Alison turned around. It was like looking down the road to heaven. There was a wide asphalt drive, lined on both sides with white birches. The asphalt was already speckled with the first yellow leaves off the birches. It had been a dry summer. The sky was blue, with white puffy clouds.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, grabbing hold of Mary’s wrist. Mary was still watching the dog as it spun around in circles, savaging the curtain. “Come on. Fast.”
“I can’t run,” said Mary.
Alison realized immediately that she wasn’t just playing for sympathy. She hadn’t been out of her cell for a long time, and she was weak. And very near her term. “We don’t have to run, Mary. But let’s get going.”
They headed down the drive as fast as Alison could propel Mary, tugging on her wrist. When they’d come to the first bend, Alison saw with dismay the asphalt drive stretching ahead of them with no sign of the highway that it must be taking them to. She had only a dim memory of arriving at the Shrine. There had been a gate, which Gerhardt had had to get out of the car to unlock. But between the gate and the Shrine? It couldn’t have been that far. It couldn’t.
“Alison,” Mary said. “I am feeling sick. I have to stop a minute. Really.”
“Sure. A little while. We’re almost there.”
“Here, take this.” Mary handed Alison the curtain rod, then walked over to the side of the drive, holding her swollen abdomen, and vomited, politely, into high weeds. Then she stood still, waiting for the second spasm.
The silence was broken by the sound of another dog somewhere ahead of them. Shit, Alison thought, how many of them are there? Standing still, looking down the tree-lined drive, she felt exposed. If a dog came running at them along the drive, the Mace wouldn’t be much of a defense.
When Mary felt she could walk again, Alison persuaded her that it would be better for them to make their way through the woods. It would slow them down, but it would also slow down a dog, and if a dog did come after them, they could get behind a tree trunk or a bush. Or even climb a tree, if need be.
“Alison, come on! I could no more climb a tree than I could… I don’t know what. Jesus, I wish we hadn’t got into this.”
“Hey, we’re almost out of it—that’s the bright side. Try and make believe we’re hikers. Looking at the beautiful scenery. The trees and… well, the trees are nice. I can’t say I care much for the stuff close to the ground. Some of them have prickers.”
“I know. I’ve already had one slice my ankle.”
Mary started crying, but she cried a lot, and as long as it didn’t slow her down, Alison decided she didn’t have to go on with the pep talk. They were already making enough noise just walking through the woods, pushing aside dead branches and stepping on things that crackled. Bugs had started to find them, nasty little gnats, and once they did, there was no getting away from them. They tagged along like a private cloud.
The barking up ahead had become almost continuous—but that could be a positive thing. Who would the dog be barking at that way? Not an animal. Unless the animal were up a tree. And if it were a person, if it were anyone but Gerhardt, they were almost home free. Alison tried to get Mary to move faster, but Mary was afraid of the dog ahead of them and slowed down to a snail’s pace. At last she seized up altogether. She sat on a log and refused to budge. You could see there was no use arguing, so Alison told her to stay where she was. At least there were bushes all around, so she wouldn’t be easy to see.
Alison went on by herself, directly toward where the barking seemed to be coming from. The trees were getting closer together, but there was less knee-level brush. She could move almost as fast as along the asphalt drive. And then ahead of her it got brighter and she could see, through the last trees, the glint of the metal fence.
She stopped at the edge of the woods. About twenty feet beyond the fence was a two-lane highway, but there was no traffic on it, and she wasn’t sure someone in a car would see her this far away—or stop, if they did see her. The fence was about ten feet high, with barbed wire strung across the top. At the bottom was only a couple inches of leeway (she tried prying it with the curtain rod, which broke) and not enough give in the fence to be able to push her way out—not without taking the time to do some digging.
She had to choose. Either follow the curve of the fence in the direction the barking was coming from, or go the other way and hope that she could eventually flag down a car.
