Punish the Sinners

by John Saul

  In the dreams he’d been back in the rectory, back with the priests, and they had been doing things to him. Things he didn’t want to think about. He’d tried to keep it from happening but there were six of them, and only one of him, and they could do anything they wanted to. Anything. And they did.

  He lay in bed, thinking about the dream, then decided to put it out of his mind. He rose from the bed, threw on a robe, and went into the living room.

  The chair had been moved away from the door.

  The chain hung loose.

  The door was unlocked.

  Peter tried to tell himself it wasn’t true, that he must have done it himself, in one of the restless periods during the night. But he knew he didn’t remember it No, something else had happened.

  Something unspeakable.

  He went quickly to the bathroom and dropped the robe from his shoulders. His back was covered with the strange red welts.

  25

  Marilyn Crane hadn’t slept all night. She covered a yawn as best she could and seated herself at the table. Her father didn’t even glance up from his paper, but her mother surveyed her critically. Marilyn wondered what she’d done wrong now.

  “Dressed for school?” Geraldine asked.

  Marilyn looked at her curiously. Was today a holiday? She searched her mind rapidly. “Shouldn’t I be?” For some reason she felt vaguely guilty.

  “I don’t see why,” Geraldine Crane said a little too sharply. “You’re not going.”

  “Of course I’m going to school,” Marilyn protested.

  Geraldine set down the frying pan she had been holding and faced her daughter.

  “Not today,” she said. “Not after what happened yesterday. Imagine, that poor child lying there all afternoon. It must have been terrible.” She clucked her tongue, her head bobbing sympathetically.

  Terrible for whom? Marilyn wondered. Certainly not for Penny Anderson. Why did everyone worry so much about what happened to people when they were already dead? It wasn’t as if Penny had been in pain. Penny’s face appeared before her again, the eyes wide open, the features frozen. Penny had looked almost happy.

  Marilyn kept her thoughts to herself. After all, nobody knew she had seen Peony.

  “But I want to go to school.”

  Her father lowered his newspaper and looked at her curiously.

  “I’d think you’d want to stay as far away from there as possible,” he remarked. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter, There isn’t going to be any school today, at least not at St Francis Xavier’s. I don’t know what they’re doing at the public school.” He shook the paper out again, prepared to drop the subject but Marilyn didn’t want to let it go.

  “Just because of Penny?” The newspaper went down again, and at the stove Geraldine froze.

  “Just because of Penny?” her father repeated, emphasizing the first word. “Marilyn, she killed herself.”

  It was the first time anyone had actually used those words, at least in front of her, and they echoed in her ears. “Killed herself …lulled herself … killed herself.…” Until that moment it hadn’t been real for her. Now it was. Penny had killed herself. By her own hand. Penny was dead. Marilyn looked from one of her parents to the other, then, wordlessly, left the table. A few seconds later they heard her tread on the stairs. Geraldine glanced toward the ceiling, as if her eyes could bore through the plaster and wood, and detect what was happening in the mind of the girl above. Then she shifted her gaze to her husband, whose interest was back on his newspaper.

  “Bill,” she said quietly, “something’s wrong.”

  He looked up at her, faintly annoyed. “You’re just catching on?”

  Geraldine ignored the sarcastic tone. “I’m not just talking about Karen and Penny,” she began.

  “And Janet Connally, and the Nelson girl,” her husband interjected.

  Tm talking about Marilyn,” Geraldine said.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Marilyn.” Bill’s nose was buried in the paper again. “Just growing pains.”

  “I don’t know,” Geraldine protested. “I think it’s something more.”

  “If something’s bothering her, shell tell us about it Greta always did. Why should Marilyn be any different?”

  Geraldine shook her head now, as if trying to jar loose a thought that was nagging at her. “They aren’t the same. They’re really quite different And something’s happening to Marilyn. Maybe I should talk to Monsignor about her.”

