A Novel: Signs Following (Prologue)

Prologue

Luke 10:19: "Behold, I give unto you the power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over the power of the enemy: and nothing by any means will hurt you"

Mark 16: 17-20: And these signs shall follow they that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God. And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.

Amen.

The fascination began in his youth.

Darrel Dawkins first met Lynnette and Jeanette Singleford, the objects of his obsession, when he was four years old. His mother, unwed Sarah Dawkins, moved her son to the snake worshipping, strychnine swallowing community of Dearing, Georgia where he grew up alongside the pretty twin girls, two years his senior.

A mere dot on the state map, Dearing was more a religious cult with a sizable tract of cooperatively owned land than a community. Although it contained a bank, a general store, and a doctor's office, Dearing's population consisted of retired carnival freaks and their offspring for the most part. The good doctor, Rudolph Morton, had traveled with, practiced medicine on, the occupants of Dearing for many years, and had delivered most of the babies.

Much gossip in the nearby town of Thomson, some nine miles northeast with a population of 25,000, centered on the notion that Dr. Rudy, as he was widely known, was not a real doctor at all, but had acquired and maintained his license via suspect methods. Still, there was rarely an empty seat in his oddly furnished waiting room”even the older, more reserved and skeptical residents of Thomson frequented his office when they failed to receive help elsewhere. Dr. Rudy nearly always had a cure for one affliction or another as long as one was prepared to follow his often-unusual instructions.

Darrel was a skinny boy with freckles sprinkled at random across his nose, huge blue eyes, skin dyed to bronze by the sun, and a thin shock of vivid white hair that stood on end and floated about in any breeze that happened to blow his way. He was a quiet child, most times overcome by the intensity of the village in which he lived, filled with a sense of disbelonging.

His mother did little if nothing to ease the boy's tension. The daughter of a southern minister who had held a strong belief in the Signs Following movement of snake handling, she had watched her father, Reverend Walter P. Dawkins of the Pea Ridge Church of God with Signs Following die from a rattlesnake bite to the left temple. She fell into religious rapture at the moment of his decline into unconsciousness and had been the one to disengage the precious snake from the rapidly swelling lump on Rev. Dawkins' head. She held the snake close and delivered minuscule and harmless bites along his middle much in the manner of the Cherokee girls around whom she had been reared. The Indian girls would have been appalled at Sarah's behavior as they revered and worshipped all snakes and only bit the greensnake”very gently”to ensure healthy teeth.

Sarah's father died several hours later.

After Rev. Dawkins death, Sarah became pregnant at seventeen by a carnival laborer she'd met at the county fair named Cog. He died before the fair left town in a freak popcorn machine accident but not before expounding in great detail about the town of Dearing where he had been born and raised. Unable to forget Cog's tales of oddity and belonging, she finally took Darrel and hitched a ride to Dearing in the back of a chicken truck and there she remained until her own death many years later.

Darrel worked hard in the community. His mother made sure of that. Because the village was a co-op, and because they had nothing to contribute monetarily, she and Darrel tithed by way of labor and sweat. At first, Sarah took in laundry and cleaned homes and found instruction for Darrel from one of the local men in the area of mechanics. Fortunately, he had a natural gift, an affinity for machines, and had no trouble learning the skill of repair. He was a master by the age of eleven, sought out with increasing regularity to repair automobiles, kitchen gadgets, anything that contained a motor and moving parts. Soon, Sarah became deeply involved in the church, rising in reverence and popularity until she had reached the pinnacle of religious respect within the tiny town, and the once destitute family of two attained high social status although they owned not a single asset nor had they ever contributed a cent to Dearing at large.

Sarah and Darrel lived in a small, whitewashed wooden house, gifted to them by Dr. Rudy for the many hours of labor he had acquired from mother and son. Next door, in a similar whitewashed wooden house, lived the Singleford twins. Darrel spent his entire childhood with the girls, sharing ice cream cones, bags of potato chips, and bowls of fresh picked blackberries. It was only when he was a boy of fourteen that he understood what was different about Lynette and Jeanette compared to other girls their age; they were conjoined twins, attached at the buttocks.

Some of Darrel's other neighbors were more unusual than Lynette and Jeanette, at least in his eyes: Renaud, the French Wolf-Man who frightened a nation with his hairy face, howls, and beady eyes, but who was in fact one of the gentlest souls one could hope to meet in a lifetime, Sydney, the Incredible Farting Man who extinguished candles and played tunes with his emissions, Sherrie the Turtle Woman, Harvey, the Chinless, and Monroe, also known as Shadow-Boy, who was emaciated to the point of skeletal due to a bizarre digestive condition.

Perhaps the only truly freaky thing about Lynette and Jeanette was their incredible beauty in the midst of such grotesque deformities. Skin as smooth and translucent as porcelain, perfect bee-stung lips, eyes the color of flawless emerald, and raven hair as fine as the silk that had once clothed royalty. Darrel, smitten by them both since as far back as his memory could take him, thought that they were lovely and kind and that out of the entire community they most resembled he and his mother's strangely unmarked appearance, aside from Dr. Rudy, and a handful of the circus freaks who had actually performed rather than been famous for their deformities. Only when the girls were viewed in profile did the mind begin to wonder just what was amiss.

