Brandon brought the car to a stop in a sandy wash out on the side of the road between a set of bending trees, their limbs drooping towards the ground as though tired from carrying the weight of the sky. Running his tongue over his teeth while Kent smoked out the window, they listened to engine ticking in the darkness. The cold metal of the .32 digging dug into his back, and, though nothing had happened yet - though nothing would happen if they stuck to the plan - he still felt his heart beating staccato against the ribs. Between the trees, the moon winked out at them, vicious and taunting.
Cool air slipped in beneath Kent's smoke and settled beneath the sweat on Brandon's face. He wiped away the chill and eyed Preacher Ferland’s house. The house was a squat, small mid-century farmhouse, sitting atop the crown of a low brown hill, alone on either side for a half mile or more. “That’s it,” he said softly.
They watched the house and the road and the emptiness of everything in this small out of the way place in silence. Neither said anything, but Brandon was certain that Kent was feeling the same thing he felt. A sense of fear. As though the place had somehow been irradiated by the man who lived inside. On the dashboard, the clock slid later and later. The edge of the coke dying inside him, Brandon turned to Kent. “You ready?”
Kent checked the chamber of his Glock and placed it in the front pocket of his hoodie. “Let’s go.”
They moved together, black hoods pulled up over their skulls, breath hanging fractal in front of their faces like wisping smoke. Above them, stars, ageless and innumerable, lay scattered across the sky, and the winking moon hung high and hysterical. Frosted ground crunched underneath their boots and the smell of cold and rot and dead crop filled their noses as they moved over the withered field, towards the Preacher’s house and the copse of trees that lay behind it.
The night hummed in stillness. No dogs. No cars. No signs of life other than their own footfalls and a porch light that hung next to the front door, gleaming dully in the night and illuminating the dead grass of the hill. Silently, they moved to the edge of the light, then circled the house before consulting briefly in the bones of the trees.
“What do you think?” Kent asked.
"I dunno, man," Brandon said. The cold was all the way in him now, and though movement had numbed his fear to a dull ache, it was still there. But so was the anxiousness of what Kent would think. "I guess I'm okay."
“Yeah. The light being on. Gotta be a mistake. Something he forgot to turn off. He’s gone. I know for sure.”
“Okay,” Brandon said, hyping himself up. Pushing the fear away. “Okay. Yeah. Fuck it, let’s go.”
Brandon took the lead. He kept low and moved quickly. Taking the short back steps in a single stride, he pressed himself against the back door of the Preacher’s house. His ears buzzed with blood. His tongue slid over his teeth, tracing the gaps. His hands were shaking.
He counted to five. Willed his hands to be still. He tried the door. Locked.
Kent rose beside him, hefted the Glock by the barrel, and swung it into the window of the door. Glass shattered and fell into the dark of the house.
Brandon rose, reached in and flipped the lock. The door swung open. Together, they went inside.
The kitchen was small and empty of furniture. Shards of glass covered the yellowed laminate floor, tossing moonlight. The floors were dirty, the cupboards an off-white, and the smell of dull smoke hung in the place, the ghosts of a previous resident.
“Where you think it is?” Kent asked, gesturing around with the gun.
Brandon shrugged. “Could be under the goddamn mattress for all I know.”
“Mattress? Man, you made it sound like this guy sleeps in a fuckin’ coffin.”
“Let’s find it and go.”
They moved into the front room, half-blind except for narrow slats of moonlight sliding through a gap in the curtains.
Somewhere in the back of the house, a board moaned, low and soft.
“Jesus,” Brandon said, spinning around, the barrel of his gun sweeping the dark. His feet backed up, reflexively, and he was almost halfway through the kitchen towards the back door when he felt Kent grab him softly in the dark.
“Stay cool, man. The place is empty. If he was as scary as you tell, He would have been out here already. Would have heard the glass break.” He winked in the dark. "It's just us and the ghosts out here now."
“Don’t say that, man. Fuck.” Brandon shivered. “I feel like I’m robbing the Devil. I mean, fucking snakes, man?”
The Preacher had come at the end of summer heat, blight and infection hot on its winds. He’d stood outside of town and promised forgiveness and deliverance, and the people had come. He handled snakes, they whispered, serpent’s that God protected him from. They claimed he’d cured the sick and offered salvation, not just to the damned, but to the town and the land itself, the vipers in his hands the whole time he spoke.
Brandon had heard the rumors - of Ferland’s Godly powers, of his command over the Holy Ghost, and that, despite the peoples’ interest, the Preacher stayed a mysterious figure, rarely seen by anyone outside his white revival tent on Sundays and Wednesdays. His interest grew with each new outrageous story he’d heard, until he felt compelled to see it for himself.
In the heat of the tent, Brandon had seen the snakes. But worse, he’d seen people he’d known his entire life overtaken by something he could not name, Prophecies of the End Times on their lips, their eyes shining in ways that made his arms burst in gooseflesh.
“They do that shit down south,” Kent said, trying to sound calm and worldly, though Brandon knew the furthest south he'd ever been was to Missouri to buy legal weed and fireworks.
He tried to shake the memory, but the white tent had bound itself to him, and even then the memory of the place and the humidity inside scared him, made the skin around his balls draw up tight and the hair on the back of his neck electric.
Kent started moving, deeper into the house. “Thing I don't get is, why would anyone in Nebraska sign up for that. We're not the south. We do things our own way here. And how does it work? Is God in the snake? What if it bites? That mean God hates the snake handler, or someone in the crowd?”
Brandon thought again of Ferland on his rickety stage, his face whittled into a grin. He thought of how he paced back and forth, rattlesnakes in each hand, the serpents flicking forked tongues and widening their jaws to strike. He remembered how he'd watched and wondered, slack-jawed, the question of what drove a man to do such a thing burning behind his eyes. He pushed the thought away. Focused instead on a different memory, the image of the wicker donation plate overflowing with cash, the Preacher blessing and raising it over his head at the end of every service.
“It's all bullshit,” he said, but even as he spoke he could hear the own rattle in his voice. Could feel the bone in the back of his throat. “None of it works. It just is. Let’s just find the money and get the fuck out.”
They began to walk again, moving deeper into the dark room off the kitchen, floorboards creaking underneath.
From somewhere in the shadows, they heard rattling.
They stopped, trading looks, fear written across their faces. Brandon reached behind him, grabbed the grip of the .32 for comfort. Breathing deep, he reached around the doorframe, found the light-switch, and flipped it on.
Dull, yellow light filled the room, barely pushing back the dark. The room was small. Unkempt. A bookshelf along the far wall filled with religious tracts, books on demonology, screeds against The Pope, and the “Left Behind” novels. A small desk pressed back against the far wall. Next to the desk, on top of an old nightstand, sat a red wooden box covered by a piece of warped plywood, cement bricks resting on either end. Muted rattling came from inside.
Brandon stared at the box, his eyes like cotton, dry and itching. It was the same box he’d seen the Preacher reach his hands into, rattlesnakes wrapped around his wrists as he pulled them back out, their hisses and rattles accompanying his apocalyptic witnessing.
Brandon took a step back. “Oh fuck, man,” he said. His bones had fallen loose inside his skin. Droplets of sweat broke out on his face. He imagined one of the snakes sliding past his teeth and down his throat, it’s tongue flicking the blood from his hammering heart.“I didn’t know he kept them here.”
“I didn’t either,” Kent said. “I thought they stayed at the tent.”
The rattling slowed to a dull drone and then stopped.
Brandon reached out and touched Kent's arm. "I’m not sure I want to do this, man. It was my idea, yeah, but, man, I don't want to be here. I don’t want to rob this dude. A normal preacher or priest of whatever would be bad enough, but this guy is another fucking level. This shit freaks me out too bad.”
Kent looked at him with cold eyes, yellow and slit in under the rooms lonely light. "You know why we wanted to do this, Brandon. Get it the fuck together."
Brandon need cut through his gut, swirling with fear. He thought of the nosebleeds, spilling down into his mouth. Of his gums, too dull to feel themselves giving up the root. He thought of Kent on the ratty bean bag, finally passed out after three days. Of how they always needed more to last them. Of how he’d finally figured a way to get out of the middle of fucking Nebraska and to a place where there was something. Better drugs, better women, better jobs. Something more than a tiny town off the highway that offered only a more bitter, angrier God, shit coke, and the same jobs at the silos. And now he wanted to throw it all away.
Because of the Preacher. Because of Ferland. Not because of the things he'd seen him do, but because of the glow he'd held in his eyes as he'd done them.
Brandon shook his head. “No. Dude. Seriously. I’m gonna wait outside.” He gestured around the room with his hand. “Fuck all of this. You wanna do it? Fine. Don’t even need my split. There are other ways we can get right. Other ways we can start over."
"You always were a pussy," Kent said. "But you better wait at the car. Cause I'm gonna find it.” He turned, walking across the small room toward the small hallway, the kitchen, and the rest of the creaking black house beyond.
Brandon looked away, shame and fear and need all twisting in him now, ringing him out until the sweat slid from his pores and the snakes smelled it and began beating themselves against the slivered wood of the container.
Behind Brandon, just a few steps in to the hall, Kent’s footsteps stopped. And then a scream rose up.
Brandon turned turned, a question forming on his tongue. From the room, he saw Kent raising his hand, the small black Glock swinging up in front of him.
The back half of Kent blew outwards, blood and muscle and bone, the gunshot thundering against the thin wood.
Gore painted the wall next to Brandon.
Iron in his mouth. Smoke burning in his nostrils. His ears went numb. Felt his heart beat through his empty gums. A scream spilled from his throat as he watched Kent’s body tumble forewards, his guts suddenly unzipped, and land face down on the wooded floor of the study, but it died between his teeth.
Brandon fell against the wall, stumbling and sliding on his friend’s blood until he ended on his knees, his eyes searching the dark where Kent had pointed.
The Preacher stood hunched in the dark of the kitchen, a shotgun leveled, a black outline against the dark of the broken back door. The man’s eyes haunted the darkness, reflecting the hoary light of the moon.
Slowly, the shotgun leading him, the Preacher walked into the room.
Brandon’s spine wracked. Fire burned through his brain, screaming for him to reach to the back of his jeans, to the pistol cold against his sweating skin, but he was frozen in place, his veins leeched of heat and blood. Behind him, the snakes in the box hissed furiously and thumped their rattles against the wood.
The Preacher stepped over Kent’s body, avoiding the spreading pool of blood, the shotgun sweeping around Brandon. "Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land; you will look on when the wicked are cut off," Preacher Ferland said, his voice softer than the rickety accented ever-rising Drone Brandon had heard in the tent. He slipped a foot under Kent's shoulder and kicked the body over on it's back.
Kent’s eyes, stuck open, stared at the bottom row of the bookshelf, a look of surprise and pain knit into his face.
In a terrible moment, Brandon realized that his friend’s twisted body, insides spilling over the wooden floor, looked like a burst snake in the middle of birth, and he fought the urge to vomit. Sweat ran from his brow. Mixed with blood. Stung his eyes. Fear, a deeper fear than he'd ever experienced, spread across the top of his skin and pounded in his skull. And below that, the urge for coke screamed.
He ran his tongue over the gaps of teeth to fight the urge. “It was a mistake,” he said, finally able to slide words from his mouth. “A mistake.”
Ferland stared in silence. Their eyes locked, and Brandon felt something, like the Preacher was probing his soul.
The snakes slowed their mad writhing, and the room became so still and silent Brandon was convinced the Preacher could hear his heart beating, and that, at the sound of it, the man’s tongue had become wet.
“Just let me go!” he screamed.
No answer. The Preacher’s body stood so still it seemed he were carved of stone.
He’d seen the Preacher speak in tongues and exorcise demons and boom to his flock - his voice always loud, musical, trembling with power - that in the very land they worked lived the Devil. But, Brandon realized, he’d never seen the man be still or silent, and in the pale of the room, the Charismatic’s quiet unnerved him even more.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the Preacher began to hum, airy and light, a hymn, like something sung joyously by a choir.
“Just let me go,” Brandon said again, his voice breaking now. He wanted to weep. Pray. Wondered if he would be able to pull out and empty the .32 before the Preacher fired on him. Knew it would be impossible. Crashed his thoughts in to one another, trying to decide if it'd be worth it anyway.
The Preacher stopped humming then. “Amen,” he said aloud, and Brandon realized the humming had been a prayer - a paean, maybe, for forgiveness. He watched as Ferland lowered the shotgun and came to him, his hand out, offering to help him up. “I’m sorry for your friend,” Ferland said. “But he was about to shoot me. I just hope he was right with the Lord. Now,” the Preacher paused, taking in all of Brandon, his ratty jeans, his worm boots, the sweat rolling across his forehead, his twisted and failing teeth, “You need to tell me why you’ve come here.”
“No,” Brandon said. “You killed Kent.”
The man’s eyes took on a determined set, the skin beneath them smooth and tanned. He stepped forward, the shotgun lowered, his hand out.
Brandon looked down and saw Ferland’s feet, slick with Kent’s blood from the spreading pool. “Just let me go,” he begged. “I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”
“Robbery, am I right?” the Preacher said, ignoring the request. “Because of drugs? Or is it a woman you’re stealing for? Either way, a whore has your soul.”
Shame soaked through him, mingling with the pulse inside that begged for a hit. Brandon nodded. “Drugs,” he said, then he reached up and took the Preacher’s hand, warm and somehow clammy at the same time, and brought himself to standing.
A dark humor settled into Ferland’s face. “But you don’t know where the donations even are, do you?”
Brandon shook his head, the bones in his neck grinding on each other. “Please, he begged, “don’t kill me.”
