Thomas M. Disch (40 page)

The alarm went off, and at the same moment Father Pat emerged from his compartment of the confessional, looking thoroughly flustered and, unbelievably, fumbling with the zipper of his fly, just like the old men you hear about in porno movie houses with paper bags in their laps. At that moment she vowed she would
never
get inside a goddamned confessional again.

“Alison!” Mary Tyler called aloud into the sudden silence. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Alison replied as Mary’s question echoed through the Shrine.

“Are you?”

“The alarm went off.”

Alison sprinted down the main aisle till she stood beside Mary. “Yes, I heard.” She glanced at Father Pat, standing before the confessional, frowning.

People don’t
run
in church.

“Whatever set the alarm off,” Alison said with a smile, “it wasn’t anything we did, Father Pat and me. I was worried about you. I thought you might have— I don’t know what.”

“Broken out of here through those metal doors? No, I didn’t do that. I was praying, like I said I would. We
need
prayers.”

“Well, maybe God heard them. Maybe that’s why the alarm went off.”

Father Pat had managed to deal with his zipper, and he came down the main aisle, looking stern and purposeful. But before he could act on his purpose, the elevator doors opened and a frazzled Hedwig appeared to explain the mystery of the alarm.

“It must have been my fault,” she said. “Gerhardt has shown me how to work the control panel of the alarm system a dozen times, but there are so many different toggles, and I must have touched the wrong one, because when I entered the sacristy I set off the alarm. But I knew how to turn it off, so there’s no harm done.” She made an apologetic grimace. “I must have given you quite a start. Not to mention Gerhardt. I think this whole expedition has been ill advised, Father Pat, but if you really want to open the reliquarium, I have the key here.”

“May I?” he asked, holding out his hand to receive a large key of tarnished brass, the kind you only see in movies, with a long stem like a pencil.

Hedwig, still grumbling misgivings, led them around behind the wall of statues inside niches that formed a semicircle around the main altar, and there, on the easternmost wall of the Shrine, in its own chapel, was the reliquarium. It had been built of great, rough-hewn slabs of dark marble that were supposed to look like the sepulcher in which Jesus had been buried when they’d taken him off the cross. The largest of the marble slabs served as the door of the sepulcher, and Alison couldn’t imagine how they were ever going to get it open without construction equipment. But Hedwig explained that there was a system of weights and pulleys, like elevators used, that made it as easy to open and close as a car door.

And sure enough, when Father Pat put the key into the concealed keyhole and gave it a twist, the great artificial boulder swung forward to reveal a small empty room all of white marble, ceiling, walls, and floor. It looked like the bathroom of an expensive restaurant. At the far end was a little staircase of three steps that led to a second, much smaller door, and it was there, Hedwig explained, that the holy relic was kept.

“Who wishes to be first?” Father Pat asked, advancing into the little room of white marble to stand at the foot of the three steps.

“Can’t you bring the monstrance out here?” Hedwig asked.

“I’m not sure that would be proper. Why else would the reliquarium have been built except to allow its special veneration here? Just here.” He pointed to the lower step.

“I think,” said Alison, “Hedwig should be first.”

“Oh, that’s very nice of you, my dear, but really—”

“She
should
be first,” Mary insisted. “Not just because she’s the oldest, but because she’s looked after the Shrine so long.”

“Well, if you both insist.”

With a thin-lipped smile of disappointment, Father Pat gestured for Hedwig to enter the reliquarium and to kneel at the foot of the steps. Then he turned around and mounted the steps with due solemnity.

He made the sign of the cross, and genuflected, and placed his hand upon the small gold handle of the smaller door. Mary also made the sign of the cross and was about to kneel down when Alison pulled at her sleeve to make her move to the side of the outer door.

Father Pat opened the inner sanctum of the reliquarium and at once the bats, already disturbed in their sanctuary by the opening of the outer door, spilled out from the darkness into the light.

For generations, in the interstices of the Shrine, wherever no human might disturb their diurnal repose, the bats had multiplied like the tribes of Israel. Thanks to the anxious nature of its founder, Monsignor O’Toole, and to the experience of its architect, Ernst Kurtzensohn, in the building of the Berlin bunker, the Shrine had been supplied with a system of secret passages designed to allow the Monsignor to proceed from his own suite to the Shrine or to any of the other subbasements. It had been this system, whose existence the Monsignor had never confided to any of his aides, which the bats had been colonizing over the years, entering and exiting via the many defective ventilators by which the building drew in air. Only lately, as the Shrine’s concrete had become brittle and begun to crumble, and as their own numbers had multiplied, had the bats spilled over from what could be said to be their own territory into that of the building’s other residents, emerging first in the catacombs of the sixth subbasement and now, so much more spectacularly, into the Shrine proper. Bats have a natural urge to nest in the highest reaches of whatever space they lay claim to—in attics and belfries—and in the Shrine’s system of colonized passages, the stairway that had led from the Monsignor’s chambers to the reliquarium had offered the bats an equivalent to an attic.

And so it was here that the bats swarmed in greatest abundance.

But once the door of the reliquarium was opened, there were new heights for the bats, all in a state of frenzied fear, to move to. Their little radar systems sensed, beyond the antechamber, a much wider and loftier space, almost a second sky—though when they quickly reached the limits of that second sky and could fly no higher, they began to circle the dome in ever increasing numbers.

