The white dwarf star astronomers call 40 Eridani B is only half as heavy as our sun, but the stuff it is made of is jammed into a little sphere the size of Mars, a planet considerably smaller than the Earth. The high concentration of mass creates a powerful gravitational field that seizes upon the very light of Eridani, holds it back, literally and actually slows it down so that time itself is slowed down, falling behind at the rate of six seconds a day.
Gregory had read about Eridani and its slow time in some scientific journal. He had been fleetingly fascinated, then had forgotten about it. Now he remembered it; now he felt like an inhabitant of a slow-time region himself. For the last few hours, time had been moving on wings of lead, dragged down by the relentless gravitational field of horror. Things seen and heard by him floated to his senses through a fog of shock; he was a drugged observer of events that took place on the other side of a theatrical scrim. Lieutenant Berardi was saying, for the second or third time, that “anything you say may be held against you,” and Gregory, smiling faintly, was saying, “Yes, I know. That’s why I’m not saying yet—until I’ve had time to choose my words—just what the Bishop and I were doing.”
“Any ideas, Father, as to what the cause of death may have been?”
Berardi’s voice reached Gregory as from a great distance, but it reached him. He thought of the last time he had seen Garth alive—upstairs, in that little bedroom, just before the exorcism ritual was started for the last time. What had happened after that Gregory had been obliged to patch together later from bits and pieces. That Garth had run from the bedroom was certain. Mrs. Farley, who had been waiting in the hallway, had seen him propel himself out of the room, terror stamped on his face. He had gone pell-mell down the stairs and out of the rectory. Mrs. Farley subscribed to the notion that he had left at the words Vade, Satanas!—Begone, Satan!—and on that assumption she darkly hinted that Garth was the Fiend in flesh. But no one knew for certain precisely when Garth had left the room.
A man passing the rectory at that time, passing at a run because of the driving rain, had knocked at the rectory door and told Mrs. Farley that he had seen Garth flee the rectory, dash across the wet street, run north—north, Mrs. Farley took pains to point out, was the direction of Talbot’s print shop—and within seconds, insisted this passerby, Garth was dead, struck to the ground by a spear of lightning that had blinded the passerby for many seconds thereafter.
“I saw the lightning myself, I did,” Mrs. Farley had said, “through the windows I saw it flash, the very lightning that struck him down. Just a few seconds after it flashed, there was this knock at the door and there this man stood telling me about the fellow he saw run out of here and get hit by lightning. God’s Hand it was, sure, that killed him dead in the street.”
Garth had indeed died in the street as he ran from the rectory, but the coroner’s office reported that there were no burns on the body. The lightning had struck near him but had not hit him. Mrs. Farley sniffed at this. If Garth wasn’t the Devil himself—and she was not ready to discredit that idea—then he was on the way to the Devil, his master, the demon who called himself Talbot. And the Hand of God had struck him down. In answer to Berardi’s question, Gregory said:
“None.”
Berardi turned to the Bishop. “You, Your Excellency?”
“No, none,” said the Bishop, “other than simply the Hand of God . . .”
“By which you mean the Hand of God figures in every death?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.”
“Even murder?”
“Surely you aren’t suggesting Garth was murdered?”
Berardi shrugged. “I’m Homicide, Your Excellency. And it is a possibility.”
“But is it a probability? In the rectory of the church? In the presence of a priest and a bishop?”
“There were others here,” said Berardi. “The girl. And Mrs. Farley.”
Mrs. Farley spoke up: “I killed nobody.”
“Not saying you did, ma’am,” Berardi assured her. “But is there anything you can add to what’s already been said?”
“No. Except maybe—Oh, it’s such a silly little thing.”
“Never mind. Let’s hear it.”
“The Father and His Excellency left the bedroom for a moment and stepped out into the hallway to talk in private. I was in the room with Garth and the unconscious girl. I saw Garth take a little bottle of pills from his pocket and pop one in his mouth. Naturally, I thought it was some kind of medicine.”
A little bottle of pills. At the words, time plunged ahead again for Gregory and the scrim quickly lifted. He felt himself turn pale and hoped nobody noticed.
“Pills, eh?” said Berardi. “That must have been the bottle we confiscated along with the other items in his pockets. Best clue we’ve had so far. I think we can all adjourn to the living room now—we’re through up here.”
Mrs. Farley asked, “Can I look into the master bedroom and see if the girl is still sleeping quietly?”
“Sure,” said Berardi, “but come right down to the living room because I may want to ask you some more questions about those pills.”
