A Bat in the Belfry (4 page)

Hungry and mean.
Who’s there
? she might have ventured, but she couldn’t make her throat move. A need to pee seized her, along with a wish, deep and piercingly hopeless, to be home in her own bed with the covers pulled up and her flashlight illuminating the pages of a library book; her dad said reading at night was just a waste of expensive electricity.

And reading in the daytime’s a waste of eyesight, probably
, she thought bitterly, since if it weren’t for her father and his drinking and his meanness, she wouldn’t be doing this at all, she wouldn’t be here.

But she was, and so was whoever—or whatever—had made the sound, down there in the darkness of the old wooden stairwell of the All Faith Chapel on Two Church Lane in Eastport, Maine.

No further sound followed. Gradually, her heart slowed. Her breathing, which had felt like an iron band was tightening around her chest, came a little easier, and her urgent need to relieve herself was no longer quite so acute.

She still couldn’t move, though. The sound didn’t come again but neither could she un-hear it. It had been there.

Hadn’t it? Gradually, she became less sure.
Crybaby
, one side of her mind jeered meanly at her.
Useless little crybaby, dumbass, scaredy-cat
. But the other side still knew … what?

Slowly, she turned. In the flashlight’s weakening glow, the stairs vanished into the gloom above. Three more long flights to go, and then a ladder for the last part of the climb, or so she’d heard. She’d never even been in the church before, her dad being more of a regular worshipper at Murphy’s Tap Room and her mother being dead.

Also, Karen was afraid of heights; luckily it was nearly midnight and pitch dark out, so at least once she got where she was going, she wouldn’t be able to see very well just how high up she was.
Do it. Just do it and be done with it. And then …

Then she could get out of this hick town. Far away, where nobody would ever find her, not her dad or anyone else. The idea sent her scrambling up the bare, dim-lit wooden steps to the next landing, and the next. Her job was not so hard, after all: climb to the top, stick the flashlight out between the slanted wooden slats in the belfry, then snap it on and off so Harvey Spratt and his creepy friends could see that she’d done it.

The boys were hanging out on the breakwater, downhill and only a few blocks away from the church, waiting for her signal. Laughing, Harvey had promised her fifty dollars, betting she couldn’t accomplish the task he’d set her.

A thin, pimpled high school senior, Harvey had been selling pot and pints of Bushmills to his equally mangy buddies since he was in sixth grade. Now he was into the harder stuff, too, Oxys and other pills, and worse. Karen had learned this two nights earlier when sixteen-year-old Bogie Kopmeir, an awful little thief and Harvey’s ever-present sidekick since the school year started, had shoved her hard just to show Harvey how eager a sidekick he really was, and she had stumbled right into Harvey.

As she clutched at him to keep from falling, nearly pulling the Saint Christopher medal on the chain from his neck, a baggie of foil packets had tumbled from his pocket onto the damp concrete breakwater. His murderous look at her as he grabbed them back up told her that he was selling them, even if she hadn’t guessed.

So she knew he had money. And he would pay her, even though he wouldn’t want to, because Karen might be poor, what the people around here called mackerel-eating poor, and get her clothes from the thrift shop and school supplies from teachers who took pity on her, knowing who her father was and that he would rather spend money on beer than on pens and notebook paper.

But Karen had a way about her, she wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but it made the other girls at school like her, and want to be friends. Harvey knew it, too, that if
he
wanted those girls to like
him
—which why any of them would, Karen had no idea, but if he
did
—well, then, he’d better not piss off Karen.

Reminding herself of this, she paused on the next landing for a deep, self-encouraging breath. The smells were different here: two centuries’ worth of old candle smoke, and the sweetish scent of lead-paint dust. Here, too, were more tools: a T square, a screwdriver with bits of rotted wood stuck to the blade, a string with the nut from a big steel bolt tied onto one end of it.

Also on the landing lay a small spiral notebook with a lot of measurements written into it in pencil. And somehow, it was the definiteness of these that reenergized her, rejuvenating her courage. Two flights to go; not four, or six.

