by Dean Koontz
The priest and his guest seemed to have vanished as if they had whispered an incantation.
Although immobilized by the emotional impact of the longing in the Other’s voice, I could not have been standing at the end of the box row for more than a minute, probably half a minute, after the creature had fallen silent. Yet neither Father Tom nor his visitor was in sight in the passageway ahead.
Silence ruled. I heard not a single footfall. Not any creak or pop or tick of wood that sounded more significant than the usual faint settling noises.
I actually looked up into the rafters toward the center of the space, overcome by the bizarre conviction that the missing pair had learned a trick from the clever spider and had drawn themselves up gossamer filaments, curling into tight black balls in the shadows overhead.
As long as I stayed close to the wall of boxes on my right side, I had sufficient headroom to stand erect. Soaring from the eaves to my left, the sharply pitched rafters cleared my head by six or eight inches. Nevertheless, I moved defensively in a modified crouch.
The lamp was not dangerously bright, and the brass cone focused the light away from me, so I moved to the mattress for a closer look at the items arrayed beside it. With the toe of one shoe, I disturbed the tangled blankets; although I’m not sure what I expected to find under them, what I did find was a lot of nothing.
I wasn’t concerned that Father Tom would go downstairs and find Orson. For one thing, I didn’t think he was finished with his work up here in the attic. Besides, my criminally experienced mutt would have the street savvy to duck for cover and lie low until escape was more feasible.
Suddenly, however, I realized that if the priest went below, he might fold away the ladder and close the trapdoor. I could force it open and release the ladder from above, but not without making almost as much racket as Satan and his conspirators had made when cast out of Heaven.
Rather than follow this passage to the next entrance to the maze and risk encountering the priest and the Other on the route they might have taken, I turned back the way I’d come, reminding myself to be light on my feet. The high-quality plyboard had few voids, and it was screwed rather than nailed to the floor joists, so I was virtually silent even in my haste.
When I turned the corner at the end of the row of boxes, plump Father Tom loomed from the shadows where I had stood listening only a minute or two ago. He was dressed neither for Mass nor bed, but was wearing a gray sweat suit and a sheen of sweat, as if he’d been fending off gluttonous urges by working out to an exercise video.
“You!” he said bitterly when he recognized me, as though I were not merely Christopher Snow but were the devil Baal and had stepped out of a conjurer’s chalk pentagram without first asking permission or obtaining a lavatory pass.
The sweet-tempered, jovial, good-natured padre that I had known was evidently vacationing in Palm Springs, having given the keys of his parish to his evil twin. He poked me in the chest with the blunt end of a baseball bat, hard enough to hurt.
Because even XP-Man is subject to the laws of physics, I was rocked backward by the blow, stumbled into the eaves, and cracked the back of my head against a rafter. I didn’t see stars, not even a great character actor like M. Emmet Walsh or Rip Torn, but if not for the cushion provided by my James Dean thatch of hair, I might have gone out cold.
Poking me in the chest again with the baseball bat, Father Tom said, “You! You!”
Indeed, I was me, and I had never tried to claim otherwise, so I didn’t know why he should be so incensed.
“You!” he said with a new rush of anger.
This time he rammed the damn bat into my stomach, which winded me but not as badly as it might have if I hadn’t seen it coming. Just before the blow landed, I sucked in my stomach and tightened my abdominal muscles, and because I’d already thrown up what was left of Bobby’s chicken tacos, the only consequence was a hot flash of pain from my groin to my breastbone, which I would have laughed off if I’d been wearing my armored spandex superhero uniform under my street clothes.
I pointed the Glock at him and wheezed threateningly, but he was either a man of God with no fear of death—or he was nuts. Gripping the bat with both hands to put even more power behind it, he poked it savagely at my stomach again, but I twisted to the side and dodged the blow, although unfortunately I mussed my hair on a rough-sawn rafter.
