The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [0]
The List of 7
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AVON BOOKS A division of The Hearst Corporation 1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1995 by Mark Frost Published by arrangement with the author Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-39216 ISBN: 0-380-72229-1
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First Avon Books Printing: September 1996 First Avon Books Special Printing: February 1996
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
RA 10 987654321
For my family
For Lynn
Many thanks to Ed Victor, Susie Putnam, Howard Kaminsky, Will Schwalbe, and Bob Mecoy
contents
Prologue
Book One The Elbe
Book Two New York
Book Three Chicago
Book Four The New City
prologue
EAST TEXAS, JULY 1889
The scorpion sat motionless on the back of the gambler's hand. A tremor racked its ribbed, leathery torso, but the insect's aggressive instincts were overruled by a superior force its simple nervous system had no capacity to question.
It only knew: Not yet.
The gambler felt the same power pin him to the ground like a mantle of flat rocks. Spread-eagled, muscles and bones fused. His eyes could still move, wild and wide, and he could see the scorpion but not the humpbacked Preacher Man, pacing behind him, boots crunching in the crusty dirt. Terror sang in the gambler, caterwauling loud as that Eye-talian opera he'd seen in St. Louis. His thoughts melted like spring snow before they could form, the mind he'd labored so hard to educate useless to him now as a dry well.
The Preacher Man came into view, stopped, spat a hot splash of tobacco juice across the gambler's rigid face, and smiled down at the hapless dandy in his vest and spats, pegged taut as a tent in the dust.
"Promise you this; a man cheats at poker with me, friend, and I will favor him with more than a bullet for his trouble," said the Preacher, in his honey-dipped Alabama drawl. "Pay attention now, son, and I will deliver unto you a reward more righteous than a blade through your belly."
The Preacher shook out his arms and felt the Holy Fire rumble up his spine: Oh yes, he thought, this is how the Good Lord rewards his Faithful Servant; my ceaseless pain, the lost years, that black stretch of empty road down the center of my mind all forgotten: I have been sown with the seed of the Prophet! I have been chosen! The Vision coming into my dreams these past months is a gift from God, my destiny set before me, clear as ice: I will lead the multitudes into the wasteland and build a New Jerusalem in the desert. We shall strike the hammer of Salvation down on a wicked world.
The Preacher sneered contemptuously at the gambler. And this tinhorn card sharp with the ace down his boot and the derringer in his belt buckle and the rest of these prairie shit-heel peckerheads are just a sea of empty vessels waiting for me to pour purpose into their puny souls. The Archangel lifts me on his wing and fills my soul with the Power!
As he had trained himself, the Preacher grabbed hold of the Power churning his insides and shot it out across the desert like the sweep of a lighthouse beacon. A dry rattle answered and the sand boiled with life in the red dying light. He peered out, shielding his eyes against the low-lying sun: pincers, scales, spiny claws, a living wave clattering, swarming