CHAPTER 47

It was a man. Just. He was naked to the waist, pale and spindly with large splayed hands, broad shoulders, and a crumpled baby face with small pale eyes. When he snarled, Thomas could see that his teeth had been filed to V-shaped points. He was hairless and blood-streaked and he exuded malice. In one hand he held a long, curved blade, light and honed to what promised to be surgical sharpness, but broad and hooked like a sickle.

Thomas didn’t need to see the man move to know how deadly that weapon would be in his hands. There was no other doorway, no other staircase save the one in which the goblin man was crouching. Without a second’s thought, Thomas grabbed the trailing end of the chain in both hands, tossed the length of it over the iron railing, and vaulted into the air above the chancel.

The chain kicked and slid in his hands as his weight came to rest, and then he was loosening his grasp and sliding the rest of the way. He was on the sanctuary floor before Pietro’s killer had scurried to the railing.

He expected his would-be attacker to descend by the stairs, so there was something doubly alarming about the way the man leaped froglike out to the chain, following him down with easy precision. Thomas moved fast, making for the sacristy door.

He tried it just as the other completed his descent: locked. He ran to the back of the church and the main entrance that would put him back into the street where there were people, but this too was locked. For a moment he shook the handle and cursed, and then he turned and saw the man with the bat face skulking slowly up the left-hand aisle, loping, almost on all fours, and Thomas could see only one other door that looked as if it might get him out.

He ran down the right aisle, scanning for the fallen gun. There was no sign of it. He neared the door.

Be open. Please God, be open.

It was. It put him in a passage like that on the opposite wall that led to the sacristy, and Thomas ran down it, relief turning to panic as he saw that the passage ended in another door. If this was locked he’d be trapped . . .

He tried it. The latch clicked but the door did not move. He pulled and pushed, conscious of the hissing snarl of the killer in the church behind him, and only then did he see the black key in the lock. He turned it, hands fumbling, and then shoved. Too soon. He felt the lock stick and had to take his shoulder from the door while he turned the key all the way. He could hear the killer getting closer.

The latch clicked. Thomas pushed, eyes wide, heart hammering, and tore through it. He slammed the door behind him, realizing too late that he could have taken the key and tried to lock it from this side.

For a second, feeling the cool night air on his face, he thought he was free. Then he saw how the ten-foot concrete walls rose up on each side of the path, how the path led to a rock wall only yards ahead. Overhead, the night sky was half shielded by tree limbs that stretched out over the open-topped tunnel. But the door at his back was starting to open again, the snarling suddenly louder.

Thomas stumbled forward, his eyes wild, looking up and around for a way out of the blind alley. Nothing. Not, at least, till he looked down.

There was an opening in the rock, human-made, round like the mouth of a well, and inside it was a long wooden ladder, down into the dark earth. On a hook in the rock above the hole was a black rubber flashlight.

Thomas looked back once, saw the door open, and began to climb.

Five feet, ten, twenty, thirty feet down into increasing blackness, and then the pale, moonlike face of the killer appeared at the top, with his hard little eyes and terrible teeth, and Thomas was jumping the rest of the way, dragging at the ladder, pulling it away like Jack hacking down the beanstalk before the giant could follow.

The ladder fell with a resounding crack that boomed all around him, echoing through the stone caves and passages. The killer could not come that way, but he might use the chain to climb down, might even be able to do it unaided. Thomas was not safe yet, and even if he had been sure of his escape, he would have felt little better, because he knew beyond any doubt where he was.

He was in the Fontanelle.

And may God have mercy on my soul, he thought.