I was nonplussed to be in a fight with a priest. The encounter seemed more absurd than frightening—though it was plenty frightening enough to make my heart race and to make me worry that I’d have to return Bobby’s jeans with urine stains.
“You! You!” he said more angrily than ever and seemingly with more surprise, too, as though my appearance in his dusty attic were so outrageous and improbable that his astonishment would grow at an ever-accelerating rate until his brain went nova.
He swung at me again. He would have missed this time even if I hadn’t wrenched myself away from the bat. He was a priest, after all, not a ninja assassin. He was middle-aged and overweight, too.
The baseball bat smashed into one of the cardboard boxes with enough force to tear a hole in it and knock it out of the stack into the empty aisle beyond. Although woefully ignorant of even the basic principles of the martial arts and not gifted with the physique of a mighty warrior, the good father could not be faulted for a lack of enthusiasm.
I couldn’t imagine shooting him, but I couldn’t very well allow him to club me to death. I backed away from him, toward the lamp and the mattress in the wider aisle along the south side of the attic, hoping that he would recover his senses.
Instead, he came after me, swinging the bat from left to right, cutting the air with a whoosh, then immediately swinging it right to left, chanting “You!” between each swing.
His hair was disarranged and hanging over his brow, and his face appeared to be contorted as much by terror as by rage. His nostrils dilated and quivered with each stentorian breath, and spittle flew from his mouth with each explosive repetition of the pronoun that seemed to constitute his entire vocabulary.
I was going to end up radically dead if I waited for Father Tom to recover his senses. If he even had senses left, the priest wasn’t carrying them with him. They were put away somewhere, perhaps over in the church, locked up with a splinter of a saint’s shinbone in the reliquary on the altar.
As he swung at me again, I searched for that animal eyeshine I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson, because a glimpse of that uncanny glow might justify meeting violence with violence. It would mean I was battling not a priest or an ordinary man, but something with one foot in the Twilight Zone. But I couldn’t see a glimmer. Perhaps Father Tom was infected with the same disease that had corrupted the police chief’s mind, but if so, he didn’t seem as far gone as the cop.
Moving backward, attention on the baseball bat, I hooked the lamp cord with my foot. Proving myself a worthy victim for an aging, overweight priest, I fell flat on my back, drumming a nice paradiddle on the floor with the back of my skull.
The lamp fell over. Fortunately, it neither went out nor flung its light directly into my sensitive eyes.
I shook my foot out of the entangling cord and scooted backward on my butt as Father Tom rushed in and hammered the floor with the bat.
He missed my legs by inches, punctuating the assault with that now-familiar accusation in the second-person singular: “You!”
“You!” I said somewhat hysterically, casting it right back at him as I continued to scoot out of his way.
I wondered where all these people were who supposedly revered me. I was more than ready to be revered a little, but Stevenson and Father Tom Eliot certainly didn’t qualify for the Christopher Snow Admiration Society.
Although the priest was streaming sweat and panting, he was out to prove he had stamina. He approached in the stooped, hunch-shouldered, rolling lurch of a troll, as if he were on a work-release program from under the bridge to which he was usually committed. This cramped posture allowe
d him to raise the bat high over his head without cracking it against an overhanging rafter. He wanted to keep it high over his head because he clearly intended to play Babe Ruth with my skull and make my brains squirt out my ears.
Eyeshine or no eyeshine, I was going to have to blast the chubby little guy without delay. I couldn’t scoot backward as fast as he could troll-walk toward me, and although I was a little hysterical—okay, way hysterical—I could figure the odds well enough to know that even the greediest bookie in Vegas wouldn’t cover a bet on my survival. In my panic, hammered by terror and by a dangerously giddy sense of the absurd, I thought that the most humane course of action would be to shoot him in the gonads because he had taken a vow of celibacy, anyway.
