family matter, and as I no longer had any family, I put enormous value
on his high opinion of me.
The boxes on my left gave way to stacked wicker lawn chairs, a jumbled
collection of thatched and lacquered baskets made of wicker and reed, a
battered dresser with an oval mirror so grimy that I cast not even a
shadowy reflection in it, unguessable items concealed by drop cloths,
and then more boxes.
I turned a corner, and now I could hear Father Tom’s voice. He was
speaking softly, soothingly, but I couldn’t make out a word of what he
said.
I walked into a cobweb barrier, flinching as it clung to my face and
brushed like phantom lips against my mouth. With my left hand I wiped
the tattered strands from my cheeks and from the bill of my cap. The
gossamer had a bitter-mushroom taste; grimacing, I tried to spit it out
without making a sound.
Because I was hoping again for revelations, I was compelled to follow
the priest’s voice as irresistibly as I might have followed the music
of a piper in Hamelin. All the while, I was struggling to repress the
desire to sneeze, which was spawned by dust with a scent so musty that
it must have come from the previous century.
After one more turn, I was in a last short length of passageway.
About six feet beyond the end of this narrow corridor of boxes was the
steeply pitched underside of the roof at the east flank-the front-of
the building. The rafters, braces, collar beams, and the underside of
the roof sheathing, to which the slate was attached, were revealed by
muddy-yellow light issuing from a source out of sight to the right.
Creeping to the end of the passage, I was acutely aware of the faint
creaking of the floorboards under me. It was no louder or more
suspicious than the ordinary settling noises in this high redoubt, but
it was nonetheless potentially betraying.
Father Tom’s voice grew clearer, although I could catch only one word
in five or six.
Another voice rose, higher-pitched and tremulous. It resembled the
voice of a very young child-and yet was nothing as ordinary as that.
Not as musical as the speech of a child. Not half as innocent. I
couldn’t make out what, if anything, it was saying. The longer I
listened, the eerier it became, until it made me pause though I didn’t
dare pause for long.
My aisle terminated in a perimeter passage that extended along the
eastern flank of the attic maze. I risked a peek into this long
straight run.
To the left was darkness, but to the right was the southeast corner of
the building, where I had expected to find the source of the light and
the priest with his wailing captive. Instead, the lamp remained out of
sight to the right of the corner, around one more turn, along the south
wall.
I followed this six-foot-wide perimeter passage, half crouched by
necessity now, for the wall to my left was actually the steeply sloped
underside of the roof. To my right, I passed the dark mouth of another
passageway between piles of boxes and old furniture and then halted
within two steps of the corner, with only the last wall of stored goods
between me and the lamp.
Abruptly a squirming shadow leaped across the rafters and roof
sheathing that formed the wall ahead of me: a fierce spiky thrashing of
jagged limbs with a bulbous swelling at the center, so alien that I
nearly shouted in alarm. I found myself holding the Glock in both
hands.
Then I realized that the apparition before me was the distorted shadow
of a spider suspended on a single silken thread. It must have been
dangling so close to the source of the light that its image was
projected, greatly enlarged, across the surfaces in front of me.
For a ruthless killer, I was far too jumpy. Maybe the caffeine laden
Pepsi, which I’d drunk to sweeten my vomit-soured breath, was to
blame.
Next time I killed someone and threw up, I’d have to use a
caffeine-free beverage and lace it with Valium, in order to avoid