Goner House: The Return of Patience
Book 4 of The City Allegories Series
By Rob Summers
Copyright 2012 by Rob Summers
Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
No actual persons are represented in this book.
Table of Contents
Part 1 Marshal of Founders Grove
Prologue: An Appointment in a High Place
Chapter 1 Justice and Retribution
Chapter 2 Creative Financing
Chapter 3 Three Pages
Chapter 4 Lawyer Sarcasm
Chapter 5 Fire at Night
Chapter 6 The Land Opportunity Picnic
Chapter 7 Love’s Dreams
Chapter 8 Strengthened by Adversity
Chapter 9 They Think It’s Gone
Part 2 The Damnation of Leasing House
Chapter 10 Reason’s Search for a Lawyer
Chapter 11 Before You Were Born
Chapter 12 Sordid’s Weak Plan
Chapter 13 Shreds of Evidence
Chapter 14 The Return of the City Seal
Chapter 15 Axe’s Parade
Chapter 16 Hypocrisy’s Sermon to the Damned
Part 3 A Highly Improbable Mission
Chapter 17 What’s One Day?
Chapter 18 The HIMF
Chapter 19 Cloaks and Daggers
Chapter 20 Mercy and Love
Chapter 21 The Song of Indifference
Chapter 22 MMCC
Chapter 23 Numb’s Place
Chapter 24 Reason’s Poor Aim
Part 4 The Fop Dignity and the Prig Reason
Chapter 25 A Hauler of Water
Chapter 26 Visiting the Suffering
Chapter 27 The Vision of the New City
Chapter 28 A Line from Tennyson
Chapter 29 Between Two Points
Chapter 30 Call It an Experiment
Chapter 31 A Fan of Johnny Corpse
Chapter 32 A Product of the Concern Corporation
Chapter 33 Our Neighbors the Goners
Other Titles by Rob Summers
About Rob Summers
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Preface
The key to the allegory is that the houses represent persons; and the characters in a given house represent various character traits of, and influences upon, that person. Therefore, there are much fewer persons in the City Allegories books than there are characters (character traits).
Part 1 Marshal of Founders Grove
Prologue: An Appointment in a High Place
The meeting place, though chosen by his adversary, was almost welcome to Satan. He had been terribly afraid that he would be told to appear before the Throne, but this meeting in an ordinary room in the basement of a ramshackle house was no trial or terror. If anything, it was a bore. Having arrived ahead of his enemy, he looked around with disinterest, wondering why, after he had requested this interview, it would have suggested itself to the King that they meet at one of the houses under discussion. After all, the mere inhabitants of this house were of no importance except as use could be made of them. As for this particular room, no one was here but an adolescent girl asleep in her bed, with just her head showing above the covers. Around her, on shelves and furniture surfaces, lay her heaped up possessions, mostly clothes and electronic devices—nothing he wished to examine.
Not so typical were the tongues of dim flame that ran hissing along the carpet and walls, gathered in the dresser mirror, and even crawled along the blanket over the girl’s skinny body and hovered over her face. But even this was of no interest to him, for he had many in his service whose homes and selves were so attended.
Someone now entered, passing as he had through the solid wall, but it was not the King. A black woman, one of the King’s servants, looked at him but did not react to his presence other than to wrinkle her nose. Unsurprising, for he was well aware that his odor was not welcome to everyone. This insolent one—he remembered her name was Prayer—went to the bed and, while resting her hand lightly on the head of the sleeper, turned to face him, an element of challenge in her posture and expression, as if to say, Do not come any closer; this one is mine. Very well, let her believe so. Smiling at her misapprehension, he flung off his cloak and, since the King had not arrived, lowered himself to speak to her.
“Will he be late?”
She gravely shook her head. “He never is. But Lucifer, he’s decided to Skype you rather than actually appear here.”
“He’s decided to what?”
“Skype. I suppose he prefers not to experience your—stench.” She fetched a slim electronic device from the top of the dresser, adjusted it for a few moments, and handed it to him. “An iPad,” she said. “You’re familiar with it?”
