Thomas M. Disch (29 page)

“We understand, of course,” said Peter, laying his hand on his mother’s shoulder and shoving her forward, gently.

Father Cogling nodded, and turned to the next parishioner in line behind them. “Gerhardt,” he said. “You read the Gospel today with great feeling.”

Margaret turned around just in time to see Willy exchange a meaningful look with the man, Gerhardt Ober, who would, only two hours later, murder her.

“Thank you, Father,” said Gerhardt.

“Come along, Mother,” said Peter.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Bryce,” said Willy.

A bell was ringing, repeatedly, in the darkness. Silvanus, waking by degrees, thought at first that he had fallen asleep during a vigil before the Holy Sacrament. He made his hand into a fist and struck his heart, praying
Domine, non sum dignus!
0 Lord, I am not worthy! Just how true that was became evident as the bell’s ringing continued and he remembered where he was—in Delilah’s little house in the village of Low Rates Trailer Court, lying beside her corpse. Where he’d struck himself the inflamed flesh reminded him, with a flash of pain, that it was not for one who bore Satan’s mark to call upon the Lord, even to proclaim his unworthiness. That had been established beyond all doubt.

A man rattled the door of the little house and shouted, “Damon, I know you’re in there. I heard you. Stop fucking around and let me in.”

He went to the door and unbolted it, expecting to be greeted by the man who called himself Wolf. But this was someone else, younger, in a flimsy white doublet that revealed the heraldic emblems on his upper arms. “I figured I’d find you here,” he said, pushing past Silvanus to enter the house. “Shit—it stinks in here!”

Silvanus stood on the mortar block outside the doorway and considered for a moment simply running away and losing himself in the maze of the village’s unlighted paths. But he had no confidence in his powers of flight, so he followed the young man into the house and asked him who he was.

“What’s this? Suddenly you got amnesia? The shock of murdering someone has catapulted you into some new dimension?”

Silvanus stood mute, unable to answer the man’s questions.

“I’m Clay, and I’m your personal trainer. Okay, we got that settled? Now tell me what’s happened here. Something’s gone wrong.”

“I did not mean to murder her. I did what she bade me do—but with too great vigor.” He held out his hands to be manacled, as he had seen apprehended felons do so often on the Trinitron.

But Clay only wrinkled his forehead and sniffed the tainted air. “Her?”

he asked. “Don’t you mean
him?
” Then, with great feeling, “Oh shit! Delilah?

You didn’t!” He went into the next room of the little house and removed the lengths of fine fabric with which Silvanus had shrouded Delilah’s body. He turned to Silvanus with a look of incredulity. “You cut off her fucking
breast?
”

“Only after I knew her to be dead,” Silvanus said.

“Have you completely flipped out?”

“I did no more than she asked to have done.”

“Have you been here with Delilah ever since you left the bar you went to with her and Wolf?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Was there anyone else here with you?”

Silvanus gestured toward the Trinitron.

“Are you still high on something? You sound spaced out.”

The way that the man was looking at him made Silvanus realize that he was naked.

“I’ll tell you, if it was up to me, I would like nothing better than just to let the cops find you like this. You would generate some first-class headlines. It’s not every pedophile priest who manages to get tattooed and murder a hooker right after he kills the fag who’s blackmailing him. You’re definitely ahead of the competition now, Father Bryce. But it’s not up to me—fortunately for you. I’ve got orders to get you back to your fucking rectory. Pronto. I got your clothes in the car. You think you can dress yourself?”

Silvanus nodded. “My name is Father Bryce now? I am not Damon?”

The man smirked. “Hey, you learn quick.”

“A priest—not a bishop?”

“You were expecting a promotion for what you did?” Clay laughed and shook his head. “Man, you better come down from that cloud. You’re in deep shit.”

Silvanus nodded. For all the man’s expressions of contempt, he seemed to have a clear idea of what Silvanus ought to do—and he himself had none at all.

“You better get washed up,” Clay told Silvanus, and made him immerse himself in an immense white basin of heated water to remove the incrustations of blood—his own and Delilah’s—from his body. The hot water eased the pain of the Satanic face incised upon his chest and stomach, and Clay found a compartment of balms and unguents hidden behind the speculum mounted on the wall of the cubicle containing the great basin. One of these balms was applied to the inflamed tissues, to their still greater relief.

Then Silvanus dressed himself, with some assistance in the fastenings of his shirt and shoes, in a costume of black wool, finely woven. When he’d finished dressing, the image he presented in the speculum was decidedly priestly.

“Now I am a priest?” he asked Clay.

“It looks like that, don’t it?”

“But without a tonsure?”

“A tonsure?” The man laughed aloud. Then, soberly, “You’re not joking, are you? You are really out of it. Well, that won’t be my problem, once I get you out of
here
. Come on, we’ll get you back to Willowvile. Do you want to kiss Delilah good-bye?”

Silvanus shook his head. “At this moment I feel no lust at all.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Clay extinguished the flameless torches within the house and stood in the doorway, surveying the dark streets of the village. There was no one in sight. He gestured for Silvanus to leave the house, and then locked the door behind them with a key he’d taken from a small leather purse he’d found in Delilah’s bedchamber.

Silvanus now understood, from looking at the Trinitron, that what he’d first supposed to be armored houses were self-powered carriages and were, in the dominion of the Antichrist, more common than horses. Each man seemed to have his own “automobile.” (Though no one seemed able to speak Latin, many of the words in use clearly derived from Latin, just as in the vulgar tongues of Silvanus’s own era.) There were greater marvels still—self-moving carriages that flew, though with rigid wings. These were not chimeras of the sort abounding on the Trinitron, for he had seen them himself—moving
above
the clouds, traversing the sky from horizon to horizon, just as in the prophecies of Ezekiel.

