The Night Church Part 4

So I spend these predawn hours writing, hoping that somehow the act of putting pen to paper will relax me enough for a few hours of rest.

What a disaster! And there was so much time wasted after she was hurt! We had to get safely away before calling the priest. I can only hope and pray that he gets Patricia to a hospital in time.

My G.o.d, we had to leave her!

I look at my words as they stand on the paper, dry and still. Words of fear. I think it, I say it-fear, fear, fear.

We live exactly like all night things-we hide and scurry and know the way of silence. We and the rats and owls and bats.

The children are so incredibly important. Please, please may no more harm come to them. Our mistake has exposed them to an even worse enemy than our own stupidity!

The Inquisition will certainly have noticed our gaudy public fiasco. Now our tireless old enemy will be after them again.

It hides for a few years, to lull us, to tempt us. . . .

Then it jumps out of nowhere-right at our throats!

The Inquisition will battle us until Catholicism withers away. The last priest, in the last moment of the last Catholic church on earth, will strike the last blow at us.

They say we are evil, that we work to make Satan mani-fest, to give Him physical form.

I say, dear Inquisitors, evil is not all black nor your "Satan" all bad, and the world is not as simple as you would like to believe.

Inquisition: it means inquiry. Question. Such a small word for such a great terror.

To the common world the Inquisition is dead and gone. How would the ordinary Catholic feel to know that the handsome priest with the briefcase, striding so confidently out of the Chancellery, is an Inquisitor?

And that the Sam-sonite case contains a thumbscrew, a radio direction-finder, and a car bomb?

Daddy laughed and called them Christ's terrorists.

I do not laugh. They murdered my father by exposing him to plutonium. They chose that particular horror so the radiation would prevent us from salvaging his s.e.m.e.n and thus his precious genes.

Dad-covered with sores, gasping, his hair falling out on the pillow. Oh, G.o.d, help us!

Deliver the children from such a fate. Deliver my boy!

Must these hot summer days be his autumn? Death, birth, the roll of seasons, sky-changes: Jonathan is the end of a long line, the perfection of two millennia of patient breeding.

The Inquisition is so skilled. How can they be so d.a.m.n good at it? They're just a bunch of fanatical priests!

The world has forgotten us, but the Church has not, not for an instant.

I hear my heart beating: b.u.mp-b.u.mp, save his life, save his life.

I love you until my heart will break, it takes my breath away to touch you, and I cannot speak to look on your beauty. You liked to swim, you liked to play basketball, to listen to your short-wave, to look at the stars.

We raped your mind so that the Inquisition could not even torture the truth of your ident.i.ty out of you.

And now look- the disaster of this night will attract them like flies to a corpse!

I loved my father.

And I loved my husband. Poor Martin. So happy, so handsome! And I don't want to think about him either. I'm homesick for my men, for Dad and for Martin!

It's a pleasure to write his name. Martin. Such a lovely name. I can almost hear his plane falling. Iimagine wind hissing past motionless propellers.

I know all the details of loneliness, the coldness of sud-denly empty sheets, the attic boxes full of new suits.

And then there is Mike. Oh, Mike. If only you knew how tiresome I find you. I only married you because of the cover you unwittingly provide for Jonathan. Even the Inquisition will hesitate to kill a police official's son. Or so we hope.

Will anything work? Can we ever ever escape them? escape them?

"Down the nights and down the days; down the arches of the years, the Hound of Heaven . . ."

Howling in the precincts of darkness, and in my heart.

I feel awful. I hate the dreary old church we use. Of course, our our priest can't command a better parish. priest can't command a better parish.

I am sweating. I'm sick.

I imagine being put in the Lady, a steel sarcophagus lined with spikes. When the Lady is closed the spikes penetrate to a quarter of an inch every surface of the victim's body.

Mother Regina was in it three hours. Nineteen fifty-four. She really talked! She gave them the entire bloodline, told them our whole history.

-Founded by t.i.tus Flavius Sabinus Vespasia.n.u.s on Sun-day, September 9, in the year A.D. 70 on the still-smoking ruins of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.

-Based on the secrets of breeding, now known as genet-ics, contained in the scrolls that were known as the Treasure of Solomon.

-Charged with breeding a new and greater species out of the old human stock, a species that would be allied with what men call evil, as they are allied with what they call good.

But evil is not evil nor good good. They are simply different principles. Man calls himself beautiful. By his standards his replacement will be hideous beyond descrip-tion. But his replacement will be a powerful species, brighter than man, more resistant to disease, closer to nature.

The blood is the whole point. Jonathan and Patricia are precious because of their blood. They are the masterpieces of thousands of years of breeding according to Solomonic principles. Out of their union the new species will be born.

This is worse than lying and sweating up in that bedroom. This is-oh, h.e.l.l, I'm going to just burn this and sit in the dark.

Poor Patricia. She was screaming!

"Help her, Mary." Franklin, you said that, you fool!

