He spoke about seeing with the Black Eye.
He spoke about hearing the secrets of the Red Mouth.
The Red Mouth.
That was something John understood, though he had never used the exact phrase before. Red Mouth. How perfect. How apt.
He mouthed the words, and they felt like ambrosia on his tongue and lips.
He knew right then that he would forever use those words to describe what he, in his holy purpose, had done so many times and would continue to do if God willed it.
Then Homer said something else that struck to the very core of John’s personal faith.
“In the Bible Jesus talked about how the meek were going to inherit the earth. I forget where he said it, but it was important, and I think this is what he was talking about. The way people are when they wake up after I open the Red Mouths in their flesh…”
“Yes,” said John.
He said it a little too loud, a bit too emphatically, and the two other patrons turned to him.
“What?” asked one of them. “You agree with that bullshit?”
John said nothing.
“I asked you a question,” demanded the man, sliding off his stool. “I have friends in Pennsylvania. I have some family there.”
John considered how to play this. He could construct a response that would dial the man’s outrage down to a simple misunderstanding. He could do that because he’d done that sort of thing many times before, and with sharper people than this. He’d managed conversations with psychiatrists and parole review panels.
And yet …
On the screen Homer Gibbon continued to talk about the meek inheriting the earth, and about how he was helping them have eternal life. About how it was God’s will for a peaceful planet. A world without war, without hate. A world of the silent, mindless, meek. A world of people emptied of everything except the grace of a loving and generous God.
John understood and agreed with everything Homer Gibbon said.
“Yo, asshole,” said the loudmouth, moving down the bar toward John. “I’m talking to—”
His last words were gone, trapped inside the man’s chest, unable to get past the blood that now filled his throat. The man stared in uncomprehending horror at the glittering steel that seemed to have appeared as if by magic in John’s hand.
The other patron and the bartender gaped at what was happening, their incomprehension every bit as great as the dying loudmouth.
“John?” asked the bartender. “What the hell did you just do?”
Explaining would take too much time, and John did not believe either of these men would truly understand.
He killed them both.
They tried to make a fight of it. As if that mattered.
As they lay bleeding, with red mouths opened in their flesh, John watched the face of Homer Gibbon.
This was the face of the chosen of God, the rock upon which a new church was being born in the farmlands of Pennsylvania.
“You are my god,” he told the killer on the TV. “And I will be a saint of your church.”
Smiling, filled with great joy, Saint John wiped his knives clean and stepped out into the morning sunlight, knowing with total certainty that the noisy, cluttered, sinful world was about to fall. It was all going to become quiet.
As God so clearly intended.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN