by George C. Chesbro
The Prophet, Jeremiah Peoples, founder and spiritual leader of Portal to Heaven, stirred in his sleep at the sound of rustling papers, then came wide awake and sat bolt upright in bed, staring in shock and terror at the figure sitting in a chair at the foot of his bed thumbing through a sheaf of papers he was reading by the light of a standing lamp he had pulled over next to him. The man, who wore a black leather motorcycle jacket over a white shirt buttoned at the neck, looked to be about six feet tall, with chiseled features, soulful brown eyes, and thinning, shoulder-length, wheat-colored hair. Peoples reached with a trembling hand for his dentures, knocked over the cup on the end table where they soaked. Garth Frederickson leaned down and picked up the teeth off the floor, handed them to the man, who hurriedly shoved them into his mouth.
“Who are you?” Peoples croaked in a rasping voice. His pale, watery blue eyes were filmed with fear.
“I’m the angel of death,” Garth replied mildly.
Peoples made a guttural sound in his throat, then threw aside his bed covers and scrambled out of bed. He went to a closet, rummaged around inside, came out with a shotgun, which he aimed at Garth’s chest. “You’re a dead man, mister.”
Garth set the papers on the bed, leaned back in his chair, put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and smiled thinly. “Well, this is a surprise.”
Peoples brushed a strand of gray hair away from his eyes, scowled. “What’s a surprise?”
“You thinking you can kill the angel of death, or even wanting to. I came to give you the reward you’ve worked all your life for, and now you act as if you don’t even want it. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble trying to guarantee yourself a place in Paradise, and now you’re on the verge of throwing it all away. What would your disciples think? Threatening the angel of death is a serious offense. Perhaps you’d prefer to spend eternity roasting in hell?” Garth paused, took his right hand out of his pocket, and slowly raised it into the air. “I can arrange that. I’ll send you there right now, if you’d like.”
Peoples hesitated, and then quickly threw the shotgun on the bed, rubbing his hands on the front of his pajamas as if the weapon had burned them.
A door to Garth’s left opened and a young, blonde-headed girl, her green eyes puffy with sleep, tentatively stepped into the room. Garth judged her to be fourteen or fifteen years old, two or three years younger than the boy he would find exploring the desk in his den by the glow of a flashlight two nights later. Her reaction upon seeing Garth was about the same as the boy’s when Garth would turn on the lights in the den, startling him. The boy would wheel around, dropping his flashlight and pulling a gun from his jacket pocket. The boy’s acne-scarred face was flushed, his dark eyes, the same color as his long, stringy hair, glittering with shock, fear and anger.
“Congratulations, kiddo,” Garth said in an even tone. “You’ve hit the jackpot. Welcome to the American nightmare. You’ve won yourself a few years in a cage, like a hamster. Except hamsters probably have a better diet. I hope you like rice and beans.”
The boy stared uncertainly at the man in a bathrobe and slippers standing in the doorway of the den, then raised his gun and pointed it at Garth. “Don’t move,” he said.
“This is my home,” Garth said easily, walking across the room, past the boy, and settling into the chair behind his desk. “I’ll do as I like.”
The boy tugged nervously at the earring in his left earlobe. “I’ve got a gun on you,” the boy said in a voice tuned to a higher, almost whiny, pitch by tension and frustration.
“I noticed. So what?”
“What do you mean, ‘so what’? You have to do what I tell you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I could kill you.”
“True. Home invasions often end up with people dead, often by accident. Whether or not you kill me, your life is over. You’re headed for a cage, hamster city. The only question you have to ask yourself is how long you want it to be before you kiss a woman’s lips, eat whatever and whenever you want to, and so on. On the other hand, I could kill you and I’d probably get an award from the Rotary. Execution of criminals is the best crime prevention, you know, and the Supreme Court is helping the death penalty make a big comeback. I assume this isn’t the first time you’ve done this. The killing of home invaders is definitely applauded. But I’ve killed my quota of men for the year. I’m trying to cut back. You’re lucky my wife is out of town and I’m bored. Otherwise, you would probably be dead.”