G.o.d knows but I tried.

Chapter Three.

FATHER HARRY GOODWIN was awakened suddenly by the ringing of his telephone. The rings exploded in his head, one, then another, then another. Silence. Please keep ringing. Please!

No. The silence continued. There would be no fourth ring. Harry dragged himself to the edge of his bed.

His skull felt like it was going to pound itself to bits. He was nauseated with fear.

All these years he had been dreading the three rings on a night the t.i.tuses were using the church. Three rings were the maximum emergency signal. They meant only one thing-they have had a terrible accident and his church was in danger.

His impulse was to race across to the church but he seemed plunged into stifling muck; his fear paralyzed him. It was several minutes before he managed to go to the window and look across at the Spirit. He expected to see destruction, a mayhem of flames, or some unspeakable horror-maybe a conjured thing-crawling the roof slates.

But there wasn't even a haze of smoke along the roof line of the old building, nor a flicker behind the stained gla.s.s. Harry Goodwin tapped his own window. Should the Spirit burn there was no chance at all of building a new church. A fire would mean the end of this fine old parish.

Maybe the three rings had been a coincidence. The church across the parking lot seemed utterly at peace, blurred by the beginnings of a predawn shower.

Harry's familiar morning exhaustion bowed him. His alarm clock said four fifteen. In two hours he must say his first Ma.s.s . . . before a congregation of perhaps seven, in a church built to accommodate five hundred.

"Friday," he muttered. "G.o.d give me strength." He felt awful. Had he taken a sleeping pill last night? No, there weren't any left and so much the better. Leave the pills alone. Valium priests, Seconal priests, Thorazine priests. They were worse than the old-fas.h.i.+oned whiskey priests. He had so far escaped the lure of depressants and tranquilizers. As a result, his life was raw with loneliness and a sense of unfulfilled promise. The issue, of course, was faith and the lack thereof. His confessor, Father Michael Brautigan, a bluff and kindly Jesuit, red with drink, would say that faith was a matter of relaxing one's instinct to touch.

"Don't try to touch Christ," he would say. "That's the point of Thomas, isn't it?"

Harry had had to touch. But it worked both ways: one who had to touch also needed touching. Sometimes, naked in the middle of his silent rectory, he would dip his hands into cold water until they were numbed and did not feel his own, then he would close his eyes and embrace himself and dance around and around with himself in the dingy rooms. to touch. But it worked both ways: one who had to touch also needed touching. Sometimes, naked in the middle of his silent rectory, he would dip his hands into cold water until they were numbed and did not feel his own, then he would close his eyes and embrace himself and dance around and around with himself in the dingy rooms.

Lately he had become too desperate, too full of self-pity even for that. Never to be touched-or even needed, for that matter-had emerged for him as the poisonous central issue of his life. When he had first entered the priesthood, he had a.s.sumed that his services would be ardently desired by Catholics hungry for the succor of their Church. Instead he had spent his life struggling to pay bills, working against the relentless dwindling of his flock, forced to hold jumble sales and bingo and raffles, until finally even those measures failed.

Then came the t.i.tuses. Old Franklin and handsome Mar-tin, just wanting to rent "the plant," as they had called it, a few nights a week.

n.o.body will know, Father. We help out dozens of parishes in the same shape as Holy Spirit.

n.o.body will even care except you.

Our money will keep you going. You won't ever have to close your doors.

At first he had thought perhaps it was drugs or counterfeit-ing or some sort of white slavery.

He had heard their soft chanting, though, and seen the flicker of their candles. He did not actually say it to himself but he knew the truth. Every Monday and Friday morning, after their nights, he had taken to reconsecrating his altar. And he no longer kept the Host in the tabernacle on those nights. It stayed under his pillow, tucked away in the pyx.

Twenty-seven years a priest, twenty a creature of the t.i.tuses. Traitor to his own faith, to his own soul.

How black can sin be? He put his hands to his stubbly cheeks and rubbed. He longed for the velvet fingers of a woman, or of death.

As time unfolded the sad destiny that had been contrived for him it became obvious that his whole life-the vocation itself-was not really very valuable. In the world of his youth priests were essential people, needed by their congre-gations for all sorts of succor. Now when the leaves fell on his walks they stayed, and his leaking roof leaked on.

Did people sense that he was a traitor? Could they some-how smell the taint of the Night Church in the great nave of Holy Spirit?

He didn't want to be a priest anymore. He did not even want to live. No, he had a plan for himself. He intended to die unconfessed, and go to h.e.l.l-in which, despite the modern theologians, he still firmly believed. He actually looked forward to it: he deserved his d.a.m.nation, wanted it, and had for some years been seeking the death that would bring it. Once he had attempted to commit suicide by suffocating himself in a plastic bag, but it had been too terrifying. So he had tried sleeping pills-and vomited them up.