  Bill Crane turned the page of his newspaper. “Good idea. Why don’t you do that?”

  No one had told him school was canceled for the day. He had simply arrived at St Francis Xavier’s to find the place deserted. The sisters were nowhere to be seen. Monsignor Vernon, if he was around, wasn’t in his office. Peter had started to check his mail, then changed his mind. What if there was a message there? A message from the Monsignor? Better not to check at all.

  He hurried down the hill, aware of the strange silence that had fallen over Neilsville. Everywhere he looked, there were clusters of people, talking softly among themselves, and looking up now and then, suspiciously, as if by quick furtive glances they would be able to catch a glimpse of the evil in their midst.

  Peter felt the glances piercing him. They were looking at him, and wondering. Nothing much had ever happened in Neilsville until he came along. But since he had arrived, things had started going bad. How long would it be before the entire town became infected with whatever it was that was infecting the girls from St Francis Xavier’s? The only thing they could pinpoint was the outsider. Peter Balsam. The stranger. Not to be trusted.

  As he passed each group the silence deepened, and he could sense that he was the focus of it Then, after he passed, the talk would begin again, the heads drawn more closely together, lips dose to ears, but the eyes, always the eyes, following him as he made his way down Main Street

  As soon as he got to his apartment he called Margo.

  “Peter? Is that you?” He hadn’t spoken, and was pleased at the anxiety in her voice. He tried to mask his fears about the night before.

  “Want to go for a ride? I’ve got the day off.”

  “I didn’t sleep all night—” Margo hesitated.

  “Who did? But they canceled school, and I decided to go see the Bishop. I was going to borrow your car, but why don’t you come with me?”

  She almost refused, almost told him she was going to spend the day in bed. But she didn’t

  “I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes,” she said. Then, as an afterthought: “Are you going to take the tape?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Peter hedged. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  A silence, then Margo’s voice, very confident

  “You don’t have to tell him one of the voices is yours,” she pointed out pinpointing his hesitation. “The only voice that’s recognizable is Monsignor Vernon’s.”

  What she said was true, but still he hesitated, wishing there was some other way. He knew there wasn’t Without the tape, how could he expect the Bishop to believe him? He made up his mind.

  ““I’ll be waiting,” he said. “With the tape.”

  He hung up the phone, and opened the bottom drawer of the desk. He reached into the back of the drawer, groping for the tiny cassette. His fingers couldn’t find it. He pulled the drawer out further, and felt again.

  He was still searching when Margo arrived twenty minutes later. All the drawers had been emptied, and he was methodically going through their contents, though he knew it was useless. As soon as Margo saw what was happening, she knew.

  “It’s gone, isn’t it?”

  Peter nodded mutely.

  “Was it hidden?”

  Again, he nodded. “But no one searched for it. They knew exactly where it was.” Margo’s face clouded: was he accusing her?

  “Only one person knew where the tape was,” Peter went on. He looked at her with an anguish that tore at her. Whatever he was going through, he wasn’t
accusing her.

  “Who?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Me,” Peter said bitterly. “Pm the only one who knew where that tape was. So I must have taken it myself.”

  He told her about the night before, about locking himself in and chaining the door. Then about putting a chair in front of the door, to be extra sure. Then about the dreams, the dream in which he had been at the rectory, been back with the Society.

  “This morning the door was unlocked,” he finished. “The chain was loose, the chair was back over there … And I was a mess.”

  Margo sank onto the sofa, despair washing over her like a wave.

  “And you took them the tape?” she said softly. “Is that what happened?”

  “What else could have happened?” Peter answered, spreading his hands in a gesture of frustration. “The only thing I had on them, and I gave it to them myself.”

  “Maybe you didn’t,” Margo said suddenly, standing up. “Maybe you just hid it somewhere else, and forgot.” She began searching the room, methodically at first, but then more and more frantically, as Peter looked on. As suddenly as she had begun searching, she stopped. She looked at him, and for the first time Peter saw fear reflected in the depths of her eyes.

