Let the Fire Fall Read online

  Lorna hadn’t said anything at all yet, but now she lifted her head and stared at him. “Why did you bring me out with you?”

  “A precaution,” Blake said. “You keep getting me in trouble, so I decided to put you where you’d be quiet for a while.”

  She stiffened and turned away from him. She looked very unhappy.

  They rested for three hours, then started to walk again. They were walking north. Blake didn’t intend to lead them out of the mountains at all, but stay in them until they were clear of Obie’s domain. Winifred shuddered at the thought. She didn’t think she would last that long, but she knew that if they did descend, they’d surely be found in the lowlands that were virtually owned by Obie.

  The days and nights became dreamlike. They walked. Blake produced food, or sometimes didn’t produce food; they ate or fasted, drank cold clear water from streams, and walked some more. They slept under pine trees whose branches swept the ground. They walked some more. They talked when they stopped to rest. Lorna said very little. Winifred and Blake talked a good deal.

  “There’s a particular mentality permeating the land now,” Blake said once to Winifred. “The people don’t consider the land as theirs any longer. They have crowded together along the coasts, and they line the rivers, and all in between is a wilderness, except for the great stretches of cultivated fields. And they are a wilderness of another sort. You can fly over them for hours and hours and see nothing but fields. The roads have been obliterated, the towns razed, the farms vanished completely. The tractors roll day and night, controlled from the underground headquarters where they are dots moving in well-ordered lines. We aren’t likely to see anyone at all in the woods. Most people don’t believe anyone could live in the woods for more than a couple of days. They think the game is all gone, the streams polluted. Many of them are, but high as we will be staying the water is good. The only meat most people have seen has been canned, and mixed with other things. If they have seen vegetables at all, it’s been in packages of so many ounces, not growing out under the sun.” He tossed a walnut and caught it. “I bet not one in twenty has ever seen a nut.”

  “God knows they flock to the woods in droves during vacations,” Winifred said. “Those who can afford it anyway.”

  “Sure. They go to cities that are on the edge of the woods, with paved trails weaving in and out of the trees, with nothing growing along the trails on the floor of the woods because they have picked it all clean. Turn one of them loose fifty miles from his city, and he would probably die.”

  Lorna looked at him then and said bitterly, “Are you pretending that we aren’t going to die in the woods?”

  “We might,” Blake said easily. “I guarantee nothing. But everyone dies sooner or later, somewhere. Why not here in the woods rather than back in the camp?”

  Lorna shivered. “I’m freezing. At least back there I was warm and full. Why don’t you ask me if I knew they were using me to lead them to you? Why don’t you ask if I still believe in Obie Cox and his Voice of God Church?”

  Winifred sighed in satisfaction.

  Blake laughed. “Lorna, I remember you as a pretty bratty kid, always talking, talking, full of importance, demanding attention. I thought you had reformed.”

  It was teasing, but with such good humor that even Lorna grinned. “I give,” she said suddenly. “I’m sorry, Blake. I was stupid, stubborn. I should have known what the whole act was about, but I didn’t. When I saw you on New Year’s. Eve… I never had been so surprised in my life. Then they were there and I understood all of it all at once. I was so miserable. I wished they would simply shoot me, or hit me harder than they did, or “Something.”

  “And the Church?” Winifred asked.

  “Oh, you know. You told me all about it. I didn’t believe you. I went to the Listener’s Booth and found myself spilling everything. I didn’t want to. I really’ thought I wouldn’t, but there it all came….”

  “Honey, I told you, they use a hypnotic gas in those damn tapers of theirs. You couldn’t help it.”

  Blake laughed again, a happy, boyish sound. “Wait until they use the fake wine along with the tapers,” he said finally. “It’s an antidote.”

  They all laughed almost hysterically, and afterward Lorna cracked nuts with gusto. They slept close together for warmth, and when Lorna awakened once during the night listening to a strange noise, she found that Blake’s arms were about her, her cheek against his chest. She fell asleep again instantly.

  Blake paced them and demanded more of them than they would have thought they could give. But they were happy, and the days continued fairly mild. They had no more rain until the ninth day. They spent the entire day under a rock that formed a ledge over their heads. Winifred caught Blake eyeing her several times, and each time, she straightened up consciously, only to slump again as soon as he looked away. He had her lie down and he ran his hands over her back later in the day, pressing gently here and there. She relaxed under his hands and the pain that had tormented her was eased, but she knew that she could not hike through the mountains for the next six or eight weeks, the time he said it would take to get to a cabin in Pennsylvania.

  That night Blake left them. Lorna woke to find him gone. She touched Winifred lightly on the arm and two women sat shivering for the next two hours until they heard the snort of a horse close by. Lorna screamed.

  “It’s all right,” Blake’s voice called softly.

  They could see nothing, but presently he was there with them again. “I thought we were fairly near a Cherokee village that I visited once,” he said. “I paid a visit to the chief and he loaned me a couple of horses. I’m going to leave you both with his people. They’ll take care of you.”

  Over the morning fire Lorna protested. “I won’t stay,” she said. “I know I’ve been nothing but trouble, but I won’t stay here. I want to help you, Blake. You said Derek is with you, let me come too.”