He had asked Martin t.i.tus to kill him, just a few weeks before t.i.tus himself had been killed in an airplane crash. "I'll think it over," the man had replied absently, and changed the subject. Harry was not even important enough for martyrdom.

He said a bitter prayer, a Hail Mary, and turned once again to his bed.

As he slid beneath the sheet he heard quite distinctly from the church a human sound. It was a loud, woeful groan, loud enough to carry across the parking lot to the rectory.

He should have gone straight over there. d.a.m.n fool not to. Three rings at this hour, and he had made himself believe it was a coincidence. Harry Goodwin was a weak man, and that was a fact.

He put his hand on the bedside table. In the drawer was a small pistol. Mike Banion over at the 112th Precinct had given it to him after the ritual murder of Father Santa Cruz at Saint Thomas in Brooklyn. He shouldn't have accepted it, but he didn't want Mike to know how he envied old Santa Cruz.

This was the right time to have a pistol. He felt the comforting steel of it in the palm of his hand. One day soon, when he could bear the taste of the barrel in his mouth, he was going to use it on himself.

As he pulled on the old raincoat liner he used as a robe and jammed his feet into his aged and corn-cut Adidas, he struggled for some sort of inner stability. Gun or no gun, he was terrified. The t.i.tuses did horrible things over there.

He hurried past empty bedrooms (it had once taken six priests just to administer this parish) and descended the back stairs to the kitchen. There was a folding umbrella in the bottom of his briefcase. He fished around for it, opening it as he went out the kitchen door.

Curtains of rain swept the muddy parking lot. As Harry crossed it he was reminded by the sucking of his shoes that he could not afford reasphalting. He opened the side door to the sacristy. Inside, the Spirit was inky black. As he care-fully pulled the door shut behind him he twisted the little pistol's safety to the off position.

All he heard was the din of rain on the roof. Just as he was beginning to think he had dreamed the human sound he heard another one-a long sigh. At first he was frightened, fumbling for the lights. Then he realized the sound was coming from the altar and a flash of anger mixed with his fear. How dare they leave him to clean up one of their desecrations.

In the dancing, vanis.h.i.+ng light of the votive candles he could just make out a dense shadow splayed across the altar. Harry stared hard. Wasn't that a large animal? He raised his gun but he could not take aim in the dimness. Then he realized that the shape was not a crouching animal but a p.r.o.ne human body.

His fingers found the right switches and he flipped them all at once. Light flooded the church.

There was a woman on the altar, lying on her back. Her blood flowed down to the sacristy floor in thin streams like bars. Harry had only a moment for astonishment. The girl moaned again, horribly.

He approached the altar. The poor child lay in a dark pool of her own blood, her legs spread, her arms akimbo, her hair tangled about her face.

The fact that he knew this woman so well pulled the first sound from his throat. His own scream was more real to him and more frightening than even the horror before him. In his urgency to get to the phone in the sacristy he dropped his pistol, which went clattering into the dark behind the high altar at the back of the nave.

This was incredible. This could not be condoned. And yet ... he had to deal very carefully with the whole affair. His own life, his very soul, was teetering on a knife edge.

Turning away from the horror he dashed on his long legs to the phone, grabbed it, dialed 911. The t.i.tuses would be furious with him for calling the police, but what else did they expect him to do? They had just gone off and left him with this tragedy and not one word of instruction.

There were voices outside. Neighbors. Of course-the girl's screams had roused the neighborhood. The t.i.tuses must never have intended to leave her behind. Circ.u.m-stances had forced them. Perhaps they even wanted her saved.

In any case, she would would be saved. He might not be much of a priest anymore, but Harry Goodwin was still a human being. be saved. He might not be much of a priest anymore, but Harry Goodwin was still a human being.

He heard the first siren start not long after he had hung up the phone. The New York City Police Department was more than half Catholic, and it protected the Church almost as carefully as it did itself.

Harry knew one of the two patrol-men who came sprinting up the aisle, their guns in their hands. Timothy Reilly was his name. Impossible that such a scrawny, mischievous altar boy could have grown into this enormous, competent-looking man in blue. Reilly took in the scene at once.

"He still in the church, you think, Father?"

Harry told the first of what he realized miserably would be many lies. "I thought perhaps I heard him. I'm not quite sure. It could have been the echo of a door closing." Trick the cops into searching the church.

Give the t.i.tuses and their congregation a little more time to get well away.

Reilly's partner began to search with a flashlight while Reilly joined Harry beside the poor, damaged girl.

Her eyes were rolling slowly up into her head. "Her name is Patricia Murray," Harry said, and woe tugged his heart. "She's one of the hardest-working young women in the parish." His throat closed. "One of my best people." He wept and could not stop, and it was useless and stupid but he was so full of anger and self-disgust and sorrow that he wished right now he could be torn to pieces, and the rancid bits of himself scattered through the filthiest deeps of the Pit, each to suffer separately the full and eternal measure of d.a.m.nation.