11:05 P.M. September 17, 1957 — Washington, D.C.

  Jonah Merrin sat in his study, his head—more accurately his face—nestled in his hands. He needed to see for himself just how bad the footage was, and had ordered the courier from the printing office to go back and return with someone with the necessary equipment and skills. The men were downstairs now, under Ruth’s watchful eye. Her precious dining room table was not to be harmed in any way or the United States Government would be purchasing her a new one.

  On the face of it, it was a disaster. How much of one—that he would know shortly. On the plus side he’d exposed Thomas Larsen for the menace that he was. His colleagues—the ones who’d spent the st year ughing at him—would have to take the threat seriously now. They still had the internment camps from the war. Those could quickly, and cheaply, be brought back to life as they were needed, as more threats pretending to be human were identified. But, like the Bible itself, the interpretation of the film being prepared for viewing in his dining room couldn’t be left to the lesser minds of the common man. They had their uses, particurly around election time, but this was too important to leave to uneducated, unenlightened minds.

  Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

  Matthew 7:6. Jonah could usually rely on Matthew for assurance that he was still on the true path. He’d watch the film, make his notes—suggestions on editing—and send them back to the printing office. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as he remembered. The parts that he did remember. His memory still had gaps, spaces that the film would fill. Who knows what the camera operator had been focused on at the end. The light had been blinding in the room. It was possible that there was nothing on the film but white light. And sound.

  You want to know what I am? I’ll show you what I am!

  He’d sat there dumbfounded as the spectacle unfolded before him. His next memory was of sitting on the floor beneath the desk as the voice continued to fill the room.

  You have no idea what real power is! MERRIN! STAND UP AND LOOK AT ME! You said you knew what I was! Well, I know what YOU are! You’re a coward and a bully!

  His teeth still ached at the memory. Like a voice in his head, but every sylble had vibrated microphones, gsses, ashtrays, everything, off the tables in the room.

  He’d been terrified in that moment, and ashamed afterward. Ashamed that he’d been the one to cower finally. Not the man in the witness’s chair. Not the man who had—unlike the other witnesses—remained defiant. Not the man who had turned the tables on him.

  It might not be as bad as Jonah thought. But he was almost positive that it was.

  11:17 PM

  “Just get it started and then wait in your truck. My wife will get you when we’re done.”

  “Yes, Senator,” the man said as he made his final adjustments. Ruth was already seated. She’d been ready for bed when he arrived to inform her they were expecting visitors. She dressed quickly, scks and a blouse, no makeup or jewelry. She still wore slippers, and an expression that reminded Jonah how much she disliked changes in routine. Jonah maneuvered a chair next to hers just as the movie started and the man departed.

  “Are you going to tell me what upset you so much?” she asked him as the screen dispyed the ste that Billy had held in pce for eight seconds:

  SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE HEARINGS ON INHUMAN ACTIVITIES

  DATE: SEPTEMBER 17, 1957

  ROOM SH-216

  REEL # 34

  CAMERA B

  Operator: I. METZGER

  Assistant: W. MARTIN

  SOUND: AURICON SYNC

  Inhuman

  I hate that word, Ruth thought as she read the white chalk words written on bck ste.

  She’d reminded her husband more than once that God made everything and everyone in the universe—and that the Almighty had little patience for demagoguery. But her protests were like water in the desert beside Jonah’s fire. He believed himself God’s messenger, and to him, every other interpretation of faith was not just mistaken, but subordinate.

  The contrast between the hand scrawled ste and the hearing was startling. Her husband’s voice had almost an electric snap—each word a spark that he hurled at the calm man in the witness chair. Ruth thought the witness’s hair might be blond or light brown. Everything about him said academic. A pin face with round framed gsses above a what looked like a tweed jacket. His hands remained folded on the desk in front of him as he leaned forward slightly to speak into the microphone. His voice remained calm—measured—when he answered one of Jonah’s acerbic questions. Like he was giving a lecture to undergraduates.

  Why is he badgering him? she wondered. Jonah asks questions but doesn’t allow Larsen to answer.

  She sat with her own hands tightly csped together in her p, ramrod straight where the man in the witness chair, and her husband, continued to lean forward, their lips mere inches away from the rge microphones.

  “Aren’t you even curious about the lives you’re destroying?” Thomas Larsen was asking Jonah now. “These are human beings. American citizens. One of them is a constituent of yours.”

