Thomas Flood sat at a massive mahogany desk in his dark, imposing office, looking across the room at the seventeenth century pulpit the workmen had installed the day before. It was tall and ornately carved with cherubs and vine leaves and gargoyles. It had disappeared from a church in Vienna during the war, and turned up only recently in a Sotheby’s catalogue. The television audience would never see it, of course: too ornate, too sensual; but he enjoyed the feeling of power it gave him. Standing behind its soaring wooden bulk, he felt protected, one in a long line of prophets and preachers. He was most vulnerable below the waist, where the black thing, Asmodeus, lived, and the pulpit concealed it. Perhaps he would tell them the Lord wanted him to have the pulpit as a platform. Then what his flock would be able to see was the half of him they could have, the part of him that was able to heal them.
He pressed a button on his desk to summon his secretary. When Mary Ruth limped in, he could tell the pain was much worse. She was a thin woman in her fifties with a blunt, mannish appearance and a perpetually sweet expression on her face. She had been with him for over twenty years, but her strength was failing. They would have to pray together so he could tell her he was letting her go.
“Mary Ruth, you are a treasure. The pulpit is magnificent, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s just beautiful, Reverend Flood. A work of art. When they unpacked it, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. To think that some man with his hands and the grace of God could make such a wonderful thing!”
“How is your leg? You seem to be favouring it.”
“Thank you for asking. I couldn’t get much sleep last night, it hurt so much.”
“Walk for me, Mary Ruth. Let me see how strong a hold the Devil has on that leg.”
Flood watched his secretary drag her arthritic leg across the plush carpet, feeling a warm surge of the most unbelievable love well up in his breast. He frowned when he felt Asmodeus stir and stood up quickly, abruptly snapping himself from his stolen pleasure. Mary Ruth’s set sweet expression was jagged with the effort of moving her leg. Flood touched her elbow and fell to his knees on the carpet, pulling her down with him before she was prepared. Her gasp of pain when her knee struck the carpet was gratifying and exciting. Gratifying because he’d been responsible for her pain, exciting because he could heal her suffering. He launched into prayer.
“Lord, the Devil has afflicted one of the least among you; this good woman who is my helpmeet in our great battle for souls is in constant pain! She can barely walk! She limps along like... a cripple, when her spirit remains as strong and pure as your tears! Send her some relief from the affliction, merciful Lord!”
Carefully, Flood reached out to put his healing hand on his secretary’s lame leg. He didn’t want to upset her.
“It is this leg, Lord! I pray that you will heal with your infinite compassion the lameness of this dear, blessed lady who keeps my life in order. It’s hard for me to see her suffering so...”
His hand pressed into her thin leg. He heard her groan because of the pressure, and he exulted. He ended his prayer with a quote from Scripture: “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof; but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.”
He stood up, feeling Asmodeus rising, and that was shame in the sight of the Lord. He helped Mary Ruth to her feet. Tears streamed down her face. Next time they prayed together, he would tell her she must retire.
“The Lord will provide.”
“Thank you, Reverend Flood.” She hobbled to the door, where he stopped her.
“Send down for Jack, Mary Ruth. I want to discuss the figures from yesterday. Something doesn’t add up, and you know how I am about figures...”
The poor old mare is ready for the pasture, he reflected. But where would he find a replacement so loyal and so discreet? He needed people around him he could trust, but he wondered if trust had become a luxury for him. Love Everyone, Trust Yourself was not a bad motto to live by, right up there with Never Complain, Never Explain — Just Kick Them Where They Will Surely Remember It.
Jack entered on soft leopard feet, rubbing his hands together — a worrisome sign to Thomas Flood, who knew his treasurer’s every mannerism. He had trained himself to remember and analyse each of them. He trusted Jack with the collection plate, but only up to a point.
“Remember Ecclesiastes, Jack: ‘Watching for riches consumeth the flesh, and the care thereof driveth away sleep.’ What did we take in after the Evening News yesterday, when everything was totalled up?”
“Round figures? $450,000.”
“What happened to $10,000 of that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your accounting was short $10,000. That is a lot of money to fall out of the plate.”
“Oh. That’s part of your personal budget line. It came out of yesterday’s pledges.”
Thomas Flood regarded his treasurer with a baleful eye.
Jack looked down at the carpet, over to the pulpit, and back down at the carpet. He was a small, shy man with a bit of a lisp. Flood had prayed over it without result.
“Your daughter, Reverend Flood. It was her monthly stipend.”
“Blackmail. I have no daughter.”
Jack sighed. He had been around this corner a few times before.
“Perhaps so. But you made a deal. You pay, she stays away.”
“Yes, Jack, I made a deal with the Devil in my daughter.”
“As a matter of fact, there was a letter from her.”
“I won’t give her a penny more.”
“She’s living up in San Francisco. She wants to see you.”
“What for?”
“She says it’s about her mother.”
“A whore is a deep ditch: don’t forget, Jack boy, what kind of woman her mother was. A very deep ditch.”
