THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance

by Thomas M. Disch

  It wasn’t possible that someone had got into the Shrine from out here, but something must have happened to have riled the dog, so Gerhardt went around to the side of the portal, where there was a lancet window of clear glass that would let him look inside if he boosted himself onto the ledge below it. But he didn’t even have to get on the ledge to see what the problem was. The bats had gotten into the Shrine. He couldn’t see much of the dome itself from where he stood, but even from the slice of the interior visible to him, he could see that there must have been a whole lot of bats in there.

  He didn’t know how it had happened, but he was certain that it was something Hedwig had done, perhaps when she’d gone into the sacristy. She was the only one besides himself who had access to the ground floor. Her—and now the bats.

  “Damn!” he said, and then, this time with real conviction, “Aus!”

  Sheba stopped growling, though she maintained attack posture.

  Gerhardt took out his beeper and pressed the button that paged Hedwig. There was no response. He pressed it again, more firmly, and then a third time. Hedwig never went anywhere without her beeper in one of her pockets, and she had never failed to respond to his summons. Her silence was a greater cause for concern than having the dogs loose. He decided to enter the Shrine through the main portal and punched in the appropriate code on his security beeper. He waited a moment for the tumblers to respond and then tugged on one of the large brass handles. The right panel of the door yielded sluggishly at first; then, with the help of its own inertia, it was less of a strain. Even before the door had been folded into the recess designed for it, the first of the excited bats found its way outside.

  Gerhardt went down the center aisle of the nave until he could see the whole of the dome. His heart sank. There were hundreds of bats, all caroming about like black popcorn inside a popcorn popper. How did you fumigate something the size of that dome? And if you didn’t fumigate, how else could you get rid of them? And how in hell had such a swarm of bats got into the Shrine in the first place? If Hedwig had done this, he would brain her!

  He tried his beeper one more time, and this time Hedwig answered. “Gerhardt? Damn this thing anyhow. Can you hear me?” She sounded simultaneously groggy and half-hysterical.

  “I can hear you, Hedwig. And I would like an explanation. Where are you?”

  “Gerhardt, I fell on my bad arm, I am in agony. And it’s completely dark. How long have I been in here?”

  “In where, Hedwig?”

  “In the reliquarium. I was in here with Father Pat, and then he knocked me down, and after that… I don’t know. I must have hit my head on the floor. I can feel blood on it, and… Gerhardt, something touched me!”

  “Just keep calm, Hedwig. Tell me, how did you get in the reliquarium of all places?”

  “Gerhardt, I can feel it on my ankle!”

  Gerhardt realized that all the bats must have got into the Shrine when the reliquarium had been opened, but he couldn’t understand why his sister would have remained there in that case. Bats sent her into conniptions. Somehow (he realized) she’d had an accident and wasn’t aware of the bats.

  Then she began to scream.

  “Hedwig, just keep still. The bats won’t hurt you. Just don’t move about, or you’ll excite them more. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  He hurried down the aisle and then went around behind the main altar. Even before he could see the boulders of the simulated sepulcher in the chapel devoted to the reliquarium, he could hear Hedwig’s muffled screams.

  “I’m here, Hedwig! Now, quiet down! Do you hear me, Hedwig?” He was right beside the boulder that served as a door to the sepulcher. “I’m opening the door now, Hedwig!”

  But the door wouldn’t budge. It was locked, and the key was not in the lock. For a moment he thought his sister must have taken the key with her, but the door couldn’t be locked from within, so if she did have the key, how had the door been locked?

  “Gerhardt, are you there? Open the door, Gerhardt! Open it!”

  “It’s locked, Hedwig.”

  “Then use the key! I left it there in the lock.”

  “It’s not there now, Hedwig. Was anyone else here with you, Hedwig?”

  There was no response.

  “Hedwig, answer me!”

  He could hear her whimpering, and he feared she was beyond reach of his reasonable advice.

