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  Stating it quietly, as a fact, Preacher said, ‘One second, my dear, can be a very long time. Longer than a human lifetime – but it all depends on the particular second.’ His eyes narrowed upon her. ‘Do you believe this is the only life you have?’

  ‘You mean another life, in the hereafter?’ May-Beth wasn’t sure she did believe that. She wanted to and, brought up as a Baptist, that’s what they’d preached at her since she was old enough to comprehend. Trouble was, she couldn’t remotely imagine what such a place would be like. Certainly not angels with harps and God with a long white beard reclining on a fluffy pink cloud. She rejected that childish vision, of course, but could find nothing to put in its place. Common sense battled with blind faith and defeated it every time. No contest.

  Preacher inclined his lean body towards her, and again she felt those soft fingers worming into her mind. ‘I speak not of the hereafter, but of the herenow. I mean another life lived in the here and now. You have yearned for such a thing, May-Beth, desired it in your innermost secret dreams.’

  Well, yes, she couldn’t deny it. Wasn’t everybody the same? Everybody daydreamed of living a life that was more exciting, more glamorous, more intensely felt. It was the human condition to imagine a fantasy world in which mundane reality was pushed aside and secret desires fulfilled. The fact that she’d been born, grown up and lived her entire short life in the small town of Dubach, forty miles away, was an even more compelling reason. Most of the folk from around here never left the state. Employment locally was with the cattle ranches, or they could head further south to the bayou and find work on the shrimpers or the alligator farms. As for girls her age, May-Beth thought bitterly, ambition wasn’t encouraged. Find a fella, marry and settle down, raise a family. The stuff she saw on TV, in the magazines she read, about a legion of strong liberated women forging ahead in a man’s world might have been happening on another planet. Sure, she dreamt of what it would be like, wished she could be one of them, but what use was dreaming and wishing when all the chips were stacked against her? Backwoods-educated, no college degree, no special skills or hidden talents, plain of face and round of form; the only thing she possessed was the honesty to admit that such an uninspiring package would take her exactly nowhere – except into a dead-end marriage with a houseful of kids, a thirty-year mortgage and varicose veins.

  The unconscious recognition of this grim fate – and an obscure need to rebel against it – had perhaps led May-Beth to feel drawn to the Messengers when they showed up in Dubach the previous summer. They had arrived from somewhere up north in the ancient silver trailer and taken over a derelict chapel with a rusting corrugated-iron roof on Frog Wash Road, about two miles out of town. A closed, secretive sect, they didn’t actively seek converts, and it was only by word of mouth that their presence became known. Rumours started to circulate that the Messengers had charismatic healing powers. They didn’t hold services nor even have regular meetings. Neither did they solicit donations, and were rarely seen in town except once or twice a month laying in provisions. Along with the rumours, it was this air of mystery surrounding them that had first sparked May-Beth’s curiosity. Not that she needed physical healing, but she did feel an emptiness in her life, a kind of aimless despair at having nothing on the horizon to look forward to, and worse still – that this was the best it was ever going to get.

  The Messengers hadn’t transformed her life (nothing so dramatic) but they had given her the precious possibility of hope. Ever since the evening in late summer last year when she persuaded her old schoolfriend Cheramie to take a ride with her out to Frog Wash Road, May-Beth had felt the – for her – unusual tingle of optimism. A few local people attended gatherings at the chapel, and pretty soon she started turning up on a regular basis, though without Cheramie, who soon lost interest when she met a boy from Farmerville with sideburns and a Mustang GT convertible.

  It was Preacher himself, the leader of the sect, who asked if she was willing to visit the state prison. In agreeing, May-Beth had assumed the purpose to be a mixture of providing social comforts and spiritual solace to the inmate population. She assumed wrong. Preacher had in mind only one inmate, whose time on death row was ticking away rapidly towards zero. And why Frank Kersh in particular? To May-Beth he seemed not much different from the other convicted killers she had seen during her visits. Just as puzzling to her was Preacher’s insistent, indeed obsessive, demand that Kersh understood that ‘in the final second lay his salvation’, as Preacher phrased it. She had obeyed, done as he asked, but that didn’t make her any the wiser or convert her scepticism into belief.

