The Servants of Twilight

For many years, his violent and self-destructive life had been easy to justify to himself. Bitterness, hatred, and rage had seemed to be essential armor against society's cruelty. Without his reckless disregard for personal well-being and without his diligently nurtured lust for revenge, he would have felt defenseless.

The world insisted on making an outcast of him, insisted on seeing him as either a seven-foot buffoon with a monkey's face or a threatening monster. Well, he wasn't a buffoon, but he didn't mind playing the monster for them; he didn't mind showing them just how viciously, shockingly monstrous he could be when he really put his mind to it. They had made him what he was. He wasn't responsible for his crimes. He was bad because they had made him bad. For most of his life, that's what he had told himself.

Until he met Mother Grace Spivey.

She showed him what a self-pitying wretch he was. She made him see that his justifications for sinful and self-indulgent behavior were pitifully flimsy. She taught him that an outcast could gain strength, courage, and even pride from his condition. She helped him see Satan within himself and helped him throw the devil out.

She helped him understand that his great strength and his singular talent for destruction were to be used only to bring terror and punishment to the enemies of God.

Now, sitting in front of Mother Grace as she drifted in a trance, Kyle Barlowe regarded her with unqualified adoration. He didn't see that her untrimmed mane of gray hair was frizzy, knotted, and slightly greasy; to him, in the flickering golden light, her shining hair was a holy nimbus framing her face, a halo. He didn't see that her clothes were badly wrinkled; he didn't notice the threads and lint and dandruff and food stains that decorated her. He saw only what he wanted to see, and he wanted to see salvation.

She groaned. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open.

Still sitting on the floor and holding their candles steady, the eleven disciples of the inner council became tense, but none of them spoke or made any sound that might break the fragile spell.

"Oh God," Mother Grace said as if she had just seen something awesome or perhaps terrifying." Oh God oh God oh God!"

She winced. She shuddered. She licked her lips nervously.

Sweat broke out on her brow.

She was breathing harder than before. She gasped, open mouthed, as if she were drowning. Then she drew breath through clenched teeth, with a cold hissing sound.

Barlowe waited patiently.

Mother Grace raised her hands, grabbed at the empty air. Her rings gleamed in the candlelight. Then her hands fell back into her lap, fluttered briefly like dying birds, and were still.

At last she spoke in a weak, strained, tremulous voice that was barely recognizable as her own." Kill him."

"Who?" Barlowe asked.

"The boy."

The eleven disciples stirred, looked at one another meaningfully, and the movement of their candles caused shadows to twist and flap and shift all over the room.

"You mean Joey Scavello?" Barlowe asked.

"Yes. Kill him," Mother Grace said from a great distance.

"Now."

For reasons that neither Barlowe nor Mother Grace understood, he was the only person who could communicate with her when she was in a trance. If others spoke to her, she wouldn't hear them. She was the only contact they had with the spirit world, the sole conduit for all messages from the other side, but it was Barlowe, through his careful and patient questioning, who made certain that those messages were always clear and fully detailed. More than anything else, it was this function, this precious gift that convinced him he was one of God's chosen people, just as Mother Grace said he was.

"Kill him. kill him," she chanted softly in a raspy voice.

"You're sure this boy is the one?" Barlowe asked.

"Yes."

"There's no doubt?"

"None."

"How can he be killed?"

Mother Grace's face was slack now. Lines had appeared in her usually creaseless skin. Her pale flesh hung like wrinkled, lifeless cloth.

" How can we destroy him?" Barlowe inquired again.

Her mouth hung open wide. Breath rattled in her throat. Saliva glistened at one corner of her lips, welled up, and drooled slowly onto her chin.

"Mother Grace?" Barlowe prodded.

Her voice was even fainter than before: "Kill him… any way you choose."

"With a gun, a knife? Fire?"

"Any weapon… will succeed… but only if… you act soon." "How soon?"

"Time is running out. Day by day… he becomes… more powerful…

less vulnerable."

"When we kill him, is there a ritual we must follow?" Barlowe asked.

"Only that… once dead… his heart.

"What about his heart?"

"Must be… cut out," she said, her voice becoming somewhat stronger, sharper.

"And then?"

"It will be black."

"His heart will be black?"

"'As coal. And rotten. And you will see.