Thomas M. Disch (42 page)

When they got to the center aisle, the sound of the bats whirling around up in the dome suddenly became very loud. Very loud and very shrill. At the same time the dog in the doorway was still going at it, just as loud, not as shrill.

Mary giggled.

Alison shot her a questioning look.

“I was just thinking,” Mary said. “It sounds like some kind of organ that’s gone crazy. And the two of us are walking down the aisle. So it’s kind of like the wedding we both never had. We’re even wearing white.”

“Very funny. Are you okay?”

“Uh-huh. I just wish you had a gun instead of a can of Mace, but I’m okay.”

They’d gone half the distance toward the door, and the dog didn’t seem to have any intention of coming into the Shrine after them. It just stood its ground and went on barking, which was probably good strategy from its point of view.

As they got closer, they automatically slowed down. When they were only about twenty feet away, the dog’s behavior changed. It stopped barking and took a couple of steps backward and started to snarl. Its snarl was scarier.

“What do we do now?” Mary asked.

“Just keep going ahead, real slow.”

When they were ten feet away, Alison could see the dog’s body tensing, and she decided this would have to be the moment. She pressed the button on the can of Mace, and she could see the cone of vapor shoot out of the nozzle.

But not, she could tell right away, far enough.

The dog didn’t know about Mace, though. It only knew that some kind of action had been directed against it, and it lunged right into the cone of vapor, and the Mace did its work.

When the dog hit the center of the curtain, Mary dropped her end of it and ran for the portal. Alison closed her eyes and directed another solid squirt from the can in the general direction of the blinded dog, then followed Mary out into the open air, almost stumbling down the short flight of concrete steps.

At the bottom of the steps they both turned back to watch—to marvel, to applaud—the dog as it thrashed about, baffled, attacking the curtain for want of any better enemy.

Alison turned around. It was like looking down the road to heaven. There was a wide asphalt drive, lined on both sides with white birches. The asphalt was already speckled with the first yellow leaves off the birches. It had been a dry summer. The sky was blue, with white puffy clouds.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, grabbing hold of Mary’s wrist. Mary was still watching the dog as it spun around in circles, savaging the curtain.

“Come on. Fast.”

“I can’t run,” said Mary.

Alison realized immediately that she wasn’t just playing for syrnpathy.

She hadn’t been out of her cell for a long time, and she was weak. And very near her term. “We don’t have to run, Mary. But let’s get going.”

They headed down the drive as fast as Alison could propel Mary, tugging on her wrist. When they’d come to the first bend, Alison saw with dismay the asphalt drive stretching ahead of them with no sign of the highway that it must be taking them to. She had only a dim memory of arriving at the Shrine.

There had been a gate, which Gerhardt had had to get out of the car to unlock.

But between the gate and the Shrine? It couldn’t have been that far. It couldn’t.

“Alison,” Mary said. “I
am
feeling sick. I have to stop a minute.

Really.”

“Sure. A little while. We’re almost there.”

“Here, take this.” Mary handed Alison the curtain rod, then walked over to the side of the drive, holding her swollen abdomen, and vomited, politely, into high weeds. Then she stood still, waiting for the second spasm.

The silence was broken by the sound of another dog somewhere ahead of them. Shit, Alison thought, how many of them are there? Standing still, looking down the tree-lined drive, she felt exposed. If a dog came running at them along the drive, the Mace wouldn’t be much of a defense.

When Mary felt she could walk again, Alison persuaded her that it would be better for them to make their way through the woods. It would slow them down, but it would also slow down a dog, and if a dog did come after them, they could get behind a tree trunk or a bush. Or even climb a tree, if need be.

“Alison, come on! I could no more climb a tree than I could… I don’t know what. Jesus, I wish we hadn’t got into this.”

“Hey, we’re almost
out
of it—that’s the bright side. Try and make believe we’re hikers. Looking at the beautiful scenery. The trees and…

well, the trees are nice. I can’t say I care much for the stuff close to the ground. Some of them have prickers.”

“I know. I’ve already had one slice my ankle.”

Mary started crying, but she cried a lot, and as long as it didn’t slow her down, Alison decided she didn’t have to go on with the pep talk. They were already making enough noise just walking through the woods, pushing aside dead branches and stepping on things that crackled. Bugs had started to find them, nasty little gnats, and once they did, there was no getting away from them.

They tagged along like a private cloud.

The barking up ahead had become almost continuous—but that
could
be a positive thing. Who would the dog be barking at that way? Not an animal.

Unless the animal were up a tree. And if it were a person, if it were anyone but Gerhardt, they were almost home free. Alison tried to get Mary to move faster, but Mary was afraid of the dog ahead of them and slowed down to a snail’s pace. At last she seized up altogether. She sat on a log and refused to budge. You could see there was no use arguing, so Alison told her to stay where she was. At least there were bushes all around, so she wouldn’t be easy to see.

Alison went on by herself, directly toward where the barking seemed to be coming from. The trees were getting closer together, but there was less knee-level brush. She could move almost as fast as along the asphalt drive.

And then ahead of her it got brighter and she could see, through the last trees, the glint of the metal fence.

She stopped at the edge of the woods. About twenty feet beyond the fence was a two-lane highway, but there was no traffic on it, and she wasn’t sure someone in a car would see her this far away—or stop, if they did see her.

The fence was about ten feet high, with barbed wire strung across the top. At the bottom was only a couple inches of leeway (she tried prying it with the curtain rod, which broke) and not enough give in the fence to be able to push her way out—not without taking the time to do some digging.

