Revival

XI

And so, little more than six months after the brief reincarnation of Chrome Roses, I once more touched down at the Portland Jetport and once more journeyed north to Castle County. Not to Harlow this time, though. Still five miles from the home place, I turned off Route 9 and onto Goat Mountain Road. It was a warm day, but Maine had gotten belted with its own spring blizzard a few days before, and the musical sounds of melting and runoff were everywhere. Pines and spruces still crowded close to the road, their branches sagging under the weight of snow, but the road itself had been plowed and shone wetly in the afternoon sun.

I paused for a couple of minutes at Longmeadow, site of all those childhood MYF picnics, and longer at the spur leading to Skytop. I had no time to revisit the crumbling cabin where Astrid and I had lost our virginity, and couldn’t have even if there had been. The gravel was now paved, and this road had also been plowed, but the way was barred by a stout wooden gate with a padlock the size of an orc’s fist threaded through the latch. If that didn’t make the point, there was a large sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING and VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW.

A mile further up, I came to the Goat Mountain gatehouse. The way wasn’t barred, but there was a security guard wearing a light jacket over his brown uniform. The jacket was unbuttoned, maybe because the day was warm, maybe to give anyone stopping by a good view of the holstered gun on his hip. It looked like a big one.

I powered down my window, but before the guard could ask for my name, the gatehouse door opened and Charlie Jacobs came out. The bulky parka he wore couldn’t disguise how little was left of him. The last time we’d met, he had been thin. Now he was gaunt. My old fifth business was limping more severely than ever, and although he might have thought his smile of greeting warm and welcoming, it barely lifted the left side of his face, resulting in something closer to a sneer. The stroke, I thought.

“Jamie, good to see you!” He held out his hand and I shook it… although not without reservations. “I didn’t really expect you until tomorrow.”

“In Colorado they get the airports open fast after storms.”

“I’m sure, I’m sure. May I ride back up with you?” He nodded in the direction of the security guard. “Sam brought me down in a golf cart, and there’s a space heater in the guardhouse, but I chill very easily now, even on a day as springlike as this one. Do you remember what we used to call spring snow, Jamie?”

“Poor man’s fertilizer,” I said. “Come on, get in.”

He limped around the front of the car, and when Sam tried to take his arm, Jacobs shook him off briskly. His face didn’t work right, and the limp was actually closer to a lurch, but he was pretty spry, just the same. A man on a mission, I thought.

He got in with a grunt of relief, turned up the heater, and rubbed his gnarled hands in front of the passenger-side vent like a man warming himself over an open fire. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Does this remind you of the approach to The Latches?” he asked, still rubbing his hands. They made an unpleasant papery sound. “It does me.”

“Well… except for that.” I pointed to the left, where there had once been an intermediate-level ski run called Smoky Trail. Or maybe it had been Smoky Twist. Now one of the lift cables had come down, and a couple of the chairs lay half-buried in a drift that would probably be there for another five weeks, unless the weather stayed warm.

“Messy,” he agreed, “but there’s no point fixing it. I’m going to have all the lifts taken out once the snow’s gone. I’d say my skiing days are over, wouldn’t you? Were you ever here when you were a child, Jamie?”

I had been, on half a dozen occasions, tagging along with Con and Terry and their flatlander friends, but I had no more stomach for small talk. “Is she here?”

“Yes, arrived around noon. Her friend Jenny Knowlton brought her. They had hoped to get here yesterday, but the storm was much worse Downeast. And before you ask your follow-up question, no, I haven’t treated her. The poor woman is exhausted. Tomorrow will be time enough for that, and time enough for her to see you. Although you may see her today, if you like, when she eats what little dinner she can manage. The restaurant is equipped with closed-circuit television cameras.”

I started to tell him what I thought of that, but he held up a hand.

“Peace, my friend. I didn’t put them in; they were here when I bought the place. I believe the management must have used them to make sure the service staff was performing up to expectations.” His one-sided smile looked sneerier than ever. Maybe that was just me, but I didn’t think so.

“Are you gloating?” I asked. “Is that what you’re doing, now that you’ve got me here?”

“Of course not.” He half turned to regard the melting snowbanks rolling past us on either side. Then he turned back to me. “Well. Perhaps. Just a little. You were so high and mighty the last time we met. So haughty.”

I didn’t feel high and mighty now, and I certainly didn’t feel haughty. I felt caught in a trap. I was here, after all, because of a girl I hadn’t seen in over forty years. One who had bought her own doom, pack by pack, at the nearest convenience store. Or at the pharmacy in Castle Rock, where you could buy cigarettes at the counter right up front. If you needed actual medicine, you had to walk all the way to the back. One of life’s ironies. I imagined dropping Jacobs off at the lodge and just driving away. The idea had a nasty attraction.

“Would you really let her die?”

“Yes.” He was still warming his hands in front of the vent. Now what I imagined was grabbing one of them and snapping those gnarled fingers like breadsticks.

“Why? Why am I so goddamned important to you?”

“Because you’re my destiny. I think I knew it the first time I saw you, down on your knees in your dooryard and grubbing in the dirt.” He spoke with the patience of a true believer. Or a lunatic. Maybe there’s really no difference. “I knew for sure when you showed up in Tulsa.”

“What are you doing, Charlie? What is it you want me for this summer?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, but there were other questions I didn’t dare ask. How dangerous is it? Do you know? Do you care?

He seemed to be thinking about whether or not to tell me… but I never knew what he was thinking, not really. Then Goat Mountain Resort hove into view—even bigger than The Latches, but ugly and full of modern angles; Frank Lloyd Wright gone bad. Probably it had looked modern, even futuristic, to the wealthy people who had come here to play in the sixties. Now it looked like a cubist dinosaur with glass eyes.