The boy’s hand holding the gun had begun to shake, and he shifted the weapon to his other hand. The shock and anger had gone out of his smoky eyes, and he had taken on the look of a trapped animal. “What are you, some kind of tough guy?”
“That would be my brother.”
“Who’s your brother?”
“Somebody who’d disapprove of this little experiment in social engineering I’m conducting.”
“What?”
“By now my brother would have taken that gun away from you and shoved it down your throat. He’d be sitting on your head waiting for the police to arrive. I tend to take a more radical approach to problem solving. What do you think of the way I’m handling this situation so far?”
The boy swallowed hard, tugged even harder on his earring. “Dude, you’re creeping me out. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Besides holding a black belt in karate, my brother has a PhD in Criminology. He’s full of interesting factoids, like the fact that the United States has five percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the people incarcerated. We have a larger percentage of our people in prison than the Russians or Chinese. We also give out by far the longest prison sentences, and we’re the only Western nation with the death sentence still on the books. You are about to become the beneficiary of all this American judicial munificence.”
The boy squinted slightly. “If you knew I was here, why didn’t you call the police?”
“Why do you ask? Are you in a hurry to be locked up?”
“You’re a crazy dude.”
“Then you picked the wrong home to burglarize, didn’t you?”
“How did you know I wouldn’t just shoot you when you walked in here and surprised me?”
“I can tell. I was poisoned many years ago with a very peculiar substance, and it left me with a rather peculiar mental acuity. For a time a lot of people thought I was a god, but I won’t bore you with that story. I can tell when people are lying, and I can usually distinguish between the good, the bad, the ugly, the really ugly, and the wack jobs. I put you on the cusp between bad and ugly. I don’t think you’re a killer.”
The boy raised the gun higher, leveling it at Garth’s head and holding it steady with two hands. Garth stared back at him impassively, then finally continued in an even tone, “Of course, I could be wrong about you. As I said, it’s up to you how long you want to spend in prison.”
“I’m going to walk out of here now, mister.”
“Nope. Not an option. Five minutes after you walk out that door you’ll be in handcuffs. Guaranteed.”
“If I kill you, maybe I won’t go to prison.”
“That’s not an option either. Every move you’ve made, every word you’ve spoken since you pulled into my driveway in that van, has been digitally recorded. It’s all in a computer system, buffered at the moment, but ready to be relayed to the Cairn police station when I activate it, or after a certain time interval even if I don’t activate it. You’re busted, kiddo.”
The stringy-haired youth took a cell phone out of his pocket, nervously dialed a number, and put the phone to his ear. When there was no answer, he dialed the number again.
Garth continued, “If you’re trying to call the guy in the van, you’ll have a long wait. He’s indisposed.” He paused, shook his head. “Do you have any idea whose house this is?”
“A folk singer by the name of Mary Tree,” the boy said, sounding slightly defensive. He shook the cell phone, as if it was the machine’s fault that nobody answered, and then shoved it back in his pocket. “She was real famous before I was born. Supposed to have a lot of money. Her Web site said she was away on tour. Usually those sites say if someone is married, but it didn’t mention a husband.”
“I keep a low profile because I have a lot of very ugly enemies. What were you thinking when you broke in here? Didn’t it ever occur to you that any celebrity would have a state of the art security system?”
The boy shrugged.
“You’re an idiot.”
“Who the hell are you?” the youth mumbled.
“I’m the guy who trails along behind the circus cleaning up after the elephants. The minute I saw you entering my home with that big cross dangling around your neck, I figured the circus was in town.”
The boy’s pitted face flushed with anger and his pale blue eyes glittered. “You’re saying I’m nothing but elephant crap.”
