by Dean Koontz
With half an hour remaining before sunset on this Tuesday in August, the western sky blazed orange, steadily deepening toward red, as though the sun were wounded and bleeding in its retreat. The white walls of the church took color from the heavens, and appeared to be full of holy fire.
Stormy waited for me in front of St. Bart’s. She sat on the top step, beside a picnic hamper.
She had traded her pink-and-white Burke Bailey’s uniform for sandals, white slacks, and a turquoise blouse. She had been cute then; she was ravishing now.
With her raven hair and jet-black eyes, she might have been the bride of a pharaoh, swept forward in time from ancient Egypt. In her eyes are mysteries to rival those of the Sphinx and those of all the pyramids that ever were or ever will be excavated from the sands of the Sahara.
As if reading my mind, she said, “You left your hormone spigot running. Crank it shut, griddle boy. This is a church.”
I snatched up the picnic hamper and, as she rose to her feet, I kissed her on the cheek.
“On the other hand, that was a little too chaste,” she said.
“Because that was a kiss from Little Ozzie.”
“He’s sweet. I heard they blew up his cow.”
“It’s a slaughterhouse, plastic Holstein splattered everywhere you look.”
“What’s next—hit squads shooting lawn gnomes to pieces?”
“The world is mad,” I agreed.
We entered St. Bart’s through the main door. The narthex is a softly lighted and welcoming space, paneled in cherry wood stained dark with ruby highlights.
Instead of proceeding into the nave, we turned immediately to the right and stepped up to a locked door. Stormy produced a key and let us into the bottom of the bell tower.
Father Sean Llewellyn, rector of St. Bart’s, is Stormy’s uncle. He knows she loves the tower, and he indulges her with a key.
When the door fell quietly shut behind us, the sweet fragrance of incense faded, and a faint musty smell arose.
The tower stairs were dark. Unerringly, I found her lips for a quick but sweeter kiss than the first, before she switched on the light.
“Bad boy.”
“Good lips.”
“Somehow it’s too strange…getting tongue in church.”
“Technically, we’re not in the church,” I said.
“And I suppose technically that wasn’t tongue.”
“I’m sure there’s a more correct medical term for it.”
“There’s a medical term for you,” she said.
“What’s that?” I wondered as, carrying the hamper, I followed her up the spiral staircase.
“Priapic.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Perpetually horny.”
“You wouldn’t want a doctor to cure that, would you?”
“Don’t need a doctor. Folk medicine offers a reliable cure.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“A swift, hard blow to the source of the problem.”
I winced and said, “You are no Florence Nightingale. I’m going to start wearing a cup.”
At the top of the spiral stairs, a door opened to the belfry.
A carillon of three bronze bells, all large but of different sizes, hung from the ceiling in the center of this lofty space. A six-foot-wide catwalk encircled them.
The bells had rung for vespers at seven and would not ring again until morning Mass.
Three sides of the belfry were open above a waist-high wall, presenting splendid views of Pico Mundo, the Maravilla Valley, and the hills beyond. We stationed ourselves at the west side, the better to enjoy the sunset.
From the hamper, Stormy produced a Tupperware container filled with shelled walnuts that she had deep-fried and seasoned lightly with both salt and sugar. She fed me one. Delicious—both the walnut and being fed by Stormy.
I opened a bottle of good Merlot and poured while she held the wineglasses.
This was why earlier I had not finished the glass of Cabernet: As much as I love Little Ozzie, I would rather drink with Stormy.
We don’t eat in this perch every evening, only two or three times a month, when Stormy needs to be high above the world. And closer to Heaven.
“To Ozzie,” Stormy said, raising her glass in a toast. “With the hope that one day there’ll be an end to all his losses.”
I didn’t ask what she meant by that because I thought perhaps I knew. By the affliction of his weight, there is much in life that Ozzie has been denied and may never experience.
Citrus-orange near the western horizon, blood-orange across the ascending vault, the sky darkened to purple directly overhead. In the east, the first stars of the night would soon begin to appear.
“The sky’s so clear,” Stormy said. “We’ll be able to see Cassiopeia tonight.”
She referred to a northern constellation named after a figure of classic mythology, but Cassiopeia was also the name of Stormy’s mother, who had died when Stormy was seven years old. Her father had perished in the same plane crash.
With no family but her uncle, the priest, she had been placed for adoption. When in three months the adoption failed for good reason, she made it explicitly clear that she didn’t want new parents, only the return of those whom she had loved and lost.
Until the age of seventeen, when she graduated from high school, she was raised in an orphanage. Thereafter, until she was eighteen, she had lived under the legal guardianship of her uncle.
For the niece of a priest, Stormy has a strange relationship with God. There is anger in it—always a little, sometimes a lot.
“What about Fungus Man?” she asked.
“Terrible Chester doesn’t like him.”
“Terrible Chester doesn’t like anyone.”
“I think Chester’s even afraid of him.”
“Now that is news.”
“He’s a hand grenade with the pin already pulled.”
“Terrible Chester?”