Mrs. Farley walked to the master bedroom, opened the door and tiptoed in. Susan was sound asleep on a big bed, breathing deeply and regularly. She was pale, but her face was serene. Mrs. Farley closed the door quietly and joined the others downstairs.
In the living room, Berardi had picked up the phone and was dialing the coroner’s office. “Doc Foster there? Yeah, it’s important . . . Doc, Berardi. Any news? . . . Mmm, well, as soon as you find out the cause of death, let me know. Listen—those pills we took from the body: what does the label say? . . . No label? That’s funny . . . Well, will you put them through analysis and let us know what they are? Call me here at the rectory.” Berardi gave him the number and hung up. “Suicide, maybe,” he mused. “I hadn’t figured on that.” Then he turned to Gregory. “Father, an hour or so ago you said something in passing—something about checking Garth’s record. You were interrupted and never got back to it. What did you mean?”
“Two things, actually,” said Gregory. “First, I wondered if Garth had ever been picked up on a child-molesting charge, years ago perhaps and possibly under a different name.”
“A sex charge? We can try to check, of course. What was the other thing?”
“Garth’s wife died six years ago—drowned in a lagoon—accidentally, it’s believed. Would there be any chance of investigating that?”
“You suspect foul play?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” said Berardi, stroking his chin, “we could investigate up to a point, but six years is a long time. Were there any witnesses?”
“Garth. And the girl.”
“Those are pretty sinister suspicions you have, Father. Child-molesting, murder . . .”
“If they have any foundation,” said Gregory, “they may go a long way toward explaining his death. Because if Garth believed his crimes had been discovered, suicide might have seemed the only way out. It’s just a guess.”
“Not a bad guess, Father. We’ll try to check into that stuff.” Berardi’s eyes dropped in concentration for a moment, and then he said, “One odd thing. If Garth killed himself because he felt cornered, and if he didn’t feel cornered until his visit to the rectory today, then why did he have poison on his person? Why would he just casually carry it around with him like a pack of cigarettes or something? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Perhaps it was—” Gregory checked himself.
“Yes?”
“Well, I don’t know. Anything I say may be held against me?”
“That’s right. On the other hand, it’s illegal to withhold valuable evidence or information.” Berardi smiled genially. “We’ve got you coming or going, Father.”
“So I see,” said Gregory, also smiling. “Well, it was just another guess. But what if the bottle normally contained the kind of pills a person might conceivably carry around—aspirin or indigestion tablets, that sort of thing—and somebody substituted poison?”
“Somebody?” asked Berardi. “Who?”
“Why . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Father,” Berardi said, “what about that daughter? Up to now I’ve respected your wishes and haven’t pestered her with questions. You said she’d gone through something so terrible you couldn’t even discuss it with me, and I believed you. But not being able to question her has left too many holes in my information. I have nothing to go on, and I have a feeling she may be able to help me get to the bottom of this. How about it?”
“Lieutenant,” said Gregory, “I want to help you—but not at the expense of that girl’s sanity. It could be disastrous to disturb her now. The poor orphan doesn’t even know her father is dead!”
Orphan. The word brought Father Halloran to Gregory’s mind. Susan, when in the claws of that Other Force—madness or demon—had shifted her story so often, slid into ambiguity and equivocation, accused Father Halloran one time and Garth the next, that no rational man could have grounds to say one utterance was truth and another falsehood. Garth was dead, and could never tell them. Susan was alive and seemingly herself again—but how could one be sure of that? Unless investigation uncovered evidence of past child-molesting of Garth’s, his sexual guilt or innocence would remain a mystery.
And so would Father Halloran’s. Yes, thought Gregory, sadly, the ex-pastor of St. Michael’s, that humorless, driven man who had seen a naked girl for the first time in his life in the stillness and privacy of his study . . . the sexual guilt or innocence of that man, too, was still a looming question mark.
Berardi was saying, “How can you be sure she doesn’t know her father’s dead?”
“She was unconscious . . . and we didn’t tell her . . .”
“Maybe you didn’t have to, Father. Think of this: who wanted him dead? Wanted him dead so much that he—or she—switched the pills in his bottle? I’ve got to talk to that girl.”
“You cannot.”
“Can you tell me,” said Berardi, his gaze fastened firmly on Gregory’s eyes, “can you honestly tell me on your honor as a priest that this girl is incapable of murder?”
Gregory thought of Susan’s fingernails buried in Father Halloran’s throat.
Berardi said, “With your hand on the breviary can you tell me that?”
Gregory looked away. “No,” he said.
