Chapelwood

by Cherie Priest

  He nodded.

  “Do you mind if we take a seat?” I asked, and when he did not object, I went to the edge of his bed and perched there, facing him. Wolf declined to join me on the quilt, but he stood beside me all the same.

  I wasn’t sure where to begin, but that was all right—the inspector had a plan, as usual. Not that it did him a great deal of good. He launched into his explanations: “Mr. Lorino, we’re here about—”

  The man in the rocker interrupted quickly. “You were sent by the stars, I know. It’s about the church in the trees, and a blade on a stick, and the men in white—except when they’re in black. You’re here, and I knew to expect you. They told me you’d come.” He spoke far faster than I’d expected he might, the words rattling out of his mouth one atop the other in a rapid rush.

  “Your sister told you we’d come,” Wolf insisted calmly.

  “She doesn’t know anything. She thinks you’re here because of the gray lady, but that was only the cause, not the reason. It was only a piece, only a note. A telegram from the solar system, and from the cosmos beyond it.”

  I realized I’d have to dive right into the fray if I wanted to get a word (let alone a question) in edgewise. “But I am here because of the gray lady. That’s what you called her, the woman in the picture you drew.” I fished it out of my bag and, while I unfolded it, I continued. “I’m missing her. I’ve been missing her for years.”

  I held it up and showed it to him, but he stared right past it, at me instead. “And you’ll miss her for all the years you have left. I’m sorry, but that’s what the patterns tell me. Her image was only a lure. Through her and through the old doctor you touched the in-between place; you engaged it, you battled it—yet you returned with your life, and your sanity. You are the middle point between then, and now. Between that, and this. The patterns request your assistance. They have recalled you from the middle distance to do battle again.”

  My throat tightened. “The . . . the patterns?”

  “In the stars. Good ones and bad ones, I’d say . . . but they say that’s not true. They say there are only patterns that align with our interests, and those which do not. I do not know how much the will of humanity can sway them, or adjust them, or deflect them. That’s the great question of the age, not the small ones—not the small patterns, small wars waged by Shapley and Curtis. Theirs is only a war of semantics, in the grand scheme—an argument between big and bigger with no idea how much bigger the biggest has biggened.”

  “I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand. I only wished to ask you about this drawing.” I still held it aloft, but it was drooping toward my lap.

  “Ask whatever you like. I don’t know her, and never did.”

  “Is she alive?” Wolf broached suddenly. It’s the question I would’ve presented, had I gotten the chance.

  “She is gone from this world.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Mr. Lorino frowned, and the left edge of his mouth twitched. “But I can’t answer the question you asked. She is gone, that’s the best I can tell you. She’s gone, and she won’t be back.”

  “Have you ever seen her before? In person?” I tried. Maybe the right arrangement of words would make the question better, or tease more information from him—since semantics seemed to matter.

  “Only in the bladed night, in my dreams after the axe.” He sighed. “Never in life, Miss Andrew. The drawing was only a little bait, a little candle in the darkness. They wanted you here. Or something wants you here, someone does. Someone wishes to fight blades with blades, to confront esoteric knowledge with esoteric experience—yours, and his.” He nodded at the inspector. “Someone. Something.”

  Wolf said, “I am the one who invited her.”

  “No,” he insisted stubbornly. “They did. They want you, too,” he added with a nod. “They want all the help they can get, because a pattern has been . . . bent.”

  “Bent?” The conversation was getting away from me. It had been steered well away from Nance, at least, and it looked like it was going to stay aimed in some other direction. I let the paper lie in my lap, but I held it almost for comfort, as if it could ground me while the strange tide of this man’s words worked to sweep me off my feet.

  “Bent. Manipulated. Forced out of balance. That’s a better way to put it,” he muttered to himself. “Balance, that’s a more correct term. There is balance in the universe—it was left in the wake of the old things. They left it behind, not that they meant to. It was only a happenstance, an unintended consequence of their leaving. Their upheaval was so great, so unprecedented, that everything they left behind, everything they failed to consume . . . it all aligned in favor of entropy, as a matter of self-preservation, you might say.”

