Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  Agnes hasn't felt this angry since the day she wanted to kill Ronald Wegeman.

  Jo is back-pedaling. Agnes swings again, and knocks over a standing lamp.

  "Agnes, I'm sorry," says Jo.

  Jo's heels catch in the doorjamb of the bathroom, and she falls backwards. She scrambles to a spot near the bathtub.

  Agnes's blind rage overtakes her. She swings the broom back. It hits the drop ceiling.

  Thump!

  Even in their respective states of drunkenness and anger, Jo and Agnes both realize instantly that the sound is all wrong. Agnes hits the ceiling with the broom handle again.

  Thump! Thump!

  "There's something up there," says Agnes. "God I hope it's not a body."

  She tries to push up one of the ceiling panels. It won't budge more than an inch. Jo smiles in a dazed way.

  "Give me a hand with this," Agnes commands.

  Jo rises unsteadily to her feet. Both women grip the broom and push upward. Something on top of the panel slides. They push upward again. Suddenly, the panel dislodges and falls to the floor, nearly crowning them. They are showered with what has been stashed in the ceiling.

  "What...?" says Agnes.

  Comic books. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all featuring the same two archetypes: sacred and profane love, poor and rich, naive and sophisticated, saint and whore, blond and brunette, The Girls of Tremont High, Prudence and Rosalie.

  Agnes stands up on a chair and looks into the space above the ceiling panels. "There must be a thousand of them up here."

  "I haven't read Prudence and Rosalie since I was a kid," says Jo. "What does it mean?"

  Tommy's words ring in Agnes's ears:

  "Drop ceilings are only good for hiding pornography."

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  "I don't know, Agnes," says Jo. "Maybe he just collects them. Even priests need an outlet."

  "If he were a collector, he's have them in plastic bags. This is porn—I'm sure of it. Why hide it? Unless his landlord has some weird ideas about insulation."

  "But Prudence and Rosalie?" says Jo. "They were always so sweet."

  Prudence Wheelwright and Rosalie Sorrels and their pals were at one time the comic books characters of choice for adolescent girls. They appeared, separately and together, in about seventy-five titles each month: Prudence & Rosalie; The Adventures of Prudence & Rosalie; Willy's Gals; Pru 'n' Ro; Wheelwright, Sorrels & Co.; The Days and Nights of Prudence; Around the World with Ro; The Girls of Tremont High—every possible permutation. The comic books existed primarily so that the girls could be drawn in the latest fashions. Prudence was blond and sweet and simple and poor. Rosalie was brunette and snotty and fabulously wealthy. They vied for the affections of Willy Boyd, a simpleminded soul with hearts in his eyes who couldn't decide between them.

  "Tommy says that men are so insanely driven by sex that they're aroused by more things than we can possibly imagine," says Agnes. "Traditional porn is just the tip of the iceberg. Now I'm sure that Father Chris is the Minotaur. Look—it's always two women, always and blond and a brunette."

  Jo closes the comic she has been paging through. She seems sober. "You're scaring me."

  "I'm trying to. Let's get out of here."

  Jo takes a breath and nods. "Okay."

  Agnes has an inspiration. She opens Father Chris's closet. She parts his cassocks. In the back of the closet is his electric typewriter. Agnes takes out the ribbon cartridge and replaces the machine.

  They get into Jo's big red jeep. Jo starts to get into the driver's seat, but Agnes stops her. Jo slides meekly over.

  Agnes starts the engine.

  "I have to think," she says, overwhelmed by all that she knows and all that she must do. "He's with the kids. Would he hurt them?"

  "He's never hurt children," says Jo.

  "You're probably right. But the cops should check."

  "I have their phone numbers," says Jo. "I can call."

  Jo reaches in the back of the jeep and finds a bottle of spring water. She drinks some and passes it to Agnes. The water seems to percolate in Agnes's stomach, which feels as heavy as the Weird Sisters' cauldron.

  Jo looks for the numbers in her daytimer.

  Agnes throws the jeep into gear and peels out of the parking space without even checking her blind spot. She roars to a pay phone. Jo gets out and checks on the children. Antonio made it home. Perri didn't, and her parents are frantic. There is no answer at the home of the girl who played Beatrice, Sybil Pike.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  The jeep roars up Eighth Avenue. Agnes slows but does not stop for red lights.

  "Where are you going?" says Jo nervously.

  "To the rectory," says Agnes. She darts to the left of a slow-moving Dodge Colt and finds herself corralled by a construction gang and some double-parked cars. "Goddamn it."

  "Why there? What is it?" says Jo

  "He needs time alone with them," says Agnes.

  Jo whimpers. She looks with horror at the objects in her lap: the comic books, Barbara's resume, the typewriter ribbon. The jeep crashes through a moonscape of potholes.

  "Another blond and brunette, of course," says Agnes. "Sybil died her hair for the show. Just like Prudence and Rosalie. But it was always too confusing, just out of reach. I thought of Barbara as dark, but she had just died her hair. Mrs. Bloch was blond, but she wore a dark wig. Mrs. Chesser was dark, and her daughter was blond. The stewardesses—the same, one of each."

