by Edward Lee
“A clinking sound?”
“Yes, sir, over the past several nights, not to mention for an hour or so this afternoon. The sound was described by residents as something like hammers to chisels. I knocked on your front door earlier but there was no answer and, I’m very sorry to trouble you with this. But if you could look into it?”
“I, uh, I will,” Paul faltered.
“Good day to you, sir.”
The doorman returned to his post.
“Clinking sound? What the hell was that all about?” Jess asked, one arm wrapped around a carryout bag.
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” Paul mounted the steps. “All I want to do now is scarf down my char-grilled lemongrass pheasant satay and ball Cristina’s brains out…and not necessarily in that order.”
“You dog, you!”
Paul paused to grin at the door. “I’m telling you, man. Cristina’s never been so good. She makes me feel twenty again. All of a sudden she just so, so, so…”
“Horny as a mutt in heat?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of voracious but, yeah, that’ll do.”
“Come on.”
“We’re here!” Paul announced when he and Jess barged through the front door. They stalked to the kitchen to set the bags down.
“Damn, that smells good,” Jess remarked, putting his face to a bag. “Hey, where are the girls?”
“Here we are,” Britt said. They must’ve been in the bedroom. She and Cristina simultaneously embraced their men. “Oh, baby, I really missed you,” Paul said, breathing in the scent of Cristina’s hair.
She gave him a half-lewd kiss. “How was your trip?”
“A pain in the ass but now it’s over.”
“Amen to that,” Jess said, arm around Britt.
Cristina got four beers from the fridge. “Here’s the Chinese beer you wanted.”
“We’re ready,” Jess said.
Britt looked in the bags. “I hope you got the Hunan-style ostrich steak.”
“Two orders,” Paul said. “Plus pheasant satay, crab ran-goon made with Cousie crab, prawns in XO sauce, drunken chicken—oh—and sweetbreads with black mushroom.”
“What exactly are sweetbreads?” Cristina asked.
“I don’t know, lamb brains or something. Thymus glands.”
“I know what I won’t be eating…”
They all grabbed a beer, but Paul and Jess looked at each other as if by premonition. Something didn’t seem quite right. The girls, he thought. They both looked wearied in some way, their blouses smudged, their jeans dusty. It was as though they were trying to smile to cover up their fatigue.
“Everything all right?” Paul asked.
“Yeah, you girls look like you’ve been hanging Sheetrock,” Jess said, halfway done with his beer already.
Now it was Cristina and Britt who traded glances. But neither spoke.
“Come on. What’s up?” Paul prodded, and then the thought struck him. “You girls weren’t doing anything in the basement, were you?”
Britt’s eyes widened. “Why…do you ask?”
Paul was just shy of getting ticked. “The doorman at the place next to us said some of the old folks were complaining about noises coming from the house.” He eyed Cristina in particular. “From the basement. But how could that be? The basement’s off-limits.”
“The funky mold,” Jess added.
“Well,” Cristina began but then faltered and looked to Britt.
“All right, we were in the basement,” Britt spoke up.
Paul’s anger flared. “Britt, you were here when the doctor said—”
“Forget about what the doctor said,” she came back. “He was wrong. The contractor told Cristina the mold was typical and harmless. It’s not important. And we were down there all day and we didn’t get sick, we didn’t hallucinate.”
“We found something down there, Paul,” Cristina said.
“Look, I’m totally confused now—” Paul shook his head, aggravated. “What are you talking about? You found something?”
“Let’s show them,” Britt said, and then she and Cristina headed for the basement steps.
“Women are kooky,” Jess said.
They followed them down.
Paul didn’t like it even before he hit the steps. “I don’t know about this,” he muttered.
“Yeah,” Jess added. “I think we should do what the doc said and stay out of here until it’s clean.”
Britt frowned over her shoulder. “Oh, Jess, forget about the fucking mold! You’ve got to see this.”
