the answer to that mystery and would almost certainly reveal it when he
had regained his composure.
Instead of asking the question at the heart of all that had happened
this night, I shakily apologized to the sobbing priest. “I’m sorry. I
I shouldn’t have come here. God. Listen. I’m so sorry. Please
forgive me. Please.”
What had my mother done?
Don’t ask.
Don’t ask.
If he had started to answer my unspoken question, I would have clamped
my hands to my ears.
I called Orson to my side and led him away from the priest, into the
maze, proceeding as fast as I dared. The narrow passages twisted and
branched until it seemed as though we were not in an attic at all but
in a network of catacombs. In places the darkness was nearly blinding;
but I’m the child of darkness, never thwarted by it.
I brought us quickly to the open trapdoor.
Though Orson had climbed the ladder, he peered at the descending treads
with trepidation and hesitated to find his way into the hall below.
Even for a four-footed acrobat, going down a steep ladder was
immeasurably more difficult than going up.
Because many of the boxes in the attic were large and because bulky
furniture was also stored there, I knew that a second trap must exist,
and that it must be larger than the first, with an associated
sling-and-pulley system for raising and lowering heavy objects to and
from the second floor. I didn’t want to search for it, but I wasn’t
sure how I could safely climb backward down an attic ladder while
carrying a ninety-pound dog.
From the farthest end of the vast room, the priest called out to
me-“Christopher”-in a voice heavy with remorse. “Christopher, I’m
lost.”
He didn’t mean that he was lost in his own maze. Nothing as simple as
that, nothing as hopeful as that.
“Christopher, I’m lost. Forgive me. I’m so lost.”
From elsewhere in the gloom came the child-monkey-not-ofthis-world
voice that belonged to the Other: struggling toward language, desperate
to be understood, charged with longing and loneliness, as bleak as any
arctic ice field but also, worse, filled with a reckless hope that
would surely never be rewarded.
This plaintive bleat was so unbearable that it drove Orson to try the
ladder and may even have given him the balance to succeed.
When he was only halfway to the bottom, he leaped over the remaining
treads to the hallway floor.
The priest’s journal had almost slipped out from under my belt and into
the seat of my pants. As I descended the ladder, the book rubbed
painfully against the base of my spine, and when I reached the bottom I
clawed it from under my belt and held it in my left hand, as the Glock
was still clamped fiercely in my right.
Together, Orson and I raced down through the rectory, past the shrine
to the Blessed Virgin, where the guttering candle was extinguished by
the draft of our passing. We fled along the lower hall, through the
kitchen with its three green digital clocks, out the back door, across
the porch, into the night and the fog, as if we were escaping from the
House of Usher moments before it collapsed and sank into the deep dank
tarn.
We passed the back of the church. Its formidable mass was a tsunami of
stone, and while we were in its nightshadow, it seemed about to crest
and crash and crush us.
I glanced back twice. The priest was not behind us. Neither was
anything else.
Although I half expected my bicycle to be gone or damaged, it was
propped against the headstone, where I had left it. No monkey
business.
I didn’t pause to say a word to Noah Joseph James. In a world crewed
up as ours, ninety-six years of life didn’t seem as desirable as it had
only hours ago.
After pocketing the pistol and tucking the journal inside my shirt, I
ran beside my bike along an aisle between rows of graves, swinging
aboard it while on the move. Bouncing off the curb into the street,
leaning forward over the handlebars, pedaling furiously, I bored like