Expecting to take a kick in the head from an ecclesiastical boot, I climbed higher nonetheless, into the attic. Evidently I’d been sufficiently stealthy to avoid drawing Father Tom’s attention, because he wasn’t waiting to kick my sinus bones deep into my frontal lobe.
The trapdoor lay at the center of a small clear space that was surrounded, as far as I could discern, by a maze of cardboard cartons of various sizes, old furniture, and other objects that I couldn’t identify—all stacked to a height of about six feet. The bare bulb directly over the trap was not lit, and the only light came from off to the left, in the southeast corner, toward the front of the house.
I eased into the vast attic in a crouch, though I could have stood erect. The steeply pitched Norman roof provided plenty of clearance between my head and the rafters. Although I wasn’t concerned about walking face-first into a roof beam, I still believed there was a risk of being clubbed on the skull or shot between the eyes or stabbed in the heart by a crazed cleric, and I was intent on keeping as low a profile as possible. If I could have slithered on my belly like a snake, I wouldn’t have been all the way up in a crouch.
The humid air smelled like time itself distilled and bottled: dust, the staleness of old cardboard, a lingering woody fragrance from the rough-sawn rafters, mildew spooring, and the faint stink of some small dead creature, perhaps a bird or mouse, festering in a lightless corner.
To the left of the trapdoor were two entrances into the maze, one approximately five feet wide, and the other no wider than three feet. Assuming that the roomier passage provided the most direct route across the cluttered attic and, therefore, was the one that the priest regularly used to go to and from his captive—if indeed there was a captive—I slipped quietly into the narrower aisle. I preferred to take Father Tom by surprise rather than encounter him accidentally at some turning in this labyrinth.
To both sides of me were boxes, some tied with twine, others festooned with peeling lengths of shipping tape that brushed like insectile feelers against my face. I moved slowly, feeling my way with one hand, because the shadows were confounding, and I dared not bump into anything and set off a clatter.
I reached a T intersection but didn’t immediately step into it. I stood at the brink, listening for a moment, holding my breath, but heard nothing.
Cautiously I leaned out of the first passageway, looking right and left along this new corridor in the maze, which was also only three feet wide. To the left, the lamplight in the southeast corner was slightly brighter than before. To the right lay deep sable gloom that wouldn’t yield its secrets even to my night-loving eyes, and I had the impression that a hostile inhabitant of this darkness was within arm’s length, watching and set to spring.
Assuring myself that all trolls lived under bridges, that wicked gnomes lived in caves, that gremlins established housekeeping only in machinery, and that goblins—being demons—wouldn’t dare to take up residence in a rectory, I stepped into the new passageway and turned left, putting my back to the impenetrable dark.
At once a squeal arose, so chilling that I swung around and thrust the pistol toward the blackness, certain that trolls, wicked gnomes, gremlins, goblins, ghosts, zombies, and several psychotic mutant altar boys were descending on me. Fortunately I didn’t squeeze the trigger, because this transient madness passed, and I realized that the cry had arisen from the same direction as before: from the lighted area in the southeast corner.
This third wail, which had covered the noise that I’d made when turning to confront the imaginary horde, was from the same source as the first two, but here in the attic, it sounded different from how it had sounded when I’d been down in the second-floor hallway. For one thing, it didn’t seem as much like the voice of a suffering child as it had earlier. More disconcerting: The weirdness factor was a lot higher, way off the top of the chart, as if several bars of theremin music had issued from a human throat.
I considered retracing my path to the ladder, but I was in too deep to turn back now. There was still a chance, however slim, that I was hearing a child in jeopardy.
Besides, if I retreated, my dog would know that I had haired out. He was one of my three closest friends in a world where only friends and family matter, and as I no longer had any family, I put enormous value on his high opinion of me.
The boxes on my left gave way to stacked wicker lawn chairs, a jumbled collection of thatched and lacquered baskets made of wicker and reed, a battered dresser with an oval mirror so grimy that I cast not even a shadowy reflection in it, unguessable items concealed by drop cloths, and then more boxes.
