The Fraternity of the Stone (6 page)

In the ceiling above the sink, a trapdoor led to the insulation beneath the roof. He removed his shoes so he wouldn't leave marks on the porcelain and, holding them, climbed upon the sink, hearing it creak beneath his weight. He groped above him, exhaled when he felt the rim of the trapdoor, pushed it up, and lifted himself into the musty, cold, yet sweat-producing closeness. After sliding the trapdoor back into place, he crawled across the irritating glass wool insulation toward a far corner, where he lay as flat as he could, hiding behind joists and upright support beams. He tried to keep his mind still but couldn't.

Breathing dust, he brooded. About his fellow monks.

And Stuart Little.

Chapter 20.

The bell stopped tolling, its muteness eerie. He went rigid, straining to listen, knowing that his hunters would be leaving the chapel now. The drizzle that had earlier beaded on his window increased to a steady rain that drummed on the slanted roof above him. Shivering from the chill and the damp, he pressed himself harder against the insulation. Despite its bulk, he felt the sharp-edged two-by-sixes that formed the skeleton of the floor beneath him. He waited.

And waited.

On occasion, he thought that he heard far-off muffled sounds. No voices, of course - the team would follow established procedures and communicate with gestures. But other noises were unavoidable, doors being opened, footsteps on hard bare floors. Indeed, with an ear against the insulation, he suspected that several indistinct creaks he heard below him were due to someone creeping through his oratory, study, and sleeping quarters. These sounds could easily have been imagined. Nonetheless he concentrated his attention across the dark attic toward the unseen trapdoor, listening apprehensively for the scrape that it would make if someone pushed it up. He licked his dry lips.

And waited.

The night passed slowly. Despite his tension, the stifling air made him groggy. He blinked at the dark through heavy eyelids, woke with a jerk, and fought not to drowse again. The next time he woke, disoriented, quickly on guard, he noticed a hint of light through the cracks in a ceiling vent that allowed the build-up of heat to escape during summer. Morning. He no longer heard the drumming of the rain on the roof. Indeed, except for the dry controlled hiss of his breath, he heard nothing.

All the same, he waited. In his former life, he'd once been hunted for five days through a jungle. He'd eaten almost nothing, only non-toxic leaves that gave his brain the potassium and lithium it needed to remain alert. Unable to trust the bacteria-ridden water, he'd depended on rainfall to give him moisture. By comparison with that jungle, this attic presented few problems. He was sedentary, after all, and accustomed to fasting. If the month had been August instead of October, the swelter up here (even with the heat vents) would have been unendurable. But given his circumstances, chilly but not dangerously cold, he could remain here for three full days. That was the limit for surviving without water. Perhaps he could last even longer, but he'd be delirious.

He brooded throughout the morning, feeling death below him. The corpses would have passed beyond rigor mortis now, entering the stage of livor mortis, beginning to swell from body gases, stinking. The same would be happening to Stuart Little.

His forehead ached from frowning. In 1979, he recalled, he'd been in such despair that he'd wanted to kill himself. The monastery had provided his only alternative, a way to punish himself and try to save his soul.

Then why now was he so desperate to avoid whoever was hunting him? Why did he feel compelled to stop them from doing what he'd almost done to himself? If the assassins killed him, it wouldn't be suicide, after all. He wouldn't be damning himself.

Because it was one thing to be martyred, quite another to invite being martyred. Presumption was as damning a sin as despair. He couldn't dare count on God to save him merely because he'd been killed for his sins. He had to fight for salvation. He had to use every device in his power, every trick he could think of, to avoid his executioners.

I want to be punished. Yes. For my former life. For the monks who died because of me.

But...

Yes?

I'm also under an obligation.

Oh? To do what?

To punish others, those who killed them.

But you didn't even know those monks. They were hermits like yourself. Personally, they meant nothing to you.

It doesn't matter. They were human beings, and they were cheated. They deserved the chance to pursue their holiness.