Specifically: two. And with that her whole future, started off by the fifty dollars that Harvey would have to pay her, rose up wonderfully before her. First a hitchhike to Perry Corners, a five-minute ride off the island over the Broad Cove causeway to the mainland. She’d have no trouble getting a lift; everyone knew her, yet another of the reasons she wanted so desperately to get away. Making up a reason for the trip would be easy, too.

A friend’s mother was meeting her, she would say, or her father would be picking her up. The sweet, obedient girl that she was known to be wouldn’t lie.

So no one would suspect. After that: the bus to Bangor and a room at the YWCA, and a job. Dishwashing, yard work, Karen didn’t care. With winter coming soon, it could even be shoveling snow. All she needed was enough to get to New York and to a modeling agency, and then … well, she wasn’t entirely clear on the details of what her life in the big city would be.

But it would be fabulous, she knew. After all, she was tall, thin, and young; that she wasn’t quite pretty didn’t matter, since neither were the girls whose pictures she saw in the glossy fashion magazines. Instead, they had a look she recognized:

Direct. Dead-eyed, as if they’d gone way inside somewhere, no visible remains of what they thought or felt left on their faces at all. When Karen saw these girls in the print ads she pored over at the public library on Water Street, she found no more feeling in their expressions than in the clothing they wore or the accessories they displayed.

It was the same look she saw every day in the mirror, so she knew she was the type wanted by the men—even at fourteen, she knew they would have to be men—who took the photographs and would pay her for them. Karen felt confident that she could do whatever those girls had done to get where they were. All she had to do was try.

How hard could it be? Like now, for instance. Above, the last flight of steps angled sharply upward. At the top, the wavering beam of her flashlight picked out the bottom rungs of a ladder. Sighing at the sight of this last challenge, she took one step up toward it.

But then she froze, hearing a sound again in the stairwell below and behind her. “Hello?”

Silly. There’s no one here
. But …

Not a scuffing sound, though that would’ve been bad enough. No, it sounded like someone
breathing
.

And then suddenly it didn’t. Karen held her own breath and waited, but the dark mouth of the stairwell as it curved down and away remained silent. Even the fluttery skittering of mice in the walls ceased.

She poked the flashlight’s faint beam one more time into the black maw yawning below, then turned sharply from it and climbed the rest of the steps.
Dumbass
. If she kept getting spooked like this, claiming her fifty dollars could take all night.

So let’s get to it
. Grimly she tucked the flashlight under her arm and put a foot on the ladder’s bottom rung. Above her, the top rungs disappeared into the gloom inside the tower’s bell chamber. But beyond that, a faint glimmer hovered, the pale, silvery moonlight from outside coming through the tower’s wooden slats.

Up, up … she poked her head through the square, wood-framed trapdoor’s aperture. Around her, moonlight fell in bars on the dusty old floor. The huge, hulking shapes of the clockworks set into the walls loomed enormously, notched iron wheels and angled ratchets and massive pulley lines like the rigging on ships.

Karen had a sudden, bad thought that the mechanisms might start moving all by themselves in a nightmare meshing of gears, one that might seize her and grind her up. Fright made her hands loosen on the ladder’s rungs briefly, just for an instant.

But that was enough. The flashlight slipped from under her arm, its lens popping out and the bulb shattering as it smashed to the wooden landing below. It bounced clattering away down the stairs, leaving her in near darkness. Still clinging to the top rung of the ladder, she froze in horror, unable to believe what had just happened, trying to take it back, that careless moment.

Knowing she couldn’t. All this way, she’d come all this way, only to … but then a new thought struck her: the lighter. Her cigarette lighter would work, wouldn’t it?

Not in daylight. But now, in only the moonglow, its tiny flare was enough to be seen for two blocks, surely? Now, in the dead of night?

Well, it would have to be, was all. Just as she’d planned to do with the flashlight, she would creep over the dusty floor of the bell tower, stick the cigarette lighter out through the slats in the wall, and send a signal: SOS.

Get me out of here
. Away, to a place where no one knew her as the charity case, poor drunk Hank Hansen’s daughter. Then she would be mysterious, exotic … free.

