The Obsidian Blade (27 page)

The doors opened suddenly, almost knocking Tucker off the steps. A thin young man with a shaved head, a wiry dark beard, and deep-set dark-brown eyes looked out at him.

“I am sorry. No admittance.” He had the same peculiar accent as the man at the house. And he didn’t look sorry at all.

“Are you Father September?” Tucker asked.

The man tried to close the door. Tucker wedged his foot against it, holding it open.

“I need to see Father September.”

“You cannot —” He broke off, looking down at Tucker’s blue-clad foot. “Ah,” he said. “A fellow traveler. Enter, friend. I am Brother Koan.”

Tucker’s heart began to race. His Medicant boots were his ticket to see Father September, which confirmed his suspicions. The miracle-working preacher had traveled the diskos.

Inside, the church was exactly as he remembered: twenty rows of pews, the modest limestone altar, and standing proudly behind it, the great organ, its cluster of pipes reaching toward heaven.

Brother Koan pointed toward the back of the church. “You will find him there.”

Behind the wall of organ pipes was a small sacristy. Tucker looked inside. The room was empty except for a narrow cot, a sink, a wooden chair, and a small desk. He heard faint muttering coming from beneath the organ. A pair of bare legs and sandaled feet were sticking out from between the wind chests.

“Excuse me?” Tucker said.

A muffled voice came from beneath the organ. “Go away!”

“I’m looking for Father September,” Tucker said.

More muttering. It sounded like Latin. A claw hammer and a wooden walking staff slid out from beneath the wind chests, followed by the rest of Father September, a robed, elderly man with long gray hair and a full white beard. Using his staff, he climbed painfully to his feet. His long mustard-colored robe was stained with dust and oil, his face crisscrossed with scars and spotted with age, his eyes set deeply in nests of wrinkles.

“Father September?” Tucker said.

Father September peered at Tucker, his brow furrowed. They stared at each other for several heartbeats, then the old man’s eyes flared in sudden recognition.

“Curtis!”

The deep voice hit Tucker like a mallet striking a gong. He knew it well.

“Dad?” Tucker’s voice cracked.

The old man’s face went soft. “Tucker! I thought you were my brother come again.”

Tucker stared. His father had become an old man.

“But it is truly you,” said the Reverend Adrian Feye. He added, in a voice almost too soft for Tucker to hear, “As it is written.” He sank to his knees and reached out with his arms.

Tucker took a step back.

The old man looked down at himself and spat out a bitter laugh. “You are frightened. I cannot blame you.” He used his staff to help himself stand. “Come.” He gestured toward the sacristy. “There is much to discuss, and little time.”

He used his staff to steady himself as he limped into the sacristy and lowered himself to the cot. He laid his staff on his lap. Tucker sat across from him on the wooden chair, a thousand questions fighting for his tongue.

The old man waited.

“I went to the house. I saw Mom,” Tucker said.

The old man’s eyes softened. “Did she know you?”

Tucker shook his head.

The old man sighed. “She does not remember me, either.”

“What
happened
to her? How did she get so young? And you — how did you get so
old
?”

The old man smiled. Several of his teeth were missing. Tucker thought,
Can this really be my father?

“When did you see me last?” his father asked.

“In the tomb. When you told me Mom was dead. When the soldiers came.”

“The tomb. Yes. The soldiers . . .”

“I thought they were going to kill you!”

“As did I. They threw me into an oubliette — an underground cell so small that I could not spread my arms without touching the walls. I do not know how long I sat in the darkness with only vermin for company.

“I passed the time by addressing the vermin as I would my flock. I spoke the Gospels, the great stories of the New Testament, first in Latin, then in Aramaic, and again in Greek. It seemed to calm the rats; they bit me less often. The fleas and lice were not so forbearing.” He scratched a remembered itch. “I did not know at the time, but my words echoed through the shaft to where they could be heard by others. They gathered — the rats, the people — to hear my words. It was during those long, dark, endless days of hearing nothing but my own voice that I found God again.”

“You believe in God now?”

“If not God, then who shepherded me through those dark times? The Medicants tore God from my heart, but I found Him again in the blackness, and yet again when the Romans dragged me out of the hole and nailed me to a cross.”

“They crucified you?”

He displayed the knotted scars on his wrists. “Along with several others. I hung with thieves, runaway slaves, heretics, graverobbers. . . . It was a festive affair, much better attended than Josua’s execution.”

“Did you —? I mean, what happened?”

“Unlike Josua, the man you saw on the cross, I was saved. Josua never rose from the dead — he was too far gone for the Medicants’ digital witchcraft.” His voice took on a bitter edge. “Heartless drones, drowning themselves in digits and devices. The Medicants represent a dark path for mankind, Tuck, both as victims and carriers of the Plague.”

“But how did you survive? You said you were crucified!”

“I was stolen from the cross by those who would become my disciples. The Essenes. They had heard me preaching from the oubliette and recognized me as a vessel of the Lord even before I knew it myself.

“For weeks I lay in a morass of fever and pain, hidden deep within the house of a man called Yosef, willing my body to heal, speaking directly to God. They say that in my delirium, I spoke the Gospels — or rather, what would later become the Gospels. Yosef assigned a scribe to attend my every utterance. It came to pass that when I recovered, I understood that my purpose was to spread the Word.

“I traveled the Holy Land and spoke of things to come. Wherever I went, I was followed by a throng. It was not for many long years that I came to realize that those who followed me were far more righteous than I, for they had left their homes willingly, while I fed upon their adoration with all the narcissism of a false prophet. And so, as I felt myself entering my twilight years, I knew that I must become a seeker myself. I had my apostles raise me to the Gate on Golgotha. Standing upon their shoulders, I cast myself into the whorl. That was how I met the Master and how my eyes were truly opened.”