  Inspector Wolf was stunned into silence, and I was right there with him.

  Our confusion agitated our host; he fidgeted with his Bible, and then tossed it aside. It hit the floor with a thud, its pages fluttering and then settling, open to some chapter in Daniel.

  It irked him, the way we did not grasp the universal truths he was doing his best to share with us—but what did we know about universal truths? Nothing. And what did we know of this man in the rocking chair? Very little, except that the dented place in the back of his head was where an axe blade had struck him, and although it had healed, it had left him a man who drew portraits of missing women—a man who chattered about entropy and the stars.

  • • •

  (I remembered, in the back of my mind, a tidbit about the Adventists—or rather, the woman who founded their church: She was a schoolgirl when she was hit on the head by a carelessly thrown rock. When she awoke, she could hear the voice of God. Or so it is said.)

  • • •

  “You will understand,” he told us, but I think he was trying to convince himself. “Someone else must understand—someone who can bend the pattern back, while there’s time to reshape it. Right now.” He leaned forward, and his tone took a turn for the conspiratorial. “Right now, the only men who understand the pattern wish to use that understanding for evil. Or, no. Not evil. Unbalance, yes. I’ll stick with that word. Balance. There is balance and unbalance, that is all.”

  I thought at first that this was his conclusion, his great final proclamation—so I took the pause to try one last time: “Please, Mr. Lorino. You’re the only one who can answer this for me . . . If the gray lady is gone, and she isn’t coming back, then where is she?”

  He didn’t exactly sneer, because he wasn’t exactly being cruel. The twist of his lips was more like a dismissive thing, like once again I was on the wrong track, asking the wrong questions. But if he wanted me to ask the right ones, he could damn well give me some hint about what they were!

  “No one can answer you. Not me, not anyone else.” Then his eyes went almost cunning, and it worried me. For a moment, I could not be certain if he was balanced, or unbalanced. “However, there are others you can ask. They will lie to you, of course; but the lies might tell you something all the same. Ask at the church,” he said, looking sideways over to Inspector Wolf. “He knows the one.”

  “Chapelwood?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question—I could see the certainty on his face, and the set of his jaw suggested resignation, too.

  “The unmakers of balance. The benders of patterns. It’s their magic, after all. They’re the ones who shouted the invitation out into the galaxy, the ones who have raised their trumpets to the great Milky Way—whether or not it’s the center of anything, or merely a small tendril in a greater picture, but the Great Debate is nothing, it means nothing. It’s not about the balance. It’s meaningless. The men at Chapelwood . . .” His attention wandered upward, to the small window over his head, and when he spoke again, his voice slipped from one thing to another. It dropped an octave. Syllable by syllable, it lost its manic warmth. “Ask them, but be careful about it. They’ve l
ost their offerings one by one by two by three, and they seek more to replace them. They’ll tell you anything, if it might keep you there—and you have a glaring weak spot, my lady.”

  For a tense, awful minute his voice rang in my ears, and it wasn’t his voice. Not the quick, nattering prattle of a madman who might not be mad, but the lower, richer, slower tones of a professor from upstate. His was the voice of a man who would’ve killed us all thirty years ago; and besides the sound of his words, there was a flash of the flat, terrible emptiness behind his eyes. I saw it, for all that it moved quickly—it darted across his face, fast and cold as a shark.

  My heart stopped. I felt it, I swear—it went cold and heavy, and I couldn’t breathe.

  Wolf put a hand upon my shoulder. “Miss Andrew?”

  I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so very dry.

  “Miss Andrew?” Mr. Lorino said my name now, and when he said it, he sounded like himself again. The memory of an old shark was gone, and only this little man in his little room remained. “Are you all right?”

  I would’ve answered, but a knock on the door spared me. A woman’s voice announced, “Gaspera, it’s me.”

