter scramble to mobilize. Sitting through Lucifer’s dreary session of instructions about who to look for first, and how to strike at whom, and whom not to strike at, et cetera, et cetera, had been the most infuriating bore. Talk about hurry up and wait! Who’d ever thought that they were going to get in at all? The least he could have done was let them at it.

Kallaystra and her little team, of course, had been allowed to leave right away. Privileges of the elite and all. Yes, her little flood of operatives had
apparently done their job, but the way she’d crowed and preened about it had been positively revolting.

As Basquel glided toward the nearest buildings, he was overtaken by a sudden wave of vertigo and a terrible sense of weight, as if he were falling, which he realized with a shock, he was! Instinctively, he braced against the impact as he plowed into the ground, utterly dumbfounded to find himself suddenly . . .
corporeal
!

“What on earth?”
he blurted out, doubly stunned to hear his own quite audible voice! He had made no decision to materialize! How could this have happened? Worse still, he found that he could not dissolve back into his ethereal form. The weight of his obese bulk alone seemed crushing—the physicality left him near to retching. He stumbled to his—
all Hell’s gates!
—his
feet,
and staggered desperately away from the village, knowing that he mustn’t be caught like this by anyone. Incarnate, he was utterly vulnerable to . . . well, to all sorts of unthinkable outcomes!

“Basquel!”

The sound of Kallaystra’s voice made Basquel flinch. He feared to be caught incarnate even by her—perhaps especially by her. They’d never been that fond of each other. What if she took advantage of his helpless condition?

“Basquel, you fool,” Kallaystra said when he ignored her summons, “come this way. We are ordered to retreat!”

“Where are you?” Basquel called, humiliated by his inability to see her disembodied form with his own disgracefully material eyes. “What has happened to me?”

“You’ve been forced to materialize,” Kallaystra replied, cruel amusement all too evident in her voice.

“How?” he wailed, still struggling away from Taubolt. “By whom?”

“By Michael,” Kallaystra growled, “and his host of Morningstar’s Children.”

“They
are
here, then?” Basquel blurted out, anger leaping up through the fear and confusion in his breast.

“They are here,” Kallaystra’s voice intoned from somewhere very near now. “And, as you see, some of them are still powerful. A few steps more, and you will be clear of their spells, however. Follow my voice.”

Even as her last words were spoken, he felt the dead weight of his unwanted flesh begin to lessen, and then, to his immense relief, he was free, dissolving ecstatically back into mere thought, will, and vapor once again.

He could see her clearly now, not ten feet in front of him, still looking smugly satisfied at his recent discomfort. This so annoyed him that he might
have blasted her with more than mere enmity if not for the presence of so many others all around them.

“Commanded to retreat by whom?” he demanded instead. “I’ve no desire to go anywhere until these half-breed vermin have been exterminated. I thought we’d gotten the last of them centuries ago.”

“So we had assumed.” Kallaystra frowned. “But they’ve been here all along, it seems, hiding in the Cup’s shadow, as always. Their ability to force us into flesh changes everything. Lucifer commands our return to Hell to regroup and amend our plans.”

“Very well,” Basquel sighed, as if merely humoring her with compliance, though she was right. This latest development would require some whole new approach.

As Molly examined the happily marginal fire damage to her store, her disciples began gathering to support her and report on the evening’s other disasters. Two shops on Main Street had also been firebombed, though, like Molly’s place, they’d been saved from more serious damage by the swift work of Taubolt’s volunteer firemen. With poorly disguised satisfaction, Alicia had arrived to inform them that Sam Cotter’s so-called mission had been set ablaze as well, shortly after the two shop fires had started, and had burned halfway to the ground. Of Cotter himself there was no sign, and rumors were already circulating that blamed him for having set all five blazes himself.

“What kind of idiot would burn his own place down?” Margery wondered aloud.

“They think he may have done it to throw suspicion off himself,” Alicia answered smugly. “They say he bought a lot of paint thinner at the hardware store earlier tonight.”

“Then he’ll be charged with murder,” Sharine said. “What an awful thing about St. Luke’s. You should see the mess up there. It’s a total loss.” She shook her head. “They’re saying that man who runs the junk shop was stabbed inside before the fire. And that poor old priest! Everybody says he was the kindest man in town.”

“Do they think the other one will live?” Lolly asked sadly.

“No one’s saying,” Sharine answered, “but I saw them put him in the helicopter.” She blanched visibly at the memory. “He looked dreadful.”

Just then Carolena arrived in a breathless rush. “Molly! There are people falling from the sky!” she exclaimed in hushed excitement, as if afraid of being
overheard. “Naked people! I saw one! With my own eyes! Not more than fifteen feet in front of me!”

“You saw what?” Molly asked. “Calm down, dear, and make some sense.”

“The fairies!”
Carolena gasped, still at half a whisper. “
I’ve seen one too!
It happened just after the fires started. He looked
very
disoriented. His back was turned. I don’t think he saw me!”

For a moment, everyone stared at her as if she’d belched up a toad.

“I’m serious!” she protested. “Why would I make up such a ridiculous story?”

The ladies looked from Carolena to one another, as if waiting for someone to decide how they should react.

“I knew it!” Alicia said at last. “First those children, now this! I knew it was real!”

“The new age of enlightenment has dawned,” Molly said, looking back gravely at her damaged store. “For every gift there is a price. The goddess has exacted her price this evening, and these are but the birth pains as Taubolt brings its gift into the world.”

Joby rode beside Ben’s stretcher, hardly able to endure the sight of his friend’s ruined face, yet unable to look away. Crombie had been declared dead at the scene by the nurse accompanying the paramedic on the helicopter from Santa Rosa; his body would be transported by ambulance, along with Alfred’s, to the morgue in Heeberville.

One of Taubolt’s two fire trucks had come racing uphill toward the burning church before Joby had run half a block for help. Moments later Jake had appeared, looking desolate, and bent over Crombie’s body with tears in his eyes. Then he’d gone to Ben, touched him briefly, and whispered something Joby hadn’t been able to make out above the clamor of the fire and those fighting it. Ben’s moaning had fallen off then, but Jake had turned to look at Joby as if he were among the burned as well, and said, “There’s no more I can do for him. The helicopter’s on its way. Stay with him, Joby.” Joby had nodded, wondering where else Jake imagined he might go.