“Met them.”

“Yes.”

“And they talked to you?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t sell?”

“No. I swear.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this when you first got here?”

“I don’t know.” Frankie felt his dizziness return. “I’ve never told anyone before. It just happened that one time.”

“And they actually talked to you,” the Reverend said. “That’s a … rare … thing.” He isolated these last words as if his doubt was spacing them apart. “What did they sound like?”

“Like … regular people, I guess.”

“Maybe they sounded like you.”

Frankie shrugged.

“They do that. There’s some that speak Spanish, too. They know every language we’ve got, except maybe German.”

“They didn’t say a whole lot. They just made a prediction, and a kind of … promise.”

“End of the world?”

“No,” Frankie said, “not exactly.”

“The list?”

“No. It was something else.”

The Reverend’s tongue appeared and pressed against his upper lip. He nodded a slow, abbreviated yes, which seemed to indicate that the cross-examination was over. “Well, be careful, son,” he said, leaning back. “You may not want to see what they have to show you.”

“It was just that one time,” Frankie said again.

“And you’re sure you don’t sell?”

“Positive.”

“If I only had your hair,” the Reverend said, dragging a hand over his scalp. “Hair holds sweat like a sponge, you know? You never think about it till you go bald, and then it’s just a free-for-all. Gives my eyebrows too much to do. Did they take you on their ship?”

“No. They just talked to me.”

“Then let me show you something that’s not for sale.”

Frankie followed him through the kitchen and out the back door. Behind the house, across several feet of muddy grass, sat a rusted aluminum shed with a peaked roof. They walked out to it with the ground sucking at their shoes. The Reverend dug into one robe pocket, then another, and produced a single key. With his elbows tucked into his body he turned completely around on his boot heels, then turned around again in the reverse direction. He passed the key from his right hand to his left, and back to his right. Then he unfastened the padlock and slid open the door. The key vanished into his robe and his hand passed over the wall just inside the shed, illuminating a single lightbulb mounted over the door.

“If it wasn’t about the end,” he said, stepping up onto the plywood floor of the shed, “and it wasn’t about the list, what was it they talked to you about?”