The Night Church Part 15

I put pen to paper confidently, trusting that those we serve will guide us through out troubles. I have belonged to them, as have you, all the days of my life. I have come to love their hardness, to embrace their danger.

I cannot call them evil, any more than I can call you anything but my beloved child. I hope my words will help you in your confusion and fear. Remember yourself. Re-member what you were before the hypnosis and what you are becoming again. Remember that you will be the father of the anti-man.

He will be a creature of what men call darkness. But not to himself. Men's dark will be his light, their evil his good. Your son will have strengths and powers mankind never had; he will have the attributes of the demons.

The anti-man will have the intelligence of Asmodeus and the strength of Belial. He will be able to discourse like Satan and will s.h.i.+ne with Lucifer's fire.

Do you remember learning all of that in catechism? Re-member the stories of the demons?

They are all hoping for you now, Jonathan. Can you feel them in your heart, hear them whispering to you when the wind hisses through the leaves?

Remember the vision of Belial you had when you were nine? "I will speak to you in the voice of the dry leaves," he said. That was such an extraordinary vision, and it filled you with such determination.

I know what you are feeling, what conflict rages in your heart. Now that you have been exposed to the world of man you have come to love it. But, Jonathan, remember that G.o.d has owned this earth for millions upon millions of years. It is time for the Devil to have His share of rule. This is justice.

Anti-humanity will be stronger than humanity, and far greater. Life on earth has been steadily evolving toward higher and higher intelligence. So our creation is only the next logical step. Satan gave man knowledge in the first place. Now He will give the earth a humanity fas.h.i.+oned in His image.

Compared to us ordinary folk your son will literally be a G.o.d-as far above us as we are above the ape men who preceded us.

When our species was born we pushed our forebears into extinction. And that was just.

But modern h.o.m.o sapiens would resist its own extinc-tion. A fearful and jealous humankind will destroy the new species before it can get a proper start.

The destiny of this earth is to produce your son and all his race. As a Church, we wors.h.i.+p this destiny.

As scientists, we help to bring it about.

Jonathan, I can scarcely imagine how shocking it must be to discover these truths about yourself after you thought yourself an ordinary man. You are not ordinary. You are the product of centuries and centuries of the most careful breed-ing. You and Patricia are hardly even human.

Your bodies are ordinary. They are the past. Your souls, though, contain the seed of the future.

Do not recoil at the responsibility, my son: you are merely the instrument of nature. The law of evolution is expressing itself through you.

Now I must tell you why you are going through all this difficulty and confusion, why you have been made to forget your own past.

When your natural father and Patricia's parents were killed by the Inquisition, we hid you both. We did it by hypnotizing you and concealing you under false ident.i.ties. Even under torture you would not reveal the truth about yourselves.

I am so sorry we made you endure this, and in our ignorance caused the accident in June at Holy Spirit.

All I can do is plead an excess of protective zeal.

You two are so precious! When I think that we nearly destroyed you by our very effort to protect you I almost go mad!

But we were not wrong to take the steps we did. The Inquisitors are master saboteurs. Their murders usually seem like accidents. They are so stealthy I think that they could kidnap an unborn child from its mother's womb. I myself trust n.o.body. When the cricket stops at moonset, I suspect the sneaking approach of the Inquisitor with his tinder ready to set a fire in my bed. And when the darkness sighs, I listen for the Inquisitor's voice, murmuring word of our defeat.

I sit here by the hour waiting and listening and worrying.

How can I help you through your rediscovery of yourself? Advice seems hollow, love futile. All I can tell you is that the earth's will is toward evolution. It is your privilege to enact it.

Accept this fundamental reality and all your confusion will evaporate. You will reacquire the moral precision that has always supported you. You will know know the rightness of our cause. the rightness of our cause.

It is the middle of the night, warm and still. I am hunched in a pool of light at my desk in the upstairs sitting room. I can hear Mike snoring across the hall. And at the far end, in your room, you have just sighed. I will go and kiss you, my dearest son.

Five minutes have pa.s.sed. I am back from your bedside. You moaned when my lips touched your cheek.

Your sleep is troubled again tonight, darling. I wish that I were a demon, and could bless you with a demon's insight.

Franklin says the life of the Church has always been this hard, but I don't agree. It was bad during the Albigensian Crusade and worse during the Spanish Inquisition, but at least then the Catholic cards were placed on the table. Now the Inquisition is secret, and therefore more dangerous than ever.

My darling, may you be granted full measure of courage. May your burdens be borne with bravery.

A mother's hope is with you.

Mary t.i.tus

Chapter Nine.

PATRICIA ATTRIBUTED TO the trauma of her a.s.sault her feeling that a great unseen force was slowly capturing her. Since the attack she was always under threat in her dreams, always being pursued by some relentless thing she could never quite see.

