The Power That Preserves

One: The Danger in Dreams

THOMAS Covenant was talking in his sleep. At times he knew what he was doing; the broken pieces of his voice penetrated his stupor dimly, like flickers of innocence. But he could not rouse himself, the weight of his exhaustion was too great. He babbled like millions of people before him, whole or ill, true or false. But in his case there was no one to hear. He would not have been more alone if he had been the last dreamer left alive.

When the shrill demand of the phone cut through him, he woke up wailing.

For a moment after he threw himself upright in bed, he could not distinguish between the phone and his own flat terror; both echoed like torment through the fog in his head. Then the phone rang again. It pulled him sweating out of bed, compelled him to shamble like a derelict into the living room, forced him to pick up the receiver. His numb, disease-cold fingers fumbled over the black plastic, and when he finally gained a grip on it, he held it to the side of his head like a pistol.

He had nothing to say to it, so he waited in blankness for the person at the other end of the line to speak.

A woman’s voice asked uncertainly, “Mr. Covenant? Thomas Covenant?”

“Yes,” he murmured, then stopped, vaguely surprised by all the things he had with that one word admitted to be true.

“Ah, Mr. Covenant,” the voice said. “Megan Roman calling.” When he said nothing, she added with a touch of acerbity, “Your lawyer. Remember?”

But he did not remember; he knew nothing about lawyers. Numb mist confused all the links of his memory. Despite the metallic distortion of the connection, her voice sounded distantly familiar; but he could not identify it.

She went on, “Mr. Covenant, I’ve been your lawyer for two years now. What’s the matter with you? Are you all right?”

The familiarity of her voice disturbed him. He did not want to remember who she was. Dully, he murmured, “It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have called if it didn’t have to do with you. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it if it weren’t your business.” Irritation and discomfort scraped together in her tone.

“No.” He did not want to remember. For his own benefit, he strained to articulate, “The Law doesn’t have anything to do with me. She broke it. Anyway, I–It can’t touch me.”

“You better believe it can touch you. And you better listen to me. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but-“

He interrupted her. He was too close to remembering her voice. “No,” he said again. “It doesn’t bind me. I’m-outside. Separate. It can’t touch me. Law is”-he paused for a moment, groped through the fog for what he wanted to say-“not the opposite of Despite.”

Then in spite of himself he recognized her voice. Through the disembodied inaccuracy of the phone line, he identified her.

Elena.

A sickness of defeat took the resistance out of him.

She was saying, “-what you’re talking about. I’m your lawyer, Megan Roman. And if you think the law can’t touch you, you’d better listen to me. That’s what I’m calling about.”

“Yes,” he said hopelessly.

“Listen, Mr. Covenant.” She gave her irritation a free hand. “I don’t exactly like being your lawyer. Just thinking about you makes me squirm. But I’ve never backed down on a client before, and I don’t mean to start with you. Now pull yourself together and listen to me.”

“Yes.” Elena? he moaned dumbly. Elena? What have I done to you?

“All right. Here’s the situation. That-unfortunate escapade of yours-Saturday night-has brought matters to a head. It-Did you have to go to a nightclub, Mr. Covenant? A nightclub, of all places?”

“I didn’t mean it.” He could think of no other words for his contrition.

“Well, it’s done now. Sheriff Lytton is up in arms. You’ve given him something he can use against you. He spent Sunday evening and this morning talking to a lot of people around here. And the people he talked to talked to other people. The township council met at noon.

“Mr. Covenant, this probably wouldn’t have happened if everyone didn’t remember the last time you came to town. There was a lot of talk then, but it’d calmed down for the most part. Now it’s stirred up again. People want action.

“The council intends to give them action. Our scrupulous local government is going to have your property rezoned. Haven Farm will probably be zoned industrial. Residential use will be prohibited. Once that’s done, you can be forced to move. You’ll probably get a fair price for the Farm-but you won’t find any other place to live in this county.”

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I had the power, and I didn’t know how to use it.” His bones were full to the marrow with old hate and death.

“What? Are you listening to me? Mr. Covenant, you’re my client-for whatever that’s worth. I don’t intend to stand by and let this happen to you. Sick or not, you’ve got the same civil rights as anyone else. And there are laws to protect private citizens from-persecution. We can fight. Now I want”- against the metallic background noise of the phone, he could hear her gathering her courage- “I want you to come to my office. Today. We’ll dig into the situation-arrange to appeal the decision, or file suit against it-something. We’ll discuss all the ramifications, and plan a strategy. All right?”

The sense of deliberate risk in her tone penetrated him for a moment. He said, “I’m a leper. They can’t touch me.”

“They’ll throw you out on your ear! Damn it, Covenant-you don’t seem to understand what’s going on here. You are going to lose your home. It can be fought-but you’re the client, and I can’t fight it without you.”

But her vehemence made his attention retreat. Vague recollections of Elena swirled in him as he said, “That’s not a good answer.” Absently, he removed the receiver from his ear and returned it to its cradle.

For a long time, he stood gazing at the black instrument. Something in its irremediable pitch and shape reminded him that his head hurt.