  The woman who entered was younger than Mr. Lorino by perhaps as much as ten years. She was modestly dressed, with flat shoes and her hair in a tidy bun—but she wore a hint of rouge. Her eyes were tired but kind, and pretty in a doelike way.

  Inspector Wolf smiled broadly. “Miss Lorino, I’m so glad you could join us. Miss Lizbeth Andrew, this is Miss Camille Lorino.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” I whispered. My heart was moving again, but feebly; my eyes were not watering, but I felt some lightness in my head and saw a faint smattering of sparks. I wasn’t going to faint, was I? No, I told myself repeatedly. I will not faint.

  I did not faint.

  I said, “Your brother has been telling me about this drawing he made.”

  “It’s a picture of your sister—isn’t that right?” She closed the door behind her and came to sit beside me on the bed.

  “That’s correct. She . . .” I swallowed, desperate for the moisture. I would’ve given anything for a glass of water. “She disappeared thirty years ago. There’s been no sign of her since. No sign but this one.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, softly and with sympathy. “Gaspera, what did you tell her? Could you help?”

  “Not at all. Her Nance is lost, but,” he said to me rather than to Camille, “you should keep the drawing if you like it.”

  “Technically, it’s evidence,” Wolf said. It wasn’t quite an objection; he was only trying to move the conversation back to someplace more manageable. “In the axe murders, you know. That’s where I found it, in a box with other evidence.”

  “Evidence,” Mr. Lorino mumbled. “There’s evidence, and then there’s evidence. The attacker won’t be caught, not by the likes of you. Maybe he shouldn’t be.”

  “Gaspera, don’t say such things.”

  “I’ll say what I like,” he snapped at his sister. “If that’s the one privilege I gained by the bend in my skull, I’ll take it. The man who attacked us is misguided, but not so misguided as he seems. His heart is in the right place.”

  Camille Lorino looked at me with apology in her eyes. “I’m sorry, but you see how he is. Talking in circles, and I never know what it means.”

  He leaned forward and patted her knee. “It’s just as well. You have no part in this play, and I’m glad for that. It’s a small mercy. Maybe those are all the mercies we have left. But you don’t need to understand. They do.” He bobbed his head toward me, then Wolf. “They will unbend the pattern. Maybe they’ll even straighten the wrinkle—though if they don’t, he’ll straighten himself soon enough. Or someone else will do it for him . . . one of the robed men.”

  “Mr. Lorino, are you saying that you know who attacked you? Who murdered all those people?” Wolf asked. He was not quite incredulous, I think because he didn’t know how much to believe. You could believe as little or as much as you liked when Mr. Lorino spoke . . . but good luck understanding any portion of it.

  He shook his head, and the change in angle showed me quite clearly where the dent behind his left ear was deep and long, though it’d healed enough that his hair was growing back around its deeply cleft scar. “Do I know his name? No. I only know his shape, and his motive. He wants to unbend the pattern, too—but he’s making a mess of it. I wouldn’t worry about him.”

  “You wouldn’t worry about an axe murderer?” I asked, trying to keep my eyebrows from lifting too high, or my voice from carrying too much insult.

  “Not this one. He’ll stop before long, or they’ll stop him. Another two or three victims at best. There are bigger things at stake,” he said with great and sudden earnestness. “More lives, exponentially more lives. Look at you, both of you—you’re worried for the solar system, when the whole universe writhes in peril!”

  His sister noticed the Bible on the floor, and bent to retrieve it—but he slapped it out of her hand, and rose from his seat. “It’s useless, and I want you to take it away! Worse than useless, because it makes promises but offers no answers!”

  “Gaspera, calm down,” she told him firmly, and then retrieved the Bible. She held it to her chest, and did not offer to return it. “I’ll take it away, if that’s what you want—but you’re the one who asked me for it in the first place.”

