Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Thirteen

“SISTER Diane had a little fainting spell,” Obie said, trying to shove the senator from the room. Calvin Taylor Dinwiddie stared from Obie to Dee Dee, who was lying on a couch, ashen-faced, sipping a drink. He could hardly see her for the other men in the room. Security guards in the guise of cooks, gardeners, teachers, they were all there. Senator Dinwiddie resisted the push toward the door.

“Now, Brother Cox, you just relax and take it easy now. Sister Diane is in good hands.” He gave ground, sidestepping slightly to go to the side of the door instead of through the doorway. “Sister Diane,” he called. “If you want me to get these people out of here, you just say the word.”

Dee Dee didn’t say anything. Obie gave up with the senator and announced generally, “If you gentlemen will kindly leave now. I’m sure Sister Diane is feeling better. If you will kindly leave us now and let us pray together….”

No one was paying any attention.

“Miss, did Johnny touch you?”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Has he been in touch with you before?”

Lenny Mallard stood slightly behind the others watching Dee Dee closely. When she appeared to be regaining her composure somewhat, he said with authority, “I think that Miss MacLeish should be allowed to rest now. We can talk to her in the morning.” The others looked from her to Lenny, then one by one left the room. Lenny was the last to leave.

“You started to order some supper,” he said at the door. “Why don’t you go ahead and do that. You two must want to be alone. Things to talk about. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Dee Dee sat up suddenly. “I want to go home,” she said.

Obie crossed the room swiftly to kneel at the couch and take her hand. “It’s all right now, Dee Dee,” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

She pulled loose and sat up. She looked at Lenny. “I won’t stay. I want to go home now. Tonight.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible, Miss MacLeish,” Lenny said smoothly. “There’s no transportation out of here tonight.”

“The plane is still here. I’ll pay whatever it costs to fly it out of here.”

“It’s out of the question,” Lenny said, less smoothly, but smiling still.

“I won’t stay here tonight! I won’t!”

“What happened?” Lenny reentered the room all the way closing the door after him. “You tell me now what happened and I’ll see to it that you go home.”

“Tonight? ”

“Yes.”

Dee Dee held out her glass and Lenny took it from her and refilled it from a decanter on a side table. She drank deeply, then said, “You won’t believe it. None of you will. I’ve read about your denials of his power.”

Very patiently Lenny said, “Try me.”

“All right,” Dee Dee said, sipping now, watching the gin and ice. “I came in to ask Obie, Brother Cox, about supper. I was standing at the door. Suddenly I felt strange, not myself. I was terrified all at once. I pulled the door open and he appeared there, just appeared out of nothing. And I felt him trying to get my mind, my brain. He was there, but he was inside me too. It was so horrible! I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything. It seemed to last for an eternity. Minutes, hours, I don’t know how long. Then I felt him shift, and I was able to move and scream. That’s all I know.”

Lenny continued to watch her without speaking. Dee Dee returned his gaze, her face smooth, untroubled, her eyes very clear. “So that’s to be the story?” he said finally.

“But that’s exactly what happened. I said you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Well you were right about that. I don’t.”

Dee Dee shrugged. “Perhaps you could explain it all a different way?”

Lenny started toward the door again. “No, I can’t explain it. I believe you planned the whole thing. I don’t think you really want to leave. I think this is the opening act of a charade that you plan to continue through the next two days, your planned stay with us. So, I will follow our agreement. I’ll call the pilot back. Be ready to leave within half an hour, please.”

“Please don’t throw me in that ole briar patch,” Dee Dee murmured.

Lenny’s expression didn’t change a fraction. He left them. Obie, still on his knees at Dee Dee’s side said, “What did happen to you? Are you all right now? You look strange.”

“I told him and you what happened, Obie. I was a perfect receiver for the Star Child. Obviously you aren’t, or you would have felt it too. I really can’t stay, because he’ll be successful the next time, and such a power isn’t confined by walls or time. But you must stay and go through your interview with him as you planned.”

