Mungojerrie, to all appearances unaffected by this surfeit of death and decor, was standing in the hallway, in the inconstant light that pulsed through the open door of the final room, peering intently past that last threshold. Then suddenly he became way too intent: His back was arched and his hackles were raised, as if he were a witch’s familiar that had just seen the devil himself rising from a bubbling cauldron.
Though gunless, I was not going to let Sasha go through another doorway first, because I believed that whoever entered this next room in the point position would be blown away or chopped like a celery stalk in a Cuisinart. Unless the last four bodies had been mutated in ways concealed by clothing, we had not encountered another refugee from The Island of Dr. Moreau since the woman slumped in the Morris chair downstairs, and we seemed overdue for another close encounter of the bowel-loosening kind. I was tempted to pick up Mungojerrie and pitch him into the room ahead of me, to draw fire, but I reminded myself that if any of us survived, we would need the mouser to lead us through Wyvern, and even if he landed on his feet unscathed, in the great tradition of felines since time immemorial, he was likely thereafter to be uncooperative.
I moved past the cat and crossed the threshold with absolutely no cunning, ad-libbing and adrenaline-driven, hurtling headlong into a deluge of Victoriana. Sasha was close behind me, whispering my name with severe disapproval, as though it really ticked her off to lose her last best opportunity to be killed in this sentimental wonderland of filigree and potpourri.
Amidst a visual cacophony of chintz, in a blizzard of bric-a-brac, a television screen presented the cuddly cartoon creatures of the veld capering through The Lion King. The marketing mavens at Disney ought to turn this into a bonanza, produce a special edition of the film for the terminally distraught, for rejected lovers and moody teenagers, for stockbrokers to keep on the shelf against the advent of another Black Monday, package the videotape or DVD with a square of black silk, a pad and pencil for the suicide note, and a lyrics sheet to allow the self-condemned to sing along with the major musical numbers until the toxins kick in.
Two bodies, numbers ten and lucky eleven, lay on the quilted chintz spread, but they were less interesting than the robed figure of Death, who stood beside the bed. The Reaper, traveling without his customary scythe, was bending over the deceased, carefully arranging squares of black silk to conceal their faces, plucking at specks of lint, smoothing wrinkles in the fabric, surprisingly fussy for Hell’s grim tyrant, as Alexander Pope had called him, although those who rise to the top of their professions know that attention to detail is essential.
He was also shorter than I had imagined Death would be, about five feet eight. He was remarkably heavier than his popular image, too, although his apparent weight problem might be illusory, the fault of the second-rate haberdasher who had put him in a loosely fitted robe that did nothing to flatter his figure.
When he realized that there were intruders behind him, he slowly turned to confront us, and he proved not to be Death, the lord of all worms, after all. He was merely Father Tom Eliot, the rector of St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church, which explained why he wasn’t wearing a hood; the robe was actually a cassock.
Since my brain is pickled in poetry, I thought of how Robert Browning had described Death—“the pale priest of the mute people”—which seemed to fit this lowercase reaper. Even here in the animated African light, Father Tom’s face appeared to be as pale and round as the Eucharistic wafer placed upon the tongue during communion.
“I couldn’t convince them to leave their mortal fate in God’s hands,” Father Tom said, his voice quavering, his eyes brimming with tears. He didn’t bother to remark upon our sudden appearance, as if he had known that someone would catch him at this forbidden work. “It’s a terrible sin, an affront to God, this turning away from life. Rather than suffer in this world any longer, they’ve chosen damnation, yes, I’m afraid that’s what they’ve done, and all I could do was comfort them. My counsel was rejected, though I tried. I tried. Comfort. That was all I could give. Comfort. Do you understand?”
“Yes, we do, we understand,” Sasha said with both compassion and wariness.
In ordinary times, before we had entered The End of Days, Father Tom had been an ebullient guy, devout without being stuffy, sincere about his concern for others. With his expressive and rubbery face, with his merry eyes and quick smile, he was a natural comedian, yet in times of tragedy he served as a reliable source of strength for others. I wasn’t a member of his church, but I knew his parishioners had long adored him.
Lately, things hadn’t gone well for Father Tom, and he himself hadn’t been well. His sister, Laura, had been my mother’s colleague and friend. Tom is devoted to her—and has not seen her for more than a year. There is reason to believe that Laura is far along in her becoming, profoundly changed, and is being held in The Hole, at Wyvern, where she is an object of intense study.