“You’re going to be treated a lot worse than that where you’re going. A lot of your fellow convicts are going to think you’re cute as a ballerina. Who’s the guy in the van?”
“My uncle.”
“Was this his idea?”
The boy hesitated, and then nodded. “What did you do to him?”
“Your uncle’s a very ugly man. We wouldn’t have anything to talk about. He belongs in a cage because he’s always going to be a danger to other people if he’s free. When I surprised him, he pulled a gun on me. He meant to kill me. What do you think I should have done with him?”
The boy again swallowed hard, and then took a step backward, lowering the gun slightly, as if its weight was becoming too much for him to bear. Now he seemed confused and uncertain, as had the young girl after recovering from her initial shock of finding Garth in Jeremiah Peoples’s bedroom two nights before.
“Prophet?” the girl had said in a sleepy voice, brushing a strand of yellow hair away from her puffy eyes. “I heard voices. Is something wrong?”
“Come in, Julie,” Garth said quietly, gently smiling at the young girl. “There’s nothing wrong. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The girl blinked slowly. “You know my name?”
Garth nodded. “And the names of your sister wives. I’m the angel of death, but I haven’t come for you. I’m sorry, but it’s not your time. I’m here to send your husband to heaven.”
The girl jumped up and down, clapping her hands. Her green eyes glowed with joy. “Oh, Prophet!” she exclaimed. “That’s wonderful news! Hallelujah!”
Jeremiah Peoples did not look like he shared the girl’s enthusiasm. His lined, weathered face was ashen, his eyes narrowed to slits as he glanced nervously back and forth between Garth and his teenage wife.
“Go and get your sister wives, Julie,” Garth said. “We’ll all celebrate together.”
“Stay here, Julie,” the old man croaked.
The girl named Julie looked uncertainly at Garth, who nodded. “It’s all right, Julie. Do as your husband says. I can’t force him to share his good fortune.”
“Who are you?” Peoples whimpered.
“I’ve told you. Sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
Garth took a sheet of paper from the stack on the bed, laid it on the pillow along with a pen. “We have some paperwork to take care of before I send you to heaven, some documents for you to sign. You can start with this one.”
Peoples squinted as he stared at the paper. “What is it?”
“It’s a legal document transferring ownership of all property and monies currently held by Portal to Heaven to a private agency that’s going to help care for all the children here. I have other papers for you to sign that will transfer ownership of the private accounts held by you in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.”
Jeremiah Peoples’s pale, watery eyes went wide. “What?”
“It seems that upon joining your flock all of your disciples signed over power of attorney to you and transferred all their possessions to a trust controlled by you.”
Peoples averted his gaze, said in a small voice, “They don’t know the ways of the world.”
“Precisely. In a few hours, at dawn, a whole gaggle of sheriff’s deputies are going to arrive here to shut the place down. They’ll be taking away all the children, including the underage brides. Their Prophet will be in heaven, so there’ll be no one to help guide them in those mysterious, perilous ways of the world you mentioned. The money you’re transferring will help to offset the costs of their physical care and the extensive psychological counseling they’re going to need to reenter the world. For years you’ve been forcing children to have children, and then arbitrarily reassigning some of those children to different parents. We’ve got a real tangle of family relationships here, and the agency will try to sort everything out and reunite children with their birth parents so that they can form some kind of a normal family. When we get finished with the legal work, I need you to get me all of the birth records you have. And you’ll tell me what else I need to know. Julie, perhaps you could help me with that?”
The girl’s initial elation had receded once again to shock, and now she stared blankly at Garth.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Julie.”
The girl swallowed hard. “I’m not, sir.”
