EPIPHANY
by Connie Willis

"But pray ye that your flight he not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day."
— MATTHEW  24:20
A little after three, it began to snow. It had looked like it was going to all the way through Pennsylvania, and had even spit a few flakes just before Youngstown, Ohio, but now it was snowing in earnest, thick flakes that were already covering the stiff dead grass on the median and getting thicker as he drove west.
And this is what you get for setting out in the middle of January, he thought, without checking the Weather Channel first. He hadn't checked anything. He had taken off his robe, packed a bag, gotten into his car, and taken off. Like a man fleeing a crime.
The congregation will think I've absconded with the money in the collection plate, he thought. Or worse. Hadn't there been a minister in the paper last month who'd run off to the Bahamas with the building fund and a blonde? They'll say, "I thought he acted strange in church this morning."
But they wouldn't know yet that he was gone. The Sunday night Mariners' Meeting had been cancelled, the elders' meeting wasn't till next week, and the interchurch ecumenical meeting wasn't till Thursday.
He was supposed to play chess with B.T. on Wednesday, but he could call him and move it. He would have to call when B.T. was at work and leave him a message on his voice mail. He couldn't risk talking to him—they had been friends too many years. B.T. would instantly know something was up. And he would be the last person to understand.
I'll call his voice mail and move our chess game to Thursday night after the ecumenical meeting, Mel thought. That will give me till Thursday.
He was kidding himself. The church secretary, Mrs. Bilder-beck, would miss him Monday morning when he didn't show up in the church office.
I'll call her and tell her I've got the flu, he thought. No, she would insist on bringing him over chicken soup and zinc lozenges. I'll tell her I've been called out of town for a few days on personal business.
She will immediately think the worst, he thought. She'll think I have cancer, or that I'm looking at another church. And anything they conclude, he thought, even embezzlement, would be easier for them to accept than the truth.
The snow was starting to stick on the highway, and the windshield was beginning to fog up. Mel turned on the defroster. A truck passed him, throwing up snow. It was full of gold-and-white Ferris wheel baskets. He had been seeing trucks like it all afternoon, carrying black Octopus cars and concession stands and lengths of roller-coaster track. He wondered what a carnival was doing in Ohio in the middle of January. And in this weather.
Maybe they were lost. Or maybe they suddenly had a vision telling them to head west, he thought grimly. Maybe they suddenly had a nervous breakdown in the middle of church. In the middle of their sermon.
He had scared the choir half to death. They had been sitting there, midway through the sermon, and thinking they had plenty of time before they had to find the recessional hymn, when he'd stopped cold, his hand still raised, in the middle of a sentence.
There had been silence for a full minute before the organist thought to play the intro, and then a frantic scramble for their bulletins and their hymnals, a frantic flipping of pages. They had straggled unevenly to their feet all the way through the first verse, singing and looking at him like he was crazy.
And were they right? Had he really had a vision or was it some kind of midlife crisis? Or psychotic episode?
He was a Presbyterian, not a Pentecostal. He did not have visions. The only time he had experienced anything remotely like this was when he was nineteen, and that hadn't been a vision. It had been a call to the ministry, and it had only sent him to seminary, not baring off to who knows where.
And this wasn't a vision either. He hadn't seen a burning bush or an angel. He hadn't seen anything. He had simply had an overwhelming conviction that what he was saying was true.
He wished he still had it, that he wasn't beginning to doubt it now that he was three hundred miles from home and in the middle of a snowstorm, that he wasn't beginning to think it had been some kind of self-induced hysteria, born out of his own wishful thinking and the fact that it was January.
He hated January. The church always looked cheerless and abandoned, with all the Christmas decorations taken down, the sanctuary dim and chilly in the gray winter light, Epiphany over and nothing to look forward to but Lent and taxes. And Good Friday. Attendance and the collection down, half the congregation out with the flu and the other half away on a winter cruise, those who were there looking abandoned, too, and like they wished they had somewhere to go.
That was why he had decided against his sermon on Christian duty and pulled an old one out of the files, a sermon on Jesus' promise that He would return. To get that abandoned look off their faces.
"This is the hardest time," he had said, "when Christmas is over, and the bills have all come due, and it seems like winter is never going to end and summer is never going to come. But Christ tells us that we 'know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning,' and when he comes, we must be ready for him. He may come tomorrow or next year or a thousand years from now. He may already be here, right now. At this moment. . ."
And as he said it, he had had an overwhelming feeling that it was true, that He had already come, and he must go find Him.
But now he wondered if it was just the desire to be somewhere else, too, somewhere besides the cold, poinsettialess sanctuary.
If so, you came the wrong way, he thought. It was freezing, and the windshield was starting to fog up. Mel kicked the defrost all the way up to high and swiped at the windshield with his gloved hand.
The snow was coming down much harder, and the wind was picking up. Mel twitched on the radio to hear a weather report.
". . . and in the last days, the Book of Revelation tells us," a voice said, " 'there will be hail and fire mingled with blood.' "
He hoped that wasn't the weather report. He hit the scan button on the radio and listened as it cycled through the stations. ". . . for the latest on the scandal involving the President and . . ." the voice of Randy Travis, singing "Forever and Ever, Amen" . . .
"hog futures at" . . . "and the disciples said, 'Lord, show us a
sign	'"
A sign, that was what he needed, Mel thought, peering at the road. A sign that he was not crazy.
A semi roared past in a blinding blast of snow and exhaust. He leaned forward, trying to see the lines on the pavement, and another truck went by, full of orange-and-yellow bumper cars. Bumper cars. How appropriate. They were all going to be riding bumper cars if this snow kept up, Mel thought, watching the truck pull into the lane ahead of him. It fishtailed wildly as it did, and Mel put his foot on the brake, felt it skid, and lifted his foot off.
Well, he had asked for a sign, he thought, carefully slowing down, and this one couldn't be clearer if it was written in fiery letters: Go home! This was a crazy idea! You're going to be killed, and then what will the congregation think? Go home!
Which was easier said than done. He could scarcely see the road, let alone any exit signs, and the windshield was starting to ice up. He kicked the defroster all the way up and swiped at the window again.
He didn't dare pull over and stop—those semis would never see him—but he was going to have to. The defroster wasn't having any effect on the ice on the windshield, and neither were the windshield wipers.
He rolled down the window and leaned out, trying to grab the wiper and slap it against the windshield to shake the ice off. Snow stabbed his face, stinging it.
"All right, all right," he shouted into the wind. "I get the message!"
He rolled the window back up, shivering, and swiped at the inside of the windshield again. The only kind of sign he wanted now was an exit sign, but he couldn't see the side of the road.
If I'm on the road, he thought, trying to spot the shoulder, a telltale outline, but the whole world had disappeared into a featureless whiteness. And what would keep him from driving right off the road and into a ditch?
He leaned forward tensely, trying to spot something, anything, and thought he saw, far ahead, a light.
A yellow light, too high up for a taillight—a reflector on a motorcycle, maybe. That was impossible, there was no way a motorcycle could be out in this. One of those lights on the top corners of a semi.
If that was what it was, he couldn't see the other one, but the light was moving steadily in front of him, and he followed it, trying to keep pace.
The windshield wipers were icing up again. He rolled down the window, and in the process lost sight of the light. Or the road, he thought frightenedly. No, there was the light, still high up, but closer, and it wasn't a light, it was a whole cluster of them, round yellow bulbs in the shape of an arrow.
The arrow on top of a police car, he thought, telling you to change lanes. There must be some kind of accident up ahead. He strained forward, trying to make out flashing blue ambulance lights.
But the yellow arrow moved steadily ahead, and as he got closer, he saw that the arrow was pointed down at an angle. And that it was slowing. Mel slowed, too, focusing his whole attention on the road and on pumping his brakes to keep the car from skidding.
When he looked up again, the arrow had slowed nearly to a stop, and he could see it clearly. It was part of a lighted sign on the back of a truck. "Shooting Star" it said in a flowing script, and next to the arrow in neon pink, "Tickets."
The truck came to a complete stop, its turn light blinking, and then started up again, and in its headlights he caught a glimpse of snow-spattered red. A stop sign.
And this was an exit. He had followed the truck off the highway onto an exit without even knowing it.
And now he was hopefully following it into a town, he thought, clicking on his right-turn signal and turning after the truck, but in the moment he had hesitated, he had lost it. And the blowing snow was worse here than on the highway.
There was the yellow arrow again. No, what he saw was a Burger King crown. He pulled in, scraping the snow-covered curb, and saw that he was wrong again. It was a motel sign. "King's Rest," with a crown of sulfur-yellow bulbs.
He parked the car and got out, slipping in the snow, and started for the office, which had, thank goodness, a "Vacancy" sign in the same neon pink as the "Tickets" sign.
A little blue Honda pulled up beside him and a short, plump woman got out of it, winding a bright purple muffler around her head. "Thank goodness you knew where you were going," she said, pulling on a pair of turquoise mittens. "I couldn't see a thing except your taillights." She reached back into the Honda for a vivid green canvas bag. "Anybody who'd be on the roads in weather like this would have to be crazy, wouldn't they?"
And if the blizzard hadn't been sign enough, here was proof positive. "Yes," he said, although she had already gone inside the motel office, "they would."
He would check in, wait a few hours till the storm let up, and then start back. With luck he would be back home before Mrs. Bilderbeck got to the office tomorrow morning.
He went inside the office, where a balding man was handing the plump woman a room key and talking to someone on the phone.
"Another one," he said when Mel opened the door. "Yeah."
He hung up the phone and pushed a registration form and a pen at Mel.
"Which way'd you come from?" he asked.
"East," Mel said.
The man shook his balding head. "You got here in the nick of time," he said to both of them. "They just closed all the roads east of here."
"And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat upon them."
— REVELATION   9:17
In the morning, Mel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. "I won't be in today. I've been called out of town."
"Out of town?" Mrs. Bilderbeck said, interested.
"Yes. On personal business. I'll be gone most of the week."
"Oh, dear," she said, and Mel suddenly hoped that there was an emergency at the church, that Gus Uhank had had another stroke or Lottie Millar's mother had died, so that he would have to go back.
"I told Juan you'd be in," Mrs. Bilderbeck said. "He's putting the sanctuary Christmas decorations away, and he wanted to know if you want to save the star for next year. And the pilot light went out again. The church was freezing when I got here this morning."
"Was Juan able to get it relit?"
"Yes, but I think someone should look at it. What if it goes out on a Saturday night?"
"Call Jake Adams at A-1 Heating," he said. Jake was a deacon.
"A-l Heating," she said slowly, as if she were writing it down. "What about the star? Are we going to use it again next year?"
Is there going to be a next year? Mel thought. "Whatever you think," he said.
"And what about the ecumenical meeting?" she asked. "Will you be back in time for that?"
"Yes," he said, afraid if he said "no," she would ask more questions.
"Is there a number where I can reach you?"
