FAITH AND HENRY GUSTAFSON
Paul F. Olson
Published by Mark V. Ziesing, 1991.
The rain had stopped by the time they reached The Black Pike, a fact for which Henry Gustafson was very grateful. The Pike (known locally as “The Hellbender”) was tricky enough to negotiate when dry. When it was muddy, as it was now from a three-day downpour, the drive became an exercise in nail-biting adventure. Toss in the extra inconveniences of darkness and rain drumming on the windshield, and Henry supposed it would be easier to pull over to the side of the road, get out, and walk.
“Whaddya think, Artie?” he said to his partner. “Call came from the old Bible camp. That’s, what, maybe two-three miles more?”
Artie nodded silently and Henry turned his attention back to the twists and turns, rises and falls, of the road. The butterflies were still congregating in his belly. The first couple had arrived as soon as the call had come in. More were dropping by all the time. Right now they were having a nice little caucus. He figured that by the time he and Artie actually reached the old Singing Waters Bible Camp, his gut would be in the throes of a goddamned butterfly convention.
He wanted to talk over the situation, but knew it was useless. Artie would listen, but he wouldn’t have much in the way of input. When you got right down to it, Artie was an awful lot like an old B-movie character carried out to the extreme. The tough, rugged, silent type. That was Artie to a T.
The call had come into the Kelly’s Corners Police Station at 12:37 A.M. Henry had spent the next fifteen minutes trying to raise some assistance, all to no avail. The chief was vacationing downstate. Lizzy Halprin was still on maternity leave. Bill McInnis was out east somewhere, taking a two-week course in rural law enforcement. When Henry had tried calling across the lake to Patterson Falls, the phone had rung at least thirty times without an answer. He guessed old Harv Bennedict, who had been chief of police over there longer than God had been making planets, was home sleeping off some Old Grand Dad. Or perhaps still out somewhere drinking it. That left the volunteer ambulance, which was supposedly on the way, maybe ten minutes behind, and the county sheriff’s department, which was too far away to be much help but had told Henry to call again if he found he needed a back-up on the scene.
“Shitfire,” Henry muttered, because it seemed like a good, practical thing to mutter under the circumstances. He could see the entrance to the Bible camp up ahead, and what he thought was someone waving them down with a weak flashlight. He realized a moment later that it wasn’t a flash at all, just the bouncing reflection of the Blazer’s headlights glinting off the mailbox at the head of the driveway.
“Ready, pard?” he asked Artie as he swung into the drive. The trees were very close here, the darkness thick. “Somebody’s gotta be around,” he said, mostly to himself. “I mean someone placed the call, didn’t they? Sure they did. I heard ‘em. I talked to ‘em.”
He pulled up in front of the administration building, feeling the tires sink hopelessly in the mud as he came to a stop. In the old days, when Henry had been a kid and they had come out here three or four times a summer for Sunday School picnics, they had called this place the Lodge. He had a fairly clear memory of the inside — an enormous open room with picture windows looking out on Conley Lake, a rough stone floor, a timber beam ceiling, the biggest fireplace he’d ever seen, before or since. On the keystone of the fireplace had been engraved Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life 2 Timothy 6:12, and on the wall above had been a mounted moose head, an old, bedraggled, moth-eaten thing that the kids had predictably nicknamed Bullwinkle.
But that had been a long time ago. Henry wasn’t a kid anymore, he had forgotten many of his Bible verses, and the only place you saw Bullwinkle was in reruns. The syndicate of Upper Peninsula churches that had operated Singing Waters had gone bust in the early seventies, and through some sort of court fiasco the whole shebang had been taken over by a group of Chicago idiots who had wanted to run the place as a fishing resort. That had lasted approximately an hour and a half, and the camp had sat empty, decaying, for a long, long time. Until August, as a matter of fact, just a couple of months ago, when Henry had heard that some Detroit-area businessman’s association had purchased it for use as an executive’s weekend retreat. That was supposed to begin next summer.
