The Coastal Circuit

Thanks for coming Elliot.  Let me just turn the music down.  I really need to get something off my chest. I won’t ask you to believe everything I say.  What? I appreciate the support , but you’d best wait until you’ve heard the whole thing before giving such reassurances.  It’s not easy to hear. Do you recall that hobby I had in college? Exposing frauds and the like.  I kept it up afterwards. Specialized in tv preachers. Faith healers, fake prophets and so forth.  I took a few down, too. You might have heard of Reverend Polov, discredited on national television a few years back.  The anchors were reading my research on his supposed “resurrections”. He’s back with a new message, but I don’t even care anymore; and anyway, thats not what I want you to hear.

I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of The Right Reverend Harold Binning?  I thought not, he’s strictly small-time.  Mostly runs a Coastal circuit between Humarock, Massachusetts and Carrabelle, Florida.  He first came to my attention a couple of months ago. I was posing as a staunch believer at a revival meeting in an old baptist church in Tennessee.  A bunch of older folk told me about his “miracles” – how he exorcises demons from people, and that sometimes the demons are visible.  None of them had actually seen him, but they assured me he was the real deal.  It sounded like a good trick, and I was curious to see how much of the scam was actual sleight of hand and how much was based on rumor.  The imagined sight of a grown man pulling a rubber demon or some other slimy prop “from” someone in a church was enough motivation for me.

I caught up with him in Noank, Conneticut.  Small? I doubt there’s a two thousand people there.  Not overflowing with believers either.  There couldn’t have been more than twenty attendees on the first day. There was a thin strain of music playing, but I couldn’t hear it properly; for some reason it made me think of the ocean.  Binning was not what I had expected.  He was dressed in a poorly tailored stained black suit, with an equally stained and frayed tie. He’s very tall, nearly seven feet. Very lean too, with a big hawk nose, sallow cheeks and narrowed eyes.   His sermons focused on the purity of the soul and body, and the importance of removing aberration. Toward the end, he’d give a prayer in a very strange language.  I thought it was gibberish at first.  I can’t recall the exact words, if they could even be called words.  One of the sounds might have been “Urr-Li-yeh.”  Nonsense?  I thought so too, at the time.

When you’re in the business of exposing charlatans, you watch certain things carefully.  Like reactions. Most of the attendees didn’t seem to interest him, but every now and then someone would wander in that would merit his prolonged attention.  I didn’t notice at first, but after a day or two I could see that they all seemed to be sort of… ugly isn’t the right word.  They just looked wrong.  Like they weren’t really people. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but you haven’t seen what I have seen. They looked as though they were suffering from a degenerative disease, and they all had the same strange look. Unblinking eyes, very small nose and ears, large forehead.  Flaking skin. Funny odor.  I like to think I’m tolerant, especially of those suffering from disease, but I confess I was utterly repulsed by them and if they came too close I could not help edging away.  I wasn’t the only one.  Everyone’s skin seemed to crawl at their presence.

By the Wednesday of that week I still hadn’t see one of these supposed exorcisms, or any sort of scam, and was ready to drop the whole thing as more and more of these noxious visitors kept arriving.  God, I wish I had dropped it.  There are some things none of us should know… Sorry, Elliot.  It’s difficult to focus these days.  What kept me going was a single incident, no doubt small enough, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. Binning was accompanied by a woman I assumed to be his wife, though now that I think of it, she looked so like him she might have been his sister.  She would greet devotees as the entered, and they would both acknowledge us as we left.  As I was leaving on Thursday, I thought I heard him mutter :  ”Not so many pure now. We can begin cleansing.”  That stuck with me as I got a late dinner in a greasy highway diner.  What had he meant?  Well the question rolled around in my head that night.  I slept only fitfully, and had disturbing dreams when I did that woke me up again, drenched in sweat and tears.  It’s a small mercy that I cannot remember what they were about. I now recall vaguely that I was afraid to be too near either Rev. Binning or those sick people. By the morning I had forgotten my apprehension, and resolved to go back one more night to the meeting.  God that night.  Why did I have to go Elliot?  I could have just left and now…  I’m sorry, let me pull myself together.  Drink?  Well I’ll have one anyway.  I’ll need it for this.  I reasoned that, based on his comment, Binning would not begin the real show until the audience was wholly composed of those aberrant… things.  I tried to adopt their shuffling gate and unblinking stare as I approached the chapel that night.  The woman gave no sign she saw through my act. She just smiled and waved in me into the chapel.  To this day I don’t know if she was deceived. A strange ritual was obviously about to take place, and I was eager to finally see the “show” and even more eager to stop this strange preacher.

The church had been… redecorated with strange icons. I would have thought it vandalism if i hadn’t been the only one to pay it any attention.  The symbols were nothing Christian, and not from any religion I had ever seen.  they seemed to center around nautical depictions of fish and squid, along with other things less recognizable. A curtained off area had been set up to the left of the stage, stretching all the way to the side-door of the old chapel.  Everyone was dreadfully calm. The only sound was the ever present music, slightly louder than before, and the rustle of the other attendees. Binning’s face was impassive, as was the woman’s.  Everyone was very calm, except myself.  There was a great portable aluminum coat-rack holding large black robes of coarse fabric, with dark stains on them.  Every devotee had put one on, and I did as well.  The rotten stench of the robe I wore was so terrible I almost choked, but no one else seemed to notice, and now, of all times, I did not want to stand out.  I had a premonition that discovery was to be avoided at all costs.  I can’t tell you how I knew, Elliot, but I did know, and I was right.  The sermon itself was changed little, still full of hyperbole about purification and aberration.  What had changed was Binning himself.  He was animated, his normally flat monotone rose and fell over the course  of the sermon. His eyes shined with a life I hadn’t known was in him.  He was practically yelling toward the end.

