Agnes Among the Gargoyles (39 page)

   "Another blond and brunette, of course," says Agnes. "Sybil died her hair for the show. Just like Prudence and Rosalie. But it was always too confusing, just out of reach. I thought of Barbara as dark, but she had just died her hair. Mrs. Bloch was blond, but she wore a dark wig. Mrs. Chesser was dark, and her daughter was blond. The stewardesses—the same, one of each."

   "And Miss Lenihan wore a wig because of the radiation treatments," says Jo.

   "Wigs and dye, wigs and dye," says Agnes. "Ripkin and Slade don't fit. They were both brunette. But I don't know. Does it have to fit exactly?"

   "I don't know."

   "I don't know either."

   They pull up to the rectory. If she weren't held down by her safety belt, Jo would jump out of her seat, for parked directly across the street is Father Chris's flaming yellow Le Baron. The supposedly uninhabited building is encased in scaffolding, but Agnes can see a light—faint, flickering and ominous—coming from the window nearest the clothesline, the window out of which Father Chris once leaned to hang up his brassieres.

   "Find a phone," Agnes orders Jo. "Call Tommy. Call the hot line. Call 911. Call anybody. Just get us some blue uniforms over here."

   Agnes bolts from the jeep and runs to the rectory. Her shoulder bag knocks against her hip as she runs. The weightiness of the bag is comforting. Gandalf is ready.

   She crawls under the scaffolding. The front door is locked. The windows are out of reach. Agnes fights the momentary urge to go home and crawl under the covers and read about it all in the papers tomorrow morning. Even when the lives of children are at stake, it isn't easy to make yourself go where someone wants to torture and kill you. Agnes leans on the scaffold. If it wouldn't call attention to herself, she would vomit.

   Agnes crawls back under the scaffolding and looks up at the window. The mysterious light flares briefly for several seconds. Agnes has a vision of the two girls, sightless and cowering, more frightened than anyone ever should be.

   Cleaving to the shadows to avoid detection, Agnes makes her way around to St. Basil's church. She knows that the front doors are bolted. She goes around to the back and scales a cyclone fence—something she hasn't done since she was a child and something that, even then, she wasn't very good at. She rips her pants down the side, and nearly impales herself in the fleshy part of her palm. The fence buckles and a dog starts to bark. She wheels a dumpster over to the side of the church. The dumpster smells of dogshit and rattles on its undercarriage like a sound-effects thunder machine. The dog redoubles its barking.

   Standing on the dumpster, Agnes is eye-level with the bottom of a stained glass panel depicting the Old Testament story of Belshazzar and the writing on the wall. Belshazzar, looking troubled, has separated himself from his feast and concubines; Daniel interprets the writing, informing the king that he has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Daniel wears the pleased expression of someone who has gotten off a zinger. With a piece of old two-by-four she finds under the scaffolding, Agnes smashes one section of glass: the bottom of Belshazzar's red cloak. The lead strips hold the rest of the window intact. By arching her back and nearly dislocating her shoulder, she can reach in just far enough to open the catch of a small sash window. Getting through the window isn't easy: she must slide in on her side, head first; she tumbles into the church on her hands. She feels a pain in her left wrist that will grow steadily worse. She has suffered a hairline fracture.

   "Fuck, fuck, fuck," says Agnes. The words echo in the empty church.

   Her eyes must adjust to the darkness.

   The only lights comes from two racks of flickering electronic candles, and a pin spot shining on the large crucifix on the altar, illuminating the death-grimace of Christ. The church should be quiet, but it isn't. The electric candles buzz, the old pews creak, and a kneeler falls with a terrific crash. There is another faint sound, an almost musical rustling—the wind stirring in the organ pipes? She wheels to look in the choir loft. She sees movement: indistinct forms, gray and white, swirl in the blackness. Finally Agnes realizes that she has been fooled by the movement of the fluid in her own eyes.

   "I gotta calm down," she says aloud.

