The Occupied Page 22

  “Too late,” Ashley said, and I gave a tight-lipped smile.

  I tossed my belongings and my shaving kit in my overnight bag, snatched my laptop, and trotted down to the front desk and checked out. The desk guy was still wearing his Braves cap. I wished him well for the rest of the baseball season, then fast-walked to my rental.

  I pulled out of the parking lot and headed away. In my rearview mirror I noticed a brown sheriff’s deputy cruiser slowly pulling up to the lobby.

  46

  The task was to find a place to crash for the night. But a new hotel didn’t seem like a good idea, as the deputies could put out a quick APB to every hotel in the area. I entertained the idea of simply giving myself up. What’s the worst that could happen?

  But the consequences were obvious. The sheriff could lock me up for a while and keep me from ever getting to the bottom of Bobby’s death, while their flimsy case proceeded against a conveniently undesirable defendant who was almost certainly innocent.

  I did a quick mental checklist. Bobby was my friend. God had given me a strange gift to sift out the demons among us. Because Bobby’s death had the same hallmarks as the demonic killings in New York, I was in the position to put this all together, to track down the hellish source and achieve some justice for my murdered friend. Ipso facto, I must be in Manitou because I was on a mission from God.

  Given that, and considering the ethical balance that had been taking place in my mind ever since my great awakening, I landed on the side of nonviolent civil disobedience, at least until I came up with some answers. Then Butch Jardinsky could do whatever he wanted with me. I even entertained the thought that I could finish my magazine article in jail at that point. Joining the ranks of some notables who had penned powerful stuff behind bars. Saint Paul, the apostle. John Bunyan. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Martin Luther King Jr.

  But, no, I didn’t belong in their ranks. Besides, I knew too much about jail. Not something to take lightly, especially considering that I was innocent of whatever Jeffery Opperdill had fabricated for the sheriff about our conversation. I needed a bed for the night. I knew I could always leave the jurisdiction of Manitou. The problem would be getting back in again.

  Then I remembered something. The back side of the parking area behind the Covenant Retirement Village, where Rev. Cannon lived. A parking spot hidden from view.

  I took a turn into an industrial area, heading for the opposite side of town, where the nursing home was located.

  As I rolled down the unlighted boulevard that cut through the industrial park, I glanced in my rearview mirror. I saw some headlights about a half mile behind me, coming through the intersection that was illuminated by the overhead streetlight. It was the brown squad car of the sheriff’s deputy, and he was coming up on me fast. At that point he hadn’t engaged his flashing blue lights yet.

  I needed to think fast. Was I committing a crime? Eluding an officer? One of my first criminal defense cases was exactly that, a guy chased by an officer over a curvy road where the officer took too long to turn on his lights. The jury acquitted my client, whereupon I advised my appreciative client to quickly plead guilty to the simple speeding ticket and be glad about it.

  The boulevard took a long curve to the left, and I floored my little Fiat. But it would be another couple of miles through the industrial area before I would reach the bypass that would take me to the retirement village. By then, out there in the open, the squad car would have its lights on and would be catching up to me and pulling me over.

  Funny the things that you remember in a pinch. This was the same part of the city where late at night I would recklessly race my ’68 Ford Fairlane down that wide-open boulevard when I was in high school. And I remembered something else. There was a shortcut to the bypass.

  It was an alley that cut in from the left, and it ran through an area full of warehouses on each side and ended up at a stop sign, right at the bypass.

  The alley appeared on my left, and I slowed down slightly, then turned my headlights off and skidded into a turn with my tires squealing as I entered the alley. I gunned my little Fiat straight down the narrow asphalt lane. There were a few yellow overhead lights among the warehouses, not enough to light the alley, but at least enough to give me a shadowy sense of whether I was staying on the asphalt.

  I throttled up the Fiat. To fifty miles an hour. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five. The outlines of buildings were whizzing by. I hope the alley is clear ahead.