“Ah!” he said. “Here we are. You’ll want to freshen up and rest a bit. I know I want to rest a bit. It’s very exciting having you here, Jamie, but also tiring. I’ve put you in the Snowe Suite on the third floor. Rudy will show you the way.”

Rudy Kelly was a mountain of a man in faded jeans, a loose gray smock top, and white crepe-soled nurse’s shoes. He was a nurse, he said, as well as Mr. Jacobs’s personal assistant. Judging by his size, I thought he might also be Jacobs’s bodyguard. His handshake was certainly no limp-fish musician’s howdy.

I had been in the resort’s lobby as a kid, had once even eaten lunch here with Con and the family of one of Con’s friends (terrified the whole time of using the wrong fork or dribbling down my shirt), but I had never been on any of the upper floors. The elevator was a clanky bucket, the kind of antique conveyance that in scary novels always stalls between floors, and I resolved to take the stairs for however long I had to be here.

The place was well heated (by virtue of Charlie Jacobs’s secret electricity, I had no doubt), and I could see some repairs had been made, but they felt haphazard. All the lights worked and the floorboards didn’t creak, but the air of desertion was hard to miss. The Snowe Suite was at the end of the corridor, and the view from the spacious living room was almost as good as that from Skytop, but the wallpaper was waterstained in places, and in here a vague aroma of mold had replaced the lobby’s smell of floor wax and fresh paint.

“Mr. Jacobs would like you to join him for dinner in his apartment at six,” Rudy said. His voice was soft and deferential, but he looked like an inmate in a prison flick—not the guy who plans the breakout, but the death-row enforcer who kills any guards who try to stop the escapees. “Will that work for you?”

“It’s fine,” I said, and when he left, I locked the door.

I took a shower—the hot water was abundant, and came at once—then laid out fresh clothes. With that done and time to kill, I lay down on the coverlet of the queen-size bed. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and I can never sleep on planes, so a nap would have been good, but I couldn’t drift off. I kept thinking about Astrid—both as she’d been then, and as she must be now. Astrid, who was in this same building with me, three floors down.

When Rudy knocked softly on the door at two minutes to six, I was up and dressed. At my suggestion that we take the stairs, he flashed a smile that said he knew a wimp when he saw one. “The elevator is totally safe, sir. Mr. Jacobs oversaw certain repairs himself, and that old slidebox was high on the list.”

I didn’t protest. I was thinking about how my old fifth business was no longer a reverend, no longer a rev, no longer a pastor. At this end of his life, he was back to plain old mister, and getting his blood pressure taken by a guy who looked like Vin Diesel after a face-lift gone bad.

Jacobs’s apartment was on the first floor in the west wing. He had changed into a dark suit and white shirt open at the collar. He rose to greet me, smiling that one-sided smile. “Thank you, Rudy. Will you tell Norma that we’ll be ready to eat in fifteen minutes?”

Rudy nodded and left. Jacobs turned to me, still smiling and once more producing that unpleasant papery sound as he rubbed his hands together. Outside the window, a ski slope with no lights to illuminate it and no skiers to groove the spring snow descended into darkness, a highway to nowhere. “It will only be soup and salad, I’m afraid. I gave up meat two years ago. It creates fatty deposits in the brain.”

“Soup and salad is fine.”

“There’s also bread, Norma’s sourdough. It’s excellent.”

“Sounds delicious. I’d like to see Astrid, Charlie.”

“Norma will serve her and her friend Jenny Knowlton around seven. Once they’ve eaten, Miss Knowlton will give Astrid her pain medication, and help her make her evening toilet. I told Miss Knowlton that Rudy could assist with these tasks, but she won’t hear of it. Alas, Jenny Knowlton no longer seems to trust me.”

I thought back to Astrid’s letter. “Even though you cured her of her arthritis?”

“Ah, but then I was Pastor Danny. Now that I’ve eschewed all those religious trappings—I told them so, felt I had to—Miss Knowlton is suspicious. That’s what the truth does, Jamie. It makes people suspicious.”

“Is Jenny Knowlton suffering aftereffects?”

“Not at all. She’s just uncomfortable without all her miracle mumbo-jumbo to fall back on. But since you brought up the subject of aftereffects, step into my study. I want to show you something, and there’s just time before our evening repast appears.”

The study was an alcove off the suite’s parlor. His computer was on, the extra-large screen showing those endlessly galloping horses. He sat down, grimacing with discomfort, and tapped a key. The horses gave way to a plain blue desktop with only two folders on it. They were labeled A and B.

He clicked A, revealing a list of names and addresses in alphabetical order. He pressed a button, and the list began to scroll at medium speed. “Do you know what these are?”

“Cures, I’d assume.”

“Verified cures, all affected by administration of electrical current to the brain—although not the sort of current any electrician would recognize. Over thirty-one hundred in all. Take my word for it?”

“Yes.”

He turned to look at me, although the movement clearly pained him. “You mean it?”

“Yes.”

Looking gratified, he closed file A and opened B. More names and addresses, also in alphabetical order, and this time the scroll was slow enough to pick out several names I recognized. Stefan Drew, the compulsive walker; Emil Klein, the dirt eater; Patricia Farmingdale, who had poured salt in her eyes. This list was much shorter than the first one. Before it ended, I saw Robert Rivard go sliding by.

