Under the Beetle's Cellar (7 page)

Here the noises of Molly trying to interrupt with a question were
drowned out by Samuel Mordecai’s voice rising to a commanding shout. “Sit down and listen. Woman, you came to hear me tell what we believe. I’m telling you. Now sit down and listen to it, the way I want to tell it, so you can write it as it should be.”

Molly, hearing this on tape, felt her skin prickle as though she were covered with fire ants. She pushed the “pause” button, feeling shaky and flushed. “Thelma, this is hard for me to listen to. I feel the need to explain something here. I am not accustomed to taking orders. Actually, I can’t remember a single time other than what you’re hearing here where I did anything I was told to do. But something happened when I was out there at Jezreel, something extremely upsetting to me. There is this … quality about Samuel Mordecai, and you should know this if you are going to talk to him. He has this … well … I really am at a loss for words here. He has something—some force—that caused me to sit down and shut up, even though sitting down and shutting up is something I haven’t done since the third grade and even then I didn’t do it very well. Maybe it was fear—I
was
afraid—but usually fear makes me more aggressive. …” Molly knew her words weren’t conveying the insane energy and repressed violence of the man. “Anyway, I never let this sort of thing happen before.”

“I think I understand it a little,” Thelma said softly. “I think something like what you’re describing happens to those negotiators, too, when they’re talking to him on the phone. When they describe to us, the parents, what they’ve been trying to do, they have a hard time explaining why they never seem to be able to say what they planned to say. They get cowed, sort of scared into being quiet, even when they’ve planned to control the conversation. Molly, help me figure out how to prevent that from happening when I talk to him. Let’s hear the rest.”

Molly turned the player back on. Samuel Mordecai’s voice rambled on, unimpeded now by questions or interruptions: “We are adrift, we so-called modern men, in a river of corruption, with no life jacket, no anchor, just like I was adrift, floating helpless, no identity, abandoned by all but the cloak of the Beast enfolding me. We have no mother to take care of us, because the mother is out whoring to the false God which has risen up from the mind of man and lives embodied in the computer, that false God disguised as progress, which promises ease and wealth, but delivers chaos and—”

Thelma held a hand up. “Stop it there. Can you stop it there and replay it?”

Molly hit the “stop” button. “How far back shall I go?”

“Go back to before where he talks about how there are no more mothers.”

Molly hit the reverse button. “…  We have no mother to take care of us, because the mother is out whoring to the false god …”

Molly hit the “pause” button. Thelma was leaning forward raptly. “What are you thinking?” Molly asked.

“Well, that’s like what he said on his KLTX talk, but he goes farther here. He sure doesn’t think much of mothers. Did you know he was adopted?”

“You mean by his grandmother?”

“No. By his mother, Evelyn Grimes. Then after she adopted him, she ran off and left him with her mother, his grandmother.”

Molly was surprised. “Whaaat? I never heard or read anywhere that he was adopted. Where did you hear that?”

“His grandmother told me. She called me this morning.”

“She did?”

“Yes. She saw me on television and had a vision that God wanted her to call me and tell me something she’d never told anyone before. She said Donnie—that’s his real name, you know, Donnie Ray Grimes—was not really her flesh-and-blood grandson. Her daughter adopted him and then ran off and she had to take him over. She also wanted to tell me she’d been praying for me and Kim every morning and that she was so sorry she just wanted to crawl into a hole.”

“Really? She said her daughter adopted him?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if it’s true. It hasn’t appeared in any of the news coverage about him.”

“Well, Miz Huff—that’s the grandmother—says her daughter kept it secret. Even her friends thought she gave birth to him. So they just never talked about it. But the feeling I got was Miz Huff wants to disown him. She was in an explaining sort of mode—said she tried to do right with him, but she didn’t have much money or time or support. You know, the same thing all parents seem to say at some point: I did the best I could at the time.”

Molly smiled. “Yeah. Seems to me I’ve said that once or twice myself.”

