"They stopped Speaking," he said. "It happens after a while. It'll happen to Angel in a year or two."
"And then what?"
"Some other little girl will start to Speak."
"They've all been girls?"
"Sure," he said a little impatiently. "Look it up, it's all in the books. The Speakers change but the Voice remains the same."
"And what's the Voice?"
"The Voice gives the Church direction. It's always the same Voice. It's a Spirit, Simeon," he said. "Its name is Aton, or Alon in the first Revealings. The first Speaker, poor little Anna, had a cleft palate, she couldn't say her T's, and all the early writings called it Alon. See, the writings come through the Speaker, and they're spoken onto tape and then written down, so the first writings got it wrong. But the Voice is the same, and it doesn't seem to care what you call it. I've heard two Speakers, and they sounded pretty much alike. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is listen to the cassettes. They're only nineteen-ninety-five. And the content, of course, the content is the same from Speaker to Speaker."
"Aton is Egyptian. The God of the Sun."
"The voice is American. It's told us that, it's said that it was an American last time around."
"Can we get some coffee?" I was beginning to feel like I weighed six hundred pounds. I hadn't slept much since Sally Oldfield was killed.
"I've got some whiskey in my pocket," Skippy said unexpectedly. "You want to step outside?"
Back out in the parking lot, Skippy shivered in the breeze as he pulled out a silver hip flask that could have dated from the twenties. "Glenfiddich," he said. "About a hundred years old and smoked over peat bogs or something." He handed it to me first.
I'm not a whiskey drinker, but the first sip converted me. It was warm and smoky and smoother than an Irish lie. I felt a red line of heat, like a thermometer in reverse, snake down from my throat to my belly button.
"I knew there was a reason for grain," I said, "other than roughage I mean." I handed it back. The world looked a lot better. The cypresses, black against the spangling of stars, achieved the spiral harmony Van Gogh had painted. Skippy gulped twice and then burped.
"This is a no-no," he said, wiping his mouth and giving the flask back. "No drinking during the retreat."
"I thought there weren't any rules."
"Normally there aren't. But this thing, this retreat, is like a fat farm for the consciousness. Just like you're not supposed to slip away to Winchell's for a doughnut while you're losing weight, you're not supposed to cloud your consciousness while you're here."
I took a much longer swig this time. The flask held more than I'd thought. "Sounds reasonable," I said, swallowing. "Are you sure this stuff is legal?"
I was positive that Skippy's answer made sense, but it was hard to make it out around the neck of the flask, which was lodged between his lips. I hadn't eaten in hours, and I felt suddenly light-headed. "Damnaroonies," I said. "Gimme that."
He did. This time I was the one who burped. I tried to hand the flask back, but Skippy was looking at his watch and I almost dropped it. "Any minute now, she should be coming in," he said.
"Who?"
"Angel. And Mary Claire. Don't you want to see them?"
Since I still had the flask, I took another swipe at it. "Sure, I want to see them. Let's go."
"Just a minute." Skippy turned the flask to a ninety-degree angle and drained it. "You know," he said confidingly, "as a great statesman and drinker once said, there is some shit up with which I will not put. That's Winston Churchill, when some twit tried to edit his prose. Why shouldn't a sentence end with a preposition?"
"Every sentence has to end somewhere," I said. "Unless you're Marcel Proust."
"Prowst. I always pronounced it Prowst."
"Well, he's dead anyway. Are we going in, or what?"
"In," Skippy said, shoving the flask back into his pocket. "About the shit I won't put up with, though. I mean, why shouldn't I drink? In moderation, of course."
"That goes without saying." I hiccupped. "Moderation is the important thing." Skippy laughed. Together we wove our way back into the hall.
It seemed brighter and noisier than when we'd left it. Also a lot more cheerful. The whiskey hummed a little Irish jig in my veins.
"So what happens to them?"
"Who?" Skippy said, squinting in the light. He was making a slightly erratic line for the pastries, with me trailing behind.
"The ones who stop Speaking."
"They grow up, I guess. Well, one of them, anyway. The first speaker, Anna Klein, she and her mother got killed a few years back. Automobile crash. They were on their way to one of the Church's cable broadcasts-did you know the Church has its own cable show?"
"No. How would I? I don't watch TV."
"Well, they were driving down from Yosemite, where they lived, she and her mother, I mean, and they blew a tire on the Grapevine. On the long downhill. Totaled. Terrible thing. You want a bear claw?"
"I'll take the whole bear." Skippy lurched around to hand me a pastry and succeeded in mashing it against my hand. "Oops," he said.
"Gee, you still remember your line. Were they alone in the car?"
"Yeah, I think so. Let me get you another one."
"That's okay. My stomach doesn't know what it's supposed to look like. Whose fault was it?"
Skippy's face was red enough to make Listener Dooley give him a hard look from across the table. Dooley's whiskey nose quivered like a divining rod.
"Whose fault was what? The bear claw?"
"No. The accident. The bear claw was John Barleycorn's fault." I gave Listener Dooley a winning smile. "Great pastries," I said. "My compliments to the chef."
Skippy said, "The accident was the tire's fault."
Dooley twitched audibly and Skippy followed my gaze. '"Evening, Listener," he said genially. "What, no coffee?"
Dooley's little raisin eyes were nuggets of suspicion. "Mr. Miller " he began grimly, "alcohol is not…"I put a hand on Skippy's arm to steer him elsewhere.
A celesta rang out. Everyone looked at the far end of the room.
The bells were struck again and the crowd parted to admit Angel and Mary Claire. Both of them had changed clothes, the mother into a simple dark dress, and Angel into a sky-blue middy blouse with matching skirt. Her dazzling blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail now, and she looked like any other beautiful little girl. She held on to her mother's arm as though the presence of all the adults made her feel shy. She'd left the kitten backstage. There were four men with them, dressed alike in vaguely naval white jackets and dark trousers. A shimmer of coral behind them drew my eye, and I saw Dr. Merryman following along in their wake.
"I guess her stomach's better," Skippy said. "See, Simeon, she doesn't look like she's been through anything terrible."
"Who are the Gilbert-and-Sullivan sailors?"
"Ushers. They're supposed to take care of Mary Claire and Angel. Just in case of crazies, you know?"
People were pressing in on them now, squeezing past the Ushers to greet Angel and thank her for the Revealing. A couple of them shook her hand. Mary Claire's hand fell protectively onto her daughter's shoulder, but Angel ignored it. She exchanged polite words with the adults, and when a girl her own age came up to her, a friend, apparently, she whispered something and giggled.
"I want to meet them," I said.
"Sure," Skippy said, "no problem." We started toward them.
"What do I call her?"
"What do you mean? You think she's the Queen Mother or something? When she's not Speaking she's just a little kid. Call her Angel."
We were about ten feet from them when something behind us fell with a loud crash. I turned quickly to see the heavyset woman who'd asked for Skippy's autograph, looking mortally embarrassed in front of an overturned table of books. She and two Listeners started to pick them up. When I looked back at Angel, she was surrounded by a white wall of Ushers, as alert as Secret Service men, standing shoulder to shoulder. Merryman had one hand on Mary Claire's shoulder and the other on Angel's. His face was set and hard.