   She is afraid on many levels. She has the New Yorker's prosaic fear, the certainty that if she got inside so can others: homeless lunatics and crack addicts. She also feels the terror of superstition, the dread that the statues will come to life and laugh mockingly. But neither of these fears approaches the knot-in-the-heart idea of entering the lair of a serial killer as he goes about his work. Agnes hears a scratching in the wainscoting, a discordance in the air itself. The pews settle, popping like arthritic joints; she hears faint raspings and heavings in the gloom like the death rattle of the ceramic spotlit Christ.

   "Get a grip. Get a grip."

   She feels a chill on her back. A real chill. A breeze blows in from somewhere. The electronic candles flicker. The swirling fluid in her eyeballs is kaleidoscopic.

   She goes down the trapdoor in the baptistery. She carries a lit sacramental candle. She doesn't bother to close the trapdoor. She takes about five steps in the tunnel before the trapdoor crashes down, plunging enough air into the tunnel to extinguish the candle.

   Agnes doesn't move. She listens for movement but doesn't hear any. She has never known greater temptation: there is nothing she wants more than to turn on the switch and flood the tunnel with reassuring light. But she doesn't dare. The wiring in these old places is funny. You never know how many things work off a single switch. Turning on the light might telegraph her presence to the Minotaur.

   It is ten or fifteen degrees colder in the tunnel. Cold enough for chattering teeth? Agnes's thermostat has gone berserk.

   Agnes ascends the stairs with great caution. Sweat drips into her eyes. She itches all over. Her bag won't stay on her shoulder.

   She tiptoes into the rectory.

   The windows are bare. The furniture and rugs have been removed. Outlines mark the places on the walls where pictures and crosses once hung. Big holes gape in the walls. Loose masonry and all kinds of tools litter the floor.

   She tries to get her bearings. She looks out the window but doesn't see any police cars. The room with the flickering light couldn't possibly be any lower. Agnes searches all the rooms on that floor. She opens closets until she finds one that isn't a closet at all but the entrance to a short flight of steps, at the top of which is a flickering, orange brightness.

   Someone is humming—distracted, sporadic humming, as though the hummer were involved in come close work, watch repair or taxidermy or organ dissection.

   Agnes fondles Gandalf. She takes off the safety catch.

   Onward and upward.

   The staircase leads to an attic with a sloping ceiling. Father Chris sits at a desk. His back is to Agnes. The flickering light comes from two candles in jars on his desk.

   There is no point screwing around, thinks Agnes. She takes the gun from her bag and points it at the priest's back.

   "Hello, Father," says Agnes shakily. She clears her throat.

   He looks up but does not turn around.

   "Agnes?" he says mildly.

   "That's right," she says, her chest heaving. "I figured you'd be here."

   "You seem to have caught me in the act," he says, and starts to turn around.

   "Don't move, Father. I have a gun."

   His knobby head tilts questioningly. "Oh my."

   "And I'm not afraid to use it."

   He actually laughs. "That really takes me back. I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has said that to me."

   "This is real life, Father," says Agnes. Two beads of sweat the size of marbles slide into her eyes. "The police are on their way."

   "Why?" asks Father Chris.

   Agnes doesn't answer. Slowly, she moves toward him.

   "I had a funny feeling about you," says the priest. "Sometimes you can just tell about people. You seemed like someone into guns."

   Agnes advances to the priest's side. There is what appears to be coagulated blood on his lips—a swath of it. There is blood on his teeth, blood on his palms and fingertips.

   The barrel of Gandalf is an inch from his eyes. He winces, waiting for Agnes to blow his head off. He is shaking. With two unsteady fingers, Agnes rakes a bit of blood off his chin. She smells her fingers.

   "Chocolate," she says.

   "My weakness," says the priest. On the desk is an open copy of
Backstage
and what's left of the chocolate
Great Expectations.

   "Why are you here?" she demands.

   "Privacy," he says. "That was a mistake, obviously."

   Agnes rests her rear end on the desk. "What's wrong with your apartment?"

   "Father Clarence is in and out of there all the time. This is a lot quieter. Usually."