Maybe they're in Heaven now.

There's no guarantee. That's presumption again.

So in its place, you prefer revenge? Is that a proper Carthusian motive? An eye for an eye as opposed to turning one's cheek?

He didn't have an answer. Unfamiliar disturbing emotions, dormant for six years, welled up in him. The world had intruded, corrupting him.

Chapter 21.

The next night, late, it stormed again. Lightning flashed, dimly visible through the slots in the air vents. Thunder shook the roof. He decided to take advantage of the weather and crawled toward the trapdoor, shifting it as silently as possible, easing down to the darkness that hid the sink. As the storm raged outside, he crept to his murky sleeping quarters, pausing, sensing. An assassin would have to be terribly determined, not to mention patient, to wait here two nights in a row on the slim chance that Drew was hiding in the attic. More likely, the team would have sent someone up there after him or at least have used tear gas to force Drew down. Besides, once the team had suspected that Drew was out of the building, they'd have felt compromised, afraid that if he escaped he'd alert the police. When their harried search had failed to reveal him, they'd have been forced to pull out.

Or so Drew hoped. Nothing was sure. But here in the night he had an advantage. One of his principal skills, the result of concentrated special training, was hand-to-hand combat in total darkness. Even after six years of inactivity, he hadn't forgotten how it was done. For an instant, he felt transported back to that oppressive black room in the abandoned airplane hangar in Colorado. Now motionless, breathing slowly, listening intently, he neither smelled nor heard a lurking assailant.

Of course, the drumming of the rain would obscure other sounds. At a certain point, he had to act on faith, crossing his sleeping quarters, on guard against a brush of cloth, a sudden rush in his direction. It didn't occur. He glanced back. As rain lashed his window, lightning streaked beyond it, illuminating the room, giving him a hurried chance to reassure himself that no one was there.

Darkness returned as thunder rumbled, and he realized that staring at the lightning had been a mistake. His pupils had contracted to protect themselves against the sudden brilliance; now in the dark they were slow to dilate again. His night vision had been impaired. He had to wait, unsettled, temporarily blind. With agonizing slowness, he began to see murky outlines in the dark. He bit his lip. All right, he'd made a mistake. He admitted it. But the mistake had been a useful one. He'd learned from it. His skills were returning. Already he was calculating a way to turn the lightning to his advantage.

Keeping his back to the window, he left his sleeping quarters, then passed through the deeper blackness of the study and the oratory, again still feeling and ignoring the tug of habit to stop there and pray. On the stairs that led down to his workroom, he saw his open door, the light that glowed from the hall. He smelled a too-familiar, stomach-turning stench. When he reached the bottom, he cautiously surveyed the room. His cup and bowl remained on the workbench. Stuart Little was in the same position on the floor. But as he'd anticipated, the mouse was now bloated, filled with gas.

Drew swallowed, not in disgust but in pity. Because he needed the body, he lovingly picked up the corpse by the tail and gently wrapped it in a handkerchief that he'd left on his woodpile. He tied the handkerchief to his skipping rope and tied the rope around the waist of his habit.

From a drawer in his workroom bench, he removed four photographs, the only items he'd brought with him from his former life. Six years ago, he'd shown these photographs to Father Hafer after the priest, gasping, had heard his confession. The photographs had verified what Drew had said, convincing the priest to relent, to recommend Drew's acceptance by the Carthusians. The photographs showed a man and woman consumed by flames, a young boy screaming in horror. In the monastery, Drew had studied these images every day, reminding himself of what he'd been, of his need for penance. He couldn't bring himself to leave now without them.

Shoving them into a pocket in his robe, he glanced around. What else? He needed a weapon. The ax from his woodpile.

The storm became more violent. Even with his back to the window, he saw another blaze of lightning fill the room. He approached his open door, peered both ways along the empty corridor, glanced back with longing toward the place that had been his home for the past six years, then hefted his ax and crept down the hall toward the rear of the monastery.

