Grace looked into Brother Robert's eyes and for the first time sensed the enormity of the events taking shape around her. It made her weak. She turned to Mr. Veilleur. His eyes had a faraway look. He spoke, more to himself than to them.
"I don't know where he's been hiding these years, but now it seems he's found a way back."
"Satan has never been away," Brother Robert said. "But now he has taken human form for an all-out assault on humanity."
"Satan?" the man said. "Did I mention Satan?" He shrugged. "Never mind. The fact remains that you're going to need help."
"What kind of help?" Grace said.
"I don't know. Once there was someone, but he's gone. Now…"He paused and looked from Grace to Brother Robert to Martin. "Perhaps someone in your group is the key."
"Who?" Brother Robert said. "How can we tell?"
Mr. Veilleur turned and headed for the door. "I haven't the foggiest. But he'll have to be someone special. Someone very special."
And then he was gone, leaving Grace staring at Brother Robert and wondering who it might be.
Fourteen
Friday, March 8
1
"What's that song you're whistling, Father?"
Bill looked up and saw Nicky standing on the far side of his desk, all dressed and ready to spend the weekend with the Calders.
"A real oldie called 'It's a Great Day.' "
"What's so great about it?"
"Everything, Nicko. Everything. The sun's out, the work week is almost over, spring is only two weeks away. A great day from morning till night."
He felt almost giddy and had to rein in his feelings before they ran away with him. He couldn't share the details with Nicky just yet, but he had a feeling that come Sunday night they'd both have reason to celebrate.
Bill reached over his desk and straightened Nicky's tie. It was too red and too narrow to be fashionable, and it hung down below his tightly cinched belt, but it was the cleanest of the three red ties available. The collar of the white shirt was too big for his scrawny neck, and the sleeves of the blue blazer were too short for his gangly arms. The same was true of the gray slacks, which showed too much white sock below the cuffs.
All in all, a sight to give a Brooks Brothers salesman a case of the vapors, but it was the best they could do out of that motley collection of hand-me-downs and better-quality donated clothing they called the dress-up closet. But then again, Bill didn't want the kids going out on their home visits looking too well dressed. Nicky's attire screamed, Give this boy a home! And that was probably all to the good.
He was clean, that was the important thing. His dark hair had been washed and combed up in the front, which was a mixed blessing in a way—although it camouflaged some of the more misshapen aspects of his skull, it exposed more blackheads on his forehead. He had play clothes and some clean underwear in the battered canvas satchel on the floor beside him.
"Nervous?" Bill said.
"Nah. I've been to lots of these."
"No, sweat, ay? Just a cool cat taking off for the weekend."
"Okay." Nicky's smile was slow and shy. "Maybe a little nervous."
"Just be yourself."
His eyes lit. "Really?"
"On second thought…"
They both smiled at their private joke.
The intercom buzzed. "The Calders are here," said Sister Miriam's voice from the front office.
"We're on our way."
He took Nicky's satchel and placed an arm on his shoulder as he led him down to the first floor.
"This is it, kid. Strut your best stuff for these people and you'll be in Fat City."
Bill felt Nicky's arm go around his back and hug him.
2
Bill waved good-bye to Nicky as the Calders drove away with him in the backseat of their new Dodge, then hurried back to his office and pulled the letter from under the desk blotter. It had arrived this morning from the Maryland Provincial and he must have read it and reread it a dozen times since then. Loyola High School in Baltimore had a spot for him! He would have preferred Loyola College, but at least this was a step in the right direction. He could report there on June 1, and come September he could begin as an instructor in the religion department… if he still wished to trade his current post for that of high-school teacher.
Wished? He was dying to get out of his current post!
And what a great location they were offering him! Just forty-five minutes down the Baltimore-Washington Expressway and he'd be in the capital, right in the heart of the action. There was always something going on in D.C., such as the new civil-rights bill before the Senate right now.
And it would put him far away from Carol. A few hundred miles would serve to cool his night thoughts. Maybe then he could get some sleep.
He kissed the letter and slipped it back under the blotter.
Nicky's going to find himself a home, and I'm going to rejoin the human race.
He began humming "Everything's Coming Up Roses."
3
The ground was thawed and the weekend was promising to be a warm one, so Jonah decided to get an early start on the garden. Come Friday afternoon most weeks he was bushed by the time he got home from the plant. But lately he had been full of life, bursting with energy, and the vegetable garden was as good a place as any to work some of it off. Maybe he'd be able to bring in some lettuce this year.
The first thing he was going to do, though, was set up a decent perimeter fence to keep the rabbits out. He would have loved to set up coils of razor wire to shred the greedy little rodents as they hopped into the garden, but the neighbors would raise a fuss when the same thing happened to their wild little bastards as they took their usual headlong shortcut through his backyard.
So he'd have to settle for chicken wire.
He planned to set up a two-by-four post at each corner of the garden, then string the mesh between it. Three feet would be more than high enough.