  “Hedwig, I will have to go and get the other key that’s in my safe. Just wait here, do you understand?” He realized, even as he said it, that there was something ridiculous in ordering her to do what she couldn’t help doing in any case.

  “I’ll be right back.” He tried to sound reassuring, but in fact he was thoroughly pissed off with her.

  Someone—either Father Pat or one of the girls—must have closed the door on her, locked it, and taken away the key. Which meant that there was someone here in the Shrine besides the bats. He hadn’t seen anyone, but then they might have hidden from him. They certainly couldn’t have left the Shrine. Unless… He rushed back to the door he’d left open, but Sheba was still standing guard, barking at the occasional bat that had the wit or the luck to fly low enough to escape through the door.

  There was also the possibility that the person who’d locked Hedwig in the reliquarium had stolen her security beeper and taken the elevator to one of the lower floors. Gerhardt recalled that she’d let Father Pat have a beeper of his own. It was him, then, the son of a bitch! Gerhardt didn’t know what Father Pat thought he was up to, but if he’d figured out that he was a prisoner here as much as the girls and was trying to break out, he wasn’t going to get very far. Sheba was guarding the main church door, and if he got past her, there was still Rambo and Trixie to contend with. If he’d gone to one of the floors below, Gerhardt would find him.

  But all in good time. Gerhardt’s first priority was to release his sister from the reliquarium. To a certain extent, she might have only herself to blame for the predicament she was in. She’d deferred too readily to Father Pat’s authority, but then how could she have done otherwise?

  Gerhardt took the elevator to 3 and went to his office. The safe where the spare key to the reliquarium was kept was an old-fashioned combination safe, and Gerhardt fumbled the combination twice.

  Then, as he tried a third time, the alarm went off, and this time it didn’t stop. Gerhardt hurried down the hall to the security office and checked the monitor. A message flashed on the screen: MAIN GATE—ATTEMPTED ENTRY. There was no video surveillance of the main gate, so Gerhardt had no way of knowing what was happening. The only other time there’d been a similar alarm had been last November, when Trixie had chased a young doe right into the fence at night. The deer had tried to scramble up the mesh of the fence and tangled itself in the chain that secured the gate to the post. Trixie had torn one haunch to shreds before Gerhardt could get there.

  He had no hope that the reason for this alarm would be so harmless. When it rains, it pours. He would have to come to Hedwig’s rescue later. There wasn’t even time to get the key from the safe. Instead, he opened up the arms locker in the security office and helped himself to a 9mm Sig Sauer and a 12-gauge pump. He stuck the automatic inside the waistband of his trousers and, for good measure, pocketed another magazine.

  XXXIX

  The blade of the lance was poised, ready to pierce the right side of Father Bryce’s breast. It was just such a blade, elliptical in shape, as the Roman legionnaires had used for the coup de grâce on such occasions. Amazingly, he was not yet dead. The torture of crucifixion had been developed to elicit maximum suffering for an extended period of time.

  Father Bryce regarded Crispo and prayed for the mercy of death.

  Their eyes met.

  “It’s time, isn’t it, Father, to say Consummatum est?”

  Father Bryce turned his head aside. The effort sent new signals of pain through his wracked flesh. He was no longer aware of any single pain. Pain had no locus; it was his whole existence.<
br />
  “Or is it?” Crispo asked. “Perhaps, for all my efforts, your mind has not yet been obliterated. Perhaps there is still a part of you that wonders who I am and why I do this. And I would like to tell you, if I could, Father, but I am legion. I am Crispo, of course—dentist, surgeon, torturer, agent of the Holy Inquisition, and—would you believe?—paterfamilias. Oh, a very doting parent, a capable spouse, a solid citizen.

  “But I have other names, different faces, a vast bibliography of crimes. A few, the most notorious, may ring a bell. I am Moloch first, a very god, if you believe such things. Herod, too, as myth blends into history, but still my pleasure is the slaughter of innocents, of innocence. What were your pleasures, Father? Weren’t they much the same as mine?

