“No! All that was real! It all is real!”
“You wanted them to be real. It’s been your death-dream. You never stole a soul from anyone.”
“I did too!”
“Did not.”
“Did too!”
Ryan chuckles. He crosses his arms. His nubbed fingers grip his elbow. “Time to get warm again, Ben. We can take it slow, if you want.”
Ben recoils. “Listen to me. Just shut up and hear me out! The Master told me all about you, Ryan. He told me where you preached, and there you were! He told me where you lived, and here you are! It wasn’t just lucky guesses!”
“I made those suggestions to you, and you assumed it was your Master talking. You were so into the hell game with all those self-imposed rules and expectations. But you’ve played at it long enough. It was time you and I had a little talk. Face to face.”
“Who are you?” Ryan wails. Then he stops. He shakes his head. He stares.
“Oh, Christ.”
Ryan laughs lightly. “Not this time. Just Ryan.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Shit…just look at you!”
“I know. A bit dramatic.”
“So you really aren’t a preacher?”
Ryan just smiles.
“Who are all those others? The Discards?”
“Some are angels in human form, here to help me out. Others, they’re truly as they are. As I have made them. Good people. Perfect. Innocent.”
“You preached to them as a person, what, for months already? And what about them now? You’ll go off and leave them alone?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered. One of the angels’ll take over. And I’ll be watching and listening, of course.”
Ben’s fists, which were clenched, begin to loosen. He licks his lips, runs his tongue along the hole in his cheek. “You put on this whole scenario just for me?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think you’ve put yourself in hell long enough?”
“I…” Ben mind crashes back to the wreck, his drunken stupor, how he’d crawled out of the car and ran away, thinking if he didn’t see his daughter dying then she surely couldn’t be dying. But she was. And she did. Thinking he could not have done what he did. But he had. Julie, the little girl scared of Santa. The older girl who loved every stray dog that ever came along. The almost-a-teen, excited because her father had just bought a brand new yellow convertible. The kid who knew nothing of drunks and idiocy and irresponsibility. Reduced by his pathetic defenses and denials that he took his own life to escape. Ben begins to weep.
“You okay, Ben?”
“I’m….I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry for what I did. I’m so goddamned fucking sorry! What I did was horrible! The worst!”
“It was.”
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
Ryan nods. “I know.”
Ben clenches his skeletal fists. “Oh, God, Julie, forgive me! Please forgive me!”
“That’s all we wanted to hear. Now come here.”
“No! I can’t! You’re too hot!”
“You’re warming up already.”
“I can’t!”
“Come here. It’ll be fine.”
Ben wipes tears and snot from his face, and slowly, hesitantly, scoots over to Ryan, his hands palming the uneven flooring, his twisted legs scraping out behind him like thin, fleshy contrails. He feels Ryan’s intense heat licking his skin, but as he gets closer and bears into it, it eases. When he reaches Ryan’s feet, there is only warmth.
“See?” asks Ryan.
“Yeah. Wow.”
“You ready to shed that skin of yours? It’s really just an illusion, anyway.”
“I guess.”
Ben looks down at the floor. He sighs. All this, all he’s been through, his imagination. His spirit wrangling itself, punishing itself.
He looks up.
There, hovering over him, standing where Ryan had stood, is the Master. Dark, cold, red-eyed and claw-handed, snarling and stinking of ash and sulfur. Ben shrieks and covers his face and wails.
“Ben, I’m kidding with you!”
Ben looks up again. Ryan is there once more, a sheepish smile on his distorted face. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Not funny?”
“Damn! No, not funny!”
“Okay, okay. I apologize. But dealing with sin and death and life and eternity, sometimes you can appreciate a sense of humor. You know that. You’re pretty funny yourself. You crack me up sometimes. All those jokes.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I like that.”
Ben feels the corners of his mouth tug into a small smile.
“Hold still now,” said Ryan. He reaches out and touches Ben’s forehead, and in that instant Ben finds himself standing straight and steady. His headache is gone. He is warm. And Ryan is no longer in the Ryan body, but is transformed into Light.
“Just don’t tease me like that anymore, okay?” Ben asks.
“I won’t. I promise,” says God. He reaches for Ben’s hand. Ben’s fears fall away. “I love you. And I never break my promises. Oh, and did you hear the one about the one-legged devil who went into the car wash, looking for a whiskey?”
“Yeah. I made that one up.”
“Oh, that’s right. That was good…really good! Got a big chuckle out of that. Glad to have you back, Ben. Glad to have you back.”
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SINEATER
The Bram Stoker Award-Winning Novel
PROLOGUE
1979
The young boy stands by his mother’s bed, watching her scream.
Beside the boy is his younger sister, a tiny blond-haired five-year-old. The little girl’s pale hair is plastered to her cheeks with tears and sweat. Her eyes are tightly closed. They wince with each scream. It is mid-June, and the room is hot and wet like a soaked wool blanket.
At the foot of the bed, sitting on a kerosene can, is the teenaged midwife. Her name is Jewel Benshoff. Jewel’s eyes are nearly closed, too. The boy knows she does not want to be in this room; she does not want to be birthing the child who is soon to come. The boy’s own fear terrifies him. But the midwife’s fear excites him.
Curry Barker, the seven-year-old boy, the oldest of the two children, does not close his eyes. It is his duty to watch his mother. She said a new baby was the family’s business, and it was not a private thing. Curry can see his mother’s private things, though. They are splayed out between her spread legs, hairy and gaping and red. He makes himself look at them, and at the blood and wetness running out onto the mattress.
Curry’s mother screams into the dishrag clamped in her teeth. She bucks her shoulders. Her fingers slash the air. Mottled, leaf-stained sunlight from the cabin window patterns her face. The rest of the room is dark, the walls of black wood and pitch. The mother’s feet flex in the darkness, then draw up and push out violently. She takes a breath, a moment of silence, allowing faint goat bleats to be heard from outside. Then she screams again. The sound is loud and long, a throaty wail that rattles the bed frame.
Birthing is a family matter. Curry is there. His sister, Petrie, is there.
But, of course, the father is not there.
“Feel it coming!” cries the mother around the rag.
Curry clamps his teeth down. His eyes want to shut but he makes them stay open, and they sting. He watches the place between his mother’s legs for it to come. The blood reminds him of the blood of the chickens he kills for the family meals; of the fresh, stinking blood of the deer his mother is teaching him to hunt. The white of the mattress makes him think of the white muscle of the stripped oak branches his mother is training him to form into simple baskets. Jewel’s bloodied, grasping fingers make him think of the hands of the damned in the lake of fire of the Bible, reaching out for pity and salvation.