“No. Fungus Man. Real name’s Bob Robertson. The hair on his back was standing straight up like I’ve never seen it.”
“Bob Robertson has a lot of hair on his back?”
“No. Terrible Chester. Even when he scared off that huge German shepherd, he didn’t raise his hackles like he did today.”
“Loop me in, odd one. How did Bob Robertson and Terrible Chester happen to be in the same place?”
“Since I broke into his house, I think maybe he’s been following me around.”
Even as I spoke the word following, my attention was drawn to movement in the graveyard.
Immediately west of St. Bart’s is a cemetery very much in the old style: not bronze plaques set in granite flush with the grass, as in most modern graveyards, but vertical headstones and monuments. An iron fence with spear-point pickets surrounds those three acres. Although a few California live oaks, more than a century old, shade portions of the burial ground, most of the green aisles are open to the sun.
In the fiery glow of that Tuesday twilight, the grass appeared to have a bronze undertone, the shadows were as black as char, the polished surfaces of the granite markers mirrored the scarlet sky—and Robertson stood as still as any headstone in the churchyard, not under the cover of a tree but out where he could be easily seen.
Having set her wineglass on the parapet, Stormy crouched at the hamper. “I’ve got some cheese that’s perfect with this wine.”
If Robertson had been standing with his head bowed, studying the engraving on a memorial, I would still have been disturbed to see him here. But this was worse. He had not come to pay his respects to the dead, not for any reason as innocent as that.
With his head tipped back, with his eyes fixed on me where I stood at the belfry parapet, the singular intensity of his interest all but crackled from him like arcing electricity.
Past the oaks and beyond the iron fence, I could see parts of two streets that intersected at the northwest corner of the cemetery. As far as I could tell, no marked or un
marked police vehicle was parked along either avenue.
Chief Porter had promised to assign a man at once to watch the house in Camp’s End. If Robertson hadn’t been home yet, however, that officer could not have established surveillance.
“You want crackers with the cheese?” Stormy asked.
Crimson had seeped down the summer sky, closer to the horizon, staining the western swathe of bright orange until it narrowed to a swatch. The air itself seemed to be stained red, and the shadows of trees and tombstones, already soot-black, grew even blacker.
Robertson had arrived with nightfall.
I set my wineglass beside Stormy’s. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Crackers aren’t a problem,” Stormy said, “just a choice.”
A sudden loud flapping-fluttering startled me.
Turning to see three pigeons swooping into the belfry and to their roost in the rafters above the bells, I bumped into Stormy as she rose with two small containers. Crackers and wedges of cheese spilled across the catwalk.
“Oddie, what a mess!” She stooped, set the containers aside, and began to gather the crackers and cheese.
Down on the darkening grass, Robertson had thus far stood with his arms at his sides, a slump-shoulder hulk. Aware that I was as fixated on him as he was on me, he now raised his right arm almost as if in a Nazi salute.
“Are you going to help me here,” Stormy asked, “or are you going to be a typical man?”
Initially I thought he might be shaking his fist at me, but in spite of the poor—and rapidly fading—light, I soon saw that the gesture was even less polite than it had seemed at first. His middle finger was extended, and he thrust it toward me with short, angry jabs.
“Robertson’s here,” I told her.
“Who?”
“Fungus Man.”
Suddenly he was on the move, walking between the headstones, toward the church.
“We better forget dinner,” I said, drawing Stormy to her feet with the intention of hustling her out of the belfry. “Let’s get down from here.”
Resisting me, she turned to the parapet. “I don’t let anyone intimidate me.”
“Oh, I do. If they’re crazy enough.”
“Where is he? I don’t see him.”
Leaning out, peering down, I couldn’t see him either. Apparently he had reached the front or the back of the church and had turned a corner.
“The door at the bottom of the steps,” I said, “did it lock behind us automatically when we came into the tower?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I didn’t like the idea of being trapped at the top of the tower, even though we could shout for help and surely be heard. The belfry door had no lock, and I doubted that the two of us could hold it shut against him if, in a rage, he was determined to open it.
Grabbing her by the hand, pulling to impress on her the need for urgency, I hurried along the catwalk, stepping over the cheese and crackers, around the bells. “Let’s get out of here.”
“The hamper, our dinner—”
“Leave it. We’ll get it later, tomorrow.”
We had left the lights on in the tower. But the spiral stairs were enclosed, and I couldn’t see all the way to the bottom, only as far as the continuously curving walls allowed.
Below, all was quiet.
“Hurry,” I urged Stormy, and without using the handrail, I preceded her down those steep steps, setting a pace too fast to be safe.
NINETEEN
DOWN, DOWN, AROUND AND DOWN, I LED AND she followed, striking too much noise from the Mexicantile steps, unable to hear Robertson if he was climbing to meet us.
At the halfway point I wondered if this haste might be an overreaction. Then I remembered his upraised fist, the extended finger, the glowering photos in his study.
I plunged even faster, around and around, unable to block from my mind the image of him waiting below with a butcher knife on which I might impale myself before I could stop.
When we reached the bottom without encountering him, we found the lower door unlocked. I opened it cautiously.
