The new phone rang. Everyone knew who it was before Sprout
picked up the receiver.
“He wants to talk to Roy,” she said, covering the mouthpiece.
Roy was on the other side of the room, screaming hellointo a
sugar dispenser.
“He’s not here right now,” she said. After listening to the reply
she hung up the phone.
“He said basically that he’ll see us in hell,” Sprout said. “He said
this means war.”
“How supremely redundant,” Colin declared.
“Man the battlestations then,” said Partment.
But there were no battlestations. Short on military education, the
group had not yet planned a second offensive. Like mischievous
children, they played a trick on someone without thinking about the
consequences. Suddenly that all became glaringly apparent.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see,” said Niles.
They disbanded for the evening, pensive and apprehensive. All
except for Roy, that is, who for the first time in his life felt at peace
with the world. He was finally going home.
Aside from stories about the strange weather, the news was all about
Biddenbrooks. How could a catastrophe of this sort happen, most of
the commentators demanded to know. But forensics found out.
Anyone wanting to adversely affect large numbers of people need
only taint milk and sugar dispensers at big coffee franchises. These
were easily accessible to anyone so inclined, rivers of milk and honey
feeding thirsty desert dwellers. Or wells waiting to be poisoned.
Roy didn’t really know what happened at Biddenbrooks. He
hadn’t known the coffee had been spiked. A human mind confronted
with hallucinations never imagines them to be of its own
manufacture. Even the most skeptical tend to believe that what they
saw really happened. This is how Paul, a devout Jew, became the
greatest of all evangelical Christians after a blinding seizure on the
road to Damascus threw open his imagination. This is how Sammy
Davis Jr., a black Christian, became an unlikely Jew after a blinding
car accident on the road from Las Vegas. This is how novelty comes
into the world: through brief flashes of insanity. This is how belief
beats truth every time. Beats it senseless.
The Biddenbrooks store was closed down that day, pending an
investigation into the whys and wherefores of the whodunit.
ABYSSINIA
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