“Good. You can call me Garth. After I send the Prophet to heaven and the police arrive to take you and the others, there will be no more Portal to Heaven. I know you find this very frightening. In many ways the world outside is as terrible as the Prophet has told you, but there are also wonders he has kept hidden from you. One of those wonders is love, something you may find with a boy of your own age. You will be free to make your own decisions, and I know that is very frightening, but there will be many good people out there waiting to help you make these adjustments. I’ll be there to help you, if you want. You, in turn, can help the others, for all the hundreds of children here are going to desperately need help returning to the world outside. The journey will be difficult, but the freedom to think and act and love on your own can be very rewarding. Will you trust me?”
The girl nodded.
Peoples, who had been looking at his wife with disapproval, now shifted his gaze to Garth. “God hasn’t told me about these things,” he said, again casting a furtive glance out of the corners of his eyes at the girl.
“Well, that’s why he sent me. God wants you to do the right thing, Jeremiah. Ask yourself what Jesus would do. Sign the papers so we can get about gathering your records. We’re running out of time.”
“But I don’t want to die,” Peoples said in a small, hoarse voice. The fear in his eyes and voice was now shaded with desperation.
“Prophet?” Julie said, looking at her husband, who would not meet her gaze. “I don’t understand. Why don’t you want to go to God now that he’s called you?”
“Yeah, ditto that,” Garth said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s the story here, Jeremiah? Your whole life has been about death and the eternal life after, or so you say. Everything you’ve done, and coaxed your followers into doing, was supposed to be about securing places for yourselves in heaven. You have eight wives, three of them under the age of sixteen, five more than you need for the celestial marriage you claimed would guarantee you a place in Paradise. You’ve forced any number of young teenage girls into marriages to much older men, and then moved the children they had to other families, all so you could go to heaven. Now the time has come to cash in, and you act like you don’t want it. If you aren’t so sure you’re not going to end up more than worm food when you die, maybe it means that Portal to Heaven is nothing more than a sex club for pedophiles and sex addicts. Is that what you’re saying? If that’s so, then you’re a very naughty fibber and hypocrite who’s been using some god as an excuse for you and like-minded souls to bed a lot of young girls and steal gullible fools’ money. Should I send you to hell instead of heaven?”
Peoples reached out for Julie’s hand, but the girl shied away from him. She was looking at him strangely.
“The first Prophet commanded us to do these things,” Peoples said quickly, raising his right hand in a kind of imploring gesture. “He wrote it down. We were just following instructions.”
“Well, now I’m giving you instructions. If you don’t want to spend eternity having your toes toasted, pick up that pen and start signing the papers. Then we’ll get to your birth records.”
Peoples scowled. “God knows who the parents of the children are.”
“This is God’s busy season, so he sent me to get the records. Now you get busy, or it’s off right now to the big rotisserie.”
“I don’t believe you are who you say you are,” the old man said in a slightly louder voice. His tone had become petulant.
Garth shrugged. “I could be a private investigator working for an agency which will be serving as advocates for all the children you and your male followers have raped and the children they’ve borne because your male disciples like young girls and you couldn’t keep your puppets in your pants. I could be the guy who trails along behind the circus cleaning up after the elephants. What’s the difference, Jeremiah? Dead is dead. Why do you care how you get to heaven? In the meantime, you’re a big elephant who’s leaving a big mess behind here on Earth. Cleaning up after you is going to be expensive, and that’s why God needs you to sign these papers and hand over your birth records. Are you afraid of death? If that’s the case, then it seems you’ve been lying to your disciples. Could it be that you’re a false prophet?”
Jeremiah Peoples licked his lips, whispered, “But it may not be my time to go.”
“Oh, it’s time for you to go, and you’re going. The question is where you go. If you don’t accept your death now, you’re going to prison for statutory rape and forcing underage girls into marriage with older men. In prison you’re going to be sexually abused yourself, because that’s what happens to sex abusers in prison. You’ll be treated as a pedophile. Is that what you want? If you prefer, I’ll let you live and go to prison, but you still have to sign the papers and get me the birth records. And you have to say that you’re a false prophet. If you don’t, I’m going to have to hurt you. Are you a false prophet?”