“You haven’t seen Robin in two years. Since before she went to Paris.”
“I’ll consult with the Lord and let you know. Meanwhile, I want you to work up some figures on the merger with our friends in Atlanta.”
And Jack scurried back to his office, where he directed a staff of twenty number crunchers, most of them Pentecostals, in managing the Parousia Foundation empire. Because he laboured over his spreadsheets, Thomas Flood could kneel and pray, secure in the knowledge that his money was safe. The Lord’s Treasury...
But before prayer, a nap. I need my strength to address the Lord. He pressed a button on his desk console and a panel opened behind him onto a large dressing room. Here he made up for his broadcasts and kept a narrow couch where he napped.
Often, he dreamed. Sometimes brief flashes of nightmare struck, and he awoke wondering if in these last days, the world had cracked open. He stretched out and pulled a blanket over his shoulders. Asleep, he watched himself stand up and walk, but no one saw him until he opened his mouth and poured forth hell and damnation. His wife, who often appeared in his nightmares, and his daughter, who seldom did, appeared before him wearing the white robes of angels but with their heads turned from his view. He spoke to them of hell and they turned eyes full of overwhelming defiant lust upon him. And he ripped the angelic garments from them in anger and they were transformed back into serpents crawling on their bellies on the ground...
And then it happened in his dream that he branded his daughter, that he stamped her back with fire to burn the Devil from her. But Asmodeus entered her and corrupted her... and he slew the great harlot, her mother...
Thomas Flood came awake with a dry mouth, his heart racing. He fell to his knees next to the bed and prayed for relief from the nightmares.
— I have tried to atone to her, Heavenly Father. But as is the mother, so is the daughter.
— Thomas Flood quotes Scripture. Don’t make me laugh. Did you forget this one? ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these...’ You violated her innocence. You burned her body.
— You made me who I am, Master.
— I’m sorry, I won’t take the blame for you, even if it was a botched job.
— She wants to visit me. She wants to talk about her mother.
— Tell her about her mother. Explain.
— I’ve tried, but she won’t listen. There is a devil in her.
— Don’t argue with me. See her. Tell her again.
— Thy will be done. But what should I say?
— Tell her the truth, you pusillanimous hypocrite. You murdered your wife.
Thomas Flood looked out over the studio audience, waiting for the singing to stop. He hated Christian rock, but it brought them in. They came to be healed — the hope in their eyes was almost blinding — but they also came to be entertained. They wanted theatre, and the Parousia Foundation gave them theatre — and aerobics classes, daycare, and sweatshirts — whatever they wanted, just so they came.
Flood himself preferred the simple old hymns — “And He walks with me, and He talks with me” — but that was part of the old style of churchgoing. So were sermons that offered no answers. The world had become a perilous place, and people demanded answers.
A technician attached a tiny microphone to the top of Thomas Flood’s bright red tie. The music stopped. The eyes that were recognised across the globe, cold blue eyes that saw right through you, were staring straight at America, prime time, into its living rooms and bedrooms, into its wounded psyche. The rich baritone voice asked them:
“Why is pornography anathema in the sight of God and of all true Christians? The answer to this question is available to us right in the Book of James: ‘But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.’
“Friends, lust comes into everything. It has many disguises... I’m going to relate to you a misadventure that befell a young minister of God to illustrate this important truth about the power of lust. The story is about the temptation that a young man is likely to fall prey to. Temptation is tricky, like old Satan himself. Did you know that in the dictionary it says that temptation is ‘a thing that attracts’ but then after that it says it’s an ‘incitement to sin’? No wonder it’s confusing. We all like to go towards the thing that attracts, don’t we? Whether it’s...”
He paused to drink from a glass of tea at this point.
“...good for us or not. Whether it’s right in the eyes of Our Lord and Shepherd is not something we consider when we’re young and ready to find a life’s partner. We see the raiment of the flesh and we are blinded. We are hypnotised by the sight of a well turned figure. Or so it happened to one young man — and some of you may already have guessed that this young man was me.
“Her name was Rebecca, straight from the good book, and she was attractive. Comely. She was a definition of temptation in her comeliness. She was fair, almost pale, and her hair was black as the crow’s wing, black and glossy. And her eyes, well, they were jewels you wanted to look at forever.”
Another sip of tea. He smiled benignly as they waited for him to resume. He had them now. He looked over the heads of the attentive studio audience as if he saw the angel Azrael approaching on a cloud suspended from the ceiling.
He resumed: “Rebecca became my bride, and I was the happiest young minister in the State of....well, just call it matrimony. Holy matrimony.” Here they laughed, and he paused again. “But my happiness was built on the satisfaction of lust. Satiation was the rule Rebecca lived by, as I learned to my sorrow on our wedding night. I began to neglect my relationship with God. The marriage bed became a grave of lust for me. Now, some might say, if children resulted from this carnal union, why then the marriage is fruitful and that is all that need be said. But I knew my soul was struggling with the Devil. I knew...”