“These are the ones who have suffered significant post-cure aftereffects. Eighty-seven in all. As I believe I told you the last time we met, it amounts to less than three percent of the total. Once there were over a hundred and seventy names in File B, but many have stopped having problems—in medical parlance, they have resolved. As you have. I stopped following my cures eight months ago, but if I’d kept on, I’m sure this list would be even shorter. The ability of the human body to recover from trauma is extraordinary. With the proper application of this new electricity to the cortex and the nerve tree, that ability is effectively unlimited.”

“Who are you trying to convince? Me or you?”

He blew his breath out in a disgusted pah sound. “What I’m trying to do is set your mind at rest. I’d rather have a willing assistant than a reluctant one.”

“I’m here. I’ll do what I promised… if you can cure Astrid. Let that be enough.”

There was a soft knock at the door.

“Come,” Jacobs said.

The woman who entered had the plump, matronly figure of the Good Gramma in a children’s story and the beady eyes of a dick in a department store. She set a tray down on the table in the parlor, then stood with her hands clasped primly in front of her plain black dress. Jacobs rose with another grimace, then tottered. In my first act as his assistant—in this new stage of our lives, at least—I caught his elbow and steadied him. He thanked me and led me out of the study.

“Norma, I’d like you to meet Jamie Morton. He’ll be with us at least through breakfast tomorrow, and back for a longer stay this summer.”

“Pleased,” she said, and held out her hand. I shook it.

“You don’t know what a victory that handshake represents for Norma,” Jacobs said. “Since childhood, she’s had a deep aversion to touching people. Haven’t you, dear? Not a physical problem, you’ll notice, but a psychological one. Nevertheless, she’s been cured. I think that’s interesting, don’t you?”

I told Norma it was nice to meet her, holding her hand a moment longer than necessary. I saw her mounting unease, and let loose. Cured, but perhaps not completely cured. That was interesting, too.

“Miss Knowlton says she’ll bring your patient to dinner a bit early tonight, Mr. Jacobs.”

“All right, Norma. Thank you.”

She left. We ate. It was light fare, but sat heavily in my stomach, just the same. My nerves felt all on the outside, sizzling my skin. Jacobs ate slowly—as if to taunt me—but at last he set aside his empty soup bowl. He seemed about to reach for another slice of bread, then looked at his watch and pushed back from the table instead.

“Come with me,” he said. “I think it’s time you saw your old friend.”

The door across the hall was marked RESORT PERSONNEL ONLY. Jacobs led me through a large outer office furnished with bare desks and empty shelves. The door to the inner office was locked.

He said, “Other than the security company that supplies twenty-four-seven gate guards, my staff consists of just Rudy and Norma. And while I trust them both, I see no need to put temptation in their way. And the temptation to peek at the unsuspecting is a strong one, wouldn’t you say?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I could have. My mouth was as dry as old carpet. There were a dozen monitors in all, stacked in three rows of four. Jacobs pushed the power button on RESTAURANT CAMERA 3. “I believe this is the one we want.” Cheerful. Like a cross between Pastor Danny and a game show host.

It seemed to take forever before a black-and-white picture swam into view. The restaurant was large, with at least fifty tables, but only one was occupied. Two women were sitting there, but at first I could only see Jenny Knowlton, because Norma blocked the other one out as she bent to serve them their bowls of soup. Jenny was pretty, dark-haired, mid-fifties. I saw her mouth move in a silent thank you. Norma nodded, straightened up, stepped away from the table, and I saw what remained of the first girl I ever loved.

If this were a romance, I might say something like, “Although necessarily changed by the passage of years and somewhat wasted by the depredations of disease, her essential beauty remained.” I wish I could, but if I begin lying now, everything I have told so far becomes worthless.

Astrid was a crone in a wheelchair, her face a pallid pouch of flesh from which dark eyes stared listlessly down at food she obviously had no interest in. Her companion had put a large knitted cap—a kind of tam-o’-shanter—on her head, but it had slipped to one side, revealing a bald skull fuzzed with white stubble.

She picked up her spoon with a scrawny hand that was all tendons, then put it down again. The dark-haired woman exhorted her. The pallid creature nodded. Her tam fell off when she did, but Astrid appeared not to notice. She dipped into her soup and raised the spoon slowly to her mouth. Most of its cargo fell off during the trip. She sipped what was left, pooching her lips out in a way that reminded me of how the late Bartleby would take a slice of apple from my hand.

My knees unhinged. If there hadn’t been a chair in front of the bank of monitors, I would have gone straight to the floor. Jacobs stood beside me, gnarled hands clasped behind his back, rocking to and fro with a slight smile on his face.

And since this is to be a true account rather than a romance, I must add that I felt a sneaking relief. I would never have to keep my half of our devil’s bargain, because there was no way the woman in the wheelchair was coming back. Cancer is the pitbull of diseases, and it had her in its jaws, biting and rending. It would not stop until it had torn her to pieces.

“Turn it off,” I whispered.

Jacobs leaned toward me. “I beg your pardon? My ears aren’t as good as they used to be these da—”

“You heard me perfectly well, Charlie. Turn it off.”

He did.

We were kissing beneath the fire escape of Eureka Grange No. 7 as the snow swirled down. Astrid was blowing cigarette smoke into my mouth while the tip of her tongue slipped back and forth, first along my upper lip and then inside it, lightly caressing the line of my gum. My hand was squeezing her breast, although there wasn’t much to feel because of the heavy parka she was wearing.

Kiss me forever, I thought. Kiss me forever so I don’t have to see where the years have taken us and what you’ve become.

But no kiss goes on forever. She pulled back and I saw the ashen face inside the fur of her hood, the dusty eyes, the slack mouth. The tongue that had been inside my mouth was black and peeling. I had been kissing a corpse.

Or maybe not, because the lips rose in a grin.