He couldn’t imagine who would be there now. It was almost Halloween, for Chrissakes. But someone was there. Workmen, maybe, fixing the place up. Someone, somebody. Because one somebody had called the station to report that another somebody was dead.
Pulling together a dash or two of false bravado, Henry said, “Let’s get going, Artie m’man,” and climbed out of the Blazer. His boots immediately sank into four inches of mud, but he had larger concerns on his mind, including finding the phone caller, finding the body, and wondering how far behind the goddamned ambulance was.
There was nobody in the Lodge. That became obvious as he tried the door and found it locked, walked past the windows and shined his flashlight through the glass, picking out nothing but lots of cobwebs and ancient furniture slumbering beneath filthy dust covers. At one point, thinking he saw some stealthy movement, the butterflies flapped madly and his heart leapt almost completely out of his chest. He calmed himself, steadied his light, and chuckled weakly.
“Of course there’s mice,” he whispered, watching two of the little buggers scurry out of sight. “Place’s been empty for years. Shit, it’s prob’ly a regular Disneyland for rodents in there.”
Leaving the Lodge, they tramped through the mud, past two locked storage buildings and a shack with a sign identifying it as the PX, past the collapsed roof of what had once been a picnic shelter, past the huge open-air amphitheater where long-ago campers had burned bonfires and sung hymns, to the double ring of cabins on the shore of the lake.
It would have been a lie to say the butterflies were gone completely, but Henry was nevertheless beginning to feel some hope. The longer they stayed and the more they searched without finding anyone, the greater the likelihood that the whole damn thing was a prank. It surely wouldn’t be the first time. Even now he could imagine some kids, or maybe a couple of drunks using the pay phone at Worthy’s Rustic Tap or the Red Rooster, laughing their asses off at the thought of cops trekking miles and miles out into the woods to search for Prince Albert in a can.
The first cabin was a ruin. Like the picnic shelter, the roof here had given way under the weight of countless old snowfalls, leaving rubble surrounded by a shell of walls. The other cabins looked all right (at least at a quick glance and in near total darkness), though most had lost their doors and windows to time and storms and vandals. Inside each one stood the stark skeletons of bunk beds, six sets to a cabin, a table, four chairs, a row of rusty lockers, and a bulletin board on which had been painted two headlines: TODAY’S CHORES on the left, TODAY’S SCRIPTURE on the right.
They went west of the cabins to the large community bathhouse. A sign above the door read KYBO. Keep Your Bowels Open, Henry thought. Jesus, that’s a blast from the past if I ever heard one. He poked the beam of his light through the open doorway, studied the empty toilet stalls and the shower heads that now served as the anchoring points for great swoops of cobwebs, and shrugged.
His mood was improving rapidly, his step becoming lighter, his breath coming a little easier. Even Artie seemed happier. He didn’t say anything, of course, but some of that perpetual tension seemed to have gone out of his broad shoulders and strong back.
The only things left to check were the old baseball diamond (it was now just a big overgrown field, dotted with sapling trees), and the lakefront dead ahead of them. They were going to come out of this okay, Henry decided. He tried, but couldn’t even muster any resentment toward the kids or drunks who had done this to them. What the hell, a prank once in awhile was good for the soul, it kept you on your toes.
Five minutes later, when they found the body outside the boathouse, he wished he could have held onto a few of those happy thoughts just a little longer.
“Could’ve saved the ambulance boys some sleep,” he said when he found his voice. The last of the butterflies had been suddenly replaced by a cold leaden weight sitting three inches below the bottom of his rib cage. “This fella’s past hope. What we need here’s the medical examiner.”
He swallowed a trickle of bile that had climbed into his throat and turned around to see what Artie thought. His mouth was open to actually ask the question — Helluva mess, eh, pard? — but he shut it with a snap when he saw that Artie was gone.
