The Mad and the Macabre

November 10th, 2010

Wednesday

Gabriel hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair. His heart was pounding and his palms were damp. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to go through with this. After nearly a week had passed without word from Cavenaugh, he had begun to think that he might never hear from him again, which had sounded better and better as time had passed. It had taken planting the cross on the peak of Mount Isolation to truly come to grips with the fact that his little sister was dead. Granted, not knowing how she had perished ate him alive inside, but worse was the prospect of learning that she might have suffered. Finding a single disarticulated bone didn’t bode well in that regard. Of course, the authorities had until recently speculated that she was still alive somewhere out there, that she and the others had formed some sort of cult and were now living safely in some apocalyptic compound praying for the Rapture. They apparently believed that there was a fine line between a believer and a zealot, and that anyone who disappeared into the wilderness looking for God had long since crossed it.

But that wasn’t his sister. Not his Stephanie. Hers was not a blind faith, but a carefully orchestrated search for a higher power.

He supposed that was what he had been doing all this time, too. In the years following their parents’ death, they had both embarked upon a quest for answers. He had only been sixteen years old and Stephanie fourteen when the car accident had uprooted them from their stable lives in Hartford, Connecticut and moved them to Denver to live with their maternal grandparents. It wasn’t right for any God to orphan two children on what felt like a sadistic whim. In retrospect, Gabriel understood that their individual searches had diverged long ago. He had thrown himself into a science lab where he worked through a microscope, not necessarily to disprove the notion of God, but to prove that man held power over Him, especially when it came to life and death, while Stephanie had turned her eyes to the heavens.

None of that mattered now. He had promised, if only to himself, that he would never let any harm befall her, and he had failed. Maybe they hadn’t found her body, but deep down, he knew. His little sister was dead.

Gabriel swiped away the tears and rose from the chair. He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The discomfort in his stomach told him he was hungry, but nothing looked remotely appealing. He finally settled on another bottle of Rolling Rock and returned to the living room of the small apartment, where he sat in front of the desktop computer. For the last six days, he had felt its inexorable pull and had resisted through sheer force of will, but now he knew the time had come.

Cavenaugh had made all of the arrangements, just as he had promised he would. The cabins were rented for two weeks, and four of the others would be meeting them there on Saturday morning. Gabriel had already arranged his leave with the university by cashing in every last one of his accrued vacation days, while secretly hoping he wouldn’t have to use them. The short notice was going to cost him two classes over the summer session, but if he managed to gain some measure of closure, then it would definitely be worth it. Until now, the trip had been something of an abstraction, the kind of plan that never really materialized, but now he was faced with the reality of the situation: in two days he would return to the last place where his sister had been seen alive in hopes of discovering how she had died.

He set aside the beer, which seethed like acid in his gut, and typed in the web address.

After a moment, the home page opened and he stared at the image on the left side of seven smiling men and women, barely out of their teens. Their faces were flushed with the prospect of adventure. Gabriel was certain that was how they would have chosen to be remembered. Stephanie stood in the middle, her blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, her blue eyes like twin sapphires. She was wearing the yellow sweatshirt with the CU buffalo across the front that he had given her three months before on her twenty-third birthday. Had he known that birthday would have been her last, he would have given her something special, something meaningful. The cross she always wore hung over the collar: gold with five diamonds, one in the center and another at each end. She had been so vibrant, so beautiful, the kind of person who naturally became the center of attention whenever she entered a room. To her right stood Jenny Cavenaugh, who had short dark hair and her brother’s stocky build. She had eyes a shade of shamrock green so intense they looked computer-altered. Beside her were Levi Northcutt, who was tall and gangly, and had yet to outgrow his adolescent acne, and Nathan Dillinger, an average-looking guy with a Rockies cap pulled down over his eyes, and both femora still seated firmly in their sockets beneath his dirty jeans. To Stephanie’s left was Grant Farnham, who reminded Gabriel of Peyton Manning. He was discreetly holding his sister’s hand, which confirmed what Gabriel had suspected for several months leading up to their disappearance. Beside Grant were Chase Evans, a short, chubby boy with moppish red hair and a crooked smile, and Deborah MacAuley, a frumpy brunette with thick glasses and a palsy hand she held close to her chest. And rubbing his flank on Stephanie’s shin was her rescued orange tabby, Oscar, named for his frequently rotten disposition. Even he had vanished without a trace, leaving behind his empty food and water bowls, a used litter box, and his traveling crate amidst the collection of clothes, personal effects, and the food none of them had bothered to collect in their hurry to join the supposed cult.

Gabriel felt a rush of anger at the thought and realized he was grinding his teeth. After more than a year of dissociating himself from his emotions, the last six days had broken the floodgates and left him at their mercy. He wanted to scream, cry, lash out, collapse into bed and sleep forever. But he hadn’t opened the website simply to view the photograph. Though he could probably recite the video blogs by heart, he needed to watch them again.

A link on the right side of the home page led him to the “Diary Page,” which listed all of the dates of entry in columns beside the rectangular video screen in the center. The seven had each taken turns. His sister had been first in the rotation. He clicked the first link and Stephanie’s frozen image appeared in the viewer. His heart caught and a lump rose in his throat. With a shaking hand that caused the cursor to tremble on the screen, he clicked the triangular “PLAY” button.

“Well, here we are, Day One,” Stephanie said. She wore the same smile she generally reserved for birthdays and Christmas morning. She was so happy she positively glowed. Her hand moved back and forth in the lower periphery of the image, soliciting a contented purr from her lap. Behind her, the window had been opened on a wall of pines and whatever forest creatures chattered in the canopy. The walls were paneled with wood so coarse it could give you splinters just by looking at it. “We would all like to thank our families for being so supportive of our little adventure. So, thank you.”

Stephanie blew the camera a kiss and there was a chorus of assent from somewhere off-screen.

Gabriel smiled, even as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

“So, as you all know, we’re here in the middle of nowhere searching for proof. Maybe we’ll find it. Maybe we won’t. Either way, it’s going to be an exciting summer that none of us will ever forget. Another year of grad school and we’ll all have our master’s degrees. Some of us will continue on and pursue doctorates, while the rest of us will venture out into the real world and try to make a living in this primarily theoretical discipline. I guess that makes this our final hurrah.

“And now our statement of mission for posterity. We’re here on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, nearly an hour’s drive from the nearest indoor plumbing, because this is where the scriptures have led us. When we say we’re looking for proof of the existence of God, we understand that no such thing can ever be found. God must be taken on faith. However, what we can find is corroborative evidence to support the verses in the Bible, peripheral proof if you will. Like Porcher Taylor found what we believe to be Noah’s Ark on the top of Mount Ararat. Astronomers have recreated the night skies to validate the presence of the star that led the three wise men to the stable where Jesus was born, and the lineages of the Caesars can be factually dated to correspond with those in the Bible.

“I would like to read a few verses now.

“This is from the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve, verses seven through nine. And there was a war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found anymore in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

“There’s another from Second Peter, chapter two, verse four: For God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.

“And that’s why we’re right here, right now. We believe that somewhere, hidden in these hills, we will find where the nephilim, the dark angels cast out of heaven with Lucifer, landed on earth, and provide incontrovertible proof that angels do exist. And by inference, we will be one step closer to finding God.”