"No. I'll check in tomorrow." He hung up quickly, and then sat there on the bed, trying to decide whether to call B.T. or not. He hadn't done anything major in the fifteen years they'd been friends without telling him, but Mel knew what he'd say. They'd met on the ecumenical committee, when the Unitarian chairman had decided that, to be truly ecumenical, they needed a resident atheist and Darwinian biologist. And, Mel suspected, an African-American.
It was the only good thing that had ever come out of the ecumenical committee. He and B.T. had started by complaining about the idiocies of the ecumenical committee, which seemed bent on proving that denominations couldn't get along, progressed to playing chess and then to discussing religion and politics and disagreeing on both, and ended by becoming close friends.
I have to call him, Mel thought, it's a betrayal of our friendship not to.
And tell him what? That he'd had a holy vision? That the Book of Revelation was coming literally true? It sounded crazy to Mel, let alone to B.T, who was a scientist, who didn't believe in the First Coming, let alone the Second. But if it was true, how could he not call him?
He dialed B.T.'s area code and then put down the receiver and went to check out.
The roads east were still closed. "You shouldn't have any trouble heading west, though," the balding man said, handing Mel his credit-card receipt. "The snow's supposed to let up by noon."
Mel hoped so. The interstate was snow-packed and unbelievably slick, and when Mel positioned himself behind a sand truck, a rock struck his windshield and made a ding.
At least there was hardly any traffic. There were only a few semis, and a navy-blue pickup with a bumper sticker that said "In case of the Rapture, this car will be unoccupied." There was no sign of the blue Honda or of the carnival. They had seen the light and were still at the King's Rest, sitting in the restaurant, drinking coffee. Or headed south for the winter.
He passed a snow-obscured sign that read "For Weather Info, Tune to am 1410."
He did. ". . . and in the last days Christ Himself will appear," an evangelist, possibly the one from yesterday, or a different one— they all had the same accent, the same intonation—said. "The Rook of Revelation tells us He will appear riding a white horse and leading a mighty army of the righteous against the Antichrist in that last great battle of Armageddon. And the unbelievers— the fornicators and the baby-murderers—will be flung into the bottomless pit."
The ultimate "Wait till your father gets home," threat, Mel thought.
"And how do I know these things are coming?" the radio said. "I'll tell you how. The Lord came to me in a dream, and He said, 'These shall be the signs of my coming. There will be wars and rumors of wars.' Iraq, my friends, that's what he's talking about. The sun's face will be covered, and the godless will prosper. Look around you. Who do you see prospering? Abortion doctors and homosexuals and godless atheists. Rut when Christ comes, they will be punished. He's told me so. The Lord spoke to me, just like he spoke to Moses, just like he spoke to Isaiah. . . ."
He switched off the radio, but it didn't do any good. Because this was what had been bothering him ever since he started out. How did he know his vision wasn't just like some radio evangelist's?
Because his is born out of hatred, bigotry, and revenge, Mel thought. God no more spoke to him than did the man in the moon.
And how do you know He spoke to you? Because it felt real? The voices telling the bomber to destroy the abortion clinic felt real, too. Emotion isn't proof. Signs aren't evidence. "Do you have any outside confirmation?" he could hear B.T saying skeptically.
The sun came out, and the glare off the white road, the white fields, was worse than the snow had been. He almost didn't see the truck off to the side. Its emergency flashers weren't on, and at first he thought it had just slid off the road, but as he went past, he saw it was one of the carnival trucks with its hood up and steam coming out. A young man in a denim jacket was standing next to it, hooking his thumb for a ride.
I should stop, Mel thought, but he was already past, and picking up hitchhikers was dangerous. He had found that out when he'd preached a sermon on the Good Samaritan last year. "Let us not be like the Levite or the Pharisee who passes by the stranded motorist, the injured victim," he had told his congregation. "Let us be like the Samaritan, who stopped and helped."
It had seemed like a perfectly harmless sermon topic, and he had been totally unprepared for the uproar that ensued. "I cannot believe you told people to pick up hitchhikers!" Dan Crosby had raged. "If one of my daughters ends up raped, I'm holding you responsible."
"What were you thinking of?" Mrs. Bilderbeck had said, hanging up after fending off Mable Jenkins. "On CNN last week there was a story about somebody who stopped to help a couple who was out of gas, and they cut off his head."
He had had to issue a retraction the next Sunday, saying that women had no business helping anyone (which had made Mamie Rollet mad, for feminist reasons) and that the best thing for everyone else to do was to alert the state patrol on their cell phones and let them take care of it, unless they knew the person, although somehow he couldn't imagine the Good Samaritan with a cell phone.
There was a median crossing up ahead, but it was marked with a sign that read "Authorized Vehicles Only." And if I get my head cut off, he thought, the congregation will have no sympathy at all.
But it was threatening to snow again, and the green interstate sign up ahead said "Wayside, 28 Mi." And the carnival had been his Good Samaritan last night.
" 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me,' " he murmured, and turned into the median crossing and onto the eastbound side of the highway, and started back.
The truck was still there, though he couldn't see the driver. Good, he thought, looking for a place to cross. Some other Samaritan's picked him up. But when he pulled up behind the truck, the man got out of the truck's cab and started over to the car, his hands jammed into his denim jacket. Mel began to feel sorry he'd stopped. The man had a ragged scar across his forehead, and his hair was lank and greasy.
He slouched over to the side of the car, and Mel saw that he was much younger than he'd looked at first. He's just a kid, Mel thought.
Yeah, well, so was Billy the Kid, he reminded himself. And Andrew Cunanan.
Mel leaned across and pulled down the passenger window. "What's the trouble?"
The kid leaned down to talk to him. "Died," he said, and grinned.
"Do you need a lift into town?" he asked, and the kid immediately opened the car door, keeping his right hand in his jacket pocket. Where the gun is, Mel thought.
The kid slid in and shut the door, still using only one hand. When they find me robbed and murdered, they'll be convinced I was involved in some kind of drug deal, Mel thought. He started the car.
"Man, it was cold out there," the kid said, taking his right hand out of his pocket and rubbing his hands together. "I been waiting forever."
Mel kicked the heater over to high, and the kid leaned forward and held his hands in front of the vent. There was a peace sign tattooed on the back of one of them and a fierce-looking lion on the other. Both looked like they'd been done by hand.
The kid rubbed his hands together, wincing, and Mel took another look. His hands were red with cold and between the tattoo lines there were ugly white splotches. The kid started rubbing them again.
"Don't—" Mel said, putting out his hand unthinkingly to stop him. "That looks like frostbite. Don't rub it. You're supposed to . . ." he said, and then couldn't remember. Put them in warm water? Wrap them up? "They're supposed to warm up slowly," he said finally.
"You mean like by warming 'em up in front of a heater?" the kid said, holding his hands in front of the vent again. He put up his hand and touched the ding in the windshield. "That's gonna spread," he said.
His hand looked even worse now that it was warming up. The sickly white splotches stood out starkly against the rest of his skin.
Mel took off his gloves, switching hands on the steering wheel and using his teeth to get the second one off. "Here," he said, handing them to the kid. "These are insulated."
The kid looked at him for a minute and then put them on.
"You should get your hands looked at," Mel said. "I can take you to the emergency room when we get to town."
"I'll be okay," the kid said. "You get used to being cold, working a carny."
"What's a carnival doing here in the middle of winter, anyway?" Mel asked.
"Best time," the kid said. "Catches 'em by surprise. What're you doin' out here?"
He wondered what the kid would say if he told him. "I'm a minister," he said instead.
"A preacher, huh?" he said. "You believe in the Second Coming?"
"The Second Coming?" Mel gasped, caught off-guard.
"Yeah, we had a preacher come to the carny the other day telling us Jesus was coming back and was gonna punish everybody for hanging him on the cross, knock down the mountains, burn the whole planet up. You believe all that's gonna happen?"
"No," Mel said. "I don't think Jesus is coming back to punish anybody."
"The preacher said it was all right there in the Bible."
"There are lots of things in the Bible. They don't always turn out to mean what you thought they did."
The kid nodded sagely. "Like the Siamese twins."
"Siamese twins?" Mel said, unable to remember any Siamese twins in the Bible.
"Yeah, like this one carny up in Fargo. It had a big sign saying 'See the Siamese twins,' and everybody pays a buck, thinking they're gonna see two people hooked together. And when they get there it's a cage with two Siamese kittens in it. Like that."
"Not exactly," Mel said. "The prophecies aren't a scam to cheat people, they're—"
"What about Roswell? The alien autopsy and all that. You think that's a scam, too?"
Well, there was some outside confirmation for you. Mel was in a class with scam artists and UFO nuts.
"After what happened the first time, I don't know if I'd wanta come back or not," the kid said, and it took Mel a minute to realize he was talking about Christ. "If I did, I'd wear some kind of disguise or something."
Like the last time, Mel thought, when He came disguised as a baby.
The kid was still preoccupied with the ding. "There's stuff you could do to keep it from spreading for a little while," he said, "but it's still gonna spread. There ain't nothing that can stop it." He pointed out the window at a sign. "Wayside, exit 1 mile."
Mel pulled off and into a Total station, apparently all there was to Wayside. The kid opened the door and started to take off the gloves.
"Keep them," Mel said. "Do you want me to wait till you find out if they've got a tow truck?"
The kid shook his head. "I'll call Pete." He reached into the pocket of the denim jacket and handed Mel three orange cardboard tickets. They were marked "Admit One Free."
"It's a ticket to the show," the kid said. "We got a triple Ferris wheel, three wheels one inside the other. And a great roller coaster. The Comet."
Mel splayed the tickets apart. "There are three tickets here."
"Bring your friends," the kid said, slapped the car door, and ambled off toward the gas station.
Bring your friends.
Mel got back on the highway. It was getting dark. He hoped the next exit wasn't as far, or as uninhabited, as this one.
Bring your friends. I should have told B.T., he thought, even though he would have said, Don't go, you're crazy, let me recommend a good psychiatrist.
"I still should have told him," he said out loud, and was as certain of it as he had been of what he should do in that moment in the church. And now he had cut himself off from B.T not only by hundreds of miles of closed highways and "icy and snow-packed conditions," but by his deception, his failure to tell him.
The next exit didn't even have a gas station, and the one after that nothing but a Dairy Queen. It was nearly eight by the time he got to Zion Center and a Holiday Inn.
He walked straight in, not even stopping to get his luggage out of the trunk, and across the lobby toward the phones.
"Hello!" The short plump woman he'd seen the night before waylaid him. "Here we are again, orphans of the storm. Weren't the roads awful?" she said cheerfully. "I almost went off in the ditch twice. My little Honda doesn't have four-wheel drive, and—"
"Excuse me," Mel interrupted her. "I have a phone call I have to make."
"You can't," she said, still cheerfully. "The lines are down."
"Down?"
"Because of the storm. I tried to call my sister just now, and the clerk told me the phone's been out all day. I don't know what she's going to think when she doesn't hear from me. I promised faithfully that I'd call her every night and tell her where I was and that I'd gotten there safely."
He couldn't call B.T. Or get to him. "Excuse me," he said, and started back across the lobby to the registration desk.
