him, just as thousands more were still suspended, motionless.
"How?" he said shakily, as if the moons, being able to levitate, ought
also to be able to speak. "How? Why?"
The moons fell as one. As by the breaking of some spell, the thousands
of pieces of paper dropped straight to the floor, where they lay in
uneven heaps, in a drift over Dom's winter boots, with no lingering
trace of the mysterious life-force that had possessed them.
Bewildered and half in shock, Dom shuffled toward the doorway that led
to the hall. The moons crunched and rustled like dry autumn leaves. At
the door he stopped and played his flashlight beam slowly over the short
corridor, where not a single lunar image remained moored by staples,
tape, or glue. The walls had been stripped bare.
Turning, he took a couple of steps into the center of the living room
once more, then knelt among the debris. He put down the glowing
flashlight and sifted paper moons through his trembling hands, trying to
understand what he had seen.
Within him, fear fought delighted amazement and terror battled awe. But
in truth he could not decide how he ought to feel, because there was no
precedent for what he had experienced. One moment a giddy laugh began
to build, but then joy was frozen by a breath of cold horror. Now he
felt he'd been in the presence of something unspeakably evil, but now he
was just as convinced it had been something good and pure. Evil. Good.
Perhaps both . . . or neither. Just ...
well something. Some mysterious thing beyond the descriptive,
definitive power of words.
He knew one thing only: Whatever had happened to him the summer before
last was far stranger than he had realized heretofore.
Still sifting paper moons through his fingers, he noticed something
unusual on his hands. He brought them palms-up into the direct beam of
the flashlight. Rings. On each palm blazed a ring of swollen red skin,
each as perfect as if the inflamed tissues had conformed to a pattern
drawn with a draftsman's compass.
Even as he watched, the stigmata faded, vanished.
It was Tuesday, January 7.
6.
Chicago, Illinois
In his bedroom on the second floor of St. Bernadette's rectory, Father
Stefan Wycazik woke to the thump of a drum. The beat had the deep boom
of a bass drum and the hollow reverberation of tympani. It sounded like
the pounding of an enormous heart, although it embellished the simple
two-stroke rhythm of the heart with an extra beat: LUB-DUBdub . . .
LUB-DUB-dub . . . LUB-DUB-dub . . .
Bewildered and still half asleep, Stefan switched on the lamp, squinted
in the blaze of light, and looked at his alarm clock. It was
two-oh-seven, Thursday morning, certainly not a reasonable hour for a
parade.
LUB-DUB-dub ... LUB-DUB_dub ...
After each triad of thumps, there was a three-second pause, then a set
of beats identical to all the others, then another three-second pause.
The precise timing and unfaltering repetition of the noise began to seem
less like the work of a drummer and more like the laborious
piston-stroke of an enormous machine.
Father Wycazik threw back the covers and padded barefoot to the window
that looked out on the courtyard between the rectory and the church. He
saw only snow and bare-limbed trees in the backwash of the carriage lamp
above the sacristy door.
The beats grew louder, and the pause between the groups shortened to
about two seconds. He took his robe from the back of a chair and
slipped it on over his pajamas. The sonorous pounding was so loud now
that it was no longer merely an annoyance and puzzlement. It had begun
to frighten Stefan. Each burst of sound rattled the windowpanes and
shook the door in its frame.
He hurried into the upstairs hall. He fumbled in the dark for the wall
switch and finally turned on the overhead light.
Farther along the short hall, on the right, another door opened, and
Father Michael Gerrano, Stefan's other curate, dashed out of his room,
struggling into his own robe. "What is that?"
"Don't know," Stefan said.
The next triple-thud was twice as loud as the group preceding it, and
the entire house reverberated as if it had been struck by three!
gigantic hammers. It was not a hard sharp sound, but mufflid'in spite
of its loudness-as if the hammers were thinly padded yet swung with
tremendous force. The lights flickered. Now the thumps were separated
by no more than a second of silence, not long enough for the echo of the
previous fulminations to fade away. And with each powerful hammering,
the lights flickered again and the floor under Stefan trembled.
In the same instant, Father Wycazik and Father Gerrano perceived the
locus of the noise: Brendan Cronin's room. They moved swiftly to that
door, which was directly across the hall from Father Gerrano.
Incredibly, Brendan was fast asleep. In spite of the thunderous
explosions that made Father Wycazik flash back to the mortar fire of
vietnam, Brendan dreamed on, untroubled. In fact, in the pulsing light,
there seemed to be a vague smile tugging at the young priest's lips.
