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  "You didn't ask him if he wanted the job."

  "It's not a job!" said Letitia. "It's a calling from the Lord!"

  Melda wasn't fazed. She looked straight at the other woman and said, "Says who?"

  Chesney's mother had already cleared the launch pad and was ready for second-stage ignition. Chesney was surprised to see Hardacre calm her with a quiet word and another pat on the arm. Then the preacher turned to Melda and said, "Well, that's the question, isn't it?"

  "And I'm still waiting for the answer," the young woman said.

  Hardacre smiled. "You're wasted as a manicurist," he said. "You should have been a lawyer."

  "There's no need for insults," Melda said, but she gave him back the same smile.

  "Okay," said the preacher, "cards on the table. The way I read this, the person I've got to convince is you."

  Chesney spoke. "Melda is handling this one for us."

  Letitia would have lit up again, but Hardacre said, "That's fine. Let's get to it, then. How much do you know of what's happened with Chesney in the past little while?"

  "Pretty much everything."

  Hardacre looked for confirmation to the subject of their conversation. Chesney nodded.

  "Then let me summarize," the preacher said. He succinctly laid out the key events: Chesney's accidental summoning of a demon and the young man's refusal to render up his soul; the consequential strike by Hell's demonic labor force, leading to an impasse; Hardacre's entry into the situation, brought about by Chesney's mother, one of his followers; the deal that settled the strike, with Chesney apologizing and being given the part-time services of a demon to aid him in his lifelong desire to be a crimefighter.

  "I know all of that," said Melda.

  "And do you also know of my theory that the universe and all of us in it are part of a book that God is writing?"

  "I've heard it. Why is he writing it?"

  "Again," said Hardacre, "it's only my theory. One thing I learned as a novelist is that sometimes you write a book to work something out, something complex. I think God is writing a book, a book in which we are all characters, in order to learn morality."

  "You think that?" Melda said. "You think God doesn't know right from wrong?"

  "Put it this way," said the preacher, "He's learning as He goes."

  Melda shrugged. "What's this got to do with the man I love?"

  Even as he was replaying the last words in his head and feeling a glow spread through him, Chesney was wondering if Melda had said them just to rile his mother. Hardacre had to calm Letitia once more, then he said to the young woman, "Events have moved on since then. I've been in touch with the senior angel that was part of the negotiations. Together, we've been working on a… call it a new chapter in the big story."

  "The Book of Chesney?"

  "That's the one."

  "Where he's supposed to be a prophet?"

  "Uh huh."

  "Whether he wants to or not, you and an angel just write a book about him, a book that's supposed to become reality for him and for everybody?"

  "That's about the size of it," said Hardacre, "if I've got this thing right."

  Melda looked at him for a long moment, then she said, "You got a lot of damn gall."

  Letitia spluttered, but again Hardacre held her down with that soft motion of his hand. Chesney wished he'd known that trick when he was growing up. The preacher said, "It doesn't work unless he buys in."

  Melda didn't budge. "But you're making him an offer he can't refuse." Hardacre started to speak but she kept on. "At least, that's the way Letitia puts it to him."

  Chesney's mother froze the young woman into a pillar of ice with a single glare, but Melda's inner heat burned right through. "He doesn't want to be a prophet. He already is what he wants to be."

  "At this point," Hardacre said, "all we're asking is that he – and you – read the book. It's not written in stone, if I may use an appropriate phrase. We've always thought that Chesney should have input into the draft." His tone firmed up a couple of notches. "And the two of you have already agreed to that, so why don't we finish our lunch then get on with it?"

  Lieutenant Denby put the ghost car where he'd parked before, next to the estate wall and under the trees. He got the directional microphone and its recorder out of the trunk, slung a pair of high-powered field glasses around his neck and climbed on top of the roof. He was in time to see a man and a woman come around from the back of the house, get into a blue Toyota van with Appleby Catering painted on the side and drive out through the gates. Their route did not take them past his position, so he kept his attention on the house.

  He scanned the grounds and the windows with the glasses. Most of the curtains were open now, including the room into which he had peeked, but he saw no movement. He rigged the mike and pointed it at one window after another. There was nothing from the room with the glowing book. He tried the kitchen and heard the refrigerator, but no voices. He picked up a conversation from an upstairs window, but a burst of applause told him that someone had left a television tuned to a religious network channel that was running an afternoon talk show.

  The policeman swore softly to himself. He'd been hoping for a repeat of the previous surveillance, but with more participants and more information. He swung the mike in a wider arc and caught a faint whisper from the rear of the big house. He turned up the gain on the instrument, but all he could achieve was a susurration of sound. From the ups and downs, he could tell it was speech and not just a rustling of leaves from the shade trees planted around a wall that extended from the back of the mansion. But he could not make out any words.

