The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister - Landon Wark (bill gates best books TXT) 📗

Newman beside the door. The intruder was clearly agitated, his hand clamping down on the wrist of the older man, a wild look in his eyes, but despite this there was no air of danger in the room. The congregation filed out orderly, barely looking back to see what all the fuss was about, as if things like this were becoming more and more common lately. The original yell fell away into a smattering of forced whispers and Newman’s protestations that he had to be going.

“Paul,” he beckoned. “Paul, can you come and help Mr. Wilson?”

Paul's legs straightened at the knee as he came up to his full, lanky height, shaking the loose change in his hand before dumping it into the bucket that he handed off to one of the volunteers. Paul adjusted his tie and walked over to rescue the reverend from the younger man. He was not so wild eyed as Paul had originally thought, but there was an urgentness about him, as if there was something important he was supposed to do that had been put off until this moment.

“Mr. Wilson. What seems to be the problem?” Paul asked.

He was in his element here. Here there was no politics to the work, no pamphlets or fliers, no pulpit pounding or protesters carrying signs. As Newman slipped away into the large rectory the massive vulgarity of the glass cathedral seemed to lessen slightly and the glaring light of the place seemed to dim. Mr. Wilson, as Newman called him, seemed to calm a little as Paul approached.

“It, uh—” Wilson looked around to make certain that the last of the parishioners were making their way out the door before he began. “I was really hoping to talk to Reverend Newman. I, uh, I used to go to the, uh, Saint Sebastian's... When I was a kid. They moved.”

“Reverend Newman is getting ready to retire.” Paul immediately regretted his tone. “I’ve been taking over some of the counselling duties. I did pretty well in seminary.”

Wilson looked around nervously again, tugging at the collar of his wrinkled suit. As he entered into range Paul's nose alerted him to the fact that Wilson hadn't changed or showered in a few days. “It’s my wife,” his voice fell to a whisper and it became clear just how disturbed he was. “I think that, well…”

“Do you want to sit down?” Paul motioned to one of the pews in the front before the sparkling eight-foot tall lacquered saviour at the front of the church.

Wilson nodded furiously.

“I think she’s fallen in with some sort of… I don’t know what you’d call it. This woman, she said they were looking for people—desperate people I guess—and I… It’s just that… ever since our son… she…”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning.”

“I’m trying, damn it.” He looked around. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. This place is more garish than parish anyway.”

This line, practised in his head for days brought, if not a laugh, then a slight sense of release.

“My wife, Jenny, she… You’ve heard of the people who moved in from out of town?”

“A little.” They were running some kind of business out there if he remembered the local gossip correctly. He had tried to keep up with it, but it had a way of being easily dismissible.

“Jenny’s moved in there.”

Paul frowned. “Moved in there?”

“Didn’t take any of her things, didn’t take any money, didn’t even say goodbye. She just left.”

There was a foothold there. A thousand techniques for just such a problem had been programmed into him during Seminary, techniques that had been co-opted from traditional psychology and had the word God shoe-horned into them in a dozen places each, but effective nonetheless. But there was an unresolved issue.

“And you think this place is some kind of… a cult?”

This sort of problem happened rarely, but more often than was admitted in this area. Mostly they were fundamentalist sects with leaders who could be diagnosed as megalomaniacs and followers who could be diagnosed as lacking self-esteem, vulnerable types. Definitely desperate types, looking for something, or someone to give them even a twisted sense of purpose.

“Yeah. No. Well, not really. They invited us over there, said they knew we were having money troubles from our son and his… My insurance at work said it was ‘an unnecessary procedure’. They wouldn’t cover it. So we… It was hard on her, you know?”

Paul nodded, his curiosity goading him on.

“There was this woman there. Fat as a heifer. She told us that they wanted to help us out, but that it would take sacrifice.”

Ah, there was the rub. Salvation always demanded sacrifice.

“Did they ask you for money?”

Wilson harrumphed. “None to give them. But they didn’t seem to want any. It seemed more like a job interview than anything else.”

“And your wife was impressed with this?”

He swallowed. “Not at first. But, like I said, Jenny, she’s fragile sometimes. I started to leave, but she stopped us, said there was something she wanted to show us and…”

There was a long silence. The kind of silence that befitted a much smaller church. At times Paul thought that this church had been built for bone-rattling choirs and pulpit pounding sermons. That was the kind of religion it peddled, and that was fine for some. But Paul's God—not just the God that people invoked whenever they needed some irrefutable moral authority, or some symbol to befit their righteousness; but the God that a person prayed to, when they were alone, because they needed to, not just to shoehorn themselves into the world—that God needed a smaller place.

"Do you believe in the Devil, Father?"

Paul's frown deepened. That question was taken for granted around these parts. A more common question was 'Do you believe the Devil's in our government?" or "Why are the schools teaching our kids Satanism?"

"It's