Dee Dee wouldn’t add a word to that, and half an hour later, her bags still packed, never even opened, she left the estate as she had arrived there, by vertical take-off craft, heavily draped. This time she was the only passenger.

It was noon when Dee Dee watched the plane vanish into the blazing sky the next day. Several people were running toward her from the control shack. She left her suitcases on the ground and started to walk toward the men who managed the airstrip. Crisply she said, “Call the house and tell Merton I want to see him immediately. Tell him to drop everything and get up here. And get me a copter right now.”

Merton was there by the time she arrived. “Come on,” she said, leading him toward her suite in the mansion that topped the mountain. It was a three-storied house, with tall columns, wide porches, high ceilings, thick Persian carpets and antiques. Her suite, three rooms, office, bedroom, and sitting room, was all in jade and ivory with flaming pink pillows and draperies. She told Louise, her maid, that she wanted a bath, clean clothes, and lunch, all very fast. Louise nodded silently and vanished. Dee Dee started to discard the clothes she was wearing and Merton sat down and waited for her to begin the story. But Dee Dee remained silent until the maid said the bath was ready. “I’ll call you if I need you,” Dee Dee said. Louise nodded and left the suite.

“Now?” Merton said.

“They might have slipped me a bug,” she said.

Merton’s eyebrows peaked. He examined her clothing, purse, and suitcases very carefully, then shook his head.

Dee Dee motioned for him to follow her. She had pulled a flowing robe about her and she dropped it on her way to the bath. She caught up her long hair with a scarf twisting it all about her head, then stepped into the sunken bath of black and white ivory. Only then did she say, “The Star Child is Obie’s bastard.”

Merton sat down hard on an ornate bench before a dressing mirror. He stared at Dee Dee, visible from the neck up, the rest of her body hidden by rainbow-hued bubbles. Dee Dee was busy soaping herself, not watching his reaction at all. She turned on the spray then, and water spouted from dragons’ mouths on two sides of the rub, rinsing her as she stood up. Automatically Merton handed her a large towel that wrapped about her completely. His gaze was on her, but seeing nothing, as she let the towel drop, powdered herself, and left the bathroom to start dressing in the bedroom. Presently Merton followed. Dee Dee was brushing out her hair by then. She was wearing a white silk sari-like garment held at the shoulder by a cluster of pink rosebuds fashioned around a diamond pin.

“You’re sure?” Merton asked, as she led the way into the sitting room.

Dee Dee opened the draperies, revealing a window wall with a view of the mountains stretching to the horizon. Neither of them saw the autumn vista, which looked as unreal as a Saturday Evening Post cover. She nodded. “I couldn’t be more certain. I fainted when I saw him.” She poured coffee for both of them, and sipping hers, lifted the tops from various silver bowls and serving dishes. She told Merton what had happened.

“Okay, you covered it pretty well. But how about Obie? Does he know?”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t have left him there if he had seen it. The kid is exactly like Obie was in high school. It’s uncanny. But Obie has looked at that beard and all that hair for so long that he doesn’t know what he looked like before. No one else does either. Except possibly his mother, and she’s as crazy as a loon.”

Merton said nothing for several minutes and Dee Dee served herself stuffed mushrooms, asparagus vinaigrette, Boston lettuce with crab salad and tomato wedges, tiny hot rolls crisped on the outside, steamy and fragrant when she broke them open.

“You know what that means?” Merton said finally. “Blake is the alien. And he’s vanished. We’ve got to find him”

“I know,” Dee Dee said, between bites. “He’s the only one who can blow the whistle now.”

“And we’ve got to get the Star… the kid out of that place….”

“I thought of that, but why? Let them keep him under wraps for us. It’s Blake I’m worried about. What if he wakes up one day and says, ‘By golly, I think I’m an alien?’” She licked a drop of butter from her finger and her eyes were drawn to the fingers that had been mashed in the car door ten years ago. There was no scar, no trace of the accident. She said, “We know that Blake has something, power, whatever you want to call it. He’s got it. I wonder what else he has by now. He was a damn good-looking kid.”

“I’ll have to kill him,” Merton said.

“I know. More coffee?”

