CHAPTER 46
Thomas descended without hope, driven only by a mad need to know. He ran, his heart thumping, stumbling down the stairs, into the sacristy, back through the lightless passage. He burst into the church.
It was quite empty. The rear doors were still closed. The pews were deserted. Thomas stepped up onto the elevated part of the sanctuary, his back to the altar, and gazed down the length of the nave: nothing.
And then he heard a slight pattering like rain behind him.
He turned slowly, the trepidation he had felt cooling, hardening like stone in his gut. Behind the altar the stone floor was half covered by a gleaming irregular pool, and though the light was low it was clear that the liquid was a dark, terrible scarlet. Another drop fell into the pool, then another. Thomas forced himself to look up.
Against the rear wall of the apse was a high altar with a golden tabernacle, six tall candles, and, above it all, a framed icon of the Madonna and Child with a triangular pediment. Suspended in front of this from the gallery of the dome above, hanging by a length of heavy chain, was the monsignor.
No. Not this. Not now.
His torn cassock was black and glistening with blood so that it was hard to see what had been done to him, but it seemed that the chain that bore his weight had been laced through his chest, so that he hung by his breastbone in the air of the chancel.
For a long moment Thomas could not move, and then he caught the merest whisper of sound and looked up. The priest’s eyes had opened. He was still alive.
Thomas looked wildly around, the spell broken. He couldn’t climb up the altar to him. He had to get up to the gallery in the dome.
Where are the damned stairs?
He leaped down the steps of the sanctuary and threw open the door to the sacristy. There in the wall was a doorway, behind it a flight of stone steps. He ran up them two at a time and cannoned out into the emptiness of the dome so fast that he almost went right over the rail.
The gallery was narrow, the rail a single wrought-iron rod circling the dome at waist height. He forced himself to slow down, inching to where the chain had been lashed to the slender fence, leaving twenty or thirty feet coiled untidily. It would take an age to untangle the knotted chain that kept him suspended there, so there was nothing to do but drag the old priest up. Thomas grasped the chain, slick in places with blood, and began to pull.
Pietro was a big man. Thomas strained, but he just couldn’t move him. He tried to gather the chain over his shoulder, but the dome gave him nowhere to go and the more he pulled, the more it felt like the weight would drag him over the rail. He relaxed and took a breath. Below him, the old priest groaned. He wouldn’t last much longer.
Thomas braced his feet against the iron bases of the rail, leaned back as far as he could, and began to haul using only his arms and chest. He worked hand over hand, six inches of chain at a time, head back, teeth clenched, his shoulder blades squared, and sweat breaking out all over his torso. He pulled with one hand till his fist reached his shoulder, then did the same with the other. Each pull was harder than the one before it, each one strained his muscle and sinew till he thought something would pop, and twice he felt his grip slide a link or two down the chain, so that he had to just hold it tight until the energy to pull farther came back to him. At last, with a cry of determined fury, he hauled the priest to the top.
Thomas seized Pietro under the arms, dragging, shunting, levering him up and over the rail. As he did so, the pistol slipped from his pocket, hit the gallery floor, and bounced through the railings and down, clattering hollowly in the church below.
He’s dead already, Thomas thought, panting, and for a long moment the priest made no sound or movement, and his blood-spattered face was still as earth.
Then the eyes flickered and opened halfway, and the mouth parted.
“Thomas,” he said, slowly, struggling to get the words out. “I am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” said Thomas, biting back his horror, staring into the man’s face to avoid seeing the rest of him. “It’s okay.”
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” he whispered.
My fault, my fault, my grievous fault . . .
“What did you do?”
“Tanaka,” he said.
“The Japanese guy? What about him?”
“Took him inside.”
“Inside where?”
But Pietro closed his eyes again and tears squeezed out, though whether they were from pain or memory, Thomas couldn’t tell. The priest was dying. He had only seconds left.
“Ed’s papers,” Thomas breathed, forcing himself to ask, feeling callous for doing so, but knowing this was his last chance.
The priest smiled softly. He was already slipping away, fading.
“Il Capitano,” he said.
“What?” Thomas gasped. The priest’s eyes had closed. “Capitano? What do you mean? Pietro? PIETRO!”
And then the eyes opened again, like a fish using the last of its strength to turn against the current, and one hand grasped Thomas’s wrist with sudden and surprising power. His mouth opened, but though the eyes seemed to strain and the muscles of his throat constricted, the words didn’t come.
“What?” asked Thomas, begging, coaxing. “Tell me.”
The grasp on his wrist tightened still further, pulling him close, and the monsignor’s mouth whispered into his ear, each urgent, terrible word forced out with the last of his strength.
“Il mostro,” he gasped. “The monster. He. Is. Still. Here.”
And then he was gone.
The silence that followed his last breath was broken by a sibilant, hissing snarl, and Thomas turned to see the creature he had glimpsed in Paestum, nestled at the top of the stairs not ten yards from where he stood.