Under the Beetle's Cellar (3 page)

Walter Demming had known fear before; he had lain awake nights in damp jungles waiting for attacks from an enemy he couldn’t see. He had been in combat and had seen death up close. None of those events had made his stomach heave and his heart contract the way they did every time Samuel Mordecai materialized outside the bus door. Walter hoped his terror, and his loathing, didn’t show. The kids all had enough of their own without his adding to it.

Samuel Mordecai stepped into the bus. He wore a white tank shirt and his long, muscled arms glistened with sweat. In his right hand he carried a Bible.

Lucy began shaking again. Walter put an arm around her shoulders and whispered into her ear, “Remember Jacksonville. You can do that, too.”

Samuel Mordecai stood at the front of the buried bus and spread his arms out wide like St. Francis waiting for the birds to light on him. He smiled, flashing dazzling white teeth, but his eyes remained cloudy and intense, unmoved by what the mouth was doing. He called out in a thin twangy voice: “Lambs of God, firstborns every one, a joyful good morning to you. I come to tell of what must soon take place. The time is near. It’s almost here.” He closed his eyes as if in ecstasy. “Can’t you just feel it, Lambs? You are the generation. You are the ones, alive and innocent when all the signs are right. The prophecies are fulfilled. Rejoice at being chosen for a role of the greatest importance in the working out of God’s
ultimate plan.” Keeping his arms spread, Mordecai moved his fingers, inviting a response. When none came, his brilliant smile faded. His face grew stern, lips tight and thin. “Lambs,” he said, “five more days! Don’t it make you want to cry out in praise?”

From the back of the bus came a few small voices, Brandon and Sue Ellen murmuring, “Praise Him” and “Hallelujah.”

Walter Demming, who hadn’t been to church since he was fourteen, and even then had disliked public prayer, forced his lips to move, but he made no sound.

Samuel Mordecai nodded his head. “Only five more days, you sweet Lambs of God. Smile. Open your mouths and praise the name of Him, oh Him, who is gonna cause wonders beyond the imagining and terrors also.
The sun shall turn black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon shall turn blood red, and the stars in the sky shall fall to earth. The powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.

“Our job is to prepare the way. You and me. We are the human agents for what is ripe. Now gather round for the lesson.” He started walking up the aisle toward them. “Open up your ears and your hearts to the word of God almighty, who can take one left adrift, helpless, wrapped in the cloak of the Beast and transform him into a prophet. That’s the wonder He worked with me so I could be here to tell y’all and the rest of the world what is transpiring on this rebel planet.”

The kids all moved like zombies to their seats. Walter knew it would be useless to try to talk to Mordecai now, when he was already rolling, so he sat, too, and resigned himself to waiting it out.

“Now you recall,” Samuel Mordecai said, “we was talking about the signs that have given us to know that the end is at hand. They’re all here. You see ’em every day out in the world of so-called technology. Bar codes and credit cards, TV shopping, implants, transponders, electronic transfers, cyberspace, and those so-called computer games. It was all foretold in the Book of Revelation.
‘He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the Beast or the number of his name.’

“I told you yesterday that I would tell you something that will amaze you, Lambs. Now, I know most of you have had enough arithmetic so you can add pretty good. So follow along. In many languages there’s a code where letters of the alphabet are given numbers. Often in sixes. So A is six, B is twelve, C is eighteen, and so on. Now say we do that with our alphabet. Then we take the word ‘computer’ and assign each letter in that word its number. Okay? You following me, Lambs? You know what that adds up to? You know what number, of all the numbers in the world,
that makes?” Samuel Mordecai looked around, his eyes wide and his breathing coming hard. “Do you know what ‘computer’ equals?”

He waited, as if expecting an answer.

Walter looked back. The kids were squirming, shaking their heads.

“You’d need pencil and paper to do the adding up, I guess. So I’m gonna just tell you.” Mordecai paused again and his blue eyes were wide. “It adds up to six hundred and sixty-six. Six, six, six. Yes! The number of the Beast from the Book of Revelation. Ain’t that just an amazing sign, Lambs? Don’t that fill you with wonder? Just think that when all those prophecies were made two thousand years ago, the prophet John, the disciple beloved of Jesus, who wrote the Book of Revelation, could foresee the computer. John said,
‘If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the Beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.’
Don’t that strike you with awe? The letters in ‘computer’ add up to”—he held up six fingers and shook them in the air—“six, six, six.”

