Revelator

by Daryl Gregory

Suddenly she felt sorry for Lunk’s entire congregation. All that talk about God, and they never got to see Him. Their whole religion depended on faith—faith that He was real, that He was coming back. But for her, and for Motty and her mother before her, belief wasn’t required, any more than she needed to believe in gravity for the rain to fall. The God in the Mountain just was.

Hendrick rolled on, following the Standard Baptist Funeral Script, a time-honored string of bromides, Bible verses, reassurances, and evangelism. The loved one’s suffering is over, their race has been run, Jesus has called them home, and have you got right with the Lord? The main message was that you were a sucker for grieving. Why shed tears over someone who’s crossed over River Jordan into the Promised Land? And don’t you want to be there too? The whole point of the sermon was not to honor the dead, but to use that death to remind sinners their own souls were in jeopardy. The corpse on display was merely a motivational prop. What offended Stella most about the script was that it erased the woman they were talking about.

When Stella communed, there was never a moment when she felt like she could demand anything from it. There was nothing she could tell it, no words it would listen to. It wanted nothing from her but obedience. The great lie about communion was that it wasn’t a union at all. Every experience was a one-way street. The Ghostdaddy filled her with its thoughts, over and over, until she burst. And then, when she’d proved to be a failure, it stopped talking to her altogether. Just like it had stopped talking to Motty, and then Lena. The Revelator wasn’t good enough for it, so it moved on to the next child.