Thomas M. Disch (47 page)

“Joanne Woodward,” Father Mabbley filled in.

“Right! Sometimes he was Clay, and sometimes he was—what was the other name?”

“Silvanus.”

“So,” Greg asked, “when he thought he was this Silvanus, that’s when he started killing everyone?”

“Yes, that’s what he
thought
. But the first murder he committed, which he described in dreadful detail, probably never happened. Delilah, her name was. Isn’t that classic? But she was only his fantasy, along with the tattoo parlor where he claims to have met her. The police went there, and it had been a tattoo parlor once, some four years ago. It was near a motel that Father Bryce often visited for his bouts of solitary drinking, so he must have taken it in, and it became a permanent fixture of his unconscious, along with the contents of the Boscage book. Then he did his best bit of interactive insanity, according to the prosecution’s psychiatrists: He appeared, as Clay, at the scene of the imaginary crime (which was an actual trailer court near Little Canada) and chauffeured himself back, as Silvanus, to his rectory in Willowville. From that point it was Silvanus who was in charge of Father Bryce’s mortal flesh, while Father Bryce was relegated to a medieval existence that became increasingly more horrific.”

“But if Father Bryce thought he was back living in the Middle Ages, how could he have told you about what was happening when he was Silvanus?”

Father Mabbley beamed at Janet. “
That
,” he said, “is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. When he first confessed to me, at the Shrine, he claimed to have no recollection of his doings in the days just gone by, when he was with you there. But then the clouds began to part. He remembered attacking Raven Peck when he’d entered her cell alone and found her in restraints. By this time the police already knew that he had violated her, because they’d tested the… fluids he’d left.”

“Let’s not talk about all that stuff, huh?” said Janet. “It gives me the creeps.”

“Same here,” said Alison. “Sometimes, when I think how close I came to the same thing happening to me..

“Father Bryce felt much the same way about it. Horror and disgust over Silvanus’s behavior. Which was expressed, in Father Bryce’s imaginary medieval existence, in the most drastic possible way. He had himself crucified by one of the torturers working for the Inquisition. A priest, after all, is supposed to be reenacting Christ’s sacrifice on the cross each time he says Mass. And the details of the Crucifixion are impressed on a priest’s imagination by the need to deliver sermons on that subject at least once a year. You might say that he died for Silvanus’s sins.”

“I’ve heard those sermons,” said Janet. “They used to scare the shit out of me.”

“Did the Church actually
crucify
heretics back then?” Greg asked. “I thought they burned them at the stake.”

“Quite so. The rationale for Father Bryce’s crucifixion was another borrowing from the Boscage book, and Boscage in turn had taken his idea from a British writer, Joseph Cornwell, who proposed that the Shroud of Turin was the work of forgers of relics (a major industry in the Middle Ages), who created the uncanny image of the crucified Christ by duplicating the original process.”

“Gross,” commented Janet. “Do
you
think that’s what really happened?”

“It’s not for me to speculate. We know the Shroud is a forgery; that’s embarrassing enough from the Church’s viewpoint. If it was made in such a way, I can’t believe that any clergyman would have been directly involved. It seems the ultimate sacrilege, and that is probably why Father Bryce incorporated it into his vision of the Middle Ages. So. At the suggestion of our hostess, Silvanus entered the reliquarium that had been built to hold the threads from the Shroud, praying that it would be a doorway back to his own era, and when he opened the inner door, his prayers were answered. He returned whence he came, and it was Father Bryce who awoke in the darkness of the tomb, with the bats about him, beside the dead body of Hedwig Ober. He told me that he supposed he’d gone to hell.”

“Yeah,” said Janet. “It’s too bad he didn’t. He deserved it more than she did, though I can’t say I feel
that
sorry for her. Not after all that happened.”

“It was an awful way to die,” said Alison. “But my therapist says I shouldn’t blame myself for it. I didn’t know about the bats. Nobody did.”