“Four of those here are Catholic,” he said. “Members of my flock. Their souls were in my hands. My hands. The others are Lutheran, Methodist. One is Jewish. Two were atheists until…recently. All their souls mine to save. Mine to lose.” He was talking rapidly, nervously, as if he were aware of a bomb clock relentlessly ticking toward detonation, eager to confess before being obliterated. “Two of them, a misguided young couple, had absorbed incoherent fragments of the spiritual beliefs of half a dozen American Indian tribes, twisting everything in ways the Indians would never have understood. These two, they believed in such a mess of things, such a jumble, they worshipped the buffalo, river spirits, earth spirits, the corn plant. Do I belong in an age where people worship buffalo and corn? I’m lost here. Do you understand? Do you?”
“Yes,” Bobby said, having followed us into the room. “Don’t worry, Father Eliot, we understand.”
The priest was wearing a loose cloth gardening glove on his left hand. As he continued to speak, he worried ceaselessly at the glove with his right hand, plucking at the cuff, tugging at the fingers, as if the fit was not comfortable. “I didn’t give them extreme unction, last rites, didn’t give them the last rites,” he said, voice rising toward a hysterical pitch and pace, “because they were suicides, but maybe I should have given unction, maybe I should have, compassion over doctrine, because all I did for them…the only thing I did for these poor tortured people was give comfort, the comfort of words, nothing but empty words, so I don’t know whether their souls were lost because of me or in spite of me.”
A month ago, the night my father died, I experienced a strange and unsettling encounter with Father Tom Eliot, of which I’ve written in a previous volume of this journal. He’d been even less in control of his emotions on that cruel night than he was here in the Stanwyk mausoleum, and I had suspected he was becoming, though by the end of our encounter, he had seemed to be racked not by anything uncanny but rather by a heart-crushing anguish for his missing sister and by his own spiritual despair.
Now, as then, I searched for unnatural yellow radiance in his eyes, but saw none.
The cartoon colors from the television patterned his face, so I seemed to be looking at him through a constantly changing stained-glass window depicting distorted animal shapes rather than saints. This inadequate and peculiar light flickered in his eyes, as well, but it couldn’t have concealed more than the faintest and the most transient glimmer of animal eyeshine.
Still worrying at the glove, his voice as tight with stress as power lines taut and singing in a storm wind, sweat shining on his face, Father Tom said, “They had a way out, even if it was the wrong way, even if it was the worst sin, but I can’t take their way, I’m too scared, because there’s the soul to think about, there’s always the immortal soul, and I believe in the soul more than in release from suffering, so there’s no way out for me now. I have damning thoughts. Terrible thoughts. Dreams. Dreams full of blood. In the dreams, I feed on beating hearts, chew at the throats of women, and rape…rape small children, and then I wake up sickened but also, but also, also I wake up thrilled, and there’s no way out for me.”
Suddenly he stripped the glove off his left hand. The thing that slid out of the glove, however, wasn’t a human hand. It was a hand in the process of becoming something else, still exhibiting evidence of humanity in the tone and the texture of the skin, and in the placement of the digits, but the fingers were more like finger-size talons, yet not talons precisely, because each appeared to be split—or at least to have begun to split—into appendages resembling the serrated pincers of baby lobster claws.
“I can only trust in Jesus,” the priest said.
His face streamed with tears no doubt as bitter as the vinegar in the sponge that had been offered to his suffering savior.
“I believe. I believe in the mercy of Christ. Yes, I believe. I believe in the mercy of Christ.”
Yellow light flared in his eyes.
Flared.
Father Tom came at me first, perhaps because I was between him and the doorway, perhaps because my mother was Wisteria Jane Snow. After all, though she gave us such miracles as Orson and Mungojerrie, her life’s work also made possible the twitching thing at the end of the priest’s left arm. Though the human side of him surely did believe in the immortal soul and the sweet mercy of Christ, it was understandable if some other, darker part of him placed its faith in bloody vengeance.
No matter what else he was, Father Tom was still a priest, and my folks had not raised me to take punches at priests, or at people insane with despair, for that matter. Respect and pity and twenty-eight years of parental instruction overcame my survival instinct—which made me a disappointment to Darwin—and instead of aggressively countering Father Tom’s assault, I crossed my arms over my face and tried to turn away from him.