Something important had happened to him.

As if for the first time, he heard the lawyer saying, Sunday evening and this morning. He turned woodenly and looked at the wall clock. At first he could not bring his eyes into focus on it; it stared back at him as if it were going blind. But at last he made out the time. The afternoon sun outside his windows confirmed it.

He had slept for more than thirty hours.

Elena? he thought. That could not have been Elena on the phone. Elena was dead. His daughter was dead. It was his fault.

His forehead began to throb. The pain rasped his mind like a bright, brutal light. He ducked his head to try to evade it.

Elena had not even existed. She had never existed. He had dreamed the whole thing.

Elena! he moaned. Turning, he wandered weakly back toward his bed.

As he moved, the fog turned crimson in his brain.

When he entered the bedroom, his eyes widened at the sight of his pillow; and he stopped. The pillowcase was stained with black splotches. They looked like rot, some species of fungus gnawing away at the white cleanliness of the linen.

Instinctively, he raised a hand to his forehead. But his numb fingers could tell him nothing. The illness that seemed to fill the whole inside of his skull began laughing. His empty guts squirmed with nausea. Holding his forehead in both hands, he lurched into the bathroom.

In the mirror over the sink, he saw the wound on his forehead.

For an instant, he saw nothing of himself but the wound. It looked like leprosy, like an invisible hand of leprosy clenching the skin of his forehead. Black crusted blood clung to the ragged edges of the cut, mottling his pale flesh like deep gangrene; and blood and fluid seeped through cracks in the heavy scabs. He seemed to feel the infection festering its way straight through his skull into his brain. It hurt his gaze as if it already reeked of disease and ugly death.

Trembling fiercely, he spun the faucets to fill the sink. While water frothed into the basin, he hurried to lather his hands.

But when he noticed his white gold ring hanging loosely on his wedding finger, he stopped. He remembered the hot power which had pulsed through that metal in his dream. He could hear Bannor, the Bloodguard who had kept him alive, saying, Save her! You must! — hear himself reply, I cannot! He could hear Hile Troy’s shout, Leper! You’re too selfish to love anyone but yourself. He winced as he remembered the blow which had laid open his forehead.

Elena had died because of him.

She had never existed.

She had fallen into that crevice, fighting desperately against the spectre of mad Kevin Landwaster, whom she had Commanded from his grave. She had fallen and died. The Staff of Law had been lost. He had not so much as lifted his hand to save her.

She had never even existed. He had dreamed her while he lay unconscious after having hit his head on the edge of the coffee table.

Torn between conflicting horrors, he stared at his wound as if it were an outcry against him, a two-edged denunciation. From the mirror it shouted to him that the prophecy of his illness had come to pass.

Moaning, he pushed away, and rushed back toward the phone. With soapy, dripping hands, he fumbled at it, struggled to dial the number of Joan’s parents. She might be staying with them. She had been his wife; he needed to talk to her.

But halfway through the number, he threw down the receiver. In his memory, he could see her standing chaste and therefore merciless before him. She still believed that he had refused to talk to her when she had called him Saturday night. She would not forgive him for the rebuff he had helplessly dealt her.

How could he tell her that he needed to be forgiven for allowing another woman to die in his dreams?

Yet he needed someone-needed someone to whom he could cry out, Help me!

He had gone so far down the road to a leper’s end that he could not pull himself back alone.

But he could not call the doctors at the leprosarium. They would return him to Louisiana. They would treat him and train him and counsel him. They would put him back into life as if his illness were all that mattered, as if wisdom were only skin-deep- as if grief and remorse and horror were nothing but illusions, tricks done with mirrors, irrelevant to chrome and porcelain and clean, white, stiff hospital sheets and fluorescent lights.

They would abandon him to the unreality of his passion.

He found that he was gasping hoarsely, panting as if the air in the room were too rancid for his lungs.

He needed — needed.

Dialling convulsively, he called Information and got the number of the nightclub where he had gone drinking Saturday night.

When he reached that number, the woman who answered the phone told him in a bored voice that Susie Thurston had left the nightclub. Before he could think to ask, the woman told him where the singer’s next engagement was.

He called Information again, then put a long-distance call through to the place where Susie Thurston was now scheduled to perform. The switchboard of this club connected him without question to her dressing room.

As soon as he heard her low, waifish voice, he panted thickly, “Why did you do it? Did he put you up to it? How did he do it? I want to know-”

She interrupted him roughly. “Who are you? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Who do you think you are? I didn’t do nothing to you.”

“Saturday night. You did it to me Saturday night.”

“Buster, I don’t know you from Adam. I didn’t do nothing to you. Just drop dead, will you? Get off my phone.”

“You did it Saturday night. He put you up to it. You called me ‘Berek.’ Berek Halfhand-the long-dead hero in his dream. The people in his dream, the people of the Land, had believed him to be Berek Halfhand reborn-believed that because leprosy had claimed the last two fingers of his right hand. “That crazy old beggar told you to call me Berek, and you did it.”

She was silent for a long moment before she said, “Oh, it’s you. You’re that guy-the people at the club said you were a leper.”