I turned a corner, and now I could hear Father Tom’s voice. He was speaking softly, soothingly, but I couldn’t make out a word of what he said.
I walked into a cobweb barrier, flinching as it clung to my face and brushed like phantom lips against my mouth. With my left hand I wiped the tattered strands from my cheeks and from the bill of my cap. The gossamer had a bitter-mushroom taste; grimacing, I tried to spit it out without making a sound.
Because I was hoping again for revelations, I was compelled to follow the priest’s voice as irresistibly as I might have followed the music of a piper in Hamelin. All the while, I was struggling to repress the desire to sneeze, which was spawned by dust with a scent so musty that it must have come from the previous century.
After one more turn, I was in a last short length of passageway. About six feet beyond the end of this narrow corridor of boxes was the steeply pitched underside of the roof at the east flank—the front—of the building. The rafters, braces, collar beams, and the underside of the roof sheathing, to which the slate was attached, were revealed by muddy-yellow light issuing from a source out of sight to the right.
Creeping to the end of the passage, I was acutely aware of the faint creaking of the floorboards under me. It was no louder or more suspicious than the ordinary settling noises in this high redoubt, but it was nonetheless potentially betraying.
Father Tom’s voice grew clearer, although I could catch only one word in five or six.
Another voice rose, higher-pitched and tremulous. It resembled the voice of a very young child—and yet was nothing as ordinary as that. Not as musical as the speech of a child. Not half as innocent. I couldn’t make out what, if anything, it was saying. The longer I listened, the eerier it became, until it made me pause—though I didn’t dare pause for long.
My aisle terminated in a perimeter passage that extended along the eastern flank of the attic maze. I risked a peek into this long straight run.
To the left was darkness, but to the right was the southeast corner of the building, where I had expected to find the source of the light and the priest with his wailing captive. Instead, the lamp remained out of sight to the right of the corner, around one more turn, along the south wall.
I followed this six-foot-wide perimeter passage, half crouched by necessity now, for the wall to my left was actually the steeply sloped underside of the roof. To my right, I passed the dark mouth of another passageway between piles of boxes and old furniture—and then halted within two steps of the corner, with only the last wall of stored goods between me and the lamp.
Abruptly a squirming shadow leaped across the rafters and roof sheathing that formed the wall ahead of me: a fierce spiky thrashing of jagged limbs with a bulbous swelling at the center, so alien that I nearly shouted in alarm. I found myself holding the Glock in both hands.
Then I realized that the apparition before me was the distorted shadow of a spider suspended on a single silken thread. It must have been dangling so close to the source of the light that its image was projected, greatly enlarged, across the surfaces in front of me.
For a ruthless killer, I was far too jumpy. Maybe the caffeine-laden Pepsi, which I’d drunk to sweeten my vomit-soured breath, was to blame. Next time I killed someone and threw up, I’d have to use a caffeine-free beverage and lace it with Valium, in order to avoid tarnishing my image as an emotionless, efficient homicide
machine.
Cool with the spider now, I also realized that I could at last hear the priest’s voice clearly enough to understand his every word: “…hurts, yes, of course, it hurts very much. But now I’ve cut the transponder out of you, cut it out and crushed it, and they can’t follow you anymore.”
I flashed back to the memory of Jesse Pinn stalking through the cemetery earlier in the night, holding the peculiar instrument in his hand, listening to faint electronic tones and reading data on a small, glowing green screen. He’d evidently been tracking the signal from a surgically implanted transponder in this creature. A monkey, was it? Yet not a monkey?
“The incision wasn’t very deep,” the priest continued. “The transponder was just under the subcutaneous fat. I’ve sterilized the wound and sewn it up.” He sighed. “I wish I knew how much you understand me, if at all.”
