Chapter 1: In Dreams

   Harry couldn’t feel his feet. Nor could he see them. He was enveloped in a thick, gray mist that pressed in on him like a damp, gray flannel blanket.
He could hear water lapping at the shore, somewhere close by. A huge beam of light from the lighthouse swooped through the murk over his head, and the foghorn blast vibrated in his chest. 
The beam from the lighthouse slashed by again, and Harry narrowed his eyes as he tried to peer through the fog. There was something out there on the water.
A wave of anxiety welled up from his stomach, and the fog horn blasted again. 
This was wrong…terribly wrong. Something had to be done…but what? What was he supposed to do? 
The light slashed by again. It didn’t seem that enough time had passed. Was the light moving faster? It wasn’t supposed to do that. And there! Something was definitely out there. 
The breeze began to freshen, and it brought the unmistakable odor of mildew and decay. He could hear the sounds of creaking timbers and flapping canvas. The light swung by again, and this time it slashed through the dissipating fog to show the distinct form of an old sailing ship. 
Harry could feel his heart begin to pound. “Too close,” he murmured. “It’s too close to shore.”
He raised his arms, and began to wave frantically. He tried to call out, but his voice just came out as a gravelly whisper. Desperately, he began to run towards the sound of the shore, still waving his arms, still trying to croak out a warning. His feet splashed into cold water, and he could feel it washing up his legs. The lighthouse beam swung by, the foghorn blared, and the fog fell away before the rising wind.
Harry stopped short, and gazed out at the ship that was fast approaching wreck and ruin upon the rocks. 
He could see it clearly now - a decrepit, three-masted schooner. The rags of rotten sails fluttered and flapped  from the broken spars, and the soggy remains of the ropes and lines hung about the thing like old, abandoned cob webs. As the ship came even more dangerously close, Harry could see that the deck was full of people. They stood motionless and silent…looking at him. The wind screamed through the rigging, now, but the people just remained still and staring. 
He could make out the details of their faces, now. The paleness of their skin, the limp tangles of their hair, their unblinking eyes as they relentlessly stared…stared straight into his soul. They were like refugees straight out of Hell, bound for destruction on this bleak, rocky, windswept shore.
And somehow he knew they were coming for him.
He couldn’t run...he couldn’t even turn away. Those eyes had him, begging him, accusing him...watching him. 
The bow towered above him, now.  Any moment it would roll over him and crush him into the stones beneath that inky water. His eyes turned up to the ship’s figurehead. But it wasn’t a figurehead...it was a man lashed to the figurehead. The ropes cut cruelly into his wrists and ankles, and the black blood flowed down his arms. 
He was saying something...no, he was screaming in agony. 
This man was being crucified on the figurehead of this ghost ship. 
Harry tried to call out to the man, to offer some shred of comfort or compassion, but his voice came out as a rasping whisper. He tried again, tried harder, but still his voice just crackled in his throat. He drew in a deep lung full of the rancid air, and bellowed forth with all his might. This time, his voice roared out as a mighty wind that shook the very gunwales of the ship. 
Then as he continued to yell, his view changed, and he was now looking down upon the man on the beach. His arms and legs were frozen yet they burned like fire. The sound of his own screams then pierced his ears as he realized that he was indeed the one being crucified, and there would be no escape. The screams echoed on and on…

Harry Wheaton woke up screaming.  
“Jesus,” he whispered in the night, “A dream...a nightmare...phew.”
He lay there in the dark, waiting for his heart to stop pounding as he tried to slow his breathing. The sheets were soaked with sweat, and he was clammy and wet all over. He felt elated that it had only been a dream, though. He smiled to himself, and even chuckled a bit, as a wave of relief washed over him. 
He heaved a sigh, and rolled himself out of the bed. Yawning and scratching, he shuffled his way into the bathroom and turned on the light. He checked his reflection in the mirror, then filled a glass with water.
A man in a uniform stood solidly behind him.
The glass slipped from Harry’s fingers and smashed in the sink. The sound of the glass shattering became the howl of gale force winds, and the spray of broken glass became the spray of waves breaking over the gunwales.  As Harry turned, he found himself standing on the deck of the rotting ship, standing face to face with the Captain. 