“Something happened,” Astrid said. “Didn’t it, Jamie? Something happened, and Mother will be here soon.”

I jerked awake with a gasp. I had gone to bed in my skivvies, but now I was naked and standing in the corner. I had the pen from the bedside table curled in my right hand and was using it to jab at my left forearm, where there was a small but growing constellation of blue dots. I dropped it on the floor and staggered backward.

Stress, I thought. It was stress that brought on Hugh’s prismatics at the Norris County revival, and it was stress tonight. Besides, it’s not like you poured salt in your eyes. Or came around to find yourself outside gobbling dirt.

It was quarter past four, that deadly time of morning when it’s too late to go back to sleep and still too early to rise and shine. I pulled a book from the smaller of my two bags, sat down by the window, and opened it. My eyes took in the words just as my mouth had taken in Norma’s soup and salad: without tasting. Eventually I stopped trying and just looked out into the darkness, waiting for dawn.

It was a long time coming.

I took breakfast in Jacobs’s suite… if you can call a single piece of toast and half a cup of tea breakfast. Charlie, on the other hand, worked his way through a fruit cup, scrambled eggs, and a goodly heap of homefries. Skinny as he was, it was hard to tell where he put it. On the table by the door was a mahogany box. In it, he told me, were his healing instruments.

“I no longer use rings. No need of them, now that my performing career is over.”

“When are you going to start? I want to get it over with and get out of here.”

“Very soon. Your old friend dozes through her days, but doesn’t sleep much at night. Last night will have been a particularly difficult one for her, because I told Miss Knowlton to withhold her midnight pain meds—they depress the brainwaves. We’ll do our business in the East Room. It’s my favorite at this time of day. If you and I didn’t know God is a profitable and self-sustaining construct of the worlds’ churches, the morning light would be almost enough to make us believers again.”

He leaned forward, looking at me earnestly.

“There’s no need for you to be a part of this, you know. I saw how upset you were last night. I’ll need your help this summer, but this morning either Rudy or Miss Knowlton can assist me. Why don’t you come back tomorrow? Pop over to Harlow. Visit your brother and his family. I think that, were you to do that, you’d see an entirely different Astrid Soderberg on your return.”

In a way, that was exactly what I was afraid of, because since leaving Harlow, Charlie Jacobs had made a career of trickery. As Pastor Danny, he had displayed pigs’ livers and declared them to be extracted tumors. It was not a résumé that inspired trust. Could I be absolutely sure the haggard woman in the wheelchair actually was Astrid Soderberg?

My heart said she was; my head told my heart to be careful and trust nothing. The Knowlton woman could be an accomplice—a shill, in carny terms. The next half hour was going to be an ordeal, but I had no intention of ducking out and allowing Jacobs to affect a sham cure. Of course he would need the real Astrid to pull it off, but many lucrative years on the revival circuit made that a possibility, especially if my long-ago girlfriend found herself hard up financially in her old age.

An unlikely scenario, to be sure. What it came down to was the responsibility I felt to see this through to what was certain to be a bitter end.

“I’ll stick around.”

“As you like.” He smiled, and although the bad side of his mouth still wouldn’t cooperate, there was nothing sneery about this one. “It will be nice to work with you again. Like the old days in Tulsa.”

A soft knock came at the door. It was Rudy. “The women are in the East Room, Mr. Jacobs. Miss Knowlton says they’re ready when you are. She says the sooner the better, because Miss Soderberg is in a lot of discomfort.”

I walked side by side with Jacobs down the hall, carrying the mahogany box under my arm, until we got to the East Wing. There my nerve temporarily failed me, and I let Jacobs go in while I stood in the doorway.

He didn’t notice. All his attention—and considerable charisma—was focused on the women. “Jenny and Astrid!” he said heartily. “My two favorite ladies!”

Jenny Knowlton gave his outstretched hand a token touch—enough for me to see that her fingers were straight and seemingly untouched by arthritis. Astrid made no attempt to raise her own hand. She was hunched in her wheelchair, peering up at him. There was an oxygen mask over the lower half of her face, and a tank on a wheelie-cart beside her.

Jenny said something to Jacobs, too low to hear, and he nodded vigorously. “Yes, we must waste no time. Jamie, would you—” He looked around, saw I wasn’t there, and beckoned to me impatiently.

It was no more than a dozen steps to the center of the room, which was filled with brilliant early light, but those steps seemed to take a very long time. It was as if I were walking underwater.

Astrid glanced at me with the disinterested eyes of one expending all her energy to cope with her pain. She showed no recognition, only looked down at her lap again, and I had a moment’s relief. Then her head jerked up. Her mouth fell open inside the transparent mask. She covered her face with her hands, knocking the mask aside. It was only part incredulity, I think. Most of it was horror, that I should see her in such a state.

She might have hidden behind her hands longer, but she didn’t have the strength for it and they dropped into her lap. She was crying. The tears washed her eyes and made them young again. Any doubts I might have had about her identity passed away. It was Astrid, all right. Still the young girl I’d loved, now living inside the failing wreck of a sick old woman’s body.

“Jamie?” Her voice was as hoarse as a jackdaw’s.

I got on one knee, like a swain about to propose. “Yeah, honey. It’s me.” I took one of her hands, turned it over, and kissed the palm. The skin was cold.

“You should go away. I don’t want you to…” There was a whistling sound as she drew in breath. “… to see me like this. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”

“It’s all right.” Because Charlie’s going to make you better, I wanted to add, but didn’t. Because Astrid was beyond help.

Jacobs had drawn Jenny away and was conversing with her, giving us our moment of privacy. The hell of being with Charlie was that sometimes he could be tender.