In Father Tom’s journal, he had referred to the members of a new troop that was less hostile and less violent than the first, and he had written that he was committed to their liberation. Why there should be a new troop, as opposed to an old one, or why they should be set loose in the world with transponders under their skin—even how these smarter monkeys of either troop could have come into existence in the first place—I couldn’t fathom. But it was clear that the priest styled himself as a modern-day abolitionist fighting for the rights of the oppressed and that this rectory was a key stop on an underground railroad to freedom.
When he had confronted Father Tom in the church basement, Pinn must have believed that this current fugitive had already received superficial surgery and moved on, and that his hand-held tracker was picking up the signal from the transponder no longer embedded in the creature it was meant to identify. Instead, the fugitive was recuperating here in the attic.
The priest’s mysterious visitor mewled softly, as if in pain, and the cleric replied with a sympathetic patter perilously close to baby talk.
Taking courage from the memory of how meekly the priest had responded to the undertaker, I crossed the remaining couple of feet to the final wall of boxes. I stood with my back to the end of the row, knees bent only slightly to accommodate the slope of the roof. From here, to see the priest and the creature with him, I needed only to lean to my right, turn my head, and look into the perimeter aisle along the south flank of the attic where the light and the voices originated.
I hesitated to reveal my presence only because I recalled some of the odder entries in the priest’s diary: the ranting and paranoid passages that bordered on incoherence, the two hundred repetitions of I believe in the mercy of Christ. Perhaps he wasn’t always as meek as he had been with Jesse Pinn.
Overlaying the odors of mildew and dust and old cardboard was a new medicinal scent composed of rubbing alcohol, iodine, and an astringent antiseptic cleanser.
Somewhere in the next aisle, the fat spider reeled itself up its filament, away from the lamplight, and the magnified arachnid shadow rapidly dwindled across the slanted ceiling, shrinking into a black dot and finally vanishing.
Father Tom spoke reassuringly to his patient: “I have antibiotic powder, capsules of various penicillin derivatives, but no effective painkiller. I wish I did. But this world is about suffering, isn’t it? This vale of tears. You’ll be all right. You’ll be just fine. I promise. God will look after you through me.”
Whether the rector of St. Bernadette’s was a saint or villain, one of the few rational people left in Moonlight Bay or way insane, I couldn’t judge. I didn’t have enough facts, didn’t understand the context of his actions.
I was certain of only one thing: Even if Father Tom might be rational and doing the right thing, his head nevertheless contained enough loose wiring to make it unwise to let him hold the baby during a baptism.
“I’ve had some very basic medical training,” the priest told his patient, “because for three years after seminary, I was called to a mission in Uganda.”
I thought I heard the patient: a muttering that reminded me—but not quite—of the low cooing of pigeons blended with the more guttural purr of a cat.
“I’m sure you’ll be all right,” Father Tom continued. “But you really must stay here a few days so I can administer the antibiotics and monitor the healing of the wound. Do you understand me?” With a note of frustration and despair: “Do you understand me at all?”
As I was about to lean to the right and peer around the wall of boxes, the Other replied to the priest. The Other: That was how I thought of the fugitive when I heard it speaking from such close range, because this was a voice that I was not able to imagine as being either that of a child or a monkey, or of anything else in God’s Big Book of Creation.
I froze. My finger tightened on the trigger.
Certainly it sounded partly like a young child, a little girl, and partly like a monkey. It sounded partly like a lot of things, in fact, as though a highly creative Hollywood sound technician had been playing with a library of human and animal voices, mixing them through an audio console until he’d created the ultimate voice for an extraterrestrial.
The most affecting thing about the Other’s speech was not the tonal range of it, not the pattern of inflections, and not even the earnestness and the emotion that clearly shaped it. Instead, what most jolted me was the perception that it had meaning. I was not listening merely to a babble of animal noises. This was not English, of course, not a word of it; and although I’m not multilingual, I’m certain it wasn’t any foreign tongue, either, for it was not complex enough to be a true language. It was, however, a fluent series of exotic sounds crudely composed like words, a powerful but primitive attempt at language, with a small polysyllabic vocabulary, marked by urgent rhythms.
