Poster Girl

By Liam A. Spinage

"Silent Night…"

Faith slipped out of the church as the choir began singing another carol and quietly closed the door behind her so as not to disturb them in their moment. Packed inside was most of the town of Salvation, Montana, praying for her best friend, Joy. The vigils had been Faith's idea from the start, bringing the community together in this time of profound loss. Rather than celebrating the miracle of the birth of Christ, they were huddled together inside praying for the safe return of one of their own. Nobody had seen Joy in nearly a month. Nobody knew where or why she had gone. There were no leads, no clues, no ransom demands. Search parties returned each day just before dusk, the hills and the woods being too dangerous to search at night. They had found nothing. So, each night, the town of Salvation did what they did best. They prayed.

"Holy Night…"

It was Christmas Eve, so Faith wanted to believe in miracles now more than any other time. She wanted to believe she'd see her friend again tomorrow, safe and well with a story to tell. Instead, the single candle she held in her gloved hands sputtered in the winter wind as snow flurries blew in continuous circles in the car park around her. Catching a moment of silence outside, she looked up at the heavens and, as she wiped a solitary half-frozen tear from her eye, offered a sincere, solitary prayer.

"All is calm…"

A thin layer of snow peppered the car park, but the clouds above were thick with the stuff. A fresh layer, deep and crisp and even, would put paid to any hope of the search parties, covering any prints, and removing any traces of her friend that might remain. Faith shivered in the chill of the night, but the cold was invigorating, strengthening, somehow, compared with the stifling heat of the crowd. Faith needed a moment alone with God, a pause from the frantic mayhem of the past weeks and the constant attention of the townsfolk's perpetual, penetrating gaze.

"All is bright…"

As she was about to turn and rejoin the vigil inside, something in the hills above the town attracted Virginia's attention. A procession of lights -- bright as stars but lower in the sky -- began to dance across the horizon, ducking below the silhouetted tree lines on the ridges of the two mountains and then resurfacing. Silvery motes arcing across her vision, beckoning her forth, promising her all would be well. She took three steps gingerly forward, convinced her prayer had been answered but still unwilling to leave her father the Rev. Shepherd to manage the congregation alone.

She hesitated for what seemed like a heartbeat but felt like a lifetime. The modern world being what it is, it would later be simple enough to time that pause properly and ascertain that it lasted precisely nine minutes according to the CCTV footage of the church entrance. At the end of that pause for thought, one light in particular shone very briefly and very brightly and Virginia took one more step forward toward the source, raptured by the beauty of that strange glow.

It was to be her final step. Nobody in Salvation ever saw her again. The wind picked up around the chapel, carrying with it flurries of snow that hid her precious last movements and blew an old poster, torn at one edge, onto the church door where it stuck almost in defiance. The poster read: Missing. Joy Carpenter, aged 15. Please contact Sheriff Carpenter in Salvation with any details. Between these sentences was nestled a slightly grainy black and white photo of a young girl, smiling through pearly white teeth, a pair of glasses jammed into a bun of dark hair rather than resting on her nose.

Nobody noticed Faith was missing at first. Not like Joy, whose absence had been picked up and reported almost immediately. There was a singular advantage, after all, in being the daughter of the sheriff, even if that relationship was somewhat strained by the natural problems of bringing her up as a single parent with a busy job, not to mention the nascent rebelliousness of teenage years. The community had brought the three girls up: Joy, Faith and their friend Hope, all daughters of prominent townsfolk. They raised them with good Christian values and a respect for their family and community which would have been the envy of other parents, had Salvation ever had visitors from outside except for the odd hunter or hiker. The three had been inseparable, the loss of Joy had left the others inconsolable.

Without Joy, though, the cracks had started to appear in their otherwise picture-perfect community. While nobody could conceive of a bad word to say against any of the girls, there were others upon whom scrutiny and suspicion fell in equal measure. Accusations of impiety began as mere whispers then rose in volume and frequency with each passing day Joy remained undiscovered.

Sheriff Carpenter, distraught and sleepless at the loss of his only daughter, called a town meeting at which he could barely contain his grief and others, particularly those with youngsters themselves, could barely contain their fear and anger. The Reverend Shepherd urged calm: for the first time in his career, he realized that his loyal congregation weren't listening to him.

"Keep faith," he repeated ad nauseam, "The Lord moves in mysterious ways. Keep faith and we will find Joy again." This offered less comfort than he imagined: he was terrified himself, incensed that something so horrific should happen to Salvation, to the little town where, like so many others around him, he had been born and lived his entire life.