“Cigarettes,” she said in that hoarse jackdaw voice. “What a stupid way to kill yourself. And I knew better, which makes it even stupider. Everybody knows better. Do you want to know something funny? I still want them.” She laughed, and that turned into a harsh chain of coughs that clearly hurt her. “Smuggled in three packs. Jenny found them and took them away. As if it would make any difference now.”

“Hush,” I said.

“I stopped. For seven months, I stopped. If the baby had lived, I might have stopped for good. Something…” She drew a deep, wheezing breath. “Something tricks us. That’s what I believe.”

“It’s wonderful to see you.”

“You’re a beautiful liar, Jamie. What’s he got on you?”

I said nothing.

“Well, never mind.” Her hand had strayed to the back of my head, just as it used to when we were making out, and for one horrible moment I thought she might try to kiss me with that dying mouth. “You kept your hair. It’s lovely and thick. I lost mine. Chemo.”

“It’ll grow back.”

“No it won’t. This…” She looked around. Her breath whistled like a child’s toy. “A fool’s errand. And I’m the fool.”

Jacobs led Jenny back. “It’s time to do this thing.” Then, to Astrid: “It won’t take long, my dear, and there will be no pain. I expect you’ll pass out, but most people have no awareness of that.”

“I’m looking forward to passing out for good,” Astrid told him, and smiled wanly.

“Now, now, none of that. I never make absolute guarantees, but I believe that in a short time, you’re going to feel much better. Let’s begin, Jamie. Open the box.”

I did so. Inside, each item nestled in its own velvet-lined depression, were two stubby steel rods tipped with black plastic, and a white control box with a slide switch on top. It looked exactly like the one Jacobs had used the day Claire and I had brought Con to him. It crossed my mind that, of the four people in the room, three were idiots and one was crazy.

Jacobs plucked the rods from their nesting places and touched the black plastic tips together. “Jamie, take the control and move that slide switch the tiniest bit. Just a nudge. You’ll hear a click.”

When I did, he pulled the tips apart. There was a brilliant blue spark, and a brief but powerful mmmm sound. It didn’t come from the rods but from the far side of the room, like some weird electrical ventriloquism.

“Excellent,” Jacobs said. “We’re good to go. Jenny, you need to place your hands on Astrid’s shoulders. She’ll spasm, and we don’t want her to come around on the floor, do we?”

“Where are your holy rings?” Jenny asked. She was looking and sounding more doubtful by the second.

“These are better than the rings. Much more powerful. More holy, if you like. Hands on her shoulders, please.”

“Don’t you electrocute her!”

In her harsh jackdaw’s voice, Astrid said, “The least of my worries, Jen.”

“Won’t happen,” Jacobs said, adopting his lecture-hall voice. “Can’t. In ECT therapy—shock treatments, to use the layman’s term—doctors employ up to a hundred and fifty volts, thus provoking a grand mal seizure. But these…” He tapped the rods together. “Even at full power, they would barely budge the needle of an electrician’s ammeter. The energy I intend to tap—energy present in this room, all around us at this very moment—can’t be measured by ordinary instruments. It is essentially unknowable.”

Unknowable was not a word I wanted to hear.

“Please just do it,” Astrid said. “I’m very tired, and there’s a rat in my chest. One that’s on fire.”

Jacobs looked at Jenny. She hesitated. “It wasn’t like this at the revival. Not at all.”

“Perhaps not,” Jacobs said, “but this is revival. You’ll see. Put your hands on her shoulders, Jenny. Be prepared to press down hard. You won’t hurt her.”

She did as she was told.

Jacobs turned his attention to me. “When I place the tips of the rods on Astrid’s temples, slide the switch. Count the clicks as it advances. When you feel the fourth one, stop and wait for any further instructions. Ready? Here we go.”

He put the tips of the rods in the hollows at the sides of her head, where delicate blue veins pulsed. In a prim little voice, Astrid said, “So nice to see you again, Jamie.” Then she closed her eyes.

“She may be frisky, so be ready to bear down,” Jacobs told Jenny. Then: “All right, Jamie.”

I pushed the slide switch. Click… and click… and click… and click.

Nothing happened.

All an old man’s delusion, I thought. Whatever he might have done in the past, he can’t do it any long—

“Advance two more clicks, if you please.” His voice was dry and confident.

I did so. Still nothing. With Jenny’s hands on her shoulders, Astrid was more hunched over than ever. Her whistling respiration was painful to listen to.

“One more,” Jacobs said.

“Charlie, I’m almost at the end of the—”

“Did you not hear me? One more!”

I pushed the slide. There was another click, and this time the hum on the other side of the room was much louder, not mmmm but MMMOWWW. There was no flash of light that I saw (or that I remember, at least), but for a moment I was dazzled, anyway. It was as if a depth charge had gone off far down in my brain. I think Jenny Knowlton cried out. I dimly saw Astrid jerk in the wheelchair, a spasm so powerful that it flung Jenny—no lightweight—backward and almost off her feet. Astrid’s wasted legs shot out, relaxed, then shot out again. A security alarm began to bray.

Rudy came running into the room, closely followed by Norma.

“I told you to turn that blasted thing off before we started!” Jacobs shouted at Rudy.

Astrid pistoned her arms up, one right in front of Jenny’s face as she came back to put her hands on Astrid’s shoulders again.

“Sorry, Mr. Jacobs—”

“Shut it OFF, you idiot!”

Charlie snatched the control box out of my hands and slid the switch back to the off position. Now Astrid was making a series of gagging sounds.

“Pastor Danny, she’s choking!” Jenny cried.