He made one stop - to examine another cell. The sharp, nauseating stench as he budged the door open told him everything. But he pushed the door farther and stared at the grotesquely misshapen body of a monk.

So the team had left the monastery as they'd found it, closing each door on the ultimate secret, not bothering to dispose of the dead - no time to do so - but at least perversely respectful of their victims.

That too didn't matter. Regardless of their peculiar ethics - Drew himself had once been faithful to such ethics - there would be hell to pay.

Chapter 22.

At the rear of the monastery, he faced the exit that led to the vegetable garden. Thunder shuddered through the thick wooden door.

He reconsidered his decisions. The obvious way to leave the monastery was out the front of the lodge, then down the dirt road through the forest to the paved country road at the bottom of this hill. Granted, he'd seen the approach to the monastery only for a brief time six years ago when he'd been driven here. But he remembered that country road and the town - what had its name been? Quentin? - ten miles or so to the south. Still, if leaving through the front toward the road was the obvious route, precisely for that reason he had to take a different direction. Because, although the team had apparently fled from the area, there was a chance -a strong one - that a man had been left behind to watch the monastery from a distance, in case Drew was still on the premises. Their suspicion would be that Drew had escaped and alerted the police. But what if the police didn't arrive? The death team would have to conclude that Drew had not escaped. They'd risk returning for one more search. All the more reason for Drew to get out of here.

But not out the front, not by a route that a spotter would pay close attention to. Okay, out the back. Even so, given the quality of the team's professional conduct, Drew had to make other assumptions.

First, the spotter would not ignore the other exits from the cloister. He'd stay a careful distance away, choosing a location that gave him a confident view of the entire complex. Only one location allowed for such a vantage point: in back of the cloister, on the wooded hill that rose above this one.

Second assumption. The spotter would be equipped for night surveillance, using either an infrared scope, which projected an invisible beam, or a Starlite scope, which magnified whatever minuscule light was available. Because this storm would obscure the stars, an infrared scope was the better choice.

Drew studied his robe. Usually white, it was now a dingy gray from the cobwebs, dust, and insulation in the attic. But even if the robe were caked with coal dust, he knew that it could still be seen through a night scope. Unless, Drew thought, and remembered the lightning.

He glanced above him, toward the bulb that glowed in the corridor's ceiling. The moment he opened the door, the spotter would be attracted by the new illumination. There wasn't any light switch in the hallway - Drew assumed that the switch was on a master panel in a custodial room he'd never been shown - so he reached up, tall enough to wrap his scapular around the bulb and unscrew it. As an added precaution, he went farther along the corridor and unscrewed two other bulbs, surrounding himself in darkness. Because the hallway had no windows, a spotter couldn't know what had happened.

He returned to the door, took a long breath, exhaled, and twisted the latch. He pulled the door open slowly, trying to avoid an obvious change in this section of the cloister. As he pulled, he stood out of sight behind it.

At last it was fully open. He waited, flexing his shoulders. Timing was everything now, because both infrared and Starlite scopes had a common weakness: sudden illumination blinded the observer. The temporary sightlessness that Drew had experienced in his sleeping quarters when he used the lightning to help him scan the room would be drastically intensified through a night scope. The normal instinct would have been for Drew to run from the cloister during the intervals of blackness between glaring flashes of lightning. Drew realized, however, that his only chance to get out unseen was to do the opposite - to prime himself, to alert every reflex, to race outside for cover as soon as a new fork of lightning blazed.

In darkness, he shifted from behind the door, studying the garden. With breath-held caution, he peered toward the rain-enshrouded night. He closed his eyes and glanced away as lightning struck a tree beyond the garden. A branch crashed. Night resumed abruptly. But he knew where he had to go now. Thunder. Soon the streaks of lightning came closer together. Drew imagined the agony that a spotter would be enduring.