Under the Beetle's Cellar Read Online Free

repetitive he didn’t need to listen. He pretended to listen, of course. He didn’t want to anger the man. He looked directly at him, followed his movements with his eyes, but his mind he let float across the field of wildflowers that stretched from his house all the way to Theodora Shea’s gravel driveway where her sixteen-year-old golden retriever dozed in the sun and her garden awaited his attention and the earth awaited his hands. Today he would plant geraniums, bright red geraniums—lots of them.
    Lucy’s sobbing brought him back. He looked over at her in the seat across from him. She was trying to hold it in, but an occasional sob escaped her.
    Samuel Mordecai was shouting. “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolators and all liars—they will all be made into blood statues on the last day! We got to go through the blood. Can’t avoid it, can’t go over it, can’t go around it, got to go through it. If you reject the opportunity that is offered to you, woe unto you, for then you shall go to the place where the worm never dies.”
    Walter turned his head to check on the other kids. Bucky sat upstraight with his hands folded in his lap. His eyes were shut so tight that his face was screwed up in a grimace. Philip’s head had sunk into his lap. Brandon Betts was nodding and muttering under his breath.
    Five more days, Walter thought—five more days of this shit and we’ll all be praying for the world to end. O Lord, please help us—lately he found himself praying—him, a man who hadn’t prayed even in foxholes. Whatever is going to happen, he prayed, with his eyes squeezed shut to keep the tears in, please get this over with and see us safe through it. His stomach contracted in sharp hunger pangs. But first, dear Lord, You who loved little children and incompetent sinners like myself, we sure could use some breakfast here. Oh, we sure could.

CHAPTER
TWO
“We’re fixing to get these new nine-digit zip codes, you know. Add this to your nine-digit Social Security number, and what does it give you? Eighteen numbers that will be your identity—that’s three sixes, and the Book of Revelation prophesied it real clear—in the end days, the number 666 is gonna be stamped on people to label them as Satan’s property. Don’t that just bring you to your knees?”
S AMUEL M ORDECAI , QUOTED BY M OLLY C ATES , “T EXAS C ULT C ULTURE ,”
L ONE S TAR M ONTHLY , D ECEMBER 1993
    “Beyond telling you I’m sick to death of it, I don’t know how to explain it, Richard,” Molly Cates said without turning away from the window.
    “Try.” Richard Dutton’s voice retained its habitual caustic edge, even though Molly knew he was making an effort to sound warm and understanding.
    She kept her eyes fixed on the tiny cars scooting along the Congress Avenue bridge in the lunch-hour traffic twenty-one stories below. “When I first got the police beat at the Patriot , I thought it was the world’s luckiest break. I was eager for it all. Crime was an adventure, this alien subculture that sucked me in. Ever since then, for twenty-two years, I’ve been a regular visitor to that place.” She felt the slither of dread deep in her chest. “Now I feel like a native there.”
    She turned around to see his reaction. The staff meeting at the Capitol Club was over, and the rest had gone back to the office, leaving Molly alone with her boss. Richard Dutton, the editor of Lone Star Monthly , sat with his chair pushed back from the mahogany table and stared down at his long legs stretched out in front of him.
    “I’ve been thinking it’s time for me to get out of that world,” she said, her voice sounding whiny and uncertain in her ears. “I’ve had too much of it—a steady diet for more than twenty years. It’s starting to give me bad dreams. And this horror going on in Jezreel is—” She stopped, at a loss for the end to the sentence.