He sighed. That had been the way of things more and more often lately. He would get a call for a domestic or a B&E or a disturbing the peace or even a grisly smash-up out at the intersection of 41 and Kelly Road … he would get one of those and the butterflies would start and he would try to ignore the whispering voice that told him he wasn’t cut out to be a cop, he had never been cut out for it, and that he didn’t have the nuts to handle whatever the trouble du jour might be … that would happen and then Artie would be there, Artie his partner, his pard, his good buddy, and everything would be okay for a while.
There had been a time when Artie had stayed with him all the way through the calls, right up through the boring paperwork at the end. But for the last year or so, Artie had gotten him going and then split when things got hairy. It was almost as though he was saying, I’ll help you get your wheels under you, boyo, but the rest is up to you. You gotta have faith in yourself, trust yourself to pull through. You gotta learn how to handle the bad shit on your own.
Bad shit, Henry thought. It seemed safe to say that was exactly what he had on his hands right now. He turned back to the corpse and tasted bile again. Where the hell is that ambulance? he wondered. He felt utterly, hopelessly alone and lonely. Goddammit, Artie, I hate it when you run out on me.
“The problem is,” he murmured, “there’s never an imaginary partner around when you need one.”
The victim was male, a young and healthy guy judging from the build, but it was hard to be sure because the face was missing. There was nothing there but a pulpy mass of flayed tissue clinging to the skull, and even if there had been some slight hope of pinning down an age or even identifying the man, Henry just couldn’t bring himself to examine things more closely.
It seemed his original guess had been right. The fella was some kind of workman or caretaker, probably hired by those Detroit bigwigs to start a few odds and ends repairs before the snow flew, setting the stage for the real work next spring, cleaning up, getting ready. Henry made this assessment by noting the man’s dirty Joe Journeyman coveralls and muddy work boots, the tool belt he wore around his waist, the big hands toughened by rings of callouses.
He wondered briefly if the guy was local, someone from either the Corners or the Falls. Probably. It would’ve made sense to hire someone from the area to keep an eye on things. There were plenty of men around who did work like that for the summer folks and seasonal resorts. Shutter windows, drain pipes, shovel snow off roofs, things like that. Henry knew most of them personally. Some of them were big gents, like old Joe Journeyman here, but like the ravaged face, that was something he didn’t want to dwell on very much.
He paced nervously away, down to the place where the weeds and grass of the camp property dropped off into a jumble of rocks along the shoreline. The large boathouse, whose roof had sagged dramatically in old age, was a black hulk to his left, Conley Lake an even darker patch spread out before him. It was like looking at … nothing … at nothingness. Only a faint, damp, fishy smell and the gentle lapping of water on stone confirmed that the lake was even there.
He knew there was a procedure to follow in situations like this. He racked his brain, but couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be. In his eight years on the Kelly’s Corners force he had seen a lot of fatalities — car, motorcycle, and snow machine wrecks mostly. Only three murders, all simple domestics that had crossed that invisible line and gotten irrevocably out of hand. In each of those three cases, George Remillet, the chief, had been there to handle things. Henry’s own role had been more that of chief cook and bottle washer. Or more to the point, chief dork and body bagger. Perhaps if he’d taken George’s advice and gone with Bill to that two-week course out east, he’d know what to do. Of course if he’d done that, he wouldn’t be here now and this whole mess would be somebody else’s problem.
He hesitated, shifting his thoughts into neutral and raising his head. From somewhere behind him, from the direction of the Lodge and the driveway and The Black Pike, he heard a noise. His initial response — Hot damn. Them ambulance boys were slow enough, weren’t they? — changed quickly into something else: Not the ambulance. That ain’t no body buggy. Footsteps. It’s the fella who called the station. And finally from that into a thought that nearly overwhelmed him with its dark simplicity and even darker implications.
There was a murder here, you ignorant jerk-off, a goddamned murder! Who do you think them footsteps belong to? The guy who called you? Maybe. But maybe it’s Joe Journeyman’s killer coming back to —
Henry swallowed and felt fear as sharp as glass sticking in his throat. There were procedures again, steps he should be taking. He groped through his mind, trying to latch onto things he had read, things George Remillet had lectured him on over the years, but all he could come up with was a simple phrase, one he’d used hundreds, maybe thousands of times, the one he used when he had a speeder pulled over out on Kelly Road or Conley Lake Drive: “Good afternoon, sir. May I see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please?”
