Son of the Endless Night, page 27
She opened the bathroom door again, slowly, and peered inside. No flies. The apple core was still there. She reached in and snatched it off the shelf, went running down the hall to the boys' room, opened their door, burst out crying, and flung the core at Dean's head.
"You think you're so damn funny, Dean! There are flies all over my bathroom!"
The apple core missed him widely and skidded off a poster advertising Return of the Jedi, landing on top of the hamsters' cage. The animals leaped and skittered, falling back in a palpitating huddle behind their water bottle.
Charley looked up in amazement from the handle of the hockey stick he was wrapping with tape.
"What's the matter with you?' Dean said.
"You know what! You know! You snuck in while I was taking my shower, invaded my privacy, took the apple I was saving, and left that rotten p-piece of garbage, and it drew flies!''
"No, I didn't," he said, growing hostile in the face of these absurd, unanswerable accusations.
"You're a damn liar!"
"I've been here all the time! Ask Charley-chuck."
"You're both big liars. I'm gonna tell Mom, I'm sick and tired of the way you treat me all the time, you think because I'm a girl you can get away with it." She stamped her bare foot as Charley's face creased in a befuddled grin. "It wasn't funny, it wasn't!"
"Stop this."
Their father's voice, so unexpected— he had returned home unnoticed by them only minutes ago— snuffed the argument. All eyes went to him, Hillary's still weeping.
Conor stood in the doorway, taking up almost all of the space, staring feverishly at them through slits where the flesh around his own eyes, dark as plums, hadn't quite swollen shut. His nose, also huge across the bridge, was taped. The edges of the tape lapped down unevenly over his cheekbones. Together with the bulges he had for eyes he seemed to be wearing some sort of complicated, profane mask, unspeakably dismaying in its crude symbolism, imbued with a pagan love of death. His left hand had been so thoroughly wrapped in stapled, flesh-colored hospital bandage that only the blunt fingertips showed. Conor held the hand, rather awkwardly, unsupported across his chest. In all the years he had earned his living as a professional wrestler he had never shown himself at home looking so thoroughly ravaged.
Hillary, with a galloping, thundering heart that dragged her attention behind it, glimpsed past him, where his side wasn't touching the door jamb, her mother's face, rinsed of color, flattened by a fright so vast she seemed only just recovered from the throes of a scream no one had heard. The level of blood in Hillary's body fell to her knees, leaving her head an unsupportable stone weight. Darkness; the miasma of deep melancholy she knew so well. She saw, as if from the distance of the moon, to the precious center of her life, now visited by purposeless corruption: the browning of an apple, the bath full of windy overblown flies. Jarred loose from her senses, she touched a cold breast moving in time to her immense heartbeat; she clasped a hand over her widened mouth so as not to let death in. The pupils of her eyes turned chalky. She gagged on hysteria and fell thrashing to the floor.
47
At six fifteen in the morning it was still pitch dark when Father James Merlo drove a Honda Accord into the parking lot of the Arcadia Winter Sports Center on Route 38 just north of the Joshua city limits. Even at that hour there were approximately three dozen other cars and recreational vehicles in the lot, grouped near the entrance to the fabricated steel building.
He got out of his stubby rental car, a surprisingly long-legged black man who wore a navy pea coat over boot-cut corduroys and a turtleneck sweater. He walked into the ice arena, which was reverberating with the sounds of a youth league hockey game in progress on one of the full-size rinks. The other rink was occupied exclusively by figure skaters who looked, even the youngest, to be dashingly adept, with the self-bewitched grace of cygnets coasting in a doze on mirrored surfaces. In contrast to the boisterous hockey players the skaters worked in a chilled, almost ethereal silence except for terse comments by coaches who were videotaping the sessions and the hiss, as of ripping silk, of blades on milk-toned ice.
Lingering for a few moments, Merlo admired the form of a young blond boy with a glossy thatch of hair; he seemed unbound by the demands of gravity as he careened through splits and backspins for which the priest had no names. He had never tried skating himself; it was all his parents could do to keep him in sneakers when he was growing up.
