Chapter 6
The storm hit, and hit big.
Flash flooding kept us all busy for a few days while we cleaned up the mess. Thankfully my chapel didn’t get damaged. This time. I’d not always been so lucky.
During one particularly violent downpour, a runnel was cut under the northeast corner of the building, causing the wall to crumble. I wound up having to rebuild and repair not only that corner, but the roof above it as well. It took me the better part of two weeks, during which the interior of the chapel was both drafty, and prone to gathering more than its usual layer of noxious dust.
But now, with our water supply somewhat renewed, the mood in the valley grew optimistic. Funny how our time in this place had simplified our expectations. Even something as mundane as an unusual abundance of water could be a cause for rejoicing.
Me? I remained quietly anxious.
Over the next ten days I had half a dozen repeats of the conversation I’d had with the Deacon, only with different people from different congregations around the valley. I told them all what I could—omitting the one big piece of information I dared not reveal—and life went on its merry way.
The wait become a month.
Then two months. Then three.
No sign of the Professor.
My dread of the inevitable began to deepen. The Professor had never specified when the end might come, so I had no way of knowing if this was a delay in the course of events as he’d described, or merely the running out of the proverbial sand into the bottom of the proverbial hourglass. Since he’d not come back I suspected that any hope I might kindle—and this happened more than once—was a false hope. So I stuffed it down inside and tried to be resigned to whatever fate awaited us.
If nothing else, the Professor’s visits all over the valley sparked interest among the general population. My chapel’s average attendance grew substantially. I wasn’t sure what to think about that, other than being grateful for the increased donations of goods and food at my drop box by the front door.
I still didn’t preach—would not have had the foggiest idea what to say to any of them—but I kept the chapel clean, I made sure the altar and all the objects on it were tidy and arranged according to pattern, and I welcomed in everyone who felt the need to come.
When an entire Purgatorial year passed—perhaps one and a half Earth standard—I began to wonder if the Professor really had been an eccentric. A nutball. Such people existed among humans, why not the mantes? He had been chasing religion, after all, and I had nothing to corroborate what he’d said. Perhaps he’d been the mantis version of a millennial—someone attracted to and fascinated by “end times” myth. Enough to spin me a story?
The first sign of the inevitable came when the hill farmers reported that The Wall was beginning to close in.
Deacon Fulbright and I rushed out to the valley rim, hiking for hours up to the peaks so that we could take a look for ourselves.
Seeing was believing.
“Christ in Heaven,” she said under her breath. We were less than a meter away from The Wall—silent, shimmering, and deadly. I kicked a couple of stones up to it, one in front of the other. Perhaps three centimeters apart. As we watched, The Wall gradually and inexorably drifted over the top of the first stone, then over the top of the second. Not terribly fast. Maybe a millimeter per minute. But given the fact there was nowhere for anyone to go, it didn’t matter.
The Deacon stared at me.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew this would happen.”
“No,” I said. Which was the technical truth. The Professor had never told me the precise nature of our doom, should it come.
“You knew!”
This time she’d yelled it at me.
My cheeks reddened with shame.
“Well, okay, dammit, so maybe I did. What was I supposed to do? Go blabbing to every man, woman, and child in the valley? Who would that have helped? Would it have solved anything? It would have caused panic, that’s what it would have caused. And half of them would not have wanted to believe me in any case. I’d have been cast out as a crazy and the chapel would have been shut down.”
Tears stained the Deacon’s face.
“I’m sorry, Diane,” I said. “I really am. But I didn’t dare tell anyone. Not even you. How could I?”
She spun away from me and began marching back down the mountainside.
“Wait!” I called after her, practically running to catch up.
When I grabbed her shoulders she threw off my hands with a violent twist of her body.
“Don’t touch me,” she snarled.
“I said I was sorry.”
“Like it matters?”
“To me it does. Diane, think about it. We’ve all been trapped here for how many years now? With no sign that there will ever be any escape? People have begun families. It’s not much of a life, but it’s something. People have found ways to get by. And you and I and the rest of the religious leadership, we’ve been part of that. You know we have. Prematurely telling people what I knew about the mantes’ plans would have been a gross betrayal of our service. My job—your job too—is to give everyone a mode for hope. Not all of them use it, but enough of them do that I couldn’t in good conscience let them down by becoming a prophet of death.”
She’d stopped in her tracks. From the side I could tell that fresh tears continued to leak from her eyes. The shuddering of her back told me all I needed to know about the anguish she must be feeling. I myself merely felt a hollowness in my chest where emotion should have been. If the news had just hit Diane like a baseball bat between the eyes, I’d had to live with it on my heart like a slow corrosive. Insidious and malignant.
“Well you can’t hide the truth now,” she finally said, her voice cracking. “Word’s already getting around. Even the hardcore doubters will eventually come up here and confirm things for themselves. Just like we did. What’s going to happen, Harry? Are we going to keep blowing sunshine up their asses, or are we going to be straight with them?”
“Didn’t you once tell me you thought our incarceration was God’s way of testing us?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, snuffling. “It was easy to talk, then. The war was more or less over. The mantes seemed to have left us alone. Now? I guess this means God’s passed judgment.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Is that what you’re going to say on Sunday?”
“I don’t know yet. All I know is I want to get the hell off this mountain.”
She began walking again, which left me no choice but to follow her.