He didn’t think a killer would be impressed with an opening line like that.
Improvising, he dropped to his knees and fumbled his service revolver from its holster. The gun had always seemed big, clunky, and inconvenient to lug around before. Now it seemed impossibly small, even dainty. I’m trapped down here, he thought, trapped with my back to the water like a bug on a wall. He tried to stay calm and trust in himself, but that was too big an order to follow, and he thought, God damn you to hell, Artie! Why can’t you be real?
The footsteps came steadily closer, moving between the cabins now, squishing through the mud, swishing through the weeds and witch grass. He heard another sound, too, a high, thin, eerie whistle, lonely-sounding notes of a familiar-sounding song. It took him a moment to pull the memory of that song out from among the yammering terror that had seized control of his brain. A hymn, an old hymn, he thought. We used to sing it a lot. Jesus … that was it … Jesus Something.
The answer came to him in a ghostly mental chorus of children’s voices
Jesus Savior, pilot meeeeeee over liiiiiiiiifffe’s tempestuous seeeeeeaaa
and he remembered, dammit, he really remembered it.
It wasn’t the camp theme song — that had been “Hail to Thee, O Singing Waters” or some hogwash like that — but every time they had come out here from town, scruffy local kids mingling with the more well-to-do (and infinitely snottier) campers who came from all over the midwest, the camp administrator, Reverend Somebody, Reverend Douglas, Reverend Davis, Reverend Dufus, had led them in a chorus of “Jesus Savior, Pilot Me” before the barbecue or the softball game or whatever it was they were there for.
Henry remembered that now as he listened to that slow, sad whistle. It was a pretty sound in a way, almost uncannily on key, but listening to it getting closer and closer sent a scurrying chill from the back of his neck all the way down to his tailbone.
Something clicked inside him, a sticky relay switch closing at last, and he lurched into action. The way he saw it, he had two options. He could follow Artie’s advice, trust in himself, and play the tough guy by turning on his flashlight, aiming it at the eyes of the approaching whistler, and barking, “Police! Hold on, or I’ll blow your jewels to China!” Never having been that kind of cop, however, and finding himself constitutionally incapable of becoming one now, Henry opted for his second choice.
As quickly as he could, staying low to the ground, he moved down the shoreline to the boathouse. The door on the high side of the building was padlocked, but that didn’t matter because the whole thing was off its rusted hinges, barely hanging from the hasp and lock. He slipped inside, hesitating a moment, wishing he could turn on his light and get the lay of things. Too risky, he decided. He was standing on a catwalk; he knew that much. In all likelihood it ran all the way around the building, a safe distance above the water. That was all he needed to know right now. He could hear the sound of the lake gently caressing the pilings below, and as long as he kept that sound in mind and didn’t venture too far in any direction, he would be okay.
Revolver still ready, he turned back to the door and peered out. The complete darkness inside the boathouse made it appear much brighter outside. He didn’t think he’d have any trouble seeing the whistler when he broke out of the cabins and came into view.
It occurred to him that he was being awfully cowardly (though as always he preferred to think of it as cautious) in the face of someone who might not even be Joe Journeyman’s murderer. What if it was the man who had called in the murder rather than the killer himself? Henry considered that. It was possible. But it was also possible that the person who had called was miles away by now. There certainly didn’t seem to be any working phones around here. And what if the murderer had also been the caller? Shit, things like that happened all the time on TV.
The bottom line was that he didn’t think an innocent man would be strolling around an abandoned camp at one-thirty in the morning, whistling hymns. Only a candidate for the giggle mill, a genuine wacko, would do that.
His heart, which had actually been slowing itself to something approaching normal speed, took another staggering jolt. The whistler, still whistling, had appeared from behind the last cabin, a shadow of a shadow, almost formless. “Jesus Savior, Pilot Me” finished on a drawn-out note, like a perfect sigh, and began again.
