The Beasts Of Valhalla

19

"Can you see yet?" "A little."

"Just don't get caught peering over the top of your glasses." "I won't."

The last rays of the setting sun were glancing off the surface of Lake Superior, the relative darkness triggering the infrared receptors in my altered retinas, bathing everything in a shimmering glow that ranged from pale violet to crimson. It was like watching life through a tinted X-ray negative; although I'd been seeing like this for months, I still wasn't used to it. It was positively otherworldly.

But then, I was becoming positively otherworldly.

The site of the commune, which we now approached as we trudged down a long slope, was in a large, grass-covered clearing flanked by orchards and forest on three sides, and Lake Superior to the west. To the north was another large clearing which could have been a cow pasture, but was now empty. In the main clearing were a myriad of garden plots set out in a checkerboard pattern. There were perhaps a dozen buildings constructed of wood and sheets of corrugated steel.

At the end of the road and mouth of the clearing was a large wooden shack, and waiting outside the shack was a reception committee of one. I'd been expecting something a bit more festive, assuming Garth's story had stuck-or disastrous, if it hadn't. I found it a rather murky omen, and it seemed to mean that the others had either not been told about us, or had been instructed to stay away.

The man waiting for us was older than Leviticus, and had thick, dark hair that seemed to explode out of his head in unruly ringlets. His face was gaunt, his eyes haunted, his manner dark and brooding. He wore overalls like the three young people out at the stand, but in addition he wore a gold cross around his neck that looked big enough to ward off a tribe of vampires-which, judging by the uncertain expression on his face as we approached, he may have been expecting.

It had to be Reverend Ezra.

"Father love you, Reverend," Garth boomed cheerfully as he pulled me to a stop in front of the man. "I'm Billy Jamison, and this is my brother, Boris."

The Reverend nervously cleared his throat, tentatively extended a thin, bony hand to Garth; in the light cast by two spotlights over the entrance to the shack, viewed through my smoked glasses, the hand looked skeletal. "Father love you, Brother Billy and Brother Boris. I'm Reverend Ezra. Uh.. welcome."

"You can't imagine how happy we are to be here," Garth said as he pumped the other man's hand. "Boris and I have been on a very long spiritual journey, and this is the end of the trail."

"So I've heard," the Reverend said, obviously uncomfortable. He retrieved his hand from Garth's grasp, glanced at his watch. "Would you come with me, please? I'd like to see that you're comfortable, and we don't have time to talk now. I'm expecting an important phone call."

Oh-oh. Suddenly I didn't much care for Garth's description of the commune as the end of the trail.

"Of course," Garth said easily.

We followed the Reverend along a path to a building that resembled a large quonset hut. Two burly men wearing overalls and uncertain expressions on their faces flanked the entrance. "Father love you," Garth said to the two men as we passed between them.

It was a spacious, neatly appointed office with a long, heavy oak desk as the centerpiece. The only items on the desk were a telephone and a large, well-worn Bible. There was a sofa and three straight-backed chairs in addition to the swivel chair behind the desk, two more doors-both closed. Above each door hung a framed painting, one of Jesus, the other of Siegmund Loge. Father.

"I think you'll be warmer here," the Reverend mumbled, not looking at us. He gestured toward the sofa. "Please sit down. This shouldn't take long."

Garth led me over to the sofa, and we both sat down. The Reverend eased himself down into the swivel chair behind the desk, then stared off into space and absently drummed his fingers on the oak. Obviously, we were to wait with him until he got his phone call. I sorely missed the Colt; punching out Reverend Ezra wasn't going to get us past the two men at the door, and it wasn't going to help us find Siegmund Loge.

It was Garth who finally broke the silence. "Reverend? Is something wrong?"

For a time I wasn't sure he was going to answer. He cast a longing look at the telephone, stared up at the ceiling for almost a minute, then finally looked at us. "Frankly, I'm not sure what to do," he said at last.

"Billy?" I said, tugging anxiously at Garth's sleeve. "Is something the matter? Father said everything would be all right."

"We did have a vision, Reverend," Garth intoned ominously. "Was Father wrong in telling us to come here?"

"Mike told me about your vision and your afflictions," the Reverend answered in a distinctly nervous tone of voice. "Would you describe them to me, please?"

He was stalling for time, I thought, waiting for the phone to ring.

