Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set Read Online Free PDF Page B

demonstration. 
    “Where’s Sister Carrie?” someone of them asked. 
    That had to be One-thumb George, but Dan couldn’t place him in the crowd.  George had asked the question at least a dozen times since they’d left Tompkins.
    “Sister Carrie is in her room at the convent, praying for us.  Her order doesn’t allow her to march in demonstrations.”
    “I wish she was here,” the voice said, and now Dan was sure it was One-thumb George.
    Dan too wished Carrie were here.  She’d done as much as he to organize this march, maybe more.  He missed her. 
    “And I’m sure she wishes she could be here with us,” Dan shouted.  “So let’s make her proud!  Waldorf, ho! ”
    Pointing his arm uptown like an officer leading a charge, he jumped off the sculpture base and marched his troops the remaining blocks.  He was just starting to position the group when Senator Crenshaw’s limousine pulled up before the entrance.  Dan had a brief glimpse of the senator’s head—the famous tanned face, dazzling smile, and longish, salt-and-pepper hair—towering over his entourage as he zipped across the sidewalk, and then he was through the front doors and gone.
    Damn!  He’d shown up early.
    He heard groans from the demonstrators but he shushed them.
    “It’s okay.  We’ll be all set up for him when he comes out.  And we’re not leaving until he does.”
    They spent the interval marching in an oval within the area reserved for their demonstration, demarcated by light blue horses stenciled in white with Police Line - Do Not Cross .  Dan led them in chants updated from the sixties, like: “Hey, hey, Arthur C., why you wanna imprison me?” and “Hell, no!  We won’t go!”  And of course there were the endless repetitions of “We Shall Overcome.”
    The choices were calculated.  Dan wanted to bring to mind the civil rights marches and anti-war protests of the sixties to anyone who saw this particular demonstration on TV.  Many of the movers and shakers in the country today—the President included—had participated in those demonstrations in their youth; many of them still carried a residue of nostalgia for those days.  He hoped enough of them would realize that but for luck and the grace of God they might be marching on this line tonight.
    As he marched and led the chants and singing, Dan felt alive .  More truly alive than he had in years.  His priestly routines had become just that—routine.  Hearing confession, saying Mass, giving sermons—it seemed little more than preaching to the converted.  The souls who truly needed saving didn’t go to Mass, didn’t take the sacraments.  His priestly duties around the altar at St. Joseph’s had become...empty. 
    But when he left the main floor and went downstairs to the soup kitchen in the basement—the place he’d dubbed Loaves and Fishes— then he felt as if he truly were doing God’s work.
    God’s work ...Dan had to smile at the phrase.  Wasn’t God’s work for God to do?  Why was it left to mere mortals like him and Carrie to do God’s work? 
    And lately, in his darkest moments, Dan had begun wondering if God was doing anything .  The world—at least the part of it in which he spent his days—was, to put it bluntly, a fucking mess.  Everywhere he looked people were sick, hurt or dying—from AIDS, from racism, from drugs, from child abuse, from stabbings, shootings, or just plain old kick-ass muggings.  And the violence was escalating.  Every time Dan told himself it can’t get any worse than this, sure enough, it did.
    And every year there seemed to be more homeless—more lost souls. 
    Tighten up on the misery spigot, will you, God?  We’re up to our lower lips down here.
    Yeah.  Where was the hand of God in all this?  Why wasn’t it doing God’s work?  A long, continuous howl of agony was rising from this city, this world.  The Middle East was ablaze with a fire that might never burn out; when Muslim factions