“Don’t be stupid!” Jacobs snapped. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright. He looked twenty years younger. “Norma! Call the gate! Tell them the alarm was an accident!”

“Should I—”

“Go! Go! Goddammit, GO!”

She went.

Astrid’s eyes opened, only there were no eyes, just bulging whites. She gave another of those myoclonic jerks, then slid forward, legs kicking and jerking. Her arms flailed like those of a drowning swimmer. The alarm brayed and brayed. I grabbed her by the hips and shoved her back in her chair before she could land on the floor. The crotch of her slacks was dark, and I could smell strong urine. When I looked up, I saw foam drizzling from one side of her mouth. It fell from her chin to the collar of her blouse, darkening that, too.

The alarm quit.

“Thank God for small favors,” Jacobs said. He was bent forward, hands on his thighs, observing Astrid’s convulsions with interest but no concern.

“We need a doctor!” Jenny cried. “I can’t hold her!”

“Bosh,” Jacobs said. There was a half-smile—the only kind he could manage—on his face. “Did you expect it to be easy? It’s cancer, for God’s sake. Give her a minute and she’ll be—”

“There’s a door in the wall,” Astrid said.

The hoarseness had left her voice. Her eyes rolled back down in their sockets… but not together; they came one at a time. When they were back in place, it was Jacobs they were looking at.

“You can’t see it. It’s small and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead. She waits on the other side, above the broken city. Above the paper sky.”

Blood can’t turn cold, not really, but mine seemed to. Something happened, I thought. Something happened, and Mother will be here soon.

“Who?” Jacobs asked. He took one of her hands. The half-smile was gone. “Who waits?”

“Yes.” Her eyes stared into his. “She.”

“Who? Astrid, who?”

She said nothing at first. Then her lips stretched in a terrible grin that showed every tooth in her head. “Not the one you want.”

He slapped her. Astrid’s head jerked to the side. Spittle flew. I shouted in surprise and grabbed his wrist when he raised his hand to do it again. I stopped him, but only with an effort. He was stronger than he had any right to be. It was the kind of strength that comes from hysteria. Or pent-up fury.

“You can’t hit her!” Jenny shouted, letting go of Astrid’s shoulders and coming around the wheelchair to confront him. “You lunatic, you can’t hit h—”

“Stop,” Astrid said. Her voice was weak but lucid. “Stop it, Jenny.”

Jenny looked around. Her eyes widened at what she saw: a delicate pink wash of color beginning to rise in Astrid’s pale cheeks.

“Why are you yelling at him? Did something happen?”

Yes, I thought. Something happened. Something most surely did.

Astrid turned to Jacobs. “When are you going to do it? You better hurry, because the pain is very… very…”

The three of us stared at her. No, it was the five of us. Rudy and Norma had crept back into the East Room doorway, and they were staring, too.

“Wait,” Astrid said. “Wait just a darn minute.”

She touched her chest. She cupped the wasted remains of her breasts. She pressed her stomach.

“You did it already, didn’t you? I know you did, because there is no pain!” She pulled in a breath and let it out in an incredulous laugh. “And I can breathe! Jenny, I can breathe again!”

Jenny Knowlton went to her knees, raised her hands to the sides of her head, and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer so fast she sounded like a 45 rpm record on 78. Another voice joined her: Norma’s. She was also on her knees.

Jacobs gave me a bemused look that was easy to read: You see, Jamie? I do all the work and the Big G gets all the credit.

Astrid tried to get out of the wheelchair, but her wasted legs wouldn’t hold her. I got her before she could do a face-plant, and put my arms around her.

“Not yet, honey,” I said. “You’re too weak.”

She goggled at me as I eased her back onto the seat. The oxygen mask had gotten twisted around and now hung on the left side of her neck, forgotten.

“Jamie? Is that you? What are you doing here?”

I looked at Jacobs.

“Short-term memory loss after treatment is common,” he said. “Astrid, can you tell me who the president is?”

She looked bewildered at the question but answered with no hesitation. “Obama. And Biden’s the vice president. Am I really better? Will it last?”

“You are and it will, but never mind that now. Tell me—”

“Jamie? Is it really you? Your hair is so white!”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s certainly getting there. Listen to Charlie.”

“I was crazy about you,” she said, “but even though you could play, you could never dance very well unless you were high. We had dinner at Starland after the prom and you ordered…” She stopped and licked her lips. “Jamie?”

“Right here.”

“I can breathe. I can actually breathe again.” She was crying.

Jacobs snapped his fingers in front of her eyes like a stage hypnotist. “Focus, Astrid. Who brought you here?”

“J-Jenny.”

“What did you have for supper last night?”

“Sloop. Sloop and salad.”

He snapped his fingers in front of her swimming eyes again. It made her blink and recoil. The muscles beneath her skin seemed to be tightening and firming even as I watched. It was wonderful and awful.

“Soup. Soup and salad.”

“Very good. What is the door in the wall?”

“Door? I don’t—”

“You said it was covered with ivy. You said there was a broken city on the other side.”

“I… don’t remember that.”

“You said she waits. You said…” He peered into her uncomprehending face and sighed. “Never mind. You need to rest, my dear.”

“I suppose so,” Astrid said, “but what I’d really like to do is dance. Dance for joy.”

“In time you will.” He patted her hand. He was smiling as he did it, but I had an idea he was deeply disappointed at her failure to remember the door and the city. I was not. I didn’t want to know what she had seen when Charlie’s secret electricity stormed through the deepest recesses of her brain. I didn’t want to know what was waiting behind the hidden door she had spoken of, yet I was afraid I did.