The windows rattled. Drapery hooks clicked against the rods to which
they were attached. On the dresser, a hairbrush bounced up and down,
and several coins clinked together, and Brendan's breviary slid first to
the left and then to the right. On the wall above the bed, a crucifix
jiggled wildly under the picture hook from which it was hung.
Father Gerrano shouted, but Stefan could not hear what the curate said,
for now there were no pauses between muffled detonations. With each
tripartite beat, Father Wycazik retreated further from his initial
mental image of a huge drum and became increasingly convinced that what
he was hearing was the throbbing of some enormous and immeasurably
powerful machine. But it seemed as if the sound came from all sides, as
if the machinery was hidden within the walls of the house itself,
laboring at some mysterious and unknowable task.
As the breviary finally slid off the dresser and the coins began to
spill to the floor, Father Gerrano backed to the doorway and stood there
wide-eyed, as if he might flee.
But Stefan went to the bed, bent over the dozing priest, and shouted his
name. When that had no effect, he grabbed Brendan by the shoulders and
shook him.
The auburn-haired curate blinked and opened his eyes.
The hammering stopped abruptly.
The sudden cessation of thunderous noise jolted Father Wycazik as badly
as the first boom that had shattered his sleep. He let go of Brendan
and looked around the room, disbelieving.
"I was so close," Brendan said dreamily. "I wish you hadn't wakened me.
I was so close."
Stefan pulled aside the covers, took hold of the curate's hands, and
turned them palms-up. There was an angry red ring in each palm. Stefan
stared at them in fascination, for this was the first time that he had
seen the stigmata.
What in God's name is thi
s all about? he wondered.
Breathing hard, Father Gerrano approached the bed. Staring at the
rings, he said, "What're those from?"
Ignoring the question, Father Wycazik spoke to Brendan: "What was that
sound? Where did it come from?"
"Calling," Brendan said in a voice still thick with sleepand with a
soft, excited pleasure. "Calling me back."
"What was calling you?" Stefan demanded.
Brendan blinked, sat up, and leaned against the headboard. His eyes had
been out of focus. Now his gaze cleared, and he really looked at Father
Wycazik for the first time. "What happened? You heard it, too?"
"Somehow, yes," Stefan said. "It shook the whole house.
Amazing. What was it, Brendan?"
"A call. It was calling me, and I was following the call."
"But what was calling you?"
"I . I don't know. Something. Calling me back "Back where?"
Brendan frowned. "Back into the light. The golden light of the dream I
told you about."
"What's this all about?" Father Gerrano persisted. His voice was shaky,
for he was not as accustomed to the miraculous as were his rector and
his fellow curate. "Will somebody clue me in?"
The other priests continued to ignore him.
To Brendan, Stefan said, "This golden light . . . what is it? Could
it have been God calling you back to His fold?"
"No," Brendan said. "Just ... something. Calling me back. Next time,
maybe I'll get a better look at it."
Father Wycazik sat on the edge of the bed. "You think this will happen
again? You think it'll keep calling to you?"
"Yes," Brendan said. "Oh, yes."
It was Thursday, January 9.
7.
Las Vegas, Nevada
Friday afternoon, Jorja Monatella was at the casino, working, when she
learned that her ex-husband, Alan Rykoff, had killed himself.
The news came by way of an emergency telephone call from Pepper
Carrafield, the hooker with whom Alan had been living. Jorja took the
call on one of the phones in the blackjack pit, cupping a hand over one
ear to block out the roar of voices, the click and snap of cards being
dealt and shuffled, the ringing of slot machines. When she heard that
Alan was dead, she was shocked and sickened, but she felt no grief. By
his own selfish and cruel behavior, Alan had ensured she would have no
reason to grieve for him. Pity was the only emotion she could summon.
"He shot himself this morning, two hours ago," Pepper elaborated. "The
police are here now. You've got to come."
"The police want to see me?" Jorja said. "But why?"
"No, no. The police don't want to see you. You got to come and clean
his stuff out. I want his stuff out of here as soon as possible."
"But I don't want his things," Jorja said.
"It's still your job, whether you want them or not."
"Miss Carrafield, it was a bitter divorce. I neither want nor-',
" He had a will drawn up last week. He named you executor, so you got
to come. I want his stuff out of here now. It's your job."
Alan had lived with Pepper Carrafield in a high-rise condominium, a
ritzy place called The Pinnacle, on Flamingo Road, where the call-girl
owned an apartment. It was a fifteen-story white concrete monolith with
bronze windows. Surrounded by undeveloped desert land, it appeared to
be even taller than it was. And because it stood alone, it looked oddly
like a monument, the world's largest, swankiest tombstone. The grounds
were lushly planted with sprinkler-tended lawns and flowerbeds, but a
few dry tumbleweeds had blown in from the bordering plots of sand and
scrub. The chill and desolate wind which stirred the tumbleweeds also
fluted hollowly under the condominium's portico.