  Blake looked at her hard, then shrugged. He got the women up on the horses and led them through the trees. Lorna never had been on a horse before, and by the end of the first hour she was too sore to move.

  “How did you get way over here in the middle of the night?” she asked Blake some time later. They were pausing briefly on a bluff, and in the distance they could see the gleam of white birch tents.

  Blake shrugged. Winifred remembered the enlarged lungs and hearts of his people and knew that accounted for his stamina. She wished she shared it. She felt faint with fatigue.

  They bypassed the tent village. Blake grinned and said, “That’s for the tourists. Show only. They don’t live like hat.” He continued to lead their horses, and finally they started down the cliffs. Suddenly, rounding a bend, they came within sight of the village. It was so well hidden that the appearance of the two dozen small cottages was almost like a conjurer’s trick. There were neat fields, not plowed yet, standing green with a winter wheat crop, and a windmill, and a group of children playing with a ball. It was a scene of timeless simplicity.

  Chief Whitehorse met them. A tall strong man dressed in Levis and a plaid shirt, he greeted them warmly. “Dr. Harvey, you are welcome to be our guest as long as you like. We are very happy to receive you.” He clasped her hand. His knowing gaze passed from Lorna to Blake and there was a smile crinkling the skin about his eyes. “Miss Daniels, if you change your mind, please accept our hospitality, such as it is.”

  Breakfast was ready, he told them. Coffee, eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, corn bread, wild honey…. Over coffee he explained that no outsider had stumbled across their village for forty years. Winifred asked mildly how Blake had found them, and he smiled and said that Blake was their brother. “We adopted him in order to keep our record clean,” the chief said.

  The next day Blake and Lorna left again, this time on horseback, accompanied by one of Chief Whitehorse’s sons, who would ride with them for two days, and bring back the horses then.

  Winifred watched them out of sight with tears on her cheek
s. The chief stood silently by her side until she turned toward him. Then he said, “He has friends, many, many friends. If he has need of them they will materialize everywhere around him. He is a great chief among men and beasts.” His sharp eyes held hers and he added, “He is the alien, isn’t he?” Winifred nodded. “Yes, I suspected as much years ago when he came to us as a boy. Come now, Dr. Harvey, and let me explain to you the psychology of the tourists who want to believe that dried corn silk glued to pigskin and enclosed in duralite blocks are actually scalp locks for which they are willing to give much, much money.”

  INTERLUDE TWELVE

  Winifred Harvey’s Diary, cont.

  Bookworld, Nov. 1993

  Today the N. Y. Supreme Court upheld the decision handed down by the lower court granting the Voice of God Church on injunction against the North American Publishing Corporation, its president, Orson Beamish, and writer Newell Oates, who are ordered to cease and desist the distribution of Oates’s latest book, The Paranoid Church. Meanwhile the plunder and arson of those bookstores and department stores where the book has been on display continue….

  Washington Post, Nov. 1994

  Today the CDL, Committee for Decent literature, received the official recognition and official status that it has been seeking for over a quarter of a century. Miss Grace Livingstone, retired in 1973 after teaching high school literature for twenty years, was named director of the department, which will operate under the auspices of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Miss Livingstone said that her department immediately will start a review of all materials in public schools, libraries, for sale in public places, or advertised In any media that is easily accessible to the public as a whole. A board of review, already formed, will then examine any questionable material and decide whether or not it is in the public. interest to permit it to remain where it is accessible to young, developing minds, she stated.

  HUAC Reactivated

  Special to the New York Times

  Today the N. Y. Supreme Court upheld the decision handed down by the once-defunct House Un-American Activities Committee, known as HUAC. HUAC has been granted an appropriation of $785,000, and the mandate to investigate the activities of “certain people and groups of people who seek to perpetuate works of atheistic views in order to undermine the freedom of religion established under the Constitution of our country.”

  Crandall Worth, committee chairman, announced following the vote that the committee would hold its first hearings next Wednesday in New York City. Mr. Worth denied that there was, or could possibly be, a conflict between the freedom granted in the First Amendment and the freedom of religion amendment which he has sworn to uphold. He said, further, that those members of the House who had seen fit to vote against the motion might well find themselves in the witness chair when his meetings get under way. Citing the recent reversals of the Supreme Court, overthrowing decisions made in the sixties, Mr. Worth thanked those House members who had voted with him in reestablishing the committee. His concluding statement was, “If our committee finds evidence that any religion is being vilified, then those persons guilty of such a transgression of God-given law will face due process of law. We are a nation under God, let us not forget that. Our founding fathers were men inspired by God, and today we have among us yet another man so inspired who is God’s hand now in this time of mortal peril. Those who would question this fact will have to answer to our committee.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  DEREK was not at the cabin, and judging from the condition of the food stocks, had not been there for months. Lorna looked at Blake, her eyes dark ,with apprehension and dismay. “Obie…?” she said.

  “Possibly, but I don’t think so. He left things in order.” Blake looked over the equipment carefully. Derek had taken the tiny radio. Tentatively he tried to call him; the channel was open, but there was no response. “We’ll keep trying. He must have anchored it somewhere safe, where he can be in touch with it at some time during the day.”

