A Fiendish
Publishing Co.
The Catalog / No. 006
No. 006 · In Development
Novel · Religious / folk horror
The cures are real. Everyone who was there will tell you so.
The prayer list is three thousand cards, and every one records, in somebody’s own hand, who loved the sick enough to ask.
The Book
For eleven years Cybil Halsey has kept the books for a traveling healing ministry — the offering, the tape orders, and the prayer list, three thousand index cards in two steel drawers. Each night she works the side of the healing line and decides, in a murmured half-sentence at the preacher’s elbow, who reaches his hands first.
She has never said aloud what she believes the cards show: that a healing does not cancel an affliction so much as move it, along the person who loved the healed enough to ask.
She cannot prove it. She has never stopped acting on it either. She favors the requests whose asker is already dying, estranged, or alone, and keeps the others out of the selected pile. She calls it mercy.
Then her mother steps into the line outside Glasgow without being called, and is well by morning. Cybil wants that recovery to hold more than she has wanted anything in eleven years. She also knows what her own records say about who pays.
Her own symptoms begin in September. In October a card comes in her mother’s handwriting. WHO IS SICK: Cybil. WHO IS ASKING: Lorene. RELATION: mother. Cybil is holding the only lever she has ever had.
There is no villain under the canvas. There is a ledger. The preacher believes every word, the cures feel like grace, and nobody out here gets rich. The antagonist is a correlation that can be neither proved nor dismissed, kept by the one person placed to see all of it — who may have built it herself.
And whatever is or is not true about the transfer, this much is on paper: she left requests unanswered, kept letters from the preacher, and decided which families would hear nothing back.
The prayer list is three thousand cards, and every one records, in somebody’s own hand, who loved the sick enough to ask.
By the last night she understands she was never only the witness. What she does with that knowledge takes four seconds and one line of ink, written in the only field on the card that was ever hers.
The People
Keeper of the books
Eleven years counting the offering, banding the bills portrait up, filing the cards. Reads every card twice. Decides who reaches the preacher’s hands first, and has never once explained why.
The preacher
Believes every word he says. Sits on the bunk because it is nearer than the chair, and measures a night by whether it gets them to the next county. The cures feel like grace to him because, as far as he can tell, they are.
Cybil’s mother
Writes the way she talks, weather first and the important thing last, in the same pen she uses for everything. Lives outside Glasgow. Her letters come in the third bundle.
The grandmother on the card
Raising her granddaughter Hazel in Barbourville. Writes in pencil, large and careful, the way a person writes who would very much like to be understood.
The man at the station
Wants a count before he will take a radio proposal to his manager. Cybil gives him one. It is not the list.
Spoiler-safe · drawn from the opening chapters
Read the Opening
The damp got into the bills before it got into anything else. By the time she had the first bucket up on the table the ones had gone soft as cloth and would not separate, and she worked them apart with her thumbs, portrait up, the way her mother had taught her to hand money to a man so that he could not say afterward she had been careless with it. The bucket was galvanized and dented at the lip from a night in Hodgenville when the handle had come loose and the whole take had gone into the grass. She had crawled for it on her hands and knees in the dark, and Asa had stood over her with a flashlight and not said a word about it then or since. The handles were wired now. That was a thing you learned. The fan in the corner did not help. It moved the heat from the window to the bench and back, and it moved the smell of the field with it, crushed grass and wet canvas and the diesel off the truck, all of it worked into her hands.
9:48 at the top of the sheet.
Out in the field the men had the lights down to two strings and were taking the chairs up four at a time, and the folding carried across the ruts into the trailer. That was the sound of a night being over, and she had heard it in four states now.
Barbourville had been thin. Ninety in the tent, maybe a hundred, in a canvas that held four hundred when the county turned out. Two buckets had gone down the rows and come back, and neither of them had the weight a bucket ought to have had. The offering was not the point, Asa said, and he meant it, and the offering was also the fuel and the permit and the lease on the lot and the postage on the mail that came to a forwarding address in another county. A thin night was a night they drove slower and ate less.
On a good night there were four.
Eleven years at this and she could tell from the door what the buckets would weigh. Some towns are tired. Some are afraid of a tent, and some have a church of their own and no need of a man with a microphone and a folding table and a woman at the corner of the platform taking cards. She had stopped taking the thin ones personally years ago.
The trailer was eighteen feet and had been somebody's hunting camp before it was hers. Bench down one side, sink at the end of it, the long drawers underneath, the bunk she slept on and the table where she worked, and a fan in the corner that moved the heat around without changing it. She had hung a towel over the window against the field lights. Her hands smelled of the field, of crushed grass and wet canvas, and would until she washed them, and she was not going to wash them until the counting was done.
End of sample · the cards come in at four o’clock
Particulars
Illness, faith healing, and family estrangement. A full content notice will be posted with the finished manuscript.
In development · not yet released
Behind the Book
Prayer Request
Every request on the circuit comes in on a card like this one, filled out at the gate before the service. The card is filed under the sick. The person who asked sits in a field of their own, and in Cybil’s drawers that is the field that matters.
The Catalog