He was not an experienced fighter. Like a grade-school boy in a playground brawl, he threw himself wildly against me, using his entire body as a weapon, ramming into me with a lot more force than you would expect from an ordinary priest, even more than you’d expect from a Jesuit.
Driven backward, I slammed hard into a tall armoire. One of the door handles gouged into my back, just below my left shoulder blade.
Father Tom was hammering at me with his right fist, but I was more worried about that weird left appendage. I didn’t know how sharp the serrated edges on those little pincers might be, but more to the point, I didn’t want to be touched by that thing, which looked unclean. Not unclean in a sanitary sense. Unclean in the sense that the cloven hoof or the hairless pink corkscrew tail of a demon might look unclean.
As he pounded on me, Father Tom urgently repeated his statement of religious commitment: “I believe in the mercy of Christ, the mercy of Christ, the mercy, I believe in the mercy of Christ!”
His spittle sprayed my face, and his breath was disconcertingly sweet with the fragrance of peppermint.
This ceaseless chanting wasn’t meant to persuade me or anyone else—not even God—of the priest’s unshaken faith. Rather, he was trying to convince himself of his belief, to remind himself that he had hope, and to use that hope to seize control of himself once more. In spite of the malevolent sulfurous light in his eyes, in spite of the urge to kill that pumped uncanny strength into his undisciplined body, I could see the earnest and vulnerable man of God who struggled to suppress the raging savage within and to find his way back toward grace.
Shouting, cursing, Bobby and Roosevelt clutched at the priest, trying to tear him off me. Even as he clung fast to me, Father Tom kicked at them, drove his elbows backward into their stomachs and ribs.
He hadn’t been a skilled fighter when he launched himself at me, seconds ago, but he seemed to be learning fast. Or perhaps he was losing the struggle to subdue his new becoming self, the savage within, which knew all about fighting and killing.
I felt something pulling at my sweater and was sure that it was the hateful claw. The pincer serrations were snagged in the cotton fabric.
With revulsion thick in my throat, I grabbed the priest’s wrist to restrain him. The flesh under my hand was strangely hot, greasy, and as vile to the touch as might be a corpse in an advanced state of decay. In places, the meat of him was disgustingly soft, although in other places, his skin had hardened into what might have been patches of a smooth carapace.
Until now, our bizarre struggle had been desperate yet at least darkly amusing to me, something that you couldn’t laugh at now but at which you knew you would laugh later, over a beer, on the beach: this roundhouse fight with a chubby clergyman in a chintz-choked bedroom, a Looney Tunes collaboration between Chuck Jones and H. P. Lovecraft. But suddenly a positive outcome didn’t seem as assured as it had a moment ago, and it wasn’t amusing anymore, not slightly, not even darkly.
His wrist joint was no longer like the wrist joint you study on a skeleton chart in a general-biology class, more like something you might see during advanced delirium tremens while drying out from a ten-bottle bourbon binge. The entire hand turned backward on the wrist, as no human hand could do, as if it operated on a ball joint, and the pincers snapped at my fingers, forcing me to let go before he had a chance to cut me.
Although I felt as though I had been struggling with the priest long enough to justify having his name tattooed on my biceps, he had been in this pummeling frenzy for no more than half a minute before Roosevelt tore him off me. Our usually gentle animal communicator communicated to the animal inside Father Tom by lifting him off the floor and throwing him as if he were no heavier than the real Death, who is, after all, nothing but bones in a robe.
Cassock skirt flaring, Father Tom crashed into the footboard of the bed, causing the pair of suicides to bounce as though with postmortem delight, springs singing under them. He toppled facedown to the floor, but instantly sprang to his feet with inhuman agility.
No longer chanting about his faith, now grunting like a boar, spitting, making strange strangled sounds of rage, he seized a walnut chair that featured tie-on cushions in a daffodil print and slip-on daffodil arm protectors, and for an instant it seemed that he would use it to smash everything around him, but then he pitched it at Roosevelt.
Roosevelt spun away just in time to take the chair across his broad back rather than in the face.
From the television came the mellifluous and emotional voice of Elton John, with full orchestral and choral accompaniment, singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”
Even as the chair was cracking against Roosevelt’s back, Father Tom threw a vanity bench at Sasha.
She didn’t dodge quickly enough. The bench clipped her shoulder and knocked her over an ottoman.