So they decided to renew the search, for Blake Daniels Co…. No, just Blake Daniels. Merton was a scowling man when he left Dee Dee. How to find a person who had vanished nine years ago without a trace in a world of nearly four billion, with over three hundred and seventy million of them in this one country? If Blake had gone to a doctor in the past three years his file would be in the medical computers. If he’d been in legal trouble in the past five years, the information would be in the legal computers. If ever he had registered for a credit card, or for a travel ID card, or for college, or military service, they would find him. It would mean money and a lot of it to buy such information, but it could be had. A new thought struck Merton and he stopped in his tracks. All that money! Grateful people, healed by Blake, had set up trusts, had made outright gifts, had donated money for his education. Untouched for more than ten years now it had grown, doubled, then doubled again…. A couple of million dollars? Billy knew. It must be a couple of million by now. Some of it could be collected any time by Blake, and the rest would be his at twenty-one.

He’d never see twenty-one, Merton promised himself. If he’d had a moustache he would have twirled it then, but he didn’t. He was smooth-faced, a hawk-faced man, with dark skin and straight black hair, probably Amerindian in his background. He couldn’t trace his lineage back beyond his mother. So he never knew his heritage.

He went to his office and made a list of those people he could contact, people he knew enough about to be able to rely on them for help. Suddenly he thought of the bastard’s mother. He couldn’t remember her name. He had found her once, and he would again. But then what? Was she a real threat? If the U.N. Science Advisory Board suddenly started to flash the kid’s picture around would she recognize him as Obie Cox’s son, and her own? He gnawed on his finger and pondered it. He added her name to the list of things he had to do.

He had to erase all evidence that could link Johnny to Obie Cox. He had to find Blake Daniels and erase him. Florence? That was her name, and she had married some jerk of a mechanic…. Peters? He didn’t know. But that was the simple part. He thought for another half hour then began calling people. He made many appointments for that night and the following day, so that by the time Obie returned from his conference with the Star Child, the wheels were in top speed, rolling soundlessly throughout the states, hopping oceans, covering other continents.

Obie returned with a distracted air. Expecting to find a devil he had found a boy filled with hatred, with dreams and fantasies, with insufferable egotism, the nimble fingers of a pickpocket, an avocation he practiced daily, with all the play skills known to man practically—swimming, skiing, skating, all forms of ball playing, chess, cards, skin diving, fishing…. He had been taught them all and liked none of them. Obie sat at table on the first night home and said almost unbelievingly, “I think he is converted! He couldn’t learn enough about the Church and my message.”

“What about him, the kid himself?” Wanda asked. “You like him?” She was unbelievably gross, and her fat was distributed equally on her frame so that she was no less fat through her shoulders than through her hips, so her stomach and her immense breasts were balanced, her arms and her legs were of a kind. She had to have all her clothes made for her, even her stockings and gloves, and that was the advantage of being rich and fat: she could have what she needed made to order. For all her fat there was no soft place on her, no sag, no loose muscles, her stride was brisk and purposeful, her hands quick. With her ropes of hair piled high on her head adding six inches to her height, she. appeared to be the queen of Amazons. She thought she was rather magnificent.

Obie was thinking about the question. Did he like the Star Child? Finally he shrugged. He really didn’t know how to express what he felt; what he could do was express what others felt. His emotions were mixed concerning the kid. He had liked him very much at first, then had wanted to shake him, or worse, thrash him, then had liked him better than in the beginning. And so on. It hadn’t stopped on like or dislike but had skittered from one to the other again and again.

Merton was going through Obie’s bags carefully and he grunted and began to work out a button that was wafer thin, stuck to the lining of the three-suiter. He got it loose and put it on the table before Obie, worked it open to show a tiny transmitter. Very carefully he detached wires, then cracked the “button” down the middle. No one in the room spoke. He flipped it a couple of times thoughtfully, then tossed it into the fireplace where logs were burning quietly. It got very cool in the mountains after dark. Presently there was a blue flame of copper; white smoke spiraled up, turned yellow-gray as a hissing sound of plastic boiling was heard, and finally the logs resumed burning quietly.

