Kornwolf (16 page)

Sadly, in this situation, he said, perhaps 3:6 was more appropriate: “
And the tongue is a fire, and a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on a fire of hell
…”

Again, an uproar swept the room.

In twenty-five years of church attendance, Grizelda had never seen anyone
leave
. Entire families were flooding the exit. And those left behind were left arguing bitterly: the Tulks and Zieglers and Stoltzfi on one end, calling for action in spite of the Schnaeders and Beckers, who clung to salvation through prayer and atonement, whatever the cost, on the other.

While Bishop Schnaeder stared defiantly into the fragmenting congregation and Minister Bontrager, slumped in his seat like a bandit king, watched with cold acceptance, everyone else, save for Ephraim, Colin and Gideon, hovered in between, till the caustic odor intensified, reaching a pungency hitherto unimagined—wafting of vomit and toxic bile, so thick and restrictive, so utterly
rank as to choke many cries in mid-sustain. The uproar cut to an agonized choir of sneezing, coughing, retching and heaving. A wave of shame overcame the assembly. How it could generate such an execrably hellish odor was beyond comprehension. Only one thing was clear: this service was over. Already gone to the chao, as it were: with the horseman of pestilence galloping through, the rest of the morning would have to be cut.

Deacon Byars, whose neck was breaking out in hives, at last stepped forward. As the fading lock on a past that had little future, his present might still serve a purpose: to end this madness. Or so it was hoped …

Instead, he removed a sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and, coughing into his sleeve, then peering through fogged bifocals, began to deliver baptismal announcements.

The congregation could have killed him.

Grizelda herself could have murdered the fool.

Clamping her mouth with the cuff of one sleeve, she strained for a fleeting glimpse of her nephew. Along with Colin and Gideon, hunched in a quiet trance, the boy sat motionless. All of them looked to have gone into shutdown.

Behind them, in contrast, Jonathan followed the Deacon's announcement in rapt attention.

Here it came …

As the congregation hacked its way into a chorus of gurgles, he read the list. For what it was worth (all ceremonies were sure to be put on delay, for the moment) there were seven names. As had been expected for several months, Fannie Hostler was one of the first. But less foreseeably, the seventh, most recent addition was announced as: “Jonathan Becker.”

All at once, Ephraim snapped to attention. Colin and Gideon stirred from their daze. Confused, all three of them looked to Jon for an explanation—a motion of denial, an assurance that someone had misunderstood. Granted, Jon had been out of the running for weeks, which hadn't gone unnoticed. However, his regular church attendance, as they had always understood it, had served
as ongoing vocal training—a means of getting ahead in the game—not as an actual rite of conviction. The Crossbills had never suspected as much. He'd given no indication of joining The Order / leaving his gang, or whatnot. Surely, he wouldn't have quit without telling them. Surely, there had to be some mistake …

But apparently not. Coughing, he nodded in confirmation of Byars's announcement. Colin, Ephraim and Gideon watched in disbelief from the Sinner's Bench. In a roomful of suffocating Plain Folk, they seemed uniquely unaffected by the stench. Jonathan, suddenly aware of their attention, didn't look back. His gaze remained locked on the Deacon. Grizelda watched as, slowly, Ephraim turned away in apparent bewilderment. He might have remained in that state all day had the Deacon not kept on with autumn announcements, during which Jonathan's name was mentioned again—this time to surprise all around.

With the hives on his neck in angry splotches, tears streaming into his beard and the room in a state of fuming pandemonium, Deacon Byars lifted his head to announce the betrothal of Jonathan Rubin Becker to Fannie Gwendolyn Hostler, scheduled to marry November 20th.

Ephraim fell to the floor, unconscious.

Forty-three-year-old Hector Shlem had just clocked in for his midnight shift with three other Sprawl Mart security guards—had taken a seat in a cubicle overlooking the superstore's parking lot, and scarcely broken the seal on a can of sardines—when “the whirlwind” appeared from the south. At first, as it came over the hill in a flurry of movement, Shlem had mistaken the flash for a motorbike—somebody tooling the fields. But then he'd picked up on the silence, the notably total lack of an engine's roar. Shlem put down his can of sardines and stood, prompted to curiosity. He watched as the movement blazed down the weedy slope from the edge of 342, rounded a light pole and leveled out to the parking lot, heading directly for him. It seemed to be gaining momentum steadily. Its features were blurred in the swarm of activity. Nothing was clearly visible, save for the fact that it wasn't slowing down. On the contrary, it was accelerating. Without any question, approaching fast … No sooner had Shlem begun to wonder than impact became undeniably imminent. He dodged to one side with scarcely a moment to spare before it crashed through the cubicle. Thirty-five square feet of reinforced glass exploded inward, raining oblivion. Shlem ended up in a crouch on the floor, uninjured. The spray of glass had blown over him. The whole thing was finished before he could stand.

His sardines would later turn up in cosmetics.

A swath of destruction was torn down an aisle, back to the exit and, no less explosively, straight through another wall of glass.