He began digging the hole for the first corner post. About eighteen inches would do it. Jonah liked the slicing sound the spade made as he jammed it into the soft earth, loved to feel the countless rootlets part beneath the blade as he drove it deeper into the ground with his foot. There was something delicious in disrupting the delicate balance below. Years of interplay; of give-and-take between the soil, the nutrients, the bacteria, the insects, and the vegetation—all altered forever with the thrust of a shovel.
When he had dug down about a foot, the dirt began to turn red.
Strange. He hadn't known there was any clay around here. And then he saw that it wasn't clay but a red liquid seeping up through the soil. He lowered himself to his hands and knees for a closer look. He sniffed.
Blood.
Jonah's pulse suddenly picked up as a shudder of elation raced through him. This wasn't a hallucination. This was the real thing. Another in a long line of signs he had been gifted with throughout his life.
Breathless, he watched the thick red fluid well up in the hole until it reached the rim, then ooze off into the garden in a thin, slow rivulet. Jonah would have liked to have let it fill the garden, to watch it cool and clot as dusk fell, but there were no secrets in these tiny, crowded backyards around here. It wouldn't do at all to have the neighbors wondering what had happened in the Stevenses' yard.
Reluctantly he began shoveling the earth back into the hole, stoppering the crimson flow. When the sod was back in place, he stepped back, reined in his excitement, and stood there thinking.
Blood flowing in his backyard. How else could he interpret that but as a harbinger of death, the death of someone close to his home? It was also a sign that events were gathering speed, and that he should not waste his time tilling the earth.
Fifteen
Saturday, March 9
1
Bill was reading his daily office in his room when the phone rang, startling him. Only a handful of people had his private number, and when they called, it was usually with bad news. So he was espe
cially worried when he recognized Jim's voice.
"Jim! Is something wrong?" he said in a rush, remembering Carol's anxious call on Tuesday and Jim's vaguely hostile reception of his offer of help. Was Carol all right?
"No. Everything's fine, Bill. Really fine. I just wanted to apologize for acting so weird when you called me the other day."
"It's okay," Bill said, feeling his muscles uncoil. "We all get uptight now and again."
It was good to hear Jim sounding like his old self.
"Yeah, well, the will, the inheritance, the mansion, everything sort of combined to do a number on my head. Got me all bent out of shape. But I've got everything back in perspective now and I feel a whole lot better."
During the small talk that followed, Bill noticed that Jim danced away from anything that had to do with Hanley or the inheritance or who his mother might be. He gathered from Jim's too casual air and uncharacteristic use of jargon that he hadn't climbed completely out of the pressure cooker yet. He was dying to ask if he had learned anything about his mother but remembered how coolly that subject had been received on Tuesday, so he kept mum.
After hanging up, Bill sat by the window thinking how sad and ironic it was that just as he was reestablishing contact with an old friend, he was preparing to move a couple of hundred miles away.
And he was moving away. Old friend or not, Bill wasn't going to let anyone keep him here at St. F.'s. Nothing was going to delay his departure now that the Provincial had found a teaching spot for him.
He sat a while longer at the window, feeling unaccountably blue. What was wrong? Certainly he wasn't going to miss this place:
Then he realized that this was the time he usually played chess with Nicky. It seemed empty without him here scratching his misshapen head and picking his blackheads. But that was soon to be a part of the past. Nicky would be adopted by the Calders and Bill would be on his way to Baltimore.
He was about to return to his breviary when he noticed a late-model blue Dodge pull up to the curb in front of St. F.'s. It looked familiar. Just like—
Oh hell!
Nicky got out of the car and ran up the front steps, disappearing from view. Professor Calder got out of the driver's seat and followed him at a much slower pace. Bill quickly shrugged into his cassock and hurried downstairs.
Professor Calder was already on his way out when Bill arrived.
"What—?"
The professor waved him off. "It's not going to work," he said over his shoulder.
"Why not? What happened?"
"Nothing. He's just not right."
And then he was out the door and gone.
Bill was stunned. He stared at the slowly closing door in mute confusion, then turned to Nicky who was leaning against the far wall, looking at his shoes.
"What did you do this time?"
"Nothing."
"Bull! Let's hear it!"
"I caught him cheating at chess!"
"Oh, come on, Nicky! Give me a break!"
"It's true! Everything was going great until we started playing chess. I was winning with that bishop's gambit you showed me. He sent me out to the kitchen for another cup of hot chocolate, and when I came back, he had moved his queen's knight one square to the left."
"And you accused him of cheating?"
"Not right away. I just told him that the knight wasn't where it was when I'd left the room. He got all huffy and said, 'I'm sure you're mistaken, young man.' "
"Then what?"
"Then I called him a cheat!"
"Damn it, Nicky!" Bill felt his anger shooting straight to the boiling point, but he kept a lid on it. "Did it ever occur to you that you could be mistaken?"
"You know I don't make mistakes like that!" Nicky said, tears starting in his eyes.
That did it. Bill picked up Nicky's duffel bag and shoved it into the boy's arms. His jaw ached as he spoke through his teeth.
"Get out of the good clothes, put them back in the dress-up closet, then go to your room and stay there. Don't show your face till dinner."
