Sequence Six: Heal Thyself

"Close your eyes. Accept the Spirit!"

The young woman's eyes fluttered shut under his hand; with his other hand he cupped the back of her head.

"Do you feel the power, sister?" Tevel cried out, his voice dramatic. "Do you feel it? Do you feel the healing power of Tibura?"

A vibration between his hands as she shifted and moaned. Then: "I feel it!" she screamed.

It was too easy.

***

Tevel Douglass had made a halfway decent living for a dozen years on the tent revival circuit. He stopped through Podunk towns to inflame bored locals with the scorching flames of the divine; he parked his caravan at a Florida church for the winter months and served there as an adjunct mission; every election season he lent his services to politicians, motoring about to their whistle stops and factory tours and appearances at town halls. He even made occasional guest appearances, as it were, on the OTA, taking his well-practiced rhetorical skills into the studios of tiny country broadcast stations, his sermons and exhortations flying through the air on the backs of those mysterious angels of the technological age, the radio waves.

It was all theater, of course. If there was anything Tevel knew deep in his cynical bones, it was that there was no goddess, and neither were there heavenly retainers; there was no celestial palace - and no demonium. The entire idea of opposing forces of good and evil, personified in such ways, made him laugh. It was such an absurd simplification! As if Good and Evil existed outside of personal preference; as if a goddess, were there to be such a thing, would be a woman elevated to supernally powerful status; as if a demonias, an agent of wickedness, really could be a grinning man with the hooves of beasts down below, and the horns of a bull up above, and red skin all over.

No. The universe was empty of all such higher (or lower) authorities, and he damn well knew it. If it were otherwise - if Tibura did punish evildoers or Dinysio reward them - then he would long since have encountered their relative brands of justice. He had not. He had bandied their names, created palpable fear out of empty superstition, even sparked a race riot or two. But never had he faced supernatural reckoning.

That was about to change.

***

""I feel it!" the young woman screamed, her body twisting, her head shuddering in his grasp. Tevel was forced to loosen his hold lest he accidentally snap her neck, as she began a wild gyrating dance and began to chant in broken, primal syllables.

She was too young for cataracts, but they had blinded her all the same; Tevel has seen how the milky scabs occluded her eyes. Now, though, now - not it was different. Tevel caught sight of her fluttering eyes as the young woman danced away from him, a hair-raising ululation rising from her throat. Her eyes were white, but it was the white of eyes rolled back in a hypnotic frenzy. He suppressed a grin, knowing that the crowd was watching every moment with breathless, fascinated excitement; this performance was better than anything he could have hoped for had he hired someone to play the young woman's role. Tevel hadn't needed to pay shills for years now, he'd become so good at inciting religious ecstasies. He simply let the emotional rapture of those he mesmerized take the show over.

It didn't matter that his healings were shams. Later on, the crowd would scarcely even remember what was supposedly going on: They would only recall - and only vaguely - the dancing, the disjointed syllables of hysterical gibberish that the faithful believed to be holy speech, the electric excitement of the day. By the time the young woman came to her senses and realized she was still blind, the crowd would have dispersed and Tevel would have moved on. He was a master at plucking up his tent and getting on the road as soon as the evening was done.

"Shesh no qa lih hoj na qo tla jhe!" the young woman cried, her whirling form straying all across the stage area. Tevel edged toward her, concerned that she might trip over a rope or a box, or become snagged on a stay line. But her body seemed to know the shape of the space; she danced on, avoiding perils and staying within the stage area where the preacher confined himself and excluded onlookers. "Tle no ha na qo faj tlo nekh!" she shouted.

And the crowd, caught up in her frenzy, dancing as she danced, cried out as one:

"Hoj na qo tless ha!"

"What in all infernum?" Tevel murmured to himself. He'd never seen anything like this before.

Abruptly he became aware that the girl had stopped spinning. He looked over to her, and gasped to see her dark eyes fixed upon him with keen and focused intensity.

