Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [136]
Sixteen years of memorizing Scripture finally paid off in something more meaningful than being able to take down women’s phone numbers without a pen and pad.
18-24-18-63-08-46.
I worked the dial carefully and at the end of my troubles heard nothing. If I’d dialed the correct combination, there had been no confirming click to acknowledge it.
However, when I pulled on it, the heavy vault door swung wide.
58. HEY, LADY-KILLER: GET RELIGION;
SAY YOUR PRAYERS; DON’T SPILL
The vault interior was eight feet tall, five feet across, and maybe three and a half feet deep. There were five shelves, a gray cash box the sole squatter of the upper shelf, notebooks and manuals stacked on the two shelves closest to eye level, vials in racks on the shelf at belt level, a collection of dust balls on the first shelf above the floor. On the floor were two large corrugated cartons, one taped shut, one open.
I examined the notebooks and a manual, but the jargon contained so many formulas, they might as well have been authored by aliens.
The first three vials were labeled hydrochloric acid, sodium azide, and sodium cyanide—not the ingredients you wanted to drop in Aunt Maud’s tea. I was no chemist, but I’d had my share of hazardous materials classes for the fire department and knew hydrochloric acid and sodium cyanide shouldn’t be mixed. Sodium azide was a poison if taken orally and lethal enough that even contact with your skin was to be avoided. Two years ago it had been the centerpiece of a shocking story about a pair of teenagers who’d broken into a factory in Massachusetts and gotten it on themselves while looking for cash and drugs. Both died. God only knew why Marge was keeping it in this vault or what they used it for here.
Dangerous as they were, these weren’t chemicals that would send your brain back through twelve million years of evolution. No. We were looking for something else.
I knelt and peered into the open cardboard box on the vault floor. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t a carton of Bibles. I pulled the first three or four out and examined the black leather bindings in the dim light.
Last February Holly’s truck had been carrying Bibles.
I picked out a book and leafed to a random passage, something William P. Markham had taught us to do. My index finger fell on Ecclesiastes 2:20–21: Therefore I turned my heart and despaired of all the labor in which I had toiled under the sun. Yeah, me, too. According to Markham, a random opening of the Bible would be directed by God; thus, whatever passage you turned to was given to you by God, meant for you specifically, a message from above, the word of God out of his mouth. Before his stroke my father often let his Bible fall open at random. If he happened on a passage he didn’t like, he continued the process until he found something more to his taste.
I recited the next verse in Ecclesiastes from memory. “ ‘For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge, and skill; yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.’ ”
The passage was about two emotions I had come to know well: despair and vanity. I was in despair because of my situation yet had enough vanity left to think I counted for something in the grand scheme of things, that I was more than a molecule on the ass of a flea crawling across a map of the universe. There was only one problem.
I wasn’t.
I was the same as every other human on the planet, and when the final random asteroid came hurtling through space to take us all out in one big flash, to pitch us into the inferno, our destruction would no more be directed by William P. Markham’s God than by a finger randomly placed in the Bible.
How I wanted to believe in a God. I envied believers, no matter what their persuasion. Maybe that was the despair the