  The mike's parabolic dish picked up minute vibrations, tiny echoes of sound inaudible to the unassisted ear. Denby figured he must be catching sounds as they were bounced off the inside of the wall and then reflected off the branches and foliage of the overhanging trees. It wouldn't do.

  He put the equipment on the front seat of the car and continued down the road that ran along the side of the estate. A little over a quarter mile later, the wall met a patch of woods; here the side of the estate began, fenced not by stone but by wire mesh. Another hundred yards or so, and he came upon a dirt road that went into the trees. Across the road was a barrier made of a length of heavy steel pipe hinged to a concrete post at one end and secured to another post by a padlock and chain.

  The ghost car's surveillance suite included a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters. The chain was soon parted and Denby was driving into the woods, the gate closed behind him and the bright scars on the chain smeared with mud. The road wound to a clearing where someone had been cutting firewood. A trail led toward where the policeman reckoned the rear wall of the estate would be. His reckoning turned out to be correct and he was soon looking at a chain-link fence. Beyond was a screen of trees through which he could see a sweep of lawn, which rose in terraces to a tennis court and a patio beyond.

  Denby had brought the bolt cutters with him. He made a hole and wriggled through it, then crept to the edge of the trees and scanned the view. Four people sat around a white-painted cast-iron table. The preacher and the nerd's girlfriend were talking back and forth. Denby quickly deployed the directional mike and was just in time to hear Hardacre say, "… agreed to that, so why don't we finish our lunch then get on with it?"

  From then on it was mostly munching and swallowing, comments on the food and offers of more beer or lemonade. He noted that the older woman didn't have much appetite, and even less appreciation for the company, but the other three dug in with varying degrees of gusto. Denby wondered if the kid's mother might be more squeezable than the girlfriend, but a close examination of the powdered face told him that though she might blurt out something in anger, the odds of changing Letitia Arnstruther's mind about just about anything were way beyond a long shot.

  He watched them eat, then gather up their dishes and utensils and carry them into the house. The mike gave him a clatter of kitchen sounds, then the hum of a dishwasher, over wh
ich he distinctly heard Hardacre say, "If you would all like to join me in the study."

  There were no servants in the house, Denby reasoned. That was why the four people had carried in their lunch dishes and started up the dishwasher. He had already broken a number of laws by cutting the chain on the gate and the wire-mesh fence and by trespassing on the estate. "I might as well bite the whole bullet," he said to himself. He realized the expression didn't make much sense, but he was already sprinting across the back lawn, the directional mike and field glass left behind in the trees.

  • • • •

  The stack of paper glowed on the preacher's desk, even though the room was well lit by the afternoon sun that came through the uncurtained windows. Chesney sat down in one of the three leather armchairs that were grouped in a conversation area. Melda took the one next to his.

  "I won't ask if anyone wants a drink," Hardacre said, closing the door. "Doesn't seem appropriate." He briskly crossed to the desk, picked up the manuscript, and without ceremony brought it to the young man.

  Chesney accepted it and laid the stack of pages on his knees. Warmth seeped through his pants legs, but the radiance seemed to fade as he gazed at it, as if his eyes had grown accustomed to the unnatural glow. The top sheet said only, The Book of Chesney. He took up the sheet of paper and handed it to Melda. Then he began to read the first page.

  FIVE

  Denby walked silently across the patio, through some French doors and into a rec room that didn't look as if it ever got much use. The billiard table's green felt was gray with dust. Out in the hall he passed the doorways to a kitchen with a walk-in pantry on one side and a utility room on the other. Then he was in a baronial-sized stonefloored foyer at the front of the house, with closed doors leading off on several sides. The lieutenant didn't have to guess which one Hardacre and the others were behind: he could see the creamy glow of the strange light coming through the crack beneath the door and even through the old-fashioned keyhole beneath the doorknob.

  He crept to the door, knelt, and put his eye to the source of the light.

  "It doesn't make sense to me," Chesney said. "I haven't done any of these things. I don't plan on doing any of them. Most of them I couldn't do even if I wanted to."

  "If I'm right," said Hardacre, "and the angel thinks I am, even if you don't do them, it will be the same as if you did."

  Melda said, "You mean Jesus didn't really walk on water, but once it was written down and passed around – once everyone believed it – it was the same as if he had."

  "Pretty much," said the preacher.

  "But who's going to believe that I called together all the leaders of the world," said Chesney, "and that they came when I called? Never mind that I confounded them with my wisdom."

  "Again," said Hardacre, "if I understand how this works, it will become the truth. Divinely empowered truth."

  "And what about this part," Chesney shuffled through the pages and found the one he was looking for, "here, where I go down into Hell and tell the Devil his time is up."

  "It's an embroidering of the facts, I admit," said Hardacre, "but it seems to be where they want the story to go."

  "They?" Melda said.

  Hardacre pointed a finger upwards.