Henry felt sweat break out on his forehead. Dartmouth, he thought wildly. The old guy’s name was Reverend Dartmouth. He was from somewhere in the Eastern U.P. — Newberry, the Soo, St. Ignace — a real nut, crazy as a damned loon with some of that fundamentalist crap he spouted, strict as hell, mean to the kids, a tall guy, skinny and … Christ, was he really a hundred and ten years old, or did he only look that way to us kids?
The whistler’s shapeless silhouette came toward the boathouse. Henry grabbed again for that elusive inner strength, missed it, and sidestepped away from the door, moving a few feet down the catwalk. Not far, he thought ashamedly, I won’t go very far. I’ll just slip out of sight, that’s all. Maybe the guy can’t see me, but God only knows what his night vision’s like. He might spot me as quick as shit.
He backed into something that wasn’t the catwalk railing or the boathouse wall.
His breath snagged.
His heart stuttered.
His mind registered softness, dampness, a vague sensation of radiating warmth.
He pivoted slowly, moving away from that wet embrace but simultaneously turning to face it. He had to know. Hooding the lens of his flashlight with his hand, he turned it on and stared at what was in front of him.
Four of Joe Journeyman’s buddies (his mind randomly, crazily named them: Mike Mechanic, Pete Plumber, Kent Carpenter, Willie Workman) were hanging from the boathouse wall. Their shirts and jackets had been pegged over the nails upon which had once hung boater’s life jackets or canoe paddles. Their faces, like Joe Journeyman’s face, had been slashed and mangled beyond recognition by some object that Henry now realized must have been both heavy and wickedly sharp. Blood had flowed freely down the front of their necks to their shirts and coveralls, still wet, still warm. Henry almost choked when he understood that it was Mike Mechanic’s blood he felt soaking slowly through the back of his shirt.
He was ready to turn the light off again when he noticed the legend scrawled on the wall above the victim’s heads:
TODAY’S SCRIPTURE
IF THERE IS FOUND AMONG YOU A MAN WHO DOES WHAT IS EVIL IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD AND HAS GONE AND SERVED OTHER gods
YES EVIL BUSINESS YES EVIL $$
THEN YOU SHALL BRING FORTH TO YOUR GATES THAT MAN WHO HAS DONE THIS EVIL THING AND PUT HIM TO DEATH
DEUT 17
Deuteronomy, Henry thought wearily, finding another memory. Deuteronomy was Dartmouth’s favorite book of the Bible, the book of Hebrew Laws as set forth by God and His main man, Moses. He remembered the old preacher saying once that he wished he had a book of Deuteronomy to run Singing Waters. Do this, dear little campers, do this but don’t do that. You’ll be blessed for one and cursed for the other.
Henry felt a wave of anger surge through him, and he thought that perhaps his years of cowardly cophood were going to boil and explode, pushing him forward, forcing him at last to find all his hidden strength and do what was right. People didn’t do things like this. You didn’t kill innocent people in the name of some old collection of laws that said eating pigs was a sin but it was fine to rape a captured woman if you shaved her head and waited thirty days.
He felt some mystical connection moving toward completion deep inside his body and brain, a connection almost being made, a connection that would finally banish his fear and give him the faith he needed to charge forward without worrying about what might happen to him.
But the whistling stopped suddenly and Henry felt the two ends of that connection shrivel away in the silence. It seemed that perhaps his brain had stopped functioning and that his blood had frozen in his veins. He began to tremble, and his eyes were drawn helplessly back to that writing on the wall, the last line of which was less than an inch above the heads of the slain construction workers: Then you shall bring forth to your gates that man who has done this evil thing and put him to death.
“And the people shall say Amen,” said a thick, slow voice behind him.
