I shushed her—a fatal mistake in any circumstances but these—and listened at the crack between the door and the jamb. The thinnest breath of a warm draft tickled my ear, but with it came no sounds from outside.
I waited. I listened. I grew increasingly uneasy.
Stepping away from the outer door, I whispered to Stormy, “Let’s go back the way we came.”
We returned to the door between the sacristy and the sanctuary, which she had locked behind us. But I hesitated again with my fingers on the deadbolt release.
Putting my ear against the crack between this door and jamb, I listened to the church beyond. No teasing draft spiraled down my auditory canal, but no telltale stealthy sounds came to me, either.
Both sacristy doors had been locked from the inside. To get at us, Robertson would need a key, which he didn’t possess.
“We’re not going to wait here till morning Mass,” Stormy said, as though she could scroll through my thoughts as easily as through a document on her computer.
My cell phone was clipped to my belt. I could have used it to call Chief Porter and explain the situation to him.
The possibility existed, however, that Bob Robertson had been overcome by second thoughts about the wisdom of assaulting me in such a public place as the church, even though at this moment there were no worshipers or witnesses present. Having reined in his rampant anger, he might have gone away.
If the chief dispatched a patrol car to St. Bart’s or if he came himself, only to find no smiley psychopath, my credibility would take a hit. Over the years, I had banked enough good will with Wyatt Porter to afford to make a withdrawal or two from my account, but I was reluctant to do so.
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician—but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.
Although I employ no sleight of hand, though what I offer is truth glimpsed by supernatural means, I am aware not only of the magician’s vulnerability but also of the danger of being the boy who cried wolf—or in this case, the boy who cried Fungus Man.
Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard’s thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.
As a miracle worker of sorts, I walk a wire, too high to make one misstep and survive.
Chief Porter is a good man, but he is human. He would be slow to turn against me, but if he was made to feel foolish and gullible more than once, that turn would surely occur.
I could have used my cell phone to call Stormy’s uncle, Father Sean, in the rectory. He would come to our aid without delay and without too many awkward questions.
Robertson, however, was a human monster, not one of supernatural origin. If he was lurking in the churchyard, he would not be deterred from violence by the sight of a Roman collar or by the brandishing of a crucifix.
Having put Stormy in jeopardy, I shrank at once from the idea of endangering her uncle, as well.
Two sacristy doors. The outer led to the churchyard. The inner led to the sanctuary.
Having heard nothing at either exit, I had to rely on intuition. I chose the door to the sanctuary.
Apparently the bouncing ball of Stormy’s intuition hadn’t yet rattled to a stop on any number. She put her hand atop mine as I took hold of the lock.
Our eyes met for a moment. Then we turned our heads to stare at the outer door.
This was an instance when the card that we had drawn from that carnival fortune-telling machine and our matching birthmarks seemed indisputably to be meaningful.
Without exchanging a word, we arrived at a plan that we both understood. I remained at the door to the sanctuary. Stormy returned to the churchyard door.
If when I unlocked my door, Robertson lunged for me, Stormy would throw open the outer door and bolt from the sanctuary, shouting for help. I would attempt to follow her—and stay alive.
TWENTY
THAT MOMENT IN THE SACRISTY DISTILLED THE essence of my entire existence: always between two doors, between a life with the living and a life with the dead, between transcendence and terror.
Across the room, Stormy nodded.
On the prie-dieu, a small book of prayers waited for a kneeling priest.
No doubt bottles of sacramental wine were stored in one of the cabinets. I could have used a little spiritual fortification.
I leaned hard against the sanctuary door to brace it. When I disengaged the lock, the bolt made a thin sound reminiscent of a razor sharpening against a strop.
Had Robertson been poised to burst in upon me, he ought to have reacted to the deadbolt retracting from the striker plate in the door frame. Of course he might be less of a hothead and more cunning than he had appeared to be when he’d stood in the graveyard, flipping us the finger.
Perhaps he suspected that I was wedging the door shut with my body and that I would snap the lock in place the instant that he tried to shove into the sacristy. Insane as he might be, he would nonetheless have some intuition of his own.
The Bob Robertson who left his kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, banana peels, and crumbs was too sloppy to be a wise strategist. The Robertson who kept the neat study and maintained the meticulous files in those cabinets of dread was, however, a different man from the one whose living room had featured drifts of sleazy magazines and well-read paperback romances.