  “And after that? Nero, surely, but not only he, for the amphitheaters were packed to the upmost tiers for the spectacles I rejoiced in, and the whole audience shared my pleasure, you may be sure. Those extravaganzas were the first soul-warping traumas of your own pathetic creed, and your churches still honor the tradition—not just with the image you so vividly present to my private view at this moment, hanging there from the crossbar, my own delectable Grünewald, my do-it-yourself Ecce homo, but in myriad variations. There are churches in Rome, and indeed throughout all Christendom, that would put to shame Hollywood’s sleaziest horrormongers. Decapitations, eyeballs served up on platters, you name it—in some chapel there is a vivid rendering. Fascinating works of art, and I am, I like to think, their most discerning connoisseur.

  “And I have other names, not all in the realm of art history. Kings, generals, bishops, revolutionary firebrands, and ordinary civil servants. Anyone given enough power must succumb to such temptations. Why, even a little power can lead to infamies. Hasn’t that been your experience? There’s the old Jesuit saying, ‘Give me a child for his first ten years, and I will give you a Catholic for life.’ Give me a child, indeed—eh, Father? Then give me another. Can there ever be enough? It becomes an addiction. Oh, yes, it does.

  “Who else am I? I am you, of course. I think that’s been understood from the start. For there has to be a kind of reciprocity in these things. Doppelgängers, and all that. The devil in the flesh. The Other, who turns out, to our astonishment, to be none other than ourself.

  “I didn’t want you to die without some degree of enlightenment, Father Bryce. Or”—he thrust in the lance—“may I call you Pat?”

  40

  “Are you afraid of bats?” Mary asked Alison in a whisper as they huddled together inside the confessional. Alison was sitting on the chair the priest would have used, and Mary was on her lap with her right arm around Alison’s shoulders.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want one to come in here,” she said, “but right now I’d have to say I like bats. Seeing what they’ve done for us.”

  “I hadn’t looked at it that way. That’s funny.” She was quiet for a while, and then she asked, “What do you think he’s going to do, Alison? Don’t you think he’s going to come looking for us?”

  “At some point he will.”

  “I wish we’d gone up that staircase. This will be the first place he looks.”

  “But I don’t know where those stairs go. There’s nothing up there, that I know of, but the dome. Shh! I think I can hear him.”

  Alison parted the curtain of the confessional, but all she could see was the nave and the main altar. The confessional was positioned so that she couldn’t see the portal itself, only the sunlight streaming in across the marble floor. Which meant that the door had been left open. But she knew that the dog that had been barking just outside the portal was probably still there, even though it had stopped barking.

  Then they heard, far off and muffled, Hedwig scream, and then Gerhardt shouting something at her. The dome magnified their voices but muddied them at the same time, so you couldn’t tell what Gerhardt was saying.

  Mary sighed. “She’s still alive, anyhow. I was wondering what happened to the two of them, locked inside there. With all those bats, Jesus. What do you think Gerhardt will do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know what I was thinking when we were pushing the door shut? I was thinking how it was just like in Hansel and Gretel, when the witch gets shoved into the oven.”

  Alison laughed. Not loudly, but with the same feeling of relief that comes from a good belly laugh. “That’s just what Joyce said. It was all her idea, you know, getting them to go inside the reliquarium.”

  “It was Joyce’s idea?” Mary asked.

  “Well, she said it was Raven’s idea originally. They’d planned it all out, back when they still were allowed to talk together by themselves.”

  “They never told me,” said Mary, a little resentfully.

  Alison shushed her. Gerhardt was shouting again, and Alison couldn’t make any of it out, until the very last words—“I’ll be right back.” Alison leaned forward again and parted the curtain the least little bit. Mary’s fingernails dug into her shoulder.

  “There he is, I see him,” Alison said. “He’s off to the side from the altar, and he’s just standing there, looking around.”

  “Don’t hold the curtain open,” Mary whispered urgently.