She gave him a smile that seemed sharp, dangerous - hungry. "Ha thal yu! Shi tha thal yu!" she cried. "Behold the healer!"

The crowd exploded in cheers and incoherent words of jubilation.

Tevel was petrified at the sudden departure form the script. How had the show spun out of his carefully maintained control? He'd never seen anything like this before; somehow, the young woman had seized the momentum of the healing frenzy and now she, and not he, was in charge. Tevel had no idea how he was going to finesse the crowd to a happy conclusion and send them wafting away on a cloud of contentment, as he'd done so many other times, in so many other places - in this place, too, a while back. Tevel always let two or three years pass before he revisited any given town, so that his failures could be forgotten and the revelry of his healings simmer into local legend. His heart hammered in his chest and his hair seemed to rise up...

But then the air of wild jubilation dissipated and the crowd - still acting as a unit, with a solidarity of mood and purpose - began to drift away on its own. In just a few minutes Tevel was alone in the tent with the young blind woman.

No cloudiness remained in her eyes now. Her dark eyes were crystal clear, and looking right at him with piercing intensity.

It wasn't just her eyes. Her entire being was utterly transformed. She was no longer the hesitant and pale creature who had haltingly made her way to the stage area and asked in a thin voice for Tibura's blessing. Now she sashayed toward him with animal grace - and predatory confidence. Strange thoughts flashed through Tevel's mind... was she about to kiss him? Kill him? Murmur strange seductions in the gibberish language that often came with the dancing frenzy?

"A miracle," she said, pausing before him. She put her arms around his neck and drew close, her dark eyes clear and liquid and hot. "Truly you are blessed. Truly you bring blessing. Truly your name will be shouted and hearkened to."

And it was.

***

Within a few weeks the crowds that greeted Tevel's traveling ministry of healing began to swell. No longer were they dominated by curiosity seekers and bent, broken, or afflicted locals suffering and desperate for relief. No longer was it the idle and the gullible and the monomaniacally devout who flocked to him. Now the crowds were peppered with more respectable sorts, with the rich as well as the poor, and with the parsonry of more sober strips of The Faith, rather than the ragged and sometimes deranged practitioners of The Faith's more extreme fringe.

That strange woman stayed with Tevel, at least in his thoughts; her eyes seemed to glance at him from dark corners or half-glimpsed faces, startling him with a shock of dread. Was she, with her restored eyes, somehow keeping watch on him? Tevel had put a lot of distance between himself and the town where he'd laid hands upon her. But was she following him? Who had she been? Could she have been a sorceress - or perhaps a familiar of the demonium?

At first Tevel has shaken such fancies off. He was a man of reason, if not a man of principle - though, in a way, he was a man of principle, too. The principle of looking out for his own interests, that was, and those who hadn't the perspicacity or the prudence or the sheer native intelligence not to be rooked by his tricks deserved the fleecing they got. And it wasn't as though so many people actually believed in his shenanigans; most folks simply accepted his healings as a form of road show, an amusement that held out hope to those who needed it and provided a form of entertainment that was in line with the letter (though maybe not the spirit) of the Sacred Writings.

But Tevel's cold reasoning and his reliance on the world as a place of pitiless factuality began to buckle as events accumulated - stopovers in little towns, and even small cities, that produced actual results. What Tevel was seeing, what alarmed him deeply, though he was too much a performer to let it show, was how his sham healing had become authentic, the sick and elderly regaining robust health... not simply responding momentarily to a surge of enthusiasm or conviction, but truly becoming healthy and revitalized. Arthritic spines straightened; jaundiced faces took on a ruddy glow; limbs deformed at birth or through misfortune seemed to shift and re-shape; rashes and plagues, coughs and cancers, ailments of every kind cleared up in a matter of seconds when he laid his hands upon those who approached, or even held his hands out toward his onlookers.