A lot of the boxes had now been stacked aside, widening the aisle. A few more yards down, Paul spied some shovels, a small sledgehammer and a chisel.
“I thought the freaky doorman was high,” Jess said. “Guess that explains the clinking sound.”
When Paul saw most of the cement patchwork broken up and piled to the side he almost had a fit. “Cristina! Why the hell would you do this?” There was also some dirt piled to the side. “You’ve been digging? For what?”
“I—I wasn’t sure,” Cristina said. “But the patch was already cracked.”
“What?”
“Paul, calm down,” Britt said. “Just…look.” And then she pointed down.
After they’d broken out the cement, they’d dug several feet down. “We couldn’t get it out,” Britt told them.
Cristina looked down, too. “It’s too heavy.”
“So we figured you two he-men could lift it out of there.”
In the hole sat a single barrel of some sort that seemed to be covered in rust.
“What is that? A metal drum?” Paul asked and got down on his knees.
Jess knelt as well. “Maybe it’s a keg of wine, like, three hundred years old or something.”
“Or maybe buried treasure,” Paul fantasized.
Britt tapped her foot impatiently. “We won’t know what it is unless you guys can get it out.”
The men hesitated. Then they shrugged and got to work.
“Lever it up,” Paul said, his feet in the hole and pulling the strange drum backward. Jess got the shovel’s edge beneath the cannister’s base. Paul then pulled it over on its side with a huff.
“Jesus, the damn thing’s heavier than a floor safe…”
Jess lifted up on the rim, then shot a frown at Britt. “We’re lawyers, not forklifts!”
“Quit whining,” Britt egged on, laughing. “Would you rather Cristina and I mess up our beautiful nails?”
Paul and Jess failed at the first two attempts to lift the small barrel, but on the third—
“Up, up!” Paul grunted.
“Fuckin’-A!”
“Be careful,” Cristina fretted.
They hoisted it out on its side, then after a few more grunts got it set upright.
“Now what?” Jess asked, sitting exhausted against some boxes. “I’ll bet that thing’s made of cast iron.”
“And look at the lid,” Paul observed. “It’s crimped under the lip.”
“Try this,” Cristina said, offering the hammer and chisel.
Paul got to work, gradually hammering, then bending the iron lip up around the rim. The noise was nerve-racking. “I think I’m getting it…” Eventually—
“Bingo,” Britt said.
When Paul pried the lid open, Jess lifted it away and—
clang!
—heaved it aside.
Britt dropped to her knees and shouldered between the two men, reaching in. The smell that eddied up was nothing unpleasant but surely a fetor that suggested antiquity: old metal, old wood, and the scent of fabric that should be rotting but for some reason wasn’t. Paul froze, and Cristina and Jess stared when Britt lifted some unknown object swathed in old, burlaplike cloth.
“Well, I can tell already it’s not jewels or gold coins,” she said, setting it on the floor. She began to carefully unwrap the cloth, then gagged.
Everyone else gagged as well.
�
��That’s just great!” Jess said, repelled.
Paul muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Within the emaciated cloth lay a yellowed animal’s skull.
“It looks like a dog’s skull,” Cristina said, a hand to her stomach.
“What the fuck is a dog skull doing buried in our basement?” Paul remarked.
“But there’s something else.” And Britt was reaching in again, lifting out another object padded by the ancient, crumbling fabric. “It feels like some sort of a—”
What she held up was a crude bowl—about the size of a cereal bowl—that seemed to be made of fired clay. A disturbed look touched her face even before she turned it around.
“What’s that there on the side?” Jess asked with some excitement.
“Maybe they are jewels,” Paul hoped.
Britt said nothing when she showed the feature to Cristina, who croaked, “Oh, my God,” and then fainted immediately.
Into the front of the bowl had been set three circular polished stones: one black, one green, and one red.
