Baptism in Blood(24)
At the end of the back hall there was a spiral staircase, leading dangerously upward to the squat square space where the bells were kept. Normally, nobody had to come up here. Everything was done by computer these days. You punched your instructions into the program and the machine took care of the rest. The right bells rang at the right times. The right songs played for the right moments of spiritual uplift and conviction of sin. Sometimes the bells had to be fixed, though. The next time, Henry thought, they would have it all computerized, with hymns on tapes that could be played automatically, with no bells to fix.
Henry stopped at the landing at the top of the spiral staircase. He searched around in his pockets until he found the big brass ring of church keys. He opened the bell room door and let himself in. It was dark up here and very noisy. There were no real windows in this room, only shutters that had to be screwed off the wall. The shutters were closed now, as they were whenever there was no service going on downstairs.
Henry put his keys back in his pocket and started to unscrew the set of shutters he was closest to. The bells felt like big hulking things with wills of their own. Henry hadn’t felt this nervous since he was a small boy and believed that a monster lived in his bedroom closet. He got the shutters open just as the wind changed direction in a sudden gust. He got a face full of rain and a head full of thunder, rolling and crashing and hiccuping in bursts. Then the sky was filled with lightning and thunder again. It was only when the flash spots had cleared from his eyes that Henry realized that it wasn’t really dark. The sun was up there somewhere, straining to get through. The world was full of a steady gray glow.
What Henry had hoped to see was the beach, but he’d made a miscalculation. He’d opened the wrong set of shutters. He was looking not eastward, toward sloping ground, but north. The land rose steadily but shallowly and it receded from his vantage point. There was a stand of trees and then, in the distance, the peaked roof of the camp’s main lodge. Camp, Henry thought. Lodge. That place up there wasn’t either thing. It wasn’t even a mansion. It was a palace, and the woman who owned it thought she was a queen.
He was about to close up the shutters and go downstairs again—What was he doing here, anyway? What good would it do anybody if he could see David Sandler’s house on the beach?—when he caught a movement on the lodge’s roof. For a moment he thought it was nothing but the storm. Maybe the wind had blown a few of the shingles loose up there. Then he realized that what he was seeing was a woman, walking carefully along the catwalk.
Dear sweet Lord, Henry thought. His stomach turned over. He wanted to be sick.
She’s going to fall.
But she didn’t fall. Whoever it was—not Zhondra Meyer; somebody shorter, somebody heavier—inched along the catwalk with what seemed like studied deliberateness. Henry realized that she had to be holding on to the rail, at the very least. She got to the kink where she would have to turn a corner and stopped. Then she seemed to scrunch into a ball and rock back and forth. A second later, Henry saw that she’d disappeared. She hadn’t fallen. He would have seen that. She had simply disappeared.
Into where?
Into what?
What if witches really did exist, and whoever it was had just taken off, become discorporeal, called on her God the Devil, and been made spirit right in front of Henry’s eyes?
Henry stepped away from the window and slammed the shutters closed across it. He twisted the first of the screws in so savagely it tore against his hand. He could feel an ooze of blood where the edge of the screw handle had cut into his palm. He put the other three screws in more gently and turned toward the spiral stairs.
Of course, he told himself, whoever it was probably hadn’t become discorporeal. She had simply lowered herself through some kind of trap door. If there were ways onto that catwalk there had to be ways off. It would be insane to design the thing any other way.
Henry let himself back out onto the landing and closed the bell room door behind himself. He got his keys out again and locked up. He couldn’t remember when he had last been this shaken, if he had ever been.
What was it that Saint Paul had said? The Devil is prowling among you like a raging lion.
And yes, Henry thought. Yes, he was.
9
IN THE END, DAVID Sandler made the kind of decision he had promised himself never to make—based on emotion, with all the reason left out. He should have stayed in the beach house. The water was bad, but the house was built on pilings. It was the sturdiest structure on the beach for miles. Instead, he went out onto his deck and looked at the waves coming at him. They were enormous, black and tall and as solid looking as a wall. He kept remembering the television photographs of all those houses on Nag’s Head falling into the sea during the last hurricane. He saw the splintering wood. He saw the cracking porches. He saw them collapsing like sticks into the water.