The Captain was yelling against the wind. Over and over again he said, “We have a problem!...We have a problem!...We have a problem!...”
As Harry watched, the wind tore the flesh from the captain’s face, but he just kept repeating, “We have a problem...We have a problem!” 
Finally, the face was reduced to a skull with two flaming, red eyes, and the wind fell silent. “Now...” the captain’s skull said, “You...have a problem.”

Once again, Harry woke up in bed screaming.
“What the hell?” he whispered into the darkness, the echoes of his cries still ringing in his ears. “Was that the same dream or is this a different night?”
A cool, smooth voice came from the darkness beyond the foot of his bed. “In dreams I walk with you. In dreams I talk to you.”
The haggard figure of the Captain stepped into the pool of moonlight that came through the window, and regarded Harry with the filmy, glazed eyes of a corpse.
“In dreams you’re mine. All of the time we’re together
In dreams, In dreams.”
Harry studied the dry, pale skin pulled tight over the sharp bones of the Captain’s face, the desiccated lips that were pulled back over the black gums and long teeth, and the brim of the hat that hung down over the forehead from the rotten mass of cloth on top of the skull. 
After a long pause, Harry finally muttered, “No…You’re not the ghost of Roy Orbison.”
“I can only tell you what you want to hear,” the Captain replied in his warm, melodious voice. “The trick is making you want to hear what I have to say.”
“I don’t want anything,” Harry protested as he squeezed his eyes shut.
“I know…I know…” The corpse then stretched out its arm, and Harry opened one eye and saw that it clutched a book in it’s bony fingers. The cover was emblazoned with a large, gold 72.
“What’s that?” Harry asked as he tried to slide himself back into the corner of his bed.
“It’s yours,” the corpse replied. “You have to eat it.”
“You want me to eat a book!?” Harry cried. 
“It’s yours. You make the rules. It’s the only way.” 
Harry began to slowly reach out for the book, and then stopped and clenched his hand into a hard fist.
“Wait a minute…just wait a minute…I know how this works. If I give in to this delusion, that’s it. I’ll never be right again. Nothing will ever be the same,” Harry whispered to himself. “I can’t do that.” He turned his eyes back to the Captain’s face - which had now significantly begun to decompose. “I won’t,” he stated firmly, and dropped his hand. 
“But you’ve never been right,” the Captain said easily. “This will fix it. This will fix everything.”
Harry smiled and shook his head as he sat back. “No..no. I can’t accept that. And I see what you’re doing…trying to make me doubt. Nice try, but…no.”

The sun rose over the town, bathing it in the warm golden light of morning. Birds sang, flowers bloomed, and the people of the town cooked breakfast and read the morning paper. All was right in the world...but not Harry’s world. 
The morning sun cast a ghastly, yellow light over his sunken eyes and his trembling fingers. He sat at his kitchen table staring forlornly at the silent, rotting corpse of the Captain, sitting across from him. This denizen of his nightmares would not be driven away - even by the light of day. Harry had risen, taken a shower, gotten dressed and made a pot of coffee. But the Captain still remained, following Harry’s movements. Harry mused that at the current rate of decomposition, the Captain might be completely gone by nightfall. But what then? 
In its putrid, decaying hands it still held the book. The number 72  on the cover gleamed warmly in the morning light. Seemingly unconcerned about anything else, the wraith continued to hold the book out to Harry, waiting...just waiting.
Harry’s eyes looked at the book then at the corpse’s face, then back to the book, then to the window, then to the book...he had passed the entire night this way. 
Suddenly he twitched and began to laugh. 
“How is it,” he began, “That you don’t have a shadow? How can you actually be here and not have a shadow?”
The corpse said nothing, however one of its ears fell off and hit the table like a piece of old cheese.
Harry scowled at it in disgust, and looked back to the Captain’s face. “Y’know what I think? I don’t think you’re here at all. I think that you...are a figment of my imagination.”
The corpse leaned closer to him. 
“You’re not real,” Harry stammered.
“Really?” the corpse said patiently. He smacked Harry across the face with the book and sent him sprawling across the floor.