"Has the interstate going east opened up yet?" he asked the girl behind the counter.
She shook her head. "It's still closed between Malcolm and Iowa City. Ground blizzards," she said. "Will you be checking in, sir? How many are there in your party?"
"Two," a voice said.
Mel turned. And there, leaning against the end of the registration desk, was B.T.
"And there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold a great red dragon."
— REVELATION   12:3

For a moment he couldn't speak for the joy, the relief he felt. He clutched the check-out counter, vaguely aware that the girl behind the counter was saying something.
"What are you doing here?" he said finally.
B.T. smiled his slow checkmate smile. "Aren't I the one who should be asking that?"
And now that he was here, he would have to tell him. Mel felt the relief turn into resentment. "I thought the roads were closed," he said.
"I didn't come that way," B.T. said.
"And how would you like to pay for that, sir?" the clerk said, and Mel knew she had asked him before.
"Credit card," he said, fumbling for his wallet.
"License number?" the clerk asked.
"I flew to Omaha and rented a car," B.T. said.
Mel handed her his MasterCard. "TY 804."
"State?"
"Pennsylvania." He looked at B.T. "How did you find me?"
" 'License number?'" B.T. said, mimicking the clerk." 'Will you be putting this on your credit card, sir?' If you've got a computer, it's the easiest thing in the world to find someone these days, especially if they're using that." He gestured at the MasterCard the clerk was handing back to Mel.
She handed him a folder. "Your room number is written inside, sir. It's not on the key for security purposes," the clerk said, as if his room number weren't in the computer, too. B.T. probably already knew it.
"You still haven't answered my question," B.T. said. "What are you doing here?"
"I have to go get my suitcase," Mel said, and walked past him and out to the parking lot and his car. He opened the trunk.
B.T. reached past him and picked up Mel's suitcase, as if taking it into custody.
"How did you know I was missing?" Mel asked, but he already knew the answer to that. "Mrs. Bilderbeck sent you."
B.T. nodded. "She said she was worried about you, that you'd called and something was seriously wrong. She said she knew because you hadn't tried to get out of the ecumenical meeting on Thursday. She said you always tried to get out of it."
They say it's the little mistakes that trip criminals up, Mel thought.
"She said she thought you were sick and were going to see a specialist," B.T. said, his black face gray with worry. "Out of town, so nobody in the congregation would find out about it. A brain tumor, she said." He shifted the suitcase to his other hand. "Do you have a brain tumor?"
A brain tumor. That would be a nice, convenient explanation. When Ivor Sorenson had had a brain tumor, he had stood up during the offertory, convinced there was an ostrich sitting in the pew next to him.
"Are you sick?" B.T. said.
"No."
"But it is something serious."
"It's freezing out here," Mel said. "Let's discuss this inside."
B.T. didn't move. "Whatever it is, no matter how bad it is, you can tell me."
"All right. Fine. 'For ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.' Matthew 25:13," Mel said. "I had a revelation. About the Second Coming. I think He's here already, that the Second Coming's already happened."
Whatever B.T. had imagined—terminal illness or embezzlement or some other, worse crime—it obviously wasn't as bad as this. His face went even grayer. "The Second Coming," he said. "Of Christ?"
"Yes," Mel said.  He told him what had happened during
the sermon Sunday. "I scared the choir half out of their wits," he said.
B.T. nodded. "Mrs. Bilderbeck told me. She said you stopped in the middle of a sentence and just stood there, staring into space with your hand up to your forehead. That's why she thought you had a brain tumor. How long did this . . . vision last?"
"It wasn't a vision," Mel said. "It was a revelation, a conviction ... an epiphany."
"An epiphany," B.T. said in a flat, expressionless voice. "And it told you He was here? In Zion Center?"
"No," Mel said. "I don't know where He is."
"You don't know where He is," B.T. repeated. "You just got in your car and started driving?"
"West," Mel said. "I knew He was somewhere west."
"Somewhere west," B.T. said softly. He rubbed his hand over his mouth.
"Why don't you say it?" Mel said. He slammed the trunk shut. "You think I'm crazy."
"I think we're both crazy," he said, "standing out here in the snow, fighting. Have you had supper?"
"No," Mel said.
"Neither have I," B.T. said. He took Mel's arm. "Let's go get some dinner."
"And a dose of antidepressants? A nice straitjacket?"
"I was thinking steak," B.T. said, and tried to smile. "Isn't that what they eat here in Iowa?"
"Corn," Mel said.

"And when I looked, behold . . . the appearance of
the wheels was as the colour of a beryl stone and . . . 
as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel."
— JEREMIAH   10:9-10

Neither corn nor steak was on the menu, which had the Holiday Inn star on the front, and they were out of nearly everything else. "Because of the interstate being closed," the waitress said. "We've got chicken teriyaki and beef chow mein."
They ordered the chow mein and coffee, and the waitress left. Mel braced himself for more questions, but B.T. only asked, "How were the roads today?" and told him about the problems he'd had getting a flight and a rental car. "Chicago O'Hare was shut down because of a winter storm," he said, "and Denver and Kansas City. I had to fly into Albuquerque and then up to Omaha."
"I'm sorry you had to go to all that trouble," Mel said.
"I was worried about you."
The waitress arrived with their chow mein, which came with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans.
"Interesting," B.T. said, poking at the gravy. He made a halfhearted attempt at the chow mein, and then pushed the plate away.
"There's something I don't understand," he said. "The Second Coming is when Christ returns, right? I thought He was supposed to appear in the clouds in a blaze of glory, complete with trumpets and angel choirs."
Mel nodded.
"Then how can He already be here without anybody knowing?"
"I don't know," Mel said. "I don't understand any of this any more than you do. I just know He's here."
"But you don't know where."
"No. I thought when I got out here there would be a sign."
"A sign," B.T. said.
"Yes," Mel said, getting angry all over again. "You know. A burning bush, a pillar of fire, a star. A sign."
He must have been shouting. The waitress came scurrying over with the check. "Are you through with this?" she said, looking at the plates of half-eaten food.
"Yes," Mel said. "We're through."
"You can pay at the register," the waitress said, and scurried away with their plates.
"Look," B.T. said, "the brain's a very complicated thing. An alteration in brain chemistry—are you on any medications? Sometimes medications can cause people to hear voices or—"
Mel picked up the check and stood, reaching for his wallet. "It wasn't a voice."
He put down money for a tip and went over to the cash register.
"You said it was a strong feeling," B.T. said after Mel had paid. "Sometimes endorphins can—nothing like this has ever happened to you before, has it?"
Mel walked out into the lobby. "Yes," he said, and turned to face B.T. "It happened once before."
"When?" B.T. said, his face gray again.
"When I was nineteen. I was in college, studying pre-law. I went to church with a girlfriend, and the minister gave a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon on the evils of dancing and associating with anyone who did. He said Jesus said it was wrong to associate with nonbelievers, that they would corrupt and contaminate you. Jesus, who spent all His time with lowlifes, tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers! And all of a sudden I had this overwhelming feeling, this—"
"Epiphany," B.T. said.
"That I had to do something, that I had to fight him and all the other ministers like him. I stood up and walked out in the middle of the sermon," Mel said, remembering, "and went home and applied to seminary."
B.T. rubbed his hand across his mouth. "And the epiphany you had yesterday was the same as that one?"
"Yes."
"Reverend Abrams?" a woman's voice said.
Mel turned. The short plump woman who'd been on the phone and at the motel the night before was hurrying toward them, lugging her bright green tote bag.
"Who's that?" B.T. said.
Mel shook his head, wondering how she knew his name.
She came up to them. "Oh, Reverend Abrams," she said breathlessly, "I wanted to thank you—I'm Cassie Hunter, by the way." She stuck out a plump, beringed hand.
"How do you do?" Mel said, shaking it. "This is Dr. Bernard Thomas, and I'm Mel Abrams."
She nodded. "I heard the desk clerk say your name. I didn't thank you the other night for saving my life."
"Saving your life?" B.T. said, looking at Mel.
"There was this awful whiteout," Cassie said. "You couldn't see the road at all, and if it hadn't been for the taillights on Reverend Abrams's car, I'd have ended up in a ditch."
Mel shook his head. "You shouldn't thank me. You should thank the driver of the carnival truck / was following. He saved both of us."
"I saw those carnival trucks," Cassie said. "I wondered what a carnival was doing in Iowa in the middle of winter." She laughed, a bright, chirpy laugh. "Of course, you're probably wondering what a retired English teacher is doing in Iowa in the middle of winter. Of course, for that matter, what are you doing in Iowa in the middle of winter?"
"We're on our way to a religious meeting," B.T. said before Mel could answer.
"Really? I've been visiting famous writers' birthplaces," she said. "Everyone back home thinks I'm crazy, but except for the last few days, the weather's been fine. Oh, and I wanted to tell you, I just talked to the clerk, and she thinks the phones will be working again by tomorrow morning, so you should be able to make your call."
She rummaged in her voluminous tote bag and came up with
a room-key folder. "Well, anyway, I just wanted to thank you. It was nice meeting you," she said to B.T, and bustled off across the lobby toward the coffee shop.
"Who were you trying to call?" B.T. asked.
"You," Mel said bitterly. "I realized I owed it to you to tell you, even if you did think I was crazy."
B.T. didn't say anything.
"That is what you think, isn't it?" Mel said. "Why don't you just say it? You think I'm crazy."
"All right. I think you're crazy," B.T. said, and then continued angrily, "Well, what do you expect me to say? You take off in the middle of a blizzard, you don't tell anyone where you're going, because you saw the Second Coming in a vision?"
"It wasn't—"
"Oh, right. It wasn't a vision. You had an epiphany. So did the woman in The Globe last week who saw the Virgin Mary on her refrigerator. So did the Heaven's Gate people. Are you telling me they're not crazy?"
"No," Mel said, and started down the hall to his room.
"For fifteen years you've raved about faith healers and cults and preachers who claim they've got a direct line to God being frauds," B.T. said, following him, "and now you suddenly believe in it?"
He kept walking. "No."
"But you're telling me I'm supposed to believe in your revelation because it's different, because this is the real thing."
"I'm not telling you anything," Mel said, turning to face him. "You're the one who came out here and demanded to know what I was doing. I told you. You got what you came for. Now you can go back and tell Mrs. Bilderbeck I don't have a brain tumor, it's a chemical imbalance."
"And what do you intend to do? Drive west until you fall off the Santa Monica pier?"
"I intend to find Him," Mel said.
B.T. opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it and stormed off down the hall.
Mel stood there, watching him till a door slammed, down the hall.
Bring your friends, Mel thought. Bring your friends.
"For now we see through a glass darkly, hut then face to face."
— I   CORINTHIANS   13:12
"1 intend to find Him," Mel had said, and was glad B.T. hadn't shouted back "How?" because he had no idea.
He had not had a sign, which meant that the answer must be somewhere else. Mel sat down on the bed, opened the drawer of the bedside table, and got out the Gideon Bible.