(II)
“O quam magnificum, o domnul …”
Father Rollin sat dejected in his heavily curtained study, nervously thumbing his pendant under which had been etched the same words he’d just muttered to himself. And then he looked at his ring, and saw the same words etched again. Paul Nasher and the other man had returned a while earlier, Rollin had seen through his window. With his binoculars, then, he watched the four of them mingle in the kitchen for a few moments; then they disappeared.
Where are they? the priest wondered, his stomach strangely tight. They hadn’t gone upstairs because he’d kept the glasses trained regularly on the steps.
Why do I have this feeling they’re in the basement?
The light was draining out of late afternoon. Rollin couldn’t guess where his surveillance might be best posted tonight: here, or his room at the Ketchum. He dreaded returning to the hotel to night, for the bawdy convention was going strong. Just don’t have it in me tonight. But he couldn’t believe what he was doing next: leaving his church on the pretense of going for a walk.
A walk around the alley.
Those homeless girls kept weighing on his mind. They’re all prostitutes, or were in their better days, he felt sure. And Canessa herself was a prostitute. Was he seeing too much into it?
He didn’t know. Sometimes he felt like he didn’t know anything.
How hackneyed. He was whistling as he walked down Dessorio Avenue—Bach’s Passacaglia. of all things—to seem inconspicuous. An old man walking his dog nodded to him; then a woman in a business dress walked briskly by without even noticing. I’m invisible to everyone but the old, he joked, but liked the idea. I wish I could BE invisible, so I could walk right into the annex house and see what they’re up to.
Ludicrous.
The old Banana Republic stood dark, which was strange for he knew there were guards there round the clock. Just before he cut into the alley, a patter of footfalls startled him. Had he heard giggling, too? He jerked around and glared back down the street but there was nothing.
A dark alley is no place for a priest at sundown, he caught himself worrying, yet he felt fairly sure that God would protect him from muggers. Fairly sure. Do I even deserve his protection? Perhaps not. Now he felt inane. He turned left down the alley, pretending to meander, until he was directly behind his old annex house. One high sodium lamp provided the only useful illumination. Don’t let your shadow be seen, he warned himself. Then he’d really have some explaining to do. If they ARE in the basement, they might see me …
He hunkered down quickly and peered in the streetlevel windows.
Did he hear voices? Just my imagination? he wondered, but for a moment he thought he’d heard agitated conversation. Then: No, he thought. The basement stood completely lightless, all that looked back at him were solid panes of black.
Rollin walked back toward the alley exit in long strides, and when he passed the Banana Republic he shivered for no apparent reason.
Back at the church, he found the door unlocked. I couldn’t possibly have, he felt sure. Nevertheless, it was. “Absentmindedness is a symptom of men my age,” he muttered next. He’d done it before, and he always reasoned that there was little to steal in a barely used church. He pushed into the murky nave entrance and turned on a few dim lights, and then locked the doors.
I don’t know what I’m going to do now but of course…I NEVER know what I’m going to do.
He had no appetite so he skipped making himself dinner, and instead elected to go back upstairs to watch some more with his field glasses. Now the front study’s murk was double what it had been before he left; he left the door open but didn’t turn on a light. Only a slant of illumination leaked in from one of the few lights in the long hall. He approached his chair and the slight part in the drapes, was about to pick up the binoculars again when—
His heart surged at a pattering of sound.
Footsteps in the hall?
Damn it. Someone DID come in. “Who’s there? There’s nothing to steal so you may as well just be on your way.”
His call was only answered by what he thought must be giggling, yet he didn’t step forward nor even turn on the light. Instead, he stood frozen, staring.
The shadow of a figure now faced him from just aside the door.
Rollin gulped.
“Who are you?”
The reply seemed to build first with a sound like blowing leaves. “You already know,” came the feminine words, lilting and accented. “You’ve been awaiting me for some time, as have your pitiful ancestors—traitors to your country’s true heart.”
Rollin couldn’t have moved even if at gunpoint. His teeth actually chattered but he managed to command: “Get out! This is hallowed ground!”