As children, Darrel, Lynette, and Jeanette whiled away many of the hottest summer hours playing in the stream beyond Dearing, quickly running for cover in the high grass on the rare occasion that children from outside the community made an appearance. They were young, but old enough to understand that they didn't quite fit in with the rest of the world. Most times, their play was undisturbed and a joyful way to spend non working hours.

Although the years had changed the world and the need for circus or carnival acts was virtually nil, the twins' adoptive mother, Bernice, herself a sideshow freak sporting a thick black moustache and male genitalia, thought to make the twins famous, just like Daisy and Violet Hilton had been: famous for their medical condition, for their talented voices raised in song, and for their uncommon beauty. Whenever Darrel's mother could manage to disengage from the heavy religious robe she had wrapped round herself, she often commented on Bernice's motives in seeking to exploit Lynette and Jeanette.

"I don't understand that woman, I just don't. Everybody knows those days are come and gone. Siamese twins don't gather nothing but media coverage and newspaper headlines, and that's something we don't need round here.

Darrel, by this time sixteen and deeply in love with either one, or maybe both”he was unsure himself”of the Singleford twins winced at his mother's callous remark. "Siamese twins was considered an offensive term. Dr. Rudy's brand new set of Britannica Encyclopedias said so. He stared at the bandages on Sarah's arms”snakebites for certain”and turned away, refusing to acknowledge such an idiotic comment.

The familial and loving mother son bond had given way to resentment and loneliness on Darrel's part. Sarah would never be lonely, her heart and her bed filled each night with the presence of her god manifested in various human male forms. Queen of the Dearing Worship Hall of God with Signs Following, Sarah was much sought after in the community, young and old and all ages in between, convinced that Sarah would somehow birth them a modern day acolyte, or perhaps even a new savior. For all the trying, for all the pretense, for all the mindless belief in Sarah as a holy mother, she appeared to be barren, having birthed the only child she ever would when she pushed Darrel from her womb. That fact did not temper the followers' belief and many wives sent their husbands off to Sarah's house come evening in hope that they would be indirectly involved in the creation of a new holiness, for which their thirst was never sated. None of the men were turned away.

Darrel missed his mother's care and nurturing, but replaced it with the love of Lynette and Jeanette. They played family games in the twilight of summer's eve, enchanted by the eerie dusk, the luminescence of skin and teeth in the bluing atmosphere, the magical properties of the fleeting time between night and day. Even as teenagers the girls took turns pretending to be Darrel's mother, sometimes going so far as to encourage him to suckle at their breasts. Darrel complied but pretended irritation, hiding his erection and smiling in the gloaming, unnoticed, unseen, uncaring if he had been, and loved beyond comprehension.

If Sarah Dawkins was the queen of the Dearing Worship Hall of God with Signs Following, then Dr. Rudy was its lordly king, presiding over his subjects with near maniacal fierceness. The good residents of nearby Thomson, who lined the doctor's pockets and thusly filled the community's coffers, would never know about this part of Dr. Rudy's life, nor would they know about the scores of children produced from the loins of the self-appointed snake handling king. He wore a coarse burlap mask to devotion, round holes cut for eyes, nose, and mouth, long diaphanous robes to conceal the many tattoos that covered his body. Dr. Rudy was perhaps unaware of how closely he resembled a kind of clansman who had been known to terrorize the south.

Only the Signs Following worshippers knew the man behind the mask. They protected him as fiercely as the zealots had tried to protect the Christ so long ago. Dr. Rudy found the comparison to his liking. During worship, when the snakes were brought out, and the song of Babel shook the hall, and the strychnine filled jars were passed among the congregation, Dr. Rudy stepped back through a time-portal of his own creation. He stumbled amid his followers as if he carried a heavy burden strapped against his back, as if he were weak from a cup of poisoned wine, as if all eyes were cast upon his divine countenance, even as if he were deflecting imaginary spittle directed his way from angry, traitorous, imaginary mouths. He fought his way valiantly to the pulpit and there he leaned against the enormous roughly hewn cross that dominated the stage where he wept and cried and eventually died.

Imaginarily, of course.

Darrel tried to avoid worship. When he was small, he had backed away to the farthest wall in fright; as a teenager, he had gritted his teeth and bent his thoughts elsewhere; now as a young adult, he rarely attended unless Dr. Rudy forced the situation, because the good-natured doctor, who had acted as father to Darrel in some ways, was the only person left in Dearing other than the twins whom Rudy trusted. Those three people and, naturally, the mute boy.

Something wicked was churning through the dust upon the streets. Something unholy was crawling through the worship hall's faded brown carpet. Something sinister was clicking into place deep within Darrel's mind.