Fenn Resists Einor and Prays

Gerry Fenn’s resistance to EITHER-NOR is an inward battle fought at the point where fear has nearly made him powerless. Surrounded by the collapse of the shrine and unable to free himself from the creature’s hold, he draws on the voices he has heard in dreams and finally prays. The scene makes resistance less a display of strength than a choice to oppose the force overwhelming him, and places that choice immediately before the oak’s apparent power turns EITHER-NOR back.

Crisis and Paralysis

Fenn comes to himself on the platform, struggling to breathe and aware of panic below him. People are staggering toward the exits; the tremors bring some down, where others trample them. Darkness prevents him from making out the chaos clearly, but the cries convey its scale. Even amid his confusion, he understands that he must get away and find Sue and Ben, then lead them out of danger. The urgency of that intention makes his inability to move especially stark: he feels depleted, while his nerves remain taut, and his attention is fixed on the disfigured creature before him.

The danger is not only physical. Fenn experiences EITHER-NOR as possessing strength drawn from the people present, an accumulated force associated with their evil and described as a negative power pulled away from the positive. The perception makes the crowd part of the struggle: the creature’s power is collective in origin, while resistance must be made by someone caught within that collective crisis. Fenn hears an inner command to resist, but cannot readily turn the command into action. His moan and failed effort register the distance between recognizing the need to oppose her and being able to do so.

The Dream Voices Return

The voices are familiar from Fenn’s dreams, where they had repeated the same instruction. Their return gives the present confrontation a continuity with what came before, but does not make their source certain. Fenn wonders whether they are the voices of two dead priests or a form of self-delusion. The scene preserves that doubt even as it gives the voices practical force: they name the resistance he cannot yet manage and later direct him toward prayer.

The contrast with the church at Barham sharpens the change in Fenn’s response. There, he had fled his nightmares rather than face them, denying their reality. At the shrine, flight is no longer available to him. The encounter is imposed, and his will still feels too weak to break the creature’s hold. His resistance therefore does not begin with confidence or mastery. It begins in fear, through the painful recognition that he cannot simply run from what confronts him.

Prayer as Resistance

The crisis around the altar shows how far the creature’s influence extends. Bishop Caines is on his knees, attempting an uncoordinated Sign of the Cross, his lips moving in words that Fenn can barely hear. Fenn himself remains fixed in place, unable even to look away. Against this shared debilitation, the voices’ repeated command to resist becomes more than an abstract exhortation: it offers a possible action when bodily effort has failed.

That possibility becomes concrete when the platform begins to vibrate and the ground opens into a widening rent that stretches toward the shrine. EITHER-NOR approaches Fenn, while the supernatural pressure that has held him in place continues. The voices urge him to pray. He closes his eyes and does so. The gesture is small beside the shaking ground and the approaching creature, but it marks a change in his participation: he no longer only suffers the confrontation or tries unsuccessfully to escape it. He acts against the force by turning toward prayer.

Reversal and Consequence

As Fenn prays, lightning strikes the oak. The tree catches fire, and EITHER-NOR turns toward it, then moves backward with her arms outstretched. The timing makes the action’s consequence legible without making Fenn’s prayer a display of personal command: his resistance coincides with a reversal, but the oak and the lightning provide the visible force that drives the creature away. The scene shifts from Fenn held in place by fear to EITHER-NOR retreating from the tree.

Sue and Ben then pull Fenn from the platform. As they flee, he sees the burning tree fall and EITHER-NOR beneath it; the creature is crushed and consumed in the destruction of the shrine. Fenn’s prayer is thus part of a sequence that ends his paralysis and enables his rescue, though he does not escape by himself. The moment also completes the movement from the earlier refusal at Barham to a forced confrontation met, at last, with resistance. Fenn’s action matters not because it removes uncertainty about the dream voices, but because he follows their instruction at the moment when fear has left him almost unable to act.