  I looked in my rearview mirror. There was nothing behind me. Where was the squad? Maybe he had passed the alley that I was on.

  I looked ahead.

  But now, only seconds to react.

  Oh no . . .

  In the shadows, an empty trailer with its ramp down in my direction appeared in the middle of the alley. Just feet away. No time to avoid it.

  I jammed the accelerator down. My Fiat reached the ramp at aircraft takeoff speed and launched up the ramp and into the air over the trailer. I was airborne. Midair, the Fiat started to tilt backward. Impact upside down would crush me. I begged God for survival.

  But instead of flipping backward, the Fiat righted itself and then came down on all four tires with a bone-crushing crash. The Fiat skipped a few times like a stone on a lake. It was still running, but something was grinding under the hood. Was it the transmission?

  I hobbled to the end of the alley, then took the service road to the bypass and drove in the slow lane with my flashers on until I saw the turn-in to the nursing home. There were only a handful of cars in the front lot of the Covenant Retirement Village. I limped my Fiat to the back, behind the trees, parked it, and shut the engine off. I decided to spend the night there, and would have to figure things out in the morning.

  After my stunt driving, sleep was the last thing on my mind. So I booted up my laptop.

  Then, with my face bathed in the electronic glow of my laptop screen, a memory came to mind.

  Maybe the Fiat crash had jarred something loose in my head. Or maybe it was my race around that familiar industrial boulevard. Or simply being back in Manitou.

  Whatever the cause, at that moment it was right there in front of me, as if all those years had evaporated. And I was a teenager again, standing there in Mason Krim’s house. Looking at a painting on the wall. A picture of a dead Jesus who had just been taken off the cross.

  Thinking back to that painting, this one thing I was sure about: the wound depicted in the painting was on the left side of Jesus’ chest, just at the heart. The same place where the horribles had mutilated all their victims.

  And opposite the side where, according to Christian tradition, the spear had entered Jesus’ chest, as confirmed by Dr. Twilliger.

  So why did the painting in Mason Krim’s house have it the other way around? And why did he have a painting like that hanging in his house in the first place? He didn’t seem like the churchgoing type.

  Luckily I found a WiFi signal on my laptop, and I discovered the retirement village wasn’t particular about Internet security—no password required. I did an online search for paintings of Jesus, amazed at the massive number of depictions through the ages. I had to narrow my search. So I typed in a new keyword phrase: Dead Christ wound wrong side.

  That was when I found it, the famous painting. And Krim had a reproduction of it hanging in his house.

  I kept reading. The painting was by artist Édouard Manet back in the 1800s. It caused a scandal when it was publicly unveiled. First, because Manet attributed the inspiration for the painting to the Gospel of John, chapter 20, verse 12, which proved to be the wrong verse. In fact, that is the verse in John’s Gospel that says that Mary Magdalene ran to the tomb of Jesus but merely found it empty.

  But the second artistic mistake was even more fatal. Manet had depicted the wound from the soldier’s stabbing on the left side of Jesus’ chest, right by the heart. Critics derided Manet. The grotesque, ultra-realistic portrayal of the pale corpse of Christ, with its attribution to a Gospel vers
e that mentions only an empty tomb, and the placement of the wound on the wrong side of his chest could easily create the impression, right or wrong, that the artist may have had a hidden intent, a message mocking the death of Christ.

  I clicked off my laptop and moved the handle in the Fiat to lower the seat as far as it would go. Maybe I could get a few hours of sleep before daybreak. I knew what had to be done the next morning. There was one more aspect of my mysterious former neighbor Mason Krim that still had to be unraveled.

  47

  When daylight forced my eyes open, I called in the incident to the car rental office at the Milwaukee airport, followed quickly by a call to my insurance agent.

  Last was the call to a towing service. When I had tried to start the Fiat, I was greeted with a gritty, grinding noise and a pool of oil on the cement. Not that I needed to drive anywhere soon. I had business to take care of at the Covenant Retirement Village first.