The Other seemed pathetically desperate to communicate. As I listened, I was surprised to find myself emotionally affected by the longing, loneliness, and anguish in its voice. These were not qualities that I imagined. They were as real as the boards beneath my feet, the stacked boxes against my back, and the heavy beating of my heart.
When the Other and the priest both fell silent, I wasn’t able to look around the corner. I suspected that whatever the priest’s visitor might look like, it would not pass for a real monkey, as did those members of the original troop that had been tormenting Bobby and that Orson and I had encountered on the southern horn of the bay. If it resembled a rhesus at all, the differences would be greater and surely more numerous than the baleful dark-yellow color of the other monkeys’ eyes.
If I was afraid of what I might see, my fear had nothing whatsoever to do with the possible hideousness of this laboratory-born Other. My chest was so tight with emotion that I couldn’t draw deep breaths, and my throat was so thick that I could swallow only with effort. What I feared was meeting the gaze of this entity and seeing my own isolation in its eyes, my own yearning to be normal, which I’d spent twenty-eight years denying with enough success to be happy with my fate. But my happiness, like everyone’s, is fragile. I had heard a terrible longing in this creature’s voice, and I felt that it was akin to the sharp longing around which I had ages ago formed a pearl of indifference and quiet resignation; I was afraid that if I met the Other’s eyes, some resonance between us would shatter that pearl and leave me vulnerable once more.
I was shaking.
This is also why I cannot, dare not, will not express my pain or my grief when life wounds me or takes from me someone I love. Grief too easily leads to despair. In the fertile ground of despair, self-pity can sprout and thrive. I can’t begin to indulge in self-pity, because by enumerating and dwelling upon my limitations, I will be digging a hole so deep that I’ll never again be able to crawl out of it. I’ve got to be something of a cold bastard to survive, live with a chinkless shell around my heart at least when it comes to grieving for the dead. I’m able to express my love for the living, to embrace my friends without reservation, to give my heart without concern for how it might be abused. But on the day that my father dies, I must make jokes about death, abo
ut crematoriums, about life, about every damn thing, because I can’t risk—won’t risk—descending from grief to despair to self-pity and, finally, to the pit of inescapable rage and loneliness and self-hatred that is freakdom. I can’t love the dead too much. No matter how desperately I want to remember them and hold them dear, I have to let them go—and quickly. I have to push them out of my heart even as they are cooling in their deathbeds. Likewise, I have to make jokes about being a killer, because if I think too long and too hard about what it really means to have murdered a man, even a monster like Lewis Stevenson, then I will begin to wonder if I am, in fact, the freak that those nasty little shitheads of my childhood insisted that I was: the Nightcrawler, Vampire Boy, Creepy Chris. I must not care too much about the dead, either those whom I loved or those whom I despised. I must not care too much about being alone. I must not care too much about what I cannot change. Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love, which means that to live I must care not about what I am but about what I can become, not about the past but about the future, not even so much about myself as about the bright circle of friends who provide the only light in which I am able to flourish.
I was shaking as I contemplated turning the corner and facing the Other, in whose eyes I might see far too much of myself. I was clutching the Glock as if it were a talisman rather than a weapon, as though it were a crucifix with which I could ward off all that might destroy me, but I forced myself into action. I leaned to the right, turned my head—and saw no one.
This perimeter passage along the south side of the attic was wider than the one along the east flank, perhaps eight feet across; and on the plywood floor, tucked in against the eaves, was a narrow mattress and a tangle of blankets. The light came from a cone-shaped brass desk lamp plugged into a GFI receptacle that was mounted on an eave brace. Beside the mattress were a thermos, a plate of sliced fruit and buttered bread, a pail of water, bottles of medication and rubbing alcohol, the makings for bandages, a folded towel, and a damp washcloth spotted with blood.