At that point she heard, behind the barking of the dog, a man’s voice, not loud but urgent, and moments later a whistling sound, like a teakettle whistling on the stove when you’re outside of the house. She realized, still undecided which way to go, that the whistling sound was the alarm inside the Shrine that had gone off before.
She chose—and began to jog alongside the fence toward the sound of the barking, keeping a firm grip on the can of Mace. As the fence curved, a large ornamental gateway came into sight, and parked beside it was a car that Alison recognized at a glance as Greg’s red junker Olds.
She broke into a run and called out his name, and there he was, there outside the locked gate. He looked up and shouted “Alison!” but the dog had seen her at the same moment, another German shepherd like the one outside the Shrine, and it came bounding toward her.
Alison didn’t think, she just kept running straight for the dog, and when they were almost ready to collide, she veered to one side and closed her eyes and pressed the nozzle on the Mace and didn’t stop squirting until the dog had knocked her over and she’d rolled into the fence. The dog made a kind of howling noise she’d never heard before, so she was sure she’d got him in the eyes. But she’d got herself, too, a little. It felt like what happens if you rub your eyes after you’ve eaten something with Tabasco sauce.
She made herself blink tears and tried to see what the dog was doing. It was shaking its head from one side to the other, like it was trying to shake off water, but at the same time it was staggering toward her. It was blind, and probably unable to smell anything either, but it was angrier than ever, just the way the dog outside the Shrine had been when it was tearing the curtain to shreds.
“Alison.” It was Greg. He was down on his knees right on the other side of the fence, near enough to touch.
“Greg,” she said. “Oh, Jesus. I love you.”
“Alison, you got to get away from the dog. Can you climb the fence? Try and climb high enough that the dog can’t get to you.”
It sounded like a dumb thing to do and probably impossible, but she would try. She grabbed hold of the mesh and pulled herself to her feet. Her eyes were on fire, and she really couldn’t see anything now. She fitted her toe into the mesh of the fence. She’d climbed mesh fences before, when she was little, and her feet were still small enough so she could jam in her toe and get a purchase. She got a higher handhold and pulled herself up, and Greg, on the other side of the fence, was coaching her.
The dog lunged into the fence, off to the side from where she was, and she lost a toehold. Her leg was dangling down like bait.
Then there was a huge explosion, and the dog stopped barking. Someone had shot it, and her first thought was simply despair, because she couldn’t think who would have had a gun except Gerhardt.
“Fucking hell,” said Greg, but not to her. “You had a gun all this time and you didn’t use it?”
“Against a dog that was doing only what it was supposed to do? Until this young lady appeared— Are you all right, Miss?”
“I’m fine,” said Alison, who was back on terra firma. “But my eyes hurt. There’s Mace in them, it’s like pepper.”
“I think,” said the stranger with Greg, “that there is still some water left in the car. Let me go see.”
“Are you all right?” Greg asked, trying to touch her through the mesh. They managed to twine their fingers together with the wire between.
“I’m fine. My eyes hurt. Oh, I’m so happy to see you.” She laughed. “And I can’t see you.”
&nbs
p; They managed to kiss, and then the other man was there with the water. He told her to make a cup of her hands and hold them close to the fence, and then he poured a little water into them. She doused her eyes, and for just a moment it was heaven, but the stinging started up again, almost as bad. He continued pouring and she continued washing her eyes until she became aware that the man pouring the water into her hands was wearing a Roman collar.
She let her hands drop, dismayed, blinking, still half-blind. “You’re a priest,” she said.
“Yes. But don’t let that alarm you. I’m no part of this unholy operation. I’m here with your friend to help you get away. When you appeared, Greg had been trying to use the tire iron from the car to break the lock on the gate. I confess that I tried to dissuade him. Apparently, the situation here is worse than we could have imagined.”
“A whole lot worse,” said Alison. “There’s another priest in there, and he’s some kind of— Oh God, I can’t explain, it’s a mess. I thought that dog was going to kill me. Where’s Greg?”
