Punish the Sinners

by John Saul

  “I’m sorry,” he said contritely. “I thought you were all familiar with Peter Balsam’s background. But I can see that you’re not.” He looked from one face to the next, as if trying to make up his mind whether to go on. He made his decision. “But since you aren’t,” he said, “I think it would be highly inappropriate of me to talk about him just now. Highly inappropriate.” He turned, and a moment later had left the room. The nuns, left to themselves, huddled together, trying to decide what the priest had been talking about.

  All but Sister Marie. Sister Marie remained in her seat, her eyes fixed on the door through which Monsignor Vernon had just passed.

  Peter Balsam spent most of that day alone in his apartment. In the middle of the morning he had gone out, gone downtown, just because the walls had begun closing in on him. Downtown, it was worse. Downtown, Neilsville closed in on him.

  They were staring at him openly now. There was no silence as he passed. Now, they raised their voices to be sure he heard what they were saying. Much of the talk was about Janet Connally:

  “Why did they let her out of the hospital?”

  “They thought she was all right. He said she was all right!” (A not very surreptitious look at Peter Balsam.)

  “He went to see her, you know.”

  “And they let him? Well, I never!”

  “Lord knows what he told her. but after that note she left—”

  The talk that wasn’t about Janet Connally was about him:

  “Comes from Philadelphia—”

  “Studied for the priesthood, but they threw him out—”

  “You know, he’s seeing Margo Henderson!”

  “But she’s divorced—”

  “Ever since he came to Neilsville—”

  That was the summation. Everywhere he went. Peter Balsam felt it bearing down on him. “Ever since he came to Neilsville—” The sentence was never finished, always left hanging to be completed by the listener. By noon he was back in his apartment, the door locked, the draperies drawn. He was beginning to feel like a caged animal, and he was sure he could sense them outside; the small-town people, passing by his building and looking at the closed-up apartment, and wondering what he was doing inside, what he might be planning in the darkness.

  He had not been accused. He had not been tried.

  But he had been judged, and found guilty.

  Peter Balsam wanted to leave Neilsville, wanted to pack his clothes and flee. It would be easy. He could simply walk once more through the town, and go to the train station. There would be a train at six o’clock. Once, he went so far as to pull his suitcases down from the closet shelf and open them on the bed.

  But he couldn’t do it. Not this time. He’d run away before—from the priesthood, then from his marriage. Besides, this time there was more to think about than himself. There were the children. If he left, it would go on and on, and nobody would know how to stop it Nobody would even understand it And why would they? It was simply too bizarre.

  Too bizarre, The words rang in his bead. It was too bizarre. There had to be something more. Something he was overlooking. In the middle of the afternoon, he went back to his books.

  First the story of the saints. He reviewed it all, what little there was.

  He read briefly over the paragraphs about Fiero da Verona, the fanatical Dominican priest who had roamed Italy during the early years of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and sinners, in the name of the True Faith and the Mother Church.

  Then he came to the man whose name was so similar to his own—Piero da Balsama, the heretic who had finally been driven too far, and waited in ambush one night to crush Verona’s head with a stone.

  Not that the killing had accomplished anything, Balsam realized. The Medieval Church had elevated its murdered Inquisitor to the status of saint, named him St Peter Martyr, and used his martyrdom to carry on the Inquisition. And apparently it had worked very nicely, for the murderer, poor Piero da Balsama, had repented, and joined an order himself. Eventually he had even joined his Inquisitor in the ranks of the saints.

  Piero da Balsama had become St Acerinus.

  Was it all really happening again? Balsam wondered. Had his old friend Pete Vernon really come to believe that the two of them were the ancient saints in reincarnation?

  He went over their histories in his mind. Certainly there were parallels beyond the simple coincidence of their names. Pete Vernon, since his elevation to Monsignor, had certainly taken on the sort of fanatical dedication to the Church that had been the hallmark of the Dominican Inquisitors.

  And Peter Balsam had certainly undergone some profound doubts of his own faith, the sort of doubts that once, long ago, would have branded him a heretic. But that was long ago. In the modern Church, questioning such as his was common. Many Catholic theologians, Balsam knew, had proposed more radical ideas than he ever had. But not in Neilsville. With a chill that turned his body to ice, Balsam remembered the massive black-clad figure of the Monsignor standing in the gym, pointing at him; remembered the light in his eyes and the word he had used: heretic.

  He remembered all the times he had tried to confront the priest, and all the times he had backed off in the face of the priest’s hypnotic wrath.

  Hypnotic.

  It was like a light had been switched on, and the darkness cleared away. The word stood out in Balsam’s mind, and images began to swirl around it

  The flickering candlelight

  The steady rhythms of the chanting.

  The memory lapses, when time had been telescoped, and hours had been compressed into minutes.

  The things Janet had told faim: “I’m being forced to do things I don’t want to do.” “It’s as if something’s controlling me, making me do things.”

  It had to be a form of hypnosis, but a form that went beyond the normal.