Fortunately, I never had the opportunity to prove myself to be the expert marksman that such a perfectly placed shot would have required. I aimed in the general direction of his crotch, and my finger tightened on the trigger. No time to use the laser sighting. Before I could squeeze off a round, something monstrous growled in the passageway behind the priest, and a great dark snarling predator leaped on his back, causing him to scream and drop the baseball bat as he was driven to the attic floor.
For an instant, I was stunned that the Other should be so utterly unlike a rhesus and that it should attack Father Tom, its nurse and champion, rather than tear out my throat. But, of course, the great dark snarling predator was not the Other: It was Orson.
Standing on the priest’s back, the dog bit at the sweat-suit collar. Fabric tore. He was snarling so viciously that I was afraid he’d actually maul Father Tom.
I called him off as I scrambled to my feet. The mutt obeyed at once, without inflicting a wound, not a fraction as bloodthirsty as he’d pretended to be.
The priest made no effort to get up. He lay with his head turned to one side, his face half covered with tousled, sweat-soaked hair. He was breathing hard and sobbing, and after every third or fourth breath, he said bitterly, “You….”
Obviously he knew enough about what was happening at Fort Wyvern and in Moonlight Bay to answer many if not all of my most pressing questions. Yet I didn’t want to talk to him. I couldn’t talk to him.
The Other might not have left the rectory, might still be here in the shadowy cloisters of the attic. Although I didn’t believe that it posed a serious danger to me and Orson, especially not when I had the Glock, I had not seen it and, therefore, couldn’t dismiss it as a threat. I didn’t want to stalk it—or be stalked by it—in this claustrophobic space.
Of course, the Other was merely an excuse to flee.
Those things that I truly feared were the answers Father Tom might give to my questions. I thought I was eager to hear them, but evidently I was not yet prepared for certain truths.
You.
He’d spoken that one word with seething hatred, with uncommonly dark emotion for a man of God but also for a man who was usually kind and gentle. He transformed the simple pronoun into a denunciation and a curse.
You.
Yet I’d done nothing to earn his enmity. I hadn’t given life to the pitiable creatures that he had committed himself to freeing. I hadn’t been a part of the program at Wyvern that had infected his sister and possibly him, as well. Which meant that he hated not me, as a person, but hated me because of who I was.
And who was I?
Who was I if not my mother’s son?
According to Roosevelt Frost—and even Chief Stevenson—there were, indeed, those who revered me because I was my mother’s son, though I’d yet to meet them. For the same lineage, I was hated.
Christopher Nicholas Snow, only child of Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow, whose own mother named her after a flower. Christopher born of Wisteria, come into this too-bright world near the beginning of the Disco Decade. Born in a time of tacky fashion trends and frivolous pursuits, when the country was eagerly winding down a war, and when the worst fear was mere nuclear holocaust.
What could my brilliant and loving mother possibly have done that would make me either revered or reviled?
Sprawled on the attic floor, racked by emotion, Father Tom Eliot knew the answer to that mystery and would almost certainly reveal it when he had regained his composure.
Instead of asking the question at the heart of all that had happened this night, I shakily apologized to the sobbing priest. “I’m sorry. I…I shouldn’t have come here. God. Listen. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please.”
What had my mother done?
Don’t ask.
Don’t ask.
If he had started to answer my unspoken question, I would have clamped my hands to my ears.
I called Orson to my side and led him away from the priest, into the maze, proceeding as fast as I dared. The narrow passages twisted and branched until it seemed as though we were not in an attic at all but in a network of catacombs. In places the darkness was nearly blinding; but I’m the child of darkness, never thwarted by it. I brought us quickly to the open trapdoor.
Though Orson had climbed the ladder, he peered at the descending treads with trepidation and hesitated to find his way into the hall below. Even for a four-footed acrobat, going down a steep ladder was immeasurably more difficult than going up.