“You called me Berek,” Covenant croaked as if he were strangling on the sepulchral air of the house.

“A leper,” she breathed. “Oh, hell! I might’ve kissed you. Buster, you sure had me fooled. You look a hell of a lot like a friend of mine.”

“Berek,” Covenant groaned.

“What- “Berek”? You heard me wrong. I said, “Berrett”. Berrett Williams is a friend of mine. He and I go ‘way back. I learned a lot from him. But he was three-quarters crocked all the time. Anyway, he was sort of a clown. Coming to hear me without saying a thing about it is the sort of thing he’d do. And you looked-'

“He put you up to it. That old beggar made you do it. He’s trying to do something to me.”

“Buster, you got leprosy of the brain. I don’t know no beggars. I got enough useless old men of my own. Say, maybe you are Berrett Williams. This sounds like one of his jokes. Berrett, damn you, if you’re setting me up for something-"

Nausea clenched in Covenant again. He hung up the phone and hunched over his stomach. But he was too empty to vomit; he had not eaten for forty-eight hours. He gouged the sweat out of his eyes with his numb fingertips, and dialled Information again.

The half-dried soap on his fingers made his eyes sting and blur as he got the number he wanted and put through another long-distance call.

When the crisp military voice said, “Department of Defence,” he blinked at the moisture which filled his eyes like shame, and responded, “Let me talk to Hile Troy.” Troy had been in his dream, too. But the man had insisted that he was real, an inhabitant of the real world, not a figment of Covenant’s nightmare.

“Hile Troy? One moment, sir.” Covenant heard the riffling of pages briefly. Then the voice said, “Sir, I have no listing for anyone by that name.”

“Hile Troy,” Covenant repeated. “He works in one of your-in one of your think tanks. He had an accident. If he isn’t dead, he should be back to work by now.”

The military voice lost some of its crispness. “Sir, if he’s employed here as you say-then he’s security personnel. I couldn’t contact him for you, even if he were listed here.”

“Just get him to the phone,” Covenant moaned. “He’ll talk to me.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“He’ll talk to me.”

“Perhaps he will. I still need to know your name.”

“Oh, hell!” Covenant wiped his eyes on the back of his hand, then said abjectly, “I’m Thomas Covenant.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll connect you to Major Rolle. He may be able to help you.”

The line clicked into silence. In the background, Covenant could hear a running series of metallic snicks like the ticking of a deathwatch. Pressure mounted in him. The wound on his forehead throbbed like a scream. He clasped the receiver to his head, and hugged himself with his free arm, straining for self-control. When the line came to life again, he could hardly keep from howling at it.

“Mr. Covenant?” a bland, insinuating voice said. “I’m Major Rolle. We’re having trouble locating the person you wish to speak to. This is a large department — you understand. Could you tell me more about him?”

“His name is Hile Troy. He works in one of your think tanks. He’s blind.” The words trembled between Covenant’s lips as if he were freezing.

“Blind, you say? Mr. Covenant, you mentioned an accident. Can you tell me what happened to this Hile Troy?”

“Just let me talk to him. Is he there or not?”

The major hesitated, then said, “Mr. Covenant, we have no blind men in this department. Could you give me the source of your information? I’m afraid you’re the victim of-"

Abruptly, Covenant was shouting, raging. “He fell out of a window when his apartment caught fire, and he was killed! He never even existed!”

With a savage heave, he tore the phone cord from its socket, then turned and hurled it at the clock on the living-room wall. The phone struck the clock and bounced to the floor as if it were impervious to injury, but the clock shattered and fell in pieces.

“He’s been dead for days! He never existed!”

In a paroxysm of fury, he lashed out and kicked the coffee table with one numb booted foot. The table flipped over, broke the frame of Joan’s picture as it jolted across the rug. He kicked it again, breaking one of its legs. Then he knocked over the sofa, and leaped past it to the bookcases. One after another, he heaved them to the floor.

In moments, the neat leper’s order of the room had degenerated into dangerous chaos. At once, he rushed back to the bedroom. With stumbling fingers, he tore the penknife out of his pocket, opened it, and used it to shred the bloodstained pillow. Then, while the feathers settled like guilty snow over the bed and bureaus, he thrust the knife back into his pocket and slammed out of the house.

He went down into the woods behind Haven Farm at a run, hurrying toward the secluded hut which held his office. If he could not speak of his distress, perhaps he could write it down. As he flashed along the path, his fingers were already twitching to type out: Help me help help help! But when he reached the hut, he found that it looked as if he had already been there. Its door had been torn from its hinges, and inside the hulks of his typewriters lay battered amid the litter of his files and papers. The ruin was smeared with excrement, and the small rooms stank of urine.

At first, he stared at the wreckage as if he had caught himself in an act of amnesia. He could not remember having done this. But he knew he had not done it; it was vandalism, an attack on him like the burning of his stables days or weeks ago. The unexpected damage stunned him. For an odd instant, he forgot what he had just done to his house. I am not a violent man, he thought dumbly. I’m not.