  In the same way, she found herself struggling to understand what he meant by the ‘herenow’. Maybe Preacher was right after all. Maybe she was just too plain dumb to grasp his meaning.

  ‘I can promise you another life, May-Beth, the one you secretly desire, if you will come with us on the journey. What is it you yearn for? Beauty? Fame? Power? Sexual conquest? All these can be yours if you believe in the power of our message. Come with us and you will reap your reward, I promise you.’

  ‘Come with you – where?’ May-Beth blinked at him in the torpid gloom of the trailer, feeling stupid again.

  ‘Into the mind of Frank Kersh.’

  ‘Nobody can do that, enter another person’s mind,’ May-Beth said, and then recalled with a shiver the creeping sensation she had of fingers inside her own mind whenever Preacher laid his flat, cold gaze upon her. But that was simply her imagination acting up, wasn’t it? Huh?

  ‘The power of belief is everything,’ he told her. ‘Without it, nothing is possible. Are you really so content with your life, May-Beth? No desire to change it for another? When there are so many futures to choose from, an infinite number of possibilities. A great shame that your future is already decided and mapped out because belief lies stillborn inside you.’

  May-Beth felt the urge to cry out that he was wrong – she did want to change her life. She didn’t want to settle for a drab future already laid out before her in all its dreary, small-town detail. Preacher held out the tantalising promise of a wonderful world in which all her dreams would come true, but the worm of doubt, of unbelief, prevented her from grasping it.

  Almost whispering it, she said, ‘Make me believe, Preacher. I do so want to.’

  The straight-brimmed hat tilted forward, masking his eyes, as he looked down. May-Beth looked down too. On the floor between them lay a canvas sack she hadn’t noticed till now, tied at the neck with a drawstring. Preacher reached down, jerked loose the tie, and the mouth of the sack gaped wide. There was blackness inside and, though May-Beth couldn’t be sure, she thought she saw the sack move, as if something heavy was slowly stirring within, uncoiling itself.

  She sat perfectly still, her mouth dry as sandpaper.

  ‘If you truly want to believe –’ Preacher’s voice floated towards her as from a great distance prove it by putting your hand inside.’

  May-Beth stared into the black mouth of the sack. Fear like an icy claw clutched at her heart, squeezing it dry. Was her fear stronger than her desire to believe? It was a test of her faith and willpower, she knew that; of whether she was prepared to accept with her whole heart the creed of the Messengers as the one and only truth.

  A simple enough act, really, May-Beth told herself, to put her hand into an empty sack. No harm would befall her – no possible harm, because the Messengers would never gain a single convert to the faith if the act of conversion was of itself fatal.

  She put her hand inside.

  And something did move. This time May-Beth was certain. The information flashed to her brain. Her brain flashed a message to her hand. But, before her hand could react, it seemed to May-Beth that an aeon elapsed, as if time had frozen in a single instant.

  She saw everything with stark clarity.

  The passing swampland, gloomy and ghostly through the tinted glass.

  The darkened interior with the erect, motionless figure sitting opposite, silent a
nd watchful.

  Her own bare arm inside the gaping mouth of the sack.

  Biting back a scream, she yanked her arm out. But not quick enough. Two pearls of blood seeped from the puncture marks on the back of her hand. May-Beth stared at them, her throat closing tight with panic. Her body started to twitch and jerk in spasm. Then she was shaking uncontrollably from head to foot. She tried to say something, but her mouth was filled with foam. She went stiff and felt a creeping numbness in her limbs.

  The sack had ceased to move, lay blackly gaping on the floor of the trailer. Preacher reached inside and brought out a heavy coil of thick rope. He held it up for her to see. May-Beth fell back limply on the bench seat. She looked at her hand, which was smooth and unmarked, without a drop of blood. Then she glanced quickly at the man facing her, the dark flat eyes set in bony sockets beneath the straight brim of his hat.

  His lips moved.

  ‘Do you now believe, my child?’ she heard him say, his voice a million miles away.

