half-inch of wax that remained.
In this inconstant pulse of light, the face on the porcelain figure of
Mary was a portrait less of beatific grace than of sorrow. She
appeared to know that the resident of the rectory was, these days, more
a captive of fear than a captain of faith.
With Orson at my side, I climbed the two broad flights of stairs to the
second floor. The felon freak and his four-legged familiar.
The upstairs hall was in the shape of an L, with the stairhead at the
junction. The length to the left was dark. At the end of the hall
directly ahead of me, a ladder had been unfolded from a ceiling
trapdoor; a lamp must have been lit in a far corner of the attic, but
only a ghostly glow stepped down the ladder treads.
Stronger light came from an open door on the right. I eased along the
hall to the threshold, cautiously looked inside, and found Father Tom’s
starkly furnished bedroom, where a crucifix hung above the simple
dark-pine bed. The priest was not here; he was evidently in the
attic.
The bedspread had been removed and the covers neatly folded back, but
the sheets had not been disturbed.
Both nightstand lamps were lit, which made that area too bright for me,
but I was more interested in the other end of the room, where a writing
desk stood against the wall. Under a bronze desk lamp with a green
glass shade lay an open book and a pen.
The book appeared to be a journal or diary.
Behind me, Orson growled softly.
I turned and saw that he was at the bottom of the ladder, gazing up
suspiciously at the dimly lighted attic beyond the open trapdoor.
When he looked at me, I raised a finger to my lips, softly hushed him,
and then motioned him to my side.
Instead of climbing like a circus dog to the top of the ladder, he came
to me. For the time being, anyway, he still seemed to be enjoying the
novelty of routine obedience.
I was certain that Father Tom would make enough noise descending from
the attic to alert me long before his arrival. Nevertheless I
stationed Orson immediately inside the bedroom door, with a clear view
of the ladder.
Averting my face from the light around the bed, crossing the room
toward the writing desk, I glanced through the open door of the
adjoining bathroom. No one was in there.
On the desk, in addition to the journal, was a decanter of what
appeared to be Scotch. Beside the decanter was a double-shot glass
more than half full of the golden liquid. The priest had been sipping
it neat, no ice. Or maybe not just sipping.
I picked up the journal. Father Tom’s handwriting was as tight and
precise as machine-generated script. I stepped into the deepest
shadows in the room, because my dark-adapted eyes needed little armed
the last paragraph on the light by which to read, and I scanned the
page, which referred to his sister. He had broken off in mid
sentence:
“en the end comes, I might not be able to save myself I know that I
will not be able to save Laura, because already she is not
fundamentally who she was. She is already gone. Little more than her
physical shell remains-and perhaps even that is changed. Either God
has somehow taken her soul home to His bosom while leaving her body
inhabited by the entity into which she has evolved–or He has abandoned
her. And will therefore abandon us all. I believe in the mercy of
Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe because I have
nothing else to live for. And if I believe, then I must live by my
faith and save whom I can.
If I can’t save myself-or even Laura, I can at least rescue these
pitiful creatures who come to me to be freed from torment and
control.
Jesse Pinn or those who give him orders may kill Laura, but she is not
Laura anymore, Laura is long lost, and I can’t let their threats stop
my work.