Chapter Twenty-Five

These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.

Revelation 7:14

Friday 26 October: Bob Young was out late, walking. It was very late, even for a Friday night. One in the morning and hereabouts most of the good Burgers of Springfield were tucked away in their beds. The occasional house had its porch lights on. Not many though.

Cherryvale was tree-lined like many another side street in provincial America. Well trimmed lawns wrapped themselves around the well painted Victorian clapperboard houses. Even in the moonlight, the gingerbread details of some of the finer structures were clear. Every now and again there was a flagpole with the ghost of an American flag.

Bob didn't sleep so well these days and more often than not walked by Father Sebastian's house late at night. It was an obsession with him. He recognised that in himself. But he had every right. What had that priest been up to with his Mary? What had she said to him? What had they been doing alone the night she died? It gnawed at him.

Bob Young had found things difficult since the death of his wife. His children, Jenny and Robert Junior, had always been closer to their mother. They were grown up anyway. Truth was he was lonely. He had got close to Angie Merill, talked to her a lot when they were alone on churchwatch. Her marriage was in trouble. She'd confided that much in him. She was a handsome woman. But even she spent too much time with Father Seb.

The very thought of Father Seb made Bob angry. Dona White, Alicia's girl, the policewoman, had been round nosing into his business. Even implied that he'd been the one to attack Seb. Wanted to know where he'd been. How the fuck did he know? He'd beat the guy up. Sure. And he bloody deserved it. But knife him? The thought gave him a rare twinge of pleasure. Yes, if only he had.

He found himself thinking about death. He'd been doing that a great deal lately. He'd heard that the Dalai lama said that you should contemplate your own death at least once each day. That death was a part of life. Bob did more than that. Death frightened him. The contemplation of death made it less terrible, like the child opening the dark cupboard to stare inside for monsters. Except you couldn't could you? Stare across the void to the other side of death that is. He'd studied Cicero at university. He remembered the four threats that old age brought on: retirement, weakness, less sensory pleasure, and approaching death. The way Cicero had it they all had an upside: authority, wisdom and less distraction for the first three. And the upside to apporaching death was it was a no-loose situation - either there'd be no afterlife and so no regrets, or there'd be an afterlife and a whole new adventure.

And where was Mary now? Had she ceased to exist? Or was she, a suicide, in the very pit of hell with Satan? Was there a hell or was that all allegory? And if not what was there? No physical resurection that was for sure whatever the antedeluvian credes of the church said. But a spiritual continuation of the inextinguishable spark of life? A tomorrow in which we all share a new existance as different from our current life as is the butterfly from the caterpillar? Perhaps.

Or perhaps not. Bob felt somehow distant from reality as he thought on this, feeling some pale shadow of an out of body experience, as if none of this mattered, life, death, his own existance, given the immensity of all that was.

Bob stepped from the sidewalk to cross the little street. He was walking towards the intersection with Longhill, walking home. Then he heard the roar of the engine. Heard it for maybe three seconds. Long enough to turn and look into the brilliant glare of the headlights bearing down on him.

He could have saved himself had he been just the slightest bit quicker. But he froze a split-second too long. The great black bulk of the Hummer hit him square in the chest. He folded under the vehicle, too startled to do more than gasp as the huge weight born by the nearside wheel of the H2 crushed his ribcage.

He was still conscious as he watched the vehicle recede into the dark. He gasped through the pain of his crushed ribs, fighting for air that just wouldn't come. His eyes were already misting as he saw the tail lights glow red. Then the light changed to white as the reversing light came on.

By the time the tank-like vehicle had backed over his broken body, he was mercifully unconscious.