He paused at the snack stand to buy hot chocolate and a day-old cinnamon doughnut, munched his breakfast as he entered the arena where helmeted small fry were spanking the boards and sprawling ungracefully in pursuit of the puck. A referee swooped in with whistle shrilling to stop the action. There was a tier of green-painted bleachers on one side of the arena rising almost to the struts beneath the corrugated roof; Merlo looked up at little knots of spectators, all of them presumably family, at two more teams sitting edgily in a forest of upstanding hockey sticks, waiting for this game to end so they could have their turn on the ice. The fathers and mothers were doing an admirable job of demonstrating spirit and enthusiasm, considering most of them had probably been up at four thirty to get their kids here.
The priest spotted his man, who was sitting alone, with little difficulty: that beard was like a flag of provocation in the slightly fogged gloom of the upper stands. Merlo licked a residue of cinnamon and sugar from his fingertips, took a couple of swallows of the watery beverage, which tasted only vaguely of chocolate, and proceeded up into the bleachers three steps at a time.
"Conor Devon?"
Conor looked up questioningly, then flicked his eyes back to the ice, where a tall boy suddenly sprinted away from the snarled face-off with the puck teetering at the end of his stick; he headed for the opposing team's goal.
"All right, all the way!" he shouted. "Take your time, Charley-chuck, fake him out of there!" Conor half rose from his seat, ignoring Merlo, who also had turned his head to watch the action. Charley approached the goal from the left side, hesitated, then made as if to cut sharply to his right, causing the goalie to shift his balance too far in the direction of the anticipated thrust. The goalie fell down. Charley put on the brakes, wobbled, sighted open net, and fired the puck from a distance of fifteen feet. It went in.
"Yeah!" Conor cheered hoarsely. Merlo looked up at the little scoreboard where the tally had registered. Blackhawks 7, Maple Leafs 2, third period.
"That your boy?"
Conor glanced at the priest again, nodding. His eyes, so badly blackened two weeks ago, now looked almost normal, except for streaks of apple green and dingy yellow in the fleshy orbits. His nose, healed, was back to human proportions. His left hand, showing patches of shiny new skin, was still partially wrapped in an elastic bandage that allowed him to stretch and flex the muscles while protecting the unhealed portion of his palm and thumb, where skin grafts had been necessary.
Merlo held out his own hand. "I'm Father Merlo."
He didn't mind Conor's surprise— he had expected it. Nor did he mind the hesitation before Conor reached across his body to shake the offered hand.
"You're an exorcist?"
"Uh-huh. You look a little disappointed. Who were you expecting, Max von Sydow?"
"I— I didn't know what— who to expect."
Conor tried to size up Merlo in the nimbus of light from the ice rink. His skin was the color of eggplant. His cheeks were lean, unshaven, with a two-day growth of beard. His eyes had a slight sardonic tilt to them, a hint of the Orient in the tautness of the lids. His face still had the luster, the ease, the complacency of a favored young man. But his hair had been condensed, as if by conflagration, to an ashy skullcap. His ears pressed very close to naked runneled skin; his high and thickly boned forehead looked like a battering ram.
Merlo said patiently, "Do you want me to sit down, or did you just decide you don't need me anymore? That's okay; no hard feelings. I'll go get myself some sleep. Haven't had any for the last sixty hours."
"I— yes; I need you. I'm sorry. I didn't expect anyone to show up here, at this time of the morning. Please sit down, Father."
"Thanks." The priest nodded toward Conor's left hand. "Looks like that was a pretty bad burn."
"It's getting better now."
"Your boy there is a hard skater. What's his name— Charley? I guess athletics run in your family. Monsignor Garen said you were a pro wrestler. I can believe it; you've got some size on you, my man. I spent a year in the NBA myself, with the Bullets. I did my college at St. Peter's, third leading scorer in the history of the school. But I was a step too slow for the pros. Couldn't get my shots off, some jig the size of King Kong was always there to stuff the ball in my ear or steal it for a layup. And the moves they can put on you; the in-your-face disgrace shots: a very humbling experience. Earl the Pearl; Dr. J."
