I don’t imagine it’ll last past sunrise.
“Thank you,” I tell her. I feel dispirited and horribly lost. I can’t sleep, I can’t rest, I can’t think. My son is gone. I’ve tasted this bitterness before, but never quite this deeply. It’s the uncertainty that kills hope. “I need to use my computer. That all right?”
“Surely,” she says. “As long as you don’t need our Wi-Fi password. I ain’t sharing that.”
I don’t need that. I use my cell phone to provide the signal and yoke my computer to it, and I’m online in under a minute.
I start with the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area. It’s wild and more than a little desolate. I zoom out. There are far too many possibilities, too many directions, too many backwoods small communities, towns, farms. From satellite, a cult compound looks a lot like any other place. And lots of rural people have trailers and RVs.
I search the internet for most of the rest of the two hours that remain until sunrise, but I don’t come up with much. There is almost nothing on the Assembly of Saints except for a passing reference to a long-expired church in the northwest, an entirely different group. The only mobile groups I can find seem to be Romany travelers or groups of elderly retirees with a yen to see the country on the open road.
“Ms. Proctor?”
I blink and look up. Vee Crockett is standing in front of me. She’s wearing a frilly white cotton nightgown that’s too small for her, and the long sleeves barely cover her to the elbows. She sinks down on the sofa beside me.
“Couldn’t you sleep?” I ask her, and she shakes her head. I don’t think. I just put my arm around her, the way I would Lanny. She stiffens at the touch, but then she relaxes and leans against me.
“Did you find anything?” she asks me.
I wish I could say yes. But I need to be honest with her. “No.”
“Can I show you something?”
I nod. Vee pulls my laptop over and surfs to a video site—not one of the major ones—and pulls something up. “Look.”
It’s murky and dark, and I don’t know what I’m looking at, but the color finally stabilizes. “What is it?”
“These people, they explore weird abandoned places,” she says.
“Why?”
“For fun. Just look.”
The summary underneath says that it’s an exploration of an old, abandoned Civil Defense facility. I don’t know why she’s so intent on it until they push open one of the rusting metal doors on a concrete building, and the flashlights illuminate neat rows of beds against the walls. Surplus military bunks, by the look of it; they still have mattresses on some of them. Apart from that, the place seems empty and unremarkable . . . until the lights catch on something painted on the wall, and the camera turns to bring it into focus.
It’s a carefully painted quotation.
WATCH YE, STAND FAST IN THE FAITH, QUIT YOU LIKE MEN, BE STRONG.—I CORINTHIANS 16:13
The other wall holds a more ominous verse.
GATHER MY SAINTS TOGETHER UNTO ME; THOSE THAT HAVE MADE A COVENANT WITH ME BY SACRIFICE.—PSALMS 50:5
Vee freezes the video, and we stare at it together. The word saints seems to glow—a trick of the flashlight, but somehow it seems like a message. “Where is this?”
“Thirty miles from Wolfhunter, out in the woods,” she says. “Been closed up for years, I guess.” She clicks the play button. “Keep lookin’.”
I’m afraid what we’re going to see.
The rest of the bunkhouse seems normal enough—bathrooms, bare showers, toilets. In another few minutes they leave the concrete structure. The people shooting the video start out making jokes, but that stops soon. It’s eerily quiet where they are, and as they pan around the scene, I see a long, narrow white house like a church, adorned with an outsize cross on the side. They choose to explore that next. The doors are closed but open easily, and the video shows that the large space is completely bare except for a raised platform that holds a single comfortable chair. There’s something eerie about that too. I can almost picture a room full of people standing, or kneeling, on that floor while the person that chair belongs to . . . sits. And talks.
There’s another building, a mirror to the one that held bunks. The sign outside isn’t quite as faded. It reads THE GARDEN. I’m expecting some kind of plant nursery. But it’s still bunk beds . . . just fewer of them. Farther along, there’s a small area with playpens and old, abandoned cribs.
There’s just one separate closed door, and when the exploration team opens it, they find a room with a king-size bed. Other than the single chair in the church, that bed is the only luxury in the place so far. That’s all that’s in the room, and yet I feel sick. Maybe it’s the discolored stains on the bare mattress.
Or the quotation on the wall over the bed.
AND ADAM KNEW EVE HIS WIFE; AND SHE CONCEIVED, AND BARE CAIN, AND SAID, I HAVE GOTTEN A MAN FROM THE LORD.—GENESIS 4:1
As the explorers leave, they spotlight more quotations, carefully painted huge on the walls.
FOR THE MAN IS NOT OF THE WOMAN: BUT THE WOMAN OF THE MAN. NEITHER WAS THE MAN CREATED FOR THE WOMAN; BUT THE WOMAN FOR THE MAN.—I CORINTHIANS 11:8–9
That gem makes me flinch. It has to be proof, to these poor souls, that they were born inferior and always will be. That they have no life of their own. The other wall is arguably worse.
LET THE WOMAN LEARN IN SILENCE WITH ALL SUBJECTION.—I TIMOTHY 2:11
I feel cold staring at it. Oppressed and suffocating, trapped like the women who would have been kept here. These women likely believed in this twisted version of Christianity; they had to, to keep their sanity. But it also doesn’t escape me that there are twice as many beds in the other bunkhouse—which I think must be for the men—as there are here in the Garden for women.
Women held here were outnumbered as well as indoctrinated. Relentless subjugation. I think about Carol, about her facile manipulation. Did she grow up here? Is this the place she ran away from? No, it couldn’t have been. From all appearances, this place has been vacant a long time.
“It’s the Assembly,” Vee says. “I knew it as soon as I seen this video. Always was talk they had their own place around Wolfhunter, but I didn’t know where; I was only a kid when Father Tom moved them on to a better spot.” She swallows, looking at the frozen image of the last quotation. “I met him once. Father Tom. He came to our house to recruit my momma. She told him to shoo, and he left. But he was . . .” She pauses, thinking about it. “I thought I liked him back then. He was real nice to me.”
Maybe he hadn’t been trying to recruit Vee’s mother at all. Maybe he’d been after Vee. I shudder to think that, but I remember those cribs, those playpens.
That king-size bed with the stains and the quote looming above.
I don’t doubt that Vee is right. This was once the Assembly of Saints compound, before it left Wolfhunter behind completely and moved somewhere bigger. Somewhere better.
I hug Vee and say, “Thanks. This is a big help.” I try to smile. She tries too. We’re both a little shaken. “However did you find it? It wasn’t marked as Assembly of Saints, was it?”
“No. I just looked for creepy cult videos,” she says. “In Tennessee, ’cause that’s where he started out. That’s all I found, though. Wish I’d found the new place.”