He propped the pillows up against the headboard and leaned back against them and opened the Bible to the Book of Revelation. The radio evangelists made it sound like the story of the Second Coming was a single narrative, but it was actually a hodgepodge of isolated scriptures—Matthew 24 and sections of Isaiah and Daniel, verses out of Second Thessalonians and John and Joel, stray ravings from Revelation and Jeremiah, all thrown together by the evangelists as if the authors were writing at the same time. If they were even writing about the same thing.
And the references were full of contradictions. A trumpet would sound, and Christ would come in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. Or on a white horse, leading an army of a hundred and forty-four thousand. Or like a thief in the night. There would be earthquakes and pestilences and a star falling out of heaven. Or a dragon would come up out of the sea, or four great beasts, with the heads of a lion and a bear and a leopard and eagles' wings. Or darkness would cover the earth.
But in all the assorted prophecies there were no locations mentioned. Joel talked about a desolate wilderness and Jeremiah about a wasteland, but not about where they were. Luke said the faithful would come "from the east, and from the west, and from the north" to the kingdom of God, but neglected to say where it was located.
The only place mentioned by name in all the prophecies was Armageddon. But Armageddon (or Har-Magedon or Ar Himdah) was a word that appeared only once in the Scriptures and whose meaning was not known, a word that might be Hebrew or Greek or something else altogether, that might mean "level" or "valley plain" or "place of desire."
Mel remembered from seminary that some scholars thought it referred to the plain in front of Mt. Megiddo, the site of a battle between Israel and Sisera the Canaanite. But there was no Mt. Megiddo on ancient or modern maps. It could be anywhere.
He put on his shoes and his coat and went out to the parking lot to get his road atlas out of the car.
B.T. was leaning against the trunk.
"How long have you been out here?" Mel asked, but the answer was obvious. B.T.'s dark face was pinched with cold, and his hands were jammed into his pockets like the carnival kid's had been.
"I've been thinking," he said, his voice shivering with the cold. "I don't have to be back until Thursday, and I can fly out of Denver just as easily as out of Omaha. If we drive as far as Denver together, it'll give us more time—"
"For you to talk me out of this," Mel said, and then was sorry when he saw the expression on B.T.'s face.
"For us to talk," B.T. said. "For me to figure this—epiphany— out,"
"All right," Mel said. "As far as Denver." He opened the car door. "You can come inside now. I'm not going anywhere till morning." He leaned inside the car and got the atlas. "It's a good thing I came out for this. You didn't actually intend to stand out here all night, did you?"
He nodded, his teeth chattering. "You're not the only one who's crazy."

"By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand, 
and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive."
— MATTHEW   13:14
There wasn't a Hertz rental car agency in Zion Center. "The nearest one's in Redfield," B.T. said unhappily.
"I'll meet you there," Mel said.
"Will you?" B.T. said. "You won't take off on your own?"
"No," Mel said.
"What if you see a sign?"
"If I see a burning bush, I'll pull off on the side and let you know," Mel said dryly. "We can caravan if you want."
"Fine," B.T. said. "I'll follow you."
"I don't know where the rental place is."
"I'll pull ahead of you once we get to Redfield," B.T. said, and got into his rental car. "It's the second exit. What are the roads supposed to be like?"
"Icy. Snow-packed. But the weather report said clear."
Mel got into his car. The kid from the carnival had been right. The ding had started to spread, raying out in three long cracks and one short one.
He led the way over to the interstate, being careful to signal lane changes and not to get too far ahead, so B.T. wouldn't think he was trying to escape.
The carnival must have stayed the night in Zion Center, too. He passed a truck carrying the Tilt-a-Whirl and one full of stacked, slanted mirrors for, Mel assumed, the Hall of Mirrors. A Blazer roared past him with the bumper sticker "When the Rapture comes, I'm outta here!"
As soon as he was on the interstate, he turned on the radio. ". . . and snow-packed. Partly cloudy becoming clear by midmorning. Interstate 80 between Victor and Davenport is closed, also U.S. 35 and State Highway 218. Partly cloudy skies, clearing by midmorning. The following schools are closed: Edge-water, Bennett, Olathe, Oskaloosa, Vinton, Shellsburg. . . ." Mel twisted the knob.
"... but the Second Coming is not something we believers have to be afraid of," the evangelist, this one with a Texas accent, said, "for the Book of Revelation tells us that Christ will protect us from the final tribulation, and when He comes to power we will dwell with Him in His Holy City, which shines with jewels and precious stones, and we will drink from living fountains of water. The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and there ... be ...
more—"
The evangelist sputtered into static and then out of range, which was just as well because Mel was heading into fog and needed to give his whole attention to his driving.
The fog got worse, descending like a smothering blanket. Mel turned on his lights. They didn't help at all, but Mel hoped B.T. would be able to see his taillights the way Cassie had. He couldn't see anything beyond a few yards in front of him. And if he had wanted a sign of his mental state, this was certainly appropriate.
"God has told us His will in no uncertain terms," the radio evangelist thundered, coming suddenly back into range. "There can't be any question about it."
But he had dozens of questions. There had been no Megiddo on the map of Nebraska last night. Or of Kansas or Colorado or New Mexico, and nothing in all the prophecies about location except a reference to the New Jerusalem, and there was no New Jerusalem on the map either.
"And how do I know the Second Coming is at hand?" the evangelist roared, suddenly back in range. "Because the Bible tells us so. It tells us how He is coming and when!"
And that wasn't true either. "Ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh," Matthew had written, and Luke, "The Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not," and even Revelation, "I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shall not know what hour I will come." It was the only thing they were all agreed on.
"The signs are all around us," the evangelist shouted. "They're as plain as the nose on your face! Air pollution, liberals outlawing school prayer, wickedness! Why, anybody'd have to be blind not to recognize them! Open your eyes and see!"
"All I see is fog," Mel said, turning on the defrost and wiping his sleeve across the windshield, but it wasn't the windshield. It was the world, which had vanished completely in the whiteness.
He nearly missed the turnoff to Redfield. Luckily, the fog was less dense in town, and they were able to find not only the rental car place, but the local Tastee-Freez. Mel went over to get some lunch to take with them while B.T. checked the car in.
It was full of farmers, all talking about the weather. "Damned meter-ologists," one of them, redfaced and wearing a John Deere cap and earmuffs, grumbled. "Said it was supposed to be clear."
"It is clear," another one in a down vest said. "He just didn't say where. You get up above that fog, say thirty thousand feet, and it's clear as a bell."
"Number six," the woman behind the counter called.
Mel went up to the counter and paid. There was a fluorescent green poster for the carnival taped up on the wall beside the counter. "Come have the time of your life!" it read. "Thrills, chills, excitement!"
Chills is right, Mel thought, thinking of how cold being up in a Ferris wheel in this fog would be.
It was an old sign. "Littletown, Dec. 24," it read. "Ft. Dodge, Dec. 28. Cairo, Dec. 30."
B.T. was already in the car when Mel got back with their hamburgers and coffee. He handed him the sack and got back on the highway.
That was a mistake. The fog was so thick he couldn't even take a hand off the wheel to hold the hamburger B.T. offered him. "I'll eat it later," he said, leaning forward and squinting as if that would make things clearer. "You go ahead and eat, and we'll switch places in a couple of exits."
But there were no exits, or Mel couldn't see them in the fog, and after twenty miles of it, he had B.T. hand him his coffee, now stone cold, and took a couple of sips.
"I've been looking at the Second Coming scientifically," B.T. said. " 'A great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea and the third part of the sea became blood.'"
Mel glanced over. B.T. was reading from a black leather Bible. "Where'd you get that?" he asked.
"It was in the hotel room," B.T. said.
"You stole a Gideon Bible?" Mel said.
"They put them there for people who need them. And I'd say we qualify. 'There was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell into the earth. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places.'
"All these things are supposed to happen along with the Second Coming," B.T. said. "Earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, pestilence, locusts." He leafed through the flimsy pages. " 'And there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth.' "
He shut the Bible. "All right, earthquakes happen all the time, and there have been wars and rumors of wars for the last ten thousand years, and I guess this—'and the stars shall fall from the sky'—could refer to meteors. But there's no sign of any of these other things. No locusts, no bottomless pit opening up, no 'third part of trees and grass were burnt up and a third part of the creatures which were in the sea died.' "
"Nuclear war," Mel said.
"What?"
"According to the evangelists, that's supposed to refer to nuclear war," Mel said. "And before that, to the Communist threat. Or fluoridation of water. Or anything else they disapprove of."
"Well, whatever it stands for, no bottomless pit has opened up lately or we would have seen it on CNN. And volcanoes don't cause locust swarms. Mel," he said seriously, "let's say your experience was a real epiphany. Couldn't you have misinterpreted what it meant?"
And for a split second, Mel almost had it. The key to where He was and what was going to happen. The key to all of it.
"Couldn't it have been about something else?" B.T. said. "Something besides the Second Coming?"
No, Mel thought, trying to hang on to the insight, it was the Second Coming, but—it was gone. Whatever it was, he'd lost it.
He stared blindly ahead at the fog, trying to remember what had triggered it. B.T. had said, "Couldn't you have misunderstood what it meant?" No, that wasn't right. "Couldn't you—"
"What is it?" B.T. was pointing through the windshield. What is that? Up ahead?"
"I don't see anything," Mel said, straining ahead. He couldn't see anything but fog. "What was it?"
"I don't know. I just saw a glimpse of lights."
"Are you sure?" Mel said. There was nothing there but whiteness.
"There it is again," B.T. said, pointing. "Didn't you see it? Yellow flashing lights. There must be an accident. You'd better slow down."
Mel was already barely creeping along, but he slowed further, still unable to see anything. "Was it on our side of the highway?"
"Yes ... I don't know," B.T. said, leaning forward. "I don't see it now. But I'm sure it was there."
Mel crawled forward, squinting into the whiteness. "Could it have been a truck? The carnival truck had a yellow arrow," he said, and saw the lights.
And they were definitely not a sign for a carnival ride. They filled the road just ahead, flashing yellow and red and blue, all out of synch with each other. Police cars or fire trucks or ambulances. Definitely an accident. He pumped the brakes, hoping whoever was behind him could see his taillights, and slowed to a stop.
A patrolman appeared out of the fog, holding up his hand in the sign for "stop." He was wearing a yellow poncho and a clear plastic cover over his brown hat.
Mel rolled his window down, and the patrolman leaned in to talk to them. "Road up ahead's closed. You need to get off at this exit."
"Exit?" Mel said, looking to the right. He could just make out a green outline in the fog.
"It's right there, up about a hundred yards," the patrolman said, pointing into nothingness. "We'll come tell you when it's open again."
"Are you closing it because of the weather?" B.T. asked.
The patrolman shook his head. "Accident," he said. "Big mess. It'll be a while." He motioned them off to the right.
Mel felt his way to the exit and off the highway. At least it had a truck stop instead of just a gas station. He and B.T. parked and went into the restaurant.
