sufficient headroom to stand erect. Soaring from the eaves to my left,
the sharply pitched rafters cleared my head by six or eight inches.
Nevertheless, I moved defensively in a modified crouch.
The lamp was not dangerously bright, and the brass cone focused the
light away from me, so I moved to the mattress for a closer look at the
items arrayed beside it. With the toe of one shoe, I disturbed the
tangled blankets; although I’m not sure what I expected to find under
them, what I did find was a lot of nothing.
I wasn’t concerned that Father Tom would go downstairs and find
Orson.
For one thing, I didn’t think he was finished with his work up here in
the attic. Besides, my criminally experienced mutt would have the
street savvy to duck for cover and lie low until escape was more
feasible.
Suddenly, however, I realized that if the priest went below, he might
fold away the ladder and close the trapdoor. I could force it open and
release the ladder from above, but not without making almost as much
racket as Satan and his conspirators had made when cast out of
Heaven.
Rather than follow this passage to the next entrance to the maze and
risk encountering the priest and the Other on the route they might have
taken, I turned back the way I’d come, reminding myself to be light on
my feet. The high-quality plyboard had few voids, and it was screwed
rather than nailed to the floor joists, so I was virtually silent even
in my haste.
When I turned the corner at the end of the row of boxes, plump Father
Tom loomed from the shadows where I had stood listenin only a minute or
two ago. He was dressed neither for Mass nor bed, but was wearing a
gray sweat suit and a sheen of sweat, as if he’d been fending off
gluttonous urges by working out to an exercise video.
“You!” he said bitterly when he recognized me, as though I were not
merely Christopher Snow but were the devil Baal and had stepped out of
a conjurer’s chalk pentagram without first asking permission or
obtaining a lavatory pass.
The sweet-tempered, jovial, good-natured padre that I had known was
evidently vacationing in Palm Springs, having given the keys of his
parish to his evil twin. He poked me in the chest with the blunt end
of a baseball bat, hard enough to hurt.
Because even XP-Man is subject to the laws of physics, I was rocked
backward by the blow, stumbled into the eaves, and cracked the back of
my head against a rafter. I didn’t see stars, not even a great
character actor like M. Emmet Walsh or Rip Tom, but if not for the
cushion provided by my James Dean thatch of hair, I might have gone out
cold.
Poking me in the chest again with the baseball bat, Father Tom said,
“You! You!”
Indeed, I was me, and I had never tried to claim otherwise, so I didn’t
know why he should be so incensed.
“You!” he said with a new rush of anger.
This time he rammed the damn bat into my stomach, which winded me but
not as badly as it might have if I hadn’t seen it coming. Just before
the blow landed, I sucked in my stomach and tightened my abdominal
muscles, and because I’d already thrown up what was left of Bobby’s
chicken tacos, the only consequence was a hot flash of pain from my
groin to my breastbone, which I would have laughed off if I’d been
wearing my armored spandex superhero uniform under my street clothes.
I pointed the Glock at him and wheezed threateningly, but he was either
a man of God with no fear of death-or he was nuts.
Gripping the bat with both hands to put even more power behind it, he
poked it savagely at my stomach again, but I twisted to the side and
dodged the blow, although unfortunately I mussed my hair on a
rough-sawn rafter.
I was nonplussed to be in a fight with a priest. The encounter seemed
more absurd than frightening-though it was plenty frightening enough to