Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [137]
There were probably countless habitable planets for a God to keep track of, and here he was letting little old me have this fender bender, giving me a good job, giving me a wonderful pair of daughters, letting my wife leave me, turning me into a veggie—all because it was part of some grand scheme that would make sense somewhere down the line.
What if God had put a single germ on the planet Earth a billion years ago and was coming back in another billion years to see what had come of it? What if that was all there was to his plan?
It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to believe.
More than anything I wanted to believe in a Lord who would rescue me. Yet, no matter how hard I wanted it, I couldn’t convince myself there was a God or that God provided an afterlife.
I opened six or eight Bibles from the open box, then ripped the shipping tape on the second box, which, according to the label, had been freighted in from Tennessee.
Fancy that.
More leather-bound Bibles. I took one out and turned it upside down, flapping the pages as if to dislodge a bookmark. Something broke on the floor at my feet and I heard the hollow, tinkly sound a shattered Christmas tree decoration might make.
The floor around my feet glinted with tiny jewel-like shards of glass. I’d dropped a small glass ampoule. Pieces of broken glass were everywhere, on my shoe, in my pant cuff, on my sock. Alert not to cut my hand through the latex glove, I brushed them away.
When I inspected the inside of the Bible, I found a section of the Old Testament cut out with a razor knife, just enough to accommodate the vial. I opened four more Bibles before I found a second ampoule. When I had six of them, I lined them up on a nearby chair.
Each was stoppered with a tiny synthetic cork and half filled with a greenish-gray powder that looked like ground pencil lead. None of the ampoules were labeled.
Canyon View appeared to have more use for religion than I had.
There were another thirty or so Bibles in the boxes, no telling how many more ampoules. When you thought about it, a book made a relatively secure container. After all, it had taken a whole lot of mishandling to burst the boxes in Holly’s truck.
Moving to the desk across the room, I sank into Marge DiMaggio’s plush leather swivel chair and pulled the telephone across until I could read the dial pad from the light of the street lamp outside. Stephanie answered her cell phone on the first ring.
“You all right, Jim?”
“I think I found the mother lode.”
“What is it?”
“You have to see it.”
“Be there in a minute.”
She was breathing heavily when she burst through the door, her hair tossed back with the speed of her movement. “Don’t move from the doorway,” I said as she started into the room.
“Why not?”
“I spilled something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“At least let me switch on a—”
Before I could stop her she’d turned on the lamp near the door. The black light. She turned it off as soon as she realized her mistake. I suppose, as had I, she’d forgotten the lamp was ultraviolet.
“Turn it back on.”
A moment later we were looking at a green phosphorescent glow coming from the floor in front of the vault and from my feet. It was stronger in certain spots, weaker in others, as if the black light were tracking footprints. My footprints. And my left foot, the one I’d dumped the ampoule on. Now we knew what the black light was for. Whatever was in the ampoules had been laced with phosphorescent matter to make it show up under ultraviolet. I’d noticed ultraviolet lamps in the offices downstairs, too.
“Jim. Look at yourself.” For the first time I looked down at my lap and the desk in front of me. A greenish glow came off the telephone I’d used to call her, smatterings of green on the desktop, a stronger glow from my right hand and shirt. “It’s on your face, too. What is it?”
“Holly had Bibles in her