It was jammed. Every booth, every seat at the counter was full. Mel and B.T. sat down at the last unoccupied table, and it immediately became clear why it had been unoccupied. The draft when the door opened made B.T, who had just taken his coat off, put it back on and then zip it up.
Mel had expected everyone to be angry about the delay, but the waitresses and customers all seemed to be in a holiday mood. Truckers leaned across the backs of the booths to talk to each other, laughing, and the waitresses, carrying pots of coffee, were smiling. One of them had, inexplicably, a plastic kewpie doll stuck in her beehive hairdo.
The door opened again, sending an Arctic blast across their table, and a paramedic came in and went up to the counter to talk to the waitress. ". . . accident . . ." Mel heard him say and shake his head,". . . carnival truck . . ."
Mel went over. "Excuse me," he said. "I heard you say something about a carnival truck. Is that what had the accident?"
"Disaster is more like it," the paramedic said, shaking his head. "Took a turn too sharp and lost his whole load. And don't ask me what a carnival's doing up here in the middle of winter."
"Was the driver hurt?" Mel asked anxiously.
"Hurt? Hell, no. Not a scratch. But that road's going to be closed the rest of the day." He pulled a bamboo Chinese finger trap out of his pocket and handed it to Mel. "Truck was carrying all the prizes and stuff for the midway. The whole road's covered in stuffed animals and baseballs. And you can't even see to clean 'em up."
Mel went back to the table and told B.T. what had happened.
"We could go south and pick up Highway 33," B.T. said, consulting the road atlas. *
"No, you can't," the waitress, appearing with two pots of coffee, said. "It's closed. Fog. So's 15 north." She poured coffee into their cups. "You're not going anywhere."
The draft hit them again, and the waitress glanced over at the door. "Hey! Don't just stand there—shut the door!"
Mel looked toward the door. Cassie was standing there, wearing a bulky orange sweater that made her look even rounder, and scanning the restaurant for an empty booth. She was carrying a red dinosaur under one arm and her bright green tote bag over the other.
"Cassie!" Mel called to her, and she smiled and came over.
"Put your dinosaur down and join us," B.T. said.
"It's not a dinosaur," she said, setting it on the table. "It's a dragon. See?" she said, pointing to two pieces of red felt on its back. "Wings."
"Where'd you get it?" Mel said.
"The driver of the truck that spilled them gave it to me," she said. "I'd better call my sister before she hears about this on the news," she said, looking around the restaurant. "Do you think the phones are working?"
B.T. pointed at a sign that said "Phones," and she left.
She was back instantly. "There's a line," she said, and sat down. The waitress came by again with coffee and menus, and they ordered pie, and then Cassie went to check the phones again.
"There's still a line," she said, coming back. "My sister will have a fit when she hears about this. She already thinks I'm crazy. And out there in that fog today I thought so, too. I wish my grandmother had never looked up verses in the Bible."
"The Bible?" Mel said.
She waved her hand dismissively. "It's a long story."
"We seem to have plenty of time," B.T. said.
"Well," she said, settling herself. "I'm an English teacher— was an English teacher—and the school board offered this early-retirement bonus that was too good to turn down, so I retired in June, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I'd always wanted to travel, but I hate traveling alone, and I didn't know where I wanted to go. So I got on the sub list—our district has a terrible time getting subs, and there's been all this flu."
It is going to be a long story, Mel thought. He picked up the finger trap and idly stuck his finger into one end. B.T. leaned back in his chair.
"Well, anyway, I was subbing for Carla Sewell, who teaches sophomore lit, Julius Caesar, and I couldn't remember the speech about our fate being in the stars, dear Brutus."
Mel stuck a forefinger into the other side of the finger trap.
"So I was looking it up, but I read the page number wrong, so when I looked it up, it wasn't Julius Caesar, it was Twelfth Night."
Mel stretched the finger trap experimentally. It tightened on his fingers.
" 'Westward, ho!' it said," Cassie said, "and sitting there, reading it, I had this epiphany."
"Epiphany?" Mel said, yanking his fingers apart.
"Epiphany?" B.T. said.
"I'm sorry," Cassie said. "I keep thinking I'm still an English teacher. Epiphany is a literary term for a revelation, a sudden understanding, like in James Joyce's The Dubliners. The word comes from—"
"The story of the wise men," Mel said.
"Yes," she said delightedly, and Mel half-expected her to announce that he had gotten an A. "Epiphany is the word for their arrival at the manger."
And there it was again. The feeling that he knew where Christ was. The wise men's arrival at the manger. James Joyce.
"When I read the words 'Westward, ho!'" Cassie was saying, "I thought, that means me. I have to go west. Something important is going to happen." She looked from one to the other. "You probably think I'm crazy, doing something because of a line in Bartlett's Quotations. But whenever my grandmother had an important decision to make, she used to close her eyes and open her Bible and point at a Scripture, and when she opened her eyes, whatever the Scripture said to do, she'd do it. And, after all, Bartlett's is the Bible of English teachers. So I tried it. I closed the book and my eyes and picked a quotation at random, and it said, 'Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.'"
"Tennyson," Mel said.
She nodded. "So here I am."
"And has something important happened?" B.T. asked.
"Not yet," she said, sounding completely unconcerned. "But it's going to happen soon—I'm sure of it. And in the meantime, I'm seeing all these wonderful sights. I went to Gene Stratton Porter's cabin in Geneva, and the house where Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and Sherwood Anderson's museum."
She looked at Mel. "Struggling against it doesn't work," she said, pushing her index fingers together, and Mel realized he was struggling vainly to free his fingers from the finger trap. "You have to push them together."
There was a blast of icy air and a patrolman wearing three pink plastic leis around his neck and carrying a spotted plush leopard came in.
"Road's open," he said, and there was a general scramble for coats. "It's still real foggy out there," he said, raising his voice, "so don't get carried away."
Mel freed himself from the finger trap and helped Cassie into her coat while B.T. paid the bill. "Do you want to follow us?" he asked.
"No," she said, "I'm going to try to call my sister again, and if she's heard about this accident, it'll take forever. You go on."
B.T. came back from paying, and they went out to the car, which had acquired a thin, rock-hard coating of ice. Mel, chipping at the windshield with the scraper, started a new offshoot in the rapidly spreading crack.
They got back on the interstate. The fog was thicker than ever. Mel peered through it, looking at objects dimly visible at the sides of the road. The debris from the accident—baseballs and plastic leis and Coke bottles. Stuffed animals and kewpie dolls littered the median, looking in the fog like the casualties of some great battle.
"I suppose you consider this the sign you were looking for," B.T. said.
"What?" Mel said.
"Cassie's so-called epiphany. You can read anything you want into random quotations," B.T. said. "You realize that, don't you? It's like reading your horoscope. Or a fortune cookie."
"The Devil can quote scripture to his own ends," Mel murmured.
"Exactly," B.T. said, opening the Gideon Bible and closing his eyes. "Look," he said "Psalm 115, verse 5. 'Eyes have they, but they see not.' Obviously a reference to the fog.'"
He flipped to another page and stabbed his finger at it." 'Thou shall not eat any abominable thing.' Oh, dear, we shouldn't have ordered that pie. You can make them mean anything. And you heard her, she'd retired, she liked to travel, she was obviously looking for an excuse to go somewhere. And her epiphany only said something important was going to happen. It didn't say a word about the Second Coming."
"It told her to go west," Mel said, trying to remember exactly what she had said. She had been looking for a speech from Julius Caesar and had stumbled on Twelfth Night instead. Twelfth night. Epiphany.
"How many times is the word 'west' mentioned in Bartlett's Quotations'?" B.T. said. "A hundred? 'Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the west'? 'Go west, young man'? 'One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest'?" He shut the Bible. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just—" He turned and looked out his window at nothing. "It looks like it might be breaking up."
It wasn't. The fog thinned a little, swirling away from the car in little eddies, and then descended again, more smothering than ever.
"Suppose you do find Him? What do you do then?" B.T. said. "Bow down and worship Him? Give Him frankincense and myrrh?"
"Help Him," Mel said.
"Help Him what? Separate the sheep from the goats? Fight the battle of Armageddon?"
"I don't know," Mel said. "Maybe."
"You really think there's going to be a battle between good and evil?"
"There's always a battle between good and evil," Mel said. "Look at the first time He came. He hadn't been on earth a week before Herod's men were out looking for Him. They murdered every baby and two-year-old in Bethlehem, trying to kill Him."
And thirty-three years later they succeeded, Mel thought. Only killing couldn't stop Him. Nothing could stop Him.
Who had said that? The kid from the carnival, talking about the windshield. "Nothing can stop it. There's stuff you could do to keep it from spreading for a while, but it's still going to spread. There ain't nothing that can stop it."
He felt a flicker of the feeling again. Something about the kid from the carnival. What had he been talking about before that? Siamese twins. And Boswell. No. Something else.
He tried to think what Cassie had said at the truck stop. Something about the wise men arriving at the manger. And not struggling. "You have to push them together," she had said.
It stayed tantalizingly out of reach, as elusive as a road sign glimpsed in the fog.
B.T. reached forward and flicked on the radio. "Foggy tonight, and colder," it said. "In the teens for eastern Nebraska, down in the . . ." it faded to static. B.T. twisted the knob.
"And do you know what will happen to us when Jesus comes?" an evangelist shouted, "The Book of Revelation tells us we will be tormented with fire and brimstone, unless we repent now, before it's too late!"
"A little fire and brimstone would be welcome right about now," B.T. said, reaching forward to turn the heater up to high.
"There's a blanket in the backseat," Mel said, and B.T. reached back and wrapped himself up in it.
"We will be scorched with fire," the radio said, "and the smoke of our torment will rise up forever and ever."
B.T. leaned his head against the doorjamb. "Just so it's warm," he murmured and closed his eyes.
"But that's not all that will happen to us if we do not repent," the evangelist said, "if we do not take Jesus as our personal Savior. The Book of Revelation tells us in Chapter 14 that we will be cast into the winepress of God's wrath and be trodden in it till our blood covers the ground for a thousand miles! And don't fool yourselves, that day is coming soon! The signs are all around us! Wait till your father gets home."
Mel switched it off, but it was too late. The evangelist had hit it, the problem Mel had been trying to avoid since that moment in the sanctuary.
I don't believe it, he had thought when he'd heard the minister talking about Jesus forbidding believers to associate with outcasts. And he had thought it again when he heard the radio evangelist that first day talking about Christ coming to get revenge.
"I don't believe it," he thought, and when B.T. stirred in his corner, he realized he had spoken aloud.
"I don't believe it," he murmured. God had so loved the world, He had sent His only begotten Son to live among men, to be a helpless baby and a little boy and a young man, had sent Him to be cold and confused, angry and overjoyed. "To share our common lot," the Nicene Creed said. To undergo and understand and forgive. "Father, forgive them," He had said, with nails driven through His hands, and when they had arrested Him, he had made the disciples put away their weapons. He had healed the soldier's ear Peter had cut off.
He would never, never come back in a blaze of wrath and revenge, slaughtering enemies, tormenting unbelievers, wreaking fire and pestilence and famine on them. Never.