Meanwhile, the lives of the three girls were laid bare. They were constant companions, had no romantic interests they were willing to divulge, had lived blameless, selfless lives helping to cook and deliver food for the elderly. None of them had been in the slightest bit of trouble except for the occasional familial arguments which were always followed by loving reconciliation.

If there was nothing wrong with the town of Salvation, as its population passionately believed, there must be an outside influence. The hotel guest book was scrutinized, every visitor traced and contacted. It all came to nothing.

Missing posters were printed and distributed to other local towns. Unthinkable as it was that Joy might have met her end, it also seemed unthinkable that she might have run away, especially without leaving a note and certainly not without telling her firmest friends. Nothing came of it. It seemed Joy had simply vanished.

Now the same thing had happened to Faith, on Christmas Eve no less. As the vigil continued throughout the night, nobody else left the church until the clear evening had become the dull gray sky of a snowy Montana dawn. When the caroling and prayers ended, the Reverend Shepherd looked frantically for his daughter to help fill the urns of tea and coffee and offer blankets to those who were shivering. When he couldn't find her, he began to call her name over and over, the congregation gradually hushing as their leader became more fraught in his plaintive cries. Sheriff Carpenter went to his side and began to ask the questions that nobody wanted to hear again, questions they could not answer even though in their hearts they all believed somebody must know.

"Is anybody else missing? Who isn't here? When did anyone last see her? Luke, take three others and make an immediate search of the area. Don't worry Reverend, we'll find her. We'll find her."

Thus, the disappearance of Joy ceased to be an isolated incident. If the town was afraid before, it was now in full blown panic, even as they retreated to their own residences to celebrate Christmas. Curfews were imposed in every household. The movements of anyone outside in the snow were scrutinized behind twitching curtains: the switchboard at the Sheriff's office was overwhelmed.

Sheriff Carpenter himself, a stern but fair man with great bearlike arms, listened attentively to young Luke as the search party returned.

"There’s no sign of her, Sir. No sign at all. There are only a few footsteps in the snow, just off the porch, and then they vanish into the drift. But there's something up there, you'd best come and see yourself before it gets too blustery."

Following his deputy outside, the Sheriff was certain of two things. Call it a gut instinct underlined with years of police work. Firstly, whatever had happened, the two girls were together somehow. Whether they'd run away or been abducted was something he wasn't sure of -- if it was the former there'd be hell to pay -- but he was convinced that the same thing had happened to them both. Two missing girls in a town like Salvation couldn't be a coincidence. Secondly, that meant that either their willowy, preppy friend Hope knew something, or she was in danger herself. He'd get to that once he'd taken a look at what his deputy had found.

It was a perfect circle of burnt grass, seared into the ground at the edge of the car park just beyond where Faith's footsteps finally ended. He'd not seen anything like it in his life and had no idea what might have caused it. Luke was busy taking pictures of the scene, as much for his keen interest in the unusual and bizarre as for a record. Sheriff Carpenter nodded to him and asked him to bring Hope to the church as soon as he'd finished.

Back in the church, he found the Reverend seated at a little table in the kitchen, his hands shaking as they gripped a cracked mug of hot coffee, a blanket over his shoulders placed there by his loving wife who stood quietly behind him. They both looked up as the Sheriff entered and shook his head to indicate their lack of progress.

"Who could do this, Sheriff?" The Reverend was openly weeping now. "What manner of evil creature could have taken away our precious girls?"

Removing his hat to reveal a scant growth of graying red hair, the Sheriff shook his head again.

"I must admit, I don't rightly know. We'll find them though, mark my words. We'll find them and make them pay. You have my solemn vow."

They stood there in silence for several minutes until they were interrupted by the face of a young girl, framed with disheveled golden locks, eyes red and puffy with weeping, standing in the kitchen doorway. It was Hope.

"No one is accusing you of anything." Sheriff Carpenter was doing his best to put her at ease, but it was clear that young Hope was terrified out of her wits and that his attempts to mollify her anxiety were only making things worse.

"I haven't done anything!" Near hysterical, she turned to the Reverend. "What's happened to Faith? Please, tell me? Why won't anyone tell me what's going on?"

It was Mrs. Shepherd who answered, her husband's head being firmly buried in his hands.

"She's gone, Hope. Just gone. From right outside the church. Please, if you know something, please let us know." Mrs. Shepherd bit a quivering lip to hide her worry, but her pleading words were spoken with a soothing tone.

"These first few hours are usually crucial." The sheriff interrupted. "Luke is organizing search teams…"

"I want to join in. I want to help find her."

"Hope, we need to keep you with us."

