Page 46 of The Salt King

“Oh, okay. At first, not really. But I’d been talking to Jericho, and he said, well, things like that really can get better here, and after a while . . . yeah. I guess I wouldn’t say I expected it, but I was alive to the possibility that it could happen.”

“Did you perceive God at any point?”

Reyes smiled. “You don’t take no prisoners, do you, son? I like that.”

Avelyn lifted his eyes from his notes, halfway to amused. He got this kind of thing plenty from older men. He knew why: he looked so innocent, what with being small and diligently obedient. People liked to explain things to him and feel that they’d taught him something, until he said more than two sentences. Then they remembered an urgent appointment five hundred miles away.

“No, only scalps. Did you perceive God at any point?” he repeated.

There was a tiny pause in which Reyes was clearly a little taken aback, but then he covered it over with a big easy laugh. “Well—yeah, I guess I did.”

“In what way? Can you describe it?”

“Say, where are you from?”

Avelyn rested his cheek on his knuckles. “Can you describe it?”

“You’re no fun.”

Avelyn checked his list. “All right. Thank you for your time. Could you find Sister Grace Kim for me?”

“What, that’s it?” Reyes said, indignant.

“Yes. This is an inquisitorial investigation into a miracle, but you won’t answer the questions, and I don’t like you.”

Reyes sighed. “Okay, okay, no need to overreact. It was . . . like . . . a window opened in my head, and he was on the other side.”

Avelyn almost said it along with him, because it was so close to what the others had said. A door opened, a light came on, a window opened, and God was there.

He paused, because Reyes was, in however showy a way, an exorcist. “Definitely God?” he asked.

“Rather than . . .?”

“Anything else.”

Reyes lifted his eyebrows. “Anything demonic? Have you ever met a demon?”

Avelyn thought about saying that he had.

Reyes laughed. “They don’t go round filling you with joy and curing you of awful things. They make housewives throw grown men across rooms and they cripple faithful people with injuries as real as that one.” He nodded at Avelyn’s leg. “They shriek at the name of the Holy Mother. That ain’t what’s here.”

Avelyn passed his pen to his other hand. He saw Reyes’ eyes follow it, surprised, as he kept writing. “Have you ever seen anything not explained by the fact that women are much stronger than men think, or that horrible religious guilt can cause equally horrible and real but thoroughly unsupernatural effects?”

The good cheer vanished. “I didn’t come here to be spoken down to by some kid from the Society of Jesus. Damn it, son, you all talk like the Lord signs himself ‘God, SJ’! What are you writing? What is that writing?” he added, as though he suspected Avelyn might be sacrificing a black ram later.

It was Hreod, because even after so long, Roman letters all looked the same if he was tired or ill. You wrote Hreod with both hands; Avelyn had spent a long time feeling mystified by the idea of handedness in the Outside. “Satanic runes,” said Avelyn.

“You’re a little shit, aren’t you.”

Avelyn decided that if he ever got properly bored here, he would find Reyes again and wind him up and up to see if he popped. “Good luck with the accusations, Father. Though careful of Hreod boys. If one of them reports you to the Witan . . .” He mimed scissors.

“I’m reporting you.”

Avelyn smiled his most cherubic smile. “Do it, you minx.”

The next person was a Peruvian bishop who had been sent here as a last hurrah before the Alzheimer’s worsened; now, he was as clear to speak to as anybody. He had the halo too, just faintly. When Avelyn said that it was possible he had annoyed Father Reyes, the Peruvian bishop patted him gleefully on the head and told him he was a good boy.

After the bishop was a sister from South Korea, who explained hesitatingly from some notes that she had written out painstakingly in pencil, translated from what must have been a paper dictionary, that she had been born with a congenital spinal problem that put her in a lot of pain until two weeks ago. Not surprised anymore, he watched the salt light pouring in through the bank of windows behind her veering towards her, flaring the already bright halo.