  Feverishly, Peter began going through his books; not the texts, but the odd volumes he had been collecting over the years, the flotsam and jetsam of parapsychology, psychic phenomena, and speculation.

  He picked up a piece here, a bit there. It was like fitting together extra pieces from several jigsaw puzzles to form something new. And when he was finished, it made a certain kind of sense.

  Monsignor Vernon had found a way to control minds.

  In his fanaticism he had stumbled onto a method of using the combined concentration of several minds to inflict his will on others. And it was working.

  The girls were dying.

  But why? Peter Balsam spent the rest of the afternoon worrying at the problem, turning it over in his mind, trying to fathom the motivations of the priest

  He knew it had to do with the girls. But was it just the four girls who had been victimized so far, or would there be more?

  And there was the problem of his own role. He tried to figure out how he fit into the scheme.

  He was sure that he did. Too many times Monsignor Vernon had insisted that he was vital to the Society of St Peter Martyr, although he certainly didn’t share their fanatical opinions. It was something else. It had to be.

  Something clicked in his mind. Something from his past, but way back in his past, when he had first come to the convent There was something about one of the boys, something none of them were supposed to talk about Could it have been about Pete Vernon? His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone.

  Marge’s voice brought him out of his reverie, and he glanced at the dock. The day was gone.

  “Want me to bring over some dinner?”

  “Yes. And I want you to spend the night.”

  There was a silence. Margo thought she detected something different in Peter’s voice, a sureness that she had never heard before.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  ‘Tm fine,” Peter replied “I finally put it all together, Margo. I know what’s happening around here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  ‘Tm positive. The only thing I don’t know is why it’s happening, but “I’ll find th
at out, too. And then “I’ll put an end to it all.”

  The confidence in his voice made up her mind for her. For the first time, Peter Balsam sounded as she had hoped he would sound.

  “I’ll bring some steaks. And my toothbrush.”

  While Peter Balsam and Margo Henderson ate dinner that night, and made love, and were happy together, Marilyn Crane found herself in turmoil. She tried to read, and she tried to watch television. Then she went up to her room, and tried to study. She couldn’t concentrate.

  She heard things in her mind. She heard a strange chanting, and voices calling to her. She imagined the voices were angels, and they wanted her to come to them.

  She knew she couldn’t. If the angels wanted her, they would have to come for her. She wished they would.

  She listened to the angels call out to her.

  She wanted to respond, wanted to heed their call.

  But it was sinful, and Marilyn didn’t want to sin. The Sorrowful Mother hated sin.

  Marilyn Crane forced herself not to listen to the voices.

  From the chimney on the roof of the rectory, smoke curled slowly into the sky.

  No one in Neilsville noticed it. They were all at home, worrying about their children, and watching them.

  28

  A somnolence lay over the town, and it was centered on Cathedral Hill, where the buildings of the church, the school, and the convent had taken on the air of a fortress. People moved slowly, forcing themselves through the motions of the day, as if by keeping up the appearance of normality they could somehow achieve it

  They watched each other, all of them. In every class, lessons came to a sudden halt as the teachers found themselves studying the faces of their students, searching for a clue as to who would be next

  The students, too, watched each other, and gossiped together between classes. But with them, there was almost a sense of anticipation, an excitement, as if they were spectators at a macabre circus. With the confidence of youth, each of them was sure that whatever force was striking out at them would inevitably hit someone else. Who?

  There was an unspoken consensus.

  As she moved through the day, Marilyn Crane could feel it. As long as she could remember, she had felt people watching her, felt them talking about her, felt them snickering silently at her. Now, she was sure, they had decided she was next, and they were watching her more intently than ever.

  It didn’t matter where she went; she could feel the curious eyes on her, examining her as if she were an exotic insect. And it wasn’t just her classmates, it was the Sisters, too. She heard the rustling of habits as the nuns began to keep a vigil over her. Every time she turned around one of them was there: a figure in black disappearing around a corner, or seeming to be busy with something else, or bending dose to another black-garbed figure, whispering something into an invisible ear.

  The days went by and her turmoil grew. As her emotions became more chaotic and her thoughts more confused, they knew. They knew, and they were waiting.

  She began spending more time in church. She stopped eating lunch, preferring to spend the hour in the sanctuary, losing herself in the Madonna, silently crying out to the serene figure to help her.

  She was rarely alone in the church; always there were two or three people scattered among the pews, each of them lost in his own meditations. Often they were the families of the girls who had already died, privately seeking solace for their loss, praying for understanding.

  Peter Balsam, at his own insistence, had returned to the school after only one day’s absence. But he had changed, and everyone noticed the change. They were watching him almost as closely as they were watching Marilyn Grane, and he knew why. Just as they thought Marilyn Crane would be the next victim, they thought he was responsible. Leona Anderson, in her grief, had done her work.

  Everywhere he went the watching eyes, the hostile stares, of the people of Neilsville frightened him. The nuns, too, had changed, had hardened toward him. He had tried to find out why, but none of them would tell him. They merely stared at him, as if to say “you know better than we.”