"You don't understand! She was my best friend! Of course I'm going to help! You can't stop me!" A grim defiance arose from Hope's tearstained face. Only after she spoke did Hope begin to comprehend what the Sheriff actually meant. She spoke again, faltering and stuttering this time.

"Is…is something going to happen to me too? What's happening?" That last question came out as a near-wail, the last, desperate call of distress and loss.

Luke shuffled in, a sheaf of papers in his hand. From the excited look on his face, it would appear he had a lead. He cocked his head at the sheriff and then over at Hope. Sheriff Carpenter stood up from the little wooden chair, dragging it back under the table as he nodded to the Shepherds.

"Back in a tick." He closed the door on a room of silent sobbing and fretful finger biting and beckoned his deputy to follow him out of earshot.

"What is it? Have you found something?"

Luke shuffled the papers nervously, almost breathless in his excitement.

"You're not going to believe this, boss. It's aliens."

Sheriff Carpenter sighed and massaged his temples. He could feel a migraine coming on and could do without any of his deputy's dubious theories. In the absence of anything else to go on, though, and out of the need to let Luke's prattle run its course, he waved at him to continue.

"I ran some images of that flattened circle of grass through an image search program on the internet." Luke was eager for acknowledgement, but his revelation was lost on the sheriff, whose knowledge of how tech operated began and ended with the patrol car and the fax machine. Undeterred, he continued. "They're similar to these satellite images of crop circles, there are hundreds of them across the US reported every year."

"And how does that prove it's aliens?" Sheriff Carpenter knew he had to draw this to a conclusion, preferably one that wasn't a long, drawn-out explanation. Thankfully, he didn't believe there was one.

Luke looked perplexed. "There's always aliens where there are crop circles, chief! Everyone knows that. And we know nobody in Salvation could be responsible, right?"

The sheriff knew no such thing, as much as he wanted to believe it.

"How does this help us, Luke? You want me to find their alien spacecraft and issue a search warrant?"

"Reckon it's gotta be lurking around here somewhere. Floating above us. It's probably got a cloaking device so we can't detect it."

"Tell you what, why don't you round up a few people and go looking for signs of it in the hills." Anything to get rid of his annoying deputy before his headache really set in. Besides, that would get his deputy back out searching.

Luke beamed. "Sure thing, chief! We're sure to find something! Maybe some more of these strange signs! He reached down to speak into his radio as he left the church, leaving the sheriff alone again.

Back in the kitchen, the Reverend and Mrs. Shepherd sat across the table from Hope. They all had something to say, but none of them were quite able to articulate it. Hope spoke first.

"They've found something, haven't they? That's why they left."

"Oh, sweetie." Mrs. Shepherd took her hands from her husband's shoulders and leaned across the table to take Hope's hands in hers. "They'll tell us if they find anything." She sounded reassuring, but there was a lingering doubt. What could they have discovered? She shuddered at the thought.

"I can't just sit here and do nothing. I just can't. If I…" She jumped as the door creaked open and the sheriff returned.

"Luke is leading a search party." He leant heavily on the little table, wishing the world would stop spinning long enough for him to think clearly. "Meanwhile, Hope, I think it's best you stay here. I'll let your mother know."

Hope balled her hands into little fists and stood up, her hair flicking back from her freckled face. "I want to help. I can't just sit here. Please." She cast her eyes round all the adults in the room anticipating that one of them might agree, but only met blank stares as they exchanged glances.

"We'll come with you." The reverend's voice echoed unexpectedly in the gloomy air of the tiny church kitchen. He looked over at the others.

"Guess we're all going together then. I'll radio through to Luke, let him know we're about to form a second search team." He fiddled with the dial but met only static. "Maybe it's the weather interfering. I'll go outside and call him. See you there. And wrap up warm, for Heaven's sake, it's freezing out there."

They stood with Luke on the ridge just above the town. The deputy was gesticulating wildly and excitedly about something they couldn't quite make out until he shared his camera with them.

"Look at it with the zoom on. You'll see!" One by one, they did. They saw it all. Where, on the ground, it had looked like a perfect circle, the scorched ground outside the church looked different from up here. There was a crisscross of smaller lines inside the circle itself, visible now only because of their vantage point and because snow had settled along those lines while leaving the rest of the burnt ground untouched. Even with the low midday sun barely piercing the clouds, the fine mesh of lines was bathed in its light.

"Tell me that's an accident." Luke was jubilant. "Tell me that's man made."

"What are you talking about?" The reverend was cross, and it only now dawned on the sheriff that Luke was about to share his crackpot theories with the most devout people in the town. He winced.