Henry screamed. The flashlight fell from his hands. He caught a quick glimpse of its beam going over the railing and cartwheeling down to the water below. Then a splash and darkness. He had a moment where his mind raced free, during which he wished for many things — that everything could have turned out differently; that the chief or Lizzy Halprin or Bill McInnis or even that old drunk Bennedict from the Falls had been available; that the ambulance had showed up when it was supposed to; that Artie was real; that he himself was more than just a no-brained, no-balled cop who needed an imaginary partner just to get him up out of his chair at the station. Any one of those things, and he might have had a chance.
His thoughts were chopped off by the sound of the boathouse door being pulled off the hasp. He saw a dark shape rising to fill the opening. Dartmouth? Oh God, oh no, he didn’t think so. The old man couldn’t be alive, he’d be a thousand years old by now, and he had always been so frail and skinny, while this thing was huge, towering, bulky and misshapen. It held something above its lumpy head, something he could not identify in such an instant of extreme terror but that might have been a large steel cross.
Yes, he thought, a cross … and it was lit … lit by faint light, although the boathouse and the waterfront outside were utterly dark … lit … its edges glinting like sharpened blades.
His finger twitched on the trigger of his revolver, but he didn’t know what would happen if he shot, if the bullet would hit its mark, if one would be enough to kill that gargantuan thing, if he would have the time or guts to shoot again. Still he hesitated, but finally broke and turned and stumbled away along the catwalk, left hand groping for the old, wobbly railing, right shoulder bumping past the dripping corpses of Mike Mechanic, Willie Workman, and the others. He heard boards creaking beneath his weight, the pattering of rotted wood falling into the water below. He heard the sound of the railing itself, as though it were crying, weakening, about to give out.
“And the people shall say Amen,” the voice said again, and then came the worst sounds of all — the dragging, thudding noise of the killer coming after him, the scythe-like whisper of that weapon slicing through the air.
Henry ran faster, tripping, barely maintaining his balance. When he reached the place where the catwalk ended at the boathouse’s front wall, he stumbled in surprise on the stairway that was there. He flailed his arms, felt empty space in front and below, and almost pitched over the steps before he caught himself.
His fear was replaced by a burst of understanding — perhaps Reverend Dartmouth would have called it an epiphany. He was being pursued by someone (something) that was left from the days of the old Bible camp. Someone (something) that had been here all these long years — here or quite nearby. Someone (something) that didn’t cotton to the idea of a greedy businessman’s association taking over. The same someone (something) that had stopped the Chicago idiots’ fishing resort before it ever got off the ground. Was that it? Oh Jesus, could that be it? Henry didn’t know, but he thought it very well might be.
As he descended one rickety step after another, listening to the ragged rasp of his own breath, the wild thunder in his chest, and the heavy sound of pursuit less than ten feet behind, he thought he might be facing something as large and fathomless as the spirit of the camp itself, the spirit of the place as established and embodied by a skinny old Bible beater who had loved to sing “Jesus Savior, Pilot Me” and preach from a ridiculous old legal code.
Madness. Lunacy.
Yes, it was that. But he had seen that inhuman shape. Accepting such madness and lunacy in the name of understanding, in the name of finding the strength to keep running … that had to be better than giving in to blind fear, didn’t it? If he did that, if he surrendered so easily simply because he didn’t know what he was facing, he might as well crumple into a ball right now and wait for that cross to part the top of his skull.
He reached the last step and the wooden pier at the bottom. It had been raining so much that fall that the water level had risen by inches, covering the boards. Cold water seeped into his boots as he went to the open barn-style doorway that communicated with Conley Lake. He grasped the edge of the door and swung himself around it. It was a good idea and a good try, but he missed dry ground by several feet, landed in water up to his knees, and had to scramble desperately up to the rocky shore.
The heavy thing was almost at the bottom of the stairs. The urge to stand and fight was growing strong within him, the urge to rest even stronger that that. But the thing was closer, was almost upon him, and that was enough to murder all those urges and set him in flight.
***
It was damned funny, Henry kept thinking, the way noises carried so well in the still night air.He had heard the thing chasing him quite clearly, and he had not allowed himself to stop running until he had heard it stop first. That had been — what? An hour ago? Two hours? Three?
