They were just getting their picket line organized when they spotted him. He heard cries of "Look! There's a priest!" and "A priest! A priest!"
When he reached the open gate, a slim, pale young man stepped forward to meet him.
"What's the meaning of this?" Bill asked, straining to appear calm and concerned.
"Have you been sent here to exorcise him, Father?" the man said.
"What in God's name are you talking about?"
"In God's name, yes, very apt, very apt. I'm Martin Spano. The Spirit has sent us here to expose this abomination for who he is."
"And just who do you think he is?"
"Why, the Antichrist, of course."
He seemed shocked that Bill did not know. Bill felt his control begin to slip.
"That's ridiculous! Where did you get such an idea?"
"He's a clone, Father! A group of cells taken from one man and grown into the shape of another in a blasphemous attempt to play God! But he is not a man! He is a mere cutting! He is born not of man and woman, and as such he has no soul. He is a tool of Satan, an avenue for the Antichrist to enter into this world!"
Bill was impressed with the force of the man's conviction and momentarily taken aback by the outré logic of his words. If you bought all that Revelations mumbo jumbo, you could probably be convinced that this fellow was on to something here.
"I assure you," Bill said in his loudest voice, addressing the crowd as well as their young leader, "that you have nothing to fear from Mr. Stevens. I've known him most of my life, and he is not—I repeat, not—the Antichrist!"
This seemed to slow the crowd, but not as much as Bill would have liked. A couple of them lowered their signs, but the rest stood and waited.
Their leader was taking no chances, however. He turned to them and held up his arms.
"Wait a minute!" he cried. "lust wait!" Then he turned back to Bill. "What is your name, Father?"
"Father William Ryan."
"Of what order, may I ask?"
"The Society of Jesus."
"Ah!" he said, his face lighting as if he had just had a revelation. "A Jesuit! One of the intellectuals of the Church! One of those modern priestly rationalists who would put the human mind above faith! A follower of the Black Pope!"
"That's not true at all!" Bill said. "You're making—"
"Obviously the Spirit has bypassed your unreceptive heart and settled in ours! We have been called, and it is our mission to spread the word of Truth about this man so that no matter where he goes he will be shunned and cast out by the faithful, and his words of sedition against Jesus Christ and his Church will fall on deaf ears! But the Evil One obviously has your ear already, so we will not listen to you!"
A woman beside Spano suddenly dropped her sign and raised her hands. She began babbling in an alien-sounding tongue that resembled nothing Bill had ever heard before.
"Do you hear?" Spano cried. "Even now the Spirit is with us, telling us not to be swayed by this fallen priest! We stay to spread the warning about the Antichrist within! Let us join hands and pray!"
As they clustered together, grasping hands and saying the Our Father, Bill realized there was no way he could reason with this bunch. Their Pentecostal fervor frightened him. No telling what they would do if they got onto the grounds. So while they were praying, he stepped over to the iron gate and swung it across the driveway. As the gate struck the stop on the brick column to his left, the lock clanked closed automatically.
Spano glared at him as he looked up from their prayer.
"You can't lock out the word of God, Father Ryan!"
"I know," Bill said pointedly. "But I haven't heard any of it here."
Restless and uneasy, he stood and watched the group as it murmured its prayers, remembering someone's comment about the intelligence of a crowd being inversely proportional to its size. He hoped no one did anything stupid. At least the gate barred them from the grounds. That gave him a little comfort. Since reason seemed a useless tool here, Bill turned his back on them and returned to the house.
11
"So I'm the Antichrist, am I?" Jim said after Bill had related his conversation with the kooks outside. He had spotted the crowd out front and had watched Bill talk to them. When Bill returned, he had met him at the door. "I love it!"
"Jim, please!" said Carol, at his left by the window. "This isn't funny."
"Of course it is! It's a gas!"
He could tell by their expressions that no one agreed with him, least of all Ma. She looked angry and afraid. Jim had to admit to a certain discomfiture himself. He knew he wasn't the Antichrist. Hell, he'd stopped believing in that sort of dreck back in his days at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion! That didn't mean he liked other people believing he was the devil or whatever.
But that bit about not having a soul… that was kind of creepy. It showed some pretty original thinking on the part of those nuts out there. Jim wasn't sure he believed in souls, anyway. As far as he could see, you were born, you did your best at what you had to do for as many years as you could, and then you died. That was it. No soul, no heaven, no hell, no limbo, no purgatory.
But what if there really was such a thing as a soul?
And what if he didn't have one?
Despite all his innate skepticism, despite his contempt for religion and mysticism and spiritualism and all the other isms that people used throughout the ages to insulate themselves from the cold, hard realities of existence, he knew deep inside that if such a thing as a soul existed, he wanted one.
"I've a good mind to call the cops," his mother said. "Have Sergeant Hall come out and tell them all to get lost! That'll end this fiascal!"
"Fiasco, Ma," he said. "But stay put. I'll scare them off."
He was besieged by protests from all sides but he ignored them and hurried out the door. This might be fun.
Behind him, he heard Carol say, "I'm calling the police!"
12
"Who's this coming now?" said Mr. Veilleur from beside her in the backseat of Martin's car.
Grace gasped as she recognized the figure approaching the gate from within. "That's Jim!"
"The clone? The one they think is this Antichrist?"
"Yes! Walking right up to them!"
"Pretty courageous for someone who's supposed to be the 'spawn of the Devil,' don't you think?"
"I don't know what to think," she said, remembering the smoke rising from Henry's old house, and now this. She felt utterly miserable.
"You're not alone," Mr. Veilleur said in a gentle voice. "Neither does anyone else."
13
"Hi, folks!" Jim said, strolling up to the gate with his hands in his pockets, looking as casual as he could. "What's up?"
"Who are you?" said the skinny guy who had been talking to Bill earlier. Spano was the name, if Jim correctly remembered what Bill had said.
"Oh, you know me, don't you, pal? I'm Jim Stevens, alias the Antichrist."
There were cries of astonishment from the group. Some of them even scuttled away and hid behind others. It was all Jim could do to keep a straight face. Even their leader took a step back. His voice shook as he spoke.
"You… you admit it?"
"Sure. I came into the world to really mess it up for you Christian types. You know, spread sin and fear and war and disease and bring on Armageddon. That sort of stuff. But to tell you the truth, I can't find a place to begin."