He seemed to be talking, not in a vaguely self-conscious, getting-acquainted manner but from a sense of release, wordiness being his way of repositioning his psychic furniture after a long stay in some nether realm of the lost and afflicted. Also he seemed, in the slack way he occupied the narrow bleacher plank, his knees cocked high and spread, boot heels propped against the green plank below, nomadic and perilously tired. "What else would you like to know about me? I was born and raised in the South Ward in Newark, when that was a good neighborhood to be from. My father worked for the Port Authority and my mother is a cosmetician. I was a grunt in Vietnam early on, back about '66, and that's where I began to do some serious thinking about my religion, trying to decide if I might be of some use to the Church. Well, after seminary I was assigned to Holy Rosary parish on 153rd Street in the south Bronx. That parish for some reason is a hotbed of witchcraft, voodoo, and the whole occult bag; we were always getting calls to untangle somebody from Satan. Some days it got so bad I thought I was back in Saigon. My experiences at Holy Rosary got me drafted by the Apostolic Penitentiary. For the last few years I've studied ancient languages. I've also been involved in close to a hundred exorcisms; the most recent ended six hours ago."
"Around here?" Conor said incredulously.
"In Providence, Rhode Island. An infestation, not a possession. Demons. Scuzzy little varmints without much status in the Kingdom, and no willpower. I threw the Book at them and they lit out like bats flocking home to a cave at sunrise."
The priest hitched around and looked Conor in the eye. "I hear you've got a worse problem."
"I— I think so."
"Before you explain," Merlo said, "I should tell you I came up here this morning as a favor to a friend of a friend. I'm a priest of Rome and I don't have official status in any diocese; this is my day off, so to speak."
"What does it matter?" Conor said with an edge of exasperation. "I need help, and the Church— "
"The Church, as we both know, is run by canon law; and in my line of work we follow even stricter rules of procedure or live to regret our lapses. I may not be able to give you much more than advice. With that in mind, do you want to tell me what happened? I prefer to ask questions as we go along, if that's okay."
Conor began with his first meeting with Rich in the Haden County jail, his brother's desperate appeals to him to find Henry Windross and Polly and the mysterious Inez Cord way.
"Exactly how did Richard implicate these people in his supposed situation?"
"He didn't make that very clear to me. He said he had been trying to help Polly, but she died. Those are almost his exact words."
"None of them have turned up since the night of the murder?"
"Windross was struck and killed by a train a few days later. Polly, according to the police, disappeared even before Rich claimed to have seen her in that room in the Post Road Inn. She's still officially listed as missing."
"Have you been inside the house in— where was it?"
"Ripington Four Corners. Yeah, I went to the house. I got inside. To this day I don't know if anybody else was there. I didn't see a soul. The house appeared to be occupied but— not by anybody I'd want to meet if I had a choice. I guess I'm not making myself very clear. Some things happened that— spooked me."
Conor explained about the wine, the mysterious whimpering animal, the sun-filled but sinister playroom, the odor of gasoline, the dreadful photograph.
"I don't know, maybe I was too keyed up and suggestible because of Rich's warning, and I— I didn't have any business being there. I know for sure I wouldn't go back into that house unless somebody held a gun to my head."
"Okay, go on," Merlo said gravely after a long pause. His fingertips were pressed against his high forehead, hands shutting out the glare from the rink below, the fatly padded little boys huffing and tripping and lunging at each other as they neared the conclusion of their game. Whistle. Offsides.
Conor, gazing intently at the ice as if he were trying to interpret the skaters' ghostly hieroglyphs inscribed there, told what he had heard about Rich's first meeting with the clinical psychologist: the missile tooth, the apparent seizure. He paused again, wondering if the priest would have a comment; instead he appeared to have fallen asleep.
"Father Merlo?"
"I'm listening."
Conor came to the near-disastrous morning thirteen days ago, events which in his recklessness he had provoked.