“It was kind of like having a freight train plow through your greenhouse,” Shlem would be quoted as stating.

It nearly measured up in damages, as Rudolf Beaumont would have to concur. As the first responding officer present, he would call in a six-figure estimate. Strange as it may have appeared firsthand, the sheriff's dispatcher was oddly unfazed by his spluttered attempts to describe the scene. This was due to the fact that the precinct was now being swamped with disturbance reports—the latest of which was about to go out as an APB from Sheriff Highman: priority one on a “high-speed maniac” said to be wrecking the Holtwood Development.

Hector Shlem was left in the rubble with several meandering Sprawl Mart officials while Rudolf Beaumont throttled his cruiser directly to Holtwood, a mile up the road.

He arrived to find four other officers, three private watchmen and one angry contractor present—patrolling the craggy terrain on foot between visibly damaged house foundations, cutting their flash beams over the wreckage.

Officer Beaumont got out of his cruiser to join them. He overheard one of the watchmen complain of not having heard or seen “
them
” coming and, once under siege, having been outrun. “They were too fast,” he kept saying. “Too fast.”

Rudolf approached them. “How many were there?”

Visibly shaken, the watchman snapped in reply: “How should I know?” He pointed across a series of paths to the opposite bluff. “It started up there, then headed this way. I don't know. They were just kind of everywhere at once.” He shook his head. “It happened too fast.”

Irritated, Beaumont turned from the group and, unlatching his flashlight, started up the hill. He unholstered his .45 and clicked off the safety.

An oddly unseasonal chorus of locusts split the midnight calm from the ecotone.

Almost immediately, Rudolf felt certain the prowler(s) were gone. For the seventh time in a month, and by far the most damaging yet, they had gotten away. Between Holtwood and Sprawl Mart, lo
e
were sure to exceed all accumulated wreckage to date.

Down the hill, Sheriff Buster Highman's cruiser drifted into view. He slowed to a stop and got out. He leveled his speaker horn. “Bring it in, ladies!”

Beaumont retraced his steps down the path, joining Officer Kutay along the way. Kutay, a bungling doughboy known as the “precinct pussy,” looked good and spooked. Their radios squawked of intrusion at both the Mayweather stables and a liquor store in Paradise—the first having something to do with a burning scarecrow posted along the drive, and the second a forced intrusion report. As they wound down the slope, talk came through of a wolf chasing traffic on Dillerville Pike.

The sheriff hollered: “Turn off that radio, Beaumont!”

Rudolf cut the volume.

Two more cruisers appeared from the highway, bringing the number of officers present to seven. Highman, pivoting tensely on one heel, got to the point, addressing them.

“I don't know what we're dealing with here,” he said, for lack of a better approach. “But whatever it is—kill it.”

Simple.

Order confirmed with no objections.

For over a week, while everyone else had been yukking it up at The Basin's expense, law enforcement officials therein had been running in circles, to worsening ends. Hoax or not—whether juvenile vandalism or, as had been suggested already, a moon-sick wild man roaming the fields, the Blue Ball Devil had to be stopped. This situation was out of control.

Just that evening, Philth Town 10 had aired a five-minute broadcast dubbed “A Week in the Lamepeter Public Ledger,” which featured sarcastic, embittered and frightened remarks by longtime area residents—something he found less irritating than the newscaster's subsequent laughing fit. (“Sounds like a serious
case of the blue balls—I mean, excuse me: a
bad case in Blue Ball
.”)

Millions of people had heard the report. And others like it were sure to follow. And with them would come a new wave of visitors—thrill seekers, Wiccans and gothic trash—flooding the local hotels for a week in hopes of catching a glimpse of the creature and adding to the already harrowing plight of nightly patrol in the townships of late. Every cop in the county, by now, was chomping at the bit for a shot at the culprit(s).

Officers Kreider and Hertz were dispatched to a three-mile stretch of Dillerville Pike. Officers Keiffer, Billings and Koch were assigned to the burning scarecrow reports, while Beaumont and Kutay wound up stuck with investigating the liquor store. Rudolf quietly damned the sheriff. Now was no time to be weighted down. Whatever was running amok out there, it was fast—or, in any case, highly elusive. Officer Nelson “Fatty” Kutay was probably the slowest man on the force. In every respect, he would only serve as a ball and chain around Beaumont's neck.

Furious, Rudolf got into his cruiser. He followed the typically idling Kutay back up the drive to 342 and swung onto it, instantly punching the gas. With his siren and lights in a wailing blur, he shot past Kutay's black and white, then widened the gap between them, leaving Fatty stuck at an intersection. Once in the clear, he left the highway, moving east on Harvest Lane. He was reaching to cut the lights when, ahead in the on-coming lane, a buggy appeared. There were three of them, gliding along in the dark.

What were the Orderlies doing out at this hour?

Beaumont slowed his cruiser to see, as Fatty came over the radio: “-*
Rudolf
*-?”