When he finished, the dead silence that had begun the meeting returned, only broken by the faint tinkling of the constant music, now barely audible. Instead of opening the doors to smile at attendees as they left, the woman appeared to the right of the stage, next to the curtained-off area.  Binning, still animated with religious fervor bid the attendees to come forward and be purified.  He seemed to exert over these people a compelling, almost hypnotic control.  An older man in the front, distinguishable from the others because his features were even more repellant stepped forward with a shuffling and pained gait.  The woman smiled joylessly and held out a hand to direct him behind the curtain.

It’s funny, Elliot, how little details affect your perception.  I noticed that she was wearing a pair of latex gloves.  It was so out of place that I almost physically started with the implications.  Binning walked behind the curtain where I heard him quietly exhorting the old man to cast aside his impurities.  Then I heard a sound such as I never wish to hear again in my life.  It was a scream.  Not a fake yell, as I have often heard when the “Devil” is cleansed from someone on television.  This was a scream of pain.  Very real and physical pain.  What so disturbed me was the vocal qualities of that scream.  No human ever produced such a guttural, bleating, bellow as that.  No one else in the crowd had even the slightest reaction.  I realized a second later that I was being taken in by the show. The old preacher must have a hidden speaker somewhere, playing that horrible sound on cue. From behind the curtain came a loud THUMP.  Then a dragging sound.  I heard the preacher exhort the man again, this time muttering: “You are purified, brother.”  Then I heard footsteps to the side door. The door opened and then closed.  The preacher emerged, holding the robe, which had new dark stains on it, and deposited it onto the floor of the chapel.  ”Will the next come forward to be purified?”,  He asked. There  was a general milling about, with those in front shuffling into sort of a loose line.  The music continued to play.

This went on for some time.  It was a terrible vigil. Not every attendee had the scream effect played for their benefit, but it was enough to unseat my nerves. I had managed to drift away from the stage a little, but I was much closer than I would have preferred.  Elliot I KNEW there was something wrong. All my normal instincts to get at the truth were gone. I’d finally found something that I didn’t want to know any more about, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to leave either.  God Elliot, I could have left. I should have, and maybe we’d be meeting under better circumstances.  Well, he worked through most of the crowd, there were maybe five or ten attendees left, everyone else having departed through the curtained-off side door.  From somewhere a small measure of my former courage came back to me.  Just because this was a well executed show didn’t mean it was real.  After all, I considered, I hadn’t actually seen anything terrible except these people, who, awful as they were, were probably suffering from some obscure hereditary disease.  I resolved to peek behind that curtain when the last attendee was being “purified.”  I hid my face in the shadows cast by the robe and managed to avoid his now ferocious gaze, always standing behind the other participants.  As I was waiting, a thought clawed it’s way to the forefront of my mind. Binning had never asked for any money. After the last devotee had disappeared behind the curtain with that horrible preacher I worked up my courage, and quietly as possible I began to move around to the side.  The curtain in front was made of a heavy dark red fabric, thick and soft, but the sides were covered by only a thin white sheet.  I moved slowly,and quietly, and was about to look through the gap when I realized I could faintly make out the silhouette of the figures inside the curtain. It was only then I began to understand Binning’s purpose.  If only I’d left!  Then I wouldn’t…  I’m sorry, Elliot.  What I saw was the sillhouette of.. something… being butchered. Binning and the woman were carving it up with knives, while it was still alive! The stench was overwhelming. It didn’t look like the man that had gone behind the curtain.  I can’t say what it was.  It had limbs where there shouldn’t be limbs, and all the limbs were of the wrong shape.  The way it moved… was wrong. God, that horrible noise!

I ran. I’ve never run faster, Elliot.  I found a policeman and tried to tell him what I’d seen but he thought I was drunk, or high.  He arrested me.  I didn’t care what he thought, I was just glad to be surrounded by the normal world.  I couldn’t close my eyes too long, or I would see it again.  When they got me to the station I was hysterical. I tried to tell them.  They never found anything amiss you know.  No missing persons reports, and Binning was a locally respected character. You know the rest.  Nine months in Baker’s asylum and I was finally pronounced sane.

I know you don’t believe me Elliot, and probably think I’m delusional.  I can’t blame you. What I saw silhouetted behind that curtain could not be real.  But something else happened.  Something I’ve never told anyone.  I didn’t make a clean getaway.  I had removed my robe to avoid tripping over it, in case I was detected and needed to retreat.  As I reached the front door, I turned and saw Binning, staring at me.  He knew.  He found me, in the asylum, when he explained it all…  Well Elliot, that’s why you’re here. I remembered you from college.  How you had those staring eyes, that big forehead. Sit back down. This won’t take long.

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