  "And Miss Lenihan wore a wig because of the radiation treatments," says Jo.

  "Wigs and dye, wigs and dye," says Agnes. "Ripkin and Slade don't fit. They were both brunette. But I don't know. Does it have to fit exactly?"

  "I don't know."

  "I don't know either."

  They pull up to the rectory. If she weren't held down by her safety belt, Jo would jump out of her seat, for parked directly across the street is Father Chris's flaming yellow Le Baron. The supposedly uninhabited building is encased in scaffolding, but Agnes can see a light—faint, flickering and ominous—coming from the window nearest the clothesline, the window out of which Father Chris once leaned to hang up his brassieres.

  "Find a phone," Agnes orders Jo. "Call Tommy. Call the hot line. Call 911. Call anybody. Just get us some blue uniforms over here."

  Agnes bolts from the jeep and runs to the rectory. Her shoulder bag knocks against her hip as she runs. The weightiness of the bag is comforting. Gandalf is ready.

  She crawls under the scaffolding. The front door is locked. The windows are out of reach. Agnes fights the momentary urge to go home and crawl under the covers and read about it all in the papers tomorrow morning. Even when the lives of children are at stake, it isn't easy to make yourself go where someone wants to torture and kill you. Agnes leans on the scaffold. If it wouldn't call attention to herself, she would vomit.

  Agnes crawls back under the scaffolding and looks up at the window. The mysterious light flares briefly for several seconds. Agnes has a vision of the two girls, sightless and cowering, more frightened than anyone ever should be.

  Cleaving to the shadows to avoid detection, Agnes makes her way around to St. Basil's church. She knows that the front doors are bolted. She goes around to the back and scales a cyclone fence—something she hasn't done since she was a child and something that, even then, she wasn't very good at. She rips her pants down the side, and nearly impales herself in the fleshy part of her palm. The fence buckles and a dog starts to bark. She wheels a dumpster over to the side of the church. The dumpster smells of dogshit and rattles on its undercarriage like a sound-effects thunder machine. The dog redoubles its barking.

  Standing on the dumpster, Agnes is eye-level with the bottom of a stained glass panel depicting the Old Testament story of Belshazzar and the writing on the wall. Belshazzar, looking troubled, has separated himself from his feast and concubines; Daniel interprets the writing, informing the king that he has been weighed in the balances and found wanting
. Daniel wears the pleased expression of someone who has gotten off a zinger. With a piece of old two-by-four she finds under the scaffolding, Agnes smashes one section of glass: the bottom of Belshazzar's red cloak. The lead strips hold the rest of the window intact. By arching her back and nearly dislocating her shoulder, she can reach in just far enough to open the catch of a small sash window. Getting through the window isn't easy: she must slide in on her side, head first; she tumbles into the church on her hands. She feels a pain in her left wrist that will grow steadily worse. She has suffered a hairline fracture.

  "Fuck, fuck, fuck," says Agnes. The words echo in the empty church.

  Her eyes must adjust to the darkness.

  The only lights comes from two racks of flickering electronic candles, and a pin spot shining on the large crucifix on the altar, illuminating the death-grimace of Christ. The church should be quiet, but it isn't. The electric candles buzz, the old pews creak, and a kneeler falls with a terrific crash. There is another faint sound, an almost musical rustling—the wind stirring in the organ pipes? She wheels to look in the choir loft. She sees movement: indistinct forms, gray and white, swirl in the blackness. Finally Agnes realizes that she has been fooled by the movement of the fluid in her own eyes.

  "I gotta calm down," she says aloud.

  She is afraid on many levels. She has the New Yorker's prosaic fear, the certainty that if she got inside so can others: homeless lunatics and crack addicts. She also feels the terror of superstition, the dread that the statues will come to life and laugh mockingly. But neither of these fears approaches the knot-in-the-heart idea of entering the lair of a serial killer as he goes about his work. Agnes hears a scratching in the wainscoting, a discordance in the air itself. The pews settle, popping like arthritic joints; she hears faint raspings and heavings in the gloom like the death rattle of the ceramic spotlit Christ.

  "Get a grip. Get a grip."

  She feels a chill on her back. A real chill. A breeze blows in from somewhere. The electronic candles flicker. The swirling fluid in her eyeballs is kaleidoscopic.

  She goes down the trapdoor in the baptistery. She carries a lit sacramental candle. She doesn't bother to close the trapdoor. She takes about five steps in the tunnel before the trapdoor crashes down, plunging enough air into the tunnel to extinguish the candle.

  Agnes doesn't move. She listens for movement but doesn't hear any. She has never known greater temptation: there is nothing she wants more than to turn on the switch and flood the tunnel with reassuring light. But she doesn't dare. The wiring in these old places is funny. You never know how many things work off a single switch. Turning on the light might telegraph her presence to the Minotaur.