She had to choose. Either follow the curve of the fence in the direction the barking was coming from, or go the other way and hope that she could eventually flag down a car.

At that point she heard, behind the barking of the dog, a man’s voice, not loud but urgent, and moments later a whistling sound, like a teakettle whistling on the stove when you’re outside of the house. She realized, still undecided which way to go, that the whistling sound was the alarm inside the Shrine that had gone off before.

She chose—and began to jog alongside the fence toward the sound of the barking, keeping a firm grip on the can of Mace. As the fence curved, a large ornamental gateway came into sight, and parked beside it was a car that Alison recognized at a glance as Greg’s red junker Olds.

She broke into a run and called out his name, and there he was, there outside the locked gate. He looked up and shouted “Alison!” but the dog had seen her at the same moment, another German shepherd like the one outside the Shrine, and it came bounding toward her.

Alison didn’t think, she just kept running straight for the dog, and when they were almost ready to collide, she veered to one side and closed her eyes and pressed the nozzle on the Mace and didn’t stop squirting until the dog had knocked her over and she’d rolled into the fence. The dog made a kind of howling noise she’d never heard before, so she was sure she’d got him in the eyes. But she’d got herself, too, a little. It felt like what happens if you rub your eyes after you’ve eaten something with Tabasco sauce.

She made herself blink tears and tried to see what the dog was doing. It was shaking its head from one side to the other, like it was trying to shake off water, but at the same time it was staggering toward her. It was blind, and probably unable to smell anything either, but it was angrier than ever, just the way the dog outside the Shrine had been when it was tearing the curtain to shreds.

“Alison.” It was Greg. He was down on his knees right on the other side of the fence, near enough to touch.

“Greg,” she said. “Oh, Jesus. I love you.”

“Alison, you got to get away from the dog. Can you climb the fence? Try and climb high enough that the dog can’t get to you.”

It sounded like a dumb thing to do and probably impossible, but she would try. She grabbed hold of the mesh and pulled herself to her feet. Her eyes were on fire, and she really couldn’t see anything now. She fitted her toe into the mesh of the fence. She’d climbed mesh fences before, when she was little, and her feet were still small enough so she could jam in her toe and get a purchase. She got a higher handhold and pulled herself up, and Greg, on the other side of the fence, was coaching her.

The dog lunged into the fence, off to the side from where she was, and she lost a toehold. Her leg was dangling down like bait.

Then there was a huge explosion, and the dog stopped barking. Someone had shot it, and her first thought was simply despair, because she couldn’t think who would have had a gun except Gerhardt.

“Fucking hell,” said Greg, but not to her. “You had a gun all this time and you didn’t
use
it?”

“Against a dog that was doing only what it was supposed to do? Until this young lady appeared— Are you all right, Miss?”

“I’m fine,” said Alison, who was back on terra firma. “But my eyes hurt.

There’s Mace in them, it’s like pepper.”

“I think,” said the stranger with Greg, “that there is still some water left in the car. Let me go see.”

“Are you all right?” Greg asked, trying to touch her through the mesh.

They managed to twine their fingers together with the wire between.

“I’m fine. My eyes hurt. Oh, I’m so happy to see you.” She laughed. “And I
can’t
see you.”

They managed to kiss, and then the other man was there with the water.

He told her to make a cup of her hands and hold them close to the fence, and then he poured a little water into them. She doused her eyes, and for just a moment it was heaven, but the stinging started up again, almost as bad. He continued pouring and she continued washing her eyes until she became aware that the man pouring the water into her hands was wearing a Roman collar.

She let her hands drop, dismayed, blinking, still half-blind. “You’re a priest,” she said.

“Yes. But don’t let that alarm you. I’m no part of this unholy operation. I’m here with your friend to help you get away. When you appeared, Greg had been trying to use the tire iron from the car to break the lock on the gate. I confess that I tried to dissuade him. Apparently, the situation here is worse than we could have imagined.”

“A whole lot worse,” said Alison. “There’s another priest in there, and he’s some kind of— Oh God, I can’t explain, it’s a mess. I thought that dog was going to kill me. Where’s Greg?”

“He’s back by the gate, trying to break the chain with the tire iron.

But I don’t hold out much hope of success. It’s a very thick chain. And we have no way of cutting the wire at the top of the fence, so I don’t see how we can get you to our side. What I mean to suggest to Greg, who, by the way, is very much in love with you, if I’m any judge at all—”

“You are,” said Alison gratefully. “He’s wonderful.”

As they talked, they walked together, slowly, brushing against the fence that separated them, in the direction of the gate. “What I mean to suggest is that I leave you here with Greg, and with my gun—which I never in my
life

thought that I would use, I’m very much opposed to them, but living in the West, as I have for so long— But never mind all that. I think I’m a little upset myself. What I mean to suggest,” he began again, “is that I take Greg’s car and find the nearest phone and summon the police.”

“I think that’s a very good idea,” said Alison.

When they had reached the gate, where Greg was trying to break the chain, the strange priest began to explain what he thought they should do.

Greg didn’t agree right away, and he wanted to hear from Alison what was happening in the Shrine, but before she could begin to explain, another car, big and black, pulled up alongside Greg’s junker.

“May I ask,” said the driver, stepping out of the black car, “what in the world is happening here?”

Oh, Jesus, Alison thought—this time, not thankfully. Because, even though everything was still mostly a blur, she recognized the man’s voice.

It was Father Cogling.

Father Mabbley was shaken. He was not cut out for this sort of thing.