Bentley Little - The Revelation

"Name?"

"Lewis. Marina Lewis."

The woman's finger ran down the notebook page to a line halfway down and then stopped. "Just a minute." She punched a key on the switchboard in front of her and spoke into the mouthpiece of her headset. "Dr. Kaplan? Mrs. Lewis is here to see you." She paused.

"Yes." Another pause. "Okay. Thank you, doctor." She looked up at Gordon. "Dr. Kaplan is ready for her. A nurse will be coming out with a wheelchair to take her into the exam room."

Gordon walked back across the lobby to where Marina sat reading her magazine. Her overstuffed straight-backed chair was pushed flush against a wall of crisscrossing unfinished wood. Above her head hung a framed ClanNamingha print. She was staring down at the pages of the magazine and did not notice when he walked up. He cleared his throat loudly, pompously.

She looked up at him, smiling. "So?"

"So a nurse is coming to bring you back to Dr. Kaplan." He grinned.

"You're going in style."

She sighed disgustedly. "Wheelchair?"

Gordon laughed. "You got it." He sat down in the chair next to her and gently lifted the magazine from her lap, putting it back on the small table on the other side of her. He took her hands in his, looking into her large brown eyes. "Are you going to be all right?"

She nodded. "Do you want to come back there with me?"

"I don't think they'll let me. Besides, I have to fill out the insurance forms and everything. I'll just wait here for you."

Marina smiled lightly, mischievously. "You're just afraid to go back there."

He smiled back. "You're right."

"What a wuss ."

A thin old nurse, wearing a traditional white hat and uniform, came through the set of swinging double doors next to the front desk, pushing an empty wheelchair. She looked down at the clipboard she was carrying. "Mrs. Lewis?" she called, scanning the lobby.

"That's you," Gordon said. He stood up and walked with her to the wheelchair. They stared silently at each other for a moment, each painfully aware of what the other was thinking, feeling, and she hugged him tightly before sitting down. "Don't worry," he said. "Everything's going to be okay."

She smiled, but her smile was less genuine than before and there seemed to be a hint of sadness in it. She held up her crossed fingers.

"Let's hope so."

The nurse wheeled her through the double doors and into the depths of the hospital.

The smile fled Gordon's face immediately after the doors swung shut, and he walked slowly back to the front desk feeling tired and emotionally fatigued. God, he hoped everything was going to be all right. A gut-level feeling told him that Marina's test results were going to be bad and his brain told him logically that he should prepare for the worst, but part of him wanted to believe the best and was hoping for the best.

He received a sheaf of duplicate forms and a pen from the woman at the desk and sat wearily down in the nearest chair. He twisted his neck in a slow semicircle to relieve some of the stress and closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then he glanced over the papers and began filling out the top form.

"And the Lord said unto woman, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.""

At the sound of the deep oratorical voice, Gordon jerked his gaze up from the forms in his lap. Standing before him, he saw a tall, business-suited man carrying what looked like a small black-bound Bible in his right hand, next to his chest. A bundle of thin pamphlets was clutched in his free-dangling left hand. The man's graying hair was short and neatly combed, parted on the side, and his face was almost pleasant. His eyes were two piercingly black orbs that burned with the fiery intensity of fanaticism. His tie clip, Gordon noticed, was in the shape of a cross.

"Genesis 3:16," the man said.

"I'm not interested," Gordon said shortly. He looked down, turning again to his paperwork, hoping the man would go away. But instead the stranger sat down in the chair next to him. Gordon continued writing, trying to ignore the man. He was acutely aware of the man's presence, and he knew without looking that those burning black eyes were boring into him. After a minute or so, he glanced up. Sure enough, the man was staring. "What do you want?" Gordon asked.

"My name is Brother Elias," the man said. "I want to help you."

"I don't need any help," Gordon said. He turned back to his insurance forms.

"Yes you do. Your wife is going to have a baby. And there will be troubles."

Gordon jerked his head up, shocked and, against his more rational impulses, a little frightened. "What do you mean?" he said. "Who the hell are you?"

Brother Elias smiled distractedly. He fingered his tie clip. "Do you realize," he said, "that if Christ had been killed with a knife instead of on the cross we would today be worshiping a knife? This tie clasp would be a knife." He made an expansive motion in the air.

"Sculpted knives would hang on the fronts of our churches."

The man was crazy, Gordon realized. He did not know whether Brother Elias was an ex-hippie who had turned to Christ, bringing his fried brain along with him, or whether he was a fallen fundamentalist, but he knew that the man was not one of your ordinary everyday Bible-thumpers.

Gordon picked up the pen from his lap, grabbed his forms and stood up, preparing to move to another seat.

Brother Elias stood up as well.

"I know what has befallen you and your loved ones, and I want to help you," Brother Elias said. "You are suffering the consequences of the wicked." He knelt on the lobby carpet and reached up to grab Gordon's hand. "Sit here and pray with me and we will put it right."

Gordon pulled away, shaking his head, staring in disbelief at the kneeling man. "No."

""The field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one. And the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the close of the age."

Matthew 13:39."

Gordon looked around the lobby to see if anyone else had caught this, to see if anyone else was watching. But the few people sitting in the overstuffed chairs were either staring out the smoked glass of the window onto the parking lot or looking at the carpet, contemplating their own miseries and misfortunes. No one was paying any attention to Brother Elias.

Brother Elias bowed his head. "Praise Jesus!" he said. "Praise the Lord!"

Gordon stared. Why the hell had this guy decided to pick on him?

Brother Elias looked up. "If Christ had been hung instead of crucified, we would today be worshiping a noose."

Gordon walked over to the front desk. He tapped his hand on the white countertop to get the headsetted woman's attention. "Excuse me, miss," he said. "But is this man supposed to be here?" He pointed toward Brother Elias, still kneeling on the floor of the lobby praying.

The woman took one look at the business-suited preacher, at the Bible and the stack of pamphlets on the carpet next to him, and pressed a red key on her switchboard. "Security?" she said. "The reverend is back again. Would you please escort him out of the hospital? .. . Thank you." She looked up at Gordon and nodded.

Gordon returned to his seat, but this time Brother Elias did not follow him. "Pray," the preacher said, walking voluntarily toward the glass doors of the front entrance. He looked back at Gordon. "Pray for your wife. Pray for your daughter. "For I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother."" His black orbs bored into Gordon's for a moment, then he was gone, walking out of the building just as two uniformed security guards entered the lobby from another door.

Gordon picked up his pen and the sheaf of insurance forms.

On top of the stack of papers was a small cheaply printed pamphlet.