and opened the door a crack. Candles made a smear of light at the end of a long room, lighting a black cross and the kneeling figures of twelve men. The men were in white and I figured they were the Elders. I smelled incense. A mumble of words came from the men; they were praying. They knelt in a half circle around the cross, their backs towards me. I wondered where Penelope Grayson was.
After a while the men stopped praying and stood up. I got ready to carry the Princess away, but they went single file through a door near the cross. They were loaded down with food and bottles of wine and flowers. A current of air from the open door made the candles flicker, distorted the shadow of the cross on the wall. I heard chanting from the next room, and then I noticed something below the cross. It was a kind of a litter, but with short legs; and on it was a woman. A white cloth covered all her body except her head and her long blonde hair. I walked through the darkness to her. It was Penelope Grayson. Her eyes were wide open, but the pupils were as big as horehound drops. Her face was peaceful. When I put my hand over her eyes she didn't blink. She was full of dope.
They were still chanting in the next room. The voices of the Elders were deep. I tiptoed back and got the Princess. She muttered something and I hit her with the flashlight. I put her down by the litter and jerked off the white cloth. Penelope didn't have such a bad figure. Maybe a little thin, but it had possibilities. There was rouge on her face and breasts. I stripped the Princess and took Penelope off the litter and put the Princess in her place. I pulled some pins out of the Princess's hair so it hung down the way Penelope's had. The chanting stopped, and suddenly I got spooked. I threw the cloth over the Princess and picked up Penelope and the clothes and ran to the stairs. The girl didn't weigh anything at all, and under my palms her skin was cold. She didn't struggle. Maybe she thought it was part of the Ceremony. Outside the door, at the head of the stairs, I put the blouse and skirt on her. They were too big for her. Then I looked in the room.
The Elders were just coming back. They filed in, chanting again, and picked up the litter. They stood under the cross with the litter on their shoulders. Now one of them was singing along. I caught some of the words:
She is the choice one of her that bore her.
The daughters saw her, and called her blessed;
Yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her.
I didn't know what the hell that meant. The Elders walked slowly with the litter into the other room. I pulled out my watch and turned the flashlight on it. It was quarter past twelve. Grayson and the chief should be outside by now, but I didn't go after them. Instead I crawled past the cross to the far door and looked through. I saw the big room where McGee and I had looked at Solomon's casket. Four candelabra burned on the gold-leaf altar, and the Elders had set the litter down in front of them. I could see the gleam of the Princess's blonde hair. The Elders were chanting:
If she be a wall,
We will build upon her a turret of silver:
And if she be a door,
We will enclose her with boards of cedar.
Then an Elder with a clear tenor voice sang:
I am a wall, and my breasts like the towers thereof:
Then was I in his eyes as one that found peace.
They turned and walked in pairs down the aisle to the big front door of the temple. The one with the clear tenor voice sang:
Make haste, my beloved,
And be thou like to a roe or to a young hart
Upon the mountains of spices.
Then the last two turned and swung the big door shut. I couldn't hear them any more. I went a little further into the room and got that stink of decaying flesh. It was like the smell of a too-long-dead mule. I stepped to one side of the door, so the candles by the cross wouldn't shine on my back, and waited.
All at once I felt hair rise on the back of my neck. I couldn't see anything but candles burning in the big candelabra and the light sliding off the Princess's hair, but I was plenty scared. Then I saw it, and I was more scared even though I knew what was coming. The glass top of the coffin opened and a man sat up. He had on a white robe and above it his face looked blue-white, like fish skin. He got up and stepped out of the coffin. He was very tall; I guess six and a half feet, and very thin. He went to the altar and prayed, kneeling in front of the candles. Wind came through the room, making the candles waver, and he looked around. I crouched in the shadow made by the door. He prayed again and then he took a long knife with a gold hilt off the altar. He went over to the litter, holding the knife against his chest. He pulled off the white cloth and raised the knife high above his head. I could see the golden colour of the Princess's skin by his knees.
I turned and crawled through the door. Behind me I heard a sound, as though somebody had slapped a wall with a wet towel, and then a moan, but, brother, I never once looked back. I got up and ran past the black cross and got Penelope Grayson and carried her down the stairs. She struggled a little; I guess she knew something was wrong. I propped her against the wall in the basement and shuffled through the dark towards the outside door. Suddenly something, almost like a big hand against my chest, stopped me, and I knew then what I had to do before I got the others. I guess I had been going to do it all the time or I wouldn't have taken the key to the storeroom. I unlocked the padlock and lit a match and put the diamonds and the twenty-seven grand of the Vineyard's money back where they had come from. I thought about the rest of the money, but I couldn't do anything about it, and by the time I'd got the padlock closed again I was feeling a little better. I was never cut out for a thief, I guess.
I crossed the basement and went outside. When my eyes got used to the moonlight I saw them. They were waiting by a tree in back of the temple. I recognized Chief Piper and Grayson. About five detectives were there, too.
“We thought you weren't coming,” the chief said.
Grayson asked: “Where's Penelope?”
“She's safe.”
“Where?” he growled.