Then the constricted space of the hut seemed to spring at him from all the walls. A suffocating sensation clamped his chest. For the third time, he ached to vomit, and could not.

Gasping between clenched teeth, he fled into the woods.

He moved aimlessly at first, drove the inanition of his bones as fast as he could deep into the woodland with no aim except flight. But as sunset filled the hills, cluttered the trails with dusk, he bent his steps toward the town. The thought of people drew him like a lure. While he stumbled through the twilit spring evening, odd, irrational surges of hope jabbed his heart. At erratic intervals, he thought that the mere sight of a forthright, unrecriminating face would steady him, bring the extremities of his plight back within his grasp.

He feared to see such a face. The implicit judgment of its health would be beyond his endurance.

Yet he jerked unevenly on through the woods like a moth fluttering in half-voluntary pursuit of immolation. He could not resist the cold siren of people, the allure and pain of his common mortal blood. Help! He winced as each cruel hope struck him. Help me!

But when he neared the town-when he broke out of the woods in back of the scattered old homes which surrounded like a defensive perimeter the business core of the small town-he could not muster the courage to approach any closer. The bright-lit windows and porches and driveways seemed impassable: he would have to brave too much illumination, too much exposure, to reach any door, whether or not it would welcome him. Night was the only cover he had left for his terrible vulnerability.

Whimpering in frustration and need, he tried to force himself forward. He moved from house to house, searching for one, any one, which might offer him some faint possibility of consolation. But the lights refused him. The sheer indecency of thrusting himself upon unwitting people in their homes joined his fear to keep him back. He could not impose on the men and women who lived in sanctuary behind the brightness. He could not carry the weight of any more victims.

In this way-dodging and ducking around the outskirts of the community like a futile ghost, a ghoul impotent to horrify-he passed the houses, and then returned as he had come, made his scattered way back to Haven Farm like a dry leaf, brittle to the breaking point, and apt for fire.

At acute times during the next three days, he wanted to burn his house down, put it to the torch-make it the pyre or charnel of his uncleanness. And in many less savage moods, he ached to simply slit his wrists-open his veins and let the slow misery of his collapse drain away. But he could not muster the resolution for either act. Torn between horrors, he seemed to have lost the power of decision. The little strength of will that remained to him he spent in denying himself food and rest.

He went without food because he had fasted once before, and that hunger had helped to carry him through a forest of self-deceptions to a realization of the appalling thing he had done to Lena, Elena’s mother. Now he wanted to do the same; he wanted to cut through all excuses, justifications, digressions, defences, and meet his condition on its darkest terms. If he failed to do this, then any conclusion he reached would be betrayed from birth, like Elena, by the inadequacy of his rectitude or comprehension.

But he fought his bone-deep need for rest because he was afraid of what might happen to him if he slept. He had learned that the innocent do not sleep. Guilt begins in dreams.

Neither of these abnegations surpassed him. The nausea lurking constantly in the pit of his stomach helped him to keep from food. And the fever of his plight did not let him go. It held and rubbed him like a harness; he seemed to have the galls of it on his soul. Whenever the penury of his resources threatened him, he gusted out of his house like a lost wind, and scudded through the hills for miles up and down the wooded length of Righters Creek. And when he could not rouse himself with exertion, he lay down across the broken furniture in his living room, so that if he dozed he would be too uncomfortable to rest deeply enough for dreams.

In the process, he did nothing to care for his illness. His VSE-the Visual Surveillance of Extremities on which his struggle against leprosy depended-and other self-protective habits he neglected as if they had lost all meaning for him. He did not take the medication which had at one time arrested the spreading of his disease. His forehead festered; cold numbness gnawed its slow way up the nerves of his hands and feet. He accepted such things, ignored his danger. It was condign; he deserved it.

Nevertheless, he fell into the same fey mood every evening. In the gloom of twilight, his need for people became unendurable; it drew him spitting and gnashing his teeth to the outer darkness beyond the home lights of the town. Night after night he tried to drive himself to the door of a home, any home. But he could not raise his courage high enough to accost the lights. People within a stone’s throw of him remained as unattainable as if they occupied another world. Each night he was thrown back for companionship on the unrelieved aspect of his own weakness-and on the throbbing ache which filled his skull as the infection in his forehead grew.

Elena had died because of him. She was his daughter, and he had loved her. Yet he had trapped her into death.

She had never even existed.

He could find no answer to it.

Then, Thursday night, the pattern of his decline was broken for him. In the process of his futile ghosting, he became aware of sounds on the dark breeze. A tone rose and fell like a voice in oratory, and between its stanzas he heard singing. Disembodied in the darkness, the voices had a tattered, mournful air, like an invitation to a gathering of damned souls-verses and chorus responding in dolour to each other. Elena had been a singer, daughter of a family of singers. Fumbling his way through the benighted outskirts of the town, he followed the reft sorrow of the music.

It led him past the houses, around the town, down the road to the barren field which served as a parade ground whenever the town celebrated a patriotic occasion. A few people were still hurrying toward the field as if they were late, and Covenant avoided them by staying off the road. When he reached the parade ground, he found that a huge tent had been erected in its centre. All the sides of the tent were rolled up, so that the light of pressure lanterns shone vividly from under the canvas.