  Ruth knew the woman Larsen had in mind. She was indeed a Wisconsin native. She’d even voted for Jonah—so she cimed during her own hearing. Much good it did her.

  Jonah’s voice rose. His face reddened, and beads of sweat rolled from his temples to his jaw. Ruth was spared those details, watching only in bck and white.

  “She was no constituent of mine! She wasn’t an American! SHE WASN’T HUMAN!”

  The senator from Massachusetts rose to his feet. His voice cut through the murmurs of the spectators like a bell.

  “Senator, until now I hadn’t realized how twisted—how reckless—you’ve become. You’re Ahab, chasing your own demon, not realizing what you’re hunting is inside you, not outside. And when all is said and done, sir...

  Have you no shame? No sense of decency?”

  Jonah was on his feet. As he spoke his arms rose out from his sides.

  “Shame? Decency? I am an instrument of The Lord Our God! I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people wood, and it shall devour them.”

  There were gasps audible from many mouths in the room. Ruth could not help but feel sorry for the man in the witness chair. And for her husband as the image of him on the screen extended an arm towards Larsen, and a finger.

  “You’ll sit in that chair and answer my questions until HELL FREEZES OVER Larsen! I know what you are, and soon the whole world will know!”

  Ruth couldn’t watch her husband come apart before her eyes any longer. She was about to look away when the images and sounds on the screen began to flicker—like a television broadcast interrupted by lightning.

  "You want to know what I am?” Larsen’s voice filled the living room. Where before it had been quiet, now it echoed with unnatural force. He’d spoken it like a simple question, without anger, but within it was a threat. His next words were obscured by static, and by the sounds of people screaming.

  The image panned away from the empty chair and to the form of a winged creature. It had the shape of a man, and it took Ruth a moment to recognize Thomas Larsen, much changed. His clothes and gsses were no longer evident on the humanoid shaped cloud of glowing...something. He floated suspended between floor and ceiling for a second or two before the image on the screen became white, as if someone pointed a camera at the noon day sun for too long. But the image had been there long enough to shock her to her core.

  Is that what an angel would look like? she wondered.

  Is this what it was like in Sodom, when the people surrounded Lot’s home?

  And if it is… will we pay the same price they did?

  And if she could see it, why didn’t Jonah?

  The projection screen was now showing an empty hearing room. Everything that had a moment ago been on the semicircle of desks was now gone. Some of it was visible on the floor. She’d watched with personal humiliation as her husband had cowered, and then fled, with the rest of the staff and visitors, his work completed, just not in the way he’d pnned.

  She stood and walked out into the cool night air and motioned to the man waiting there. She and Jonah sat motionless while the man disassembled everything and removed it all from their home. He left them two cans of film, only one of which—the most important of the pair—they had watched. It rested on their dining room table like a silent accusation aimed at Jonah.

  Jonah was writing furiously on a yellow pad of paper. When she spoke she kept her eyes on the wall where the screen had stood.

  “You orchestrated this. You pushed him. You kept pushing him. Was this what it was like all day? For six hours? Did you treat that calm, gentle, man like this all day?”

  Jonah stopped writing and looked at his wife. He recognized her tone of voice. She was not happy with him. “He’s not a man. You say it. That wasn’t a man. No man could do that.”

  “Do what? Defy you? Not grovel at the feet of a United States Senator? Or show you what real power looks like?”

  She was mad at him and he had no idea why. It was like they’d watched two different films.

  “You saw him. You saw the truth.”

  She nodded, her body still. They would sleep in separate rooms tonight, and possibly the next night. “I did see the truth. Is that what you wanted? For people to see the truth?”

  “No, I wanted people to take me seriously when I said the threat was real. You’re my wife. You’ve heard me talk about this for a year. You saw it for yourself. And even after all that you still don’t understand.”

  When she finally looked at him her face shocked him. She’d never looked at him with such hostility before. “I understand very well.

  He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."

  She stood without another word and walked away. Her slippered feet made no sound as she climbed the stairs—the grandfather clock in the hallway marking her progress sotto voce, in measured time.

  The metallic click of the bedroom lock brought his awareness momentarily back to the present. The implication of that sound wasn’t lost on him. He understood it as the announcement of a debt he would one day have to pay.

  But that was for the future.

  For now, his troubled thoughts returned to the yellow pad, the pen in his hand, and the story he had spent the past year shaping. He lowered his head and continued writing—determined to keep control of the narrative, no matter the cost.