Peoples gazed wide eyed at Garth, licked his lips again, and finally nodded.
Garth removed the small tape recorder, which had been running, from his pocket, placed it on the bed. “Say it for the record, so all your disciples can hear it. That’s the price for not sleeping in heaven tonight.”
“I’m a false prophet,” Peoples said in a choked, wavering voice.
Garth grunted, pushed the papers and pen across the sheets. Peoples picked up the pen, and then began to sob as he signed the first document.
“Julie,” Garth said to the girl, “this man is not your husband. Your marriage to him isn’t legal. He’s forced you to have sex with him, and maybe others. He’s lied to you and he’s robbed you of some of the best years of your life. He’s responsible for damaging the lives of hundreds of other people. What do you think I should do with him?”
The girl had been studying Peoples with barely disguised contempt. Now she looked at Garth with a puzzled expression on her face. “I don’t know,” she said, the same words the boy in Garth’s home would use two nights later.
“What should I do with you?” Garth had asked.
“Dude, you really aren’t afraid to die,” the boy said in a choked voice.
“You think maybe it’s time we called your parents?”
The boy laughed harshly, without humor. “You’ve got to be kidding. My father left when I was two years old, and my mother’s a drunk. She threw me out of the house two years ago. I’ve been living with my Uncle Bob.”
“And good old Uncle Bob has been using you to burglarize homes. He probably figured it was safer that way because if you were caught you’d be treated as a minor. You’re not such a minor now, and if you kill me in a home invasion you’ll almost certainly be treated as an adult. How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“In school?”
The boy shook his head. “Why did you mention my cross? You some kind of atheist?”
“Just curious. I don’t do gods; never did. But if I had ever driven on one of those roads, I’d have been looking in my rearview mirror all the time. In effect, I would have accepted that I was no more than some celestial creature’s pet, like a dog that would be given a treat, heaven, if I behaved, and sent to a very nasty kennel if I didn’t. That would certainly have gotten my attention, and kept it. A couple of nights ago I spent a few hours on a compound run by a religious gang, people I call godsters. They were wack jobs, every last one of them, but the one thing they had in common was that, regardless of the circumstances that had made them that way, they believed, and they acted accordingly. They had a user’s manual, a rule book, and they followed it to the letter. Their brains might have been turned to pudding, but they ate, breathed, drank, slept, and crapped under the supervision and judgment of their owner twenty-four hours a day.”
“How can you not believe in God?” the boy asked in a churlish tone.
“In my experience, it’s been the atheists who live by the strongest moral code. They look to their hearts instead of heaven. Atheists tend to pay attention to and polish their lives because they believe the life they’ve been given is all they have. Godsters are always screwing up their minds and lives, not to mention other people’s lives, worrying about what’s going to happen to them in their next life, and it’s mostly the godsters I’m cleaning up after. There’s a lot of gang warfare among godsters because all the gangs have different user’s manuals, and they think everybody should follow their rules, no matter how silly. Atheists tend to care, godsters to crucify. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that this superstition and magical thinking that is a belief in gods is a form of mental illness. Certainly, a vast majority of Muslims appear to be suffering from it. Europeans, not so much. The United States is by far the most religious nation in the West, so you’d think Americans were as wacko as the Muslims. With the exception of Hasidim and Pentecostals, I’m not sure that’s the case. What are you?”
The boy hesitated for a few moments, and then said, “Catholic.”