“IS THAT REAL ENOUGH FOR YOU!?” the Captain roared. He stood over Harry and shoved the book under Harry’s nose. “Eat the book, Harry. Just eat the blasted book!”
“No-o-o-o-o,” Harry moaned and curled up in a fetal position on the floor.
He lay there all morning, curled up into a tight, quivering ball. Unable and unwilling to process what his senses were telling him, he turned them off. He entered a state of total disconnect from the world, and sought solace in the inky blackness of oblivion. Only gradually and by degrees was he able to bring himself back to face whatever the afternoon light had in store for him. When he finally uncovered his face, he found himself alone.
He slowly got to his feet - shaky, but upright. “I’m not going crazy...oh yeah....I’m still here, sanity intact. It was rough, but I win. I’m still here, and I know what’s real. Oh yeah...but jeez, I could really use some coffee.”
No sooner had his words left his lips, when the coffee pot floated over to the table, as if by some unseen hand, and poured him a steaming cup. Harry watched it. His eyes blinked and his jaw went slack.  “Sugar?” he asked absently, and watched in curious fascination as the bowl rose into the air and a spoon dumped sugar into the coffee, and began to stir.
Harry reached out, picked up the cup and brought it to his lips. “Aaahh,” he said with satisfaction. “A ham sandwich would be nice, too.”
A nice ham sandwich materialized on the table in front of him. He picked it up and took a bite. “Very nice,” he said. “Very tasty for a hallucination. Of course I expect to see maggots come streaming out of it at any moment. How about a little more mustard?” 
He pointed at the jar of mustard on the table and it rose and floated easily to his hand. “Yeah, I could get used to this.” He studied the sandwich a moment. “Or maybe…just maybe I’m only imagining the sandwich. In which case, I’m giving in to the delusion, and that is probably not a good thing. It is tasty, though.” Harry lifted the bread off the top of the sandwich to spread some mustard on it. Instead of lettuce, he found the page of a book inside his sandwich.
“That sneaky bastard!” Harry hissed as he dropped the sandwich to the table. He sprinted to the bathroom to rinse out his mouth, but when he opened the door, he found himself on the deck of the ghost ship once again. 
“Oh Christ,” he groaned.
The helmsman turned to look at him and said, “Straight on till mornin’, eh mate?”
Harry turned away and found himself inside a gigantic sperm cell, like a giant, transparent tadpole gyrating madly through space. The sperm slammed into a giant egg with a bone-crushing impact that set off a massive explosion of light and heat and raw force that seemed to ripple the very fabric of space. Out of the searing heat and blinding light, Harry emerged as a puddle of ooze on a beach beneath a red sky. 
Parts of him lay scattered all around. The parts started to stretch and recoil and shuffle about like maggots on a piece of meat. The pieces sought each other out, and tried to move closer to each other, to join each other...trying to fit themselves back together, but not having much luck. Harry’s hand attached to a foot and managed to pick up his head. It faced the pile of ooze that he had become. “It’s time to wake up now, Harry. You’ve done quite enough damage. Eat the book, Harry...come back to us...take us home...”
Harry then found himself suspended, Christlike, in a web of glowing tendrils. He could hear voices in the background but could not make out the words they were saying. Then he saw the Captain talking to another officer. “We have a problem,” the Captain was saying.
Harry could hear no more because of the screaming all around him. When he realized it was he that was screaming, it just made him scream that much louder. “MARA ODEON, MARA ODEON, MARA ODEON!”
The sound still rang in his ears long after he sat up in his bed, gasping for breath.
“Jeez…that was…” He looked at the clock on his bedside table and saw that he’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. He then remembered that he didn’t have a bathroom in either his bedroom or his kitchen, and that his coffee maker hadn’t worked in years, and he’d been drinking instant. “A dream…all a dream. Shit! No more 3 alarm chili before bed.”
He laid back down, and closed his eyes. “Mara Odeon,” he mumbled to himself as he drifted off. “What a hoot!” 
Chapter 2: Snake Eyes

   There was nothing small-time about Reverend Dewey Thurston or his church, The Order of the New Revelation. The church could boast membership in the hundreds of thousands with any given day bringing hundreds of converts into the fold. His televised services were in global syndication, his books were always best-sellers, and his traveling road show - Salvation Through Revelation, always played to sold out audiences at the largest and best venues. 