"These are clear signs of an alien visitation! There are hundreds of websites devoted to UFOs, if I take a photo and share it…"

"Enough, Luke." Sheriff Carpenter's look said, 'I'm going to kill you for doing this'. Reverend Shepherd's said, 'I'm going to pray for your immortal soul.' His wife just looked confused as she held her husband's arm tightly.

Hope gasped as she lowered the camera. "I've seen that sign before. Joy painted it on her backpack. It's exactly the same, I swear to God." That last comment was directed at the good reverend, lest he doubt her. "I…I don't know what it means, but I think Joy did. She was really happy with how well it came out and showed us both. When we asked what it was, she just smiled, that kind of beatific, all-consuming, all-knowing smile she had sometimes." She looked over at the sheriff. "I only just remembered that. It didn't seem important before."

All eyes turned to the sheriff now, who shuffled uncomfortably. "Yeah, I remember. I was upset with her for ruining her school bag. That was the last argument we had, just a week before she went missing. She apologized the next morning. God, how could I have missed that?"

It was Reverend Shepherd's turn to speak. "I don't remember seeing anything like that in Faith's room. I'm sure I'd remember." He looked over at his wife who nodded silently in agreement.

"Chief, I'm going to head back and run this through an image search, see what it brings up. Maybe it'll give us an idea of where to look. I can take a look in Faith's things as well if that's OK with the Rev.?"

Mrs. Shepherd walked over and handed Luke the keys. "Anything for my Faith."

"I want to keep looking. There might be more of these. There might be other signs. Stay with me?"

It wasn't the way any of them had planned on spending Christmas afternoon, especially the reverend who was worried for his flock. A missing daughter was more important, though, so the four of them spent chilling hours on the outskirts of Salvation, climbing both the local hills to get better vantage points on high to look out on the town as their world lay in solemn stillness with the strife and woe far below them.

As evening drew in and the gentle snowfall of the day gave way to a clear moonlit night, the weary group began to make their way back to Salvation, exhausted and with nothing to show for their efforts. They were about to turn into the pine forest on the hill beneath them when Hope gasped.

"Look! Look over there!" They each turned to where she was pointing, up in the sky on top of the ridge they had just left. Hovering over them, drawing closer as they stared, came a procession of dancing lights, each burning brighter than a thousand stars, lighting up the whole sky now with their brilliance as they flitted toward them in fits and bursts. A mighty dread seized their troubled minds as the glowing orbs grew in size and began to take on a vaguely human shape.

Hope was the first to react. Convinced these strange beings were responsible for taking her friends, she ran toward the lights in a kind of rapt stupor, begging them to take her too so that she might be reunited with them.

Reverend Shepherd, also believing them responsible, fell to his knees even before the aliens reached the clearing and revealed themselves in their full aweful phosphorescent presence. "Bring her back! I need her! We all need her! So, help me God, bring her back!"

Mrs. Shepherd stood stock still, paralyzed with fear, awestruck at what she was witnessing.

Sheriff Carpenter began to run after Hope, to bring her back to safety, when a burst of static came over the radio. He buzzed it and heard Luke's excited voice.

"Hey Chief, this is Luke. I was wrong, so wrong. It's not aliens. That sign, it's the sign of the archangel Gabriel. Do you know what that means?"

The Sheriff knew but was unable to articulate anything beyond "Oh…my…god."

Before them manifested three beings. Their likeness was broadly humanoid in appearance but atop each of their long, translucent necks there were four heads with twelve eyes apiece, atop torsos that sprouted four sets of slowly beating wings. Each in turn was blinded by their brilliance, except for Hope who wept with joy, tears filling her eyes so that she was shielded from the magnificence of their radiance.

"Be not afraid."

The voice, not meant for human ears, boomed. They were all on their knees now.

"I bring you tidings of Joy."

Thus spake the seraph and forthwith appeared a shining throng. Suddenly a great company of all the heavenly host appeared with them.

Glory shone around. The whole town, the whole valley, possibly the whole world now was aglow with their incandescence, their all-seeing luminosity. By the time the group could see again, the visitation was over. The reverend was insensate, irreconcilable. "Take me! By all that is good, it should have been me!"

"Where is she? Where is she?" That was Mrs. Shepherd, desperately trying to find Hope. Sheriff Carpenter joined her, frantically searching in the undergrowth near the new burnt circle where the angel had appeared.

It was too late.

The Shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, but their hearts were empty. Why had the angels taken those young girls to the rapture but spared them? Were they not good enough for the kingdom of heaven? They preached, but their words were as empty as their hearts. Salvation was never the same again as it was after the time they became bereft of Joy, lost Faith and finally were devoid of Hope.