A raspy chuckle flitted about every corner of the room. “Servitor, how dull, this God of yours. As pitiful as your corroded spirit.”
“You can’t be here! This is a sanctified place, a house of God!”
More rustling, the sound like leaves, yet the angled figure didn’t budge. “Power is like faith, servitor. It fades away. It grows palsied and it dies. Like virility, and like empires.”
Rollin’s eyes couldn’t blink.
“Like you…”
The priest tore away from his stance and turned on the nearest lamp. The shadow was gone. Perhaps it had never been there at all, for now he saw that it may have merely been a queer shadow cast by the coat stand.
Christ, give me strength …
From another room, something of glass fell and broke. Rollin trotted down the hall, switching on lights as he went. His heart chugged in his old chest, then surged again and he actually shrieked.
Just as he prepared to enter his bedroom, the door burst open and out ran two dirty women with disheveled hair. A stream of giggles poured from their mouths. Rollin’s initial jolt backed him against the paneled wall and as the second interloper passed, she brazenly grabbed his crotch and squeezed. As she headed toward the stairs, the priest noticed that she was nude from the waist down, and carrying a pair of dirty jeans with her. She wore a T-shirt that read THE DAMNED, and the other one had pink sweatpants on. Their bare feet thunked down the stairs with more giggles.
Rollin knew he was too old and heart-diseased to give chase. Feebly, he shouted, “You little buggers! I’ll have the police after you!” But the warning was only answered by more mocking laughter.
One of the girls’ voices echoed from downstairs, “Sleep good in your bed to night, asshole!”
Rollin caught his breath and entered the bedroom. What had fallen was a framed picture of the Nave of Snagov Monastery, in southern Romania. Glass glittered on the old carpet like wet rock salt. He groaned when he noticed the wavy streaks of black, green, and red besmirching the white walls. His cross above the bed had been taken down and placed on his pillow. “Goddamn them,” he profaned when he picked it up.
It was wet, and th
e pillow and sheets were drenched. The odor he was only noticing now told him it was urine.
He heard a door slam deep downstairs, which he knew must be the back kitchen door. Those homeless bitches are long gone now, more unpriestly profanation occurred to him. He’d never felt so useless, so impotent.
He swore no further once down in the chancel. What could I expect? Blank-faced, he discovered similar desecration. The same scrawls of magic marker streaked the white altar linens. These weedy vagabonds had brought stout bladders, for another great wash of urine tinted not only the linens but the front carpet. The Communion decanter had been gulped dry, the packets of the Host torn open, their contents wolfed down. Evidently one of the wretches had forced herself to vomit, for that was what now filled the Holy Chalice.
Rollin calmly dragged the fouled linens off the altar and carried them to the laundry room.
(III)
“It’s impossible,” Cristina droned after having come to on the couch. Her eyes held wide on the ceiling.
“Honey, it’s a coincidence,” Paul countered. “Sure, a little weird, but it’s still coincidence. You’re overreacting again, right, Britt?”
They all sat close around the couch, save for Britt, who stood, smoking. Was she nervous? “Yes, it’s—”
“Bullshit, Britt!” Cristina railed. “How can it be coincidence?”
Jess held the odd three-gemmed bowl in one hand, and Cristina’s Noxious Nun doll up in the other. “That is pretty wild, the gems, I mean. Even the order of the colors are the same.”
“Yeah, but that’s the only thing,” Britt insisted. “There’s a logical explanation, Cristina—we’re just not seeing it yet. You’re freaked out because you’ve been dreaming about a nun holding a three-gemmed bowl, and today that’s what we find buried in the basement.”
“And you think that’s coincidence?” Cristina said.
“Yes. The two bowls don’t even look alike; in fact that thing from the basement doesn’t even look like a bowl, does it? It’s kind of warped.” She took it from Jess and placed it on the coffee table, rim-side down. “It’s probably some kind of old centerpiece. It’s not a bowl.”