It was a new era of global, religious revivalism. People all over the world were thinking more and more about spiritual issues and questions of faith. Of course, the dialogue and rhetoric fell on both sides of the question. Dismissal of the supernatural was just as vigorous as its moony-eyed acceptance. But the number of people who professed to have no opinion on the subject got smaller every day. 
And most would agree that this renewed, religious enthusiasm could rightly be attributed directly to Reverend Dewey Thurston himself. The reason for that was simply because Dewey was the real thing. He was a bona fide, documented and certified miracle man. His cures were real and complete and irreversible. His uncanny influence upon the local weather was baffling and wondrous. 
Countless skeptics had tried to discredit him, and he had submitted willingly and enthusiastically to any test they could come up with. He had been scrutinized and analyzed all the way down to his DNA. He had undergone countless CAT Scans and MRI’s and EEG’s. He had performed his cures inside Faraday cages, nuclear reactors, wind tunnels, submarines and subterranean bunkers. They had scanned him and photographed him in every band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The only thing that any of this seemed to yield was that physically and mentally, Dewey was about as average as they came. He was a bit overweight, had a bit of an elevated cholesterol level, some male-pattern baldness, and a questionable taste in clothing. 
Even then, his critics chose to disregard his miracle cures. For them, a supernatural or divine explanation would not and could not even be considered. They dubbed it the “Thurston Phenomenon” and began writing dissertations and debating various arcane aspects of the data that had been collected.  But privately and off the record, hundreds of doctors regularly referred patients to his mission houses and revival meetings. 
And there were other things, too. Despite the vapid, self-serving overtures of the pundits on either side of the question, most people simply accepted Dewey in their hearts. Regions of the world that had been gripped in droughts for decades saw their first regular rainfall after Dewey’s visits.  Floods would abate when Dewey showed up on the scene. Wildfires would die out within moments of his arrival on the scene. Epidemics would fade as he walked through plague-ridden streets. 

Most people accepted the evidence of their own eyes.

Beyond that, the Order of the New Revelation was totally non-denominational. Dewey’s miracles were open and available to anyone - no matter what their beliefs were. Ecumenically speaking, Dewey’s presence on Earth was taken as unequivocal confirmation and validation of the existence of a Divine force. Dewey represented the earthly incarnation of that force, no matter what name or form that was given to that force.   Any religion, any belief system could easily absorb the elements of the doctrine because there really was no doctrine. Dewey was all of it. 
No matter what the concept of the Deity might be - if any- a simple faith in Dewey could make it manifest in the real world. 
Whether they subscribed to Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, Elvis, Quantum Mechanics or the Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man, everybody loved Dewey, because Dewey was the real thing.

The story of Dewey’s beginnings was constantly being revised, and had quickly evolved from legend to several myths. The current version had it that as a child he had been either struck by lightning, drowned or abducted by aliens and left in a state of near death for anywhere from 5 minutes to several days. While in that state, he had been either genetically modified or given Grace or merged with the Universal Consciousness. Then, an archangel / extraterrestrial / or some other manifestation of the Divine (take your pick), came to him from out of the Void and charged him with the responsibility of bringing humanity to God or the next level of human evolution. Life then returned to his body in a whirlwind / blinding light / gasp of air and he found himself endowed with the power to heal in the name of Jesus Christ / perform cellular reconstruction by manipulating organic matter at a molecular level. 
But most baffling and disturbing, was that he also had “dominion” over the wind and rain. Many times it had been empirically and unequivocally demonstrated that Dewey could significantly influence atmospheric pressure in a radius up to thirty miles - more than enough to bring a bit of rain to a drought stricken village, or quench a small wild fire. 
Very few people knew the actual truth of Dewey’s beginnings. 
The truth of it was that Dewey had been born to a crack addict in a back alley of a slum in Montgomery, Alabama. It was by the slimmest chance of fate that the police had stumbled upon the mother and child. Otherwise, Dewey’s life would have been very short and spent in a dumpster. 