People filled the tent. They were just sitting down on benches after singing, and during the movement, several ushers guided the latecomers to the last empty seats. The benches faced in tight rows toward a wide platform at the front of the tent, where three men sat. They were behind a heavy pulpit, and behind them stood a makeshift altar, hastily hammered together out of pine boards, and bleakly adorned by a few crooked candles and a dull, battered gold cross.

As the people settled themselves on the benches, one of the men on the platform-a short fleshy man dressed in a black suit and a dull white shirt-got to his feet and stepped to the pulpit. In a sonorous, compelling voice, he said, “Let us pray.”

All the people bowed their heads. Covenant was on the verge of turning away in disgust, but the quiet confidence of the man’s tone stayed him. He listened unwillingly as the man folded his hands on the pulpit and prayed gently:

“Dear Jesus, our Lord and Saviour-please look down on the souls that have come together here. Look into their hearts, Lord — see the pain, and the hurt, and the loneliness, and the sorrow — yes, and the sin — and the hunger for You in their hearts. Comfort them, Lord. Help them, heal them. Teach them the peace and the miracle of prayer in Thy true name. Amen.”

Together, the people responded, “Amen.”

The man’s voice tugged at Covenant. He heard something in it that sounded like sincerity, like simple compassion. He could not be sure; he seemed to have learned what little he knew about sincerity in dreams. But he did not move away. Instead, while the people raised their heads from prayer, he moved cautiously forward into the light, went close enough to the tent to read a large sign posted at the side of the road. It said:

The EASTER HEALTH Crusade-

Dr. B. Sam Johnson

revivalist and healer

tonight through Sunday

only.

On the platform, another man approached the pulpit. He wore a clerical collar, and a silver cross hung from his neck. He pushed his heavy glasses up on his nose, and beamed out over the people. “I’m pleased as punch,” he said, “to have Dr. Johnson and Matthew Logan here. They’re known everywhere in the state for their rich ministry to the spiritual needs of people like us. I don’t need to tell you how much we need reviving here-how many of us need to recover that healing faith, especially in this Easter season. Dr. Johnson and Mr. Logan are going to help us return to the matchless Grace of God.”

The short man dressed in black stood up again and said, “Thank you, sir.” The minister hesitated, then left the pulpit as if he had been dismissed-cut off in the opening stages of a fulsome introduction-and Dr. Johnson went on smoothly: “My friends, here’s my dear brother in Christ, Matthew Logan. You’ve heard his wonderful, wonderful singing. Now he’ll read the Divine Word of God for us. Brother Logan.”

As he stepped to the pulpit, Matthew Logan’s powerful frame towered over Dr. Johnson. Though he seemed to have no neck at all, the head resting on his broad shoulders was half a yard above his partner’s. He flipped authoritatively through a massive black Bible on the pulpit, found his place, and bowed his head to read as if in deference to the Word of God.

He began without introduction:

"But if you will not hearken to me, and will not do all these commandments, but break my covenant, I will do this to you: I will appoint over you sudden terror, consumption, and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it; those who hate you shall rule over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like brass; and your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit."

"Then if you walk contrary to me, and will not hearken to me, I will bring more plagues upon you, sevenfold as many as your sins. And I will let loose the wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, so that your ways shall become desolate. I also will walk contrary to you, and I will bring a sword upon you, and shall execute vengeance for the covenant; and if you gather within your cities I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy."

As Matthew Logan rolled out the words, Covenant felt their spell falling on him. The promise of punishment caught at his heart; it snared him as if it had been lying in ambush for his grey, gaunt soul. Stiffly, involuntarily, he moved toward the tent as the curse drew him to itself.

“And if in spite of this you will not hearken to me, but walk contrary to me, then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and chastise you myself sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. My soul will abhor you. I will lay your cities waste. I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you; and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste."

“Then the land shall pay for its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate.”

Covenant ducked under an edge of the canvas and found himself standing beside an usher at the rear of the tent. The usher eyed him distrustfully, but made no move to offer him a seat. High on the platform at the other end, Matthew Logan stood like a savage patriarch levelling retribution at the bent, vulnerable heads below him. The curse gathered a storm in Covenant, and he feared that he would cry out before it ended. But Matthew Logan stopped where he was and flipped through the Bible again. When he found his new place, he read more quietly:

"Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world."

Slapping the Bible closed, he returned stolidly to his seat.

At once, Dr. B. Sam Johnson was on his feet. Now he seemed to bristle with energy; he could not wait to begin speaking. His jowls quivered with excitement as he addressed his audience.

“My friends, how marvellous are the Words of God! How quick to touch the heart. How comforting to the sick, the downtrodden, the weak. And how easily they make even the purest of us squirm. Listen, my friends! Listen to the Word of the Apocalypse:

"To the thirsty I will give water without price from the fountain of the water of life. He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son. But as for the cowardly, the unbelievers, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."