  “It’s no good, is it?” she said bleakly. “I won’t find it here, will I?”

  “No,” Peter said softly. “I don’t think you will.” He went to her and put his arms around her. She stiffened, then let go, her arms curling around him, holding on to him.

  “Oh, God, Peter, are they going to get you too?” She believes me, he thought. At least she believes me. But he didn’t have an answer for her question.

  Father Duncan looked up at them and smiled.

  “Mr. Balsam,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise.” But something in his face told Peter it wasn’t pleasant at all. A surprise, yes. But not pleasant. He could almost see the young priest trying to sneak a look at the calendar on his desk, hoping he had not made a mistake, hoping his name was not there.

  “It’s all right,” he said, trying to put him at his ease. “I don’t have an appointment.”

  It was the right thing to say. Father Duncan relaxed in his chair, and his smile suddenly became genuine.

  “Well, that’s a relief. Usually people come in here without an appointment, demand to see His Eminence, then insist that they set up an appointment two weeks ago.”

  “Then I can’t see him?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the secretary grinned. “Honesty should be rewarded.” He pressed the key on the intercom. “Mr. Balsam is here for his ten-o’clock appointment,” he said smoothly. He winked at Peter, then included Margo in the wink. There was an ominous silence from the intercom, then the Bishop’s voice crackled through.

  “I don’t see his name on my calendar,” he barked.

  “Really?” Father Duncan said smoothly. “My mistake; I must have forgotten. But we can’t take that out on Mr. Balsam, can we?”

  “Whom can we take it out on?” the Bishop’s voice came back.

  “Your next appointment,” Father Duncan said. “It’s Mrs. Chambers. She wants to arrange for you to give some spiritual guidance to her Girl Scouts.”

  “Little green trolls,” the Bishop muttered. “All right, show Balsam in.”

  Margo settled herself in the secretary’s office to wait, and Father Duncan ushered Peter into the inner office. The Bishop was on his feet, his hand out.

  “Nice to see you again, young man, however unexpectedly.” He tried to direct a severe look at Father Duncan and failed. “Any idea how long you can keep Mrs. Chambers at bay?”

  “She won’t wait more than twenty minutes,” the secretary warned.

  “Then let’s count on at least an hour’s chat, shall we? Sit down, Mr. Balsam, sit down.” The Bishop waited until Father Duncan was out of the room, then turned twinkling eyes back to Peter.

  “He’s terrific,” he said. “Always manages to get the people I want to see in, and keep the others out. But Mrs. Chambers won’t be easy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Peter apologized. “I should have made an appointment, but I didn’t know I’d have any free time till just a couple of hours ago.”

  “Of course you should have, but it doesn’t matter. I was going to have Father Duncan call you today anyway.” The sparkle left his eyes. “What’s going on in Neilsville?”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  It took nearly thirty minutes for Peter to reconstruct the entire story for the Bishop. He tried to make the realities of the Society of St. Peter Martyr as palatable as possible, but the Bishop prodded him. “Out with it, young man. I’m not a prude, and I’ve been around.”

  Peter told him as much as he could remember, and everything he and Margo had been able to piece together from the tape. The Bishop listened in silence.

  “And you think the Society is connected with the suicides in Neilsville?”

  “I do.”

  “It sounds pretty farfetched.”

  “I know it does. But what happened last night is pretty farfetched, too. “I’m sure I wound up in the rectory last night, and I know I didn’t want to go. I don’t remember going, I don’t remember being there, and I don’t remember coming home again. But I’m sure that’s where I was.”

  “And you think they got you there by using some kind of mind control.” The Bishop turned it over in his mind. “Frankly, I don’t think it’s possible.”

  “I wouldn’t have either, a few days ago. But when nothing makes any sense, you have to believe whatever the facts point to. Nothing else makes any sense at all—

  it’s got to be some form of mind control or hypnotism … or something.”

