The onlookers turned and walked out.
Jennifer closed the door and dragged deeply on the cigarette. "Did you notice the texture of the skin on her cheeks and eyelids?" she asked as Jack looked up.
"Yes," he replied.
"Like sandpaper or dried-out wood. As if something had sucked out all the life. I've never seen anything like it."
Jack gently touched Allison's skin, then sat up and opened the collar of his shirt. "Where's Michael?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"You don't?" His tone indicated skepticism. "He's a jackass! Kidney disease? I don't know what she has, but I'll be damned if it has anything to do with her kidneys." He stiffened. "He should have his bleeding teeth rammed down his throat."
"Now is not the time for that. Will you watch her while I go back outside?"
"Yes."
She smiled, touched his arm affectionately and walked out of the room, concerned for Allison but at the same time concerned for Michael, who she knew would be up to his neck in trouble if Allison's condition was any indication!
Preceded by the beam of light, he walked down the corridor, past the kitchen and bathroom and out into the living room. Behind him he had left another room in shambles. The bedroom of 4 A. The nexus of the confrontation. In his belt he carried a screwdriver and a chisel, which he had taken from Allison's kitchen. Both had been useful. But again the results were disappointing.
He walked to the sofa and sat down. He was tired and frustrated-mostly frustrated. He pulled the screwdriver from his belt, buried it into the couch, ripped out a wad of stuffing and threw it to the dust-strewn rug. He had an uncontrollable urge to lash out and destroy, but he was restraining himself, waiting for the right target.
He flashed the light around the room. "Damn!" he whispered. "A rotting mess." The same living room where the mistake had been made, the mistake that had cost Brenner his life. There was really no reason to examine the area again. He was sure he would find nothing. But then again he had nothing better to do-yet.
He pulled himself off the sofa and began to dismantle every drawer, closet and floor piece.
The search was unproductive.
He walked into the hall and looked at his watch-one forty-one-and listened to the rhythmic ticking. He had been in the house almost two hours. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe nothing was going to happen. Could they have called it off? Afraid that he had found out too much. Afraid that he had come to the house with help.
He started up the staircase to the fifth floor. Halfway there he stopped. Should he break open the priest's door and declare his presence even though the old man could not help but know that he was there already? He had few options and few ideas. Yet, his gut reaction was to delay his confrontation with Halliran, at least until he had no alternative. So he reversed himself and started down the staircase.
He heard a sound, the creaking of a door.
He felt a cold shiver and then an intense sensation of fear. There was something evil behind him. He wasn't sure, but he sensed it and he had to get away.
He descended like a heavy weight falling to earth, gathering speed and momentum with each step, pulled by the force of the darkness below, repelled by the uninviting unknown above. Every sense in his body was intensified, the slightest groan in the building was like a screech of a hideous gorgon. Down and down he went, his feet sliding from one step to the next, one hand holding the flashlight, the other wrapped around the gun with the index finger on the trigger. The darkness. The rapid footsteps echoing. Past 3 A and 3 B. His pulse began to race and pound. He lost his perception of time, descending through a cyclone that was the brownstone. Away from the unknown. Faster. Faster.
Then he stopped.
He whirled abruptly and threw the beam of light down the hall. There was nothing. He sighed, restraining his panting. He was scared, so terrified that he questioned himself. Had he been the one to conjure a fantastic plot from the antics of a few old fools and some crazy clerics?
He flashed the light toward 2 A. He listened. Nothing. And the chill was gone. He turned and swung the light around the corridor, near the staircase and up on the wall. The beam hit the dead bulb and then danced onto the new paneling.
The new paneling! He moved toward it. Yes, it looked strange and certainly worthy of a quick inspection. He looked up, removed the chisel from his pocket and rapped it against the wood.
The initial sound was puzzling. He examined the edges of the slab and then knocked his fist on the wood to test its density. A hollow echo returned. The overlay seemed thin and was not laid flush against the material underneath. He knocked again. There was no mistaking it. Perhaps he had found the spot for the speakers, or whatever. He did not even know what he was looking for, just that he was looking.