“The Master?”

“Yes. He was waiting on the other side of the Gate. It was he who showed me the way. It was he who showed me that it is here in Hopewell that our great work must begin.”

“Father September?” Brother Koan appeared in the doorway, hands clasped before his chest.

“Yes, Koan?”

“We should leave soon.”

“A few moments, Koan.”

Brother Koan nodded and withdrew. Father September’s eyes lost focus; for a moment, he looked as if he was about to pass out.

“How come you call yourself Father September?” Tucker asked.

“Look at me.” Father September spread his arms. “Who here would believe that I was once the Reverend Adrian Feye? Even if they did believe, it would only frighten them. I call myself September because September is when all things will change.”

“You mean this September? Now?”

“Yes. You will see.” The old man once again bestowed upon Tucker his frightful, gap-toothed smile.

“So who is this Master?”

“He who revealed to me that the roots of the Medicant curse lie here, in this time. I returned to a Hopewell filled with people walking the streets with wires coming out of their ears, communicating by pressing buttons with their thumbs, staring into tiny screens as if what they are seeing is real, turning their backs on what they once were, rushing headlong toward what they may become. We live in dreadful times.”

“This is because you don’t like computers and cell phones?”

“These digital devices . . . You have heard of the great plagues God visited upon Egypt? The greatest plague of all is upon us: the Digital Plague.”

The Medicant woman, Tucker remembered, had said something about a plague. And so had Awn.

“The question is simply this,” his father continued. “Is a future, once observed, still changeable? Or does the fact that we have observed it make it an immutable part of our personal past?” He pointed at Tucker’s blue Medicant boots. “If we change our direction, will those boots suddenly disappear from your feet? I fear not, yet I know we must try. The seeds of Plague are planted deep. Your mother was one of its first victims. The Plague began — the Plague
begin
s — here and now, in the Digital Age. Do you remember your mother working all those sudoku puzzles? It was sudoku that destroyed her.

“The Plague appears under many guises. Its victims are everywhere around us, but the disease goes unrecognized. They sometimes call it autism, sometimes Alzheimer’s, sometimes depression. Sometimes they give it other names. The doctors and scientists are blinded by numbers; they do not see that it is the numbers themselves that are destroying us. We must return ourselves to a state of grace. No cell phones, no computers, no electronic devices feeding upon our senses, no falling upon the digital sword of technology. As it says in the Bible,
We dare not make ourselves of the number.
” He raised his staff and gazed out through the walls as if looking out over a great throng. His arm holding the staff began to shake. In a softer voice, he said, “I took your mother to the Medicants to be cured — to the very people who allowed the Plague to take root. I did not know any better. The Medicants could not help her. I thought her dead, but later I learned that they gave her to the Boggsians.”

“Boggsians . . .” Tucker remembered Awn saying something about Boggsians being the builders of the diskos. She had called them Amish Jews.

“Yes, Boggsians. Unholy heretics. They command powerful digital technologies, and sell to any who can pay. They could not restore your mother, so they destroyed her.”

“But . . . she’s not dead.”

“I fear she is, but she was reborn. I do not know what digital witchery the Boggsians employed, nor why, but the woman you met in our home was raised as a Pure Girl by the Lah Sept. She is Emily, but she is not our Emily — she is the Lamb Emma. I do not account for it, but I accept the blessing of her presence.”

Tucker shook his head helplessly. The only part he understood was that his mother had forgotten him and that his father had become this strange old man.

“What about Lahlia?” he asked.

“The girl?” The old man frowned. “I know nothing of her.”

Brother Koan appeared in the doorway again.

“Father?”

“Patience, Brother.” Father September used his staff to help himself up. “Come, Tucker. We have our parts to play.”

T
HEY RODE TO THE COUNTY PARK IN A BLACK
SUV driven by Tamm, the man who had been in the house with his mother. Tamm seemed as surprised to see Tucker as Tucker was to see him, but he said nothing. Tucker and his father got in back, while Brother Koan took the passenger seat.

Tucker leaned close to his father and said in a low voice, “The guy driving? He was at our house with Mom.”

“Tamm and Emma are married.” He coughed out a bitter laugh. “He is, in a sense, your stepfather.” He placed a hand on Tucker’s wrist and squeezed. “You trust me, don’t you?”

Tucker stared at his father. If he blurred his eyes, he could still see the Reverend Adrian Feye, who had once fished from their dock, carved wooden trolls, and built a church out of dreams and faith. But mostly he saw what his father had become.

A stranger.

Tucker hardly recognized Hopewell County Park. The entrance was now dominated by an enormous arch with the words
VERE RESURREXIT
carved across the top. The soccer field was trampled brown grass beneath an ocean of folding chairs. At the far end of the field stood a wooden platform about twenty feet high, with steps leading up to it on the front and sides, making it look like a stumpy five-sided pyramid. On top of the platform was a large dark-green tent, one curtained side facing the sea of chairs. Two men in yellow shirts were setting up more chairs at the far end of the field.

Brother Tamm drove across the field and around to the back, where an RV was parked. They climbed out of the SUV and were greeted by a man who looked like Brother Tamm’s twin, with the same cap of curly black hair, the same dark eyes.

“Welcome, Father,” he said, taking Father September’s arm.

“Bless you, Brother Cort.”

Tamm and Koan went out to the RV. Tucker followed his father and Brother Cort up the steps at the rear of the platform. The man pulled aside a flap in the rear of the tent. A familiar hum reached Tucker’s ears.

“It is safe,” said his father, beckoning Tucker forward. They entered the tent together.

Inside, the tent was dimly lit by the silvery glow of a disko. The disk was smaller than the others he had seen — only about three feet in diameter — and was framed by a pink fleshy-looking band. The smell of overheated plastic stung his nose.