He would have thrown it on the floor if not for the eyes of the Lord staring at him from out of the screen. He was being watched, being heard, and suddenly did not wish to show himself in a fit of temper.
“I’m more familiar with Windows devices,” he said carelessly. “Many of my best people work for Microsoft.”
“I suspected that,” she said, and returning to the girl’s side, placed her hand on her head again. She did not seem to mind being touched by the fires around the girl.
In the iPad screen he could see little more than the King’s face, but his enemy appeared to be wearing a plain white robe. Such simplicity in the Almighty amounted to ostentation, a sort of reverse flamboyance intended to draw admiring attention to one’s supposed humility. In contrast his own appearance was more honest. Were the sleeper to wake, his apparition in her room would instantly propel her to a sitting position, eyes popping, voice struggling for a scream. But that would spoil the interview. He had to admit that the ghost-king look he was sporting, borrowed from one of the humans’ movies, was not an advantage in all circumstances.
As for this substitution of Skyping for a plain meeting, it had nothing to do with the redolence of brimstone and burning corpses that he had brought with him, but was, rather, a calculated insult, yet another outrage committed against a brave archangel who had dared to be his own man. He would choose his time and punish the King for it, not by harming him directly, which was unfortunately impossible, but by taking it out on his creations, his people. There is nothing like damaging what your enemy treasures. In this case, his revenge, he thought, would be on little children. Skype me, will you!
“Why did you bring me here?” he demanded of the wretched little screen.
He meant not only that his request for an audience naturally commanded assent and a face to face meeting, but that his importance required the meeting take place elsewhere than in a hovel.
“Do you think it’s too lowly for you?” the King’s voice answered from the pad. “No, it’s too high, since those living there are far above you. Only consider that they’re not yet damned; they still have hope. But I called you there because you claim the house as yours, and no one has come forward to counter that claim.”
Trying not to react to the jab about damnation, Satan considered, then laughed quietly. “No one has come forward? Precisely! No one loves them! You make my case for me. So you brought me here because you wish to exhibit what you long ago lost to me, what is mine? But you might have done that from outside, from the street. Why this room? Why this girl?”
The black woman was looking not at him but down at the girl’s sleeping face. Still, she must be listening intently to his every word while trying to appear uninterest
ed. She would soon be telling others about having seen him, having been in the same room with him.
“The girl in that bed has not a friend in the world,” said the King. “Not a person in this city will say a good word for her. And she deserves no better. I’ve brought you to look at her because I’ve been considering ways to defend her.”
“Defend! Against what?”
“Against herself; she has no greater enemy. But also against you.”
“Don’t you understand that I care nothing for her? Fight me, if you must, for someone of interest, someone of influence. Why do you again and again bother me with skirmishes over little nobodies? Why her?”
“Just as I said, because no one else will.”
Satan did not know what to make of such talk, the usual impenetrable ‘wisdom,’ he supposed, credited to the King by his followers.
“So what are you going to do? Befriend her? She won’t have you.”
“Indeed she won’t. Nevertheless, I have my purposes.”
“Which are?”
“Nothing I care to say to you. Now tell me why you wanted to speak to me.”
“Why?” Satan smiled, ready to warm to a well rehearsed subject. “I asked you to meet me because I find that your legal affairs people have slipped up, even deceived you, in a certain matter.”
The King’s expression did not change. His servant Prayer continued to stroke the girl’s head right through the fumes of fire.
“It pertains to the legal, or rather illegal, basis of the military presence you’ve established in this city,” Satan went on. “I took control here many years ago. Then, rather later, you seemed to think better of having abandoned the place and established an embassy within what remains my territory, and recently brought a battleship into the area. Even so, the government is still firmly mine. True, you have, at fantastic expense, purchased a handful of converts from the populace, but far too few to make the slightest difference in the balance of power among the city’s native-born.”
He paused, hoping the King would admit his failure. For many centuries the standard Heavenite defense to this line of reasoning had been the pedestrian and humorous contention that quality trumps quantity, as if the few redeemed were all the King wanted. But today he received no reply at all.
