That was as far as Jack got before Heather said: "I know the story. The drunk said something like 'that fucking racket--that fucking bloody fuck of a fucking organ making a sound that would wake the fucking dead.' Isn't that the story?"
"Yes, something like that," Jack said.
"I'll play that piece for you," Heather told him. "You can't hear much outside the walls of this church. Either the story is exaggerated, or that drunk was asleep in a pew. Not even Boellmann's Toccata could wake a drunk in Carruber's or North Gray's Close."
While the side door to Old St. Paul's, on Carruber's Close, was locked, the front entrance on Jeffrey Street was open. The church was empty, but the oil lamps by the altar were lit. They were always lit, Heather told Jack--even when she played the organ very late at night. "It's a bit spooky here at night," she confessed. "But you have to practice playing in the dark."
"Why?" he asked her.
"Lots of interesting things begin in darkness,"
his sister told him. "The Easter vigil service, for example. You can learn to play in the dark, provided you've memorized the music."
From the nave of the church, looking toward the high altar, the organ pipes stood nearly as tall as the stained-glass windows. The church was not vast, but dark and contained. One had no sense of the season outside, and--except for the muted light that made its way through the stained-glass windows and portals--no real sense of day or night, either.
Heather saw Jack looking at the Latin inscription on the altar. As Mr. Ramsey had observed, Jack struggled with Latin.
VENITE
EXULTEMUS
DOMINO
" 'Come let us praise the Lord,' " his sister said.
"Oh, right," he said.
"You'll get used to it," she told him.
Heather crossed herself at the altar and took off her backpack. Jack sat on one end of the bench beside her.
"I'll play something softer for you later," Heather said, "but Boellmann's Toccata isn't supposed to be quiet. And when you hear him play it, it'll be louder. A different church," she said softly, shaking her head.
Jack wasn't prepared for the way her hands pounced on the keyboard, transforming her. It was the loudest, most strident piece of music he'd ever heard inside a church. As the new chords marched forth, the old chords kept reverberating; the organ bench trembled under them. It was the soundtrack to a vampire movie--a Gothic chase scene.
"Jesus!" Jack said, forgetting he was in a church.
"That's the idea," Heather said; she had stopped playing, but Old St. Paul's was still reverberating. "Now go outside and tell me if you can hear it." She began the Boellmann again; it made his heart race to hear it.
Jack went out the Jeffrey Street door to the church and walked up North Gray's Close, toward the Royal Mile. The alley was dirty and smelled of urine and beer; there were broken pieces of glass where bottles had been smashed against the church, and empty cigarette packages and chewing-gum wrappers were littered everywhere. Halfway up the alley, Jack pressed his ear to the stone wall of the church; he could barely hear the Boellmann, just enough to follow the tune.
On the Royal Mile, you couldn't hear the organ at all--probably because of the traffic, or the other street sounds--and in Carruber's Close, either a restaurant's air conditioner or a kitchen's exhaust fan made too much noise in the alley for the toccata to be followable. The organ was a distant, intermittent murmur. But when Jack went back inside Old St. Paul's, the sound of the Father Willis was deafening. His sister was really putting herself into it.
As Heather said, the story about the drunk had been exaggerated--or the down-and-out must have been sleeping in a pew when the Boellmann came crashing down on him. The more important part of the story, Heather decided, was that William Burns had played the toccata so loudly that everyone inside the church--including Alice and the organist who was waiting his turn to play--had been forced to flee from the nave and stand outside in the rain.
"It was one of Daddy's bipolar moments," Jack's sister said. "I think that's what the story is really about. He drove your mother out in the rain, so to speak--didn't he?"
"He's bipolar?" Jack asked.
"No, he's obsessive-compulsive," Heather said, "but he has his bipolar moments. Don't you, Jack?"
"I suppose so," he said.
Heather was playing more softly now--she had moved on from the Boellmann. "This is from an aria in Handel's Solomon," she said, as softly as she was playing.
"Do you have bipolar moments, too?" Jack asked her.
"The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again," his sister said. "The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face, and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you--just watching you, waiting for you to wake up. I'm not talking about sex."