Contrary to my expectations, he wasn’t waiting for us in the softly lighted narthex.
Descending the tower stairs, I had let go of Stormy’s hand. Now I seized it again to keep her close to me.
When I opened the centermost of three front doors, I saw Robertson climbing the church steps from the sidewalk. Although not racing toward me, he approached with the grim implacability of a tank crossing a battlefield.
In the apocalyptic crimson light, I could see that his creepy but previously reliable smile had deserted him. His pale-gray eyes borrowed a bloody cast from the sunset, and his face wrenched into a knot of murderous wrath.
Terri’s Mustang waited at the curb. I wouldn’t be able to reach it without going through Robertson.
I will fight when I have to, against opponents who dwarf me if I must. But I turn to physical conflict neither as a first resort nor as a matter of misguided principle.
I’m not vain, but I like my face just the way it is. I prefer that it not be stomped.
Robertson was bigger than me, but soft. Had his anger been that of an ordinary man, perhaps pumped up by one beer too many, I might have confronted him and would have been confident of taking him down.
He was a lunatic, however, an object of fascination to bodachs, and an idolizer of mass murderers and serial killers. I had to assume that he carried a gun, a knife, and that in the middle of a fight, he might begin to bite like a dog.
Perhaps Stormy would have tried to kick his ass—such a response is not alien to her—but I didn’t give her that option. Turning from the entrance, I held fast to her hand and encouraged her through one of the doors between the narthex and the nave.
In the deserted church, low pathlights marked the center aisle. The enormous crucifix behind the altar glowed in a soft spotlight directed on it from above. Flames flickered in ruby-colored glasses on the votive-candle racks.
Those points of light and the fading red sunset behind the stained-glass windows in the western wall failed to press back the congregation of shadows that filled the pews and the side aisles.
We hurried down the center aisle, expecting Robertson to slam with charging-bull fury through one of the doors from the narthex. Having heard nothing by the time we reached the communion railing, we paused and looked back.
As far as I could tell, Robertson had not arrived. If he had entered the nave, surely he would have come directly after us, along the center aisle.
Although logic argued against my hunch and no evidence supported it, I suspected that he was with us. The prickled skin on my arms suggested that I should speak in a honk, have webbed feet, and be covered with feathers.
Stormy’s instinct was in sync with mine. Surveying the geometric shadows of pews, aisles, and colonnades, she whispered, “He’s closer than you think. He’s very close.”
I pushed open the low gate in the communion railing. We passed through, moving in all but absolute silence now, not wanting to mask any sounds of Robertson’s approach.
As we passed the choir enclosure and ascended the ambulatory toward the high altar, I glanced back less and proceeded with greater caution. Inexplicably, in opposition to my head, my heart said danger lay in front of us.
Our stalker couldn’t have slipped around us unseen. Besides, there was no reason for him to have done so instead of assaulting us directly.
Nevertheless, with every step I took, the tension increased in the cords of muscle at the back of my neck, until they felt as tight as key-wound clock springs.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed movement past the altar, twitched toward it, and drew Stormy closer to my side. Her hand clutched mine tighter than before.
The crucified bronze Christ moved, as if metal miraculously had become flesh, as if He would pull loose from the cross and step down to resume the earthly mantle of messiah.
A large scallop-winged moth fle
w away from the hot lens of the overhead spotlight. The illusion of movement—which the insect’s exaggerated, fluttering shadow had imparted to the bronze figure—was at once dispelled.
Stormy’s tower-door key would also unlock the door at the back of the sanctuary. Beyond waited the sacristy, in which the priest readied himself before every Mass.
I glanced back at the sanctuary, the nave. Silence. Stillness but for the moth’s shadow play.
After using and returning Stormy’s key, I pushed the paneled door inward with some trepidation.
This particular fear had no rational basis whatsoever. Robertson wasn’t a magician able to appear by legerdemain inside a locked room.
Nevertheless, my heart played knock-and-rattle with my ribs.
When I felt for the light switch, my hand was not pinned to the wall by either a stiletto or a hatchet. The overhead light revealed a small, plain room but no large psychopath with yellow yeast-mold hair.
To the left stood the prie-dieu, where the priest knelt to offer his private devotions before saying Mass. To the right were cabinets containing the sacred vessels and the vestments, and a vesting bench.
Stormy closed the sanctuary door behind us and with a thumb-turn engaged the deadbolt.
We quickly crossed the room to the outer sacristy door. I knew that beyond lay the east churchyard, the one without tombstones, and a flagstone path leading to the rectory where her uncle lived.
This door also was locked.
From within the sacristy, the lock could be released without a key. I gripped the thumb-turn…but hesitated.
Perhaps we had not heard or seen Robertson enter the nave from the narthex for the simple reason that he’d never come into the front of the church after I had glimpsed him ascending the steps.
And perhaps, anticipating that we would try to flee from the back of the church, he had circled the building to wait for us outside the sacristy. This might explain why I had sensed that we were moving toward danger rather than away from it.
“What’s wrong?” Stormy asked.
