Harken

6 The Expositor

Exhausted from another night of little sleep, I tried to take a nap to pass the time, but only ended up lying still for hours. The closed blinds let in a mild glow between long shadows across the pictures on my walls.

Maybe I needed something new up there? I had too much time to kill until leaving again. So I rolled over and went to my desk, turning my music player to a low buzz of electronic-fused sounds as I dug through my files. All of my digital photographs were organized into folders, sorted by day and on some, the location. There were so many places to photograph people in California. I could go down to The Grove and watch shoppers. Or I could venture down Hollywood Boulevard and capture tourists wandering through the attractions, pressing their hands into that of celebrities at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

The snapshots I paged through evidenced all of this. I didn’t simply use my talent for the money that clients would pay me. It was an addiction. I had to keep watching people, had to keep studying their faces for ones that would fit my walls. I clicked through photos one after the other, checking a face and then the next, hundreds flashing by.

I’d been searching for Callista’s face without even knowing it. My mind was fixed on how close San Francisco was and how she might have been down in LA at some point, maybe even in the background of one of my photos. But I wasn’t going to let myself go further down that path. I clicked my monitor off and hid the newspaper again.

When 3:45 came around, I dug through my closet for a button-up shirt then ventured downstairs. Alli was in the living room and I passed by the TV screen just as a tentacle speared a screaming woman.

“Keep watching all that joy and positivity,” I told her. She looked over my formal wear and lifted an eyebrow.

“Have…fun,” she said. On screen, tiny octopus-shaped babies started to slither out of the woman’s head. Alli rolled back over again.

I hadn’t ridden my bike in months so it was a bit difficult finding it in the garage. By the time I had it, I was already so dusty and sweaty that I wondered why I’d even bothered to dress up at all. Nothing was going to stop me now though. The author of the blog was the only clue I had left.

I pedaled down the road and followed the crossing street to the right, avoiding pedestrians out for an evening walk. There was a cool breeze that flew into my face, making the bike move slower but wiping the sweat away from my arms and forehead: a fair trade to relieve this heat, I thought. Everywhere I turned, there were people I already felt I knew, either from school or from my venturing all over the town while hunting for good photographs. Arleta was like that: you knew one, you knew them all.

Most of the houses that I passed were rickety and uneven, the old wooden panels held together by boards added for support, concrete foundations crumbled after years of age. There were chain-link covered yards holding back snapping dogs, trucks jacked up on giant tires half as tall as I was, uneven sidewalks that made my bike bounce and swerve. Scrap vendors had tall strips of tin wired up as makeshift fencing, dozens of KEEP OUT signs attached in multiple languages. If you were just a visitor passing through, all of this reeked of urban decay. To me, Arleta was like a grandmother whose skin was wrinkled and whose bones were fragile, but whose smile could never be outdone by any younger and more beautiful supermodel.

Aside from the old cars and the cheap shops, one thing that Arleta had a lot of was churches. I passed at least five before I finally saw the tall, pointed steeple of my target ahead. ST. LITA’S CHURCH, read the sign in the grass out front. I braked my bike to a stop in front of it, catching my breath.

The main part of the church was built in a traditional style with giant wooden doors behind steps leading from the sidewalk, all surrounded by neatly clipped trees. There was a parking lot to its left with people hurrying to make it inside before the service began. Most of them were Hispanic, all dressed up far better than I was, and at once I felt out of place.

I hid my bike behind the bushes and dusted my clothes off with my fingers, ridding my shirt of the grass and bugs that had flown there. I strolled up to the doors with as much faked belonging as I could—covering my burning hand in my pocket—and stepped inside.

I was immediately greeted by a host of scents that were foreign to me: candles melting with gently smoking flames atop their glowing white pillars, and perfumes and colognes from the churchgoers around me. The chill of an overworked and buzzing air conditioner carried the smell of incense from the front of the church: a smoky and exotic sensation that entered my nose like crushed flowers and spices.

The stained glass windows glowed from the evening sunlight outside. Likely accustomed to visitors, the families around me didn’t even notice that an outsider was in their midst. I quickly stepped out of the entryway, finding an abandoned spot at the end of a pew in the back. When I sat down, something beside me caught my eye: the blue wall with the golden angels. There was no mistake, it was the same from the photo.