  Except Sister Marie. She came to him the day he returned to St Francis Xavier’s, and offered to help him.

  “Help?” he asked blankly. “Help with what?”

  “Before I left, you wanted me to translate something for you. Or at least try.”

  Peter remembered. The tape. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s too late.” Then: “Sister Marie, why did you leave?”

  A small frown crossed her brow. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “Just one of Monsignor’s quirks, I guess.”

  “Monsignor’s?”

  “He ordered me into retreat.” Sister Marie’s infectious grin suddenly lit up her face. “I don’t think he likes me. I’m afraid I just don’t take things seriously enough for him. Every time he thinks I’m getting out of hand—my words, not his—he sends me off to spend a few days in retreat Believe me, if you’d ever had to maintain the Silence for three days, you’d come back feeling more serious about everything, too.”

  Peter tried to remember exactly what Monsignor Vernon had told him about Sister Marie’s sudden absence. No, there was no conflict between what the priest had told him and what the nun was telling him now.

  “I’m sorry I had to go just then,” he heard the nun saying. “Was it terribly important? Whatever it was you wanted me to translate?”

  Peter shook his head briefly, and tried to smile. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I thought it was, but now Pm not sure. Anyway, it’s too late.”

  “Peto:,” Sister Marie said slowly, as if having a difficult time making up her mind to speak. “What you wanted me to translate—did it have anything to do with—with what’s been going on? The girls?”

  “I thought it did. But now “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Sister Marie asked bluntly.

  “I think I do,” Peter said uncertainly, wondering whether to take her into his confidence.

  Sister Marie chewed her lower lip. When she looked at him again there wasn’t a trace of her usual merriment left in her eyes.

  “A lot of people here think—” She broke off, embarrassed.

  “That I’m responsible for what’s happened to the girls?”

  She nodded.

  “What do you think?” Peter said softly.

  She stared at him, and Peter saw tears brimming in her eyes. “I—I don’t know what to think,” she blurted finally. Then she turned, and hurried away from him.

  Sister Marie hadn’t spoken to him since, nor had Peter sought her out

  Every day he was growing more exhausted. Only on the nights that Margo Henderson stayed with him did he let himself deep, and there had only been two of those nights. When she wasn’t with him, he stayed up, keeping himself awake with coffee, afraid to sleep alone. The exhaustion was showing in his eyes, and he knew it was not going unnoticed in Neilsville.

  He knew Leona Anderson had gone to Monsignor Vernon, demanding that Peter be dismissed immediately; he knew that the priest had refused. But he didn’t know why the Monsignor had refused—the chill between the two men had grown to the point where they rarely spoke now, and the obvious tension between them served only to give the town one more thing to whisper about.

  Occasionally Balsam himself wondered why he stayed, but each day he told himself that this would be the day he would find a way to be alone in the rectory, to search the study for whatever might be there that would fit the last piece into his puzzle. If there was anything, he had decided, it would be in the study, for it was in the study that the horror took place. Then, when he knew why the horror was perpetrated, he would know how to stop it

  His only solace was Margo Henderson. They began to spend each evening together; each evening Peter would reiterate his theory to Margo. And she would listen.

  But nothing was happening. Neilsville was quiet. The days were beginning to take on the dull sameness they had always
had, and Margo found it a relief. The town was still restless, people were still talking, but the tension was easing.

  Except that each evening Peter Balsam would tell her again that what they were going through was only a respite, that the horror would begin again.

  “But how can you be so sure?” she demanded one night “I mean, if anything’s going to happen, why isn’t it happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Peter said doggedly. “But I know it isn’t over yet I won’t be able to end it until I know why it’s happening.”

  Margo looked at his pale complexion and haggard eyes. It was becoming an obsession with him. Their evenings weren’t fun anymore; he was too wrapped up in a problem Margo was no longer sure even existed.

  “Even if you find out, what makes you so sure you can do anything about it?” She tried to keep her voice level, but her own growing doubts about Peter came through.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” Peter asked.

  Margo saw no point in denying it The doubts had been growing for days.

  “I don’t know,” she said, compromising with herself. “I want to believe yon, Peter. But it’s ail so—” She groped for the right word. “—so farfetched. Peter, it just isn’t rational.”

  “I never said it was,” Peter countered.

  “No, you didn’t” Margo complained. “Maybe if you had tried to make the whole thing sound reasonable it would be easier. But you dont. You just insist that I believe you. You know, there really isn’t any difference between you and Monsignor.”

  The words stung, and Peter winced. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said stiffly.

  “So am I,” Margo said coldly. “But it’s the way I fed, and I can’t do anything about it”

  Peter rose from his chair and went to the kitchen to fix himself a drink. As he pried the ice loose, and measured the liquor, he reflected on the fragility of the threads of faith. His faith in the Church had broken, and he had turned to himself. Now the carefully nurtured threads between himself and Margo had broken, too. Where could he turn now?

  He returned to the living room.

  Margo was gone.