And how can I believe in a revelation about the Second Coming, he thought, when I don't believe in the Second Coming?
But the revelation wasn't about the Second Coming, he thought. He hadn't seen earthquakes or Armageddon or Christ coming in a blaze of clouds and glory. He's already here, he had thought, now, and had set out to find Him, to look for a sign.
But there aren't any, he thought, and saw one off in the mist. "Prairie Home 5, Denver 468."
Denver. They would be there tomorrow night. And B.T would want him to fly home with him.
Unless I figure out the key, Mel thought. Unless I'm given a sign. Or unless the roads are closed.

"And, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them. ..."
— MATTHEW  2:9

"They should be open," the woman at the Wayfarer Motel said. The Holiday Inn and the Super 8 and the Innkeeper had all been full up, and the Wayfarer had only one room left. "There's supposed to be fog in the morning, and then it's supposed to be nice all the way till Sunday."
"What about the roads east?" B.T. asked. "No problem," she said.
The Wayfarer didn't have a coffee shop. They ate supper at the Village Inn on the other end of town. As they were leaving, they ran into Cassie in the parking lot.
"Oh, good," she said. "I was afraid I wouldn't have a chance to say goodbye."
"Goodbye?" Mel said.
"I'm heading south tomorrow to Red Cloud. When I consulted Bartlett's, it said, 'Winter lies too long in country towns.' " "Oh?" Mel said, wondering what this had to do with going south.
"Willa Cather," Cassie said. "My Ántonia. I didn't understand it either, so I tried the Gideon Bible in my hotel, it's so nice of them to leave them there, and it was Exodus 13:21, 'And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire.' "
She smiled expectantly at them. "Pillar of fire. Red Cloud. Willa Cather's museum is in Red Cloud."
They said goodbye to her and went back to the motel. B.T. sat down on his bed and took his laptop out of his suitcase. "I've got some e-mail I've got to answer," he said.
And send? Mel wondered. "Dear Mrs. Bilderbeck, we'll be in Denver tomorrow. Am hoping to persuade Mel to come home with me. Have straitjacket ready."
Mel sat down in the room's only chair with the Rand McNally and looked at the map of Nebraska, searching for a town named Megiddo or New Jerusalem. There was Red Cloud, down near the southern border of Nebraska. Pillar of fire. Why couldn't he have had a nice straightforward sign like that? A pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. Or a star.
But Moses had wandered around in the wilderness for forty years following said pillar. And the star hadn't led the wise men to Bethlehem. It had led them straight into King Herod's arms. They hadn't had a clue where the newborn Christ was. "Where is He that is born king of the Jews?" they'd asked Herod.
"Where is He?" Mel murmured, and B.T. glanced up from his laptop and then back down at it again, typing steadily.
Mel turned to the map of Colorado. Beulah. Bonanza. Firstview.
"Even if your—epiphany—was real," B.T. had asked him this afternoon, "couldn't you have misinterpreted what it means?"
Well, if he had, he wouldn't have been the first one. The Bible was full of people who had misinterpreted prophecies. "Dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me," the Scriptures said, "they pierced my hands and my feet." But nobody saw the Crucifixion coming. Or the Resurrection,
His own disciples didn't recognize Him. Easter Sunday they walked all the way to Emmaus with Him without figuring out who He was, and even when He told them, Thomas refused to believe Him and demanded to see the scars of the nails in His hands.
They had never recognized Him. Isaiah had plainly predicted a virgin who would bring forth a child "out of the root of Jesse," a child who would redeem Israel. But nobody had thought that meant a baby in a stable.
They had thought he was talking about a warrior, a king who would raise an army and drive the hated foreigners out of their country, a hero on a white horse who would vanquish their enemies and set them free. And He had, but not in the way they expected.
Nobody had expected Him to be a poor itinerant preacher from an obscure family, with no college degree and no military training, a nobody. Even the wise men had expected Him to be royalty. "Where is the king whose star we have seen in the east?" they had asked Herod.
And Herod had promptly sent soldiers out to search for a usurper, a threat to his throne.
They had been looking for the wrong thing. And maybe B.T.'s right, maybe I am, too, and that's the answer. The Second Coming isn't going to be battles and earthquakes and falling stars, and Revelation means something else, like the prophecies of the Messiah.
Or maybe it wasn't the Second Coming, and Christ was here only in a symbolic sense, in the poor, the hungry, in those in need of help. "As ye have done this unto the least of these—"
"Maybe the Second Coming really is here," B.T. said from the bed. "Look at this."
He turned the laptop around so Mel could see the screen. "Watch, therefore," it read, "for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh."
"It's a website," B.T. said, "www.watchman." "It probably belongs to one of the radio evangelists," Mel said. "I don't think so," B.T. said. He hit a key, and a new screen came up. It was full of entries.
"Meteor, 12-23, 4 mi. NNW Raton." "Examined area. 12-28. No sign."
"Weather Channel 11-2, 9:15 a.m. PST. Reference to unusual cloud formations."
"Latitude and longitude? Need location." "8.6 mi. WNW Prescott AZ 11-4."
"Denver Post 914P8C2—Headline: 'Unusually high lightning activity strikes Carson National Forest. MT2427.'"
"What do you think that stands for?" B.T. said, pointing at the string of letters and numbers.
"Matthew 24, verse 27," Mel said." 'For the lightning cometh out of the west and shineth even unto the east, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.' "
B.T. nodded and scrolled the screen down.
"Triple lightning strike. 7-11, Platteville, CO. Nov. 28. Two injured."
"Lightning storm, Dec. 4, Truth or Consequences."
"What about that one?" B.T. said, pointing at "Truth or Consequences."
"It's a town in southern New Mexico," Mel said.
"Oh." He scrolled the screen down some more.
"Falling star, 12-30, 2 mi. W of U.S. State Hwy 191, west of Bozeman, mile marker 161."
"Coma patient recovery, Yale—New Haven Hosp. Connection?"
"Negative. Too far east."
"Possible sighting Nevada."
"Need location."
Need location. " 'Go search diligently for the young child,'" Mel murmured," 'and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him.'"
"What?" B.T. said.
"It's what Herod said when the wise men told him about the star." He stared at the screen:
"L.A. Times Jan 2 P5C1. Fish die-off. RV89?"
"Possible sighting. Old Faithful, Yellowstone Nat'l Pk, Jan. 2."
And over and over again:
"Need location."
"Need location."
"Need location."
"They obviously think the Second Coming's happened," B.T. said, staring at the screen.
"Or aliens have landed at Roswell," Mel said. He pointed to the convenience store entry. "Or Elvis is back."
"Maybe," B.T. said, staring at the screen.
Mel went back to looking at the maps. Barren Rock. Deadwood. Last Chance.
Need location, he thought. Maybe he and Cassie and whoever had written "Too far east" on the website had all misinterpreted the message, and it was not "west" but "West."
He turned to the gazetteer in the back. West. Westwood Hills, Kansas. Westville, Oklahoma. West Hollywood, California. West-view. Westgate. Westmont. There was a Westwood Hills in Kansas. Colorado had a Westcliffe, a Western Hills, and a Westminster. Neither Arizona nor New Mexico had any Wests. Nevada didn't either. Nebraska had a West Point.
West Point. Maybe it wasn't even in the west. Maybe it was West Orange, New Jersey, or West Palm Beach. Or West Berlin. He shut the atlas and looked over at B.T. He had dozed off, his face tired and worried-looking even in sleep. His laptop was on his chest, and the Gideon Bible he had stolen from the Holiday Inn lay beside him.
Mel shut the laptop off and quietly closed it. B.T. didn't move. Mel picked up the Bible.
The answer had to be in the Scriptures. He opened the Bible to Matthew. "Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not."
He read on. Disasters and devastation and tribulation, as the prophets had spoken.
The prophets. He found Isaiah. "Hear ye indeed but understand not; and see ye indeed but perceive not."
He shut the Bible. All right, he thought, standing it on its spine on his hand. Let's have a sign here. I'm running out of time.
He opened his eyes. His finger was on I Samuel 23, verse 14. "And Saul sought him every day, but God delivered him not into his hand."

"For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet."
— MATTHEW  24:6

All the roads were open, and, from Grand Island, clear and dry, and the fog had lifted a little.
"With roads like this, we ought to be in Denver by tonight," B.T. said.
Yes, Mel thought, finishing what B.T. had said, if you fly back with me, we could be there in time for the ecumenical meeting. Nobody'd ever have to know he'd been gone, except Mrs. Bilderbeck, and he could tell her he'd been offered a job by another church, but had decided not to take it, which was true.
"It just didn't work out," he would tell Mrs. Bilderbeck, and she would be so overjoyed that he wasn't leaving, she wouldn't even ask for details.
And he could go back to doing sermons and giving the choir plenty of warning, storing the star, and keeping the pilot light going, as if nothing had happened.
"Exit 312" a green interstate sign up ahead said. "Hastings, 18. Bed Cloud, 57."
He wondered if Cassie was already at Willa Cather's house, convinced she had been led there by Bartlett's Quotations.
Cassie had no trouble finding signs—she saw them everywhere. And maybe they are everywhere, and I'm just not seeing them. Maybe Hastings is a sign, and the truck full of mirrors, and those stuffed toys all over the road. Maybe that Chinese finger-trap I got stuck in yesterday was—
"Look," B.T. said. "Wasn't that Cassie's car?"
"Where?" Mel said, craning his neck around.
"In that ditch back there."
This time Mel didn't wait for an "Authorized Vehicles Only" crossing. He plunged into the snowy median and back along the other side of the highway, still unable to see anything.
"There," B.T. said, pointing, and he turned onto the median.
He had crossed both lanes and was onto the shoulder before he saw the Honda, halfway down a steep ditch and tilted at an awkward angle. He couldn't see anyone in the driver's seat.
B.T. was out of the car before Mel got the car stopped and plunging down the snowy bank, with Mel behind him. B.T. wrenched the car door open.
Cassie's green tote bag was on the floor of the passenger seat. B.T. peered into the backseat. "She's not here," he said unnecessarily.
"Cassie!" Mel called. He ran around the front of the car, though she couldn't have been thrown out. The door would have been open if she'd been thrown out. "Cassie!"
"Here," a faint voice said, and Mel looked down the slope. Cassie lay at the bottom in tall dry weeds.
"She's down here," he said, and half-walked, half-slid down the ravine.
She was lying on her back with her leg bent under her. "I think it's broken," she said to Mel.
"Go flag a semi down," Mel said to B.T., who'd appeared above them. "Have them call an ambulance."
B.T. disappeared, and Mel turned back to Cassie. "How long have you been here?" he asked her, pulling off his overcoat and tucking it around her.
"I don't know," she said, shivering. "There was a patch of ice. I didn't think anybody'd see the car, so I got out to climb up to the road, and that's when I slipped. My leg's broken, isn't it?" At that angle, it had to be. "I think it probably is," Mel said.
She turned her face away in the dry weeds. "My sister was right."