Where to begin my search? I wondered. I knew that Spud was right: there wasn’t much hope in finding one person out of this group. The children stuck close to their parents, families and pockets of old ladies scattered about—none of them looked like conspirators. The church was merely one long room with two columns of pews, split through the middle by a walkway leading to the cloth-covered altar. A woman sat behind the keys of an organ, and began to play.

Everyone stood so I mimicked their actions, picking up a hymnal and mouthing the words along with them. A bespectacled priest appeared with two altar boys in a line, one bearing a tall crucifix and the other a gigantic bible. They all wore robes: the boys in white, the priest in green, steps so practiced that none of them even came close to tripping over the ends of their clothes. Behind them strolled a single monk dressed in brown with a completely bald head. When the priest reached the front, the music stopped, and he started to speak.

I didn’t really understand much of what he was talking about because I never went to church, but I followed along with the people nearby. They would stand for some things and sit for others. I found the uneven harmonies of the old people mixed with the children to be soothing—so powerful, it even calmed my own tension.

It went on for about half an hour. My eyes continued to scan the faces around me. I couldn’t see a true Glimpse, but even without that I felt I was in the wrong place.

None of these people even appeared slightly out of the ordinary. Not a single face there could have held behind it the secrets of a plot to murder me. Even as the priest finished the reading and began his sermon, the only disturbance in the room was the snore of an old man who’d fallen asleep.

I turned my head to study the people who lurked in the back pews with me. One of the men on the opposite corner stared at the priest almost too intently. Another woman two rows ahead of him didn’t seem happy to be there. Dissatisfaction, I recognized. But murder? I couldn’t see that in either of their eyes.

I sighed, slouching a bit against the hard back of the pew. Maybe this was a waste of time. I might have had better luck hunting for a penguin in a desert.

“For the time is come,” the priest’s monotonous voice suddenly rose to a boom through the speakers, breaking me out of my reverie, “that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?”

My concentration was drawn to him again, his eyes reading from the book. I hadn’t been paying attention until now, but the fervent insistence in his voice was too much to turn away from. The priest was patriarchal and almost ancient, a short gray beard and wrinkly skin on his face, hands holding the side of the pulpit to steady himself. His eyes were bright blue, a color I could see even from across the church.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said after a pause. “Listen to those words of Peter the Apostle. Listen, for soon the judgment foretold shall be upon us—’And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear’?”

The language was so treacherously dark that it felt out of place with these people, yet all of them listened closely. The priest’s eyes scanned their faces, pausing and considering his next words.

“Who knows when this end shall come?” he proclaimed. “Ten years from now? A month? A week? Where will you be on Monday if it happens then? Will your soul be ready?”

He nodded at all of us, his croak of a voice seeming to command the very air we all breathed.

“And what of the unrighteous—those who lead our souls astray?” he went on. “For if we are the sheep, we must follow a shepherd. But what if we find that we have been deceived, and are living in the herd of a shepherd only leading us to slaughter?”

An unusual gravity had taken over the entire room. He bowed his head for a moment, tilting the microphone away a half-inch to ease the power of his voice.

“Listen for the voices that warn of the coming. Listen for the voices that cry out for the purification of your soul before the farmer comes to harvest,” he said. “Because only those who listen can hear what is true.”

Like they had been spoken in a deep chamber, the priest’s final words reverberated in my head, my hands freezing as they clutched at the wooden armrest.

The priest was done. He turned and walked back to the altar. The Expositor had been in front of me all along.

It’s strange how many motions a body makes all on its own. Even standing up is a symphony of legs pushing and arms supporting, an endless and yet unconscious attention that no one really notices before they’re on their feet. All of a thousand things happen in the span of a second, like a set of instructions your brain has so you don’t need to remember the steps.

However the moment I’d identified the Expositor, I became conscious of every motion I made. Suddenly it was as if everyone else in the church had disappeared, and if the priest were only to look up he’d pick me out at once. My breath was too loud so I tried to slow it. My arms were crossed so I uncrossed them. Breathing slower started to make me dizzy, which only made me feel more awkwardly evident. I simply couldn’t get the autopilot turned back on.

So I sat with my back pressed into the corner of the pew, trying as hard as I could to keep my eyes from the priest as he went through his long-practiced motions of finishing the service. It was him. I knew I was right.

Soon the organ’s sounds filled the halls with a final song, as the priest and his assistants filed out and around the opposite side of the church, disappearing into a small room. The song finished and everyone around me started to buzz with low greetings to their neighbors, some leaving hurriedly and others grouping into friendly pockets of conversation.