There had been nothing but silence after that, silence for a very long time, silence while he hunkered along the shore a quarter-mile from camp, silence while he collected his strength and what was left of his wits, wondering if he could sneak back into the camp and get the Blazer, if he’d be able to free it from the mud and escape. Silence. While he wept. While he pondered. While he tried again to make that difficult connection he had almost made several times that night already.
Eventually, as clearly as if he were standing right there, he had heard a vehicle rumbling up the camp driveway, the sound of doors slamming and the voices of Beverly Yates and Linc Wellington, the volunteer EMTs from the ambulance, calling his name.Henry? Hey, Henry Gustafson, where the hell are you?
Other words: We got lost, buddy and This place is as empty as shit, ain’t it? and Where’s this body s’posed to be? and again, Jesus Jumpin’ Christ, Henry, where are you?
Then more silence, not very long, followed by something short and high and horribly clipped that might have been a scream. Then a long, slow, perfectly clear whistle: Jesus Savior, Pilot Me.
Yes, it was funny how those sounds carried so well, and how that thing that might have been and probably was a scream had gone straight to his heart like a big hand, grasping two loose ends and pulling them together.
He knew what he had to do. Artie had heard that scream, that sound of another human being suffering, and had come back to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and looked him straight in the eyes. Artie had told him.
“You can’t hide anymore, boyo. This ain’t playing at cops and robbers anymore, nabbing kids out breaking curfew. This is the real thing. You ran from the scene when you shouldn’t have, you hid like a coward, you stayed here crying while them medics got taken out. Now you gotta get in there. Win or lose, you gotta try to clean this mess up. It don’t matter that you’re scared. It don’t matter that you don’t know how it’s all gonna end. You just gotta do it. You’re a cop, boyo, like it or not. That’s what cops do.”
Henry’s mouth had dropped open in amazement. “Artie … I don’t believe it. Artie, Jesus Christ, you’re talking!”
But Artie had shaken his head solemnly, and after a moment Henry had understood. It ain’t Artie talking, he thought, it’s me. Good Sweet Lord, it’s actually me. It’s me who felt that person’s pain, me who’s going to react to it. It’s me who knows what’s going on. It’s me who knows what needs to be done.
He thought about what he had seen back in camp and wondered how much of it had been real. Some of it? All of it? A huge creature that killed in the name of God? Was that possible? And if it was, then how could he ever hope to stop it?
He shook his head and sighed, knowing that didn’t matter anymore. What waited in that camp was a mystery light years beyond him, but the connection, so long in the making, had been completed. The wires were hot and tingling. He had what he’d always been missing before. The ability to trust in himself and not worry about the outcome. The ability to do what was right.
He smiled. He couldn’t exactly say that he’d be going into battle with God on his side. Images of scrawled scripture, misshapen beasts, and sharpened steel crosses made it impossible to think that. But something, something from within, would be there next to him, something good, something right, or at least something very simple and pure. He couldn’t quite touch it, but he didn’t doubt it either. When your back was to the wall and the screws were to your balls and you finally found what you’d been lacking … well, the power that came from that had to mean something, and you couldn’t just turn away from it.
He stood up from his hiding place in the weeds and rocks, slapped his service revolver briskly from hand to hand, and drew his shoulders back. Artie was standing in front of him, tall and strong, but Henry shook his head firmly.
“Not anymore, pard. Get out of here. This is my job. I’m a cop. It’s what cops do.”
He thought a smile crossed Artie’s rugged features in the moment before he disappeared for good.
Henry sighed. The sound of that ageless hymn reached him across the gulf of darkness, the notes perfect and clear. Tempestuous seas all right, Henry thought. Second Timothy, chapter six, verse twelve.
His lips parted and he found the notes of his own whistling song. He took one step, and then another, and a third, his shadow huge and strong as he advanced through the black of night into the even darker heart of the eternal mystery.