“All right then. Bring her out here.”
The Bishop said, “The shattering of that girl’s mind would be on you, Lieutenant. You alone would be responsible—”
“I’ll take that responsibility, Your Excellency!” Berardi snapped.
“But why? For what?” And then the Bishop asked, “Suppose she did kill her father?”
Berardi looked quizzically at the Bishop. “I can’t believe my ears,” he said. “‘Suppose she did?’! . . .”
“Suppose she did. I tell you, as God is my witness, that if she did, she was so driven to it, and had such justification, that mortal sin though it was, no jury on earth would convict her.”
“That’s not for you to say,” said Berardi.
“No jury on earth,” the Bishop repeated, “knowing all the facts, could possibly convict her. And I will say more. When you asked Father Sargent, on his sacred honor, if he could call the girl incapable of murder, he could not say Yes although he wanted to say it, desperately. He had to say No. Had to. Shall I tell you why? Because he knew that this same girl once attacked Father Halloran and tried to strangle him!”
“What!—”
“And yet I tell you that circumstances were such that the law would never condemn her.”
“What circumstances?”
“She was under the control of—”
Gregory quickly cut in: “The girl was not herself.”
“You mean criminally insane?”
“No. She was being manipulated.”
“By who?”
“I . . . I can’t tell you.”
“Christ!” The profane expletive burst from Berardi. He turned to the Bishop. “Your Excellency, a second ago you said no jury would convict her if they knew all the facts. Well, why not give me all the facts? I’m not your enemy!”
“No,” Gregory said, “you’re not. But others are. And anything we say may be used against us. In court. By a jury that could include people like John Talbot.”
“What’s Talbot got to do with this?”
Gregory said: “What we’ve been doing here is completely blameless, and something that might have been accepted as a matter of course a few centuries ago. But people today would find it too fantastic, smelling too much of witchcraft and black magic. The knowledge of what we’ve been doing would only feed the fire that burns in Talbot and others like him. They would call us purveyors of superstition, throwbacks to the Dark Ages. And when I say us I don’t mean merely His Excellency and me. I mean the Church. Your Church, Lieutenant. Ours. It would be covered with ridicule.”
“Look,” said Berardi, wearily, “I want to cooperate. I’m not some kind of villain. And I’m a good Catholic. But I’m also a policeman. I’ve got a job to do. My job is facts. That’s all I have to go on: facts. And I haven’t been getting many facts around here—every time a fact starts to put in an appearance, somebody shuts the door on it. Every time I ask a question, somebody tells me they’d rather not answer right now. I’ve been playing along with this, I’ve been a nice guy, I’ve been respectful. But now I have to stop being a nice guy. In this house you’ve got a girl you as much as admit killed her father—”
Gregory said, “We admitted no such thing.”
“A girl who tried to kill one man and is quite capable of killing another. But she can’t be blamed, you say. And also she wasn’t insane, you say. But my talking to her—that, you say, will drive her insane! Put yourself in my place. That’s a pretty tall story, isn’t it?”
“You must—” began the Bishop.
“I must be a cop, that’s what I must. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but nothing in this case meshes and it’s all because of that damned girl. Father, I’m talking to her. I’m talking to her and that’s final. I’m going to wake her up and question her if I have to take the whole bunch of you down to the station and lock you in the bullpen.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” Mrs. Farley roared, belligerently.
Quietly, Berardi told her, “Go get the girl, ma’am.”
“I will not.”
Berardi turned to Gregory. “Father?”
“I can’t.”
“All right,” said Berardi, walking toward the stairs, “you don’t leave me any choice.”
Gregory leaped in front of him, blocking the stairs. “No!” he said. “She didn’t do it! You must not!”
“Get out of my way, Father.”
“No! I know she didn’t do it!”
“Get out of my way!”
Will he push me aside? wondered Gregory. Will he lay hands on a priest of his Church and then hate himself for it, poor man?
But the questions were never answered, for at that moment the doorbell rang.
With the bitter humor of frustration, Berardi said, “Saved by the bell, Father. I’ll get that—it’s probably one of my men—but I’ll be back. And when I come back I’m going straight upstairs whether you and His Excellency like it or not.”
He walked swiftly out of the room, into the vestibule. The people in the living room heard the door open, then heard a quick soft exchange of male voices.
Followed by Berardi, Father Halloran entered the room.
Mrs. Farley greeted him with tears: “Oh, Father, it’s good to see you . . . things have been so terrible here since you left . . .”
Gregory greeted him with silence, fearing what might now come.
