That’s what had awakened him, or so he thought—the sound of the gate rasping open across the concrete. A moment later a car had started up somewhere down the block, and, lying there in bed, it had seemed nearly certain to him that someone had been in the backyard, and had made a noise going out. Now he wasn’t quite so certain. Ivy, his wife, would no doubt remind him of the time he’d woken up convinced he was in a submarine under the Indian Ocean….
And now that he thought about it, the noise could as easily have been the bare wisteria vines scraping the house. The garage door was locked. He could see the padlock from where he stood. The back doors of the house were dead-bolted. He walked softly down the driveway, listening hard, and slipped the latch on the gate, picking the wheel up off the concrete and swinging it open noiselessly. The backyard was quiet, the lawn pooled with rainwater. The stepping-stone path that led to the sheds behind the garage was wet, so there was no real chance of footprints. All in all, there was no indication of any prowler—nothing stolen, nothing out of order. If anyone had been back there, they were apparently only sightseeing.
Blame it on the wind. He went out through the gate again, lifting it to shut it and then easing the latch into place. It was too early in the morning to make noise. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, looking down toward Chapman Avenue and simply taking in the rainy darkness. A car rolled past the end of the block, its tires humming on the wet pavement, speeding up to beat the light at the corner. The neighborhood was dark and silent, and the sky was like something out of a painting, full of clouds illuminated by moonglow. What a morning! He was thankful all of a sudden that the wind had woken him up and lured him outside, as if it had something to show him.
A flock of birds rose into the air from the roof of St. Anthony’s Church a block away, and for a moment they glowed impossibly white in the moonlight, flying in a circle around the bell tower before alighting again. Then he saw a movement on the roof—a shadow silhouetted against the darker hedge of trees beyond. In an instant it was gone.
A man on the roof? At this hour? Walt stood watching, waiting to see it again. Except for the birds, the church roof remained empty of movement now.
He seemed to have prowlers on the mind. The neighborhood was apparently alive with them. There was probably some kind of cat-burglar convention over at the Twin Palms Motel. The wind blew straight through the flimsy cotton of his pajama shirt, and he thought about his bed upstairs, about how Ivy would yell at him when he climbed in with frozen feet.
Rain began to fall, and he turned and hurried toward the porch. Then, on a whim, he stopped at the steps, bending over to pinch through a half dozen pansy stems before going in through the door, locking the dead bolt behind him and carrying the little bouquet upstairs.
Back in the bedroom, he watched Ivy sleep for a moment. She lay tucked up in the heap of blankets she’d stolen from him in the night. She was a restless sleeper, and had a sort of tidal effect on blankets, which invariably shifted to her side of the world by morning. His side of the bed was pitifully bare except for the corner of the top sheet. He glanced at the clock: quarter to five, nearly time to get up anyway. He looked around for somewhere to put the pansies so that Ivy would find them when she woke up. An idea came to him, and he turned around and headed into the bathroom, where he dropped a pansy into each of the toothbrush slots in the brass holder on the wall, entwining the handle of Ivy’s toothbrush with the flimsy stem of the last flower.
Satisfied, he went quietly back out into the bedroom, took his shirt and sweater off the chair, and found his shoes and a pair of socks. He thought again about what he’d seen on the church roof. Something had startled the birds; he hadn’t simply imagined the shadowy figure. Still, what could he do about it? Call the cops? It was raining like in the tropics outside now. There wasn’t a chance in hell that they’d be interested in his observations. And it occurred to him that if someone had been on the roof, it was good odds that they were simply patching a leak during a lull in the storm—probably the minister himself. Surely it wasn’t someone breaking in; you didn’t break into a church by burrowing through the tile roof. He pushed the matter out of his mind and slipped downstairs again, anxious to put on a pot of coffee out in the garage.
