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 ofJesse 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