Oh, it would be elegant … Abruptly, the ladder shook and rattled as, shockingly, someone unseen scuttled rapidly up it. A hand clamped roughly onto her shoulder. A breathy shriek came out of her mouth before another hand clapped over it, cruelly.

Then, before she could fully comprehend what was happening, somebody shoved her
upward
, through the trapdoor’s small opening into the bell chamber. In darkness she staggered and fell, and her head hit the floor hard. Hands seized her legs and she heard the rich sound of thick tape ripping.

Swiftly, her ankles were shoved together and tied, tape was slapped over her mouth, and some rough, smelly cloth was tied over her eyes. Her hands were grabbed firmly and bound.

“Please …” It came out a gagging “mmmph.” But she swallowed back even that as another sound, this one very familiar, began. A bright, metallic
ringing
sound, over and over …

Not the church bell, which Karen had never heard. She willed it to ring now, prayed for the iron clapper to smack the bell’s massive side with a sound so explosive, it killed her on the spot and took her from the world this very instant.

Because one of the few things her father was good at, that he could do no matter how drunk he was, was game hunting. Moose, deer, bear, partridge, in or out of season, when he went hunting there was meat to eat. Steak, chops, stew in an iron pot …

But for all those animals to be turned into food, they first had to get dressed out: bled, skinned and gutted, then cut into pieces that got wrapped in butcher paper with labels written on in a black crayon kept specially for the purpose. Karen’s dad knew how to do all that, too, commandeering the whole kitchen for his bloody work.

And before he began, he always sharpened his knife.
Zip, zop
, the blade slid ringingly down the specially roughened surface of the sharpening steel, until with a narrowed eye he examined the glinting edge he had produced and pronounced it good.

Zip, zop …
The sound now was of a smaller steel, pocket-sized, and the blade it moved on was shorter, too, she could tell from the sound. But she still recognized it. And the sound scared her into remembering that even with her wrists bound, her fingers were still free. So she could get the cigarette lighter out of her vest pocket.

Seizing it between her thumbs, pulling it out, then letting it slide down between her shaking palms, she found the friction wheel. Tears leaked down her cheeks, her throat aching with suppressed weeping, but if she let herself sob she knew she would choke, so she didn’t.

Instead, she waited for a hand to try to do something to her. When it did, she would thrust up the cigarette lighter, at the same time pulling her thumbs down over the friction wheel. The sudden flame would hurt someone, maybe even set them on fire, send them blazing down the stairs away from her …

Gulping back tears, she gripped the lighter with her thumbs poised tremblingly over the wheel. There would be a warning, some sound from her attacker, and she would be ready.

She held her breath, waiting until a tiny movement very near her face told her someone was there, right in front of her. Then, snapping the lighter and feeling the flare of heat as she thrust it up, she was rewarded by a yell of pain, followed by an angry curse.

Ha
, she thought grimly, but then a sudden sharp blow to both her wrists knocked the lighter from her hands. As it clattered to the floor the rest of the attack came from behind, her hair gripped tightly and her head yanked painfully back to expose her throat.

After that there were more sounds, but they didn’t last long, and for most of the time that they went on, fourteen-year-old Karen Hansen was not even fully aware that she was the one making them.

I
t was a chilly night in November, and all over Eastport windows were closed against a breeze with a salt-sharp edge on it. So not everyone heard the church bell at first. On most of Moose Island, where Eastport was located—at the north end, looking toward New Brunswick, Canada, or the south, with its view of the town of Lubec and the International Bridge that linked it to Campobello—the sound was merely a far-off tolling that could have been a bell buoy bobbing on the dark bay.

But Eastport police chief Bob Arnold’s small two-story house on Clement Street stood only a few blocks from Two Church Lane. He had just put his head down on his pillow when the bell bonged for the first time, vibrating the glass in his closed bedroom window.

His wife, Clarissa, swung her feet out of bed; a strange sound in the night—strange anything, night or day—was her husband’s business until proven otherwise. “I’ll make coffee,” she said.