WHEN HE SAW the intruder in the doorway, Father Mahoney stood up, his throat constricting, a rush of fear slamming through him. For a single terrible moment he was certain that the man wasn’t wearing a mask at all, that he actually had the face of a goat. He fought to control himself, but he simply couldn’t speak, even when the moment passed and he knew he was wrong. There was something odious about the mask, something filthy that he simply couldn’t abide, and without thinking he lunged forward, snatching at it, suddenly wanting to jerk it off the man’s head. He felt himself struck hard in the chest and he fell heavily back down into the chair. There was a low laugh from within the confines of the mask, and he threw up his hands and ducked his head as the intruder drew a homemade blackjack from inside his coat—a length of pink rubber hose with a bulbous tip wrapped in cloth tape.
The intruder cracked it down on the corner of the table, leaving a dent. Father Mahoney winced backward, pressing himself into the chair as the man walked slowly around the desk, his head bobbing. The man leaned over until the mask nearly brushed the priest’s ear. “Fatty,” he whispered, his voice pitched weirdly high. He pushed the taped piece of hose into Father Mahoney’s cheek and made little clucking sounds. Then he began to giggle, picking up a marking pen off the table and striding to the wall, where he jerked a painting of Job off its nail and let it drop to the floor. With the marker he wrote a filthy word on the white plaster.
He stopped giggling, turning around as if in alarm. He stood there swaying, his breath rasping within the mask. Abruptly he picked up the cup of coffee from the desktop and drank it through the mouth hole of the mask, half the coffee dribbling out from beneath the rubber chin and down his coat.
He pitched the coffee cup into the wall and slammed the blackjack across the cigar box full of shells, breaking apart the wooden panels of the box and knocking the whole thing to the floor, the shells scattering across the linoleum. He picked up one of the cowries and looked closely at it, making little smacking noises with his lips, as if he wanted to taste it. Carefully, he set it at the corner of the table, and then smashed it flat with a single, quick blow, dusting the fragments onto the floor before smashing the second one the same way. Then, one by one, he hammered the scallops and jewel-box shells into fragments, working methodically, as if smashing the shells was the one great purpose of his visit. He trod through the scattered pieces of seashell on the floor, stomping around on them, crushing them to powder beneath his feet. There was something clearly insane about it, a drooling madness, and yet he moved with a singleness of purpose, as if the seashells were an enemy that had to be utterly destroyed.
“What do you want?” Father Mahoney asked finally. His voice shook. The man stood among the trampled shells, hunched over, his breath wheezing in his throat. “We haven’t got much money,” the priest said, “not in the church. The offering …”
The man pulled a short piece of nylon cord from his coat, made a loop in the end of it, grabbed Mahoney’s wrist, and settled the loop over it, drawing it tight, yanking his other hand around and tying them both to the chair. Then he took a cloth bag from his pants pocket and pulled it over Mahoney’s head. The bag stank, as if something dead had been stored in it, and Mahoney closed his eyes, the idea of praying only now coming to him through the haze of fear and bewilderment.
For uncounted seconds he listened to the man walking back and forth in the room, as if he were pacing, uttering an odd chanting noise that was almost idiotic, the meaningless demonic gibbering of a man who had given up all claim to humanity. There was the sound of the blackjack thudding against something wooden, then a loud grunt followed by the crash of heavy furniture toppling—the carved cabinet that held the Host and sacramental wine. Bottles broke against the floor,
and Mahoney could smell the spilled wine.
Abruptly he found himself thinking that, thank God, the Host wasn’t blessed, but then it struck him that the idea was almost foolish; he was thinking almost like the man in the goat mask—that God, somehow, could be damaged by this kind of pathetic vandalism.
Almost immediately there was another thump and the clank of something metallic falling to the floor. The chalice? It was gold; no doubt he’d steal it. There was a racket of sound: the hand-bells falling, the clanking roll of the censer, then the scrape of hangers on wooden rods—the vestments being yanked out of the wardrobe. A fold of cloth settled over his head—probably an altar boy’s gown. He opened his mouth, sucking in air. The layers of cloth made it difficult to breathe, and he wondered suddenly if the man meant to kill him. The idea of suffocation terrified him, and he tore his mind away from the thought, forcing himself to visualize the picture in the stained glass of the windows.