  Blake prepared a meal from the cans of food, and after they ate, they went outside to bathe in the cold pool. Lorna was as hard as he was almost, and she had acquired a rich although spotty tan during the trek that had taken them nearly three months. All afternoon they made love, dozed, bathed again, ate again. It was the happiest day of her life.

  Late that night they got an answer from Derek.

  He was an active member of the group known as the Barbers. Nightly they raided the churches across the country and gave free haircuts to unwilling patrons. They were an immense success, wanted by members and non-members alike, although for different reasons, not always friendly. They had found hundreds of ways to sneak scissors into meetings. Also they had completed and were using one of Blake’s unfinished projects, an electronic distorter that scrambled Obie’s magnificent voice when he used it to surround his believers. It created a noise like a fingernail on a blackboard that was most disconcerting, and it never failed to break up the most serious gathering before the end of the opening invocation.

  Obie was due to hold his annual memorial service at Covington in a week, Derek said, and they were planning a reception for him then.

  “Call me back in an hour or so, Dek,” Blake said. “I want to think about this. There must be a way to combine our efforts….”

  After the connection was broken Lorna said, “Blake, wait a minute. I don’t think you and Derek should try anything at that particular time. You don’t know about it at all.”

  Blake leaned back and said, “tell me what I don’t know.”

  “It’s a weekend thing, this memorial service, the reenactment of the meeting Obie says took place between him and God in the woods. He goes off alone and everyone prays that God will speak to him again, and there are more services, and all the while everyone is fasting, for three days. On the night of the third day the psychedelic drug they call XPT is given out on small round crackers, and now that they have your magic wine, I guess they’ll use that, too. Anything that impressive they would use. There are only the tapers for this rite, and after the last person has had his cracker with the drug, the candles are extinguished. Obie’s voice, or, as he says, God’s voice manifested through him, is there recalling the rapture of their first meeting, and describing the ecstasy of it, and a procession of young girls starts. They come in with robes on and their hair done up on their heads. One by one they go forward on the stage where Obie is standing in the middle of a small circle that is lighted. The girl enters the circle and he removes her robe, and lets down her hair. That’s all. He doesn’t touch her other than that. He sends her down into the congregation with her hair down her back. All the while there is the voice everywhere, and the drug is taking effect more and more. By the time the last girl has entered the circle everyone is… strange. Obie undresses then. He has a robe on too, and there in the circle of light he takes the last girl, or starts to, and the light goes out.” Lorna kept her eyes on Blake as she described the ritual. There was no embarrassment on her face, just the earnestness of one trying to make another understand something that is alien. “You must think it’s beastly and ugly. A real orgy. But it isn’t anything like that. With the drugs and the tapers, and the voice saying this is how life is, this is what rapture and ecstasy are like, this is the consummation of human desire…. You accept all of it, and it is rapture.”

  “It sounds like that might be the ideal time to make a raid, while everyone is so preoccupied….”

  “No! You don’t understand. Think of the precautions they take for those ceremonies, no outsider is allowed in at all. Only those they are very certain of. Have you ever heard these rites described?” He shook his head. “Rumors, only rumors. No one who has participated has spoken out. They take pictures, of course, and I heard once that they use them for blackmail, if someone does want out of the Church, but I don’t think that’s true. Those who participate come away believing they have participated in some way with the union of God and Obie Cox, that they have exper
ienced a touch of what happened then.”

  “The other rumors one hears, the homosexual groups, the lesbians, all that true?”

  She nodded. “Obie preaches that there is nothing in sex that can be evil, no perversions exist. The Church permits, condones, sponsors every known aberration ceremoniously.”

  “I wonder who was smart enough to figure that out for him,” Blake said. “The Church forbids only those things that other established churches exhort one to accept: pity, mercy, charity, love.” He made the contact then with Derek and said, “I’m delivering your sister to the group. Listen to her explain the memorial service before you decide anything. I’m going to take up where I left off in New Orleans.”

  “I won’t go back there,” Lorna said, interrupting him.

  “You can’t stay here, and you can’t go with me, so there doesn’t seem to be much choice. Talk it over with Derek.” He handed her the receiver, which she put to her ear. After listening for several moments she nodded reluctantly.

  “Okay,” she said with bad temper. “I might put you in danger again. I don’t care where I go.”

  “Fine,” Blake said grinning. He finished his conversation with Derek, and the next morning he and Lorna left the cabin. This time they were in his small hovercraft. He left her with Derek in Massachusetts, fifty miles from Boston, and he turned south.

  Lorna watched him out of sight, then smiled briefly at Derek, and at the same moment burst into tears. “For crying out loud!” Derek said helplessly. He put his arm about her awkwardly, then waited, not knowing what else to do.

  “Dek, what’ll I do?”

  “What do you mean, what will you do?”

  “I love him and he’s not even human! He’s a monster from outer space, a stranger, an alien. And I love him!”

  “Yeah, well if he has to keep rescuing you every month or two, he’s going to love you too, like poison ivy, or the mumps, or something. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”