Walter Demming felt his back teeth clenching tight. As the thin voice droned on and on, he turned to check the children. All of them sat perfectly still as they watched Samuel Mordecai pacing the aisle. He held his book in his left hand and stabbed the air with his right index finger, the motion jerky and so aggressive it made Walter want to reach out and break the finger off.

For the first week, he had tried to concentrate on these lessons so he could understand what Samuel Mordecai had in mind, but he soon discovered it was so crazy and repetitive he didn’t need to listen. He pretended to listen, of course. He didn’t want to anger the man. He looked directly at him, followed his movements with his eyes, but his mind he let float across the field of wildflowers that stretched from his house all the way to Theodora Shea’s gravel driveway where her sixteen-year-old golden retriever dozed in the sun and her garden awaited his attention and the earth awaited his hands. Today he would plant geraniums, bright red geraniums—lots of them.

Lucy’s sobbing brought him back. He looked over at her in the seat across from him. She was trying to hold it in, but an occasional sob escaped her.

Samuel Mordecai was shouting. “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolators and all liars—they will all be made into blood statues on the last day! We got to go through the blood. Can’t avoid it, can’t go over it, can’t go around it, got to go through it. If you reject the opportunity that is offered to you, woe unto you, for then you shall go to the place where the worm never dies.”

Walter turned his head to check on the other kids. Bucky sat up
straight with his hands folded in his lap. His eyes were shut so tight that his face was screwed up in a grimace. Philip’s head had sunk into his lap. Brandon Betts was nodding and muttering under his breath.

Five more days, Walter thought—five more days of this shit and we’ll all be praying for the world to end. O Lord, please help us—lately he found himself praying—him, a man who hadn’t prayed even in foxholes. Whatever is going to happen, he prayed, with his eyes squeezed shut to keep the tears in, please get this over with and see us safe through it. His stomach contracted in sharp hunger pangs. But first, dear Lord, You who loved little children and incompetent sinners like myself, we sure could use some breakfast here. Oh, we sure could.

CHAPTER

TWO

“We’re fixing to get these new nine-digit zip codes, you know. Add this to your nine-digit Social Security number, and what does it give you? Eighteen numbers that will be your identity—that’s three sixes, and the Book of Revelation prophesied it real clear—in the end days, the number 666 is gonna be stamped on people to label them as Satan’s property. Don’t that just bring you to your knees?”

S
AMUEL
M
ORDECAI
,
QUOTED BY
M
OLLY
C
ATES
, “T
EXAS
C
ULT
C
ULTURE
,”
L
ONE
S
TAR
M
ONTHLY
, D
ECEMBER
1993

“Beyond telling you I’m sick to death of it, I don’t know how to explain it, Richard,” Molly Cates said without turning away from the window.

“Try.” Richard Dutton’s voice retained its habitual caustic edge, even though Molly knew he was making an effort to sound warm and understanding.

She kept her eyes fixed on the tiny cars scooting along the Congress Avenue bridge in the lunch-hour traffic twenty-one stories below. “When I first got the police beat at the
Patriot
, I thought it was the world’s luckiest break. I was eager for it all. Crime was an adventure, this alien subculture that sucked me in. Ever since then, for twenty-two years, I’ve been a regular visitor to that place.” She felt the slither of dread deep in her chest. “Now I feel like a native there.”

She turned around to see his reaction. The staff meeting at the Capitol Club was over, and the rest had gone back to the office, leaving Molly alone with her boss. Richard Dutton, the editor of
Lone Star Monthly
, sat with his chair pushed back from the mahogany table and stared down at his long legs stretched out in front of him.

“I’ve been thinking it’s time for me to get out of that world,” she said, her voice sounding whiny and uncertain in her ears. “I’ve had too much of it—a steady diet for more than twenty years. It’s starting to give me bad dreams. And this horror going on in Jezreel is—” She stopped, at a loss for the end to the sentence. “Oh, Richard, I don’t even want to think about it.”