Dimly he heard repeated blows of the blackjack and of glass breaking, and it came to him that the man was destroying the windows too, hammering the leaded joints apart, breaking out the glass. Surely he was making enough noise so that someone on the street would hear. But it was late, and the church and its buildings took up the entire square block….
Father Mahoney stood up, the chair legs coming up off the floor. He hunched away from the desk, bending his head to his chest to dislodge the cloth bag. “Stop!” he yelled. “In the name of God … !” He yanked at the ropes that bound his wrists, jerking up and down, full of fury now.
There was a silence, and then the sound of ragged breathing again, coming from somewhere behind him. Father Mahoney tensed, waiting for the blow, for the man to hit him with the blackjack. The hair on his neck crept, and he imagined the intruder standing behind him, the goat mask regarding him now, the blackjack upraised….
And then the sacristy door banged shut. He heard footsteps pounding across the tiles of the nave. The noise faded away, leaving the night silent again but for the sound of the rain.
2
GEORGE NELSON SAT in his law office on the Plaza, waiting uneasily for the arrival of a business associate—Murray LeRoy. Through the window he could see the Plaza fountain and the small wooden nativity scene next to it. A lamp in the grass cast light on the nativity scene as a discouragement to vandals, but the light apparently hadn’t done its job, because the packing-crate manger was kicked to pieces, its palm frond roof scattered into the street, and the plaster of Paris figures knocked over and broken. It was almost ironic: Nelson himself represented a citizens’ group opposed to the display of nativity scenes on public property—the suit against the city was still pending—and here someone had come along in the night and done the job single-handedly.
He picked up the phone and dialed LeRoy’s number. Nothing. LeRoy was already out, already on his way. There were only a couple of hours left before the arrival of Nelson’s secretary, and before then he wanted to be finished with LeRoy. There were a number of reasons for cutting LeRoy loose forever. Mostly it was because LeRoy was a little unsteady these days.
In fact, if his behavior yesterday morning was any indication, the man was positively cracking up, and that was a dangerous thing. He had looked like he’d slept in his clothes, and he hadn’t shaved for days. He was half drunk, too, at nine in the morning, and his head shook with some kind of palsy that had made Nelson want to slap him. Six months ago the man didn’t drink except at weddings, and then he didn’t enjoy it and was always willing to say so in a loud voice. Nelson knew that there had been good reasons for LeRoy to keep his personal life private, but he had the public persona of some kind of scowling Calvinist missionary, and that’s what made his downhill slide so strange—he was making it so damned obvious. The thought wasn’t comforting.
Nelson had no idea exactly what he’d do about it in the end, but this morning he intended to try to buy the man out. That was the simplest route—something he should have done two or three months ago when LeRoy first started to crack. He wondered suddenly if the business with the nativity scene had been LeRoy’s doing. It would certainly fit the pattern. If the man were arrested again, he’d probably babble like the nut he’d become.
He heard a sound then, like the laughter of cartoon devils. “Murray?” He stood up out of his chair, listening. He opened his desk drawer and slipped his hand in, sliding the loaded .38 to the front. Then he saw a glow beyond the window curtains, and he realized that what he heard now no longer sounded like laughter. There was a crackling, almost like fat sizzling on a griddle, and at that moment he smelled the burning. There was something sulphurous about it, something that nearly choked him even though the windows were shut and locked.
Abruptly it dawned on him that the building might be on fire, that LeRoy had torched it. Thank God the man had become an incompetent fool! He slammed shut the desk drawer and hurried out into the foyer, opening the coat closet and pulling out the fire extinguisher. In a second he had unlocked the door and was out on the sidewalk, yanking the little plastic cotter key out of the lever of the extinguisher. The streets were empty. He slowed down, fully expecting to find LeRoy himself squatting in the flowerbed and dressed up like a clown or a little girl. He angled out toward the street and peered into the alley, which was lit up now with flames.