  It is ten or fifteen degrees colder in the tunnel. Cold enough for chattering teeth? Agnes's thermostat has gone berserk.

  Agnes ascends the stairs with great caution. Sweat drips into her eyes. She itches all over. Her bag won't stay on her shoulder.

  She tiptoes into the rectory.

  The windows are bare. The furniture and rugs have been removed. Outlines mark the places on the walls where pictures and crosses once hung. Big holes gape in the walls. Loose masonry and all kinds of tools litter the floor.

  She tries to get her bearings. She looks out the window but doesn't see any police cars. The room with the flickering light couldn't possibly be any lower. Agnes searches all the rooms on that floor. She opens closets until she finds one that isn't a closet at all but the entrance to a short flight of steps, at the top of which is a flickering, orange brightness.

  Someone is humming—distracted, sporadic humming, as though the hummer were involved in come close work, watch repair or taxidermy or organ dissection.

  Agnes fondles Gandalf. She takes off the safety catch.

  Onward and upward.

  The staircase leads to an attic with a sloping ceiling. Father Chris sits at a desk. His back is to Agnes. The flickering light comes from two candles in jars on his desk.

  There is no point screwing around, thinks Agnes. She takes the gun from her bag and points it at the priest's back.

  "Hello, Father," says Agnes shakily. She clears her throat.

  He looks up but does not turn around.

  "Agnes?" he says mildly.

  "That's right," she says, her chest heaving. "I figured you'd be here."

  "You seem to have caught me in the act," he says, and starts to turn around.

  "Don't move, Father. I have a gun."

  His knobby head tilts questioningly. "Oh my."

  "And I'm not afraid to use it."

  He actually laughs. "That really takes me back. I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has said that to me."

  "This is real life, Father," says Agnes. Two beads of sweat the size of marbles slide into her eyes. "The police are on their way."

  "Why?" asks Father Chris.

  Agnes doesn't answer. Slowly, she moves toward him.

  "I had a funny feeling about you," says the priest. "Sometimes you can just tell about people. You seemed like someone into guns."

  Agnes advances to the priest's side. There is what appears to be coagulated blood on his lips—a swath of it. There is blood on his teeth, blood on his palms and fingertips.

  The barrel of Gandalf is an inch from his eyes. He winces, waiting for Agnes to blow his head off. He is shaking. With two unsteady fingers, Agnes rakes a bit of blood off his chin. She smells her fingers.

  "Chocolate," she says.

  "My weakness," says the priest. On the desk is an open copy of Backstage and what's left of the chocolate Great Expectations.

  "Why are you here?" she demands.

  "Privacy," he says. "That was a mistake, obviously."

  Agnes rests her rear end on the desk. "What's wrong with your apartment?"

  "Father Clarence is in and out of there all the time. This is a lot quieter. Usually."

  Agnes lowers the gun. "Father, did you take the children to Brooklyn?"

  "No. I dropped off the sheet music at the church first. Father Clarence was there. He said he was going to Brooklyn anyway. He took them."

  "I feel sick," says Agnes.

  "Maybe your blood sugar is low. You want some chocolate." Agnes says no. Father Chris breaks another piece off Great Expectations and gnaws on it himself. "Father Clarence had gotten a call from Sybil Pike's parents. Their plane was delayed in Toronto, and they won't be back until tomorrow. He was going to take Sybil to her sister's place. Agnes?"

  "Mmmm?"

  "Why were you going to shoot me?"

  "Jesus, Father, I thought you were the Minotaur."

  "Oh," he says, frankly puzzled. "Why would you think that?"

  Agnes doesn't know where to begin. "Let's just say the comic books sealed it."

  Now the priest is really confused. "Comic books?"

  "Of course you wouldn't know about them," says Agnes forlornly. "I've made a terrible mistake."

  "When I was on TV, that was only make-believe, you know."

  "I know, Father. And I'm sorry."

  "Don't anybody move," says Tommy. He stands on the stairs, gun drawn, crouching dramatically.

  "Now why does he want to shoot me?" wonders the priest. "Does he think I'm the Minotaur too?"

  "It's all a terrible misunderstanding, Father," says Agnes. She runs to Tommy. "You want to fill me in?" says Tommy edgily.

  "I'm made a terrible mistake. He's not the Minotaur."

  Tommy holsters his gun.

  "But I think Father Clarence is," says Agnes.

  "What!" says Father Chris.

  "Well he was my next guess," says Tommy.

  "It's true," says Agnes. She turns back to Father Chris. "I hope I can make this up to you someday, Father."

  The priest shrugs. "Think nothing of it, I guess."

  "We've got to hurry," Agnes tells Tommy. "They're in Brooklyn."

  Agnes flies down the stairs, and Tommy follows.

  "It doesn't have to be a priest, you know," Tommy
calls to her.

  Father Chris crosses himself and prays and then takes a few bites of chocolate, but finds that he has no appetite.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Right church, wrong pew, thinks Agnes.