"But he cheated!" Nicky said, his lips quivering.
"So what! Are you so damn perfect you can't overlook that?"
Nicky turned and ran toward the dormitory.
Bill watched him go. Then, for lack of anything better to do, he headed for his office. Once there, he lifted the blotter, pulled out the letter from Loyola High School, and sat there staring at it.
Damn, damn, damn!
He felt like a heel for yelling at Nicky like that. If there was one thing you could say about that kid, it was that he didn't lie. Another thing you could say was that his memory was damn near perfect—eidetic, in fact. He could picture entire pages of a book in his mind and read the text back verbatim. So Bill knew that if Nicky was concentrating on a chess game, he would have the position of every piece etched in his mind.
Which meant that Professor Calder had cheated.
So… the prof was a pompous toad whose ego wouldn't allow him to be defeated in chess by a bright ten-year-old kid, and Nicky was stupid for not letting the guy have his petty, tainted victory. And Bill had promised to stay on at St. Francis until Nicky was adopted.
What a screwed-up mess!
In spite of himself, he had to admire Nicky's intellectual honesty in calling Professor Calder out. Maybe he didn't want to be adopted by a phony and a cheat, but for chrissake, everybody made compromises in life! Nicky could have looked the other way!
His frustration finally reached the overflow point. With an angry growl Bill balled up the letter from Loyola High and bounced it off the far wall of his office.
I'm never getting out of here!
Which might not be an exaggeration, he realized. If he turned down this post, who knew when he'd get another offer of a teaching job?
There was only one thing to do: Take the job.
He scouted the floor of his office, found the letter, and flattened it out on the desk. He knew he had made a promise to Nicky, but he couldn't be bound by it if Nicky wasn't going to hold up his end. Maybe Nicky didn't want to leave St. F.'s. Okay, that was fine. But Bill Ryan wasn't going to rot here in Queens when there was so much to be done out there in the real world.
He began composing the letters he would have to write.
Sixteen
Sunday, March 10
1
You walk through the moaning forest outside Targoviste and revel in its beauty. Its splendid trees straddle the road that leads to the south, the road on which the Turks will approach. A young forest, only a few days old, yet numbering twenty thousand trees. When you grip the trunk of one of its saplings, the tips of your thumb and middle finger meet on the far side.
The wind does not sigh through the boughs of this forest. It screams.
Twenty thousand saplings, all freshly planted. Never have you experienced such a concentrated dose of agony. It is making you lightheaded, giddy. You lift your gaze to the upper levels of this forest where dear Vlad's impaled enemies—real and imagined, men and women and children, dead and dying, Romanians, Turks, Germans, Bulgarians, and Hungarians— all await Muhammad II.
It is a still forest, this. Although cries of pain fill the air, there is little or no motion among the boughs. For each victim has learned of the agony beyond bearing that attends the slightest movement. In their subjective time the nightmare started an eternity ago, when a long, sharp—but not too sharp—stake was driven deep into an anus or a vagina or down a throat, or simply poked through the abdominal wall, after which the hapless man, woman, or child was hoisted into the air upon that stake, which was then planted along the side of this road.
In the fortunate ones, the point of the stake quickly found a vital organ or artery, and death rescued them. You curse their limp, silent, blissful death. But in so many others, the stake moves more slowly, in short hops, remorselessly forging a path of torture through the innards as the weight of the body pulls it relentlessly downward. Sometimes there is a respite of sorts, as wh
en the point lodges against a bone and its progress is halted. Then every movement, even the slightest shudder of pain, must be avoided. And a breeze is the most dreaded thing of all.
You hear soft whimpering from just above your right shoulder. The pain-mad eyes of a young girl look down at you pleadingly. Evidently the stake within her has run up against something that will not let it pass. The eyes beg for help. You smile. Yes, you will help. You grasp the stake and shake it violently. You are rewarded by hoarse, mindless screeching as her body suddenly slips three inches lower. Blood rushes down the stake and runs over your hand.
You lick your fingers…
Carol awoke and ran to the bathroom, retching uncontrollably. These dreams! Tonight's was the worst, the sickest, the most real of all! What was wrong with her? Please, God! These dreams… when were they going to stop?
2
She was feeling better now, but the lingering memory of the dream had left her queasy. They'd run out of milk, so she'd gone down to Stan's Market for a quart, but now the waxed container sweated unnoticed in one hand along with the five-dollar bill and the box of Entenmann's doughnuts in the other as she stood at the counter and stared at a headline on one of the tabloids. She felt her mouth go dry as she read the words that filled The Light's entire front page.
WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTIST LEAVES ESTATE TO SELF!
Oh, my God, it can't be!
She dropped everything on the counter and snatched up the tabloid, praying it was just an awful coincidence, just another crackpot tale to go along with The Light's usual UFO, eye-injury, and freak-show contents.
"Story on page three" read the small print in the lower right corner. Her hands trembled as she opened the paper.
Please don't let it be!
But her prayer went unanswered. She almost screamed when she saw the byline, "by Gerald Becker."
The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) Page 137
