Downfall

  ****

  I’d been hearing about saints my whole life. Dad got obsessed with his theory on saints-among-us well before he wrote his first book. But finding out the secret about what Cain could do―what all the people who met under Gaunt House were learning to do―was my own personal spiritual apocalypse. It was way beyond the scope of what I’d ever comprehended about faith. I’d supported, but never interrogated, my dad’s ideas. In all honesty I hadn’t truly believed saints lived among humans in the literal sense before now. I was a good Catholic, but also a rational one. My view had always been that the more ‘unscientific’ elements of religion should be understood figuratively, and scriptural stories were largely allegorical. I’d thought of saints not so much as flesh-and-blood beings delivering actual miracles but as catalysts for personal revelation. Bringers of divine teachings, serendipitously accompanied by the close shaves and unlikely recoveries people recognized as miracles.

  Trouble was, Cain and the other three did what saints would. They worked with miracles to help the suffering in their hours of need. And I had concrete, with-my-own-eyes kind of evidence: I had seen a halo around Cain. That night at the lake I looked up at him and saw his face aglow with warm, pearly light. That fact alone kept me from abandoning my epiphany as complete nonsense. Faced with the solid, real being of Cain, and simultaneously with his power of seeing visions and compulsion to rescue, I was forced to revise my old views. This man was a human imbued with godly gifts.

  It was terrifying. It was like seeing a ghost after years of blithely claiming to believe there is ‘something else.’ No matter how much you thought you really believed, it wasn’t a triumphant moment when you were forced to accept the evidence of your own senses. It was a ghastly, sickening, earth-shattering shock. So I sat at home throughout the next day feeling small and scared. Albion had all Dad’s books on the shelf so I pulled down book two, Beings of Light, and devoured the words.

  Saints as the servants of God have wrought the most remarkable miracles in His name, some to directly help humans and others to cement our faith. There are saints who raise the dead, deliver miraculous cures, or heal seemingly permanent injuries. Saints who pronounce prophecies or show mystical knowledge of the inner workings of men’s hearts. Other saints exhibit the gift of understanding and speaking foreign or ancient biblical languages. There have been saints who could bilocate, appearing in two places at one time, or even levitate and fly. Some saints demonstrate the miracle of the ‘crown of thorns’ or stigmata, where the injuries of the Christ appear on the hands, feet, abdomen, and forehead. Then there are the saints whose bodies remain incorrupt after death, or who can live for many years without food, and others that appear to us through voice or by the heralding of birds or other animals. God delivers His marvelous work through the lives of saints, and you too can learn to enact His miracles and take your place among them.

  I thrust the book away from me. Suddenly it felt like my father was a Charlatan. He toured the country, accepting money from people who hated their pointless lives and believed Don Carver could help them tap into some kind of higher meaning. I’d truly believed he was doing good work, until now. But now I knew there were saints among us, and they certainly weren’t the shrieking crowds Dad preached to, claiming he could help unlock their divinity. I wished for a moment I knew nothing about saints but those hours of research and note-taking for Dad now colored everything I thought about this man with whom I was so deeply in love. The very essence of him was holy. He was beautiful to all my senses, from his taste and voice to the scent of clean summer air when I touched him and the almost painful feeling of joy when he smiled. His visions of the future were the messages from God, just like when Saint Colette was forewarned of her convent burning to the ground. And I’d seen firsthand the way he lit up under the moonlight that night at the lake. Could I somehow find my way back to seeing him as a normal man? Not likely.