Here he paused and seemed lost in thought, as indeed he was. He was recalling the visitation of the Devil in his marriage bed, and the vision stunned him with its power. He was between Rebecca’s thighs rooting there with his lips to taste her where he shouldn’t, and the snake appeared from her fundament, the green terrible snake of lust struck and bit his tongue, his lascivious tongue...
He shook his head clear with a widening of his eyes. On television screens it was magnified, so he seemed to be struggling with devils inside. In fact, he was, but he smiled and returned to his story:
“She was like an addiction for me. I confess it and I attest to it... she was like a drug I had to have. Her sex — the power of her generative organ — aroused in me a lust of monstrous proportions...Let me tell you, after a while it got so bad that Rebecca just began to live in bed all day long, watching television and eating candy and waiting for me to come home from church. I knew something was wrong with our marriage, but I didn’t know what it was. I was innocent before I married her! And the worst part was, that it didn’t stop even when she conceived, even when her womb was full...”
He covered his eyes with his hand, and bowed his head in shame. The audience stirred at the sight of him struggling with such a concupiscent Devil. But the memory he struggled with was not of his wife’s sin, but his own.
He was seven, small for his age. His Sunday School Class went to the circus as a reward for learning all their Bible lessons. Little Tommy Flood went dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and sandals. The circus was thrilling. A tent was pitched in a vacant lot in the small Indiana town where he grew up, and there were animals and rides and clowns.
It was the clowns that Tommy wanted to see. He went off by himself to look for them, impatient before the show to see the funny men. But the clowns were cruel and scary and there was a snake charmer who held him and suddenly the snake was inside him...
He was getting sick and for a moment he lost his train of thought. Get rid of the snakes, he told himself. Snap out of this.
“Yes, I was innocent. I didn’t know about the temptation of lust and what the punishment for it might be. It was God’s punishment that was visited upon us. He was so sickened by our lust that he struck Rebecca dead.”
He could almost feel them shiver out in the blue cathedral of television land. He could almost hear the million intakes of breath. He had never told this story before.
“My wife Rebecca was killed by an intruder in our home. He raped and murdered her, and it was God’s punishment on us!”
His glistening blue eyes widened dramatically. His head fell to his chest.
After lingering on him for a slow sixty seconds, the cameras switched to Flood’s co-host on the Evangelical Evening News, the Reverend Bill Dalrymple, who was inspired to make a particularly effective appeal for Crusade contributions at this dramatic moment.
The studio audience saw Flood step off the brightly decorated set and disappear through a door. He was headed for the men’s room to recover himself, or throw up. He was in sore need of guidance.
He hurried down the long hallway to the men’s room, pushed the heavy door open, and found Jack at the urinal. His treasurer zipped up hurriedly. A warning buzzer went off in Thomas Flood’s mind, but he ignored it, his crisis was so great. He stepped quickly up to the white urinal and unzipped himself before Jack could leave.
His eyes fixed on Jack’s, he held his power in his hand and shook it mightily, daring his treasurer not to look at the serpent in his hand. The moment was too brief, but Flood felt a deep thrill at having shown his power to this insignificant servant.
“Excuse me, would you, Jack? I really came in here to pray.”
Flood fell to his knees before the urinal and called upon the Lord.
— This is more than I can bear, Lord. How do I explain Rebecca?
— You got yourself into this.
— Help me.
— You’re beyond my help.
— I’m helpless.
— You’ve told yourself the story so often you believe it yourself.
— I confess, Lord, I don’t know shit from Shinola right now. I can no longer distinguish what really happened from my version of it.
— You never could. You’re hopeless as well as helpless, but you are my servant. Get out there and finish your lie, for sometimes I am with you.
Thomas Flood had spoken with God. It was on his face when he returned to the set, a look of awed resolution. He faced the camera and offered up his account of his wife’s death, skipped over his indictment, trial and acquittal for the crime, and picked up the thread of his sermon again:
“The man who came into our home and murdered Rebecca was a consumer of pornography... the police found a collection of Playboy magazines in his closet! A fiend of lust! You know the famous saying, ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the instrument?’ The man who came into our home was injected with the poison of pornography— the word itself means ‘the writing of whores’— unclean images! Unchaste cartoons. Foul stories...”
God spoke through Thomas Flood. He felt transformed.
“Pornography is noxious in the nostrils of God, and our ministry here at the Parousia Foundation has been selected by the Lord to lead a great crusade into the capital of pornography and heathenism, San Francisco.
“That’s right: San Francisco, Sodom by the Sea. It’s a city built on vice, on licentiousness. Just a hundred years ago the Barbary Coast was known throughout the world for the number of its prostitutes. Not for the number of its churches! The Lord warned San Francisco in 1906 with a great earthquake, but still it kept to its evil ways. Our crusade to save the soul of San Francisco will burn the pornography and scatter the Devil worshippers! Lust will be defeated by our crusade, and driven down into the fiery pit!”
He roared the last line, arms stretched skyward in a triumphant ‘V’, eyes glowing with a fervour that was money in the plate:
“Lust is the devil we will drive down into the fiery pit!”