The size of the crowds, and the intensity of their need and desire, didn't simply double each week. It was far more out of hand than that. As Tevel looked out at the swarm of bodies that crushed and pullulated in the broad, long field where he'd paid a farmer to set up his tent, he realized that he was going to have to forgo the tent and simply carry out his healing as best he could in the open. The crowd had materialized with frightful swiftness as soon as he'd parked his sturdy Studebaker truck, its long steel bed full of canvas and rope and iron spikes. All of that gear would remain in the truck bed tonight, as would the lanterns - this crowd seemed to have brought plenty of their own lights. Their faces seemed to radiate light, so expectant were they.

"Good people," Tevel began, and those were the last words he heard himself say. The roar of the crowd blotted everything out, and suddenly hands were grabbing at him, plaintive wails and pleas for salvation emerging in fragmentary snatches from the cacophony. One woman, her body twisted and lumpen, threw herself upon him. Her gnarled hands clutched painfully, and her untrimmed nails dug into and cut his skin; as soon as she touched him, she seemed to be seized with the jumping fever, her body rigid and spasmodic against him. Then she broke away, her shape suddenly different: Lithe, and tall, and supple as she moved. She broke into the dance, that same dance he kept seeing men and women and entire crowds fall into - and from her throat soared that same language, those same words that he was getting to know by heart. He could have recited them along with her, those words she chanted, and he even knew now what he had failed to discern earlier: That the words followed a tune, that the people he healed were singing.

"Shesh no qa lih hoj na qo tla jhe!" the woman's voice pealed.

The crowd joined her as the song continued: "Tle no ha na qo faj tlo nekh!"

Then Tevel did recite the words, the words he knew came next: "Hoj na qo tless ha," he intoned along with the woman and the crowd.

The whole time, he kept thinking: What in the names of sulfur and sea was going on? What was he stuck into, and how could he get out?

***

But there was no getting out. When the crowds became too massive and the local constabularies refused him entry to their townships, and then the gardae of the three states where he tended to tour began to harass him with requirements for permits and security, Tevel retreated to Florida, where hardly anyone but the locals knew he had a winter residence, a small apartment attached to a church rectory.

But the crowds followed him there, and the parson asked him to move out, to move on, and to seek Tibura's guidance. It didn't seem right to him, the parson said, that the crowds were acting as they did. There was something impious about these masses of people; it was understandable that they were seeking healing, but there was something more to it, something nasty and upsetting.

The parson's words were borne out when word spread that he'd asked Tevel to leave. In a heartbeat, the crowd became a mob; the rectory was vandalized, then intruders broke in and hauled the parson out onto the grounds, where he was beaten and then stoned. The mob only fell back once the rectory and the church were engulfed in flames.

Tevel heard of it weeks later; he'd left town before the mob attacked. He turned his Studebaker Northwards, to states and territories in colder climates where he would not be known. The people of the North were of cooler temperament, too, and not so easily tipped into frenzies.

Or so Tevel had always thought. But when he reached Minnesota and parked his Studebaker in a lot near to an hotel and checked in there, and then set out to explore the streets as night fell, one passerby and then more began to pause and stare at him.

Tevel began to have an uneasy feeling.

"You're that preacher man," a large fellow in a heavy coat and a gray hat said to him.

Tevel's dread blossomed into terror at that moment, but there was escape because those words unleashed something: Suddenly it was another mob scene, with hands plucking at him, and screams, and fists waving wads of paper money, and a sense of miasma - a pall of rage and desperation that seemed to hang, invisible and yet palpable, over the street.

One tiny, elderly man fought his way through the press of the crowd with unexpected ferocity and snatched Tevel's hand. His eyes were rheumy - not blanked out with cataracts like that young women, the nameless woman who'd started all this, but mossy and fogged and yellowish and veined. His lips were haggard, his jaw lacking most of the teeth that had once been there. His skin was paper-thin and crumpled with lines and creases like paper, too, paper that had been wadded and crushed and then smoothed flat once more. Paper that had been plastered over his bulging skull, which looked like death in some spare disguise -

But then the old man seemed to plump and swell. His skin took on richness of color and texture, and his frail lips grew red and full. His eyes transformed, too; the whites were clear and spotless, the pupils a crystalline icy blue. His croaking cries became resonant as his voice took on strength and volume. The word he kept repeating grew louder and more distinct until it penetrated the din of the hysterical mob: "Miracle!" he was shouting. "Miracle!"