Meanwhile, within the reliquarium there had been a grave mischance—almost, indeed, a fatality. For as the bats had poured out of the inner chamber of the reliquarium, Father Pat (or Silvanus, as we know him better) had backed away in panic—as who would not? Forgetting he stood on the third of three steps, he’d toppled backward, falling on the kneeling figure of Hedwig, who had not had time to realize that the worst fear of her life had just come true before she was knocked unconscious. Silvanus lay atop her, stunned, watching the multitudes of bats stream through the narrow white marble room.

Then, slowly, that room began to darken as Alison and Mary, with their arms covering their heads and faces to protect themselves from the bats (who, being bats, were in no danger of dashing themselves against anything their radar warned them of), put their shoulders against the simulated boulder that served as the sepulcher’s door. As the boulder slipped into position, fewer and fewer bats were able to escape the inner chamber, and two of them had the misfortune of being crushed to death as the door, with a final joint effort by the two girls, slipped into its frame.

The little antechamber began to fill with the bats that had nested in the lower passageways, summoned by the cries of their fellows. Silvanus could no longer see them, for the sepulcher was once again perfectly dark, but he could hear their shrilling, and sometimes he could feel himself brushed by their wings.

He covered his face with his hands and, rolling away from Hedwig’s body, pressed himself against the lowest of the three steps in an ecstasy of fear.

He knew, at last, that he was in hell.

The dogs! Gerhardt thought, once he’d settled down again with his
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, having assured himself that the alarm was in fact a false alarm. The security monitor had said SACRISTY and, under that, MISCHANCE, which meant that someone had accidentally triggered the sacristy alarm and then shut it off within the ten-second allotted period. It must have been Hedwig. There was nothing to worry about, except that the alarm would have released the dogs from their kennel, and they would be ranging about the property, which they considered theirs and were keen to defend against all comers. Ordinarily, Gerhardt would have let them enjoy their freedom for an hour or two, since the Shrine’s twelve acres of scrub wood were enclosed by a tenfoot-high cyclone fence. But Father Cogling would be arriving any moment now, and he had his own key to the outer gate. The dogs had not been taught to recognize Father Cogling as a friend, so any encounter could be dangerous to the old priest. Gerhardt would have to go outside and fetch them back to the kennel.

He was getting to think that the dogs were more trouble than they were worth, what with the cost of feeding them and having to take them out twice a day to have their dump. They were beautiful animals, of course, and he’d seen them put through their paces after they’d completed their attack training, and it had been an impressive display. But so far there’d never been an occasion for them to translate their training into practice. They were beginning to look like a luxury.

Gerhardt went up to ground level on the freight elevator, exiting not through the Shrine proper but through the utility core. First he checked out the kennel, and sure enough the dogs were gone, leaving only a bad smell. He realized that he’d been remiss in the past two days with their feeding and exercise, what with his visits into the Twin Cities. They were probably in a mean temper. He took up the leashes from the hook by the door and went in search of them.

Even before he’d got around to the front of the Shrine, he could hear one of them barking up a storm. He could tell by her voice it was Sheba. And there she was, standing right in front of the main portal, behaving just as though she had cornered a trespasser and was holding him at bay. “Sheba!” he commanded. “Aus!” But “Aus!” didn’t do the trick. Sheba turned her head, recognizing Gerhardt, and then went right on barking at the invisible intruder.

It wasn’t possible that someone had got into the Shrine from out here, but something must have happened to have riled the dog, so Gerhardt went around to the side of the portal, where there was a lancet window of clear glass that would let him look inside if he boosted himself onto the ledge below it. But he didn’t even have to get on the ledge to see what the problem was. The bats had gotten into the Shrine. He couldn’t see much of the dome itself from where he stood, but even from the slice of the interior visible to him, he could see that there must have been a whole lot of bats in there.

He didn’t know how it had happened, but he was certain that it was something Hedwig had done, perhaps when she’d gone into the sacristy. She was the only one besides himself who had access to the ground floor. Her—and now the bats.

“Damn!” he said, and then, this time with real conviction, “Aus!”

Sheba stopped growling, though she maintained attack posture.

Gerhardt took out his beeper and pressed the button that paged Hedwig.

There was no response. He pressed it again, more firmly, and then a third time. Hedwig never went anywhere without her beeper in one of her pockets, and she had never failed to respond to his summons. Her silence was a greater cause for concern than having the dogs loose. He decided to enter the Shrine through the main portal and punched in the appropriate code on his security beeper. He waited a moment for the tumblers to respond and then tugged on one of the large brass handles. The right panel of the door yielded sluggishly at first; then, with the help of its own inertia, it was less of a strain. Even before the door had been folded into the recess designed for it, the first of the excited bats found its way outside.

Gerhardt went down the center aisle of the nave until he could see the whole of the dome. His heart sank. There were hundreds of bats, all caroming about like black popcorn inside a popcorn popper. How did you fumigate something the size of that dome? And if you didn’t fumigate, how else could you get rid of them? And how in
hell
had such a swarm of bats got into the Shrine in the first place? If Hedwig had done this, he would brain her!

He tried his beeper one more time, and this time Hedwig answered.

“Gerhardt? Damn this thing anyhow. Can you hear me?” She sounded simultaneously groggy and half-hysterical.

“I can hear you, Hedwig. And I would like an explanation. Where are you?”

“Gerhardt, I fell on my bad arm, I am in agony. And it’s completely dark. How long have I been in here?”

“In where, Hedwig?”

“In the reliquarium. I was in here with Father Pat, and then he knocked me down, and after that… I don’t know. I must have hit my head on the floor. I can feel blood on it, and… Gerhardt, something touched me!”

“Just keep calm, Hedwig. Tell me, how did you get
in
the reliquarium of all places?”

“Gerhardt, I can feel it on my
ankle!
”