Dee Dee said, “Did you go through them all?”

“One more.”

She nodded and leaned back again, not willing to talk until Merton said it was clear. Wanda said, “Are you going back to see the Star Child again?”

“He wants me to. He has this number, and he is allowed to make approved calls. We’ll see.” Merton found another transmitter, this time an eraser had been replaced in a pencil, stuck in Obie’s shirt pocket along with two other pencils and pens. Merton fixed it also, then nodded. All clear.

“Obie,” Dee Dee said then, “I want to show you something.” She rose and crossed the room to a cabinet, opened it and removed a slender book. It opened to the middle and there were pictures of teenagers. She had covered one page so that nothing was visible except for the picture of one boy, very blond with light eyes. Obie looked at it without touching it, then reached for the book. Dee Dee backed up a step. “Familiar?”

“You know it. Me. School book: So?”

“Un-huh, Obie. Look again.” She handed him the book and crossed the room again, this time to mix a drink. She heard his strangled gasp and came back, holding out the glass to him. Obie took it and drank deeply.

“It’s that kid. Our class book,” he said. He turned accusingly to Merton. “Did you fix this?”

“Didn’t touch it,” Merton said.

Dee Dee took the glass and refilled it. Obie drank again. His hand was shaking. The scotch hit him hard. He hadn’t had a drink in ten years. “That lousy goddamn horse doctor! He switched them! Blake…” He drank again.

“Blake is the alien,” Dee Dee said complacently. “We have to find him and kill him, Obie.”

“My kid up there with all them atheists, with them U.N. monkeys, locked in day and night, year after year, hating them all, wanting out. And Blake… running around free, laughing, happy, getting rich…. Them trust? All that money in his name?” He turned furiously to Billy Warren Smith, who was drinking steadily. “He can’t have it!”

“I don’t know, Obie, It is in his name, you know. He never claimed to be your son. He denied it, as a matter, of fact. If it comes to a court case… I just don’t know.”

“Shut up,” Merton said then. “This isn’t going to come to a court case. Obie’s the boy’s legal guardian. If he dies, Obie inherits. I think he’s already dead, we can put in a claim. Seven years without a trace of him should be enough to satisfy a court….”

“We can’t do that,” Obie said. “I’ve hinted too often that he is studying and that we are in touch. I can’t come up now and say that he’s been dead all these years.”

“Use your head, Merton,” Dee Dee said smoothly. “What Obie really needs is a martyr. Blake’s young, beautiful, undefiled body to exhibit, to have come to life, ascend to heaven, issue proclamations to Obie, to the masses. You know the bit.”

Obie stared at her with narrowed eyes, nodding slightly. He smiled.

A new phase in the Voice of God Church was begun. Obie was relieved. He could drink again. He no longer feared his own kid, and he faced it now, he had been afraid of him. When Blake had looked directly at him, he had felt himself shrink, and had remembered how little he had read, and how little he knew about most things. He didn’t know where Auldand was, for example, once when Wanda had asked while doing a crossword puzzle. Blake had waited for him to supply the answer and when he couldn’t Obie had felt put down because the kid knew it. And him only six or seven then. A goddamn smart aleck. That’s what he’d been. Laughing at Obie for believing he was the father of the real alien, while his own boy, the boy of his flesh, with his hair and his eyes, was tortured daily by the atheists, Then when Blake had started to heal…. Obie shuddered. That had scared him. He had believed that he really was a God-child, and he, Obie, the father of God. That was a bad time. He thought of his mother, locked up in the sanatorium, calling herself the mother of God, screeching for him to come and make a miracle so the attendants would believe her, writing her weekly letters full of prayers, and wishes, and demands. The letters always started the same, addressed to him, headed, To My Son, God. Dee Dee laughed at them, but they made Obie very uneasy. What, he had wondered, if the old bat was right? Secretly at night, in his room with the door locked, he had tried to make a miracle sometimes. But he never had succeeded. The ashtray that he tried to float simply sat there. The window he tried to close or raise without touching it didn’t budge. When he tried to summon Dee Dee to him, she resisted. What was the good in being God if he couldn’t do simple things like that? So he had been forced to go along with the opinions of the doctors who said it was a psychotic delusion that his mother suffered. And when he had come to believe the same thing about his son that she had believed about him, he had worried. He had visions of being put in the same sanatorium along with her, and having her point him out to visitors: “See, my son God! Do a miracle, son God! Make a miracle! ”