“But you have been thinking about it, haven’t you?” He glanced up at her. “You are following the coverage.”

“To avoid it you’d have to leave the planet.”

“I want to understand this,” he said. “Your reluctance here—is it because of your past unpleasantness with Samuel Mordecai?”

“Unpleasantness!” Just like Richard to call the most unsettling event of her journalistic career an “unpleasantness.” “Let me remind you that when my cult story came out, Mordecai called and said if I didn’t arrange network television time for him to respond, he would mark my soul with a bar code identifying me as one to be made into a blood statue, whatever the hell that is. For months I got preachy, barely literate letters from some of his followers who were trying to set me right. And I think he’s the one who put me on the mailing list for all those right-wing religious tracts, which I am still receiving.” She stopped because she was out of breath.

Richard Dutton sat up straighter in his chair. “I hear you, Molly, and I can see how strongly you feel. But you should be able to see my point of view here, too. We’ve got this huge story going on right in our own backyard, a story that has dominated national headlines for six weeks. The clock is ticking down on it. And we’re sitting here with an unfair advantage that we aren’t using. Surely you can see that.”

She shook her head. “We don’t have an unfair advantage. If anything, it’s more like a handicap.”

He clucked his tongue. “You know better than that. You appear to be the only journalist in the country who’s met and interviewed Samuel Mordecai. The only one. You have a relationship with him—”

“Richard,” she interrupted, “Mordecai’s not someone you have a relationship with. Unless you’re willing to sit for five hours at a stretch and listen to his harangues.”

“But you did talk to him—for several hours and—”

“Several hours that were the worst of my life. And I include, for comparative purposes, the time the anesthetic wore off while I was having knee surgery
and
the time I went to divorce court.”

Dutton laughed. “Okay. But you’ve already done the painful part here. You did the interview; you might as well get something out of it. And, Molly, the fact that you hated him from the start, that you saw through him, gives you—”

“Richard!” Molly had been trying to treat it lightly, but now she lost all pretense at humor. “Richard, you don’t get it. I did see through him. I knew he was fanatical, and dangerous. I even suspected crimes were going on out there. When I left, I felt … 
contaminated.
And what did I do? I went to the sheriff, that bumbling old Bradford County sheriff, and
told him I thought Samuel Mordecai and the Hearth Jezreelites were evil and might be breaking some laws. I told him I’d felt threatened.

“He asked how they’d threatened me, and I said Mordecai had lectured and bullied me. The sheriff said it sounded like what Reverend Willard did to him every Sunday at First Baptist. Not pleasant, but not exactly against the law.

“He patted me on the head and said, ‘Now go on home, little lady, and leave this to me. I’ll check those folks out for you, sure enough, yes, ma’am.’ So I went home, good little lady that I am, and proceeded to write the story, because I had a deadline and, of course, that’s the main thing—meeting deadline, right?”

“That’s what we do, Molly. There’s no dishonor there. As for your other actions, they were blameless. You did what any good citizen would: You told the appropriate law-enforcement officials about your suspicions, right? What more can you expect of yourself?”

Molly groaned. The subject of Samuel Mordecai had been a sore one from the moment she met him two years earlier, and in the weeks since the school bus hijacking, it had become so agonizing that she tried not to think about him. But Mordecai was everywhere—his face, his name, his words, assaulted her from every television screen, every radio, every newspaper. It was impossible to ignore him.

Now, against her will, she saw his image: Samuel Mordecai, born Donnie Ray Grimes, standing in front of her, running his long, graceful fingers through his sun-streaked blond curls as he ranted about computers and calamity, beasts and apocalypse. It was an interview from the lowest reaches of hell. She had not gotten him to answer a single question. He just opened his mouth and started preaching, preaching and strutting, as if that was what she had come for. He gushed words at her nonstop, incoherently, ungrammatically, spewing them all over her. She made one or two feeble attempts to stop him, but on he raved. She had felt trapped and abused and mesmerized by the droning male voice that had kept her pinned to her chair far past the time she should have gotten up and walked out. There were things about that interview that still haunted her, things she had never told anyone. Finally, after enduring two hours of it, she had pushed her way out of the room and driven away from Jezreel convinced the man was dangerous.