He jammed the chisel under the side edge of the paneling, levered it and began to pull the wood out.
He tore through the boards at the center and along two planes of parallel lines, one horizontal, the other vertical. Large chips of wood hung from the wall. He surveyed his work in the light of the flashlight, which he had placed on the floor on top of the gun so that the beam landed directly in the center of the slab. Frantically, he began to tear at the exposed boards until, under a hail of dust and wood slivers, all the strips had fallen away and the area underneath lay exposed.
Jennifer opened the door quietly and tiptoed into the room. She screamed.
Jack lay on the floor, his skull split, a trickle of blood running from above his right ear, down his neck and onto the floor. The lamp, which had stood on the night table to the right of the bed, lay on the rug, a collection of fragments, large and small-all covered with blood.
The bed was empty; the window, which led to an emergency fire escape, was open.
As she stepped into the room the other guests piled up behind her.
"What happened?" someone asked. No one answered.
She walked to Jack's body and kneeled down. His hand moved; he was alive-if barely. She sobbed, overcome by the horror, a horror to which she had a special insight. She had seen too much. She had heard too much. Enough was enough. The time had come to stop playing Sherlock Holmes. Jack lay on the floor, bleeding and unconscious. Who was next? And where had Allison gone?
She grabbed the phone off the night table and dialed once. She waited, tears streaming down her face.
"Operator, give me the police. This is an emergency."
He laughed hysterically. There was something disturbingly horrible about the sound, hollow, trebled and distant. And as it echoed throughout the seemingly empty building- from the fifth floor, where the blind old priest sat watch, to the first-floor hallway with its misty fog-it carried with it a message of frustration, then disbelief, then anger, one replacing the other until the echo of the bellowing sound receded into the most uninviting reaches of the brownstone and dissipated into toneless vibrations.
Michael brushed off the long-accumulated dust that adhered to the uncovered surface and flicked away the lacing of spider webbings and insect matting. He stood back, lifted the flashlight and trained the beam on the letters that were carved in the wood. He reviewed his initial reactions. He reappraised their propriety. And as he began to read the inscription once again, he broke into that same uncontrolled laughter.
He read:
Through me you go into the city of grief.
Through me you go into the pain that is eternal.
Through me you go among people lost.
Justice moved by exalted creator,
The divine power made me
The Supreme wisdom and the primal love.
Before me all created things were eternal,
And eternal I will last.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
His laughter continued unabated until all the air had dissipated from his lungs. He whispered to himself, "Thank you, Dante," raised his hand and simulated a tip-of-the-hat gesture. Once again he rocked with laughter-a convulsive laughter which both appreciated the humor of his discovery and its preposterousness. The thought that a brownstone on West Eighty-ninth Street in the heart of the city of New York could be the entrance to the underworld, the portal before the River Styx, was ludicrous.
He quieted. Although the words seemed ridiculous, they were part of something sinister and real, something which he still did not understand. Involving Allison. Involving the church and the forced disappearance of numerous people over the years.
He kneeled down. Suddenly he felt his blood rush from his body. There was someone behind him. Breathing on his neck. Short choking breaths like the efforts of a victim in the final stages of pneumonia. He reached down and felt along the floor for the gun, aware that the figure behind him was waiting. The snub-nosed barrel slipped into his fingers. Carefully, he drew the gun into his palm and slid his index finger around the trigger. His breathing stopped. He whirled around, flashlight pointed ahead, gun drawn and finger ready on the trigger.
Father Halliran was standing directly over him. His face matched the picture in the Halliran file. The deep undulating wrinkles circled his skull as if the skin had been strip-mined, and his cheeks and forehead were blotched with black and blue specks, the result of bursting corpuscles. The eyebrows were gone. So too were most of the lashes. The veins and arteries that carried the blood supply under the decayed skin stretched perilously close to the surface-distended, swollen and discolored from the advanced decomposition of tissue. Topping this vision of horror was a matted web of hair, choked with dirt as if the old priest had risen from a grave beneath six feet of soaked earth.
