Bring Them All Into the Light #2
When he talks back he feels rather foolish, standing on a hill by himself in the middle of the countryside, holding a conversation with someone he cannot see.
“Build what?” he asks. Then again: “What should I build?”
Church , the voice says. Or it may have been Temple —somehow it says both at once, as if the word and the concept are one and the same.
Rob has questions. Many of them are about the voice itself, and where it comes from; but most are about the temple he wants to build.
He recognizes that now. Not just the instruction, but the desire to build on this hill, where it can be seen for miles around. He feels that he has a purpose at last.
When he returns to the garden almost an hour later, he can hear Derek and Maggie laughing in the kitchen, but he doesn’t join them. Instead, he reaches for his pencil and pad, and he begins to sketch.
EX NIHILO
Construction is slow at first. Rob knows nothing about buildings, and it turns out that Derek doesn’t either.
Hutch has a cousin who used to be an architect, and they throw enough money his way that he’s happy to turn Rob’s sketches into something like a plan.
After a month of late-night phone calls and emails querying what this or that squiggle means, they have an official blueprint, with dimensions, and visualizations, and cutaway illustrations.
When he looks at it, Rob sees the building the voice described to him.
Officially they’re meant to submit the plans to the local council for approval, but Rob says not to worry, it’s all taken care of.
Derek wonders exactly what is taken care of, and how, but he keeps his mouth shut.
He’s being paid more than he’s earned in a lifetime of odd jobs and window cleaning, and his mother always taught him not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
He doesn’t have enough of an education to know the other sayings about gift horses and Greeks.
The foundations are the toughest part. With his limited knowledge of building techniques, Derek has to spend a couple of days watching videos on YouTube.
It looks simple enough, but when they come to break ground—Rob treating them all to a glass of bubbly grape juice and Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth”—they find the soil is thick with stones, some the size of a grown man’s fist. Getting the digger up the hillside was bad enough, but now it struggles to scoop more than half a bucket at a time, the metal screaming against tumors of flint.
When the time comes for the pour, they bring in as many hands from the village as they can.
Some have previous construction experience, but others—Jim who works in the butcher’s, Silas from the Laughing Lady—are there purely to add muscle.
Derek directs them as best he can, standing to one side in his newly purchased waxed jacket.
The community spirit spills over into the back room of the Laughing Lady until the following morning, and they have to delay the next stage of building by a day.
Rob acts annoyed, but he doesn’t care. When he looks at the concrete platform they have made, he sees only what it will become.
The frame goes up next, a timber skeleton like the hull of an upturned ship.
Derek is on more familiar ground now that they’re down to planks and joists, and he occasionally rolls up his jacket sleeves and lends a hand.
The wood is delivered on the back of a flatbed truck that can barely make it around the twists and turns of the access road, then they have to carry it up the steps one piece at a time.
It’s almost Biblical, seeing all those bare-chested men hauling crossbeams up the hill.
When they’re done, it sits in a shambolic pile to one side of the foundations, like a child’s construction set ready to be assembled, or a bonfire waiting to be lit.
They cover it with two brand-new tarps, but the rain doesn’t come.
As they work, hauling the pillars upright and setting them in the ground, sawing the angles for the rafters, Rob sprawls on the grass and watches.
He has abandoned his laptop for good—his employers fired him after half a dozen disciplinary cases for non-attendance, and he accepted their generous settlement payout with open arms. In this place they have more than enough money to last them until the end of their lives. He has no need of any more.
He takes to sleeping in the open body of the church, drifting off with the dome of the heavens above him.
It’s cold, but he has an inner fire that warms him.
He knows something will happen here—he just doesn’t know when, or what.
They are building something truly great, but the miracle is yet to come.
The voice still speaks to him from time to time, usually in the middle of the night, when he’s unsure whether he’s awake or asleep.
It has coalesced into something more tangible now—a woman’s voice, resonant and clear—and it speaks in full sentences rather than single words.
