OCR Text |
Show 269 and sinew and vital fluids, like the rest of us. The difference was that they had died, and their bodies had undergone chemical and morphological changes that were not very well understood. They could appear charged with lambent energies or looking like ordinary people. They could be present but invisible. They could pass back and forth between the physical world and the spirit world, and exploit natural resistances like gravity or wind in order to move between extreme points on the surface of the earth almost instantaneously. It was even possible, he said, starting to talk faster lest Sorenson cut him off with a worried look, that they could move, like electrons, from one space to another without traversing the distance in between. He told the story of a man who had been seen entering an elevator on the ground floor of the Continental Bank Building in Salt Lake and was not there when the door opened on the second floor, and the story a friend had told him about picking up a hitchhiker in the desert south of Fish Springs who had warned him about an approaching sandstorm and vanished from the car when Lorin's friend turned his head to look. He mentioned the angel who had stepped out from behind a barn one night and shown the gold plates to David Whitmer's mother, who up until then had not believed they existed, and the angel who had been seen on the road between Harmony, Pennsylvania and Fayette, New York, carrying the plates in a knapsack. The weeks passed. They called on her sometimes in the afternoon, once finding her doing the laundry in the small kitchen, the moisture from her clothes dryer humidifying the air and making the pages of their tracts and Bibles limp in their fingers, once finding her out of sorts from having gotten the car stuck in a bank of fresh snow on the way home from grocery shopping. They found her once in a thready pink housecoat recovering from a cold, and Lorin found his pulse tripping as he noticed the soft puffiness |