hope to accomplish? Even if her brain had been perfectly healthy, it would now be decaying in her skull. Brain death is irrevocable; even I knew that.
I stepped back. “Now what, Charlie?”
“We wait,” he said. “It won’t be long.”
• • •
When the bedside lamp went out a second time, thirty seconds or so later, it didn’t come back on, and I could no longer hear the roar of the gennie below the roar of the wind. Now that he had slipped the metal band around Mary Fay’s head, Jacobs seemed to have lost interest in her. He was staring out the window, hands clasped behind his back like a ship’s captain on the bridge. The iron pole wasn’t visible through the teeming rain—not even as a shadow—but we’d see it when the lightning struck it. If the lightning struck it. So far, it hadn’t. Perhaps there was a God, I thought, and He’d taken sides against Charles Jacobs.
“Where’s the control box?” I asked him. “Where’s the connection to that pole out there?”
He looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “There’s no way to control the power that lies beyond the lightning. It would fry even a titanium box to a cinder. As for the connection . . . it’s you, Jamie. Haven’t you guessed even yet why you’re here? Did you think I brought you to cook my meals?”
Once he’d said it, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. Why it had taken me so long. The secret electricity had never really left me, or any of the people Pastor Danny had cured. Sometimes it slept, like the disease that had hidden so long in Mary Fay’s brain. Sometimes it awoke and made you eat dirt, or pour salt in your eyes, or hang yourself with your pants. That small doorway needed two keys to unlock it. Mary Fay was one.
I was the other.
“Charlie, you have to stop this.”
“Stop? Are you insane?”
No, I thought, that would be you. I’ve come to my senses.
I just hoped it wasn’t too late.
“There’s something waiting on the other side. Astrid called it Mother. I don’t think you want to see her, and I know I don’t.”
I bent to strip off the metal circlet that lay across Mary Fay’s brow. He grabbed me in a bearhug and pulled me away. His arms were scrawny, and I should have been able to break his grip, but I couldn’t, at least not at first. He held me with all the strength of his obsession.
As we struggled in that gloomy, shadow-haunted room, the wind suddenly dropped. The rain slackened. Through the window I could see the pole again, and small rivers of water running down the wrinkles in the bulging forehead of granite that was Skytop.
Thank God, I thought. The storm is passing by.
I stopped fighting him just as I was on the verge of breaking free, and so lost my chance to end that day’s abomination before it could begin. The storm wasn’t over; it had only been drawing in a breath before commencing its main assault. The wind rushed back, this time at hurricane velocity, and in the split-second interval before the lightning came, I felt what I had on the day I’d come here with Astrid: the stiffening of all the hair on my body, and the sense that the air in the room had turned to oil. Not a click this time but a SNAP, as loud as a small-caliber gunshot. Jenny screamed in terror.
A jagged branch of fire shot from the clouds and struck the iron pole on Skytop, turning it blue. My head was filled with a vast choir of shrieking voices and I understood it was everyone Charles Jacobs had ever cured, plus everyone he’d ever snapped with his Portraits in Lightning camera. Not just the ones who’d suffered aftereffects; all of them, in their thousands. If that shrieking had gone on for even ten seconds, it would have driven me insane. But as the electric fire coating the pole faded, leaving it to glow a dull cherry-red like a branding iron fresh from the fire, those agonized voices also faded away.
Thunder rolled and rain swooshed down in a rush, accompanied by a rattle of hail.
“Oh my God!” Jenny screamed. “Oh my God, look at it!”
The circlet around Mary Fay’s head was glowing a brilliant, pulsing green. I saw it with more than my eyes; it was deep in my brain, as well, because I was the