The crowd, galvanized by his cries, became even more tumultuous. Tevel had found himself in situations recently where he feared for his safety; now he was in terror for his life. The grasping hands became more violent and insistent; his clothing tore and he lost a hank of hair as he struggled to escape. Suddenly, uniformed garda were there, threading through the crowd, barking orders and even swinging their billy clubs as best they could - which was not very forcefully, because there was no room to move.

Two garda flanked him. They seized him as roughly as anyone in the crowd, and dragged him along, shouldering people aside. The crowd started to turn ugly; someone threw a stone that gashed one garda across the forehead. The garda grunted, but tightened his grip on Tevel's arm and dragged him all the more forcefully through the crowd.

A new and sinister chant was rising from the mob's collective; Tevel thought at first it was "Free him, free him," but then he heard it differently: "Hal us, heal us." The garda finally broke though into the open street and dragged him toward some sort of van. It was, Tevel realized, what they called a paddy wagon - a vehicle intended to transport unruly and even violent prisoners. The name was derived from a slur used toward Irish immigrants, who were widely, and unfairly, held to be drunkards and rioters.

Well, there was a riot going on now. But the only occupant of the paddy wagon was Tevel himself, as the vehicle lurched and turned and sped away from the mob.

***

Tevel sat in his cell alone, wondering if he was relived to be here - safe in the quiet of the garda station - or angry at having been taken into custody even though he was the one who'd been assaulted. The sergeant had made noises about Tevel being a troublemaker; about him bringing unrest to the city. Tevel felt like telling the sergeant to sizzle in his own grease, but he held his tongue. Finally, he said, "Officer, I came here to get away from all this. I don't understand it; I don't like it; I don't want it."

The sergeant offered not a white of solace. "Well, you've got it," he said in a hard, accusing tone. The cell yawned before him; the door, made of iron bars, slammed shut, with a ringing clang, behind.

Tevel traced his predicament back to that one woman - that shudder he'd felt between his hands. That had been odd, and he'd thought so at the time, but subsequent events had driven the thought from his mind until now, when he concentrated on trying to recall just what had happened and suss out exactly who she had been.

Time passed. Tevel cast his mind over his long career, his many performances before that fateful night. He'd sometimes thought of doing something else with his time... he didn't really enjoy bilking people, pretending to heal them and then leaving them behind with broken hopes. But then again, who knew? He'd heard of people whose ailments were imaginary, the result of guilt or fear or shock of some sort; maybe it as faith healers like him who provided the antidote in those cases, where science and medicine could offer not respite.

But the healings he'd seen... that he had seemingly accomplished, through no real power of his own... those had been stark and unmistakable. They had been miracles - just as the old man in the street that evening had declared. Miracles.

But if miracles existed, then anything was possible. Even the goddess. Even...

Tevel looked up with a shudder and realized that he was no longer alone in the cell. Another prisoner had been ushered in at some point - had Tevel been in such deep thought he'd not heard the garda or the clang of the iron door? Had he maybe fallen asleep without realizing it?

His new cellmate was sitting on the opposite bunk, swathed in shadow.

"Hello?" Tevel said.

The other man raised his head. His eyes were yellow - gleaming tiger yellow, almost phosphorescent in the dim. His skin - what Tevel could see of it - seemed to be dusky shade of... of...

Tevel leaned forward. His new companion did likewise, moving into the poor light afforded by the bare bulb that hung outside their shared cage. Slatted shadows fell across him, the shadows of the iron bars. His skin was a peculiar burnt color, a shade of dark orange.

The stranger caught Tevel's eye and held it, then grinned - the same ravenous, predatory grin he's seen on that girl, the one who had been healed of the cataracts and then walked up to him with such feline grace, such unstoppable purpose.

