Origin of the Brunists

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Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. What did he really expect? The Final Judgment, perhaps. Something, certainly, of importance. What he did not expect was to find himself standing on the night of Saturday the eighteenth — the Night, as it turned out, of the Sacrifice — in a ditch alongside the old road to Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, watching a young girl die. He had been prepared, as only a man of great but simple faith can be prepared, for profound and terrifying events, but he had not been prepared for that. He couldn’t even remember much of it later on, so squeezed had his mind been by plain awe. The crowd all came out of their cars and stood around, some up on the lip of the ditch, others, like himself, down near the girl, down where the long grass threw black spiked shadows. Some stared as though not seeing her. Some wept hysterically, knelt to pray. None, surely, were unmoved. He recalled seeing Mrs. Eleanor Norton at one point lying in the roadway as though dead, her husband fanning her desperately with the hem of his white tunic. Yes, oddly, Hiram retained that pointless detail: Dr. Norton’s fat knees planted painfully in the ruts and cinders of the old mine road, revealed like a secret signal with every flap of the tunic hem. But the rest of it remained forever obscure to him, lost in the mad crisscross of headlight beams, a dreamlike conjuring of happenings that whirled in a fantastical circle with neither beginning nor end.

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