“Here’s this idea I’m working on. He’s real angry at mothers because his mother abandoned him—
two
mothers abandoned him, really. And Miz Huff doesn’t sound like much of a mom to me. So Mordecai thinks he can just steal these kids and use them for whatever it is he’s got in mind because no one really cares.” Thelma’s hands rose from where they’d been resting in her lap and pressed against her chest as if she needed to hold something in. “So what if I could show him that there are mothers who love their children? What if I could show him that I am a
mother who loves her child so much she will risk everything for that child? What if I walked in and offered myself, to replace Kim as a hostage? What do you think of that idea, Molly?”

Molly thought it sounded like insanity. “The negotiators would never let you do that. One of their cardinal rules is no exchanging of hostages.”

Thelma’s face mottled. “You don’t strike me as someone who is interested in rules. I’m interested only in getting my daughter out of there alive. I don’t give a fuck what their rules are.”

Molly, feeling chastised, nodded. “You’re right that children being abandoned by their mothers is a theme with Mordecai. It makes more sense if he was adopted—this imagery about being set adrift, like Moses. It must feel like that to be put up for adoption.”

“Yes. I think so. Will you play the rest of it?” Thelma pointed at the tape player.

They sat in silence for an hour listening to the rest of Samuel Mordecai’s fiery sermon about corruption and prophecies that had been fulfilled.

When it was finally over, Molly let out one shaky breath of relief and rewound the tape.

“What was he doing during this?” Thelma asked. “From the sound, he moves around all the time.”

“Yes. He paces the room the whole time he’s talking. Lots of energy. He gestures a lot.” Molly used her index finger to stab the air. “Like that, and he tugs at his crotch and runs his fingers through his hair. He’s always on the move, twitchy in the extreme. Posing like a rooster, or a rock musician. And he rarely pauses for breath, so getting a word in, even if you aren’t scared and cowed like I was, is impossible. The only way is to talk right on top of his words. It’s almost impossible to talk to him.”

Thelma was taking it all in, nodding. “I’ve seen it with the negotiators.” Her watch emitted a little beep and she glanced down at it. “Oh, damn. I need to run. I wouldn’t go, but it’s TV—Channel 33, which he watches.” She rose to her feet. “Molly, may I ask you a favor?”

“Of course.”

“You see now what I’m after. Would you go talk to Miz Huff for me? Ask her how I might reason with her grandson? I’d go but I have to be here. I want him to see me everywhere, on TV, in his dreams, hear me on the radio. I want him to know he can’t get away from me.”

“I was planning to talk to her anyway. I’d be glad to ask her that. Give me the phone number and address and I’ll go tomorrow.”

Thelma pulled a small red notebook out of her bag, looked up the
number, and gave it to Molly along with her own phone number. “Call me when you get back.”

Molly walked her to the door and, on an impulse, hugged her. Thelma was an armful, an earth mother, solid. “I’ll be thinking about you, Thelma. I don’t pray, but if I did, I’d pray for you and Kim.”

“I appreciate that. If you have any more ideas, call me, Molly.”

Molly watched her walk down the hall, her left shoulder weighted down by the heavy bag. She sighed. Ideas—yes, she thought she just might have an idea coming up. It was just a whisper in her ear, a cold tingling in the back of her brain, nothing she could put into words yet, just that restless old feeling of an idea forming.

CHAPTER

FOUR

“And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”

R
EVELATION
20:1–2

The sound of the Bible slamming shut jarred Walter Demming back from planting geraniums in the huge terra-cotta pots on Theodora Shea’s south-facing terrace. The sun had been beating down on his bare back and his fingers were sunk deep in the damp, cool earth. He returned reluctantly and found himself sweating in the stinking air of a buried bus, with eleven hungry, frightened children, listening to a madman.

“You heard it here!” Samuel Mordecai shouted. “We’re on a collision course with destiny!” In the enclosed prison of the bus his voice reverberated. He glistened with sweat; it had soaked through his shirt and darkened his hair, which curled around his face in wet ringlets. “It’s clear that all this speedup of computer technology, this so-called progress—rapidation, I call it—is really a machine out of control, spinning us faster and faster—it’s the
final sign
we’ve been waiting on.