The Bishop greeted him with a question: “James, my son—why have you come back?” He looked into Father Halloran’s face. It was haggard, taut, the eyes ringed with the poison of sleeplessness and shrouded in an anguish such as the Bishop, in all his years, had never seen in the eyes of man or woman. When Father Halloran answered the question, his voice was a whisper so dark, so low, so full of haunt, that at the sound of it the Bishop’s skin suddenly prickled with cold dread.
Father Halloran said, “To confess.”
• • •
“Wait!” Berardi said immediately. “Don’t say a word, Father Halloran.” Berardi was on the phone in a second, barking orders to bring a tape recorder to the rectory. It was there within fifteen minutes. While waiting, Father Halloran accepted a small glass of brandy from Gregory and said words of comfort to Mrs. Farley.
The transcript of the tape was typed for Berardi that evening.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: The man Garth came to me one day to confess. He told me—
BISHOP CONRAD CRIMMINGS: James!
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: I know, Your Excellency. You’re shocked that I am about to betray a secret of the confessional. And well you should be. But the betrayal, I’m afraid, has already been committed, as you will see, so what I say now can’t make it any worse.
BISHOP CONRAD CRIMMINGS: You betrayed a penitent, James?
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: Yes.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI: Go on, Father.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: He had been carrying a terrible burden with him for a long time, and at last he had to shake it off. Several years before, I think he said six, he deliberately allowed his wife to drown. Pushed her into the water from a rowboat. I asked him why he had committed that terrible crime. “For the money,” he said. “For the insurance money.” He said there was a $10,000.00 policy. I know $10,000.00 is a great deal of money, but to kill somebody for it—your own wife—the amount did not seem to match the enormity of the crime, and I was profoundly shocked. However, men have killed for less, I know. For a warm coat or a crust of bread.
Then I began to ask him details. The insurance money, who was the beneficiary?
“I am,” he said.
Nobody else? I asked him.
“Susan,” he said. “We’re joint beneficiaries.”
And that frightened me. He had killed his wife for the money, and the money was not even his alone. Why should he stop with one murder? What was to prevent him from killing the daughter, too, so the money would be all his? A six-year interval—it was enough to offset suspicion. I voiced my fears frankly. I told him I could not absolve him, that he was not in a state of grace if there was another murder in his heart.
He said, “No, I couldn’t do that, I could never kill Susan, I love her too much, I love her, you must believe me, Father!”
And I did, I did. If you had heard him, you would have believed him, too. He sounded completely sincere—and yet when he spoke of his love for his daughter, something—I’ve never known what, I could not pin it down—something told me that things were strangely awry.
He left the confessional, after assuring me he would give himself up. Days went by. I would see him—on the street, in church on Sundays—free as air. The days turned into weeks and still he had not given himself up.
And now I began to have the first of many sleepless nights. I was helpless—I knew of a murderer who might murder again, and yet I could tell no one. Nights, I would lie sleepless on my bed, devising plans, ways by which I could arouse the suspicions of the police without actually telling them.
But even as I evolved these elaborate schemes, I knew I could not put them to use. It is not only by revealing the words he hears in confession that a priest violates the confessional. If he uses the information in any way it is a violation. He must go about his duties as if he had never heard the confession, as if it had never been spoken. It must not affect what he does or says in any way at all.
I remembered an example they used to give us in the seminary. If a priest hears, in the confessional box, that someone has placed a time bomb under his bed, he can do nothing about it. He must not use the knowledge in any way that will cause him to vary his usual routine. He must not remove the bomb, he must not sleep elsewhere that night. He must do only what he would ordinarily do—go to bed, in his own bed, at the usual hour.
So you see, there was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do with the information in my possession, even though I feared for the life of the daughter.
Day after day went by, night after night, and still Garth the murderer was free. I went to his home, talked to him privately. I urged him to confess his crime to the police. I ordered him. Finally, I pleaded with him. I said I would not leave his house until he had, in my presence, called the police and given himself up. He said he would give himself up as soon as he and Susan returned from a little vacation in the country they were taking in a few weeks. He had promised it to her for so long, he said, and it was the last thing he could ever do for her, after all.
He made me believe it. I left. But later, here at the rectory, I began to think. A vacation in the country. Why? The better to kill her, just as he had killed her mother?