I managed to stand. But what next? I’d watched the priest go into a side room in the front of the church, and I could see his shadow and the shadows of others as they performed their cleanup duties.

I wasn’t about to let him dart out a door and disappear before I could find some answers. But it wasn’t like there was any good way to start this conversation either. Have you heard any good conspiracy theories lately, Father?

Frosty air blew at me from vents against the wall, an usher switching off some of the lights that were over the altar just as I got to the pulpit. He nodded at me as I walked up the steps. I could hear the monk talking merrily with another usher, something about the old woman who’d been snoring, and they all laughed at once as I turned the corner.

The room was barely the size of my bedroom, mostly one wall with a long counter and many rows of cabinets. A table was beside the door, holding up sconces and a tall chalice that sat upside-down on a towel to dry. There was a tiny open closet with just enough room for about a dozen colored robes that hung inside, and at that moment the priest was putting his robe up, now dressed in an all-black suit and white collar of clergy. He turned just as I walked in.

“Can I help you?” he said. His voice was cavernous and mellow, the warmth of a person who lived off speaking. I stopped in the doorway.

“Um…yes.” Any words I’d prepared departed at once. The priest looked at me, his ocean eyes even more piercing now, set in the circles of age on his face. Certainly not a man who knew dark secrets—certainly not a man who knew why I’d almost been killed?

“I have a question. About…what you said earlier,” I said. He closed the door of the closet.

“Yes?” he prompted.

“Did you write it yourself?” I blurted. The lines in his face showed confusion.

“Of course,” he replied. “Well, I didn’t write it. I merely spoke from the heart. The Spirit works best when we let it guide us.”

The priest picked up the chalice and placed it in the cabinet. I glanced at the monk and usher who were still in the room. They were bantering loudly but I wasn’t sure if taking chances would be in my favor.

“I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “Alone.”

The priest raised an eyebrow. “What about?”

“I…I can’t say.”

His face twisted up. “Can’t you talk about it with me here?”

“I don’t think it’s safe here,” I said. The priest did not look convinced.

“Well I don’t know what you want to say that you can’t tell me here with Brother James,” he said. “I’ve got tomorrow’s mass to prepare for. If it’s not a time sensitive matter, maybe you can drop by the office tomorrow evening at—”

“I’ve seen the blog,” I whispered, hoarsely because it had slipped out without warning. Immediately his hands stopped, hovered in the motion of picking up the sconces, face frozen like a stone cutting. In the shock I’d given him, I saw one of the clearest and most unhindered Glimpses I’d ever witnessed. Raw terror, like the fleeting thought of a person one second before a car was about to crush them. It was paired with a feeling of entrapment and a second where he wondered just how short a time he might have left to live.

His lips parted to say something but in mid-thought he must have realized that he’d already given himself away, and there was no use in denying it.

“I won’t talk about this,” he said under his breath, moving to place the sconces into the cabinet and closing the doors.

“Please, just—”

He pushed me aside, moving to escape through the doorway I’d been standing in. In my desperation I grabbed him by the arm of his shirt, causing him to spin around, arms coming up to defend himself.

“Stay away from—!” he shouted, but his voice cut off like the breaking of a tree branch. His eyes had locked with the hand I’d lifted to stop him, straight to my black birthmark now throbbing and red.

“Daniel…” he whispered in shock. Then realizing that the room had gone silent, he blinked and looked up to the monk and usher who’d turned around to see what the trouble was. His face went paler.

“I—I’m sorry,” he said. “I will…I’ll hear your confession now, if you’d like,” he said to me hastily. “No sinner should be forced to wait for forgiveness, yes?”

Without another word, he turned and started away, so I followed. He headed straight for the back of the church, hands nervously grazing the tops of the pews as he went, head darting to each side as he checked the room. All of the parish members were already gone.

On the wall near the entrance was a set of wooden boxes that looked almost like closets, a pair of doors going in with a light over one. The priest said nothing, darting through one of the doors and closing it behind himself. On it was a plaque that read: FATHER LONNIE PETERS.

I swallowed hard as I reached for the metal handle of the other door. There was no time to think about it, not with the frantic curiosity that had taken over me. What would be said inside that room would change everything I knew.

My fingers grazed the handle and in that instant my hesitation vanished, and I slipped inside.