During the day she tried to avoid being touched. Anybody who came into contact with her might turn out to be one of the dream things. They might reappear at night, their faces stretched thin, the bones exaggerated to b.e.s.t.i.a.l size. In one recent dream all her friends had clawed up out of the street beneath her feet and grabbed her legs.

Dreams that bad can drive people mad. They can even kill. Just to survive, Patricia had been forced to make nightmare management her new specialty.

Only Jonathan knew how to comfort her. She let him sit close, and occasionally she screwed up the courage to clasp his hand. "At first you wouldn't let go," he had told her. From those hours she remembered only the sense of dissolv-ing, as if her whole self were leaking out through her wounded s.e.x. To prevent it she had felt a desperate, over-whelming need to hold onto him.

She was grateful when she felt the sun touch her face. She had slept with the window open and now she took breath after breath of the summer morning. There was again today no feeling of fullness down below.

The dull, unceasing pain had actually diminished to little more than a sensation of tightness.

Despite Mike's begging that she move, she had returned to this apartment. It was home, after all, her first real home since she had been a very little girl. And it had been consecrated by her meeting Jonathan here.

In the open drawer of her bedside table lay a small black pistol, a gift from Mike Banion. On the far wall there was a keypad. Above the keypad glowed a single red light. Until Patricia punched in the right code the light Would stay red and this apartment would remain an electronic fortress. Another gift from Mike Banion.

Beside her hand was a push b.u.t.ton. If she pressed it, a bell would ring downstairs and one of the building guards would come to her immediate a.s.sistance, twenty-four hours a day. Thanks again, Mike Banion. And thanks for the alarm on my wheelchair and the cripple-height fire extinguishers in every room, and the carry permit which allows me to wheel myself through life with a six-shooter at my hip. Thanks, Mike. You poor, sweet man, you have made me feel more threatened than I think I can bear.

It was nine A.M. Time to call Jonathan. She went to the phone and dialed the Banions' number. As he had promised, he was waiting for her and picked up the phone on the first ring. "Hi," he said. "You ready for me?"

"I'll be ready when you get here."

"On my way."

"Love you." He hung up. She stared for an instant at the phone, then replaced it in the cradle. This morning she was going to face some of her worst fears. She would enter the place where most of her nightmares were set, and wors.h.i.+p there among her terrors.

Jonathan was taking her to Ma.s.s at Holy Spirit.

As reward for the courage of her act he was then to escort her to the Caf6 Trianon in Queens Center for a late breakfast of croissants and cafe au lait. During the course of the morning they would not kiss, and they might not even touch. And Jonathan would not grin foolishly, or make elaborate conversational efforts to avoid the subjects of rape, paraly-sis, or nightmare. Nor would his talk be full of unintentional innuendo about those subjects.

It would, in short, be a nice morning after the Spirit was faced. But none of it could happen for another twenty minutes. She had to dress herself. Hard and angering labor. Her legs dangled like soft rubber tubes.

The worst part of this awful immobility was that there was no detectable reason for it. There was no physical damage at all. They had even scanned her brain. She was healthy and whole, nothing crushed, pinched, or severed. Only she couldn't walk.

Hysterical paralysis, Doctor Gottlieb had called it. Mary's dear friend. She had come to hate his watchful eyes, peering at her from behind half-gla.s.ses, and those hands, so big and yet so clever with the probes and instruments of examina-tion.

At Ma.s.s she must also see Mary Banion, who seemed desperately pained whenever they encountered one another. Did it embarra.s.s her to be in the company of a victimized woman? Activate her own personal sense of helplessness?

Mike and his minions had installed gripping bars on every wall in the apartment, but Patricia's mainstay was the big chrome wheelchair beside her bed. She checked the brakes, then twisted herself around so that she lay with her back to it. Then she pushed herself with her arms until her head was in the seat. Next she gripped the armrests and hauled herself into a sitting position. That was one of the "chair maneuvers" she had been taught in physical therapy. She was pleased; she had executed it well.

The rest of her dressing went as awkwardly as ever. She washed her face in the newly installed low sink, and combed out her hair. She dropped her comb, then rolled over it and broke it trying to find it. Then she took off her pajamas and got herself dressed in a light blue skirt and white blouse- and split the zipper in the back trying to hike the skirt down under her b.u.t.tocks. Then a little lipstick, a little eyeshadow, and she looked just right. Like she had been dressed by a drunk.

Would she please Jonathan? Would she ever really really please him again as much as she had? Perhaps she was selfish even to want that. d.a.m.nit, though, she did. please him again as much as she had? Perhaps she was selfish even to want that. d.a.m.nit, though, she did.

He buzzed right on schedule. All of a sudden the visit to Holy Spirit-which she had been carefully not thinking about-seemed formidable indeed. A visit to the heart of her latest inner h.e.l.l. "You have to,"

Jonathan had insisted, "you need to confront these fears. We'll go together." He was the brain specialist, after all; he ought to know. For an instant the back of her chair felt as cold as a marble altar.

