CHAPTER 66

Mankind is nothing else but a sheep-shambles, where we are slain and slaughtered by the devil.

Martin Luther

Pip Tower climbed the stairs to the balcony, where Alan Starr was sounding one pedal note over and over. Again and again a great roar boomed from the thirty-two-foot F-sharp Contra Bombarde.

Alan looked up and grinned and slid off the bench. “Thanks for coming. I’ve been dodging back and forth all morning, trying to get those tongues curved just right.”

“No problem,” said Pip. “Sorry to be late.” He took his place at the bench, and Alan crawled back into the organ and picked up his burnishing knife. But then he had to come out again to say hello to James Castle.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Castle, looking up eagerly at the immense height of the new Contra Bombardes. “I’ll just hang around. Don’t let me interfere.” He shook Pip’s hand. “It’s good to be back among old friends.”

Pip mumbled something, and Alan remembered how anxiously Pip had wanted to take Castle’s place. Now there was no place for him to take. Poor old Pip.

When Homer Kelly gasped his way up to the balcony, they were back at work. Again and again a single pipe in the rank of Contra Bombardes bellowed the same note. “My God,” said Homer, “it sounds like a war.”

“A foghorn,” said James Castle from the back of the balcony. “That’s what I always think.” He stood up and introduced himself to Homer, and so did Pip Tower, and everybody shook hands.

Homer went to the narrow door in the organ case, put his head in and said loudly, “What’s all this about noises on a tape?”

For a moment Alan was hidden in the forest of pipes, but then he put his head above a rank of Spire Flutes and spoke up excitedly, waving his burnishing knife. “Oh, Homer, I’ve been so dumb. It’s been there all the time, the whole thing, and I never listened. It’s on the copy, the music that was on one of the tape recorders when I came into the apartment that first time. I never played it all the way through before. There are voices on it, Rosie and somebody else—a man—and the baby crying.”

“Whose was it? Did you recognize it?”

“No, it’s too muffled. But Mary says you can get the frequencies unscrambled.”

“So she tells me. That’s good, it might be a breakthrough. For Christ’s sake, don’t lose the tape.”

“Oh God, no. I hid it in the apartment where Oates won’t come across it. I’ll find a technician on Monday and then maybe we’ll know who this bastard is.”

Homer was crouched double, and his spine was killing him. He began backing out of the narrow opening. “How’s the voicing coming? You’re almost done?”

“Almost, but it’s got to be finished for the Easter service tomorrow. I’ll be at it all day. Well, I can’t work on it during the concert this evening, but I’ll keep at it all night. Hey, Pip, hit it again.”

There was a pause. “Pip?” called Alan.

Once again the deep braying note of the F-sharp Contra Bombarde bellowed out of the pipe.

“My God,” said Homer.

“You ain’t heard nothing yet. Hey, Pip, play the fifth. There, how do you like that? That’s a sixty-four-foot resultant.”

BOOM, roared the organ. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

“Hey, Jim,” yelled Alan, deep inside the case among the Spire Flutes, “how do you like that?”

There was no answer. Homer turned his head, but no one was sitting at the back of the balcony. James Castle was gone.