Peter James - Perfect People

Everyone is being seduced by science. All the world leaders. They’re hoping science will find a cure for AIDS, forgetting science caused it in the first place. Scientists cured bubonic plague and smallpox, but what did that do for the human race? Overpopulation.

The Lord has his own way of dealing with overpopulation. He had the balance of nature just fine, until scientists came along and messed it all up.

And think about this, my friend, next time you take a walk down there in the sewers and feel your lungs getting all choked up. Who is responsible? God or scientists?

Just remember the words of St Paul to Timothy. ‘Guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from Godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith.’

Here endeth the 17th Tract of the 4th Level of the Law of the Disciples of the Third Millennium.

In a room in a house that was as spartan as a monk’s cell, high up on a mountain in the Rockies, thirty miles north of Denver, the young Disciple, working out his forty days of solitude, seated on a simple wooden stool in front of a computer, was learning each Tract by rote. He was repeating the words that had arrived in an email an hour ago, and that would shortly be erased, over and over in his head.

Everything had to be remembered. Nothing was ever to be retained in writing. Rule Four.

His name was Timon Cort. His hair was shaven to ginger stubble. He wore a fresh white T-shirt, grey chinos, sandals and oval glasses. Twice a day he ran the two-mile dirt track to the bottom of the private mountain and back up again without stopping. A further two hours a day he spent working out on the exercises he had been given to strengthen his body. The rest of the time he divided, as he had been instructed, between learning, reading the Bible, prayer and sleep.

He was blissfully happy.

For the first time in twenty-nine years, his life had meaning. He was needed. He had a purpose.

When he came down from the mountain at the end of his initiation, he would be entrusted with a Great Rite. If he carried this out successfully, he would then become a full Disciple. He would be married to Lara, a woman beyond his dreams, with her long dark hair and skin like warm silk, with whom he had spent one night before coming up this mountain, one night that in part sustained him throughout his solitude, and in part tormented him. Sometimes, instead of prayer, he counted the days to the next time he might see her. And always, afterwards, he prayed for forgiveness.

The Great Rite, then the eternal love of God expressed through Lara. You had to understand what it felt like to be wanted and loved, after a lifetime of people telling you that you were no good. A lifetime of being passed over by your father because your brother was so much smarter, so much better at baseball and football and life in general. By your mother, because you hadn’t taken any of the career paths she dreamed of for you. Because you got caught stealing some no-big-deal bits and pieces from a drugstore. Because you got six months suspended for dealing cannabis.

Passed over by your classmates, who thought you were weird, because you were too short, too physically weak, and that you never had anything to say that was worth listening to. By your teachers, who never thought you amounted to anything, and who turned you into a stammering wreck whenever you tried to show them that you were not as dumb as they thought.

That was all changed now. The Disciples loved him. Jesus loved him. Lara loved him.

All he had to do was learn the Forty Tracts. Then come down from the mountain and perform the Grand Rite of Passage – a killing in the name of the Lord of some of Satan’s progeny. A name that would be given to him. It could be a single child, or an entire family. Or maybe even several families.

And he would have done something towards making the world a better place.

And God would give him Lara as a reward. And they would live for the rest of their lives in the right hand of God. And dwell in God’s house ever after.

Naomi’s Diary

John swears Phoebe looks like him and Luke looks like me. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t see that at all. At five weeks old all I see is Fat Face and Thin Face. Mr Grumpy and Miss Calm. Mr Noisy and Miss Quiet.

Now I’m beginning to think of all the things we should have asked Dr Dettore to do. Like some gene that would make a baby sleep twenty-four hours a day until it becomes an adult. And never need food.

I’m exhausted. I feel like I’ve climbed a mountain every day since Luke and Phoebe came home, four weeks ago. I haven’t even had time for a bath! Seriously! I grab a shower when John is around, and that’s about it. I’m spending all my time washing faces, feeding them, changing nappies, loading and unloading the washing machine, ironing clothes. And just to add to the fun, Luke got colic when he arrived home and screamed hour after hour for a week.

I wept with joy when we first drove them home from the hospital. I remember that same feeling when the nurse handed Halley to us and we suddenly realized he was our baby! Ours alone. It’s an incredible feeling.

Mum is staying and that is a help (at times, anyway), and Harriet stayed a couple of days and was a big help, too. Otherwise there seems to have been a stream of visitors. Nice to see them all, but it just creates even more work. It seems everyone is fascinated by the idea of twins, as if they’re some kind of freaks.

John’s mother is coming over from Sweden next week to see her grandchildren. She’s a nice lady but with her deteriorating eyesight she’s going to be more work for me, rather than any help. She can’t be left alone in a strange house for one minute. But she’s so excited about seeing her grandchildren, bless her!

Our finances, already at a low ebb, are being drained further. Two of everything. I wish I could contribute, but there’s no way I could think about a job at this moment. I just stagger from feed to feed. And they are growing at an incredible rate. The paediatrician is surprised, but he says it’s a good sign.

Definitely beginning to regret our decision to live in such an isolated place. I’d like to see something other than sheep and birds, and trees bending in the wind. I feel peaceful for a while after visitors have left, but then I start to long for John to arrive home.

It’s OK for him, he spends all day out in the real world, talking to colleagues, having lunch with them, then comes home to his recreational toys, to his little babies and his little wifey.

One of them’s crying now. Which means the other will be crying, too, in a minute. Feed and change. Feed and change. My nipples hurt like hell. I’m some kind of a milk cow. A servant to them. I don’t remember Halley ever being this demanding.

I’m sounding hacked off. Well, I am hacked off. Having twins isn’t twice as hard as having one baby, it’s ten times as hard.

Her voice startled him, cutting through the New Age music of a harp across breaking waves that wafted through the room.

‘What is it you are looking at, John? What are you trying to see?’

He pressed the shutter then turned to Naomi. ‘Phoebe’s now very definitely a miniature copy of you!’

‘That’s not answering my question,’ she replied tartly.

He looked away awkwardly, staring around the room. It was pretty and cheery; the high, beamed ceiling and west-facing dormer window made it feel light and airy, even on a gloomy morning like this. They had decorated it themselves, with candy-striped curtains, and a jungle frieze running around the walls.

It was Saturday morning. John had cancelled his regular tennis game with Carson Dicks because he had seen how exhausted Naomi was, and wanted to give her as much help this weekend as he could. Unlike Naomi, her mother was not very domesticated. She could barely cook, and most appliances remained enigmas to her.