   Agnes lowers the gun. "Father, did you take the children to Brooklyn?"

   "No. I dropped off the sheet music at the church first. Father Clarence was there. He said he was going to Brooklyn anyway. He took them."

   "I feel sick," says Agnes.

   "Maybe your blood sugar is low. You want some chocolate." Agnes says no. Father Chris breaks another piece off
Great Expectations
and gnaws on it himself. "Father Clarence had gotten a call from Sybil Pike's parents. Their plane was delayed in Toronto, and they won't be back until tomorrow. He was going to take Sybil to her sister's place. Agnes?"

   "Mmmm?"

   "Why were you going to shoot me?"

   "Jesus, Father, I thought you were the Minotaur."

   "Oh," he says, frankly puzzled. "Why would you think that?"

   Agnes doesn't know where to begin. "Let's just say the comic books sealed it."

   Now the priest is really confused. "Comic books?"

   "Of course you wouldn't know about them," says Agnes forlornly. "I've made a terrible mistake."

   "When I was on TV, that was only make-believe, you know."

   "I know, Father. And I'm sorry."

   "Don't anybody move," says Tommy. He stands on the stairs, gun drawn, crouching dramatically.

   "Now why does
he
want to shoot me?" wonders the priest. "Does he think I'm the Minotaur too?"

   "It's all a terrible misunderstanding, Father," says Agnes. She runs to Tommy. "You want to fill me in?" says Tommy edgily.

   "It's true," says Agnes. She turns back to Father Chris. "I hope I can make this up to you someday, Father."

   The priest shrugs. "Think nothing of it, I guess."

   "We've got to hurry," Agnes tells Tommy. "They're in Brooklyn."

   Agnes flies down the stairs, and Tommy follows.

   "It doesn't
have
to be a priest, you know," Tommy calls to her.

   Father Chris crosses himself and prays and then takes a few bites of chocolate, but finds that he has no appetite.

Right church, wrong pew, thinks Agnes.

   With lights and sirens flashing and wailing, Tommy and Agnes sail across the Manhattan Bridge. They easily outdistance the D train creeping beside them; its slow pace is part of the city's efforts to save wear on the fragile old span.

   "That was pretty brave," he tells her. "I don't know if I'd have had the balls to go in there alone."

   "I fucked up. I had the wrong guy."

   Tommy cuts the lights and siren when they reach Brooklyn Heights, an enclave of wealth surrounded by mayhem that tries to avoid calling attention to itself. The streets are dark; the streetlights cannot penetrate the poplars. Tommy turns a corner. Agnes points to Father Clarence's Cadillac, which hugs a corner in a parking spot too small for it. Another turn and they are in front of Sybil Pike's house.

   Backup is on the way. Tommy checks his revolver and starts to get out of the car.

   "Can't you wait for the rest of them?" says Agnes.

   "You didn't."

   He checks his ankle holster. "Stash your pocketbook, Agnes. We don't want anyone finding that gun of yours."

   That he knew about Gandalf surprises her, and she takes comfort in his small warning to her. She shouldn't be surprised—he is, after all, a cop. Does he also know that she almost did in Wegeman?

   He climbs out of the car and jogs toward the Pikes' building.

   Agnes holds her throbbing wrist. The radio crackles ominously. A procession of police cars approaches the Pike house. Agnes jumps out of the car and follows Tommy to the rear. There is foreboding in the air. Agnes just knows something terrible is about to happen. She can see Tommy's silhouette climbing the fire escape. He reaches the roof and then descends. Slowly, slowly—he is in front of each window for only a moment, but that is too long. The second floor window is blown out in a blizzard of gunfire. Agnes's ears ring from the sound; the glass seems to fall forever to the pavement. Tommy lies in a heap. There is a scream within Agnes, a cry of fury churning and bubbling, but she can't let it out. Father Clarence, the Minotaur of the Labyrinth, steps out the window, gathers up his cassock and passes down the fire escape with barely a glance at the fallen cop. He moves by Agnes like an apparition. She is close enough to smell his cologne.