“Sure.”
“I want to go downstairs and open the big locker and . . . and—”
“Just look at them for a while,” Yeshua supplemented.
“Uh-huh. An’ I want you to come. I know you can’t help work the door or anything, but I’d like you to come anyway. Okay?”
From no place and everyplace, all over the room, House said, “This is most unwise, Sherby.”
Sherby ignored him. “Will you?”
Yeshua nodded, and Father Eddi said, “I’ll go with you too, Sherby, if you don’t mind.”
Remembering the tall man with the tall hat, Sherby said, “That’s good. Come on,” and turned and hurried away, walking right through several people who failed to notice him and get out of his way, the little horse trotting after him, his hoofs loud upon the carpeted floor.
A wide door in the kitchen opened upon a flight of wooden steps. It was hard to persuade Smoky to go down them, but Sherby led to the best of his ability, saying, “
“Here with us.” Father Eddi had been walking up and down the steps energetically to show Smoky how easily it could be done, and was rather out of breath.
“I don’t see him.”
“What you saw—the hologram—isn’t here,” Father Eddi explained.
“I’d like to see him.”
“You don’t think much of them.” Father Eddi sat down on a step to wipe his forehead with the ragged hem of his brown habit. “So House did away with it. He’s here just the same.”
“Well, I’d like to see.”
“Then you shouldn’t have walked through the holograms upstairs, and should’ve wished your mother Merry Christmas.”
“Are you a Christmas person? Like Knecht Rupprecht and Christmas Rose?” Sherby turned around to look back at Father Eddi, which surprised Smoky so much that he went down another step without urging.
“I certainly am.”
“What makes you one?”
“One Christmas, I said a mass nobody came to except a donkey and an ox.”
“Is that all?”
“I’m afraid it is.” Father Eddi looked crestfallen. “I didn’t put myself forward to House as a Christmas person, you understand, my son. But donkeys have been my friends ever since that night, so when you said that Ali Baba could bring in Kawi I came too, remembering my midnight service for the Saxons and hoping that I might be of some use here.
“No doubt he forgot me and my service long ago, but I haven’t forgotten him, my son—no more than you’ve forgotten your father and mother in the frozen-food locker down here. How did you get their bodies down these steps, anyway? You can’t have carried them yourself.”
“Mariah and Jeremy were here then. House had them do it.
“Then they went away and left you here with House? That wasn’t very wise, I’m afraid.”
“House made them,” Sherby explained. “He’s supposed to take care of me when there’s nobody else to do it, and Mariah and Jeremy weren’t supposed to take me anywhere unless my mom said it was okay. House wouldn’t let them open the door as long as I was with them. They said they’d send somebody.”
“Somebody else will get here sooner, I’m afraid,” Father Eddi told him. “I will have some advice for you, if you can get the big stainless door open.”
“You could ask House to open it for me. He can do that. You could pretend like you’re doing it. You could put your hand on the handle and House would pull it and open the door and you could go inside and tell me to come in.” It was a lot of talking for Sherby, and made him glad that Father Eddi was not much bigger than he was.
“He won’t do it, my son,” Father Eddi said gently. “He doesn’t think it good for you to come down here and look at them. Neither do I. But if you get the freezer door open, I’ll have some advice to offer, as I told you.”
“
He untied the blue terry-cloth bathrobe belt, then tied its ends together in a new knot, pulling hard to make sure it would hold. That done, he looped it around the handle of the big freezer door, and put the other loop over Smoky’s head. Returning to the foot of the steps, he shouted, “
Smoky eyed him nervously.
“I think you’d better go back upstairs, my son,” Father Eddi said.