  May-Beth nodded.

  The silver trailer moved on along the concrete strip of road that went straight as an arrow into the distance, the scummy green pools on either side belching softly in the heat of the afternoon.

  4

  Jeff Cawdor took a gulp of sparkling white wine and lay back, eyes closed, against the cushions. Curled up in an armchair, where she was reading a tourist guide to Tuscany, Sarah looked at him over her glasses.

  ‘The Uffizi Gallery. Remember, Jeff?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Florence was wonderful,’ Sarah mused with a faraway smile. ‘I hope Daniella will like it.’

  ‘She’ll love the food. Those pizzas in the Via Porta Rossa that melted in the mouth. We ate them in that little courtyard with the roses climbing the trellis, shading off the sun…’

  ‘I knew it all along. You’re a romantic at heart.’ He could hear the smile in her voice. ‘You bought a print from a street-seller, remember? The ugly-looking old guy in a red robe, a pope or something, with a huge bent nose done in profile.’

  ‘Was that the print or the street-seller?’

  Sarah giggled. ‘We had it pinned up in the upstairs hallway for a while. A Michelangelo, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Piero della Francesca. It wasn’t a pope, it was the Duke of Urbino. You threw it out? I liked that old guy.’

  ‘I took it down years ago, along with your Elvis posters. They’re probably all rolled up in the basement somewhere.’

  ‘So that’s what happened to them.’

  ‘You can’t remain a teenager the rest of your life, Jeff,’ Sarah admonished him, peering over her glasses. ‘Not when you have a daughter coming on seventeen.’

  Eyes closed, Cawdor said wistfully, ‘Reminds me of something John Lennon once said: “Elvis died when he went into the army.”’

  ‘Smartest career move Elvis ever made.’

  ‘Going in the army?’

  ‘No, dying.’

  ‘That’s cruel,’ Cawdor said.

  ‘Sure it is. But true.’

  Sarah was teasing him, he knew that, but both of them enjoyed it. Stretched out on the couch, he rested the hand clasping the wine glass on his stomach. It sank in an inch or so. He was reminded of what he’d said to Phyllis at the office, one day last week, about needing to lose a few pounds. Damn right he did. He used to jog every morning before leaving for work until he started getting a numbed feeling in his right thigh – trapped nerve or something – and gave it up. These days he did a few laps of the pool in the basement gym of the Chrysler Building, but not enough to constitute a proper exercise regime. Get a grip, he told himself Thirty-eight is just the right age to start turning into a slob. What really piqued him, however, was that Sarah, without jogging, swimming or any other form of regular workout, never seemed to have a problem with her weight or shape. She wasn’t as skinny as those catwalk models, thank goodness, with their needle-sharp shoulders and flat chests and thin legs, but somehow or other she still managed to stay slender and firm in all the right places.

  He sipped his wine. The dryness on his tongue reminded him of when he’d been daydreaming about Italy a week or so ago – the day of the storm, standing at his office window. He knew what his mind was hinting at, in which direction it was slyly nudging him. That’s how minds worked – ambushing you when you least expected it.

  It was the appearance of Doctor Khuman. Of course.

  Not that Cawdor had consciously resisted thinking about that strange meeting, but he hadn’t positively opened himself to any speculation about it either. And he hadn’t mentioned it to Sarah. That was a little odd in itself, because usually they shared their daily round of events, trivial or otherwise. So what the hell, Cawdor pondered, was it all about? Just a crank, then, this Doctor Khuman, a religious nut who happened to wander in off the street? Funnily enough, no; Cawdor found he couldn’t dismiss the Indian so easily. The thing that stuck with him, that he couldn’t shake, was that Doctor Khuman seemed to want answers from him – as if he expected Cawdor to know what he was talking about. What was it he’d said? Something about him possessing insight into a disruptive influence and having the power to change it…

  And he recalled what his reply had been. Change what?

