“In my research, I sometimes come across apocalyptic fears associated with specific locations: a flood that will destroy a particular area or a hill where the Second Coming will occur,” Professor Graham said. “But I don’t believe Reich was afraid the world would end. As the manuscript continues, what he really seems afraid of is the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires — and a person. Another minister, in fact. A man named Owen Pentecost.”
“Pentecost?”
“In the Bible, when the Holy Spirit descended on Christ’s apostles, they had visions. The transcendent experience was called Pentecost.”
“Good name for a minister. Too good to be true, I bet. Sounds like he made it up.”
“Reich’s manuscript describes how Reverend Owen Pentecost, who was tall and extremely thin and wore black, who had long hair and a beard that made him look like Abraham Lincoln, walked into Avalon nine months earlier, in April. There was a terrible drought. Winds caused dust storms. Pentecost seemed to materialize from one of the dust clouds. A man looking for a cow that wandered from its pen saw him first, and the first words out of Pentecost’s mouth were ‘The end of the century is coming.” “
“Sounds like he had some theatrical training,” Balenger said.
“Or else he was crazy. When he reached Avalon, the first thing he did was march down the main street and up a hill to the church. Reich wasn’t there. He was taking care of a sick child. The next people to meet Pentecost were a man and woman who ran the general store and supervised the upkeep of the church. They found Pentecost praying in front of the altar. He had a sack with him. It squirmed.”
“Squirmed?”
“We learn why it squirmed in a later section of the manuscript. In the coming weeks and months, Reich spoke to everyone who had contact with Pentecost. He summarizes conversations. When the couple in the church asked Pentecost if they could help him, the newcomer explained that he had come a long way. He could use food and water, but first he needed to know if anyone in town was ill. They told him that a boy was very sick with sharp pains in his lower right abdomen. The boy also had a fever and was vomiting.”
“Sounds like appendicitis,” Balenger said.
“Indeed. At the time, appendicitis was almost a death sentence. Few physicians had the surgical skills to remove the diseased organ. Even if a physician knew how to perform the operation, anesthetic in the form of ether was hard to find on the frontier. An operation without it risked killing the patient because of pain-induced shock. Avalon didn’t have any ether.
“When Pentecost reached the sick boy, he found Reich praying with the boy’s father. Because Avalon’s doctor left a year earlier, Reich also functioned as a sort of male nurse because of medical knowledge he acquired in his years of administering to sick members of his church. But appendicitis was far beyond Reich’s skills. Basically, Reich and the father were on a death watch. Pentecost asked if there was a forest nearby. In the mountains, Reich told him, but how would that help the boy? Was there anything closer? Yes, there was a grove of aspen by the lake. Reich, who was curious about the newcomer, accompanied Pentecost to the aspens, but there, Pentecost told him to wait and entered the trees by himself. A short while later, Pentecost returned with herbs he’d gathered. At the boy’s home, he made a tea from the herbs and encouraged the boy to drink it. The boy fell into a stupor. Pentecost then operated on him.”
“Operated?”
“Not only did he operate,” Professor Graham said, “but the boy survived. Pentecost then asked permission from Reich to conduct a church service and give public thanks to the Lord for saving the boy. During his sermon, he opened the sack and dumped its contents on the floor. You asked what was in it. Snakes. People screamed and charged toward the door, but Pentecost stomped the head of each snake without being bitten and told the congregation that they must be vigilant and stomp out evil just as he had stomped the snakes.”
“The guy definitely had a sense of drama,” Balenger said. “Those herbs he found. It’s awfully convenient that the exact ingredients he needed were in that grove but nobody else knew about them. Any bets that he already had a sedative hidden in his clothes and he added it to the tea when no one was looking?”
“As a former police officer, you see the manipulation from the distance of more than a century, but at the time, in that isolated mountain valley, it would have been hard to resist the spell Pentecost was weaving. I can’t explain the surgery. Maybe he took a risk and happened to succeed, or maybe he had medical training.”
Balenger felt the seconds speeding by. Amanda, he kept thinking. “Tell me about the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires.”
“We’re not certain what it was, but it sounds like a time capsule. Of course, the term wasn’t invented until the New York World’s Fair in 1939, but the concept’s the same. With each day, Pentecost emphasized that a new century was coming. He warned that their souls would soon be tested, that the Apocalypse was on its way. As autumn approached, he urged everyone to select the physical things they most cared about. In December, he ordered them to put these cherished objects into the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. ”Vanity. All is vanity,“ he told them. ”As the new century begins, material things will no longer matter.“”
“What did the Sepulcher look like?”
“No one knows.”
Balenger couldn’t subdue his frustration. “What?”
“Reich’s manuscript was hurried. He leapt from topic to topic, trying to compress as much information as he could in the limited time he had before midnight arrived — midnight of what was possibly the last day of the world. The passage you read indicates that he planned to put the pages into the Sepulcher. But then his courage snapped, and he fled, cramming the unfinished pages into his clothes.”
“Okay, the Sepulcher wasn’t described in the manuscript,” Balenger said. “But Reich could have told the doctor what it was.”
“Reich never became fully conscious. The infection from his injuries spread through him like a storm. He lapsed into a coma and died the next day.”
“The Sepulcher was supposed to contain all the treasured objects of the town, so it must have been large,” Balenger said. “Didn’t anybody find it later? The people in Cottonwood must have been curious. Surely, when spring came and the snow melted, they’d have gone to Avalon to learn what was happening there.”
“Indeed, they did.”
“Then…?”
“They never found anything that they thought might be the Sepulcher.”
“But the people in Avalon could have shown them where the Sepulcher was. A name like that, it was probably buried in the cemetery.”
“The search party from Cottonwood found a deserted town. The buildings were abandoned. There wasn’t any sign of violence, of the population having been caught by surprise. No half-eaten meals on tables. No objects on the floor that might have been dropped in a sudden panic. On the contrary, everything was neat and tidy. Beds were made. Clothes were hung up. There were gaps in the rooms, where furniture might have been removed or vases or pictures carried away. Even pets were gone. As for the larger animals — pigs, sheep, cows, and horses — those were found dead on the grassland, killed either by the freezing weather or starvation.”
“This doesn’t make any… How many people lived in Avalon?”
“Over two hundred.”
“But that many people can’t just disappear and not leave a trace. They must have gone to another town.”
“There’s no record of that,” Professor Graham said. “As word of the mystery spread, someone from Avalon who’d packed up in the middle of winter and moved to another town would have explained what happened. Out of two hundred people, someone would have spoken up.”