Mel took off his jacket, rolled it up, and put it under her head. "We'll have an ambulance here for you in no time."
"She told me I was crazy," Cassie said, still not looking at Mel, "and this proves it, doesn't it? And she didn't even know about the epiphany." She turned and looked at Mel. "Only it wasn't an epiphany. Just low estrogen levels."
"Conserve your strength," he said, and looked anxiously up the slope.
Cassie grabbed at his hand. "I lied to you. I wasn't offered early retirement. I asked for it. I was so sure 'Westward ho!' meant something. I sold my house and took out all my savings."
Her hand was red with cold. Mel wished he had taken his gloves back when the kid from the carnival offered them. He took her icy hand between his own and held it tightly.
"I was so sure," she said.
"Mel," B.T. called from above them. "I've had four semis go by without stopping. I think it's the color." He pointed to his black face. "You need to come up and try."
"I'll be right there," Mel called back up to him. "I'll be right back," he said to Cassie.
"No," she said, clutching his hand. "Don't you see? It didn't mean anything. It was nothing but menopause, like my sister said. She tried to tell me, but I wouldn't listen."
"Cassie," Mel said, gently releasing her hand, "we need to get you out of here and into town to a hospital. You can tell me all about it then."
"There's nothing to tell," she said, and let go of his hand.
"Come on, there's another truck coming," B.T. called down, and Mel started up the slope. "No, never mind," B.T. said. "The cavalry's here," he said, and, amazingly, he laughed.
There was a screech of hydraulic brakes. Mel scrambled up the rest of the way. A truck was stopping. It was one of the carnival's, loaded with merry-go-round horses, white and black and palomino, with red-and-gold saddles and jeweled bridles. B.T. was already running toward the cab, asking, "Do you have a CB?"
"Yeah," the driver said, and came around the back of the truck. It was the kid Mel had picked up, still wearing the gloves he had given him.
"We need an ambulance," Mel said. "There's a lady hurt here."
"Sure thing," the kid said, and disappeared back around the truck.
Mel skidded back down the slope to Cassie. "He's calling an ambulance," he said to her.
She nodded uninterestedly.
"They're on their way," the kid called down from above them. He went over to the Honda, B.T. following, and stuck his head under the back of it. He walked all around it, squatting next to the far wheels, and then disappeared back up the slope again.
"He says his truck doesn't have a tow rope," B.T. said, coming back to report, "and he doesn't think he could get the car out anyway, so he's calling a tow truck."
Mel nodded. "I saw a sign that said the next town was only ten miles. They'll have you in out of the cold before you know it."
She didn't answer. Mel wondered if perhaps she was going into shock. "Cassie," he said, taking her hands again and rubbing them in spite of what he'd told the kid about frostbite. "We were so surprised to see your car," he said, just to be saying something, to get her to talk. "We thought you were going down to Red Cloud. What made you change your mind?"
"Bartlett's," she said bitterly. "When I was putting my tote bag in the car, it fell out onto the parking lot, and when I picked it up, the first thing I read was from William Blake. 'Turn away no more,' it said. I thought it meant I shouldn't turn south to Red Cloud, that I should keep going west. Can you imagine anybody being that stupid?"
Yes, Mel thought.
The ambulance pulled up, sirens and yellow lights blazing, and two paramedics leaped out with a stretcher, skidded down the slope to where Cassie was, and began maneuvering her expertly onto it.
Mel went over to B.T. "You go in with her in the ambulance," he said, "and I'll wait here for the tow truck."
"Are you sure?" B.T. said. "I can wait here."
"No," Mel said. "I'll follow the tow truck to the garage and find out what I can about her car. Then I'll meet you at the hospital. What time's the earliest flight home from Denver tomorrow?"
"Flight?" B.T. said. "No. I'm not going home without you."
"You won't have to," Mel said. "What time's the earliest flight?"
"I don't understand—"
"Or we can drive back. If we take turns driving we can be back in time for the ecumenical meeting."
"But—" B.T. said bewilderedly.
"I wanted a sign. Well, I got it," he said, waving his arm at Cassie, at her car. "I don't have to be hit over the head to get the message. I'm out here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter on a fool's errand."
"What about the epiphany?"
"It was a hallucination, a seizure, a temporary hormonal imbalance."
"And what about your call to the ministry?" B.T. said. "Was that a hallucination, too? What about Cassie?"
"The Devil can quote Scripture, remember?" Mel said bitterly. "And Bartlett's Quotations."
"Can you give us a hand here?" one of the paramedics called. They had Cassie on the stretcher and were ready to carry it up the slope.
"Coming," Mel said, and started toward them.
B.T. took his arm. "What about the others who are looking for Him? The watchman website?"
"UFO nuts," Mel said, and went over to the stretcher. "It doesn't mean anything."
Cassie lay under a gray blanket, her head turned to the side, the way it had been when Mel found her.
"Are you all right?" B.T., taking hold of the other side of the stretcher, asked.
"No," she said, and a tear wobbled down her plump cheek. "I'm sorry I put you to all this trouble."
The kid from the carnival took hold of the front of the stretcher. "Things aren't always as bad as they look," he said, patting the blanket. "I saw a guy fall off the top of the Ferris wheel once, and he wasn't even hurt."
Cassie shook her head. "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have come."
"Don't say that," B.T. said. "You got to see Mark Twain's house. And Gene Stratton Porter's."
She turned her face away. "What good are they? I'm not even an English teacher anymore."
Things might not have been as bad as they looked for the guy who fell off the Ferris wheel, but they were even worse than they looked when it came to the snowy slope and getting Cassie up it. By the time they got her into the ambulance, her face was as gray as the blanket and twisted with pain. The paramedics began hooking her up to a blood-pressure cuff and an IV.
"I'll meet you at the hospital," Mel said. "You can call Mrs. Bilderbeck and tell her we're coming." "What if the roads are closed?" B.T. said. "You heard the clerk last night. Clear both directions." He looked at B.T. "I thought this was what you wanted, for me to come to my senses, to admit I was crazy."
B.T. looked unhappy. "Animals don't always leave tracks," he said. "I learned that five years ago banding deer for a Lyme disease project. Sometimes they leave all sorts of sign, other times they're invisible."
The paramedics were shutting the doors. "Wait," he said. "I'm going with her."
He clambered up into the back of the ambulance. "Do you know the only way you can tell for sure the deer are there?"
Mel shook his head.
"By the wolves," he said.

"Therefore   the  Lord   himself shall  give  you  a sign. . ."
— ISAIAH   7:14

It took nearly an hour for the tow truck to get there. Mel waited in his car with the heater running for a while and then got out and went over to stare at Cassie's Honda.
Wolves, B.T. had said. Predators. " 'For wheresoever the carcass is,'" he quoted," 'there will the eagles be gathered together.' MT2428."
"The Devil can quote Scripture," he said aloud, and got back into the car.
The crack in the windshield had split again, splaying out in two new directions from the center. A definite sign.
You've had dozens of signs, he thought. Blizzards, road closures, icy and snow-packed conditions. You just chose to ignore them.
"Why, anybody'd have to be Hind not to recognize them," the radio evangelist had said, and that was what he had been, willfully blind, pretending the yellow arrow, the roads closing behind him, were signs he was going in the right direction, that Cassie's "Westward, ho!" was outside confirmation.
"It didn't mean anything," he said.
It was getting dark by the time the tow truck finally got there, and pitch black by the time they got Cassie's Honda pulled up the slope.
And that was a sign, too, Mel thought, following the tow truck. Like the fog and the carnival truck jackknifed across the highway and the "No Vacancy" signs on the motels. All of them flashing the same message. It was a mistake. Give up. Go home.
The tow truck had gotten far ahead of him. He stepped on the gas, but a very slow pickup pulled in front of him, and an even slower recreation vehicle was blocking the right lane. By the time he got to the gas station, the mechanic was already sliding out from under the Honda and shaking his head.
"Snapped an axle and did in the transmission," he said, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. "Cost at least fifteen hundred to fix it, and I doubt if it's worth half that." He patted the hood sympathetically. "I'm afraid it's the end of the road."
The end of the road. All right, all right, Mel thought, I get the message.
"So what do you want to do?" the mechanic asked.
Give up, Mel thought. Come to my senses. Go home. "It's not my car," he said. "I'll have to ask the owner. She's in the hospital right now."
"She hurt bad?"
Mel remembered her lying there in the weeds, saying, "It didn't mean anything."
"No," he lied.
"Tell her I can do an estimate on a new axle and a new transmission if she wants," the mechanic said reluctantly, "but if I was her I'd take the insurance and start over."
"I'll tell her," Mel said. He opened the trunk and took out her suitcase, and then went around to the passenger side to get her green bag out of the backseat.
There was a bright yellow flyer rolled up and jammed in the door handle. Mel unrolled it. It was a flyer from the carnival. The kid must have stuck it there, Mel thought, smiling in spite of himself.
There was a drawing of a trumpet at the top, with "Come one, come all!" issuing from the mouth of it.
Underneath that, there was a drawing of the triple Ferris wheel, and scattered in boxes across the page, "Marvel at the Living Fountains," "Ride the Sea Dragon!," "Popcorn, Snow Cones, Cotton Candy!," "See a Lion and a Lamb in a Single Cage!"
He stared at the flyer.
"Tell her if she wants to sell it for parts," the mechanic said, "I can give her four hundred."
A lion and a lamb. Wheels within wheels. "For the Lamb shall lead them unto living fountains of waters."
"What's that you're reading?" the mechanic said, coming around the car.
A midway with stuffed animals for prizes—bears and lions and red dragons—and a ride called the Shooting Star, a hall of mirrors. "For now we see in a glass darkly but then we shall see face to face."
The mechanic peered over his shoulder. "Oh, an ad for that crazy carnival," he said. "Yeah, I got a sign for it in the window."
A sign. "For behold, I give you a sign." And the sign was just what it said, a sign. Like the Siamese twins. Like the peace sign on the back of the kid's hand. "For unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace." On the kid's scarred hand.
"If she wants an estimate, tell her it'll take some time," the mechanic said, but Mel wasn't listening. He was gazing blindly at the flyer. "Peer into the Bottomless Pit!" it said. "Ride the Merry-Go-Round!"
"And thus I saw the horses in the vision," Mel murmured, "and them that sat upon them." He started to laugh.
The mechanic frowned at him. "It ain't funny," he said. "This car's a real mess. So what do you think she'll want to do?"
"Go to a carnival," Mel said, and ran to get in his car.

"And there shall be no night there; and they need 
no candle, neither light of the sun ..."
— REVELATION  22:15

The hospital was a three-story brick building. Mel parked in front of the emergency entrance and went in.
"May I help you?" the admitting nurse asked.
"Yes," he said, "I'm looking for—" and then stopped. Behind the desk was a sign for the carnival with dates at the bottom. "Crown Point, Dec. 14" it read. "Gresham, Jan. 13th, Empyrean, Jan. 15."