“What do you think of me?” The Preacher stepped backwards, as though he were offended at the thought. “That I judge you as evil for your addiction? Because you have fallen under evil’s spell? No. No, not at all. I believe in forgiveness,” the Preacher’s face grew softer, his voice calming, “I am not meant to kill you,” he said. “I am meant to teach you how to live.”
Ferland paused, then reached out and took Brandon’s hand in his own as though he were a child, the blood on their palms mixing. “In you,” he continued, “I see one of God’s children who has lost his way. That your way to Glory has been blocked by something else. And I believe — I have to believe — that you have been brought to me, delivered to me, so that I can guide you back to righteousness.”
Preacher Ferland leading, they moved across the room together, stepping over Kent’s blood, already gathering the smell of rot. Calmly, the Preacher led Brandon to the red wooden box on the old nightstand.
“It’s in there,” he said. “And you’re going to take it. A sign of God's love. Not blasphemous Serendipity, but something older. A perfect order. I can look at you and know, through His wisdom. That you are a fearful man. But tonight, you shake the fear off.”
Hissing leaked from the box as the snakes came alive again.
Brandon bent at the waist, retching up bile. The Preacher’s hand calmly rubbed his back. “Jesus Christ,” he gasped.
“Exactly!” Ferland clapped him on the back, then raised him back to standing before taking a step away.
“Go on,” he said. “It’s waiting for you.”
Brandon tried to stall, to grab something in his mind that would spare him, but everything slipped under the weight of his need. Of his shame. His fear. The anxiousness he could never seem to shake. “You,” he tried. “You were supposed to be gone.”
Disappointment clouded the Preacher’s face. “No man will know my coming and going. Don’t you recognize that? You? A thief in the night?”
He felt Ferland reach into the back of his jeans and pull the .32 from his waist. His temples hammering in fear, Brandon stepped to the box. With hands quaking, he removed the bricks from the corners, then slid the piece of plywood off, inch by inch.
The inside of the box was dark and still, the scales of the rattlesnakes cooly reflecting the overhead light. One of the things knocked its rattle against the wooden side then fell quiet while the other tasted blood in the air with its forked tongue. Their eyes beat black and cold. His legs tingled as if to lead him away, but he could not bring himself to move. A tail slid across the top of an old metal cashbox nestled between the vipers, filling the box with a tinny echo.
“You see it,” the Preacher said, taking a step back. “You just have to believe now. God brought you here for this. Put your faith in Him and you will not be harmed.” He gestured again at the box, an air of weariness flushing across his skin. “But those who don’t believe are punished.” Ferland raised the pistol. Pressed it, softly, against the back of Brandon’s skull.
Brandon stood, staring at the snakes, his vision blurring with darkness at the edges. He tried not to think of the gun at the back of his head. Tried not to think of Kent and all the nights they’d spent on back roads, passing the pipe or the powder between them, how badly he needed it now. Tried not to think of the insides of his friend’s body, now exposed and twisted and leaking on the floor.
His tongue worked the gaps of his teeth.
He thought of getting clean, how he might actually be able to do it now that Kent was gone. He thought of Preacher Ferland’s God, full of wrath and retribution and mercy for those like him, those who had fallen into the dark. He felt the Preacher standing behind him, as though he’d been placed there by God himself, and how he’d seen seen the man plunge his hands into the box, before pulling the serpents out, always unharmed, his face calm, serene, at one with the Maker.
Brandon swallowed. He tried to summon a calmness or faith. Tried to find a way forward without his own fear.
An electricity entered the room, soft but insistent, just over the surface of his skin.
“God is here with us now,” Ferland said, pushing Brandon forward. “You can feel it. Don’t let Him leave you now.”
Brandon raised his right arm and placed it over the top, a half-forgotten Psalm on his lips.
The rattlesnakes began to writhe, their bodies turning and twisting in the shadow of his hand, the ends of their tails rattling, beating against the cheap wood. Forked tongues flicked rapidly, the serpent’s eyes shining sick and wet in the shadows.
He closed his eyes. Tried to picture God and his Kingdom. The peace of it. The bravery. The Power and the Glory and the Joy.
Slowly, Brandon lowered his hand into the red wooden container, prayers flowing from his lips. Behind him, Preacher Ferland joined in, his voice loud and commanding.
The hissing and rattling of the vipers grew louder as he lowered his hand deeper, the tails of the rattlesnakes thumping against the insides of the box. Brandon raised his voice to match the Preacher’s, his eyes clenched shut as his hand descended into the whirling mass of scales and teeth, and amidst the electricity and their voices and the shaking of the snakes tails, the room became filled with a strange uneven melody, like a man speaking in tongues.