"What did he say about Polly?" the priest asked sharply, raising his head when Conor was reluctant to try to repeat some of the language which had come from Rich's mouth. "I need to know the exact wording, if you remember it."
"No, I don't. It was vile, I can tell you that much. But Lindsay Potter recorded everything that was said on her Dictamite, and Adam made copies."
"Nothing happened to that tape? That's fortunate. I'd like to listen to it. What did you do next?"
Below them a sturdy boy, guilty of an infraction, whirled on the misty ice, grinning like a gargoyle: his two front teeth were missing. Conor continued, his distress growing The cloud of light before his eyes was like a formless apprehension leaked from his skull; his eyes watered pityingly, for the sake of his brother's soul, which he feared was, already, beyond redemption.
When he told of holding the cross behind Rich's head, Merlo said immediately, dismayed, "Where did you learn that little trick?"
"I read a book on demonology."
"And you couldn't wait to try out all the handy hints for banishing evil spirits. Easy as getting pizza stains out of your shirt."
"I had to be sure Rich was telling the truth," Conor said, annoyed and defensive. "And I didn't think the Church was going to give me any help."
"So now you know, and it was more than you bargained for."
"If I'd just had some idea of what was going to happen— "
"Okay, slowly. In detail."
"I held the cross behind his head. There was a sound like— I can't describe it very well— like solid rock splitting apart. A low, grinding, groaning that hurt my ears. It felt as if the little bones there were being ground to splinters and pushed into my brain. It was intensely painful, and I couldn't hear well for three days after."
"Where did the sound come from?"
"It came from Rich. He was on the floor on his hands and knees. Then he wasn't: he swelled up. I don't mean he turned into a balloon, but there was definite swelling all over his body until he literally floated three or four inches off the floor. All the time this groaning, wrenching, breaking noise came from him. You'll hear it. Then he— he suddenly popped into the air, rotated, compressed himself into a ball like a circus tumbler, and began to shoot around the room. I mean fast, from the wall to the floor to another wall, and then the ceiling. I tried to catch him, but it was like getting in the way of an avalanche. The impact busted my nose and loosened some teeth, and I had bruises all over my chest. There were other things going on at the same time. Slats from the Venetian blinds whirling around, lighted cigarettes in the air— "
"Is that how you burned your hand?"
"No. The cross partially melted. It was eighteen-karat gold."
"Very impressive," Merlo said, with a bleak little whistle. "Want to tell me how you got out of there alive? You're lucky to be alive, by the way."
"I crawled to the door and opened it. Then everything just stopped."
"Uh-huh. What kind of shape is your brother in?"
"They put him in the hospital for eight days. He had a contused liver, a cracked rib, a sprained neck, a dislocated shoulder, more bruises than anyone could count, and spasms in the lower back. But other than the rib no bones were broken. It's hard to believe he's not in a body cast. If you'd seen— "
"I've seen a lot of human bodies fly through the air. How soon after the incident did he regain consciousness?"
"Three hours."
"How was he acting?"
"Like a child waking up after a long fever. He didn't remember anything from the time they unlocked the door of his cell to take him upstairs."
"And what did the authorities make of all this?"
"They assumed— and we decided not to contradict them— that Rich had simply gone berserk and caused all the damage. He's in a padded isolation cell now, the only one in the jail. The lights are on twenty-four hours a day. They won't take him out of there without putting a straitjacket on first, and they won't even unlock the door until a shotgun is trained on him."
"No more manifestations have occurred?"
"None."
"Just three witnesses. You. The two lawyers. Were there other injuries?"
"Lindsay was slashed across the forehead, near the hairline. Sixteen stitches."
A buzzer sounded; the disheveled skaters grouped according to their colors at opposite ends of the rink to cheer the opposition, then filed off the ice. Charley-chuck was looking for Conor in the bleachers. Conor stood and waved and the boy pumped his stick up and down victoriously; he had scored two of his team's seven goals. His hair, with his black helmet removed, was plastered to his forehead and looked as drenched as if he had been bathing. His cheekbones were white pennies in a dusky-rose face. He gulped orange juice from a paper cup a teammate handed him.