"May I help you, sir?" the nurse said again, and Mel turned to ask her where Empyrean was, but she wasn't talking to him. She was asking two men in navy-blue suits.
"Yes," the taller one said, "we're starting a hospital outreach, ministering to people who are in the hospital far from home. Do you have any patients here from out of town?"
The nurse looked doubtful. "I'm afraid we're not allowed to give out information about patients."
"Of course, I understand," the man said, opening his Bible. "We don't want to violate anyone's privacy. We'd just like to be able to say a few words of comfort, like the Good Samaritan."
"I'm not supposed to . . ." the nurse said.
"We understand," the shorter man said. "Will you join us in a moment of prayer? Precious Lord, we seek—"
The door opened, and as they all turned to look at a boy with a bleeding forehead, Mel slipped down the hall and up the stairs.
Where would they have taken her? he wondered, peering into rooms with open doors. Did a hospital this small even have separate wards, or were all the patients jumbled together?
She wasn't on the first floor. He hurried up the stairs to the second, keeping an eye out for the men in the navy-blue suits. They didn't know her name yet, but they would soon. Even if they couldn't get it out of the admitting nurse, Cassie would have given them her health-insurance card. It would all be in the computer. Where would they have taken her? X-ray, he thought.
"Can you tell me how to get to X-ray?" he asked a middle-aged woman in a pink uniform.
"Third floor," she said, and pointed toward the elevator.
Mel thanked her, and as soon as she was out of sight, he took the stairs two at a time.
Cassie wasn't in X-ray. Mel started to look for a technician to ask and then saw B.T. down at the end of the hall.
"Good news," B.T. said as he hurried up to him. "It's not broken. She's got a sprained knee."
"Where is she?" Mel asked, taking B.T.'s arm.
"Three-oh-eight," B.T. said, and Mel propelled him into the room and shut the door behind them.
Cassie, in a white hospital gown, was lying in the far bed, her head turned away from them as it had been in the frozen weeds. She looked pale and listless.
"She called her sister," B.T. said, looking anxiously at her. "She's on her way down from Minnesota to get her."
"She told me I was lucky I hadn't gotten into worse trouble than a sprained knee," Cassie said, turning to look at Mel. "How's my car?"
"A dead loss," Mel said, stepping up to the head of the bed. "But it doesn't matter. We—"
"You're right," she said, and turned her head on the pillow. "It doesn't matter. I've come to my senses. I'm going home." She smiled wanly at Mel. "I'm just sorry you had logo to all this trouble for me, but at least it won't be for much longer. My sister should be here tomorrow night, and the hospital is keeping me overnight for observation, so you two don't have to stay. You can go to your religious meeting."
"We lied to you," Mel said. "We're not on our way to a religious meeting," and realized they were. "You aren't the only one who had an epiphany."
"I'm not?" she said, and pushed herself partway up against the pillows.
"No. I got a message to go west, too," Mel said. "You were right. Something important is going to happen, and we want you to come with us."
B.T. cut in, "You know where He is?"
"I know where He's going to be," Mel said. "B.T., I want you to go get the road atlas and look up a town called Empyrean and see where it is."
"/ know where it is," Cassie said, and sat up all the way. "It's in Dante."
They both looked at her, and she said, half-apologetically, "I'm an English teacher, remember? It's the highest circle of Paradise. The Holy City of God."
"I doubt if that's going to be in Rand McNally," B.T. said.
"It doesn't matter," Mel said. "We'll be able to find it by the lights. But we've got to get her out of here first. Cassie, do you think you can walk if we help you?"
"Yes." She flung the covers off and began edging her bandaged knee toward the side of the bed. "My clothes are in the closet there."
Mel helped her hobble to the closet.
"I'll go check her out," B.T. said, and went out.
Cassie pulled her dress off the hanger and began unzipping it. Mel turned his back and went over to the door to look out. There was no sign of the two men.
"Can you help me get my boots on?" Cassie said, hobbling over to the chair. "My knee's feeling a lot better," she said, lowering herself into the chair. "It hardly hurts at all." Mel knelt and eased her feet into her fur-edged boots.
B.T. came in. "There are two men down at the admissions desk," he said, out of breath, "trying to find out what room she's in."
"Who are they?" Cassie asked.
"Herod's men," Mel said. "It'll have to be the fire escape. Can you manage that?"
She nodded. Mel helped her to her feet and went and got her coat. He and B.T. helped her into it, and each took an arm, and helped her to the door, opening it cautiously and looking both ways down the hall, and then over to the fire escape.
"I should call my sister," Cassie said, "and tell her I've changed my mind."
"We'll stop at a gas station," B.T. said, opening the door fully and looking both ways again. "Okay," he said, and they went down the hall, through the emergency exit door, and onto the fire escape.
"You go bring the car around," B.T. said, and Mel clattered down the metal mesh steps and ducked across the parking lot to the car.
The emergency-room door opened and two men stood in its light for a moment, talking to someone.
Mel jammed the key into the ignition, switched it on, and pulled the car around to the side of the hospital, where B.T. and Cassie were working their way down the last steps.
"Come on," he said, grabbing Cassie under the arm, "hurry," and hustled her across to the car.
A siren blared. "Hurry," Mel said, yanking the door open and pushing her into the backseat, slamming the door shut. B.T. ran around to the other side.
The siren came abruptly closer and then cut off, and Mel, reaching for the door handle, looked back toward the entrance. An ambulance pulled in, red and yellow lights flashing, and the two men in the door reached forward and took a stretcher off the back.
And this is crazy, Mel thought. Nobody's after us. But they would be, as soon as the nurse saw Cassie was missing, and if not then, as soon as Cassie's sister got there. "I saw two men push a woman into a car and then go peeling out of here," one of the interns unloading that stretcher would say. "It looked like they were kidnapping her." And how would they explain to the police that they were looking for the City of God?
"This is insane," Mel started to say, reaching for the door handle.
There was a flyer wedged in it. Mel unrolled it and read it by the parking lot's vapor light. "Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up to the Greatest Show on Earth!" it read in letters of gold. "Wonders, Marvels, Mysteries Revealed!"
Mel got into the car and handed the flyer to B.T. "Ready?" he asked.
"Let's go," Cassie said, and leaned forward to point at the front door. Two men in navy-blue suits were running down the front steps.
"Keep down," Mel said, and peeled out of the parking lot. He turned south, drove a block, turned onto a side street, pulled up to the curb, switched off the lights, and waited, watching in his rearview mirror until a navy-blue car roared past them going south.
He started the car and drove two blocks without lights on and then circled back to the highway and headed north. Five miles out of town, he turned east on a gravel road, drove till it ended, turned south, and then east again, and north onto a dirt road. There was no one behind them.
"Okay," he said, and B.T. and Cassie sat up.
"Where are we?" Cassie asked.
"I have no idea," Mel said. He turned east again and then south on the first paved road he came to.
"Where are we going?" B.T. asked.
"I don't know that either. But I know what we're looking for." He waited till a beat-up pickup truck full of kids passed them and then pulled over to the side of the road and switched on the dome light.
"Where's your laptop?" he asked B.T.
"Right here," B.T. said, opening it up and switching it on.
"All right," Mel said, holding the flyer up to the light. "They were in Omaha on January fourth, Palmyra on the ninth, and Beatrice on the tenth." He concentrated, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital.
"Beatrice," Cassie murmured. "That's in Dante, too."
"The carnival was in Crown Point on December fourteenth," Mel went on, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital, "and Gresham on January twelfth."
"The carnival?" B.T. said. "We're looking for a carnival?"
"Yes," Mel said. "Cassie, have you got your Bartlett's Quotations'?"
"Yes," she said, and began rummaging in the emerald-green tote bag.
"I saw them between Pittsburgh and Youngstown on Sunday," Mel said to B.T., who had started typing, "and in Wayside, Iowa, on Monday."
"And the truck spill was at Seward," B.T. said, tapping keys.
"What have you got, Cassie?" Mel said, looking in the rearview mirror.
She had her finger on an open page. "It's Christina Rossetti," she said." 'Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.'"
"They're skipping all over the map," B.T. said, turning the laptop so Mel could see the screen. It was a maze of connecting lines.
"Can you tell what general direction they're headed?" Mel asked.
"Yes," B.T. said. "West."
"West," Mel repeated. Of course. He started the car again and turned west on the first road they came to.
There were no cars at all, and only a few scattered lights, a farm and a grain elevator, and a radio tower. Mel drove steadily west across the flat, snowy landscape, looking for the distant glittering lights of the carnival.
The sky turned navy blue and then gray, and they stopped to get gas and call Cassie's sister.
"Use my calling card," B.T. said, handing it to Cassie. "They're not looking for me yet. How much cash do we have?"
Cassie had sixty and another two hundred in traveler's checks. Mel had a hundred sixty-eight. "What did you do?" B.T. asked. "Rob the collection plate?"
Mel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. "I won't be back in time for the services on Sunday," he told her. "Call Reverend Davidson and ask if he'll fill in. And tell the ecumenical meeting to read John 3: 16—18 for a devotion."
"Are you sure you're all right?" Mrs. Bilderbeck asked. "There were some men here looking for you yesterday."
Mel gripped the receiver. "What did you tell them?"
"I didn't like the looks of them, so I told them you were at a ministerial alliance meeting in Boston."
"You're wonderful" Mel said, and started to hang up.
"Oh, wait, what about the furnace?" Mrs. Bilderbeck said. "What if the pilot light goes out again?"
"It won't," Mel said. "Nothing can put it out."
He hung up and handed the phone and the calling card to Cassie. She called her sister, who had a car phone, and told her not to come, that she was fine, her knee hadn't been sprained after all, just twisted.
"And I think it must have been," she said to Mel, walking back to the car. "See? I'm not limping at all."
B.T. had bought juice and doughnuts and a large bag of potato chips. They ate them while Mel drove, going south across the interstate and down to Highway 34.
The sun came up and glittered off metal silos and onto the star-shaped crack in the windshield. Mel squinted against its brilliance. They drove slowly through McCook and Sharon Springs and Maranatha, looking for flyers on telephone poles and in store windows, calling out the towns and dates to B.T, who added them to the ones on his laptop.
Trucks passed them, none of them carrying Tilt-a-Whirls or concession stands, and Cassie consulted Bartlett's again. "A cold coming we had of it," it said. "Just the worst time of the year."
"T. S. Eliot," Cassie said wonderingly." 'Journey of the Magi.'"
They stopped for gas again, and B.T. drove while Mel napped. It began to get dark. B.T. and Mel changed places, and Cassie got in front, moving stiffly.
"Is your knee hurting again?" Mel asked.
"No," Cassie said. "It doesn't hurt at all. I've just been sitting in the car too long," she said. "At least its not camels. Can you imagine what that must have been like?"
Yes, Mel thought, I can. I'll bet everyone thought they were crazy. Including them.
It got very dark. They continued west, through Glorieta and Gilead and Beulah Center, searching for multicolored lights glimmering in a cold field, a spinning Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy, listening for the screams of the roller coaster and the music of a merry-go-round.
And the star went before them.