But this was no lithe girl. This was a man, hulking and square, his deep breaths rumbling in his chest. Tevel stared at him with growing horror.

"I'm Hob," the man said.

"Hobbes?" Tevel repeated weakly.

"Hob, no S. One B. But that's just a nickname, really," the man said, his voice a low and grating throb.

"Mr Hob, nice..." Tevel swallowed. He felt the cold creep of a flop sweat, nervous sweat, covering him over. "...nice to meet you."

The man seemed to acknowledge this, though he didn't nod or wink or smile.

"Were you in that crowd on the street?" Tevel asked. "Is that whey they brought you in here?"

"No." Hob leaned back again, his burnt orange skin obscured in the darkness. His eyes gleamed yellow in the dark, watching him. Tevel shuddered again. "I was there, watching the crowd - but not in it. Or perhaps you could say I was in it, but more in spirit than in body."

Tevel has the prickle-haired feeling that Hob was smiling now, and his smile was better in the shadows where it wasn't to be seen.

"I think you know why things have been so strange for you lately," Hob said. "There's no need for us to act as if we don't both know what I mean. You pretended to have something, do something, you did not. Now you do have it - that gift of healing. But it hasn't been such a blessing, has it?"

"It's a nightmare," Tevel said.

"Yes," Hob replied.

The two sat in silence for a few moments.

"You understand it, so maybe you can tell me what to do," Tevel said at last.

"Indeed, I can," Hob rumbled. "I can do even better than tell you. I can make it stop - I can make everything as it was before. Your healings mere theater, nothing more than that. A source of inspiration for those who need it. A moment of hope for those looking to be freed from pain, disease, disfigurement, the disappointments of a lifetime, the wages of sin..." Now Hob laughed, and it was a watery, bubbling sort of laugh.

"Do you have trouble with your lungs?" Tevel asked. "Did you want me to heal you? Is that why you're here?"

"I don't usually have lungs at all, so no - they don't bother me," Hob said.

Tevel was careful to say nothing to this, though he felt fearful and giddy and like he should offer something. An apology. A witticism to show he wasn't afraid. But he was afraid. He bit down on his tongue. Cold sweat threaded in rivulets down his face.

"Am I your punishment?" Hob suddenly asked. "You're wondering. So, I'll tell you: No. But you are my amusement. Isn't that how you think of yourself? An amusement for most, for the majority who don't believe and don't disbelieve, who offer prayers to Tibura - thanks for a good harvest, or solicitations for protection in times of danger... But the world has not gods and no demonias. Just wind and sea, cold and summer, sky and the ground beneath your feet, stars and stones. All of it dead except for you. You, men. And skittering, swimming, flying things. And me."

Tevel hardly dared to breathe.

"But you're not interested in cosmology or theology, are you? Certainly not theology, except for the phrases from the Sacred Writings you keep at the ready. Scriptures signed with the mark of credibility like a name across a certificate of payment. But I want payment, too. For services rendered. For wishes to be fulfilled."

"Wishes?" Tevel whispered.

"You want your life back - a life of freedom from screaming mobs, a life of wandering place to place, a life full of adoring crowds and dazzling spectacle that you create with your oratory and your postures for the gratification of an audience."

"Yes," Tevel breathed.

"At what price?"

"Why should I pay anything?" Tevel asked.

"Because I require it. And whatever I demand, why should I worry what it means for you? That is your guiding philosophy, isn't it?"

It was, and Tevel had never fooled himself about it. But he didn't want to admit that, or anything else, to this Hob.

"Isn't it?" Hob's rumbling voice repeated, suddenly louder. A rumbling vibration suddenly shuddered through the room.

'Yes," Tevel agreed hastily. The burst of noise faded away and the room stopped trembling. Tevel wondered if it had been an earthquake - and whether the garda had noticed it. Would they be in to check on him?

"I want your soul," Hob announced.

"In payment for restoring my life?" Tevel asked.

"Correct."