Clay entered on one side of the automobile, and Silvanus, after fumbling at the latch, entered on the other side and lowered himself, not without difficulty, into the low, cushioned seat. Silvanus watched intently as Clay went through the motions that excited the carriage into responsive motion. In moments they were outside the perimeter of the village and part of the irregular stream of other Fords, Toyotas, Datsuns, and so forth (for there were as many varieties of automobile as there were flowers in a garden, and the distinctive excellence of each one variety compared to all the rest was one of overriding concern to the Trinitron), speeding almost soundlessly along one of the wide, gray, glass-smooth roadways.

Because of the terrible velocity at which they were moving, Clay had to fix his attention on the operation of the automobile, though his eyes would dart from time to time to Silvanus, who, for his part, was transfixed by the prospect before him, at once fearful and wonderstruck.

At length Clay spoke. “What you said a while ago, in the trailer, about how you’re a priest now, not a bishop—what did you mean by that? Why would you be a bishop?”

Silvanus did not know how to reply. Clay seemed to have his own idea of an already existing relationship between himself and Silvanus, an idea that Silvanus had no wish to challenge. That he should pose such a question meant that he had no notion of Silvanus’s real identity. He believed him to be a priest called Father Bryce, and Silvanus fervently desired nothing more than to step into the priestly shoes of this Father Bryce and to forget the life he’d led as Damon, the slave of Satan and murderer of the temptress Delilah.

So he made a reply as unrevealing as he could devise. “I cannot think why I should have said that. I was in great distress. I was not myself.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m asking, shithead. Are you yourself?”

“How can I answer such a question?”

“Why not try for honestly.”

Silvanus turned sideways and glared. He glared well, being accustomed to authority. “Yes,” he said, “I am myself.” Then, fearing that Clay’s next demand would be for some fuller declaration of his identity, he parried, “Can you say the same?”

Clay was annoyed, but not baffled, by the challenge. “Hey, who
I
am is classified information to
you
, motherfucker. I
ask
the questions, I don’t answer them. I thought we established that a while ago.”

Silvanus bowed his head, as though in submission.

“Why ‘bishop’?” Clay persisted.

Silvanus had recovered his wits to the degree that he could ask in turn, plausibly, “What priest does not think he might become a bishop?”

Clay seemed to give this serious consideration. And then he asked, simply, crushingly, “Does the name Bonamico ring a bell?”

Their eyes met, and Clay knew, and Silvanus knew that he knew, that he had touched a nerve. He had spoken a name that pertained not to this latter-day world but to the diocese of Montpellier-le-Vieux, where Bonamico was the master mason in the Bishop’s service, a man whom he detested and suspected of heresy.

“What has Bonamico to do with this?” Silvanus asked, feeling a deeper bewilderment.

“I thought you said you’d read the
Prolegomenon
.”

“I don’t understand,” Silvanus answered, truthfully.

“Boscage
became
Bonamico, when he was in Montpellier-le-Vieux.”

The man’s pronunciation was so barbaric that Silvanus did not at first recognize the name of his episcopal seat, as Clay’s tongue had formed it.

Before he could invent a plausible reply, Clay continued: “And
you

became the Bishop. Right? Is that what happened?” He said it as one might announce that one’s opponent in chess had been checkmated.

“I
became
the Bishop?” Silvanus echoed feebly. His sense of the matter was that he had, inexplicably, ceased to be the Bishop and become someone and something else.

“Jesus,” said Clay, addressing himself and, for the moment, seeming to forget Silvanus was there. “I’ve read the book, I’ve met the man, I’ve
talked
with him, but somehow I never really
believed
it. I thought this whole fucking business going after you was a damned wild-goose chase. Jesus!

Boscage really
was
zapped back to—” He turned to Silvanus. “What year was it, anyhow? Boscage could never quite get that straight.”

Though he did not understand most of what Clay had been saying, Silvanus sensed that the man was in some kind of uncertainty that paralleled his own.

Each of them knew something the other did not, and each was unwilling to surrender his privileged information.

Silvanus affected to laugh. “What year was
that?
What year is
this?
”

Clay gave him one last sideways look and then gave up. “Shit,” he said contemptuously, “you’re still stoned out of your fucking mind.”

Clay said no more, and neither did Silvanus. The automobile, under Clay’s guidance, continued on its path until it arrived at its destination.

“You’re home,” Clay announced. “You think you can get in the front door by yourself?”

“No,” said Silvanus, “I don’t think I can.”

“I figured as much.” Clay got out of the automobile, and helped Silvanus do the same. “I’ll have to keep the car to get back to my own. You got a spare set of keys?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll leave it unlocked in the parking lot of the Grand Union just down the road. The keys will be under the seat. See if your house keys are in your pants pocket.”

There was, indeed, a ring of small keys in the pocket of his breeches.

He gave them to Clay, who grimaced annoyance, but led Silvanus along a pathway of smooth mortar and up the steps of a house much larger than Delilah’s.

“There’s no lights on,” said Clay, “but if there’s anyone who’s been waiting up for you, you can say that you were too drunk to drive home yourself, so you had to be chauffeured by the bartender. As for how you explain your absence, the best alibi is always booze. Say you were bingeing and shacked up in a motel and you can’t remember any more than that.”