“A Christian flavor, arguably the biggest godster gang in the world. Very colorful, lots of costumes, fuss, and bother. But my suspicion is that Americans aren’t the religious wack jobs they appear to be. I think a whole lot of Americans pretend to be mentally ill simply because they think everybody else is, and they don’t want to be different. And then they take great pains to infect their children, so their children won’t be different. They claim it’s the only way for their children to learn right from wrong, but I consistently find it’s the godsters who are responsible for so much that is wrong in the world. Politicians are the biggest pretenders; you can’t be elected to office in this country unless you insist that you’re seriously mentally ill and really, really believe in this celestial pet owner, but then they’ll make up tales to justify destroying countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Are they afraid they might end up in hell? They never give it a second thought. Either they’re terminally stupid, which is not beyond the realm of possibility, or they don’t really believe what they say they believe. I see you as a perfect example. You belong to a gang that insists you must confess your sins, be they farting in church or thinking bad thoughts, to a priest or risk eternal damnation, and yet here you are, cross dangling around your neck, breaking into and burglarizing a man’s home and threatening to kill him. You’re willing to risk going to hell for a television set and DVR? What would Jesus think of what you’re doing?”
The boy actually looked furtively up toward the ceiling, then back at Garth. “Please just let me walk out of here, mister.”
“No. You weren’t thinking of gods, or Jesus, or heaven or hell, or anything else but money when you broke in here, were you?”
“No. But I still believe in God and Jesus.”
“Bully for you. Does that mean you’re terminally stupid?”
“I’ve broken into five other homes. I’ll make it up to them, and I promise I’ll never do anything like this again.”
“That’s for sure.”
For a moment, Garth thought the boy would start crying, but he didn’t. The teenager heaved a deep sigh, and then set the gun down on Garth’s desk “Okay, dude, you win. Don’t mess with me anymore. Push a button, or whatever you need to do, and get the cops here. Let’s get this over with.”
“I need a houseboy.”
“What?”
“What’s your name?”
“Jim Follett.”
“All right, Jim Follett, I have a proposition for you. I can’t guarantee anything, but the Cairn police chief is a friend of mine, and I might be able to get him to go along. No good is going to come from throwing you into the system. If you’re tried and convicted as an adult of home invasion, you’ll go to prison and wind up making license plates for a few cents an hour. You could come out very ugly. Instead of that, I may be able to arrange for you to work and report to me a few hours a week, mowing the lawn, painting, whatever it is my wife and I need done. You’ll have to get another job because I won’t pay you anything. We’ll say you’re working off the sentence you would have gotten if you’d gone to trial and been convicted. The time you serve will be indeterminate. You’ll be finished when I say you’re finished.”
“Okay,” the boy said softly. “Thank you. You won’t be sorry, dude ... mister.”
“Oh, the only person who’s going to be sorry is you, if this arrangement doesn’t work out. Your Uncle Bob’s outta here.”
“You killed him?”
“No. You’ll have to testify against him. He’s very ugly. He has to be caged.”
“Okay,” Jim Follett said in the same small voice.
“I’ll help find you a place to live.”
“Thank you.”
“There are other conditions.”
“Whatever you say, mister.”
“I don’t like to be around ignorant people. You’re going to be a very busy ex-burglar if you accept this deal. Besides working for me and at some other job to make money to pay back the people you stole from, you have to go back to school. You’ll need your GED, and then we’ll see about getting you into the local community college. I’ll pay for that.”
The boy opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sounds came out. He seemed dumbfounded.
“I’m not going anywhere!”
Garth turned around in his chair to see the gaunt man he had knocked unconscious earlier standing in the doorway, bracing himself against the jamb. Blood was still seeping from his smashed nose and his mouth where his teeth had been broken. He cursed at the boy, then pushed off the jambs and lurched across the room toward the gun on Garth’s desk. Garth took his own gun out of the pocket of his robe and shot the man in the stomach. The man stumbled, clutching at his stomach, then collapsed to the floor. Garth unhurriedly stood up, walked around his desk and over to the man to examine him.
Jim Follett’s eyes were wide and he seemed in a state of shock, his mouth open as he stared at Garth. Finally he found his voice, said, “You could have killed me any time.”
“Sure,” Garth replied easily, taking out his cell phone and dialing 911. “But I felt like a chat. And if I’d killed you, who would mow my lawn?”