  “Shh. There’s no way he can see us. Now he’s walking over to the elevator. Yes, he’s getting into it! Oh, thank you, Jesus.”

  Alison tried to stand up, but Mary was sitting on her. “Get up, Mary. We’ve got to take care of that dog.”

  “No!” Mary tightly wrapped both arms around Alison.

  “Mary, come on. We’ve already got this far. And I’ve got the Mace. It will work on dogs the same as on people. If you want to stay in the Shrine, that’s okay, but let me get up.”

  Reluctantly, Mary stood up, and Alison found the little doorknob that opened the low half-door of the confessional. At the far end of the nave the portal was open. The dog that had been making such a racket saw Alison at the moment she saw the dog, and it started in again. But it didn’t come rushing forward; it just stood right where it was, barking like mad.

  Alison had had time, hiding in the confessional, to figure out what to do now. She went inside the compartment where she’d found the Mace and felt around along the top of the curtain. As she’d hoped, it was hung on a rod that lifted up easily from its supports. She took down the curtain and slid it off the rod, which was wooden and as thick as a broom handle, and offered the curtain rod to Mary.

  Mary shook her head.

  “Take it,” Alison insisted. “It could be useful.”

  “I’m feeling sick.”

  “You’ll feel sicker if we don’t get out of here before fucking Gerhardt gets back.”

  Mary accepted the curtain rod. Sometimes a bit of obscenity is all it takes.

  “Now, you hold up the top corner of the curtain, like this, so it’s sideways, and I’ll hold the bottom end. So. And now we walk toward that door. Slowly. But not too slowly—we want to get out of here. And if the dog rushes at us, just wait till it gets close and then try and get the curtain over it. It’s pretty thick. It can’t bite us through the curtain, can it?”

  “Alison, those bats— Can’t you hear them?”

  “The bats aren’t our problem, Mary. The dog is our problem.”

  “Right.”

  “So, what we’ll do is—we’ll walk to the center aisle first, and then up the aisle toward where the dog is. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Alison held the left side of the curtain, so that she could use the can of Mace with her right hand. The Mace seemed like any other aerosol, with a little black button on the top that you pressed down to make it squirt. But there were no instructions as to how far away you had to be to use it.

  When they got to the center aisle, the sound of the bats whirling around up in the dome suddenly became very loud. Very loud and very shrill. At the same time the dog in the doorway was still going at it, just as loud, not as shrill.

  Mary giggled.

  Alison shot her a q
uestioning look.

  “I was just thinking,” Mary said. “It sounds like some kind of organ that’s gone crazy. And the two of us are walking down the aisle. So it’s kind of like the wedding we both never had. We’re even wearing white.”

  “Very funny. Are you okay?”

  “Uh-huh. I just wish you had a gun instead of a can of Mace, but I’m okay.”

  They’d gone half the distance toward the door, and the dog didn’t seem to have any intention of coming into the Shrine after them. It just stood its ground and went on barking, which was probably good strategy from its point of view.

  As they got closer, they automatically slowed down. When they were only about twenty feet away, the dog’s behavior changed. It stopped barking and took a couple of steps backward and started to snarl. Its snarl was scarier.

  “What do we do now?” Mary asked.

  “Just keep going ahead, real slow.”

  When they were ten feet away, Alison could see the dog’s body tensing, and she decided this would have to be the moment. She pressed the button on the can of Mace, and she could see the cone of vapor shoot out of the nozzle. But not, she could tell right away, far enough.

  The dog didn’t know about Mace, though. It only knew that some kind of action had been directed against it, and it lunged right into the cone of vapor, and the Mace did its work.

  When the dog hit the center of the curtain, Mary dropped her end of it and ran for the portal. Alison closed her eyes and directed another solid squirt from the can in the general direction of the blinded dog, then followed Mary out into the open air, almost stumbling down the short flight of concrete steps.

  At the bottom of the steps they both turned back to watch—to marvel, to applaud—the dog as it thrashed about, baffled, attacking the curtain for want of any better enemy.