Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [76]
I could hear the river a hundred yards in front of me as well as the breeze in the trees.
After some minutes, I heard footsteps in the tall grass behind me. I’d been out long enough to be thoroughly chilled in my T-shirt and sleeping shorts, long enough to start feeling sorry for myself.
“We slept in,” Stephanie said, coming alongside me and staring up at the mountain. “You have a good night?”
“Slept like the dead.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use expressions like that.” She touched my hand.
“Realistically, what do you think the odds are of stopping this before I end up like your sister?”
“Realistically?”
“You’re stalling.”
“I don’t know. I don’t—”
“You don’t think it’s going to happen, do you?”
“I do and I don’t. We basically know what’s going on, which is an advantage Holly and the others didn’t have. Except for your friend Stan, none of them suspected what this was. I’m speaking to consultants and specialists all over the country. You’ve got those people from California coming up. They might know what this is. And since Canyon View was helpful in the investigation in Tennessee, my aunt or someone working for her might know something.”
“In other words, the odds of stopping this before I end up like your sister are slim to none.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know. I said it for you.”
33. THE HEATHEN UNDER GOD’S BED
“Damn it, Stephanie. You didn’t pull any punches that first day I met you. I didn’t like it, but I admired you for it. Tell me what you really think.”
“I’m not God. I can’t see the future.”
“I can.”
She sighed and wrapped both arms around my waist. I dropped my arm over her shoulders. The sky was pale blue except for a wispy pink-tinged cloud crowning the foothills to the south. The sun still hadn’t come over Mount Si. “What an extraordinarily beautiful place,” she said.
“I don’t know if I ever truly appreciated it until now.”
“You religious, Jim?”
“I used to be. These days I’m what you might call a heathen and proud of it.”
“It seems to me religion has a place in life, especially a place for people who are in the situation you’re in. Do you think it might help if you had some counseling—I don’t know, a pastor or a priest to talk to?”
“ ‘And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’? That sort of mumbo jumbo? Or how about: ‘Let the God of my salvation be exalted’—Psalms Eighteen, verse forty-six? Or: ‘Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou are the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day’—Psalms Twenty-five, verse five. Or: ‘Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.’ Let’s try Hebrews: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ ”
“So you know the Bible?”
“I still remember about half of it.”
“So you must have prayed in the past. Your prayers were never answered?”
“I figure if there’s a God, he keeps pretty busy arranging natural disasters and destroying nations, maybe figuring out how to manipulate one population into cutting off the hands of another. What he does is a lot more fun than answering prayers from a nitwit like me. I spent sixteen years of my life hiding under God’s bed. My parents thought they had the revelation of the absolute truth of the universe through the prophet William P. Markham; he was the con artist who founded the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ. We kids got Bible assignments each morning. I think I had most of the New Testament memorized before I could read, before I could think, really, because when you’re living in a cult, thinking is pretty much discouraged. We bragged about