Robin had some friends, one or two of which had stuck in Ryan’s memory, a giant called Little John and a fat priest who had been named Friar Tuck.
Now, as Ryan turned slowly to stare down the yawning railroad tunnels of a Winchester Model 24, 20-gauge, he gaped at the figure holding the lethal blaster.
He wore a long brown gown, like a woman’s dress, that fell to sandaled feet, tied at the waist with a length of knotted cord. A whip, twin to the one on the altar, was stuffed into the makeshift belt.
Ryan’s initial guess put him at close to six feet, but he was so fat it was hard to judge. Really big men often looked shorter than they were. He looked around three hundred pounds, but it was easy to see that a lot of that was hard muscle.
His face was round, with several wobbling chins, clean shaved. The top of his head had also been shaved in a kind of circle, exactly like the picture of the legendary Friar Tuck. The eyes were difficult to judge in the gloom of the church, but they were so dark they could have passed for black, almost buried behind layers of fat, looking like little currants that had been thrown hard into a vat of white dough.
And he was smiling.
“Welcome, dear pilgrims. Such a pleasant surprise to find a pair of worshipers waiting for my services so early on such a fine morning.”
“Not exactly worshipers, Father,” said Krysty, whose face had gone pale. Ryan also noticed that her sentient hair had responded to the alarming apparition by curling in on itself, tight on her skull.
He beamed at her. “What a deeply ecumenical comment, my dear child. For surely all of us are ‘not exactly worshipers.’ How aptly spoken.”
Ryan allowed his right hand to drop casually toward the butt of the holstered SIG-Sauer, on the blind side to the monk. But the man spotted the movement and gestured toward him with the barrels of the Winchester.
“No, no, no,” he tutted. “We have only just met and you are trying to force me to speed you to your own personal Gehennah. Pray make no hasty moves.”
“Gehennah? That near Savannah?” Krysty asked. “That’s where we’re bound when we spotted your church and we were just so taken with it.”
“Filthy whoring harlot,” he said, the broad smile untouched by the anger in his voice. “An untruth in the mouth of a strumpet is like unto worms in the brain of a camel.”
Ryan guessed that the man was crazier than a shit-house rat, but he was also as dangerous as a cornered rodent. The chubby finger was tight on the triggers of the scattergun, the mean little eyes not flickering from them.
“You live here?” Ryan asked, trying to turn the conversation into safer waters.
“I have a small home close by. But I am remiss. I am called Father Sandor by my poor flock.”
“There’s a ville nearby?” Krysty probed.
“Oh, indeed, yes. Praise the gods.”
Ryan was vaguely bothered by the strange smell that lurked underneath the reek of incense, a smell that also clung to the body and clothes of the fat monk.
“You don’t need the blaster, Father,” Krysty said, taking a casual step across to her left, trying to cover Ryan from the man’s vision.
But Father Sandor was alert, gesturing with the shotgun for her to move back again. “Stupidity’ll get you very dead, my child. Before your time. And who knows when the hour cometh? Be prepared, foolish harlot.”
“Interesting stained glass,” Ryan said, gesturing toward the windows, but the monk’s attention never wavered for a moment. “Unusual.”
Father Sandor stopped smiling, so suddenly that it was like a scream. “Enough talk.”
“You aiming to keep us here?” Ryan asked. “Won’t your flock get suspicious?”
The smile came back, frosty and bleak as pack ice. “My dear one-eyed dead man, my ‘flock’as you call themshit themselves if I even glance in their direction. They know that this is not as other churches, and this is what the dirt-poor triple-dumb bastards secretly need. Not to be loved. To be cursed and whipped and tortured and sometimes chilled. That is a form of religion that makes sense in their brutish lives.”