  Jeff Cawdor thought of himself as a fairly intelligent, rational guy. He didn’t have any strong religious convictions, and his views on premonitions, psychic phenomena, and the whole ragbag of what could loosely be described as ‘the occult’ were, to say the least, sceptical. The mystery was why Doctor Khuman had touched a raw nerve somewhere. And he had. The fact that Cawdor had been skirting around the subject, never confronting it directly, proved it. Was he scared to? No, he decided, it wasn’t fear outright, not of the wet-palms, stomach-churning variety anyway; yet he had to confess to a vague apprehensiveness. A general feeling of unease … as if something was wrong, something he ought to know about, and didn’t. But what was it, for heaven’s sake?

  The sound of the TV made him open his eyes. Sarah had switched on the late newscast. It was a regional cable station that covered both national and local news.

  ‘… and, with no last-minute pleas for clemency having been received, the sentence is due to be carried out at midnight,’ the florid-faced, bow-tied newscaster was saying. ‘The execution of Frank Kersh, convicted six years ago of the murder of an emotionally challenged fifteen-year-old boy, will be the fourth this year at the Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana, bringing the total nationwide to forty-three. And now some local stories. Students at a school in Somerville, New Jersey, were alarmed to discover a six-foot boa constrictor hiding in …’

  Cawdor swung his feet down and finished off the wine. ‘That’s it, honey, I’m turning in. Do you have a broadcast tomorrow?’

  Sarah raised one eyebrow at him over her glasses. ‘Since tomorrow happens to be Wednesday, what’s your guess?’

  ‘My guess would be yes.’

  Sarah worked from home, writing feature articles for magazines and national press syndication. Three evenings a week she hosted a phone-in radio programme for WCTC New Brunswick, dealing with all manner of emotional crises and rocky relationships. Cawdor liked to kid her that she was becoming something of a media celebrity, which happened to be not so much kidding as actually true.

  In passing, he touched her hair and she reached up and squeezed his hand. ‘Won’t be long,’ Sarah said. ‘I won’t disturb you.’

  ‘Feel free.’

  Upstairs, he changed into pyjama bottoms and went into the bathroom. He preferred taking a shower at night rather than in the morning – it helped relax him for sleep – but tonight he was too tired to bother, and also a little woozy from the bottle of Frizzante at dinner, most of which he’d drunk. He brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth. The loose filling had been replaced: it felt smooth and solid. He picked up his shaving mirror in its swivel stand, intending to use the magnifying face to inspect the tooth in question, but as he spun the mirror over, his hands still wet, it slip
ped out of his grasp. The mirror hit the tiled floor, breaking free of the silvered metal rim and shattering in a burst of glittering fragments.

  Earlier that evening, a few minutes after ten o’clock, the barber had shaved his temples and a three-inch strip round his lower calves. Kersh drank two cups of black coffee and smoked a cigarette. The execution was set for two minutes past midnight. At eleven-thirty the warden appeared, escorted by Senior Guard Meacham and three guards with restraint harness, should it be needed.

  The Block was silent as Kersh was led away. Twenty-six pairs of eyes watched him go. He didn’t mind them seeing his shaven temples, but he felt ashamed, whether they knew it or not, at having to wear diapers. The worst indignity was having the guards examine the sticky-tape tabs to check they were secure before he was allowed to pull up his blue work pants.

  Coming into the main corridor of F Cellhouse, the warden turned to the left. The chamber was one floor down, at ground level. Kersh tried to feel some emotion, but nothing came. He wondered if they’d drugged his coffee. Guys were supposed to scream, go berserk, so he had heard. But this was a quiet, dead-of-night walk. He looked straight ahead, noting the shiny patch of scalp through the warden’s thinning hair. Meacham and the other guards herded him in close.

  In single file the party went down the stairwell. On the steel rail the paint had been worn down to the bare metal by years of sliding hands. They passed through a cinderblock passage into a small windowless room with a buzzing fluorescent light. An electric fan on the wall wafted the sluggish air. Two men rose as they came in. One was short and plump, neatly dressed in a dark suit, with horn-rimmed spectacles and a professionally composed face. He was holding a black bag. The other man, tall and lean in a faded black suit, looked to Kersh like a priest. Though Kersh hadn’t asked for one, he assumed it was standard procedure. They had a doctor, so why not a priest?