This new troop, to whose freedom I have committed myself gives me hope precisely because it is the antithesis of the original troop. There is no evil in these newest creatures, no thirst for violence, no rage—
A forlorn cry from the attic called my attention away from the journal. This was a wordless wail of fear and pain, so eerie and so pathetic that dread reverberated like a gong note through my mind simultaneously with a chord of sympathy. The voice sounded like that of a child, perhaps three or four years old, lost and afraid and in extreme distress.
Orson was so affected by the cry that he quickly padded out of the bedroom, into the hallway.
The priest’s journal was slightly too large to fit into one of my jacket pockets. I tucked it under the waistband of my jeans, against the small of my back.
When I followed the dog into the hall, I found him at the foot of the folding ladder again, gazing up at the pleated shadows and soft light that hung in the rectory attic. He turned his expressive eyes on me, and I knew that if he could speak, he would say, We’ve got to do something.
This peculiar dog not only harbors a fleet of mysteries, not only exhibits greater cleverness than any dog should possess, but often seems to have a well-defined sense of moral responsibility. Before the events of which I write herein, I had sometimes half-seriously wondered if reincarnation might be more than superstition, because I could envision Orson as a committed teacher or dedicated policeman or even as a wise little nun in a former life, now reborn in a downsized body, furry, with tail.
Of course, ponderings of this nature have long qualified me as a candidate for the Pia Klick Award for exceptional achievement in the field of airheaded speculation. Ironically, Orson’s true origins as I would soon come to understand them, although not supernatural, would prove to be more astonishing than any scenario that I and Pia Klick, in fevered collaboration, could have imagined.
Now the cry issued from above a second time, and Orson was so affected that he let out a whine of distress too thin to carry into the attic. Even more than the first time, the wailing voice seemed to be that of a small child.
It was followed by another voice, too low for the words to be distinct. Though I was sure that this must be Father Tom, I couldn’t hear his tone well enough to tell if it was consoling or threatening.
28
If I’d trusted to instinct, I would have fled the rectory right then, gone directly home, brewed a pot of tea, spread lemon marmalade on a scone, popped a Jackie Chan movie on the TV, and spent the next couple of hours on the sofa, with an afghan over my lap and with my curiosity on hold.
Instead, because pride prevented me from admitting that I had a sense of moral responsibility less well-developed than that of my dog, I signaled Orson to stand aside and wait. Then I went up the ladder with the 9-millimeter Glock in my right hand and Father Tom’s stolen journal riding uncomfortably against the small of my back.
Like a raven frantically beating its wings against a cage, dark images from Lewis Stevenson’s descriptions of his sick dreams flapped through my mind. The chief had fantasized about girls as young as his granddaughter, but the cry that I’d just heard sounded as though it had come from a child much younger than ten. If the rector of St. Bernadette’s was in the grip of the same dementia that had afflicted Stevenson, however, I had no reason to expect him to limit his prey to those ten or older.
Near the top of the ladder, one hand on the flimsy, collapsible railing, I turned my head to peer down along my flank and saw Orson staring up from the hallway. As instructed, he had not tried to climb after me.
He’d been solemnly obedient for the better part of an hour, having commented on my commands with not a single sarcastic chuff or rolling of the eyes. This restraint marked a personal best for him. In fact, it was a personal best by a margin of at least half an hour, an Olympic-caliber performance.
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.