“Marvellous, marvellous Words of God. Here in one short passage we hear the two great messages of the Bible, the Law and the Gospel, the Old Covenant and the New. Brother Logan read to you first from the Old Testament, from the twenty-sixth chapter of Leviticus. Did you hear him, my friends? Did you listen with all the ears of your heart? That is the voice of God, Almighty God. He doesn’t mince words, my friends. He doesn’t beat around the bush. He doesn’t hide things in fine names and fancy language. No! He says, if you sin, if you break My Law, I will terrify you and make you sick. I will make the land barren and attack you with plagues and pestilence. And if you still sin, I will make cannibals and cripples out of you. ‘Then the land shall pay for its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate.’

“And do you know what the Law is, my friends? I can summarize it for you in the Words of the Apocalypse. ‘Thou shalt not be cowardly, or unbelieving, or polluted.’ Never mind murder, fornication, sorcery, idolatry, lies. We’re all good people here. We don’t do things like that. But have you ever been afraid? Have you ever faltered just a bit in your faith? Have you ever failed to keep yourself clean in heart and mind? ‘Then the land shall pay for its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate.’ The Apostle Paul calls a spade a spade. He says, ‘That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.’ But Jesus goes further. He says, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’

“Do I hear you protesting? Do I hear some of you saying to yourselves, ‘No one can be that good. I’m human. I can’t be perfect.’ You’re right! Of course, you’re right. But the Law of God doesn’t care for your excuses. If you’re lame, if you’ve got arthritis, if you’re going blind or your heart is failing, if you’re crippled, if you’ve got multiple sclerosis or diabetes or any other of those fancy names for sin, you can be sure that the curse of God is on you. But if you’re healthy, don’t think you’re safe! You’re just lucky that God hasn’t decided to ‘walk contrary to you in fury.’ You can’t be perfect, my friends. And the Law doesn’t care how hard you tried. Instead of telling yourself what a valiant try you made, listen to the Bible. The Old Covenant says to you as plain as day, ‘The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry, “Unclean, unclean.”

He held his audience in the palm of his hand now. The orotund resonance of his voice swept them all together in one ranked assembly of mortality and weakness. Even Covenant forgot himself, forgot that he was an intruder in this canvas tabernacle; he heard so many personal echoes and gleams in the peroration that he could not resist it. He was willing to believe that he was accursed.

“Ah, my friends,” Dr. Johnson went on smoothly, “it’s a dark day for us when illness strikes, when pain or dismemberment or bereavement afflict us, and we can no longer pretend we’re clean. But I haven’t told you about the Gospel yet. Do you remember Christ saying, ‘He who loses his life for my sake shall find it’? Did you hear Paul say, ‘When we are judged by the Lord, we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world’? Did you hear the writer of the Apocalypse say, ‘He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son’? There’s another side, my friends. The law is only half of God’s holy message. The other half is chastening, heritage, forgiveness, healing-the Mercy that matches God’s Righteousness. Do I have to remind you that the Son of God healed everyone who asked Him? Even lepers? Do I have to remind you that He hung on a cross erected in the midst of misery and shame to pay the price of our sin for us? Do I have to remind you that the nails tore His hands and feet? That the spear pierced His side? That He was dead for three days? Dead and in hell?

”My friends, He did it for only one reason. He did it to pay for all our cowardly, unbelieving, unclean sabbaths, so that we could be healed. And all you have to do to get healed is to believe it, and accept it, and love Him for it. All you have to do is say with the man whose child was dying, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ Five little words, my friends. When they come from the heart, they’re enough to pay for the whole Kingdom of Righteousness.”

As if on cue, Matthew Logan stood up and began singing in soft descant, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.” Against this background, Dr. Johnson folded his hands and said, “My friends, pray with me.”

At once, every head in the audience dropped. Covenant, too, bowed. But the wound on his forehead burned extravagantly in that position. He looked up again as Dr. Johnson said, “Close your eyes, my friends. Shut out your neighbours, your children, your parents, your mate. Shut out every distraction. Look inward, my friends. Look deep inside yourselves, and see the sickness there. Hear the voice of God saying, Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting.’ Pray with me in your hearts.

“Dear holy Jesus, Thou art our only hope. Only Thy Divine Mercy can heal the disease which riddles our courage, rots the fiber of our faith, dirties us in Thy sight. Only Thou canst touch the sickness which destroys peace, and cure it. We lay bare our hearts to Thee, Lord. Help us to find the courage for those five difficult, difficult words, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ Dear Lord, please give us the courage to be healed.”

Without a break, he raised his arms over the audience and continued, ‘ ‘Do you feel His spirit, my friends? Do you feel it in your hearts? Do you feel the finger of His Righteousness probing the sick spot in your soul and body? If you do, come forward now, and let me pray for health with you.”

He bowed his head in silent supplication while he waited for the repentant to heed his call. But Covenant was already on his way down the aisle. The usher made a furtive movement to stop him, then backed off as several members of the audience looked up. Covenant stalked feverishly the length of the tent, climbed the rough wooden steps to the platform, and stopped facing Dr. Johnson. His eyes glistered as he said in a raw whisper, “Help me.”