“Your intervention in my private affairs has been completely illegal of course,” the fiend continued, “but what of that? I’m hardly one to sue you over something so petty and inconsequential. Lately, however, you’ve also spread it about that you intend to, at some uncertain date, invade and take the City, thus achieving by brute force what you couldn’t by persuasion. Such a plan, of course, concedes your dismal unpopularity here. Yes, we understand each other: my popularity in the City remains high. Yours—is it enough to say that they use your name as a swear word? But to return to my point, the legal difficulty you find yourself in is—are you listening?”
The King had turned his head away—not, he was sure, as if to yawn—but now turned back to him.
“If you are, then I’m telling you that your legal difficulty is this. You have sworn to take the City for your converts as their sweet home forever; the legal point being that these Christians are supposed to be worthy. That’s well enough for you, if that’s how you wish to dispose of bloodstained spoils of war. But you’ve made the mistake of defining what you mean by Christian. Specifically, you’re on record as saying they’re the sort to invariably forgive their enemies, pray for those who persecute them, and return good for evil. You don’t deny it?”
The King gave him a look that, even coming through an iPad, impelled him to hurry on.
“Well, those who have been with you the longest, your very first converts in this city, though you condescend to call them your children, bear no notable family likeness. I’ll admit that the inhabitants of this house, the Leasing family, have treated them badly. Of course that was necessary or how else could it be a test case? And the result? These disciples of yours I’m speaking of, the fop Dignity and the prig Reason, have come to loathe their Leasing cousins. Yes, loathe them and wish them dead. Oh, let’s not be hard on them. Evil for evil is the way of the world. But they thereby prove they are no children of yours and should not inherit.”
The King lifted into view a nail-scarred hand, palm outward, and Satan paused. “My love is in them,” he said. “They’ll yet do good to their enemies and even risk their lives for them.”
“When!” Satan said, making the word an insult.
“Sooner than you fear. Before Easter.”
“Is that a wager?” Satan crowed. “Do I carry my point, you righteous judge, and the only reply you can muster is that your babes need a little more time? You know they’ll do no such thing, and when they don’t, and all your blather of transforming them falls to the ground, will you keep your troops and your battleship stationed here and ask me for more time yet? Or will you salvage something of your integrity by calling off the invasion?”
He halted his speech, tottering where he stood, the iPad shaking in his hands, almost overcome by a sense of the peril he was courting by using such rash, insulting language. But even while questioning the King’s knowledge and uprightness, he was deep in self-admiration of his own daring and cleverness. The King would not, of course, cancel the invasion, but he had now been called to account for it, openly accused of his intent to carry it out in denial of his own law.
The King answered calmly, “I’ve put my ways in their hearts and written them on their minds. They’ll do as I’ve said. Otherwise, there could be no invasion.”
This was too wonderful an opening to be believed. Seemingly on the brink of overwhelming advantage, he strove to pursue the King’s meaning exactly, like someone holding to the light a stolen gem, perhaps priceless.
“Wait. Be clear. Do you say that you’ll call it all off if they don’t risk their lives for their enemies? You’ll give up the City?”
He was well aware that his enemy never lied. An assent would bind him, in fact was the only thing that could bind him.
“Yes.”
At this, Satan found himself shaking, almost collapsing, with gleeful triumph, so overcome that he questioned whether what he felt was more pain than pleasure. The word was spoken, the wager as good as lost!
“You fool!” he shouted, bringing his face close to the little camera eye. “You’ve lost the City! You’ve lost it by trusting in the boundless loyalty of two aging hypocrites who have learned to love quiet prosperity more than they do you or their neighbors. Don’t you know they have spouses to please and children to raise? A couple of shrewd ones able to calculate their own advantage. Ha! That’s something you apparently can’t do.”
“Shh,” said the King. “You’ll wake the child. You may go now.”
“I—I—what?”
Where the King’s face had appeared the screen was black. So he put down the iPad, put on his cloak, and without a glance at the woman or the girl, left the house. As he strolled down benighted Sandhill Street, his eyes were shining, his knees quivering. The City was his! No invasion! The City would remain his to defile!