Thomas M. Disch (43 page)

Violence. And yet, providentially, he had had the gun on his person. A gun he’d always sworn he would never use. And yet he’d brought it with him, concealed under his suit coat, and he
had
used it, and it seemed quite certain now that if he hadn’t, the poor girl they’d come to help would almost certainly have been savaged by the dog he’d killed. A justifiable use of violence—but still he felt this irrational guilt for having shot the dog, for having used the gun he’d sworn never to use.

His hands were trembling. More accurately, they were twitching in an odd way, and there was a feeling, around his rib cage, that was both elevating and vaguely distressing, like the one time he’d yielded to the temptation of cocaine. It was, in an asexual way, a little like being horny.

He wished he were anywhere else but here. He wished he’d never left Las Vegas. He wished he’d never grown up. But here he was, and now here was another priest (Father Cogling, he presumed, just by the sound of his voice), in high dudgeon, railing about the dead dog. Greg, God bless him, was railing right back, and so Father Mabbley didn’t have to switch into rhetorical mode himself. He could try to lower his blood pressure (or whatever it was) and regain his sanity.

Think, he told himself. Think what to do.

But there wasn’t time for that, because while Greg was still giving Father Cogling what for, a new player appeared on the other side of the cyclone fence, a scrawny old coot with a face as deathly as life allows, and carrying the kind of gun one hopes to see only in movies.

“Gerhardt!” said Father Cogling. “Thank heaven you’re here. I just caught these two trying to break open the gate.”

“I heard a gunshot,” the skull croaked.

“And a good thing you did,” said Greg. “My wife was almost killed by your damned dog.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Gerhardt, looking toward the dog’s body, where it lay beside the fence. “Trixie? Goddamn.”

“I saw it happen, Gerhardt,” said Father Cogling, in, for him, a placatory tone. “And I will say they had little choice. The dog was attacking this girl.” For the first time Cogling seemed to take notice of Alison and said, “Oh. It’s you. I might have known.” Then he turned to Father Mabbley and said, in another tone of voice that was entre nous, in a specifically priestly way, “No one has yet to explain what you are doing here, or why you were trying to break open the gate.”

“Let’s take care of explanations later, okay?” said Gerhardt, unlocking the gate and swinging it open. “You folks wanted to get in here. The gate’s open. Get in.”

“I think,” said Father Mabbley, “that at this point we would prefer to take this young lady with us to somewhere she can receive suitable medical attention.”

“Get in,” Gerhardt repeated, lifting his lethal weapon. “She can get the attention she needs right here.” He looked toward Father Cogling. “Which of them has a gun? Get it from him.”

Father Cogling approached Father Mabbley. “I think it would be best if you gave me your weapon. We don’t want a shooting match here, do we?”

Father Mabbley gave his gun to Father Cogling, who put it in the inside breast pocket of his suit. As he did so, Greg gave Father Mabbley a look of withering scorn. Father Mabbley could scarcely blame him. It must have looked like craven submission.

“And who’s got the keys to the red car?” Gerhardt wanted to know. When there was no answer, he turned his weapon on Greg. “It’s got to be yours. So put the keys on the ground in front of you, and go inside the gate, and you walk with the girl there along the drive. Slowly. I’ll be right behind you in your car. Father Willy, you bring your friend along in your car, but lock up the gate behind you. Okay?”

Cogling nodded.

When these things had been duly accomplished, and they had begun the slow procession toward the Shrine, Father Mabbley said, “I should inform you now, Father Cogling, that the Chancery is aware of my coming here. I don’t know what your henchman thinks he’s doing in abducting us in this fashion, but he will have to answer for it. As will you, Father, if you allow him to continue to violate our rights.”

“Violate
your
rights, is it? Your right to break and enter? I should inform
you
, Father, that the girls being cared for at this facility are here for their own protection, and for the protection of the unborn life within them.”

“A strange way to protect them, if I may say so.”

“I don’t know what was happening with the dog. I do know the girl shouldn’t have been loose on the grounds. The dogs are there for the protection of the Shrine. From those”—he gave Father Mabbley a sideways look—”who might try to break in.”

Father Mabbley felt he’d achieved no more than a stalemate. Cogling’s righteous indignation seemed equal to his own. So he changed course.

“Actually, my original purpose in coming here did not have to do with securing the release of Miss Sanders.”

“Oh,” said Father Cogling sarcastically. “She’s a Miss now, is she? A moment ago your friend had claimed her for his wife.”

“My original purpose,” Father Mabbley persisted, “was to speak with the purported director of BirthRight, Patrick Bryce.”

“Well, in that case, you’ll be disappointed in both your purposes.

Miss
Sanders is not about to be released, and Father Bryce is not receiving visitors.”

“Shouldn’t Father Bryce be able to decide that for himself?”

Cogling made no reply, and Father Mabbley might well not have taken it in if he had, for he was wonderstruck. There ahead of them stood one of the Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World, the Shrine of the infamous Blessed Konrad of Paderborn, the patron saint of antiSemites and one of the holy places of the Cold War. He’d seen photographs of the Shrine before, but photographs can never convey the nature of an atrocity. The Shrine was the perfect combination of a cathedral and a bunker, with a lead-gray dome of cast concrete that seemed to be sinking into the earth rather than soaring from it.

Every detail was expressive of the whole, though detail, as such, had not been the architect’s forte. It was, quite arrogantly, One Big Idea, and that idea was Authority. Authority that had no use for the landscape around it, or for the people who might enter it, but only for its own swollen and ill-conceived
terribilità
. It was, as the poets say, a sermon in stone (or ferroconcrete) and such an indictment of the institution that had erected it that Father Mabbley, for the first time since he had come to the decision that he would leave the priesthood, felt a sense of, if not exactly jubilation, joyful relief. What bliss it would be no longer to be implicated in what that building represented! To be a priest no more and a human being again.

