Catalog · No. 006 of 6
In development
The Prayer List
The prayer list is three thousand cards, and every one records, in somebody’s own hand, who loved the sick enough to ask.
Novel · Religious horror · Folk horror
In development · not yet released
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.
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. 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.
Who is in it
Spoiler-safe · drawn from the public pages
Cybil Halsey
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.
Brother Asa
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.
Lorene
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.
Nola Privett
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.
Hadley
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.
prayer request (n.)
Who is sick. Where. What we are asking. Who is asking. Relation to the sick. Every request on the circuit comes in on a card, 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.
Read the opening
Spoiler-safe · drawn from the opening chapter
Chapter 1: The Count
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.
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.
End of sample · the cards come in at four o’clock