  “You make it ail sound rather sinister,” the Bishop commented.

  “It is sinister. Two girls are dead. Two more nearly died. At first I thought the Society was just a sick pastime for some unbalanced priests. But it isn’t, Your Eminence. It’s something else entirely. Monsignor Vernon believes he is Peter Martyr—his reincarnation. And they think Pm a reincarnation of St. Acerinus, a man named Piero da Balsama, the man who killed St. Peter Martyr. At first I thought it was harmless, but I don’t think so any more. I think they’re all very sick, and I think they’ve found some way to inflict their sickness on everyone else.”

  Bishop O’Malley leaned forward slightly.

  “I wish I could agree with you,” he said gravely, “but Pm afraid I can’t I talked to a—” He consulted a pad on his desk. “—Dr. Shields this morning.”

  “I know him.”

  “He thinks Neilsville is experiencing a suicide contagion.”

  “I know,” Peter said shortly.

  “Then you should also know that I agree with him,” the Bishop said. “It is quite obvious to me that what’s going on at St Francis Xavier’s is a hysterical phenomenon. And, quite frankly, it doesn’t surprise me. Dr. Shields told me that the sort of thing we seem to be experiencing usually—almost without exception-occurs in mental hospitals.” The Bishop paused, considering. “Unfortunately, in small towns, parochial schools can become very institutional. I think we’re going to have to begin making some rather radical changes in the structure of the school.”

  “Will that include Monsignor Vernon’s dismissal?” Peter asked. He supposed the question was rude, or at best impertinent, but he didn’t care. He felt his stomach tighten when the Bishop shook his head.

  “I don’t see that I can go that far,” he said gently. “Not right away, at least. It may become necessary if he refuses to go along with the changes I have in mind. But not now.”

  Peter stared at the Bishop. When he finally found his tongue, the words tumbled out

  “But he’s a danger now! It’s now that he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing! I had it all on the tape!”

  “But you don’t have the tape, do you?”

  Peter could only shake his head.

  The Bishop stood up. ‘I’m sor
ry Mr. Balsam—Peter. May I call you Peter?” Balsam nodded. “Peter, I just don’t see that anyone in the world would believe the story you just told me. I don’t believe it myself. I grant you that I don’t think much of the Society of St Peter Martyr, but all you’ve given me are a lot of impressions about things you can’t even remember. After all, you could be wrong.”

  It was over. Peter walked numbly through Father Duncan’s office, and Margo fell in step behind him.

  “It didn’t go well, did it?” she asked, knowing by his face that it had not “What are you going to do?”

  He didn’t answer the question for a long time. Instead, as he drove back toward Neilsville, he watched the barren countryside, and remembered how foreign it had looked to him when he had come in on the train only a few weeks earlier. Now, it all seemed terribly familiar. Now the countryside around Neilsville looked every bit as bleak as Peter Balsam felt

  Beside him, Margo Henderson maintained the silence. She, too, watched the desert go by, and wondered if there would ever be anything else for her. She was getting tired of desert; she’d lived in it too long. She’d hoped Peter Balsam would take her out of it. Instead, he was getting caught by it

  As they approached the outskirts of Neilsville, he suddenly took her hand. “I know what I’m going to do.” He said it so quietly she almost didn’t realize what he was talking about Then, remembering, she looked at him questioning.

  ‘Tm going to play my part,” Peter said quietly. ‘I’m going to be St. Acerinus.”

  BOOK FOUR

  St. Acerinus

  26

  Leona Anderson sat in her living room, staring vacantly ahead, trying to understand it She had sat like that all day, wordlessly, not hearing the condolences of her friends.

  She had listened to Monsignor Vernon that morning, heard him telling her why her daughter could not be buried in sanctified ground. She had known it, of course, but until the priest had come to tell her, she had not believed it

  “It’s that teacher,” she said bitterly, shattering the silence that had fallen over the room.