They are bringing it to life with their labor.
This is my house and you shall build it for me , it says.
With your hands you will build life everlasting , it says.
Inside these walls you pledge yourself to me , it says.
Rob always smiles when he hears its words, and when he sleeps, he dreams of a great cavernous hall, thronged with people, their voices swelling to the heavens.
Once the framework is completed, the walls go in.
They are of a unique design, two layers of plasterboard with straw packed in between.
Rob thinks he saw something similar in a magazine once, but the design came from the voice, not from him.
The straw will act as insulation, he imagines. Keep them all warm inside.
“…and the first pig built his house of straw…” Derek mutters as the men wrestle armfuls of it into the cavities, but Rob pretends not to hear. Derek’s role has largely become an honorary one, he’s only occasionally on site to supervise. Rob wants to see them breathe life into this temple firsthand.
Finally, the doors and windows are fitted, the exterior is painted in brilliant white, and they stand back to admire what they have done.
Tomorrow the pews will arrive—pitch-pine, hand carved—and the six-foot-wide slab of oak trunk that will serve as their altar.
There are candles too, and oil lamps, and twenty bottles of paraffin to fuel them.
Thick velour curtains, in bright red and green, to hang along the walls.
The time is almost here.
BETHEL
Maggie breaks the news to him after dinner one night, the children tucked safely into bed.
“I never meant for this to happen,” she says, a wine glass clutched in both hands as if she intends to bludgeon him with it. “Neither of us did. But you’re never here anymore, and Derek…well, he’s been here with me. For me. The only future I can see is a future with him.”
Rob knows he should ask whether she loves him, but he finds that he honestly doesn’t care anymore.
He hasn’t for a while. All his thoughts are of the church now, and the voice in his head.
It speaks to him day and night, awake and asleep; it tells him that he is doing something truly incredible, that the day will soon come when it will reveal itself and their world will change forever.
“Okay,” he says, uncertain of what else is expected. “What will we tell the kids?”
“Julie and Nico already know,” Maggie says. “They’ve moved all their toys to Derek’s house; we’re going to live there. He has a hot tub and a fifty-inch TV. His Wi-Fi is excellent.”
Rob feels a pang for what they used to have.
There was a time when the kids filled his world, when he couldn’t imagine a future without them.
But even in his wildest imaginings he never imagined this.
If he has to let them go to make it happen, then so be it.
“As long as you still have time to help with the posters,” he says.
He’s been working on the posters for the past two weeks, during the final stages of construction.
It was important that he got the wording just right.
He wants as many people as possible to be there for the grand unveiling.
Fill my house from wall to wall , the voice tells him, and he desires nothing more than to please her.
The printers are due to deliver them tomorrow, then he has a team lined up to distribute them through the local villages.
This is too big to keep to their local circle.
The posters range from shop-window tabloid to 48-sheet billboards, the words shining from them in orange and red: Grand unveiling.
Experience our new Church in all its majesty.
A Special night of Celebration and Miracles.
All welcome. Bring your Families! The time and location are at the bottom, but he knows they will find it easily enough.
Now that it’s painted, the building stands on their hill like a beacon, a lighthouse for the lost and the abandoned.
There’s an artist’s impression of it on the poster, too.
Rob had tried to sketch it himself, but he’d finally had to admit that his artistic skills weren’t up to the job; as it turned out, Jim the butcher was surprisingly proficient with a set of charcoals.
Rob sits on the hill the following evening, alone, and watches the lights twinkling in far-off villages, the orange bubbles of the streetlights.
He knows which posters have gone where; there are two billboards by the glowing disc of the roundabout, five on bus stops along the main road through town.
Looking out, he imagines each tiny light is someone’s soul, sparked into life by the opportunity he is giving them.
You must fill our hall , the voice says, nearby, as if talking over his shoulder. Bring them all into the light.