That made her lunge forward, the involuntary response of a person forgetting that she couldn't get up.

When she wasn't being pursued in her dreams she was always trying to find Jonathan. She would see him walking into the ocean or across a forest glade, or down a darkly mirrored hall. She would call to him.

He used his own key to get in. "You look great."

"Thank you."

"I expected to find you upside down on the bathroom floor with lipstick in your ear."

"Funny boy."

He took the handles of the chair and pushed her out the door.

There were a couple of greetings in the elevator, more of those bright smiles she had learned to hate. It had been awful to find out that normal people no longer had any idea of how to relate to you, and would not do so at all unless trapped.

Tony had a Checker Cab waiting. Patricia could have kissed Mr. Checker for inventing those wonderful rolling boxes. Between the two of them she and Jonathan had only a hideous time getting her in. This contrasted with the inhu-man struggle smaller cabs entailed.

"How was last night?" Jonathan asked as soon as they were rolling. Poor guy, he had a big stake in her last-nights. They tended to determine where on the scale from bad to abysmal her mood for the coming day would fall.

"Not nightmare alley, anyway. But not Nirvana either."

"That's something at least. Did you trank down?"

"Nope. I slept totally drug-free, so I'm wild-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to meet my day!"

" 'Wide-eyed.' The expression is 'wide-eyed.' "

"Not in my case."

Holy Spirit filled the far end of Morris Street. It was as large as some of the smaller Gothic cathedrals, but its architects, no doubt struggling to provide enough ma.s.sive-ness to satisfy the prosperous Gay Nineties paris.h.i.+oners who had paid them, had not managed to make its stones soar. A heavier, more gargoyled and crenelated construction could hardly be imagined. Its stained-gla.s.s windows seemed to squint, little cracks in the granite facade.

"Oh, d.a.m.n it, Jonathan, there's Mike's car."

"He's here, of course. Your whole entourage is here, as a matter of fact."

"And those patrol cars." She counted four in the parking area between church and rectory. "I don't think I can stand this."

"Mike's been working on the case like a crazy person. Twenty hours a day. He really cares about you, darling. He wants very badly to find whoever did this to you. Solving the case means an awful lot to him."

"I don't want to hear about the case!" The cab stopped and they worked themselves out of it. Patricia wished Jona-than had never said the word case, but now that he had, there was no point in trying to avoid talking about it. That way ulcers lay. "d.a.m.nit all, anyway. I do want to hear about the case."

He stopped rolling her up the wooden wheelchair ramp that had recently been installed on the steps of the Spirit.

There were benches to either side of the front door. Jonathan wheeled her to one and sat down before her. "You're sure?"

She wasn't, but she nodded.

"They've tried to reconstruct your past, hour by hour, for the two weeks leading up to the incident. All they came up with out of the ordinary was the fact that you had spoken to an old man named Mr. Apple at a parish seniors supper. Aside from our date, I mean."

"How did they ever find out about him?"

"An old lady who had been at the supper remembered you talking to him."

"He was just an old man. They were wasting their time."

"Mike decided to go after the guy. Farfetched, but the only lead they had. But the night before he was due to be questioned, he died. He was buried in All Souls."

"A wild-goose chase. First off, the man was ancient. Second, he couldn't couldn't have hurt me. He was like paper. What's more, he was senile. They could have asked me about him and saved themselves some trouble." have hurt me. He was like paper. What's more, he was senile. They could have asked me about him and saved themselves some trouble."

"No more questions, says the good Doctor Gottlieb. Not until you're walking again."

"What's the point, anyway? I can't remember anything important."

"Tell that to Mike. Maybe you'll cheer him up. His other problem is that he had something going with a reporter and the reporter disappeared. Mike's convinced the same cult that got you got him. He knew something about it, it seems."

Patricia really wished, just at this moment, that she had been strong enough to tell him to wheel her straight into the church. The newspapers had called it a ritual sacrifice, a cult rape, and her imagination had been left to boil and burn with images of blank-eyed cultists waiting in the shadows around every corner.

Cult. Ugly, stupid word. She wanted very much to believe she had been the victim of a single disturbed man, acting alone. Cult meant people, dozens probably, ever-watchful, alert for any unguarded moment.

She couldn't accept that; it was just too much.

And yet, she thought, she dreamed, that something was getting closer and closer, fingers going around her neck, cool and dry and tight.

Whoever had hurt her had also done something to make her forget. Something incredible: the police hypnotist had worked with her for hours. "If it were not for the physical evidence, I would conclude that this woman had not been harmed," he had written in the report Mike had shown her. The police hypnotist was a bleak old man with a voice like a pillow.

Perhaps she should thank her rapist; maybe he had done her a favor. After all, she wanted to forget.