The Servants of Twilight

"She said she was Mrs. Scavello?"

"Well. no. She didn't give her name. But she knew he was here with his mother, and I never suspected. I mean, well, she sounded like a grandmother."

"Exactly what did she sound like?" Henry asked.

"God, I don't know. a very pleasant voice," Sherry said.

"She speak with an accent?" Charlie asked.

"No."

"Doesn't have to've been a real obvious accent to be of help to us,"

Henry said." Almost everyone speaks with at least a mild accent of some kind."

" Well, if it was there, I didn't notice it," Sherry said.

"Did you hear anything in the background?" Charlie asked.

"Like what?"

"Any noise of any kind?"

"No."

"If she was calling from an outdoor pay phone, for instance, there would've been traffic noises, street noises of some kind."

"There wasn't anything like that."

"Any noises that might help us figure the kind of place she was calling from?"

"No. Just her voice," Sherry said." She sounded so nice."

12

After her vision, Mother Grace dismissed all her disciples except Kyle Barlowe and Edna Vanoff. Then, using the phone in the church basement, she placed a call to the detective agency where Joey Scavello and his mother had gone, and she spoke briefly with the boy. Kyle wasn't sure he saw the sense of it, but Mother Grace was pleased.

"Killing him isn't sufficient," she said." We must terrify and demoralize him, too. Through the boy, we'll bring fear and despair to Satan himself. We'll make the devil understand, at last, that the Good Lord will never permit him to rule the earth, and then he'll finally abandon his schemes and hopes of glory."

Kyle loved to hear her talk like that. When he listened to Mother Grace, he knew that he was a vital part of the most important events in the history of the world. Awe and humility made his knees weak.

Grace led Kyle and Edna to the far end of the basement, where a wood-paneled wall contained a cleverly concealed door. Beyond the door lay a room measuring twenty by twenty-six feet.

It was full of guns.

Early in her mission, Mother Grace had received a vision in which she had been warned that, when Tcame, she must be prepared to defend herself with more than just prayer. She had taken the vision very seriously indeed. This was not the church's only armory.

Kyle had been here many times before. He enjoyed the coolness of the room, the vague scent of gun oil. Most of all he took pleasure from the realization that terrible destruction waited quietly on these shelves, like a malevolent genie in a bottle, needing only a hand to pull the cork.

Kyle liked guns. He liked to turn a gun over and over in his enormous hands, sensing the power in it the way a blind man sensed the meaning in lines of Braille.

Sometimes, when his sleep was particularly deep and dark, he dreamed about holding a large gun in both hands and pointing it at people. It was a.357 Magnum, with a bore that seemed as big as a cannon's, and when it roared it was like the voice of a dragon. Each time it bucked in his hands, it gave him a jolt of intense pleasure.

For a while he had worried about these night-fantasies because he had thought it meant the devil hadn't been driven out of him, after all. But he came to see that the people in the dreams were God's enemies and that it was good for him to fantasize their destruction. Kyle was destined to be an instrument of divine justice. Grace had told him so.

Now, in the armory, Mother Grace went to the shelves along the wall to the left of the door. She took down a box, opened it, removed the plastic-wrapped revolver that lay within, and put the weapon on a work table. The gun she had chosen was a Smith & Wesson.38 Chiefs Special, a snub-barreled piece that packed a lot of wallop. She took another one from the shelf, removed it from its box, and placed it beside the first.

Edna Vanoff removed the weapons from their plastic wrappings.

Before the day was done, the boy would be dead, and it might be one of these two weapons that destroyed him.

Mother Grace removed a Remington 20-gauge shotgun from one of the shelves and brought it to the work table.

Kyle's excitement grew.

13

Joey sat in Charlie's chair, behind the big desk, sipping CocaCola that Charlie had poured for him.

Christine was in the client's chair once more. She was shaken.

A couple of times, Charlie saw her put her fingernail between her teeth and almost bite it before she realized she'd be biting acrylic.

He was upset that they had been reached and disturbed here, in his offices. They had come to him for help, for protection, and now both of them were frightened again.

Sitting on the edge of his desk, looking at Joey, he said, "If you don't want to talk about the phone call, I'll understand. But I'd really like to ask you some questions."

To his mother, Joey said, "I thought we were going to hire Magnum."

Christine said, "Honey, you've forgotten that Magnum's in Hawaii."

"Oh, yeah. Jeez, that's right," the boy said. He looked troubled."

Magnum would've been the best one to help us."