Garth launched into his vision patter, embellishing it with a few rhetorical flourishes that included descriptions of flashes of lightning and claps of thunder when Father spoke. Reverend Ezra seemed quite impressed with it all.

He was even more impressed when Garth capped off his performance by opening his robe to the waist.

"The mark of the beast!" the man cried, leaping up out of his chair and making the sign of the cross.

"The mark of Father," Garth replied evenly as he closed his robe.

"How can I be sure?"

"Who else could wield such power?"

" 'And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth and their armies, gathered together to make war against Him that sat on the Throne, and against His army.'" The Reverend swallowed hard, sank back down into the chair. The blood had drained from his face. "The two of you have received the mark of the beast," he added in a barely audible whisper.

His words had triggered long-buried memories; I was a child again, smaller than other children, more frightened than other children. As she did every night, my mother was reading to me from the Bible. I'd always liked Revelations; the apocalyptic visions that spilled forth from the pages had jibed with my childhood anger and sense of injustice, had given me hope that, maybe, one day things would be all right, that one morning I might wake up and find I was no longer a dwarf.

Suddenly I knew who the hundred and forty-four thousand were. "Wrong beast, Reverend," I said. "We are two of the four."

Garth glanced at me quickly, a confused expression on his face. I continued, "'And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the Mount Sion, and with Him a hundred and forty-four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads.' Billy and I don't have the mark on our foreheads, Reverend, because we are the forehead-Father's forehead."

"Mike said you didn't know about the hundred and forty-four thousand!"

"Obviously, we do."

"'And I heard a voice from heaven,'" Garth intoned as his own memories were stirred, " 'as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder.'"

"Why were you sent here?"

"That was not revealed to us, Reverend," I said, then quoted some more Scripture. "'And they sung a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts and the elders, and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty-four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth.' We're two of the four beasts, Reverend; we represent Father's truth. You have been chosen to receive us. Will you hear our lesson, or is Father to send us somewhere else?"

"What is your lesson?"

"We must wait until it is revealed to us; or Father may wish us to discover it for ourselves. I think we should reason together. Don't you agree, Billy?"

"I certainly do, Boris," Garth said, giving me a pat of encouragement on the leg. "Reverend, you'd do well to listen to my brother. I think you should take that phone off the hook so there'll be no interruptions, and then we should try to work this out."

Reverend Ezra slumped forward in his chair, rested his head in his hands, and kneaded his temples with the ends of his long, bony fingers. He didn't take the phone off the hook. "It doesn't make sense," he said at last.

"What doesn't make sense?" Garth asked.

The Reverend slowly put his hands down on the desk, fixed his gaze on me. "That Father should mark two men to send us a lesson, and that one of those men would be a dwarf."

"What the he-uh, what do you have against dwarfs?"

"The choice of a dwarf would seem to mock everything Father has promised and taught us. The Great Time is very near at hand. Satan knows this, and it is to be expected that his armies are on the march. How can I be certain that the two of you weren't sent here by Satan?"

"Father would prevent it," Garth said with a broad gesture of dismissal. "If we were servants of Satan, Father would strike us dead."

Reverend Ezra thought about it, shook his head. "Father may have marked your bodies to show that you serve Satan, then sent you to us as a challenge to see if we are worthy of His trust and teachings. If that's true, and we accept you into our family, none of us will live to see the Great Time. I need guidance."

"Who gives you guidance?" I asked. "Father?"

"Of course," the Reverend answered in a somewhat distant tone. "But Father is not always of this world. Now I must rely on the son… and the son is not Father."

Beside me, I felt Garth tense with excitement. I sat up straighter, concentrated on keeping my face impassive and my voice even. The Reverend's words seemed to suggest that it would be Siegfried Loge, not Siegmund, who would be on the other end of the line if the phone rang. If so, it would confirm a link between Project Valhalla and the communes of Siegmund Loge-a link that, up to now, only Lippitt had been absolutely convinced of.

"Where is the son?" I ventured.

The question seemed to echo in the prolonged silence that followed. One question. If the Reverend answered it, he could stop worrying about his phone call; he'd be taking a nap while Garth and I were taking our leave.

"Don't you know?" Reverend Ezra was no longer making much of an effort to hide his suspicion.