  "I thought you told the angel," she said, "that this book we're all part of is being written by us, by what we really do. 'It's our story and God's just writing it for us.'"

  "Call it a collaboration," Hardacre said. "He's always had co-authors, but never one who knew he was part of the writing team."

  "So this is like an experiment?" Melda said.

  "I think so. He doesn't tell me directly. An angel comes to talk to me – a Throne, which is a high rank; Chesney has met him – but all the angel knows is what God wants it to know."

  "It?"

  "They don't come in boys and girls sizes," Hardacre said. "At least not now. Apparently, in an earlier draft, angels were male – a little too male, in fact, since they seduced" – he put up his fingers, bent into quotation marks – "'the daughters of men' and produced offspring who were giants and heroes of old."

  Chesney could see that Melda was working to get her head around it. He almost envied her the ability to make her own pools of light in the darkness. "So you want Chesney to sign up to this stuff. Then what?"

  "He reveals himself as an anointed one."

  "By that you mean he comes on your television show – what, dressed in a white robe? Will you work up some special-effects miracles to bring in the crowds?"

  Hardacre's face drew in on itself. "I'm not sure. The angel is playing that part close to its chest."

  "We must trust in the Lord," said Letitia.

  Melda looked at her. "Easy for you to say." To Hardacre, she said, "That's a pretty big pig in a poke."

  The man shrugged. "It always has been. That's why it's so gratifying to open the poke and see the pig."

  The young woman said, "But say Chesney does what you and this angel want. What happens then?"

  "I don't know. Something really new, maybe." His face took on a curious look, like that of a child expecting to find a wondrous gift under the Christmas tree. "Probably the end of this world – this draft – and the beginning of a new one."

  "And what happens to people who fit the old world and don't fit the new one?"

  Hardacre shrugged. "Does it matter? They're all just characters in a story. So are you; so am I."

  "Yeah," said Melda, "but you don't see yourself as just another character, do you?" Another shrug from Hardacre irritated the young woman, but she held her temper and focused on what mattered. "And what about Chesney? Suppose all that happens is makes a fool of himself? Or maybe some nut takes a shot at him."

  The preacher spread his hands. "In the end, it always comes down to faith."

  There was a silence for a while. Then Melda said, "We're going to have to think about this." She looked at Chesney and he nodded. "Think about it a lot."

  "I get the feeling," Hardacre said, "that they" – he pointed upwards again – "would like to see something happen soon."

  "Well maybe 'they' should be talking to the monkey, not the organ grinder." She put her hand on Chesney's. "No offense, sweetie."

  "None taken," he said.

  The stack of glowing paper was back on the desk. Denby could see a corner of it if he squinted sideways through the keyhole. They were talking in there – arguing, really – the preacher and McCann, about faith and miracles and special effects. The study was big, the door maybe twenty feet from where they were seated in the conversation area. He couldn't hear clearly through the closed door, except when voices rose. He heard nothing about Mr Spandex. He was starting to wonder if this was a wild goose chase, or if maybe it was only a sideshow.

  Hardacre and his mistress genuinely thought they were dealing with an angel. What if the guy was a time traveler who used different disguises when he dealt with different people? Denby had seen a statistic somewhere that said that more than two thirds of twenty-first cen tury Americans believed in angels. If you were coming here from the future and didn't want to have to answer too many inconvenient questions, masquerading as a heavenly messenger would probably be a safe bet.

  The meeting in the study was winding up. Denby saw people rising to their feet. He got away from the keyhole, thinking quickly: if they were leaving, the shortest route to where they'd left the car was out the front door. He quick-footed it across the foyer and into the hallway that led to the kitchen, pressing himself against the wall just as he heard the study door open.

  Hardacre and the girlfriend were still talking, but it was scheduling talk. "I'll give you a call after we've talked it over," McCann was saying. Denby risked a peek around the corner and saw them moving toward the doors. The older woman had her hand on the kid's arm and was battering his ears with some fiercely whispered remarks that the policeman couldn't hear. But the nerd was not happy, his shoulders hunched, and now he pulled his arm free and said, "Mother, we've settled
this." That made McCann turn her head and look over her shoulder. Denby pulled back out of sight.

  Then he heard the front door open and looked again. They were going outside, all of them, the older couple accompanying the younger down to where the cars were parked. The door to the study had been left open and Denby could see the glowing stack of paper on the desk. The temptation came, strong and sudden, and before he had time to think himself out of it, he was speeding across the foyer and into the room. He scooped up the manuscript, tucked it under his arm, and made like the running back TeShawn Bougaineville heading for a game-winning touchdown. Less than thirty seconds later he was in the screen of trees at the back end of the property, hurriedly collecting the field glasses and directional mike. Another five minutes, and he was driving on twolane blacktop toward the interstate, the glowing mass beside him on the front passenger seat.