No, one couldn’t simply reason with them.
Or perhaps one might, with the right approach. David began to seek out people calling themselves exit counselors to learn their methods. Several years later, he started his practice. After a few false starts and speed bumps, he achieved his first big successes, recommending deprogramming to his clients as a last resort if exit counseling failed. Everything in his life finally started to come together. Alyssa had already been born, followed by Dexter, and when he wasn’t working, David devoted time and energy to provide as loving and warm a home as he was able, a safe cocoon armored against the horrors of the world he knew too well.
Driving through a smoky haze, they agreed to skip the reception and pulled into a restaurant parking lot. Most people were staying home because of the fire and the unhealthy air, and David and his friends about had the place to themselves.
After ordering lunch, Beth removed her hat and said, “I guess that’s it. What are you boys doing after this? What’s next in life?”
“My band has a gig tomorrow night,” Deacon said. “Back in LA.”
“It’s wild you’re like this rock star now. Not at all surprising, though.”
“Rock, sure. Star, meh. Our fan base is devoted but small.” He trembled with restless leg syndrome, contrasting against Beth’s poised calm.
She gave him a practiced smile. “What about you, David?”
David worried the cloth napkin from his place setting, still a little anxious himself. “I’m going to return to my family and get ready for my next client.”
“You convince people to leave cults,” Beth said.
“Every single one of them, if I can. I practice exit counseling, though, not deprogramming.”
“I’m aware of the difference. It’s a perfect job for you.”
“Thanks.” David smiled and let go of the napkin. This was the conversation he’d imagined having with them, small talk and catching up and a little banter. “How about you? What’s next?”
“First, a long bath. After that, there are plenty of heads to shrink. Humanity is a spectrum disorder.”
Deacon chuckled. “I like that. What’s it mean?”
“It means very few of us are playing with a completely full deck, though there’s a huge variation in the number of cards each of us are dealt,” she explained. “That’s how you end up trusting the pilot flying the jumbo jet you’re on, while he thinks the moon landing was faked and plays lucky lottery numbers recalled from dreams. If delusions become destructive, that’s where I come in.”
The server returned with a glass of wine for Beth and coffee for the men. Deacon drank it black and bitter. David poured milk and sugar into his and stirred, already making mental notes of what he needed to do when he got home.
He’d mowed the lawn before he left, but the flower beds required weeding. He wanted to expand his backyard garden. A few unpaid bills waited on his desk. He had to practice the talk he was scheduled to give at the conference after the weekend and prepare for his next counseling session, a young man in a group called The Restoration, another lost soul needing salvation.
He sipped the hot coffee and longed to get back to these problems. The only thing better than leaving a routine was returning to it. Juggling the demands of work and children would snap him out of this anxious sense of hanging suspended between worlds. Having too much to do had always been a good way to avoid thinking about what had been done to him.
When he looked up, his friends stared at him. “What?”
“I asked you what you saw that last night,” Beth said.
Far away, a red glow outlined the crown of Red Peak.
Gaunt from hunger and hard labor and pain, the congregation shambled out of the darkness for their final act of worship…
David winced at this flashback, which appeared as sudden and real as if he’d physically transported to the past. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told you at the mental hospital. I didn’t see a damn thing. When everybody went to the Temple, I hid in the supply closet. I didn’t come out until the sheriff’s deputy found me.”
“I saw something,” Deacon said.
“Please.” Back when they were institutionalized, David had heard the horrifying story of what happened to Wyatt and had no wish to ever hear it again. “You don’t have to say it. I remember.”
“You didn’t hear everything, David. I never told Dr. Klein what I saw because I thought if I did, he’d never let me out of that place. I never told you either.”
“All right. What?”
“When the end came, when everybody was dead? I saw—” His face pale and taut, he hesitated. “I saw a pillar of fire on the mountain, shooting straight up into the sky.”
David recoiled. “What the hell?”
“That’s incredible,” Beth said.
“To put it mildly!”
“Incredible because Emily saw it too,” she clarified. “A fire that went all the way up into the air. She told me about it at the hospital but swore me to silence.”
“She never told me about it,” David said.
“You were already upset enough. She didn’t want to make it worse.”
Deacon nodded. “All the way up to the sky. Glowing red just like that forest fire out there. And that horn. It was so loud.”
She shivered. “The horn I remember. And…”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a fragment, like a dream. It’s crazy.”
“Crazier than a pillar of fire?”
David shook his head. “The light was playing tricks on you or something. The cross on the mountain was on fire, remember? Beth, I’m surprised at you. Surely, you know what Occam’s razor is and how it works.”
“Occam what?” said Deacon.
Beth filled him in. “Occam’s razor. Another way of saying the simplest explanation is almost always true.”
“You suffered a visual and auditory hallucination,” David went on. “Guys, I hate to break this to you, but whatever the Family was at one time, it turned into a cult at Red Peak. We were all brainwashed.”
“It doesn’t explain how me and Emily had the exact same hallucination,” Deacon said.
“Of course it does. On the last day, Reverend Peale said we weren’t waiting for paradise, it was waiting for us. And once everybody shed their mortal coil, as he put it so quaintly, we’d all beam up to paradise. The terrible things you saw, I can’t even imagine. These are extremely traumatic memories. The brain reacts in strange ways to trauma, especially a child’s mind.”
“He’s right about that,” Beth conceded. “But… I don’t know.”
“Okay, fine,” said Deacon. “Then where did the bodies go? How do you explain that?”
When the sheriff’s deputy took him by the hand and led him out of the shattered Temple, only bloodstains remained on the wrecked pews and mountain slopes. Not a single body was ever recovered, and what happened in the desert near a little nowhere town called Medford became forever infamous as the Medford Mystery, the subject of Unexplained Mysteries–style documentary shows.