The man was shorter than he had appeared to be from the audience. His black suit was shiny, and his shirt soiled from long use. He had not shaved recently; stiff, grizzled whiskers roughened his jowls and cheeks. His face wore an uncertain aspect-almost an expression of alarm-as Covenant confronted him, but he quickly masked it with blandness, and said in a tone of easy sonority, “Help you, son? Only God can help you. But I will joyfully add my prayers to the cry of any contrite heart.” He placed a hand firmly on Covenant’s shoulder. “Kneel, son, and pray with me. Let’s ask the Lord for help together.”

Covenant wanted to kneel, wanted to submit to the commanding spell of Dr. Johnson’s hand and voice. But his knees were locked with urgency and inanition. The pain in his forehead flamed like acid gnawing at his brain. He felt that if he bent at all he would collapse completely. “Help me,” he whispered again. “I can’t stand it.”

Dr. Johnson’s face became stern at Covenant’s resistance. “Are you repentant, son?” he asked gravely. “Have you found the sick spot of sin in your soul? Do you truly ache for Almighty God’s Divine Mercy?”

“I am sick,” Covenant responded as if he were answering a litany. “I have committed crimes.”

“And do you repent? Can you say those five difficult words with all the honest pain of your heart?”

Covenant’s jaw locked involuntarily. Through clenched teeth, he said as if he were whimpering, “Help my unbelief.”

“Son, that’s not enough. You know that’s not enough.” Dr. Johnson’s sternness changed to righteous judgment. “Do not dare to mock God. He will cast you out forever. Do you believe? Do you believe in God’s own health?”

“I do”- Covenant struggled to move his jaw, but his teeth clung together as if they had been fused by despair- “I do not believe.”

Behind him, Matthew Logan stopped singing his descant. The abrupt silence echoed in Covenant’s ears like ridicule. Abjectly, he breathed, “I’m a leper.”

He could tell by the curious, expectant faces in the first rows of the audience that the people had not heard him, did not recognize him. He was not surprised; he felt that he had been altered past all recognition by his delusions. And even in his long-past days of health he had never been associated with the more religious townspeople. But Dr. Johnson heard. His eyes bulged dangerously in their sockets, and he spoke so softly that his words barely reached Covenant. “I don’t know who put you up to this but you won’t get away with it.”

With hardly a pause, he began speaking for the people in the tent again. “Poor man, you’re delirious. That cut is infected, and it’s given you a bad fever.” His public voice was redolent with sympathy. “I grieve for you, son. But it will take a great power of prayer to clear your mind so that the voice of God can reach you. Brother Logan, would you take this poor sick man aside and pray with him? If God blesses your efforts to lift his fever, he may yet come to repentance.”

Matthew Logan’s massive hands closed like clamps on Covenant’s biceps. The fingers ground into him as if they meant to crush his bones. He found himself propelled forward, almost carried down the steps and along the aisle. Behind him, Dr. Johnson was saying, “My friends, will you pray with me for this poor suffering soul? Will you sing and pray for his healing with me?”

In a covered whisper, Matthew Logan said near Covenant’s ear, “We haven’t taken the offering yet. If you do anything else to interrupt, I’ll break both your arms.”

“Don’t touch me!” Covenant snarled. The big man’s treatment tapped a resource of rage which had been damned in him for a long time. He tried to struggle against Logan’s grasp. “Get your hands off me.”

Then they reached the end of the aisle and ducked under the canvas out into the night. With an effortless heave, Brother Logan threw Covenant from him. Covenant stumbled and fell on the bare dirt of the parade ground. When he looked up, the big man was standing with fists on hips like a dark colossus between him and the light of the tent.

Covenant climbed painfully to his feet, pulled what little dignity he could find about his shoulders, and moved away.

As he shambled into the darkness, he heard the people singing, “Blessed Assurance.” And a moment later, a pathetic childish voice cried, “Lord, I’m lame! Please heal me!”

Covenant dropped to his knees and retched dryly. Some time passed before he could get up again and flee the cruel song.

He went homeward along the main road, defying the townspeople to hurt him further. But all the businesses were closed, and the street was deserted. He walked like a flicker of darkness under the pale yellow streetlamps, past the high, belittling giant-heads on the columns of the courthouse-made his way unmolested out the end of town toward Haven Farm.

The two miles to the Farm passed like all his hikes-measured out in fragments by the rhythm of his strides, a scudding, mechanical rhythm like the ticking of overstressed clockwork. The mainspring of his movement had been wound too tight; it was turning too fast, rushing to collapse. But a change had taken place in the force which drove him.

He had remembered hate.

He was spinning wild schemes for vengeance in his head when he finally reached the long driveway leading into Haven Farm. There in the cold starlight he saw a heavy sack sitting by his mailbox. A moment passed before he remembered that the sack contained food; the local grocery store delivered to him twice a week rather than face the risk that he might choose to do his shopping in person; and yesterday-Wednesday- had been one of the delivery days. But he had been so occupied with his restless fasting that he had forgotten.

He picked up the sack without stopping to wonder why he bothered, and carried it down the driveway toward his house.