Instead, Dewey spent the first few months of his life in the hospital. Unresponsive and prone to seizures, he had a fairly steady diet of medications and therapies. As a baby, he was cranky and difficult and not really a good candidate for adoption. So his childhood consisted of being bounced around between orphanages, group homes and a long string of foster parents. At an early age, he learned how to deal with abuse of all types - both as the recipient and the donor. And that all came with a heaping helping of good, old time Pentecostal type religion. 
By the time he was ten, he had been diagnosed with sociopathic tendencies. Most people just wrote him off as a nasty little bastard, and fully expected him to wind up in prison. There was a lot of hate and rage in the boy, but it was all born of pain. The only relief he found for the pain was to share it. He took his greatest delight from the misery of others. 

But when he was fourteen, something extraordinary happened.
He was doing a stint at a juvenile detention center due to his involvement with an automotive chop shop and stealing cars. Now this particular juvenile detention center was basically a child labor camp, and it was hard time. Long days working in fields under the hot, Alabama sun took their toll on Dewey, and one day he collapsed to the ground and began to thrash in the convulsions of a massive seizure.  
They rushed him to the infirmary, and got him stabilized, but he had lapsed into a coma. He spent the next three days in a quasi-vegetative state with tubes down his throat and machines keeping him alive with incessant clickings and shirrings. 
Apparently, part of his brain simply stopped working - some small region of the prefrontal lobe. But that in turn forced other parts of his brain that had been dormant, to suddenly sputter and spark into life. By his own account, he said it was like “Somebody tuning in a radio. Suddenly, the channel was clear, and I was ready to receive the Revelation.”
Dewey’s Revelation came to him in the symbols that he knew - the Kingdom of God, the eternal battle with Satan, the Salvation of humanity through the blood of Jesus, the crying out of the martyrs. But by far, the most profound thing was the Archangel Eram who revealed to Dewey that he was “called”. There was one for whom the world had been waiting, and that Dewey had been “called” to do work in His Name. 
Eram had come down as a golden angel on wings of fire. More light than substance, he hovered overhead, and the heat of his wings went through the fiber of Dewey’s soul - burning away the blackness and bitterness that had writhed there since the day he was born. 
A deep, rumbling voice roared out of the flames, “Know me as Eram, the Captain of the Host. Know me and remember thyself as the 66. Thine eyes can see what others may not, but thou mayest not see all for thou art not whole, and the Book is not for you.”
“C-can I be made…whole?” young Dewey stammered as he stared into the molten, glowing, gold face of the angel.
“As thou makest others whole, so shall you become.” Eram’s voice thundered. “Therefore, thou shalt bless and be blessed for thou art of the Chosen One,” 
With that, Dewey’s first Revelation ended. He opened his eyes, and began removing himself from the life support machinery. When the watch nurse saw what he was doing, she came running in, yelling “No! No! You can’t do that!” 
But Dewey snaked the tube from his own throat and looked at her with a smile. “Physician, heal thyself,” he whispered. 
Dewey spent the next ten years of his life wandering the highways and byways. He was like a tumbleweed being blown by the winds of Fate, doing miraculous healings and bringing the light of his Revelation wherever he went. Usually on foot, he traversed the breadth of the continental United States a number of times. He didn’t have any kind of a plan or agenda, he just moved from church to church - regardless of faith or denomination. 
As he got to be more well known, he got to be more welcome. In fact, churches would seek him out to get him to visit them. When Dewey was in the church, the collection plate was always full. And of course, people began to follow him in larger numbers, and before long, Dewey had a ministry of his own. He found that he could grant a limited power to heal to other people, and they could go out in his name and do his work. With that, came structure and hierarchy, officers, doctrines, policies, and the need for something more solid. 
It began with a small church in Arkansas, then a larger church, then a string of churches, then a community center, then more community centers, then a small TV station, then a larger TV station, then network syndication, then missions to foreign countries, hospitals and massive humanitarian projects. It all just kept getting bigger and bigger. But no matter how big it got, Dewey was always the center of it. 
He was totally visible all the time, as well as reasonably accessible. Anybody that wanted to could manage to get a meeting or an audience with Dewey. It may have taken upwards of a year to do it, but it could be done. And yet, nobody could see the gradual darkening of his spirit. Nobody could see the weight of disappointment that grew upon him every day. 