Then, Your Excellency, word came from you that there was a post for me at Guardian Angel. I felt immediately relieved. At the orphanage, with new work to occupy me, without the sight of Garth before my eyes every day, perhaps I could forget my dilemma, and my frustrations would cease. Well, it didn’t happen that way, actually. At the orphanage I saw girls of Susan’s age, even one or two as pretty as Susan. They acted as reminders, and the feeling that I had abandoned her to murder never left me. I dreamt of seeing her dead, drowned like her mother, I dreamt of her accusing me of leaving her, even though in my rational moments I knew I could have acted in no other way. But all this is beside the point.
When Father Gregory here arrived at St. Michael’s, I introduced him to the people of the parish and passed on to him any information I thought he would find useful. But I kept putting off introducing him to Garth and his daughter—out of weakness—because I feared I would be tempted to violate the confessional. On my last day, Father Sargent and I were making our final rounds. Among others, we stopped in to see Mr. Hennessy, the pharmacist.
“You wouldn’t be stopping by the Garths, Father?” he asked me.
I said no—or, rather I started to—and then I realized that I could put it off no longer, I could not avoid meeting with the Garths again. So I told Hennessy yes.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind dropping off a prescription?” Hennessy asked me. He’s been doing that for years; it’s become a kind of joke almost. I told him I’d be glad to.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI: Yes, go on, Father.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: Father Sargent can confirm the fact that, later that evening, I handed Garth a bottle of pills.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI TO FATHER GREGORY SARGENT: Can you, Father?
FATHER GREGORY SARGENT: Yes. That’s right.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI TO FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: The wrong pills?
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: Yes.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI: The druggist made a mistake?
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: No. Hennessy’s prescription was correct. The blame is mine.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI: I don’t understand.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: It wasn’t until just this morning, at the orphanage, that I discovered my terrible mistake. We are having an unseasonably warm September there, too, and I’ve always been subject to heat prostration when the weather is sultry. I reached into my pocket for my salt tablets, which I always carry this time of year. I found the little bottle, opened it, shook out a tablet and was about to take it, when I noticed there was a label on the bottle. My bottle had never had a label on it. This one had. Although it was exactly the same size and shape bottle as mine, and although the pills were at first glance very similar in appearance to my salt tablets, this bottle bore the label of Hennessy’s pharmacy and, typed on it, “Robert Garth. Take as directed.” I had given Garth my salt tablets. And he had a bad heart, I knew.
The first thing I did was pick up the phone and call the pharmacy. I wanted to tell Hennessy to get another bottle of pills to Garth right away—the pills he had were worthless, worse than worthless. Dangerous. But before I could tell Hennessy the reason for my call, he gave me the news of Garth’s death.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI: News sure travels fast in this neighborhood.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: So I didn’t say anything about the pills. I fabricated some excuse for calling, and then I got here as quickly as I could.
BISHOP CONRAD CRIMMINGS: James, we understand how you feel, but you mustn’t blame yourself.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: Yes. Yes, I must.
BISHOP CONRAD CRIMMINGS: But why?
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI: His Excellency’s right, Father.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: No. I am to blame. Truly to blame. Ask Father Sargent. He knows what I mean.
BISHOP CONRAD CRIMMINGS: Do you, Gregory?
FATHER GREGORY SARGENT: I may.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: It was just a mistake, yes, but why do people make mistakes? Father Sargent—you know about such things. The unconscious mind, slips of the tongue and the hand; seemingly meaningless, seemingly accidental slips that are really an expression of anxieties and hostilities deep within the mind. Isn’t that so?
FATHER GREGORY SARGENT: Yes, but—
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: Hennessy put in the palm of my hand the little bottle that contained Garth’s heart medicine. His life. And when I withheld it from Garth, I murdered him. Not only did I murder him—I also violated the confessional, for I used my knowledge. Unconsciously, yes, but I used it all the same, just as if I had removed a time bomb from under my bed. That’s what it was like—a time bomb in my brain, ticking and ticking for days and nights, for weeks, until—dear God forgive me!
BISHOP CONRAD CRIMMINGS: My boy, there is no question of God forgiving you. You cannot be blamed for the workings of your unconscious mind. The Church would never consider what you did a violation of the confessional.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: Perhaps the Church simply has never had anything quite like this to contend with.
BISHOP CONRAD CRIMMINGS: Nonsense, nonsense.
FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: Are you so sure, Your Excellency? Can you be sure? Think of it. If a priest can violate the confessional at the whim of his unconscious mind, if he does not have control over his total self, then the confessional is meaningless! It becomes a farce! Oh God. Think about it, Your Excellency. Think hard about it, I beg you.
LIEUTENANT FRANK BERARDI TO FATHER JAMES HALLORAN: I’d like you to come with me and make a short statement, Father.