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Show 252 about that, but it made sense. The woman with the hemorrhage had reached through the crowd to touch Jesus's clothes and Jesus had felt virtue drain out of him and had stopped and looked around to see who had siphoned it off, and the woman was cured. The Gadarene swine had attracted the spark of a legion of devils when they had been expelled from the man foaming among the tombs. Lorin wondered, while the branch president continued steadily naming, where the devils had gone after the pigs had run squealing into the sea and drowned themselves. Just possibly salt water was a grounding medium, and they had been discharged into the murk of the ocean floor. He would try to remember to ask Sorenson if salt water could do that. The branch president, meanwhile, seemed to have found a bare wire. His voice went on as before, businesslike and unexcited, but Sister Heinmiller's body had gone rigid, and her breath came in short, quick gasps, as though she were breathing off the top of her lungs. Between his wrists Lorin saw the corners of her mouth drawn down. She raised her body, straining against the quilt, and the branch president, raising his voice for the first time and with his eyes still closed, pronounced a terrible command in the name of Jesus Christ and by the power of the holy Melchizedek Priesthood in them vested. Several things happened simultaneously. She made a long whinnying sound and her cracked tooth started to bleed again. Lorin felt a jolt in both arms, from the elbows up to his armpits, and for a brief instant thought that her husband had come in the room and thrown a tennis ball at him. He noticed that every hair on the back of his hands was standing up, and while listening to the sound of an ocean washing through his head reflected with some embarrassment that he could not be absolutely certain that he hadn't, at the critical moment, said "Jesus H. Christ" very loudly. |