"It was Father who appeared to us," I replied, "not the son."

Suddenly the telephone rang, startling all three of us. The Reverend snatched up the receiver.

"Yes?" Reverend Ezra said, his voice nervous and high-pitched.

Garth, with disarming casualness, inched forward to the edge of the sofa and planted both feet firmly on the floor; at the first sign of distress on the part of the Reverend, the man would be even more distressed to find Garth's hands wrapped around his throat. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the front door, which had been left partially ajar. Given the element of surprise, I was confident that I could take out one of the big guards quickly and silently; taking out both of them, without raising a ruckus that could summon Mike Leviticus and his gun, was a problem of considerably greater magnitude.

Fortunately, the problem appeared to become academic when the Reverend hung up the phone and did nothing more than absently stare at the receiver. His expression displayed no signs of fear or alarm-only disappointment.

"So, what does Siegfried Loge have to say?" Garth asked in a flat tone as he leaned back in the sofa and crossed his legs.

"He's unavailable," the Reverend mumbled with obvious distaste.

"For how long?"

"They won't say."

"Why is he unavailable?"

"I don't like to even imagine. There are rumors about that place- " Suddenly the Reverend's head came up, and he looked startled. "How do you know of Dr. Loge, Brother Billy?"

"The vision," Brother Boris answered. Garth had always been the more patient of the two of us, and Brother Boris was starting to get pissed. Somewhere under Reverend Ezra's frizzy curls was an address or a telephone number that could save Garth's and my life, and I had a growing urge to start banging the man's head on the desk top, or against a wall behind one of the two closed doors, to see what answers might drop out. "Father told us who the son is, but not where he is. That's what you're supposed to tell us."

"If Father didn't tell you, I don't think I should."

"Father forgot. He's got a lot of things on his mind these days, and everybody knows how distracting appearing to people in visions can be."

"Father never forgets anything," Garth interrupted quickly. "It's Brother Boris whose mind occasionally gets muddled these days; it's the remembered ecstasy of the vision. However, Father did say that you would tell us anything we wanted to know, Reverend."

Again, there was a prolonged silence while the Reverend pondered whatever it was he was pondering. Now fear moved across his face-but I somehow sensed that it was not fear of us. "I don't understand why you want to know about Dr. Loge," he said at last. "He's not a member of our family. He is of… them."

"Who?" Garth asked carefully.

"Warriors of Father. Dr. Loge leads them."

"Men like Mike Leviticus?"

Reverend Ezra nodded. "Mike is a Warrior, but he is also a member of our family. That's why he was assigned to guard us."

"If Siegfried Loge doesn't have anything to do with your-our-family, why do you have to check with him?"

"Dr. Loge is our… supervisor. Father has told us that we must follow His son's instructions."

"Father marked us, Reverend," I said softly. "We are Father's emissaries, so you have nothing to hide from us. Where did that telephone call come from?"

"I… I just can't tell you, Brother Boris. Not without permission."

"Really? In that case, maybe it's time for Brother Billy and myself to do some marking of our- "

Instantly, Garth was on his feet and pulling me to mine by the collar of my robe. "Don't pay any attention to Brother Boris, Reverend; he hasn't had his supper, and he gets cranky. Uh, would it be possible for us to meet some of the others while you wait for your phone call? We're anxious to meet the people who will be our companions in the Great Time."

The Reverend thought about it as he fiddled with the telephone receiver, then finally nodded his head. "There's a Halloween party in the commons building, and I guess there's no harm in your waiting there. Brother Amos and Brother Joshua will show you the way."

"Maybe we should have jumped him, Mongo," Garth said in a low, uncertain voice as we followed the two hulking Children of Father along a narrow path on the edge of a cliff overlooking Lake Superior. "I'm starting to have second thoughts."

"Don't. You were right. With these two waiting outside, it would have been too risky. I wonder why he's letting us mingle with the others?"

"You call this mingling? Observe that these guys' instructions don't include being too chummy with us. We make the good Reverend decidedly uncomfortable, so he figured he'd let the others keep an eye on us for a while."

"Well, we'll hang out at the party until one of us gets a chance to slip away and go back for a serious discussion with the Reverend."

Garth nodded. His mouth was set in a grim line. "We'd best be quick about it-and careful."

"What did you smell on the Reverend?"

"Doubt."