Because many of the boxes in the attic were large and because bulky furniture was also stored there, I knew that a second trap must exist, and that it must be larger than the first, with an associated sling-and-pulley system for raising and lowering heavy objects to and from the second floor. I didn’t want to search for it, but I wasn’t sure how I could safely climb backward down an attic ladder while carrying a ninety-pound dog.
From the farthest end of the vast room, the priest called out to me—“Christopher”—in a voice heavy with remorse. “Christopher, I’m lost.”
He didn’t mean that he was lost in his own maze. Nothing as simple as that, nothing as hopeful as that.
“Christopher, I’m lost. Forgive me. I’m so lost.”
From elsewhere in the gloom came the child-monkey-not-of-this-world voice that belonged to the Other: struggling toward language, desperate to be understood, charged with longing and loneliness, as bleak as any arctic ice field but also, worse, filled with a reckless hope that would surely never be rewarded.
This plaintive bleat was so unbearable that it drove Orson to try the ladder and may even have given him the balance to succeed. When he was only halfway to the bottom, he leaped over the remaining treads to the hallway floor.
The priest’s journal had almost slipped out from under my belt and into the seat of my pants. As I descended the ladder, the book rubbed painfully against the base of my spine, and when I reached the bottom I clawed it from under my belt and held it in my left hand, as the Glock was still clamped fiercely in my right.
Together, Orson and I raced down through the rectory, past the shrine to the Blessed Virgin, where the guttering candle was extinguished by the draft of our passing. We fled along the lower hall, through the kitchen with its three green digital clocks, out the back door, across the porch, into the night and the fog, as if we were escaping from the House of Usher moments before it collapsed and sank into the deep dank tarn.
We passed the back of the church. Its formidable mass was a tsunami of stone, and while we were in its nightshadow, it seemed about to crest and crash and crush us.
I glanced back twice. The priest was not behind us. Neither was anything else.
Although I half expected my bicycle to be gone or damaged, it was propped against the headstone, where I had left it. No monkey business.
I didn’t pause to say a word to Noah Joseph James. In a world as screwed up as ours, ninety-six years of life didn’t seem as desirable as it had only hours ago.
After pocketing the pistol and tucking the journal inside my shirt, I ran beside my bike along an aisle between rows of graves, swinging aboard it while on the move. Bouncing off the curb into the street, leaning forward over the handlebars, pedaling furiously, I bored like an auger throu
gh the fog, leaving a temporary tunnel in the churning mist behind me.
Orson had no interest in the spoor of squirrels. He was as eager as I was to put distance between us and St. Bernadette’s.
We had gone several blocks before I began to realize that escape wasn’t possible. The inevitable dawn restricted me to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, and the madness in St. Bernadette’s rectory was to be found in every corner of the town.
More to the point, I was trying to run away from a threat that could never be escaped even if I could fly to the most remote island or mountaintop in the world. Wherever I went, I would carry with me the thing that I feared: the need to know. I wasn’t frightened merely of the answers that I might receive when I asked questions about my mother. More fundamentally, I was afraid of the questions themselves, because the very nature of them, whether they were eventually answered or not, would change my life forever.
29
From a bench in the park at the corner of Palm Street and Grace Drive, Orson and I studied a sculpture of a steel scimitar balanced on a pair of tumbling dice carved from white marble, which were in turn balanced on a highly polished representation of Earth hewn from blue marble, which itself was perched upon a large mound of bronze cast to resemble a pile of dog poop.
This work of art has stood at the center of the park, surrounded by a gently bubbling fountain, for about three years. We’ve sat here many nights, pondering the meaning of this creation, intrigued and edified and challenged—but not particularly enlightened—by it.
Initially we believed that the meaning was clear. The scimitar represents war or death. The tumbling dice represent fate. The blue marble sphere, which is Earth, is a symbol of our lives. Put it all together, and you have a statement about the human condition: We live or die according to the whims of fate, our lives on this world ruled by cold chance. The bronze dog poop at the bottom is a minimalist repetition of the same theme: Life is shit.