But when he looked into the sack in the bright light of his kitchen, he found he had decided to eat. Vengeance required strength; there was nothing he could do to strike back against his tormentors if he were too weak to hold himself erect. He took a package of buns from the sack.

The wrapping of the buns had been neatly cut on one side, but he ignored the thin slit. He tore off the plastic and threw it aside. The buns were dry and stiff from their exposure to the air. He took one and held it in the palm of his hand, gazed down at it as if it were a skull he had robbed from some old grave. The sight of the bread sickened him. Part of him longed for the clean death of starvation, and he felt that he could not lift his hand, could not complete his decision of retribution.

Savagely, he jerked the bun to his mouth and bit into it.

Something sharp caught between his lower lip and upper gum. Before he could stop biting, it cut him deeply. A keen shard of pain stabbed into his face. Gasping, he snatched back the bun.

It was covered with blood. Blood ran like saliva down his chin.

When he tore open the bun with his hands, he found a tarnished razor blade in it.

At first, he was too astonished to react. The rusty blade seemed beyond comprehension; he could hardly believe the blood that smeared his hands and dropped to the floor from his jaw. Numbly, he let the bun fall from his fingers. Then he turned and made his way into the littered wreckage of his living room.

His eyes were irresistibly drawn to Joan’s picture. It lay face up under the remains of the coffee table, and the glass of its frame was webbed with cracks. He pushed the table aside, picked up the picture. Joan smiled at him from behind the cracks as if she had been caught in a net of mortality and did not know it.

He began to laugh.

He started softly, but soon scaled upward into manic howling. Water ran from his eyes like tears, but still he laughed, laughed as if he were about to shatter. His bursts spattered blood over his hands and Joan’s picture and the ruined room.

Abruptly, he threw down the picture and ran from it. He did not want Joan to witness his hysteria. Laughing madly, he rushed from the house into the woods, determined even while he lost control of himself to take his final breakdown as far away from Haven Farm as possible.

When he reached Righters Creek, he turned and followed it upstream into the hills, away from the dangerous lure of people as fast as his numb, awkward feet could carry him-laughing desperately all the while.

Sometime during the night, he tripped; and when he found himself on the ground, he leaned against a tree to rest for a moment. At once, he fell asleep, and did not awaken until the morning sun was shining full in his face.

For a time, he did not remember who or where he was. The hot white light of the sun burned everything out of his mind; his eyes were so dazzled that he could not make out his surroundings. But when he heard the thin, wordless cry of fear, he began to chuckle. He was too weak to laugh loudly, but he chuckled as if that were the only thing left in him.

The thin cry repeated itself. Inspired by it, he managed a fuller laugh, and started to struggle to his feet. But the effort weakened him. He had to stop laughing to catch his breath. Then he heard the cry again, a child’s shriek of terror. Supporting himself on the tree, he looked around, peering through his sun blindness at the dim shapes of the woods.

Gradually, he became able to see. He was perched high on a hill in the woods. Most of the branches and bushes were bursting with green spring leaves. A few yards from him, Righters Creek tumbled gaily down the rocky hillside and wandered like a playful silver trail away among the trees. Most of the hill below him was free of brush because of the rockiness of the soil; nothing obscured his downward view.

An odd splotch of colour at the bottom of the hill caught his attention. With an effort, he focused his eyes on it. It was cloth, a light blue dress worn by a child-a little girl perhaps four or five years old. She stood half turned toward him, with her back pressed against the black, straight trunk of a tall tree. She seemed to be trying to push herself into the wood, but the indifferent trunk refused to admit her.

She was screaming continuously now, and her cries begged at the anguish in his mind. As she yelled, she stared in unmasked terror at the ground two or three feet in front of her. For a moment, Covenant could not see what she was looking at. But then his ears discerned the low buzzing noise, and he picked out the ominous brown shaking of the rattle.

The timber rattler was coiled less than a yard from the girl’s bare legs. Its head bobbed as if it were searching for the perfect place to strike.

He recognized her terror now. Before the shout had a chance to burst past his blood-caked lips, he pushed himself away from the tree and started running down the hill.

The slope seemed interminably long, and his legs were hardly strong enough to sustain him. At each downward plunge, his muscles gave, and he almost fell to his knees. But the child’s irrefusable fear held him up. He did not look at the snake. He fixed his eyes on her bare shins, concentrated himself on the importance of reaching her before the rattler’s fangs jabbed into her flesh. The rest of her was blurred in his sight, as if she did not exist apart from her peril.

With each shrill cry, she begged him to hurry.

But he was not watching his footing. Before he had covered half the distance, he tripped-pitched headlong down the hill, tumbled and bounced over the rough rocks. For an instant, he protected himself with his arms. But then his head smacked against a broad facet of stone in the hillside.

He seemed to fall into the stone, as if he were burying his face in darkness. The hard surface of it broke over him like a wave; he could feel himself plunging deep into the rock’s granite essence.

No! he cried. No! Not now!

He fought it with every jot of his strength. But it surpassed him. He sank into it as if he were drowning in stone.