All this and much more passed through Obie’s mind very quickly that night when he learned that his son was only human after all. A thin adolescent, slow to mature, not terribly bright, afraid and feared, but human. He got very drunk that night.

“Find me the kid,” he said to Merton, waving his glass, sloshing Scotch all over the thick Persian rug, and the antique couch. “Bring him up here to me and let’s see him heal himself. Physician heal thyself, that’s what we’ll say to the little bastard. And we’ll write our own passion play. Thats it, passion play. He has the passion and we have the play. ’’N we’ll spring my kid out of that fancy prison. My poor little boy in prison all his life.” He wept noisily, was sick noisily, drank some more and finally took Dee Dee to bed, where he did things with her that he hadn’t done for years. Not being God or the father of God any longer made a difference.

When Obie finally fell asleep Dee Dee crept from his bed, aching, bruised, and happy,. and made her way to her own room again. Merton was waiting for her. She said, “You’ve gotta be kidding!”

“Relax, honey. I want to know one thing only. Is the old Obie back with us for good?”

Dee Dee simply nodded. Merton grinned. “Okay, baby. See you in the morning. This changes everything, kid. But everything.” He opened the door and stopped to look back at her appraisingly. “Boy, that sure must have been a ball!”

Dee Dee looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was a mess. Her loins ached. Her back ached. Her breasts were sore, her jaws ached. There were red marks from pinches and bites, and a bruise on her thigh, and another on her shoulder. When her gaze reached her face she was startled; she never had looked prettier.

She soaked in a tub of sudsy water and gradually the aches faded. She started to think of Merton’s remark that everything was changed now. It was true. Obie had been his own convert, and now he was a backslider. She didn’t know how that would affect the movement. She found that she didn’t really care right then.

Actually the movement was not to be affected very much at all. During the time that it mattered, while it was being formed, the leader had been a believer, and that is necessary for a successful movement. He had been a high-powered salesman who believed in his product. After selling the customer it doesn’t matter if the seller loses faith. The payments are not his concern. The machinery was set up, operant, swelling day by day; this was the concern for the administration now; the buyers would bring in others without his help. If he stopped all public appearances immediately the movement would continue to grow through its great momentum, and through the machinations of the businessmen who were the actual organizers. A man of spiritual mien is the needed ingredient at the beginning of a spiritual movement, but after it is under way, his mysticism and fuzzy thinking are a hindrance. It’s fine to produce wine and bread for the masses in the beginning, but as a daily occurrence it is better to organize tithing and bank accounts and the purchase of tax free bonds and real estate, and rules governing the official hierarchy and its exercise of power.

It is wise to provide a martyr now and then. Let the people concentrate on him and they are less likely to try to see behind him to the organization of the business called religion.

The nearest to a martyr the Church had produced as yet was in the person of a young draft dodger back in the beginnings. He had been a drug user: LSD, pot, tobacco, bennies…. He had tried everything. He had given Everett Slocum the formula for RUT, the first psychedelic aphrodisiac that never failed to produce the desired effects, and shortly after this the FDA had closed in on him and he had leaped from his tenth-floor window, flying all the way down, to end in a landing that was less than perfect. His martyrdom was short-lived because it was found that the ingredient that made RUT different from other psychedelics was the bacteria that swarmed on the hands and under the black nails of the young alchemist. It wasn’t the staph so much as the antibodies he produced against staph, and this was such a personal, unique product that with his solo flight the secret was lost.

So the Church was ripe for a martyr. And that fall Merton put into operation the largest manhunt in the history of any group outside the federal government, the search for the candidate most likely to succeed in martyrdom: Blake Daniels.