glanced back at the sanctuary, the nave. Silence. Stillness but for the moth’s shadow play.
After using and returning Stormy’s key, I pushed the paneled door inward with some trepidation.
This particular fear had no rational basis whatsoever. Robertson wasn’t a magician able to appear by legerdemain inside a locked room.
Nevertheless, my heart played knock-and-rattle with my ribs.
When I felt for the light switch, my hand was not pinned to the wall by either a stiletto or a hatchet. The overhead light revealed a small, plain room but no large psychopath with yellow yeast-mold hair.
To the left stood the prie-dieu, where the priest knelt to offer his private devotions before saying Mass. To the right were cabinets containing the sacred vessels and the vestments, and a vesting bench.
Stormy closed the sanctuary door behind us and with a thumb-turn engaged the deadbolt.
We quickly crossed the room to the outer sacristy door. I knew that beyond lay the east churchyard, the one without tombstones, and a flagstone path leading to the rectory where her uncle lived.
This door also was locked.
From within the sacristy, the lock could be released without a key. I gripped the thumb-turn ... but hesitated.
Perhaps we had not heard or seen Robertson enter the nave from the narthex for the simple reason that he’d never come into the front of the church after I had glimpsed him ascending the steps.
And perhaps, anticipating that we would try to flee from the back of the church, he had circled the building to wait for us outside the sacristy. This might explain why I had sensed that we were moving toward danger rather than away from it.
“What’s wrong?” Stormy asked.
I shushed her—a fatal mistake in any circumstances but these—and listened at the crack between the door and the jamb. The thinnest breath of a warm draft tickled my ear, but with it came no sounds from outside.
I waited. I listened. I grew increasingly uneasy.
Stepping away from the outer door, I whispered to Stormy, “Let’s go back the way we came.”
We returned to the door between the sacristy and the sanctuary, which she had locked behind us. But I hesitated again with my fingers on the deadbolt release.
Putting my ear against the crack between this door and jamb, I listened to the church beyond. No teasing draft spiraled down my auditory canal, but no telltale stealthy sounds came to me, either.
Both sacristy doors had been locked from the inside. To get at us, Robertson would need a key, which he didn’t possess.
“We’re not going to wait here till morning Mass,” Stormy said, as though she could scroll through my thoughts as easily as through a document on her computer.
My cell phone was clipped to my belt. I could have used it to call Chief Porter and explain the situation to him.
The possibility existed, however, that Bob Robertson had been overcome by second thoughts about the wisdom of assaulting me in such a public place as the church, even though at this moment there were no worshipers or witnesses present. Having reined in his rampant anger, he might have gone away.
If the chief dispatched a patrol car to St. Bart’s or if he came himself, only to find no smiley psychopath, my credibility would take a hit. Over the years, I had banked enough good will with Wyatt Porter to afford to make a withdrawal or two from my account, but I was reluctant to do so.
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician—but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.
Although I employ no sleight of hand, though what I offer is truth glimpsed by supernatural means, I am aware not only of the magician’s vulnerability but also of the danger of being the boy who cried wolf—or in this case, the boy who cried Fungus Man.
Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard’s thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.
As a miracle worker of sorts, I walk a wire, too high to make one misstep and survive.
Chief Porter is a good man, but he is human. He would be slow to turn against me, but if he was made to feel foolish and gullible more than once, that turn would surely occur.
I could have used my cell phone to call Stormy’s uncle, Father Sean, in the rectory. He would come to our aid without delay and without too many awkward questions.
Robertson, however, was a human monster, not one of supernatural origin. If he was lurking in the churchyard, he would not be deterred from violence by the sight of a Roman collar or by the brandishing of a crucifix.
Having put Stormy in jeopardy, I shrank at once from the idea of endangering her uncle, as well.
Two sacristy doors. The outer led to the churchyard. The inner led to the sanctuary.
Having heard nothing at either exit, I had to rely on intuition. I chose the door to the sanctuary.
Apparently the bouncing ball of Stormy’s intuition hadn’t yet rattled to a stop on any number. She put her hand atop mine as I took hold of the lock.
Our eyes met for a moment. Then we turned our heads to stare at the outer door.
This was an instance when the card that we had drawn from that carnival fortune-telling machine and our matching birthmarks seemed indisputably to be meaningful.
Without exchanging a word, we arrived at a plan that we both understood. I remained at the door to the sanctuary. Stormy returned to the churchyard door.
If when I unlocked my door, Robertson lunged for me, Stormy would throw open the outer door and bolt from the sanctuary, shouting for help. I would attempt to follow her—and stay alive.
THAT MOMENT IN THE SACRISTY DISTILLED the essence of my entire existence: always between two doors, between a life with the living and a life with the dead, between transcendence and terror.
Across the room, Stormy nodded.
On the prie-dieu, a small book of prayers waited for a kneeling priest.
No doubt bottles of sacramental wine were stored in one of the cabinets. I could have used a little spiritual fortification.
I leaned hard against the sanctuary door to brace it. When I disengaged the lock, the bolt made a thin sound reminiscent of a razor sharpening against a strop.
Had Robertson been poised to burst in upon me, he ought to have reacted to the deadbolt retracting from the striker plate in the door frame. Of course he might be less of a hothead and more cunning than he had appeared to be when he’d stood in the graveyard, flipping us the finger.
Perhaps he suspected that I was wedging the door shut with my body and that I would snap the lock in place the instant that he tried to shove into the sacristy. Insane as he might be, he would nonetheless have some intuition of his own.
The Bob Robertson who left his kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, banana peels, and crumbs was too sloppy to be a wise strategist. The Robertson who kept the neat study and maintained the meticulous files in those cabinets of dread was, however, a different man from the one whose living room had featured drifts of sleazy magazines