Chapter 19

The following Friday afternoon

I finished handing change to my last customer of the day at Molly’s Malts, my aunt’s diner/malt shop, when the last of the summer camp folks and vacationers rolled back into town. I had dealt with them all day, but now the trickle was a flood. Most of the townsfolk were back. At this point, I was in a literal sense, religiously pleased with myself for securing my new posts as head minister of the newly renamed church and administrator of the church school. They could try to retake control of it, but it would be very tough to pull off before the spirits recruited most of them for another cult.

I now ran the town, the church, and the school, but no one would know it from the way that I kept helping my sweet aunt with her shop for now. They saw a fresh-faced lad or kid or boy at a part-time, minimum wage job behind a register, not the de facto mayor of the town. They would soon find out, though. Hebron, West Virginia was mine now, and no one would take it away from me. I laughed when I pictured people finally seeing the severed heads on display with the inscription “praedo,” the Latin word for robber or plunderer, written in the blood of the condemned.

That was when Gordon Pratt and his wife Sheila chose to make their appearance in the shop, oblivious to the transformation that wasn’t flaunted everywhere. Thankfully, Leonard Powell and Mel Carson had kept quietly to themselves, just as the spirit predicted. They hadn’t even attended the church business meeting, which was likely a smart decision on their part. The other ten adults in town had also minded their own business, pretending that everything was normal. Well, it was normal, just the new kind, and they didn’t know any details of what happened, so they wisely chose to keep mum.

Gordon was the head of the inter-church summer youth camp ministry known as the Lord’s Retreat, a choice of words that always made me snicker. His wife, Sheila, of course, was his right hand and often a stricter disciplinarian than Gordon could be. I found that out after the time that she expelled me while my parents lived, two years back, for simply joking that Jesus was a zombie because he came back after the onset of rigor mortis. I never went back, of course, for a variety of reasons.

“Good afternoon, heathens,” Gordon announced himself in his true judgmental fashion, despite the fact that Aunt Molly never called him names even once.

“Good afternoon, Fat One with a ‘n’,” I responded with more sauce than usual.

“Excuse me?” Gordon looked down his nose at me with considerable umbrage, as if to swat me like a fly.

“In Spanish, ‘gordo’ means ‘fat one,’ and then you add an ‘n’ to that, so you’re the ‘fat one with an n.’ Don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the Spanish language. Blame your god, since he supposedly confounded languages at Babel,” I emphasized the “supposedly” part.

“My God? There’s only one God, and He’s God to us all. His name is Jesus Christ and He’s not a zombie, rigor mortis or no rigor mortis,” Gordon indicated that he recalled the incident that led to my expulsion by his wife.

“Okay, your soul, but I’d rather take my chances with Hell than go to Heaven only to get my brains eaten by zombies. What a nasty surprise you’re in for there. He even tells people to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Sounds pretty sick to me,” I carried on the blasphemy, making Aunt Molly and even the other patrons laugh at this point at my sharp wit.

“Why you... !” Gordon became very upset and everything, but just as he started to rant at me, the spirit cut him off.

“He’s not wrong, you know,” the spirit spoke up.

“Who, what the Hell?” Gordon slipped and cursed, covering his mouth as he realized what he did.

“Language, dear!” Sheila scolded him like a little boy or something.

“Yes, dear! Sorry!” Gordon obediently answered like the henpecked wimp that he was.

“Wow, she’s got your balls in a tiny glass jar, doesn’t she?” I needled both of them now, making them turn beet-red in the face.

“Who the Devil are you?” Sheila now asked the spirit.

“What happened to language?” Gordon dared to point out her hypocrisy.

“Shut up!” Sheila shouted him down.

“Yes, dear,” Gordon meekly replied now.

“Well, I’m not him, if that’s what you’re asking me. He doesn’t actually exist. I am a spirit, however. A spirit guide, if you will,” the spirit responded to her calmly, but firmly.

“So, Satan doesn’t exist ... what about God?” Sheila demanded to know now.

“Satan, God, all creations of man. At least the Christ, that is. And Jehovah. And Allah. Not your version of God. A big, old white man in the sky with a snow-white beard and hair. We, on the other hand, have always been here. Spirits, ascended masters, whatever you want to call us. I hate to break it to you, but the Nazarene is a false god, plain and simple.

“He wasn’t white, either. He had olive skin, not that far removed from the Arabs that you hate so much. Jews, Arabs, both swarthy peoples originally, the former simply affected by intermarriage with Scythians, Khazars, etc. over centuries of the Diaspora. In that century, though, Jews had very brown skin and curly hair,” the spirit observed.

“Oh, my God ... you ARE the Devil? Who else would lie to us about Jesus?” Gordon covered up his ears, but the spirit then made him bleed from them.

“What ... the ... actual... ?” Sheila screamed as Gordon simply keeled over with a stroke.

“Cerebral hemorrhage. Literally, a brain bleed. Your hubby’s dead as a doornail now. I did him a favor, actually. I don’t usually kill people that early into a discourse, but it was clear that he needed the sweet mercy of death. Life with you has to be a kind of living Hell, quite on top of the torment of living with such lies shoved down one’s throat. What a wretched drudgery of existence his marriage to you must be! When was the last time that you even gave up some ass?” the spirit taunted Mrs. Pratt now.

“Why, I never ... you foul-mouthed demon!” Sheila reacted very sharply.

“Oh, dear, you really are that dense! Yeah, I’m sure that you never ... that’s a large part of the problem, isn’t it? Off you go, into the sweet embrace of total oblivion,” the spirit answered as he dispatched her with simple cardiac arrest, making her fall dead, too.

“Let me guess, another mercy killing? Euthanasia? Good death, as the ancient Greeks called it,” I asked the spirit with a mix of amusement and shock.

“More or less. I can’t expect you to slay them all with your dagger and machete. Incidentally, I’ve given said machete magical properties, but only you and our other servants may safely touch it. A regular person who does so will burn alive from the inside out, the same with your daggers. A couple of incidents like that will teach people not to steal your weapons. The Pratts were trouble that needed nipped in the bud, and now they are. That summer camp won’t reopen next year, no doubt about that. At least not under that kind of management,” the spirit promised me, even as the patrons by now looked ghostly pale at his words.

“Alright, let’s cremate them now and attach their heads to some sort of rostra or pole or something. Let the word, ‘fanaticus’ then be inscribed under their heads. That’s simply Latin for ‘fanatic,’ you see. Ten down now. Ninety-nine to go, by my calculations. Let’s see what comes next for those outside of our tribe,” I directed Shawn and Uncle Curtis to join Erin and me as we left work and disposed of the dead.

“So, out of three hundred fifty-seven inhabitants of Hebron, one hundred seventy-eight were at least fourteen years of age at the dawn of our glorious new age, by my estimate. Ten were slain this week. Two have gone to Earth or underground or something like that. Leonard Powell and Mel Carson. A gay couple now out of the closet. They’re unlikely to join us, but also won’t cause us any trouble. Let’s call them the ‘hermits,’ for now.

“That leaves one hundred sixty-six people of age to reckon with, of which sixty-nine of us are in this group. This means that ninety-seven people of age remain to be recruited, either into a new cult of sixty-nine members ... or something else,” I noted as I nailed the inscription under Gordon Pratt’s head.

“It’s the ‘something else’ part that worries me, of course,” Uncle Curtis reminded me.