Mother.

Above the paper sky.

Astrid slept all morning and well into the afternoon. When she woke, she declared herself ravenous. This pleased Jacobs, who told Norma Goldstone to bring “our patient” a toasted cheese sandwich and a small piece of cake with the frosting scraped off. Frosting, he felt, might be too rich for her wasted stomach. Jacobs, Jenny, and I watched her put away the entire sandwich and half the cake before setting her fork down.

“I want the rest,” she said, “but I’m full.”

“Give yourself time,” Jenny said. She’d spread a napkin in her lap and kept plucking at it. She wouldn’t look at Astrid for long, and at Jacobs not at all. Coming to him had been her idea, and I have no doubt she was happy about the sudden change for the better in her friend, but it was clear that what she’d seen in the East Room had shaken her deeply.

“I want to go home,” Astrid said.

“Oh, honey, I don’t know…”

“I feel well enough. I really do.” Astrid cast an apologetic look at Jacobs. “It’s not that I’m not grateful—I’ll bless you in my prayers for the rest of my life—but I want to be in my own place. Unless you feel… ?”

“No, no,” Jacobs said. I suspected that, with the job done, he was anxious to be rid of her. “I can’t think of better medicine than sleeping in your own bed, and if you leave soon, you can be back not long after dark.”

Jenny made no further objection, just went back to plucking at her napkin. But before she bent her head, I saw a look of relief on her face. She wanted out as much as Astrid, although perhaps not for quite the same reasons.

Astrid’s returning color was only part of the remarkable change in her. She was sitting upright in her wheelchair; her eyes were clear and engaged. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you, Mr. Jacobs, and I certainly can’t repay you, but if there’s ever anything you need from me that’s mine to give, you only have to ask.”

“Actually, there are several things.” He ticked them off on the gnarled fingers of his right hand. “Eat. Sleep. Work hard to regain your strength. Can you do those things?”

“Yes. I will. And I’m never going to touch another cigarette.”

He waved this away. “You won’t want to. Will she, Jamie?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Miss Knowlton?”

She jerked as if he’d pinched her bottom.

“Astrid must engage a physical therapist, or you must engage one on her behalf. The sooner she gets out of that damn wheelchair, the better. Am I right? Am I cooking with gas, as we used to say?”

“Yes, Pastor Danny.”

He frowned, but didn’t correct her. “There’s something else you fine ladies can do for me, and it’s extremely important: leave my name out of this. I have a great deal of work to do in the coming months, and the last thing I need is to have hordes of sick people coming up here in hopes of being cured. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Astrid said.

Jenny nodded without looking up.

“Astrid, when you see your doctor and he expresses amazement, as he certainly will, all you’ll tell him is that you prayed for a remission and your prayers were answered. His own belief—or lack of it—in the efficacy of prayer won’t matter; either way, he’ll be forced to accept the evidence of his MRI pictures. Not to mention your happy smiling face. Your happy and healthy smiling face.”

“Yes, that’s fine. Whatever you want.”

“Let me roll you back to the suite,” Jenny said. “If we’re going to leave, I better pack.” Subtext: Get me out of here. On that, she and Charlie Jacobs were thinking alike; they were cooking with gas.

“All right.” Astrid looked at me shyly. “Jamie, would you bring me a Coke? I’d like to speak to you.”

“Sure.”

Jacobs watched Jenny trundle Astrid across the empty restaurant and toward the far door. When they were gone, he turned to me. “So. We have a bargain?”

“Yes.”

“And you won’t DS on me?”

DS. Carny-speak for down south, meaning to pull stakes and disappear.

“No, Charlie. I won’t DS on you.”

“That’s fine, then.” He was looking at the doorway through which the women had gone. “Miss Knowlton doesn’t like me much now that I’ve left Team Jesus, does she?”

“Scared of you is what she is.”

He shrugged it off. Like his smile, the shrug was mostly one-sided. “Ten years ago, I couldn’t have cured our Miss Soderberg. Perhaps not even five. But things are moving fast, now. By this summer…”

“By this summer, what?”

“Who knows?” he said. “Who knows?”

You do, I thought. You do, Charlie.

“Watch this, Jamie,” Astrid said when I arrived with her soft drink.

She got out of the wheelchair and tottered three steps to the chair by her bedroom window. She held on to it for balance while she turned herself around, and collapsed into it with a sigh of relief and pleasure.

“Not much, I know—”

“Are you kidding? It’s amazing.” I handed her an ice-choked glass of Coca-Cola. I had even stuck a piece of lime on the rim for good luck. “And you’ll be able to do more each day.”

We had the room to ourselves. Jenny had excused herself to finish packing, although it looked to me as if the job was already done. Astrid’s coat was laid out on the bed.

“I think I owe you as much as I owe Mr. Jacobs.”

“That’s not true.”

“Don’t lie, Jamie, your nose will grow and the bees will sting your knees. He must get thousands of letters begging for cures, even now. I don’t think he picked mine out of the pile by accident. Were you the one in charge of reading them?”

“Nope, that was Al Stamper, your friend Jenny’s old fave. Charlie got in touch with me later.”

“And you came,” she said. “After all these years, you came. Why?”

“Because I had to. I can’t explain any better than that, except there was a time when you meant the world to me.”

“You didn’t promise him anything? There was no… what do they call it… quid pro quo?”

“Not a single one.” I said it without missing a beat. During my years as an addict, I’d become an accomplished liar, and the sad truth is that sort of skill sticks with you.

“Walk over here. Stand close to me.”