Cogling brought his car to a stop and got out. Greg and Alison were standing at the foot of the steps leading to the entrance of the monstrosity, and Gerhardt was urging them to enter with motions of his lethal weapon. There was
another
dead dog lying on the steps, and— the topper—there were
bats

flittering out of the lowering Romanesque doorway. In its own gothic way, it was almost beautiful.

Father Mabbley got out of the car. He wondered, as he did from time to time, if he was about to die. He hoped not, but it was always possible, and if he were to die, there was at least this consolation: that he couldn’t have done it in higher style. This place was the very entrance to the city of Dis.

Dante would have felt right at home.

He followed Cogling into the Shrine without demur, simply marveling. The dome, which was more oppressive from within than from without, was
filled

with bats, circling about in anticlockwise gyres, like the souls of the lustful caught up in the cyclones of the second circle of the Inferno. Father Mabbley customarily felt a normative dread of bats, but these bats were so
a propos
that he could not but rejoice in them. And the
noise
they made as they whirled about—it was Bach and Richard Strauss and Philip Glass, all sent to hell in the same handbasket.

While Father Mabbley marveled, Cogling and his henchman were conferring, and the result of their conference was Cogling’s demanding to know of Alison Sanders what had become of a key that she had taken from the Shrine. Miss Sanders, after some equivocation, produced the key demanded of her, and Gerhardt, after closing and locking the central portal of the Shrine, led the way (Father Mabbley followed out of sheer fascination) toward the altar, and then around it, to stand before an object of art as wonderful in its way as the Shrine itself.

It was a parody of the sepulcher—squat and lumpy and obviously
faux
, with an effete angel posing off to one side like a gargoyle that had lost its way from Mussolini’s Rome.

Gerhardt opened the sepulcher with the key that Alison had given him, and then there was sheer pandemonium. The tomb virtually exploded. Bats streamed out of it like, what else, bats out of hell. Millions of bats!

Billions of bats! Father Cogling threw himself to the floor, and even his skull-faced henchman took cover behind the half-open door of the tomb as the bats streamed out and up and all about and filled the air around them.

Father Mabbley looked on, as at the burning bush of Moses. It didn’t occur to him to hit the deck, and the torrent of bats flew by without touching a thread of his clothes or a hair on his head.

Gradually they diminished, and Father Mabbley, as the only person still in possession of his faculties, approached the door of the sepulcher and pulled it open wider. The last and timidest bats departed the space within, and there, prostrate on the floor of the room within, with a few dead bats speckling the white marble floor about them, were the bodies of a man and a woman.

At first, entering, he supposed they were both dead, that seeming the most suitable fate for bodies found within a sepulcher. And the woman assuredly was. One could tell it without stooping to feel if there was a pulse (though he did, in common courtesy, do that). Astonishingly (if astonishment still was possible), she had the same face, in death, that Cogling’s henchman had in life, and it made Father Mabbley think, uncharitably, that perhaps her death had been deserved. But one should never judge by appearances.

The man was alive. His right hand was scrabbling, with weak convulsivity, at the marble floor. Father Mabbley got down on his knees and rolled him over on his back, intending mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, if that seemed suitable. He realized, looking down at the face and the Roman collar, that this must be the very man he’d been looking for, Father Patrick Bryce. In the innocence of its unconsciousness, you could see what, years ago, Bing must have seen in that face. The simple need that could never be satisfied and that would call to those who were fated never to satisfy the needs of others. The poor doomed fool.

Father Bryce’s eyes opened. Eyes that had been transfigured by terror.

“I’m alive,” he said.

“Yes,” said Father Mabbley. “We both are. Let us thank God for that.”

“You’re a priest.”

Father Mabbley neither affirmed nor denied the assertion. He was, after all, wearing the collar.

“Will you hear my confession?”

“It can’t wait?”

“No. If you will. Please.”

Father Mabbley made the sign of the cross and waited for Bryce to begin.

“I have been… how can I say this… the slave of Satan.”

“We have all sinned, Father.”

“No. That isn’t what I mean. I’ll show you.” He began to pull off his collar and then to undo the snaps of his black tunic. He didn’t stop until he’d bared his chest.

“Why did you do that?” Father Mabbley demanded, disconcerted and even a little embarrassed.

“So that you could see the tattoo.”

Father Mabbley looked down at the man’s chest. “I don’t see any tattoo,”

said Father Mabbley. “There’s no tattoo there.”

The man looked up at him with such a look. Once Father Mabbley had had to tell a woman that her only child had died. It was a look like that.

Then Father Bryce’s face began to grow dark. Father Mabbley looked up.

Someone was closing the door of the sepulcher upon them. Well, he thought, let them.

“Go on,” he said to Father Bryce, “with your confession. How did you become the slave of Satan? Begin at the beginning.”

Father Cogling was in a state of barely suppressed fury. Gerhardt had let things at the Shrine get utterly out of hand. Just how much out of hand he didn’t realize until Gerhardt had pushed shut the door of the reliquarium, locking the two priests inside. Then he revealed that the situation was even worse than Father Cogling could have supposed. Two of the girls in the BirthRight program were dead—three, if one added the death of Tara Seberg, of which he’d already been apprised. The Seberg girl had died after a miscarriage, so her death, however regrettable, had been the sort of mischance that the program would probably have had to face eventually. The Obers could not reasonably be held to account for it.