“I think it can be fairly said,” said Father Mabbley, “that she had only herself to blame.” He turned to Greg. “Do you know, I think I wouldn’t mind just another drop of brandy.”

“Do you think there’s any chance that Silvanus will decide to come back?” Janet asked. “If he did, he’d sure give a scare to some of the other prisoners in that prison.”

“No, I don’t think there’s any chance of that. I think Silvanus died at the hands of the Inquisition. That’s what Father Bryce believes, anyhow, and he’s the expert.”

“Well,
that’s
a relief,” said Alison. “I don’t expect he’ll ever escape from prison, but if he did—”

“I don’t think you have to worry about either Father Bryce
or
Silvanus getting out of prison. Silvanus is dead (or gone to hell), and Father Bryce seems resigned to life without parole. I wouldn’t say he’s repented his sins.

Pedophiles rarely do, because they don’t believe they’ve sinned. And while he deplores the crimes that Silvanus committed, he doesn’t feel that he’s responsible for them.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Greg. “No one else killed Raven Peck. No one else raped Mary Tyler. He did.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Alison, “and I’m glad he’s locked away and is never going to be paroled. But there’s a part of me that feels sorry for him, in a way.”

“It must be the same part that likes snakes,” said Janet.

“But that’s just it, he wasn’t a snake. Even when he thought he was Silvanus, and when he was hearing my confession that first time in my cell and started to come on about how pretty I was, and said I looked like the Virgin Mary—”

“The Virgin Mary?” said Greg. “You never mentioned that before.”

“I’d actually forgot about it. But even then, when I was most scared of him, he made me think of Jimmy Norton, who was this kid back in the eighth grade who tried to put the make on me. Only he was so afraid of
touching
me that it was almost comical. And sad, at the same time. I mean, yes, in one way he was just a creep, but in another way you knew that he’d always be like that, even if he got married someday. He would always be afraid of sex and think it was dirty but at the same time that it was something that he had to do.”

“Yes,” said Father Mabbley, looking down into his brandy glass with a sad smile, “I think that’s just who he was. There are a lot of Jimmy Nortons in our seminaries. I’ve known a few of them very well. And you’re quite right about what becomes of them. They may grow older, but they don’t grow up.”

He finished off his brandy and set down the glass decisively. “Well, there it is, the whole, uncensored story. Now let’s try to forget it, shall we?”

“There is nothing,” said Janet, “I’d rather forget.”

“Good, then let me vanish into the kitchen for no more than five minutes to whip the cream. I hope you all like strawberry shortcake?”

“I
love
strawberry shortcake,” said Janet.

When Father Mabbley had gone into the kitchen and Greg was clearing the dishes from the dining room table, Janet looked into the flames licking up from the logs for a while, and then, with a sigh of contentment, turned to Alison and said, “Is he making real whipped cream, not the stuff out of a plastic tub?”

“He always does.”

“Boy, isn’t this the life, Alison? Isn’t it great to be rich?”

Clay woke up with the mother of all headaches. The kind of headache where you could wish you didn’t exist, where all you wanted was to return to the nothingness of dreamless sleep. But there was no returning, he was awake.

He reached to the side of the bed, where he always kept a pack of Marlboros. But there was no pack there, there wasn’t even a table, and the bed almost wasn’t a bed, just some kind of cot, with another cot above it, bunk-bed-style. He couldn’t even sit up to take in where it was; he had to ease out of it sideways.

That’s when he saw the bars.

Shit!
he thought.

How in hell? He couldn’t have got so drunk that he’d forgotten everything between doing whatever had landed him here and this present, very unpleasant moment. But his mind was a fucking blank. Like a big eraser had rubbed out a few months of his existence. Like he’d been dipped in Liquid Paper.

Something was wrong. Something more than the fact that he’d woken up in a fucking prison cell without knowing how he’d got here. Something internal.

His hand reached down to his prick, and at least that was okay.

Except for one thing. It was cut. He had no foreskin.