Michael emitted a gasp and focused on the priest's eyes. There were no pupils. Neither eye had a distinguishable iris.
Encased in cataracts, both were white like eggshells.
The old man was wearing a long black robe which cuffed just below the Adam's apple, supporting the layers of dried flesh that hung from his neck; the robe covered his entire frame, including his feet. His two spindly hands, tipped by clawlike nails, were joined chest high; they held a gold crucifix which reflected the hard light of the flashlight back into Michael's eyes.
Michael squinted and moved the beam off the metal.
The priest stood still. Michael kneeled, motionless. Their eyes were locked on each other-his perceiving the challenge, the priest's blinded to what lay before him. Yet he continued to look down as if he were cognizant of every move Michael made, as if Michael's thoughts lay open before him and his future was in his power.
The priest parted his lips. His fragile diaphragm contracted. He let the air slowly out of his lungs, producing a low moan. He seemed incapable of forming words with the deadened muscles that supported his jaw. Slowly, his head began to swing back and forth. The gesture was communicative. It implied trespass and transmitted pity and remorse. With the slightest twitch of his withered head the priest conveyed many thoughts, all of which carried the impression that horror had not yet begun and that once commenced could not be stopped.
The old man moaned once more, turned and walked, holding his cross before him, back to the staircase from which he had descended.
Michael steadied himself. The sight of the priest had nearly stopped his heart. Now, moments after the initial shock, it was beating wildly. Yet underneath his panic the same resolve with which he had entered the brownstone remained. It was just a matter of subordinating primitive reactions to his inherent disciplines: the ability to reason, to apply logic to given stimuli, and to respond with calculated decision and uncommon self-control. But in the end it was more self-deceit than anything else that caused him to follow the priest down the hall. Although his very fiber doubted it, he told himself that the old priest was just a man and that though the events of past days whispered that he was challenging the unnatural, the very essence of evil, there still was a logical explanation for everything, and that by retaining his composure and challenging directly he could confront, intersect and prevail.
He caught Father Halliran at the base of the staircase. He grabbed him by the arm, flashed the light in his face and unsuccessfully tried to spin him around. The old priest, possessed of unexpected strength, continued slowly upward, one step at a time, the cross extended in front of him, his eyes glassily staring straight ahead.
"All right, my friend," said Michael. "It's about time you let us in on the game."
The old priest turned his head slightly in Michael's direction, pulled his arm free and turned away again, dismissing Michael's presence like one would shoo a bothersome gnat. He began to chant softly in Latin.
"I want to know why these things have been happening! I want to know who's behind it. I want to know the object of the game. What are you after? And I swear to you, if I don't find out, I'm going to break that cross over your head. Christ and all."
The priest stepped off the stairs onto the third floor. He was oblivious to the cries, the clutching arms and hands that pummeled him as he continued to climb, and the angered, distorted face that followed immediately to the right of his shoulder.
Michael screamed. "Talk, you bastard! Talk or I'll crush your skull!" He was quickly approaching an unrestrained fury. "Why were all those people playing charades? Chazen, Mrs. Clark, the others. How did you know so much about Allison? About her father? About me? The psychiatrist's reports? Did you see them?"
He shook the priest again. The old man stopped and slowly turned his head. His eyes were glowing, more opened and piercing than they had been before. If they reflected real emotion, he was mad.
Michael backed off; the glow hurt him.
The priest nodded-as before-pityingly, then climbed to the fourth-floor landing and disappeared around the banister. Michael hesitated, then with the beam of light the only path through the darkness, tore up the stairs, ran down the hall, climbed up the last staircase and caught Halliran as the priest began to cross the hall to his apartment.