  In the lobby I asked to see Rev. John Cannon. No, I told the desk person, he wasn’t expecting me, but I said it was urgent.

  A half hour later, Cannon and I were in the cafeteria together. I told Rev. Cannon that, yes, I would be more than happy to get him that extra serving of fruit that he wanted and another cup of coffee from the cafeteria breakfast bar. As I wandered over to fetch it for him, I wondered how exactly I was going to launch into my conversation. But with a wrecked rental car, sheriff’s deputies after me, and too many unanswered questions about my friend’s death, I decided to dive in feet first.

  So many years ago, my strange neighbor Mason Krim had mentioned something to me, and as I spoke with Rev. Cannon it weighed heavy on my mind. Something about Lutherans. So I asked him, “Did you make any enemies back when you were pastor of your church?”

  “As I told you last time . . . whenever that was . . . some of the members of Good Shepherd and the higher-ups in the synod, they were nervous when I preached about Satan and about demonic activity. And when, from time to time, I would share stories of my experiences with the powers of darkness on the mission field.”

  “Sure,” I shot back. “But I’m actually talking about more personal kinds of enemies. People who didn’t care for Lutherans like you for some reason.”

  He took a long time to think while he scraped the last bit of fruit out of the plastic cup with the spoon. Finally he shook his head.

  I dug deeper. “Does the name Mason Krim mean anything to you?”

  He put his spoon down. There was a look of recognition on his face. “How do you know that name?”

  “He was a neighbor of mine.”

  “I haven’t thought about Mason for a very long time.”

  “How did you know him, Rev. Cannon?”

  “He and his wife, and daughter too, were members of my church.”

  I had to take a moment to absorb that. “Tell me more.”

  “How important is this?” he asked. “I’m hesitant to talk about internal church business. Or about former members . . .”

  “It may be very important to my investigation.”

  Cannon took a moment. “Well, Mason’s wife died, and then his daughter, and of course he took it very hard, understandably. And became bitter. Angry. Probably at God, I suppose. But certainly aimed it at me. That can happen following a loss. Grief is such a heavy weight to bear. Then after that, he left the church.”

  “His wife and daughter died, how?”

  “His wife from cancer, as I recall. Then his daughter from kidney problems. As I understand it, the transplants failed.”

  I was trying to wrap this all together. It had to mean something. I decided to come clean about things.

  “Rev. Cannon, I believe that Bobby Budleigh was a target of demonic activity. He was mutilated in the same way as others back in New York City, where I used to live.” Then for the clincher. “The point is, I have this peculiar ability. And I am trying to use it in order to track down Bobby’s killer.”

  “Peculiar? Exactly how peculiar?”

  I explained in detail. After that, Cannon’s face told me that my use of the word peculiar may have been an understatement.

  “This ability of yours. I’m not sure I understand. When did it start?”

  “When my life back in New York City was collapsing. My marriage. My law practice. Everything. I had this moment when I prayed, sitting there in my office. Pleading with God.”

  “Tell me about that. About your pleading.”

  “I had this client, Elijah White. His life had been turned around in a dramatic way, and he told me once how it had happened. So that day, at my desk, I remembered it and it made sense. Or at least enough sense to give it a try. So I prayed.”

  “Prayed about what?”

  “About Jesus. And his death on the cross. As a pardon for every rotten thing I had ever done, and even for all the rotten things I had forgotten about. I sealed the deal. And somewhere in my mind I knew that I was entering into a completely different kind of transaction. An encounter. But not like any other. Sacred. The feeling that, at the other end of this, was the Creator of the universe, and that from then on things would never be the same.”

  “And they weren’t?”

  “Things changed. Including discovering my peculiar ability. To the point where I could sense when a particularly bad person had been taken over. Inhabited demonically. And then actually see them. The demons would become visible to me.”

  Cannon leaned back, his eyes transfixed inside the soft folds of flesh. “Become visible,” he said, repeating me.

  I nodded.

