She was beautiful. Death had erased any marks incised by the disease that had infested her brain, and her upturned face—alabaster skin set off by luxuriant masses of dark chestnut hair—was as perfect as any cameo. Her eyes were shut. Thick lashes lay against her cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted. A sheet was pulled up to her shoulders. Her clasped hands lay on it, above the swell of her bosom. A snatch of poetry, something from twelfth-grade English, came to mind and chimed there: Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face . . . How statue-like I see thee . . .

Jenny Knowlton stood beside the now useless ventilator, wringing her hands.

Lightning flashed. In its momentary glare I saw the iron pole on Skytop, standing as it had for God knew how many years, challenging each storm to do its worst.

Jacobs was holding out the box. “Help me, Jamie. We must be swift. Take it and open it. I’ll do the rest.”

“Don’t,” Jenny said from her corner. “For the love of God, let her rest in peace.”

Jacobs might not have heard her over the drumming rain and screaming wind. I did, but chose to ignore her. This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know—by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there’s still time.

I opened the box. There were no rods inside, and no control box. What had taken their place was a metallic headband, as thin as the strap on a young girl’s dress shoe. Jacobs took it out carefully—reverently—and gently pulled it. I saw it stretch. And when the next stroke of lightning came, once more preceded by that faint clicking sound, I saw green radiance dance across it, making it look like something other than dead metal. A snake, maybe.

Jacobs said, “Miss Knowlton, lift her head for me.”

She shook her head so hard her hair flew.

He sighed. “Jamie. You do it.”

I moved to the bed like a man in a dream. I thought of Patricia Farmingdale pouring salt in her eyes. Of Emil Klein eating dirt. Of Hugh Yates watching as the faithful in Pastor Danny’s revival tent were replaced by huge ants. I thought, Every cure has its price.

There was another click, followed by another flash of lightning. Thunder roared, shaking the house. The bedside lamp went out. For a moment the room was plunged into shadows, and then a generator clattered to life.

“Quickly!” Jacobs’s voice was pained. I saw burns across both of his palms. But he hadn’t dropped the headband. It was his last conductor, his conduit to potestas magnum universum, and I believed then (and now) that not even death by electrocution would have made him drop it. “Quickly, before lightning strikes the pole!”

I lifted Mary Fay’s head. Her chestnut hair fell away from that perfect (and perfectly still) face in a dark flood that pooled on the pillow. Charlie was beside me, bending down and breathing in harsh, excited gasps. His exhalations stank of age and infirmity. It occurred to me that he could have waited a few months and investigated what lay on the other side of the door personally. But that, of course, wasn’t what he wanted. At the heart of every established religion is one sacred mystery that supports belief and induces fidelity, even to the point of martyrdom. Did he want to know what lay beyond death’s door? Yes. But what he wanted more—I believe this with all my heart—was to violate that mystery. To drag it into the light and hold it up, screaming Here it is! What all your crusades and murder in the name of God were for! Here it is, and how do you like it?

“Her hair . . . lift her hair.” He turned accusingly to the woman cowering in the corner. “Damn you, I said to cut it!”

Jenny made no reply.

I lifted Mary Fay’s hair. It was as soft and heavy as a bolt of silk, and I knew why Jenny hadn’t cut it. She couldn’t bear to.

Jacobs slipped the thin band of metal over her forehead, so it lay tight against the hollows of her temples.

“All right,” he said, straightening up.

I laid the dead woman’s head gently back on the pillow, and as I looked at those dark lashes brushing against her cheeks, a comforting thought came to me: It wouldn’t work. Cures were one thing; reviving a woman who had been dead for fifteen minutes—no, closer to half an hour now—was another. It simply wasn’t possible. And if a stroke of lightning packing millions of volts did do something—if it caused her to twitch her fingers or turn her head—it would be no more meaningful than the jerk of a dead frog’s leg when electricity from a dry cell is applied. What could he hope to accomplish? Even if her brain had been perfectly healthy, it would now be decaying in her skull. Brain death is irrevocable; even I knew that.

I stepped back. “Now what, Charlie?”

“We wait,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

 • • •

When the bedside lamp went out a second time, thirty seconds or so later, it didn’t come back on, and I could no longer hear the roar of the gennie below the roar of the wind. Now that he had slipped the metal band around Mary Fay’s head, Jacobs seemed to have lost interest in her. He was staring out the window, hands clasped behind his back like a ship’s captain on the bridge. The iron pole wasn’t visible through the teeming rain—not even as a shadow—but we’d see it when the lightning struck it. If the lightning struck it. So far, it hadn’t. Perhaps there was a God, I thought, and He’d taken sides against Charles Jacobs.

“Where’s the control box?” I asked him. “Where’s the connection to that pole out there?”

He looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “There’s no way to control the power that lies beyond the lightning. It would fry even a titanium box to a cinder. As for the connection . . . it’s you, Jamie. Haven’t you guessed even yet why you’re here? Did you think I brought you to cook my meals?”

Once he’d said it, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. Why it had taken me so long. The secret electricity had never really left me, or any of the people Pastor Danny had cured. Sometimes it slept, like the disease that had hidden so long in Mary Fay’s brain. Sometimes it awoke and made you eat dirt, or pour salt in your eyes, or hang yourself with your pants. That small doorway needed two keys to unlock it. Mary Fay was one.

I was the other.

“Charlie, you have to stop this.”

“Stop? Are you insane?”

No, I thought, that would be you. I’ve come to my senses.

I just hoped it wasn’t too late.

“There’s something waiting on the other side. Astrid called it Mother. I don’t think you want to see her, and I know I don’t.”

I bent to strip off the metal circlet that lay across Mary Fay’s brow. He grabbed me in a bearhug and pulled me away. His arms were scrawny, and I should have been able to break his grip, but I couldn’t, at least not at first. He held me with all the strength of his obsession.

As we struggled in that gloomy, shadow-haunted room, the wind suddenly dropped. The rain slackened. Through the window I could see the pole again, and small rivers of water running down the wrinkles in the bulging forehead of granite that was Skytop.

Thank God, I thought. The storm is passing by.

I stopped fighting him just as I was on the verge of breaking free, and so lost my chance to end that day’s abomination before it could begin. The storm wasn’t over; it had only been drawing in a breath before commencing its main assault. The wind rushed back, this time at hurricane velocity, and in the split-second interval before the lightning came, I felt what I had on the day I’d come here with Astrid: the stiffening of all the hair on my body, and the sense that the air in the room had turned to oil. Not a click this time but a SNAP, as loud as a small-caliber gunshot. Jenny screamed in terror.

A jagged branch of fire shot from the clouds and struck the iron pole on Skytop, turning it blue. My head was filled with a vast choir of shrieking voices and I understood it was everyone Charles Jacobs had ever cured, plus everyone he’d ever snapped with his Portraits in Lightning camera. Not just the ones who’d suffered aftereffects; all of them, in their thousands. If that shrieking had gone on for even ten seconds, it would have driven me insane. But as the electric fire coating the pole faded, leaving it to glow a dull cherry-red like a branding iron fresh from the fire, those agonized voices also faded away.