At first it looked like someone must have dumped burning trashbags onto the pavement. The heat was intense and glowing with a corona of white haze that obscured the burning figure, whatever it was. The fire flickered, rising and falling as if something were literally breathing life into it. The effect was almost hallucinatory, and for a moment he seemed to be looking into the mouth of a burning, circular pit. He heard what sounded like voices, like human cries, and a sulphurous reek drifted skyward like a mass of whirling black shadows.
Clearly it wasn’t trashbags. A big dog? The burning thing had a face like an ugly damned goat. He saw then that there were shoes at the other end of it. A man! He pointed the nozzle of the extinguisher in the general direction of the body and squeezed the lever. White dust sputtered out of it, but it was as if a whirlwind encompassed the burning body, and the chemicals blew away uselessly in the air. The flames didn’t diminish; shouting at them would do as much good. He tried to get closer, but gave it up; there was no way that he intended to have his hair singed off over this. He pointed the extinguisher into the air and blew the rest of the contents in the direction of the flaming body, knowing it was pointless—no one could live through such a thing anyway—but wanting to make damn well sure that the extinguisher was empty when the investigators had a look at it.
There was something about the shoes…. He looked closely at them, recognizing them with a start of surprise—loafers, white, with tasseled laces.
God, it was Murray LeRoy! Someone must have dumped gasoline over him and lit a match. One of the shoes ignited just then, with an audible hiss, and Nelson backed away, turning around and heading up the sidewalk again, hurrying toward the door to the office, swept with relief and fear both.
This certainly solved the problem with LeRoy. He wouldn’t be babbling to anyone now. But who had done this? In his mind Nelson ran through his list of enemies. Its being done outside his office, in the early morning like this, that was the bad thing. LeRoy must have talked to someone, said something. God, but to whom? Nelson and his associates were involved in a lot of shaky dealings, but nothing that would warrant something like this.
Inside he locked the door before punching 911 into the phone and reporting the incident. He sat down then at his desk, taking out the .38. If someone wanted LeRoy dead this badly, there was no reason to think they wouldn’t want him dead, too. But who, damn it? Argyle? He was capable of it. It dawned on him just then that perhaps there were other explanations. The city didn’t have any real gang problems, but there’d been several incidents in the past couple of years of homeless people being mugged, and he seemed to remember something about a man set on fire somewhere—probably Santa Ana. Who coul
d say how long LeRoy had been in the alley? No doubt he was drunk as a judge and was easy prey for a gang of sadistic skinheads who happened to be out joyriding.
And then there was the possibility that LeRoy had simply gone to Hell.
He pushed the idea out of his mind. There were flashing lights outside the window now—a paramedics truck. He returned the gun to the drawer and went out, carrying the fire extinguisher. The fire was already out except for a weird flickering on the surface of the asphalt itself. The paramedics stood looking at the body, or what was left of it—only a heap of gray ash and charred fragments of bone. One of the shoes sat on the ground, strangely intact, but the other was gone.
“You called this in?”
“What?” Nelson looked up at the paramedic. He realized that he’d been gaping at the shoe with its ridiculous tassel. There was an ankle bone thrust up out of it, charred in half, and he wondered suddenly if there was still flesh on the foot. The idea made him sick, and he turned away and looked across at the Plaza, at the big grinning Santa Claus waving at the traffic coming up Glassell Street.
“Was it you that called, sir?”
He turned back, pulling himself together. “Yes. I tried to put the fire out, but this didn’t seem to do any good.”
“Probably too much heat,” the paramedic said. “If there’s enough heat it can blow this stuff right back at you. It’s like spraying a hose into the wind. You did what you could.”
Another truck pulled up, followed by a squad car, and in a moment the alley was full of investigators taking pictures and searching the ground, talking in undertones, their voices full of disbelief. There was a flurry of raindrops, and in moments the rain was coming down hard. Four firemen unfolded a tarp, trying in vain to keep LeRoy’s ashes dry while a plainclothes investigator hastily swept it all into a black metal dustpan that he emptied into a plastic sack. Nelson saw that there was a dime in among the ashes, and something else that might have been a tooth.
All the Bells on Earth Page 2
