Warren Murphy: Prophet Of Doom

Sections of the new ceiling were designed to roll away, and Esther noticed as they approached the building that the skylights were wide-open. Bursts of phosphorescent yellow smoke puffed from the roof holes and hung ominously in the hazy black sky.

Kaspar met them at the main entrance.

"What the hell are you wearing?" Esther whispered to him.

Kaspar's outfit was ceremonial in the extreme. A long white robe, heavily pleated at the bottom, trailed the ground behind him. A yellow shawl was drawn over his narrow shoulders, and its ends were tucked

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behind a wide lavender sash belted around his waist. A black skullcap, embroidered with the same inter-twined-serpent motif that adorned the urn he'd brought with him to Ranch Ragnarok, fitted perfectly over his thin hair.

In his hand he carried a walking stick, no longer than a drum majorette's baton, but carved in the shape of a hissing snake. There was something in the strange image on the pole that reflected the reptile within the body of Mark Kaspar.

The most startling thing was Kaspar's attitude. He not only ignored her question, but he also seemed to ignore her very presence.

Without so much as acknowledging the Truth Church leader, he aimed his snake-staff at Zen and Gary and issued a single command.

"Follow. The future awaits."

Without another word, Kaspar spun on his heel and vanished into the smoky interior of the converted warehouse.

Inside, construction had already begun to link the temple with the underground network of tunnels on the Ragnarok property. A concrete flight of stairs in the foyer led deep into the earth but stopped short of the original Truth Church perimeter fence. That phase of the project had yet to be completed.

At Kaspar's insistence there was no generator for electricity. Along the walls, hundreds of flickering candles burned dimly among the clouds of yellow smoke.

Esther had never been here this late at night and never with the strange yellow smoke swirling

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everywhere. Kaspar's bizarre costume and mysterious attitude, plus the way the little man seemed to fade and reappear with the flickering of the candlelight, made for an unnerving experience.

"This place is creepy," she hissed.

Zen and Gary didn't seem to mind. The two of them babbled incessantly about ice cream, the evils of capitalism and their previous brief encounter with Mark Kaspar.

"It was in New England," Zen confided to Esther.

"That's where we got started," Gary explained.

"And how did you come to meet Kaspar?" Esther had asked.

Silent since they had entered the building, Kaspar spoke now with a quiet solemnity—like a priest in the confessional.

"I once offered them a small glimpse of the future," Kaspar admitted.

"The dude told us to go into frozen yogurt," Zen enthused.

"We made a bundle," Gary agreed.

Both of the men seemed suddenly ashamed.

"Filthy bourgeois capitalist system," Zen spit.

"Capitalism sucks," Gary agreed enthusiastically.

They made it through the labyrinth of hallways, crossed an expansive interior chamber and moved back into a series of dank chambers on the far side of the building.

It was easy to become disoriented. Esther wasn't quite certain where they were in the old building until she recognized the grey white smoothness of the recently constructed wall.

They had reached Kaspar's special chamber.

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A heavy woven tapestry blocked the doorway to the inner hall, but it wasn't so thick that the jaundiced smoke did not seep from beneath it.

Esther's eyes watered. She wiped the tears on her pajama sleeve and tried to blink away the sharp, stinging sensation.

In the spooky gloom something brushed against her leg.

Esther nearly jumped out of her skin. "What the hell!" she shouted, spinning around wildly.

Some kind of animal was behind her. It stood quietly in the weirdly elongated shadows, the tiny bursts of candlelight reflecting in its frightened eyes.

It was a goat. Even in the darkness she could make out the rope that tethered the animal to a bronze ring in the cinder-block wall.

"What's with that?" Esther asked Kaspar.

Kaspar did not respond. Instead, he addressed Zen and Gary. "You will give the woman two hundred dollars, cash, for the sacrifice," he instructed.

Esther accepted the money sullenly, thinking she would eventually get Kaspar alone. What she was going to do to the insolent little turd when she finally did would be something.

Kaspar pulled the rope from the wall and handed the goat's leash to Zen. With no further comment, he swept the tapestry aside and ushered the others into the chamber beyond.

Esther Clear-Seer had watched the inner chamber take shape over the past month. On numerous occasions she had complained to Kaspar that it looked more like a bad Hollywood movie set than a legitimate place of worship. But in the eerie, scattered light of a

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dozen torches, with the skylights opened on the moonless black sky and with a vaporous cloud of burning yellow smoke floating like mist through the lifeless air, the huge vault took on a paganistic aura.

As the visitors entered, the pile of stone around which the room had been built spit irregular bursts of steam. The rock suggested the summit of a trapped and nearly buried mountain and made the room look like some kind of animal habitat, as if the surrounding walls formed a cage through which visitors could glimpse zoo animals in their natural environment.

And high atop this pile of rock, on a small three-legged stool balanced above the uppermost sulphur vent, sat the mysterious young girl who had arrived at Ranch Ragnarok with Kaspar. Her vacant eyes stared through the veil of yellow smoke and into the mists of time.

"Welcome to the magnificence of the Temple of Apollo Reborn," Kaspar said.

"Far out," Zen said.

"Karma-licious," Gary agreed.

"Apollo?" Esther muttered. "What is this crap?"

Kaspar mounted the stone steps that had been carved into the side of the rocky hill. When he reached the top, he turned and regarded those below.

"Sacrifice, and you will hear the wisdom of the Pythia," he intoned.

Zen and Gary looked at one another. They shrugged.

"Sacrifice?" Zen asked.

Kaspar reached beneath his brightly colored shawl and removed a long, curving dagger from a hidden

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scabbard. He threw the knife down to the waiting ice-cream merchants.

"Sacrifice," Kaspar repeated. He gestured toward the terrified goat.

It took some arguing and a lot of threatening and a great deal more work than they had expected, but in the end it was Zen who got to hold the wriggling goat while Gary stood ready to slit the throat of the hapless animal.

The girl on the stool writhed in ecstasy as the knife was drawn across the throat of the pitiful creature, and when the body was still she let out a cry that was distinctly sexual.

At Kaspar's instructions the bloody carcass was set at the foot of the stone staircase.

Afterward, when she sat back on her stool, her glassy eyes seemed somehow more fierce in the eerie torchlight. Esther noticed a flicker, almost a nervous tic, at the corner of the girl's mouth.

"You may ask your question of my master," Kaspar called down.

Nervously Zen and Gary stepped forward and addressed the girl who seemed not to be aware of their presence.

"What we need to know is should we open up a chain of Zen and Gary's Ice Cream Shops in Moscow?" Zen asked. "I mean, the political situation with the collapse of communism is awful from an anticap-italistic viewpoint, obviously. But..." Zen let his words trail away, looking for all the world as if he was ashamed of what he was thinking. He glanced at his partner.

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"But can we make a buck at it?" Gary asked hurriedly.