“He’s back by the gate, trying to break the chain with the tire iron. But I don’t hold out much hope of success. It’s a very thick chain. And we have no way of cutting the wire at the top of the fence, so I don’t see how we can get you to our side. What I mean to suggest to Greg, who, by the way, is very much in love with you, if I’m any judge at all—”
“You are,” said Alison gratefully. “He’s wonderful.”
As they talked, they walked together, slowly, brushing against the fence that separated them, in the direction of the gate. “What I mean to suggest is that I leave you here with Greg, and with my gun—which I never in my life thought that I would use, I’m very much opposed to them, but living in the West, as I have for so long— But never mind all that. I think I’m a little upset myself. What I mean to suggest,” he began again, “is that I take Greg’s car and find the nearest phone and summon the police.”
“I think that’s a very good idea,” said Alison.
When they had reached the gate, where Greg was trying to break the chain, the strange priest began to explain what he thought they should do. Greg didn’t agree right away, and he wanted to hear from Alison what was happening in the Shrine, but before she could begin to explain, another car, big and black, pulled up alongside Greg’s junker.
“May I ask,” said the driver, stepping out of the black car, “what in the world is happening here?”
Oh, Jesus, Alison thought—this time, not thankfully. Because, even though everything was still mostly a blur, she recognized the man’s voice.
It was Father Cogling.
41
Father Mabbley was shaken. He was not cut out for this sort of thing. Violence. And yet, providentially, he had had the gun on his person. A gun he’d always sworn he would never use. And yet he’d brought it with him, concealed under his suit coat, and he had used it, and it seemed quite certain now that if he hadn’t, the poor girl they’d come to help would almost certainly have been savaged by the dog he’d killed. A justifiable use of violence—but still he felt this irrational guilt for having shot the dog, for having used the gun he’d sworn never to use.
His hands were trembling. More accurately, they were twitching in an odd way, and there was a feeling, around his rib cage, that was both elevating and vaguely distressing, like the one time he’d yielded to the temptation of cocaine. It was, in an asexual way, a little like being horny.
He wished he were anywhere else but here. He wished he’d never left Las Vegas. He wished he’d never grown up. But here he was, and now here was another priest (Father Cogling, he presumed, just by the sound of his voice), in high dudgeon, railing about the dead dog. Greg, God bless him, was railing right back, and so Father Mabbley didn’t have to switch into rhetorical mode himself. He could try to lower his blood pressure (or whatever it was) and regain his sanity.
Think, he told himself. Think what to do.
But there wasn’t time for that, because while Greg was still giving Father Cogling what for, a new player appeared on the other side of the cyclone fence, a scrawny old coot with a face as deathly as life allows, and carrying the kind of gun one hopes to see only in movies.
“Gerhardt!” said Father Cogling. “Thank heaven you’re here. I just caught these two trying to break open the gate.”
“I heard a gunshot,” the skull croaked.
“And a good thing you did,” said Greg. “My wife was almost killed by your damned dog.”
“Son of a bitch,” said Gerhardt, looking toward the dog’s body, where it lay beside the fence. “Trixie? Goddamn.”
“I saw it happen, Gerhardt,” said Father Cogling, in, for him, a placatory tone. “And I will say they had little choice. The dog was attacking this girl.” For the first time Cogling seemed to take notice of Alison and said, “Oh. It’s you. I might have known.” Then he turned to Father Mabbley and said, in another tone of voice that was entre nous, in a specifically priestly way, “No one has yet to explain what you are doing here, or why you were trying to break open the gate.”
“Let’s take care of explanations later, okay?” said Gerhardt, unlocking the gate and swinging it open. “You folks wanted to get in here. The gate’s open. Get in.”
“I think,” said Father Mabbley, “that at this point we would prefer to take this young lady with us to somewhere she can receive suitable medical attention.”
“Get in,” Gerhardt repeated, lifting his lethal weapon. “She can get the attention she needs right here.” He looked toward Father Cogling. “Which of them has a gun? Get it from him.”
