half-inch of wax that remained.
In this inconstant pulse of light, the face on the porcelain figure of Mary was a portrait less of beatific grace than of sorrow. She appeared to know that the resident of the rectory was, these days, more a captive of fear than a captain of faith.
With Orson at my side, I climbed the two broad flights of stairs to the second floor. The felon freak and his four-legged familiar.
The upstairs hall was in the shape of an L, with the stairhead at the junction. The length to the left was dark. At the end of the hall directly ahead of me, a ladder had been unfolded from a ceiling trapdoor; a lamp must have been lit in a far corner of the attic, but only a ghostly glow stepped down the ladder treads.
Stronger light came from an open door on the right. I eased along the hall to the threshold, cautiously looked inside, and found Father Tom’s starkly furnished bedroom, where a crucifix hung above the simple dark-pine bed. The priest was not here; he was evidently in the attic. The bedspread had been removed and the covers neatly folded back, but the sheets had not been disturbed.
Both nightstand lamps were lit, which made that area too bright for me, but I was more interested in the other end of the room, where a writing desk stood against the wall. Under a bronze desk lamp with a green glass shade lay an open book and a pen. The book appeared to be a journal or diary.
Behind me, Orson growled softly.
I turned and saw that he was at the bottom of the ladder, gazing up suspiciously at the dimly lighted attic beyond the open trapdoor. When he looked at me, I raised a finger to my lips, softly hushed him, and then motioned him to my side.
Instead of climbing like a circus dog to the top of the ladder, he came to me. For the time being, anyway, he still seemed to be enjoying the novelty of routine obedience.
I was certain that Father Tom would make enough noise descending from the attic to alert me long before his arrival. Nevertheless, I stationed Orson immediately inside the bedroom door, with a clear view of the ladder.
Averting my face from the light around the bed, crossing the room toward the writing desk, I glanced through the open door of the adjoining bathroom. No one was in there.
On the desk, in addition to the journal, was a decanter of what appeared to be Scotch. Beside the decanter was a double-shot glass more than half full of the golden liquid. The priest had been sipping it neat, no ice. Or maybe not just sipping.
I picked up the journal. Father Tom’s handwriting was as tight and precise as machine-generated script. I stepped into the deepest shadows in the room, because my dark-adapted eyes needed little light by which to read, and I scanned the last paragraph on the page, which referred to his sister. He had broken off in mid sentence:
When the end comes, I might not be able to save myself. I know that I will not be able to save Laura, because already she is not fundamentally who she was. She is already gone. Little more than her physical shell remains — and perhaps even that is changed. Either God has somehow taken her soul home to His bosom while leaving her body inhabited by the entity into which she has evolved — or He has abandoned her. And will therefore abandon us all. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe because I have nothing else to live for. And if I believe, then I must live by my faith and save whom I can. If I can’t save myself or even Laura, I can at least rescue these pitiful creatures who come to me to be freed from torment and control. Jesse Pinn or those who give him orders may kill Laura, but she is not Laura anymore, Laura is long lost, and I can’t let their threats stop my work. They may kill me, but until they do
Orson stood alertly at the open door, watching the hall.
I turned to the first page of the journal and saw that the initial entry was dated January 1 of this year:
Laura has been held for more than nine months now, and I’ve given up all hope that I will ever see her again. And if I were given the chance to see her again, I might refuse, God forgive me, because I would be too afraid of facing what she might have become. Every night, I petition the Holy Mother to intercede with her Son to take Laura from the suffering of this world.
For a full understanding of his sister’s situation and condition, I would have to find the previous volume or volumes of this journal, but I had no time to search for them.
Something thumped in the attic. I froze, staring at the ceiling, listening. At the doorway, Orson pricked one ear.
When half a minute passed without another sound, I turned my attention once more to the journal. With a sense of time running out, I searched hurriedly through the book, reading at random.
Much of the contents concerned the priest’s theological doubts and agonies. He struggled daily to remind himself — to convince himself, to plead with himself to remember — that his faith had long sustained him and that he would be utterly lost if he could not hold fast to his faith in this crisis. These sections were grim and might have been fascinating reading for the portrait of a tortured psyche that they provided, but they revealed nothing about the facts of the Wyvern conspiracy that had infected Moonlight Bay. Consequently, I skimmed through them.
I found one page and then a few more on which Father Tom’s neat handwriting deteriorated into a loose scrawl. These passages were incoherent, ranting and paranoid, and I assumed that they had been composed after he’d poured down enough Scotch to start speaking with a burr.
More disturbing was an entry dated February 5—three pages on which the elegant penmanship was obsessively precise:
I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ….
Those seven words were repeated line after line, nearly two hundred times. Not a single one appeared to have been hastily penned; each sentence was so meticulously inscribed on the page that a rubber stamp and an ink pad could hardly have produced more uniform results. Scanning this entry, I could feel the desperation and terror that the priest had felt when he’d written it, as if his turbulent emotions had been infused into the paper with the ink, to radiate from it evermore.
I believe in the mercy of Christ.
I wondered what incident on the fifth of February had brought Father Tom to the edge of an emotional and spiritual abyss. What had he seen? I wondered if perhaps he had written this impassioned but despairing incantation after experiencing a nightmare similar to the dreams of rape and mutilation that had troubled — and ultimately delighted — Lewis Stevenson.
Continuing to page through the entries, I found an interesting observation dated the eleventh of February. It was buried in a long, tortured passage in which the priest argued with himself over the existence and nature of God, playing both skeptic and believer, and I would have skimmed over it if my eye had not been caught by the word troop.
This new troop, to whose freedom I have committed myself gives me hope precisely because it is the antithesis of the original troop. There is no evil in these newest creatures, no thirst for violence, no rage—
A forlorn cry from the attic called my attention away from the journal. This was a wordless wail of fear and pain, so eerie
Orson was so affected by the cry that he quickly padded out of the bedroom, into the hallway.
The priest’s journal was slightly too large to fit into one of my jacket pockets. I tucked it under the waistband of my jeans, against the small of my back.