  “Take it away! Bring me something else, something with answers, not promises! I don’t need a prophet!” he all but shouted at her. “I need an astronomer!”

  The situation had tipped, or as Mr. Lorino would’ve put it, it had become unbalanced.

  It was time for us to leave, so we excused ourselves before we could rile him any further . . . and before Jeremiah could return and compel our exit. Camille apologized and apologized, and we reassured her again and again that we understood and took no offense.

  We left her holding the book against her bosom, staring with patience and sadness at her brother, waiting for something like sanity—or, at the very least, reasonableness—to return to him.

  Back down the linoleum halls we retreated, walking side by side, not touching or speaking until we’d made it outside. When the big doors closed in our wake and we stood in the sunshine, beside the trim green lawns and rows of meticulous flowers, I retrieved enough of my senses to say, “Chapelwood.”

  “It’s an estate outside of town. I’ve been looking into it.”

  “Coincidentally, so have I.”

  He gave me a crooked eyebrow and a pursed lip. “You don’t say . . . ?”

  I looked up at the bright blue sky, and blinked against the light. “Not Chapelwood exclusively, mind you. It’s more an interest in alternative forms of worship, and Chapelwood has attracted the attention of people who”—I cleared my throat, still so very dry—“people who watch such things.”

  “Church-watchers? How funny,” he said, but it didn’t sound like he thought it was funny or even odd. “I didn’t realize you were that sort of enthusiast.”

  “There is truth in the faith that raised me, but that’s not the only truth to be found. It’s not the only path . . . and some of the older, stranger paths . . . intrigue me.”

  “I know the feeling,” he told me with a grin. “Well, let’s find our driver. Ah, there he is—parked over there. I told him to give us an hour, but we’ve scarcely spent two-thirds of that.”

  “And where shall we go next? To Chapelwood?”

  “Not directly. First I want another word with Ruth, and I think you’ll want a word with her, too. Her father’s the man who murdered the priest, and conveniently enough for us, he’s on trial for the crime. Right this very moment.”

  “But what does the trial have to do with the church? Or his daughter?”

  He strolled off toward the car, and I went with him.

  “Edwin S
tephenson had recently been drawn into the Chapelwood congregation, and he dragged his family along with him. Ruth did not appreciate or approve of the place at all, which speaks well of her intuition, I’m sure. At any rate, there’s something knocking around in the back of my mind . . . something Lorino said, about Chapelwood having lost its offering. I think I know what that offering was, and I think Ruth may have more to tell us.”

  Leonard Kincaid, American Institute of Accountants (Former Member)

  SEPTEMBER 29, 1921

  The math is broken. Or I am broken, and haven’t figured it out yet—I can’t tell which. It’s not that things aren’t adding up, because they are; it’s just that they’re adding up to things that don’t make sense. I’m not finding the numbers of Chapelwood’s next targets . . . instead, I think the equations are trying to tell me something else this time.

  If algebra is the language of God, or the universe, or of space and time for all I know, then I wish I understood its syntax better. The grammar baffles me, and the sentence structure pulls me in circles.

  • • •

  I ran out of blackboard space.

  Rather, I woke up and found my blackboard covered in numbers so small, handwriting so very tight, that at first I thought I’d simply fallen asleep and—in another dreamy daze—I’d laid the chalk on its side and scraped it across the slate. Upon closer inspection, I saw that I was mistaken. Tiny, tiny numbers, all over the place. Tiny columns and tables, only some of them running left to right, top to bottom. Some of them crossed on the diagonal, and some even overwrote the blackboard’s wooden frame. In those weird little places, the text was not sharp enough for me to read it.

  I knew that I had written it. Even if I didn’t know my own script so well, there’s nobody else who comes or goes from this flophouse room, and I’ve paid it far enough in advance that even the proprietor can’t be bothered to check on me, unless I should cause trouble somehow. I never cause trouble, for him or anyone else. I never give anyone a reason to come inside, and I keep the door locked when I’m “home,” and when I’m not.