Father Cogling approached Father Mabbley. “I think it would be best if you gave me your weapon. We don’t want a shooting match here, do we?”
Father Mabbley gave his gun to Father Cogling, who put it in the inside breast pocket of his suit. As he did so, Greg gave Father Mabbley a look of withering scorn. Father Mabbley could scarcely blame him. It must have looked like craven submission.
“And who’s got the keys to the red car?” Gerhardt wanted to know. When there was no answer, he turned his weapon on Greg. “It’s got to be yours. So put the keys on the ground in front of you, and go inside the gate, and you walk with the girl there along the drive. Slowly. I’ll be right behind you in your car. Father Willy, you bring your friend along in your car, but lock up the gate behind you. Okay?”
Cogling nodded.
When these things had been duly accomplished, and they had begun the slow procession toward the Shrine, Father Mabbley said, “I should inform you now, Father Cogling, that the Chancery is aware of my coming here. I don’t know what your henchman thinks he’s doing in abducting us in this fashion, but he will have to answer for it. As will you, Father, if you allow him to continue to violate our rights.”
“Violate your rights, is it? Your right to break and enter? I should inform you, Father, that the girls being cared for at this facility are here for their own protection, and for the protection of the unborn life within them.”
“A strange way to protect them, if I may say so.”
“I don’t know what was happening with the dog. I do know the girl shouldn’t have been loose on the grounds. The dogs are there for the protection of the Shrine. From those”—he gave Father Mabbley a sideways look—“who might try to break in.”
Father Mabbley felt he’d achieved no more than a stalemate. Cogling’s righteous indignation seemed equal to his own. So he changed course.
“Actually, my original purpose in coming here did not have to do with securing the release of Miss Sanders.”
“Oh,” said Father Cogling sarcastically. “She’s a Miss now, is she? A moment ago your friend had claimed her for his wife.”
“My original purpose,” Father Mabbley persisted, “was to speak with the purported director of Birth-Right, Patrick Bryce.”
“Well, in that case, you’ll be disappointed in both your purposes. Miss Sanders is not about to be released, and Father Bryce is not re
ceiving visitors.”
“Shouldn’t Father Bryce be able to decide that for himself?”
Cogling made no reply, and Father Mabbley might well not have taken it in if he had, for he was wonderstruck. There ahead of them stood one of the Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World, the Shrine of the infamous Blessed Konrad of Paderborn, the patron saint of anti-Semites and one of the holy places of the Cold War. He’d seen photographs of the Shrine before, but photographs can never convey the nature of an atrocity. The Shrine was the perfect combination of a cathedral and a bunker, with a lead-gray dome of cast concrete that seemed to be sinking into the earth rather than soaring from it. Every detail was expressive of the whole, though detail, as such, had not been the architect’s forte. It was, quite arrogantly, One Big Idea, and that idea was Authority. Authority that had no use for the landscape around it, or for the people who might enter it, but only for its own swollen and ill-conceived terribilità. It was, as the poets say, a sermon in stone (or ferroconcrete) and such an indictment of the institution that had erected it that Father Mabbley, for the first time since he had come to the decision that he would leave the priesthood, felt a sense of, if not exactly jubilation, joyful relief. What bliss it would be no longer to be implicated in what that building represented! To be a priest no more and a human being again.
Cogling brought his car to a stop and got out. Greg and Alison were standing at the foot of the steps leading to the entrance of the monstrosity, and Gerhardt was urging them to enter with motions of his lethal weapon. There was another dead dog lying on the steps, and—the topper—there were bats flittering out of the lowering Romanesque doorway. In its own gothic way, it was almost beautiful.
Father Mabbley got out of the car. He wondered, as he did from time to time, if he was about to die. He hoped not, but it was always possible, and if he were to die, there was at least this consolation: that he couldn’t have done it in higher style. This place was the very entrance to the city of Dis. Dante would have felt right at home.
THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance Page 31