Sam leaped to his feet and slapped his hands together.
“You’ve put your finger on it, Phil! How can He permit such things to happen? That’s the whole point.”
“What about David?” I said.
Sam waved impatiently.
“Let’s look at it the other way. Supposing God did use His power to prevent evil, what would happen?”
“We’d all be a hell of a sight better off.”
“Materially, sure! But what about spiritually? If the innocent never suffered and the guilty never prospered, faith would be meaningless. We would be forced to acknowledge God’s existence. It’d be like trying to deny the law of gravity.”
I nodded.
“So you’re saying that baby got boiled alive as exhibit A in an ongoing theological demonstration?”
Sam smiled.
“God is both just and loving, Phil. He’s not into playing sadistic games. Never for a single moment does he permit one of his creatures to suffer.”
I stood up.
“What about when you beat up Ellie?” I demanded. “Are you saying her pain doesn’t really exist? That she’s just pretending to be hurt because she knows it turns you on?”
Sam searched me with his eyes.
“Ellie!”
The far door opened and Ellie walked toward us in her cotton robe.
“What?”
“Did you tell Phil here anything about our bedroom secrets?”
The look of betrayal she shot me was answer enough. Sam grabbed the rifle and jabbed the barrel into her stomach with a swift bayonet-like thrust. Ellie grunted and fell to the floor.
“Stop it!” I shouted.
Sam turned the rifle on me. He smiled lazily …
“I didn’t do that to punish her, Phil. I did it to enlighten you.”
Ellie lay at his feet, clutching her abdomen.
“Initiation usually takes us over a year,” Sam went on. “Sometimes longer. We don’t have that kind of time, so I’m having to come up with some new methods.”
He pointed to the injured girl.
“Tell me what she’s feeling, Phil.”
The rifle was still pointing at me.
“Is she in pain?” Sam asked.
“Of course.”
“How do you know?”
I fought to remain calm, to play this appalling game by the rules Sam had imposed.
“Because I know that if you get hit like that, it hurts.”
“That’s not what I asked, Phil. Sure, you’ve taken hits and they hurt. But how do you know this one hurt her?”
I stared at him blankly.
“You don’t!” he exclaimed. “You can’t! There’s simply no way we can ever know what another person is feeling, or whether they’re feeling anything at all!”
“‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’” I murmured. “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’”
Sam stepped over Ellie’s prone form, gesturing rhetorically with his free hand.
“Yeah, I remember that class. The professor, what was his name? That old guy in the tweed jacket. Remember how he set fire to his pocket one time, putting his pipe back when it was still lit?”
There was a low moan from the floor behind him. Sam turned and prodded Ellie with his boot.
“Get the kid,” he said. “Bring him back here.”
The girl got to her feet, bent over, still holding her stomach. Sam waved toward the bedroom.
“Come on, Phil.”
I followed. Sam evidently had a point to make, and since he was holding both my son and the gun it seemed best to let him make it. He threw the rifle down on the bed, picked up the binoculars and scanned the scene outside.
“Where were we?” he asked without looking round.
“You were saying that we can never be sure another person really feels pain,” I replied. “But by the same token, we can never be sure they don’t.”
“Wrong!” Sam retorted, whirling round. “That’s the whole basis of the Secret! All the top theologians and philosophers have wrestled with this for thousands of years, but they’ve never come up with the solution! That’s because you can’t get there using mere rational thought. God has fixed it that way, because if the truth ever got out, His plan for the world would be destroyed. But He reveals the Secret to a few people in every age so that it won’t be lost forever. It’s kind of like a covenant.”
I found myself nodding thoughtfully, as though we were discussing steelhead fishing techniques.
“And you’re one of those people?” I prompted.
Sam nodded.
“It all happened that night I dropped that shit on the way back from the bar. Right there in that crummy house in Minneapolis, with you guys snoring your heads off all around. Divine revelation can happen anywhere, I guess, like Jesus being born in a stable. But it wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really saw the significance of the whole thing. Even then I found it hard. I thought I was alone, you see. I thought I was the only person who had ever been granted this terrible vision of the truth. It seemed like a curse which I had to bear on behalf of all mankind.”
He sighed heavily.
“That was before I realized there was a tradition of the Secret stretching back to the beginning of recorded history. It has taken many different forms, but the one which inspired me to start this thing here was the Templars. They had this inner group of twelve Professed Knights who had all been initiated into the Secret. The great task I’ve been entrusted with is to re-create that holy community. I always wanted you to be part of it, Phil, from the very beginning. And now you will.”
He looked out of the window again.
“Let’s go back to the baby that got scalded to death,” he said. “How could God permit such a thing? That’s the question, right? OK, here’s the answer. He didn’t.”
I frowned.
“You mean it never happened?”
Sam leaned forward and fixed me with his intense stare.
“There was never any baby in the first place,” he whispered.
We confronted each other in silence. Sam kept staring at me fixedly, as though trying to will me into acquiescence.
“So what was there?” I asked.
“There was something that looked like a baby and sounded like a baby,” he went on in the same hushed undertone. “Only it wasn’t.”
He relaxed now, pulling back and breaking eye contact, as though the critical moment had passed.
“Think of it as a doll,” he said in his normal voice. “The most advanced doll in the world, a million times more realistic than anything you can buy in the shops. It mimics a baby perfectly, but inside it’s empty. It has no thoughts, no feelings, no capacity for joy or suffering. In a word, no soul.”
I tried to look as if all this made perfect sense, but that there were one or two details I hadn’t quite got straightened out.
“But if we have no way of knowing whether other people have feelings or not, then it’s impossible to distinguish the imitation baby from a real one. So the distinction is meaningless.”
Sam sighed and shook his head.
“You’re still thinking logically, Phil! It’s not just that baby we’re talking about here. It’s also the baby’s junkie mother and the abused wife in the apartment next door and the kid knocked down by a hit-and-run in the street outside and the guy dying of cancer in the hospital across town and the family of ten crushed in an earthquake who called for help for five days before dying. It’s every single victim of evil and injustice and catastrophe in the whole world ever since the beginning of time!”
I wondered if Ellie had brought David yet. Perhaps he was even now just a few yards away from me. But Sam had the gun, and I was increasingly convinced that he might be capable of using it. I had to keep him in play, at least for now. On the other hand, I knew he wouldn’t buy it if I just pretended to go along with everything he said. He had to believe he had convinced me intellectually.
“OK, let’s see if I’ve got this,” I said. “Bad stuff appears to happen, but it may not really, because we have no way of knowing whether the people it happens to are real.”