  Cannon shrugged. “The Bible speaks of a variety of gifts that the Lord bestows when a man ‘seals the deal’ in his heart about Jesus the Savior, as you put it. Discernment is one of them. Discerning the spirits. But in all my days, I have never heard it manifested like this. I’m not sure what to say.”

  I knew it was a big deal when a preacher found himself at a loss for words.

  He added, “Except to say this. You, sir, are walking on the edge. You must walk it straight.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “God’s Word is the road map. But the walking is left up to you. You are not alone. God does not fail. He empowers you. Christ in you, the everlasting hope. But the way is narrow. Sometimes daunting. A thin line, like a razor’s edge.”

  Razor’s edge. The phrase rang in my head and held no comfort. “These enemies that I encounter, they’re incredibly powerful.”

  “Yes,” Cannon agreed. “Part of the trio of forces you must deal with.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. One force is the world. Created in perfection. But now corrupted.”

  I had experienced enough of the world to understand that one.

  “Second,” Cannon went on, “is the flesh. The physical organism created to operate magnificently in a perfect world. But no more, because your physical being, your reasoning, and your senses are critically flawed—all of ours, from the very beginning. Since the fall of man.”

  “And the third?”

  “His name is Beelzebub.”

  For some reason that hit me funny, and I laughed at the arcane name. It sounded like something I had read in college. A deadly boring class on sixteenth-century literature.

  Cannon wasn’t perturbed by my reaction. He asked me, “Do you know what that name—that particular name of the devil—what it means?”

  I shook my head.

  “Lord of flies,” he replied.

  I suddenly remembered the filth and the stench and the death that was in the Manitou landfill, and the flies too. No more laughing.

  Cannon added, “We are no match for him.”

  More bad news. But then, that was no surprise. “What hope is there, then?”

  Cannon dipped his head. “There is a parable about an empty house. Jesus told the story. By ‘house’ he meant the body of a man. The house was swept temporarily clean by the best of human efforts. But because it was empty, unoccupied, it could still be overcome by demonic forces th
at are wandering in dry, barren places invisible to the eye, and seeking someone to inhabit.”

  I asked him again, “Where’s the hope? My enemy can crush me at any moment. Or worse, take me over.”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “Only empty, unoccupied houses are at risk. But you, on the other hand, are occupied by Christ. By God’s grace, and your faith. You see, it is not what comes against you that matters. It is who occupies you that counts. Christ, the guardian of your soul.”

  That triggered a memory. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My bizarre chat with Hanz Delpha as he paraded himself as the curator, just before he morphed into one of the horribles and attacked me.

  “The Guardian King,” I said, repeating the phrase that had given Delpha convulsions when he struggled to speak it. “The Guardian King who crushes demons underfoot.”

  “Interesting,” Cannon said. “I like that.” He leaned forward and once more patted me on the arm. “Take heart. He commands powerful angels, messengers of light to guard you. Tell me about the demons you’ve seen.”

  I shuddered and told him about each hideous appearance.

  “How perfect,” he said in a hushed voice, “how accurate are those portraits of the demonic.”

  I missed his point.

  He explained. “That demonic wild beast, like a hyena that breaks in from the dry, empty wilderness as a murderous scavenger. Next, the violent bird god, figurehead from a doctrine of demons, worshipped ignorantly in ages past. And last, the demon you encountered in the alley in New York, the one without eyes. Demons are blind to the truth.”

  At that point he raised a wrinkled hand and pointed his finger at me. “But beware the demon who brings to you the lie that is beguiling. The most dangerous demon of all.”

  Then, changing directions quickly, Cannon asked how I had avoided destruction during those encounters. I told him how, during the jail conference with Dunning Kamera, one minute he had morphed into an angel of death and the next, after I cried out to heaven in a panic, he was transformed into my client again. And then there was the mysterious guard in the museum in New York who appeared from nowhere. And again, in my hotel in Manitou, a flash of light that drove a shadowy creature from my room.