I couldn’t know which Bob Robertson might be, at this moment, beyond the door.
When I glanced at Stormy, she made a gesture that meant either “get on with it” or “up yours.”
Leaning against the door with undiminished purpose, I turned the knob all the way to the left. It squeaked. I would have been amazed if it hadn’t.
I shifted my weight and let the door ease open half an inch…an inch…and all the way.
If Robertson waited at either entrance to the sacristy, he was outside in the churchyard. Standing in the ruddy reduction of the last red light, he must have looked like something that belonged under a granite headstone.
Stormy stepped away from her station. Together we quickly returned to the sanctuary from which we had been so eager to flee only two minutes ago.
The moth danced across the light, and again Christ seemed to twist upon the cross.
The lingering incense smelled not sweet, as before, but had a new astringency, and the votive flames throbbed with the urgency of arterial aneurysms about to burst.
Down the ambulatory, past the choir enclosure, through the gate in the communion railing, I half expected Robertson to spring at us from unlikely cover. He had grown into such a menacing figure in my mind that I would not have been surprised if he had dropped upon us from the vaulted ceiling, suddenly having sprouted wings, a furious dark angel with death upon his breath.
We were in the main aisle when a great crash and shattering of glass shook away the churchly silence behind us. We spun, we looked, but saw no wreckage.
The sacristy had been windowless, and there’d been no glass in the door to the churchyard. Nevertheless, that chamber, which we’d just left, seemed to be the source of these sounds of destruction. They rose again, louder than before.
I heard what might have been the vesting bench slamming against the vestment closets, heard wine bottles smashing, heard the silver chalice and other sacred vessels ricocheting off walls and cabinets with a reverberant metallic clatter.
In our haste to escape, we had left the light on in that room. Now, through the open door, secondhand movement was visible: a farrago of leaping shadows and flares of shimmery light.
r /> I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t intend to return to the sacristy for a look. Holding Stormy’s hand again, I ran with her along the center aisle, the length of the nave, and through a door into the narthex.
Out of the church, down the steps, we fled into a twilight that had nearly bled to death, had little red left to give, and had begun to pull purple shrouds over the streets of Pico Mundo.
For a moment I couldn’t fit the trembling key in the Mustang’s ignition. Stormy urged me to hurry, as if hurrying weren’t already my intention, and finally the key mated as it should, and the engine roared to life.
Leaving a significant offering of rubber in front of St. Bart’s, we traveled a block and a half on smoking tires, so fast that we almost seemed to have teleported, before I had the breath to say, “Call the chief.”
She had a cell phone of her own, and she entered Wyatt Porter’s home number as I gave it to her. She waited as it rang, said, “Chief, it’s Stormy,” listened, and said, “Yeah, it does sound like a weather report, doesn’t it. Odd needs to speak to you.”
I took the phone and blurted, “Sir, if you send a car to St. Bart’s real quick, you might catch that Robertson guy trashing the sacristy, maybe more than the sacristy, maybe the whole church.”
He put me on hold and made a call on another line.
Three blocks from St. Bartholomew’s, I pulled the Mustang off the street, into a Mexican fast-food franchise.
“Dinner?” I asked Stormy.
“After all that in the church?”
I shrugged. “The entire rest of our lives will be after all that in the church. Personally, I intend to eat again, and the sooner the better.”
“It’s not going to be the equal of my tower feast.”
“What could be?”
“I am starved.”
Holding the phone to my ear and driving with one hand as if that were still legal, I swung the Mustang into the line of vehicles waiting to get to the drive-up service window.
When Chief Porter came back, he said, “Why is he vandalizing St. Bart’s?”
“Don’t have a clue, sir. He tried to trap me and Stormy in the church belfry—”
“What were you doing in the belfry?”
“Having a picnic, sir.”
“I suppose that makes sense to you.”
“Yes, sir. It’s nice. We have dinner up there a couple times a month.”
“Son, I don’t ever want to catch you having dinner on the courthouse flagpole.”
“Maybe just hors d’oeuvres, sir, but never dinner.”
“If you want to come by here, we can still feed you two from the barbecue. Bring Elvis.”