Something was very wrong indeed.

He stood up, dropped the prison-issue shorts he’d been sleeping in, and looked down at his dick.

It wasn’t his. His hands weren’t his. There was something wrong with his whole body. It wasn’t the feeling you get from being massively hungover.

He looked around for a mirror, but he was looking around a prison cell (and a pretty ratty cell at that), and a mirror was not one of the amenities provided. There was the bunk bed, with its sagging mattresses (and no one in the upper bunk), a bench bolted to the opposite wall, a toilet with no lid in one corner, and in the other a kind of school desk with a few books on top of it and a plastic chair beside it. Clay had thought this kind of minimum-comfort prison cell had been made illegal sometime back in the seventies.

Three concrete-block walls, one of which featured a fucking crucifix, and a fourth wall of steel bars.

All he wanted to do was to look at his own face, but in prison you can’t always get what you want.

The toilet bowl, he thought. There’ll be water in the toilet, it’ll work like a mirror.

But when he knelt down beside the toilet to peer into its porcelain bowl, he couldn’t make out anything but his shadow. The cell was too dark, and of course, being a cell, there was no light switch.

Then, like a wish, the lights came on, and there was a guard outside the bars looking down at him, grinning. The guard was black.

“Hey, Father Rat,” the guard said, “I got a joke for you.” “Fuck off.” Clay reacted with knee-jerk automatism.

“Hey, what kind of language is that? Anyhow, I want to tell you the joke. How do you get a nun pregnant?” “Go fuck yourself.”

“You dress her up as an altar boy.”

Clay, who’d got up on his feet again, had no more ready invective. He just scowled.

“I guess you heard that one before, huh? Anyhow, I got good news for you, Father Rat. All your commotion about how it’s cruel and unusual for you to be locked up all on your lonesome has made a dent. You are to have a roommate, and you won’t be so lonely anymore. Congratulations.” “Have you got a cigarette?” Clay asked. “I need a cigarette.” “Since when did you start smoking?”

“You want me to say please, I’ll say please. I need a fucking cigarette.

I don’t feel good.”

“Sure thing,” said the guard. He took a pack of Kools from his pocket, lighted one, and handed it through the bars.

Clay inhaled gratefully. For one brief shining moment he felt okay. Then he felt sick again.

“You know, Father Rat, this shouldn’t be for me to say, but you aren’t looking very well. I don’t think you’re taking care of yourself. Maybe you need more exercise. Maybe it’s your diet. But you don’t look well.” Clay tried to concentrate on the cigarette and ignore the guard.

Another guard appeared, also black, with a prisoner in handcuffs and manacles. While the guard who’d been harassing Clay unlocked the cell door, the other guard took off the new prisoner’s cuffs and manacles and pushed him into the cell.

“Enjoy yourselves, boys,” said the first guard, and then they both went off, before Clay could think to bum another cigarette.

The new prisoner plopped down on the lower of the two bunks with a sigh.

He was a big dude, about Clay’s age, with a dago mustache and a build that looked like he’d already served a few years and spent all his time in the weight room. He looked up at Clay, and their eyes locked. It was like arm wrestling, and Clay lost the first match.

“I read about you,” the guy said.

“Yeah? What’d you read?”

“What I read made me think we got a few things in common. That may be why they put us together. Birds of a feather?” “You got a cigarette, buddy?”

“You got one in your mouth. Cocksucker.”

Clay went onto red alert. “Hey, you watch your mouth.”

The guy just smiled, almost in a lazy way. “No offense intended. I guess you like to be addressed… how? As Father? That’s okay with me.” There was a silence. Clay smoked. The guy went on looking.

When Clay threw the butt of the cigarette into the toilet bowl, the guy held out his hand and said, “Let me introduce myself.” There was a pentagram tattooed across the back of his hand. “Crispo. Donald Crispo. Does it ring a bell?” Clay didn’t offer his own hand. “Should it?”