Two police cars and a morgue wagon stood in front of the building, but
no cops were in the lobby: just a young woman on a mauve sofa near the
elevators, forty feet away; and at a desk near the entrance, a man in
gray slacks and blue blazer, who was security guard and doorman. The
travertine marble floor, crystal chandeliers, oriental carpet, Henredon
sofas and chairs, and brass elevator doors contributed to a decor that
strained too hard to convey class-but conveyed it nonetheless.
As Jorja asked the doorman to announce her, the young woman on the sofa
rose and said, "Mrs. Rykoff, I'm Pepper Carrafield. Er ... I think you
use your maiden name now."
"Monatella," Jorja said.
Like the building in which she lived, Pepper strained for Fifth Avenue
designers who had worked on The Pinnacle. Her blond hair had been cut
in an excessively shaggy carefree style that hookers preferred, perhaps
because when you spent your workday in a series of beds, shaggy hair
required less grooming. She wore a purple silk blouse that might have
been a Halston, but she'd left too many buttons open, revealing a daring
amount of cleavage. Her gray slacks were well tailored but too tight.
She wore a Cartier watch encrusted with diamonds, but the elegant effect
of the watch was spoiled by her indulgence in flashy diamond rings: She
wore four of them.
"I couldn't bear to stay upstairs in the apartment," Pepper said,
motioning for Jorja to join her on the sofa. "I'm not going back up
there until they've taken the body away." She shivered. "We can talk
right here, just so we keep our voices low." She nodded toward the
doorman at the desk. "But if there's going to be a scene, I'll just get
up andwalk away. You understand? People here don't know what I do for a
living. I intend to keep it that way. I never do business out of my
home. I'm strictly out-call. " Her gray-green eyes were flat.
Jorja stared coldly at her. "If you think I'm a scorned, suffering
wife, you can relax, Miss Carrafield. Anything I ever felt for Alan is
gone now. Even knowing he's dead, I feel nothing. Nothing much. I'm
not proud of it. I was in love with him once, and we created a lovely
child together. I should feel something, and I'm ashamed that I don't.
But I'm definitely not going to cause a scene."
" Great," Pepper said, genuinely pleased, so involved with herself and
her own concerns that she was oblivious of the domestic tragedy Jorja
had just described. "There're a lot of high-class people live here, you
know. When they hear my boyfriend killed himself, they're going to be
standoffish for a long time. These kind of people don't like messy
scenes. And if they found out what I do for a living . . . well,
there'd be no way I'd ever fit in here again. You know? I'd have to
move, and I sure don't want to. No way, honey. I like it here a lot."
Jorja looked at Pepper's ostentatiously diamond-encumbered hands, looked
at her plunging neckline, looked into her avaricious eyes, and said,
"What do you suppose they think you are-an heiress?"
Astonishingly, missing the sarcasm, Pepper said, "Yeah. How'd you know?
I paid for the condo with hundred-dollar bills, so no credit check was
necessary, and I've let them all think my family has money."
Jorja did not bother to explain that
heiresses did not pay for
condominiums with bundles of hundred-dollar bills. She simply said,
"Could we talk about Alan? What happened?
What went wrong? I would never have thought Alan was the type to . . .
to kill himself."
Glancing at the doorman to make sure he had not left his post and
drifted nearer, Pepper said, "Me neither, honey. I'd never have pegged
him as the type. He was so . . . macho. That's why I wanted him to
move in and take care of me, manage me. He was strong, tough. Of
course, a few months ago he started acting a little weird, and lately he
was downright creepy. Weird and creepy enough that I was thinking about
maybe finding someone else to look after me. But I didn't expect he'd
screw things up for me by killing himself. Christ, you just never know,
do you?"
"Some people have no consideration," Jorja said. She saw Pepper's eyes
narrow, but before the hooker could say anything, Jorja said, "Am I to
understand that Alan was pimping for you?"
Pepper scowled. "Listen, I don't need a pimp. Whores need pimps. I'm
no whore. Whores give fifty-dollar blow-jobs, screw eight or ten johns
a day for whatever they can get, spend half their lives with the clap,
and wind up broke. That's not me, sister. I'm an escort for gentlemen
of means. I'm on the approved escort lists of the finest hotels, and
last year I made two hundred thousand bucks. What do you think of that?