“That’s the girl you were with last night?”
Did he suspect we were runaways? More to the point, had he turned us in? I fed him some more of my made-up backstory, hoping some extra information would cool his suspicions. “No, that’s my wife—we’re taking a semester off of college to try to find my sister, who last I heard was hanging around this part of the state. Kind of drifting, you know?” I grimaced, as if the thought was painful. “My sister’s a little younger, still in high school; she ran away from home last year.”
“That’s too bad,” said the clerk. He leaned on the counter; a good sign that I’d caught his attention with the story. He might take it seriously enough to actually help me. “You think she’s in Baker, specifically? You have family around here?”
“We don’t,” I said, “but I’d heard…” I trailed off, like I was too embarrassed to say it, and when he nodded I knew that I had him. Suddenly I wasn’t a suspicious outsider asking about the local cult, I was a concerned family man, one of the normals, someone he could gossip with about those weirdos on the farm. I looked out the window, checking for Brooke, but our door was still closed.
“The cult,” said the clerk, nodding again. “Spirit of Light? You think she’s fallen in with them?”
“I hope not,” I said, and paused just a moment before saying, “So it’s real, then? They’re actually here?”
“Sad to say,” said the clerk. “A friend of mine joined up with them a few years back; local boy. We figured he was smarter than that but I guess nobody ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of rednecks. Them Light-Brights come into town for groceries and medicine and stuff like that, whatever they can’t make on the farm I guess, toilet paper and whatnot, and so Nick he starts chatting with this one girl every time he sees her, bagging her things in the checkout aisle and whatever. We all told him them folks was nothing but trouble, and he insisted, right hand to God, he was just trying to talk her out of the cult, not himself into it. Inviting her to the Dairy Keen and asking her to movies and such. She keeps saying maybe and then saying no, and then finally one day the big man comes in: the High Chief Light-Bright or whatever they call him. The Messiah. You don’t see him often, but he comes in now and then looking for this or that, and every time someone follows him back out. This time it was Nick. Didn’t even finish his shift. Now he’s the one comes into town buying toilet paper, and we talk to him sometimes and he says hi but he’s gone—nothing in his head but songs and stories and ain’t-it-great-to-be-alives. He smiles and nods and I’m not even sure he recognizes us anymore. Which I guess is just a long, depressing way of saying that if your sister’s in there, you’ve got a long, empty road ahead getting her back out, and that road don’t even lead out, so you’d best not take it in the first place.”
“Has anyone ever left the cult?” I asked. “Voluntarily, I mean?”
“Not that I recall.”
I asked the next question carefully, trying to sound awed by the mystery instead of desperate for concrete details. “Does anybody ever disappear?” If the cult leader was really a Withered, like Brooke’s memories said he was, he had to be killing them somehow. Learning how could be the first step to finding Yashodh’s weak points.
The clerk squinted. “From Baker, you mean? Sometimes, but they always show up as Light-Brights sooner or later.”
“But from the commune, I mean,” I said quickly. “The Light-Brights themselves, they’re not being … killed or anything?” I glanced outside again. Brooke was still in the room.
The clerk shook his head. “Trust me, kid, there’s not a person in this town doesn’t know somebody out on that farm. If they was disappearing we’d be out there with torches and pitchforks, but this ain’t the kind of cult that people disappear from. Every single one of them’s still there, growing their own food and sewing their own clothes and praising whatever non-Christian whosit they’ve decided to worship. They don’t die, they don’t leave, they don’t … do anything.”
I realized I was frowning, confused by the lack of deaths, so I changed my expression to what I thought was hope. “Thank you,” I said. “At least that means she’s still alive.”
“If she’s there at all,” said the clerk.
“How would we get out there?” I asked.
“You don’t.”
“But obviously people do,” I said. “Which road is it? Which farm?”
“You’re not listening to me,” said the clerk. “People who go there don’t come back. The city, sometimes, or the police, but folks like you? Just Light-Brights waiting to happen.”
This was interesting. “They’re that persuasive?”