Dewey carried an awful burden. In the quiet moments of his days when he would close his doors and send everyone away so he could get some rest, he would call out to Eram, and Eram would come. And Dewey would always ask if he was getting any closer to being whole. And Eram would always answer, “Wholeness doth approach, but thou art 66 parts only.”
And so Dewey would try harder. But he saw more and more that his efforts brought him no closer to Eram’s grace and the mysterious Book, and his frustration festered. With that frustration came a growing suspicion that the governments of the world were keeping the people corrupt, and that corruption is what stood between him and wholeness. 
As suspicion evolved into certainty within his mind, Dewey tasked himself with a new mission - to build the foundations of a new world order that would wipe away the old order altogether. And thus Dewey’s ministry was transformed into the Order of The New Revelation. 
He began diverting funds from the humanitarian charities, and closing hospitals in the more far-flung reaches of his ministry. He purchased a small mountain in Montana and began to build his new base of operations. From the flocks of his faithful, he began to recruit soldiers. He invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the world’s financial structures, and he bought high ranking government officials all over the globe. And he bought guns, lots and lots of guns, rockets, missiles, planes, and enough anti-tech tech to foil any modern warfare effort.  
But more than anything else, he set his followers to dig in the mountain. For years, they dug and blasted tunnels in the heart of the mountain, and carved out a subterranean complex designed to withstand anything short of a nuclear strike. 
Dewey called it simply “The Mountain” and to the casual observer it was merely a mountain retreat. It seemed a peaceful place of green trees, breathtaking vistas and total harmony. But it was actually the place from which Dewey planned to launch the final battle against evil.
But something like that took a lot of money and a lot of support, so Dewey continued with his miracles and continued to expand his ministry. And the people kept coming to him in droves. And it went practically unnoticed how many people that came to him never came back - opting instead to dedicate their lives to Dewey in the mysterious warrens and vaults of The Mountain.
Yes, to be sure, Dewey was the real thing.
That’s why the “Natchez Incident” caused such a stir.

It came to be called the “Natchez Incident” because it occurred at the Natchez Convention Center in Natchez, Mississippi, and actually turned out to be the demise of the “Salvation Through Revelation” tour that had been going strong for the best part of three years.
He stood behind a white podium, on a brightly lit stage in a light blue suit, his arms outstretched over the crowd. Two large television screens towered behind him, and a top-notch production crew made sure that everybody in the audience - both here and at home - could clearly see every subtle nuance of Dewey’s face. The whole point was to give a deep, gritty feeling of participation in Dewey’s miracles.  
Dewey lowered his arms and the crowd settled a bit. “They say,” Dewey began, “That the human body contains…seven pints of blood. The most blood that a broken body will spill is less than a gallon. And that’s really not so much…is it?” 
Dewey paused and scanned his eyes over the crowd. “Not much at all. Clean it up with a roll of paper towels, right? But friends, have you ever thought…have you ever considered how much blood is spilt by a broken soul?” Dewey laughed and wagged his finger in the air. “Now that’s something to think about. A single broken soul can break thousands of bodies…millions even! Not only that, a broken soul can pass from generation to generation! I say to you now! A single broken soul can fill oceans with blood. And that, my friends, that is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. No sir!”
The crowd was dead silent now. Dewey knew that he had them wound up tight. Now he just needed to reel them in, and he might be looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars a month in pledged contributions. 
His voice fairly sang with elation, “You come to me to be healed...but it is not I that heals you. It is Jesus that heals you through me. It is the hand of Almighty Gawd Himself that reaches down...down to touch you, down to cure you, down to heal your body through me.” 
Dewey straightened and spread his arms. “An’ that’s just fine. But friends…what good…” Dewey lowered his arms and shook his head slowly, “What good is a healed body to you if your soul remains sick and foul and broken? And Gawd…Gawd wants to heal that too, but He can’t give me the power to heal your soul. He’s got to do it by His own holy hand, but only…only if you let Him!” 
Dewey slammed his fist on the podium, and roared, “YA GOTTA OPEN YOUR HEARTS TO JESUS AND ALMIGHTY GOD! Accept His love, and let Him heal your souls - even as I heal your bodies.”
