A man in a white sheet was being stabbed to death by a dozen others, similarly clothed. A tall, powerful black man was strangling a slender young woman across a wide bed. A grizzled man in armor knelt on the floor, arms held tightly, while a shadowy figure was plucking his eyes from their sockets. A blond woman held out stumps of arms, mouth wide open to show the bloodied rags of her tongue. And in the last picture a wretched man was being drowned in what looked like a barrel of beer.
Krysty had also been looking at the stained glass, turning away from it with an expression of disgust. “Brilliantly done, but horrible,” she said. “Why put something like that in a church? Hideous.”
“Concentrate the mind on death,” Ryan said.
“I remember reading some plays by an old-time predark writer called Shakespeare, back in Harmony. I think these some of them, anyway, are from his plays, Mebbe the other side was the same before it got nuked.”
A large Bible stood open on a lectern in the shape of a brass eagle. Ryan walked to it, stopping by a carved plaque set in the wall.
This is a shrine to the blessed memory of Saint Antoninus of Padua and all penitents, remembering the legendary visit to this spot of Josephus of Arimathea, where it was once stated that this site on the Tennessee River was, perhaps, a hiding place of the Holy Grail.
“Holy Grail,” Ryan said. “I didn’t know that any of the old gospelers ever got this far west.”
Krysty had walked to the bottom of the tower, craning her head back, staring up at a single bronze bell, with a long red-and-white plaited rope dangling from it.
Ryan looked at the book on the lectern, realizing that it wasn’t actually like any Bible that he’d ever seen. It was open to the second chapter of the Dissertation of the Blessed Alphonse Donatien.
Only through pain and suffering shall there be redemption and an end to mortal weakness. Agony is seemly. There shalt be those who endure and tolerate the rending of their flesh and the splintering of their bones, and there shalt also be those that shall carry out such punishments in the name of all the holy ones.
“Sick stuff,” Ryan said, turning away.
Krysty had been unable to resist the temptation and had loosened the rope from its cleat, tugging gently at it.
The bell tolled immediately, sending out a booming note across the summer morning.
“Leave it,” Ryan snapped. “Want to rouse the whole bastard country against us?”
“Nobody here but us chickens, boss,” she said, her teeth flashing in the gloom of the belfry. “Take it easy, lover. I always wanted to do this.”
Ryan noticed that there was something lying on top of the altar. It was a multithonged whip, with tiny metal barbs knotted into each lash. All of them were stiff and stained black with what looked unmistakably like old, dried blood.
Suddenly the feeling of a threatening danger became much stronger. “Come on,” he called. “Something’s not straight about this place. Not a proper church.”
Krysty let go of the rope, letting it dangle loose, the bell carrying on ringing, quieter and quieter, until its whispering sound faded away.
“Probably be able to hear that down by the river,” she said. “Unless the noise of the water drowns it. Still, Mildred and J.B. would be close enough.”
Ryan joined her, peering up in the darkness at a narrow metal ladder that climbed into the tower, seeing the softly swinging, silent bell.
“Out of here,” he said urgently. “Before someone comes and brings trouble.”
Neither of them heard the door whisper open, but they both recognized the audible click of the twin hammers being drawn back on a scattergun.
“Welcome, pilgrims,” said a jolly voice.
Chapter Fourteen
In a wrecked vacation cottage somewhere up near what remained of the Great Lakes, Ryan had once found a stash of children’s books. Included was a beautifully illustrated copy of the adventures of Robin Hood, who had been an English outlaw in the Middle Ages who’d allegedly robbed the rich and given the proceeds to the poor. It was a way of life that had been a source of endless raucous amusement to the crew of War Wag One.