“I know y’all was raised playing them computer games, Lambs. They got computers at y’all’s school and they teach you to write book reports on them, and lots of you have one sitting on your desks at home. Looks pretty innocent, don’t it? Like a toaster. But it’s all part of the grand scheme, clearing the way for the Antichrist. All you have to do is look at the faces in one of them arcades where the crackle and flashing lights of so-called computer games turn young folks like yourselves into robots for the Beast. Y’all remember the prophecy from the Book of Revelation and I don’t even have to open the book for this one:
‘And he had power to give life unto the image of the Beast, that the image of the Beast should both
speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the Beast should be killed.’
It’s no wonder you young ones have fallen for this false prophet. Unless someone told you, like I’m doing now, how would you know that the innocent little home computer is the way the Antichrist will control human life? And, Lambs, it was all prophesied in the Bible.”

He tossed his head, flicking sweat around him. “Remember: Earth’s probation terminates in five days. Ignore or disbelieve it at your own peril. Now, you can’t say gosh I wish I’da known. Them that has heard and don’t take heed will get stamped on the soul with the bar code that glows blue and marks them, every one, for the angel Gabriel and his avenger band to find them and make them into blood statues to rot for all eternity. Amen!”

Walter Demming checked his watch. Only two hours and ten minutes. They were getting off easy today.

Samuel Mordecai’s lips curved upward in a beneficent smile, and he raised his hands in benediction, the Bible clutched in his right hand—a gesture so sanctimonious it made Walter want to leap out of his seat and attack the man, drag him to the ground and smash the expression off his face. As nutty and as incoherent as Mordecai’s message was, Walter didn’t question the sincerity of it. But he loathed the drama with which it was delivered.

Walter stifled the urge to attack. He got up quickly, put on his supplicant posture, and went to beseech—one more time. “Mr. Mordecai, may I have a word? Please.” Walter turned away from the children and lowered his voice in the hope they wouldn’t hear. “It’s about Josh. He’s getting sicker every day. He had an attack during the night. It almost killed him. He needs to be in a hospital. This is a matter of life and death.”

Walter tried to look him in the eye, but Samuel Mordecai turned and took a step toward the door.

“Please.” Walter reached out and took hold of his arm. “At the very least, send out for medication. Here”—he pulled Josh’s empty inhaler out of his pocket—“this is what he needs.” He pointed at the label. “See? Albuterol. Two refills left. Please.” He tried to hand him the inhaler but Mordecai kept both hands behind his back. “And he should have another medication that he didn’t have with him—a steroid inhaler, he says.” Walter bent closer and whispered, “I’m afraid he’ll die down here. We have no way to help him when he has these attacks. Please let him go home.” He found himself hoping Josh would suffer an attack right now so this man could see how fearsome it was.

With a saccharine smile, Samuel Mordecai said, “Inhalers? Life and death? Mr. Bus Driver, can’t you hear how foolish you sound? Here we
stand at the very brink, the end of time. Stars are whirling and seas turning to blood. Listen to yourself. Forces of momentous power and glory are heaving in the heavens and you’re fussing about
inhalers.
Aren’t you listening?” He gestured around to include the bus and all of them. “We are gathered here to advance God’s purpose, not to worry about runny noses.” He turned away again.

But Walter held on to his arm. “Wait—this is no runny nose. It’s a child’s life and it does matter. Regardless of what is going on. You’re going to come down here tomorrow and find this little boy dead and you’ll be responsible for that. Then there’s no turning back.”

“Turning back?” Mordecai threw his head back and laughed, showing off his dimples and his even white teeth. “You think we could turn back now? I fear for you, Mr. Bus Driver. You aren’t listening. Young as they are, I believe the Lambs are getting the message better than you are.” He put his head so close that Walter could feel his breath. “Time. Is. Ending. Get ready.”

“Okay,” Walter argued, talking as fast as he could, “we’re getting ready, but why can’t we have some way to make hot water and steam? That would help. And we could wash in it, too. We just need a hot plate, or one of those coil things that heat water. And some instant coffee. Josh says that helps ease an attack, and citrus—a few lemons or oranges. Those aren’t difficult to get. While we wait. Please. It wouldn’t interfere with our … purification. And the children are hungry. Cereal isn’t enough. They’re losing weight. Some of them have diarrhea and stomachaches. We need some real food down here, food that kids will eat.”