Tevel didn't believe in souls. He had scoffed at stories of demonias swapping earthly riches for some fool's so-called soul, a deal that Tevel had always taken to mean the demonias were, in fact, the foolish ones. When a man, died, he died; the man and the body were one and the same. No still-living essence drifted from the cooling flesh to the celestial brine in pure regions above; nor did it descend to infernum below. The world was a physical place, operating on defined laws according to forces that could be sensed and expressed in mathematics. Tevel had used OTAs; he knew about physics; he appreciated astronomy, and geology, and the theories about fossilized bones let behind by giant creatures from ages past, some said thousands of years ago, or even tens of thousands of years... This was science, the exercise of mind that could trace events from point to point and discern histories and patterns and natural law. Spirits didn't fit the equation.

"Since you believe in the practical things, the material things, and not the spirit world, why should it matter to you if you agree to surrender your soul?" Hob asked.

Tevel looked at the huge shape in the darkness, at the yellow eyes, wondering for a moment if Hob could read thoughts - ah, but that was more nonsense. Tevel's thoughts must be written across his face. He knew the art of careful observation, of deciphering tiny flickers of emotion. It was easy for someone as practiced as Tevel had become to start with broad comments and observations, then judge from the responses he saw how to follow up, which narrower avenues to pursue, how to extricate himself from blind alleyways, how to coax information without seeming to do so. It was like a game of Twenty-Four Questions - nothing more than that, but the gullible believed he could read their minds.

This Hob must be even more accomplished at the game than I am, Tevel thought to himself.

Perhaps that thought, too, was evident in his expression, because the hulking stranger addressed it with his next words. "If I am just another pretender, a student of human conduct rather than a master of human fate, then how can I restore your life?" Hob asked. "How did I cause the healings to take place to begin with? How have I followed you across the country? How did I assume different forms to spur crowds to their high-spirited dementias? How did I know the supernal language and put the words into hundreds of mouths? 'Tle no ha na qo faj tlo nekh!' "

Tevel had no answers. That didn't mean there were none, though.

Hob pushed himself off the bunk and rose to his full height - which seemed to be well over seven feet. He looked down at Tevel, who remained seated on the bench.

"It's a gamble either way," he rumbled. "To believe; to doubt. To have faith in living forces that supersede the human mind; to have faith in mere mechanics, the dead and senseless laws of a universe running blind like a spinning top that could topple and fling itself into chaos at any moment. 'The howl of wind is all around us, and we shiver to hear it... even as we stand straight in stillness and tranquility.' "

Tevel said nothing for another moment, and then: "What?"

"The song they were all singing. The song I taught them. That's a rough translation of the supernal words - as much as the human mind can grasp, anyway. There are many layers of subtlety it's not possible to put into human language." Hob leaned forward once gain so that the light caught in his yellow eyes. A snide smile lingered on his animal-like mouth.

Tevel was about to ask Hob what any of that had to do with his offer when he realized that the cell was empty except for himself.

"Think it over," Hob's voice echoed, rumbling though the spaces where he no longer stood.

Tevel's hands dug desperately into the course fabric of the thin mattress. The world was real and steady all around him, and yet - this was no longer the world he knew, the universe was empty of all higher and lower authorities. Suddenly, it seemed all too obvious that Tibura did punish evildoers... and so, myths notwithstanding, did Dinysio. Tevel had followed a long road to this moment, and now he felt himself perched in the brink, losing his balance in slow motion, toppling into the void.

He had bandied their names, the names of the goddess and the name of the demonias. He had created palpable fear out of empty superstition, and even sparked a race riot or two. But never had he faced supernatural reckoning... until now. And he, the counterfeit healer, lacked the power to do the one thing he's always pretended he was able to do.

"Heal thyself," he breathed into the shadowy silence of the cell. "Heal thyself."

And then, laughing, his laughter growing louder and wilder, repeating it as though it were a prayer: "Heal thyself - heal thyself - heal thyself -- !"

The silence swallowed his laughter, then his screams, and finally his sobs. The darkness seemed to smile back.

And behind the darkness, Hob was waiting.