Jason Mott - The Returned

Four

WHEN THERE WERE so many people and so little air in the room that everyone began to consider the likelihood of tragedy, the noise of the crowd began to grow silent. The silence began at the front doors of the church and marched through the crowd like a virus.

Pastor Peters stood erect—looking as tall and wide as Mount Sinai, Lucille thought—and folded both hands meekly at his waist and waited, with his wife huddled in the shelter of his shadow. Lucille craned her neck to see what was happening. Maybe the devil had finally grown tired of waiting.

“Hello. Hello. Pardon me. Excuse me. Hello. How are you? Excuse me. Pardon me.”

It came like an incantation through the crowd, each word driving back the masses.

“Excuse me. Hello. How are you? Excuse me. Hello...” It was a smooth, dark voice, full of manners and implication. The voice grew louder—or perhaps the silence grew—until there was only the rhythm of the words moving over everything, like a mantra. “Excuse me. Hi, how are you? Pardon me. Hello...”

Without a doubt, it was the well-practiced voice of a government man.

“Good evening, Pastor,” Agent Bellamy said gently, finally breaching the ocean of people.

Lucille sighed, letting go of a breath she did not know she had been holding.

“Ma’am?”

He wore a dark, well-cut gray suit very similar to the one he was wearing on the day he came with Jacob. It wasn’t the kind of suit you see many government men wearing. It was a suit worthy of Hollywood and talk shows and other glamorous things, Lucille mused. “And how’s our boy?” he asked, nodding at Jacob, his smile still as even and square as fresh-cut marble.

“I’m fine, sir,” Jacob said, candy clicking against his teeth.

“That’s good to hear.” He straightened his tie, though it had not been crooked. “That’s very good to hear.”

The soldiers were there then. A pair of boys so young they seemed to be only playing at soldiering. At any moment Lucille expected them to start chasing each other around the pulpit, the way Jacob and the Thompson boy had once done. But the guns asleep at their hips were not toys.

“Thank you for coming,” Pastor Peters said, shaking Agent Bellamy’s hand.

“Wouldn’t have missed it. Thank you for waiting for me. Quite the crowd you’ve got here.”

“They’re just curious,” Pastor Peters said. “We all are. Do you...or, rather, does the Bureau or the government as a whole have anything to say?”

“The government as a whole?” Agent Bellamy asked, not breaking his smile. “You overestimate me. I’m just a poor civil servant. A little black boy from—” he lowered his voice “—New York,” he said, as if everyone in the church, everyone in the town, hadn’t already heard it all in his accent. Still, there was no sense in him wearing it on his sleeve any more than he had to. The South was a strange place.

* * *

The meeting began.

“As you all know,” Pastor Peters began from the front of the church, “we are living in what can only be called interesting times. We are so blessed, to be able to...to witness such miracles and wonders. And make no mistake, that’s what they are—miracles and wonders.” He paced as he spoke, which he always did when he was uncertain about what he was saying. “This is a time worthy of the Old Testament. Not only has Lazarus risen from the grave, but it looks like he’s brought everyone with him!” Pastor Peters stopped and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck.

His wife coughed.

“Something has happened,” he belted out, startling the church. “Something—the cause of which we have not yet been made privy—has happened.” He spread his arms. “And what are we to do? How are we to react? Should we be afraid? These are uncertain times, and it’s only natural to be frightened of uncertain things. But what do we do with that fear?” He walked to the front pew where Lucille and Jacob were sitting, his hard-soled shoes sliding silently over the old burgundy carpet. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow, smiling down at Jacob.

“We temper our fear with patience,” he said. “That is what we do.”

It was very important to mention patience, the pastor reminded himself. He took Jacob’s hand, being sure that even those in the back of the church, those who could not see, had time enough to be told what he was doing, how he was speaking of patience as he held the hand of the boy who had been dead for half a century and who was now, suddenly, peacefully sucking candy in the front of the church, in the very shadow of the cross. The pastor’s eyes moved around the room and the crowd followed him. One by one he looked at the other Returned who were there, so that everyone might see how large the situation already was. In spite of the fact that, initially, they were not supposed to be there. They were real, not imagined. Undeniable. Even that was important for people to understand.

Patience was one of the hardest things for anyone to understand, Pastor Peters knew. And it was even harder to practice. He felt that he himself was the least patient of all. Not one word he said seemed to matter or make sense, but he had his flock to tend to, he had his part to play. And he needed to keep her off his mind.

He finally planted his feet and pushed the image of her face from his mind. “There is a lot of potential and, worse yet, there is a lot of opportunity for rash thoughts and rash behavior in these times of uncertainty. You only need to turn on the television to see how frightened everyone is, to see how some people are behaving, the things they’re doing out of fear.

“I hate to say that we are afraid, but we are. I hate to say that we can be rash, but we can. I hate to say that we want to do things we know we should not do, but it’s the truth.”

* * *

In his mind, she was sprawled out on the thick, low-hung bough of an oak tree like a predatory cat. He stood on the ground, just a boy then, looking up at her as she dangled one arm down toward him. He was so very afraid. Afraid of heights. Afraid of her and the way she made him feel. Afraid of himself, as all children are. Afraid of...

* * *

“Pastor?”

It was Lucille.

The great oak tree, the sun bubbling through the canopy, the wet, green grass, the young girl—all of them disappeared. Pastor Peters sighed, holding his empty hands in front of him.

“What are we gonna do with ’em?” Fred Green barked from the center of the church. Everyone turned to face him. He removed his tattered cap and straightened his khaki-colored work shirt. “They ain’t right!” he continued, his mouth pulled tight as a rusty letterbox. His hair had long since abandoned him, and his nose was large, his eyes small—all of which conspired together over the years to give him sharp, cruel features. “What are we gonna do with ’em?”

“We’re going to be patient,” Pastor Peters said. He thought of mentioning the Wilson family in back of the church. But that family had a special meaning for the town of Arcadia and, for now, it was best to keep them out of sight.

“Be patient?” Fred’s eyes went wide. A tremble ran over him. “When the Devil himself shows up at our front door you want us to be patient? You want us to be patient, here and now, in the End Times!” Fred looked not at Pastor Peters as he spoke, but at the audience. He turned in a small circle, pulling the crowd into himself, making sure that each of them could see what was in his eyes. “He wants patience at a time like this!”

“Now, now,” Pastor Peters said. “Let’s not start up about the ‘End Times.’ And let’s not go into calling these poor people devils. They’re mysteries, that’s for certain. They may even be miracles. But right now, it’s too soon for anyone to get a handle on anything. There’s too much we don’t know and the last thing we need is to start a panic here. You heard about what happened in Dallas, all those people hurt—Returned and regular people, as well. All of them gone. We can’t have something like that happen here. Not in Arcadia.”