I did. With no hesitation or embarrassment, she put her hand on the front of my jeans. “You were gentle with this,” she said. “Many boys wouldn’t have been. You had no experience, but you knew how to be kind. You meant the world to me, too.” She dropped her hand and looked at me out of eyes no longer dull and preoccupied with her own pain. Now they were full of vitality. Also worry. “You did promise. I know you did. I won’t ask what, but if you ever loved me, be careful of him. I owe him my life, and I feel awful saying this, but I believe he’s dangerous. And I think you believe that, too.”

Not as accomplished at lying as I’d thought, then. Or perhaps it was just that she saw more now that she was cured.

“Astrid, you have nothing to worry about.”

“I wonder… could I have a kiss, Jamie? While we’re alone? I know I’m not much to look at, but…”

I dropped to one knee—again feeling like a swain in a romance—and kissed her. No, she wasn’t much to look at, but compared to how she’d looked that morning, she was a knockout. Still—it was only skin against skin, that kiss. There were no embers in the ashes. For me, at least. But we were tied together, just the same. Jacobs was the knot.

She stroked the back of my head. “Still such wonderful hair, going white or not. Life leaves us so little, but it’s left you that. Goodbye, Jamie. And thank you.”

On my way out, I stopped to talk briefly to Jenny. Mostly I wanted to know if she lived close enough to Astrid to monitor her progress.

She smiled. “Astrid and I are divorce buddies. Have been since I moved to Rockland and started working at the hospital there. Ten years ago, that was. When she got sick, I moved in with her.”

I gave her my cell number, and the number at Wolfjaw. “There may be aftereffects.”

She nodded. “Pastor Danny filled me in. Mr. Jacobs, I mean. It’s hard for me to get used to calling him that. He said she might be prone to sleepwalking until her brainwaves re-regulate themselves. Four to six months, he said. I’ve seen that behavior in people who overdo stuff like Ambien and Lunesta.”

“Yes, that’s the most likely.” Although there was also dirt-eating, compulsive walking, Tourette’s syndrome, kleptomania, and Hugh Yates’s prismatics. So far as I knew, Ambien didn’t cause any of those things. “But if there’s anything else… call.”

“How worried are you?” she asked. “Tell me what to expect.”

“I don’t really know, and she’ll probably be fine.” Most of them were, after all, at least according to Jacobs. And as little as I trusted him, I had to count on that, because it was too late to do anything else. The thing was done.

Jenny stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “She’s better. That’s God’s grace, Jamie, no matter what Mr. Jacobs may think now that he’s fallen away. Without it—without him—she would have been dead in six weeks.”

Astrid rode down the handicapped ramp in her wheelchair, but got into Jenny’s Subaru on her own. Jacobs closed her door. She reached through the open window, grasped one of his hands in both of her own, and thanked him again.

“It was my pleasure,” he said. “Just remember your promise.” He pulled his hand free so he could put a finger to her lips. “Mum’s the word.”

I bent down and kissed her forehead. “Eat,” I said. “Rest. Do therapy. And enjoy your life.”

“Roger, Captain,” she said. She looked past me, saw Jacobs slowly climbing the steps to the porch, then met my eyes and repeated what she’d said earlier. “Be careful.”

“Don’t worry.”

“But I will.” Her eyes on mine, full of grave concern. She was getting old now, as I was, but with the disease banished from her body, I could see the girl who had stood in front of the stage with Hattie, Carol, and Suzanne, the four of them shaking their moneymakers while Chrome Roses played “Knock on Wood” or “Nutbush City Limits.” The girl I had kissed under the fire escape. “I will worry.”

I rejoined Charlie Jacobs on the porch, and we watched Jenny Knowlton’s trim little Outback roll down the road that led to the gate. It had been a fine melt-day, and the snow had pulled back, revealing grass that was already turning green. Poor man’s fertilizer, I thought. That’s what we used to call it.

“Will those women keep their mouths shut?” Jacobs asked.

“Yes.” Maybe not forever, but until his work was done, if he was as close to finished as he claimed. “They promised.”

“And you, Jamie? Will you keep your promise?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to satisfy him. “Stay the night, why don’t you?”

I shook my head. “I booked a room at Embassy Suites. I’ve got an early flight.”

And I can’t wait to get away from this place, just as I couldn’t wait to get away from The Latches.

I didn’t say this, but I’m sure he knew it.

“Fine. Just be ready when I call.”

“What do you need, Charlie? A written statement? I said I’ll come, and I will.”

“Good. We’ve been bouncing off each other like a couple of billiard balls for most of our lives, but that’s almost over. By the end of July—mid-August at the latest—we’ll be finished with each other.”

He was right about that. God help him, he was.

Always assuming He’s there, of course.

Even with a change of planes in Cincinnati, I was back in Denver the next day before 1 PM—when it comes to time travel, nothing beats flying west in a jet plane. I woke up my phone and saw I had two messages. The first was from Jenny. She said that she had locked the door of Astrid’s bedroom last night before turning in herself, but there hadn’t been a peep from the baby monitor, and when she got up at six-thirty, Astrid was still conked out.

“When she got up, she ate a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast. And the way she looks… I have to keep telling myself it’s not some kind of illusion.”

That was the good message. The bad one was from Brianna Donlin—now Brianna Donlin-Hughes. She’d left it only minutes before my United flight touched down. “Robert Rivard is dead, Jamie. I don’t know the details.” But by that evening, she’d gotten them.

A nurse had told Bree that most people who went into Gad’s Ridge never came out, and that was certainly true of the boy Pastor Danny had healed of his muscular dystrophy. They found him in his room, dangling from a noose he’d made from a pair of bluejeans. He left a note that said, I can’t stop seeing the damned. The line stretches forever.