He looked out over the crowd and smiled a warm, fatherly smile. “I can feel the love in here tonight.” His voice rang as if his heart might burst with joy. “I can feel the love of Jesus Christ movin’ through all of you tonight. If you want Jesus to help you…if you want Jesus to cure you…you just come on up here right now, and show your love for Gawd.”
The music started to play, and the cameras panned back to show a line of people forming in front of the stage as people answered Dewey’s call. The cameras zoomed in on the first one in line as  the small elevator lifted him to the stage. From back in the crowd it almost appeared that he was floating up. An attendant stepped forward from behind the curtain and helped him limp across the stage to where Dewey stood.
He began, “Reverend Thurston...I got me a...”
Dewey raised his hand and shook his head. “You don’t need to tell me, brother. You got you a bad hip. Arthritis eating it away long before your time. Do  you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Saviour?”
“Yes, Reverend.” the man whispered.
“Are you ready for the revelation of Gawd to change your life forever?”
“Yes Reverend.”
“Are you ready to be healed?”
“Yes Reverend.”
“Then by the power of Jesus Christ...I say HEAL!” and he smacked the man on the forehead. “Next”
The man started to move a little, then stopped. “It still hurts, Reverend.” The man’s puzzled face filled 300,000 TV screens around the world, and an audible gasp arose from the crowd as they fell silent.
“Eh?” Dewey turned to him, frowning.
“It still hurts.”
“Come on back here, son...” Dewey laid his hand on the man’s head and closed his eyes. “Dear Gawd,” he prayed, “This poor man is sufferin’ something fierce. Please...give me the power to do your work...Heal this poor man, in the name of Jesus Christ!” Thick, glistening drops of sweat appeared on Dewey’s forehead. 
“It still hurts,” the man whined apologetically.
Dewey snorted and shook his head. He took out a handkerchief and began to mop his brow. “Well folks, what we got here is a situation. We got the devil fightin’ us hard tonight. He’s thinking he’s big enough and tough enough to take us on tonight, and keep us from doing the Lord’s work. Well...He AIN’T!” Dewey snapped the handkerchief in the air with a flourish. 
“We’re just going to have to put him back in his place. Are y’all with me? Are ya ready to do battle with the Evil One?”
The walls of the Convention Center shook as the crowd cheered and stomped their feet. The cameras panned wildly over the crowd, picking out individuals who had entered especially heightened states of spiritual ecstasy.
An attendant wheeled a cage full of rattlesnakes out onto the stage. Dewey strutted back and forth behind the cage, waving his arms and exhorting to audience to rise to their feet. Then he stopped, strode up to the cage and thrust his hand in, and with a single fluid motion, he pulled out a huge, fat rattler, and raised it over his head for the crowd to see. The crowd gasped, and a hush fell over them. Here and there, though, people were starting to talk in tongues.
“You hear me Satan?” Dewey shouted into the air, “You got no power over these people here tonight! Gawd cast you out of Heaven for the sin of pride. And once again, I’m gonna have to humble you, you ol’ snake.”
The camera zoomed in as he brought the snake right up to his face, and stared in his eyes. 
And that’s when it happened. 
The world saw Dewey’s face turn ashen and terrified. But what Dewey saw was how the snake’s eyes became human.
“God a’mighty!” Dewey cried. At that, the snake lunged and buried his fangs into Dewey’s cheek. That’s the picture that got shared 175 million times on social media and made the covers of Time and Newsweek.
Dewey squawked, and wrenched the snake off him, and flung it into the crowd. Mayhem broke out as people fell over each other trying to get away from the stage. Dewey dropped to this knees, shaking all over. His eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth began spewing words from long dead, unknown languages. 
“Git the snake bite kit,” one of the attendants yelled, and knelt by him. “What is it Reverend...what is it you’re trying to say?” Sirens blared in the background as the paramedics pulled up outside.
Dewey’s lips smacked together as his body convulsed. “M...Ma...Ma..”
“What is it Reverend?”
Finally the words burst from Dewey’s mouth in a spray of blood and spit, “MARA ODEON! Dear God...MARA ODEON!”
Mara Odeon by Ralph Hamblin available on Amazon at 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HHMPN36