NOS4A2(54)

That was what it was all about: taking something awful and making something good of it. Mr. Manx saved the children, and Bing saved the mommies. Now, though, the mommies were over and done. Mr. Manx was locked-up gone, and Bing’s gasmask hung on a hook behind the back door, where it had been since 1996. He read the story in the news about Mr. Manx falling asleep—into a deep, endless sleep, a brave soldier under a wicked enchantment—and then printed it and folded it and decided to pray on it some.

In his fifty-third year, Bing Partridge had become a churchgoing man once again, had returned to the New American Faith Tabernacle in the hopes that God would offer some comfort for one of his loneliest children. Bing prayed that one day he would hear “White Christmas” playing in the driveway and would push back the linen curtain and see Mr. Manx behind the wheel of the Wraith, the window rolled down and the Good Man gazing out at him. Come on, Bing! Let’s go for a ride! Number ten is waiting for us! Let’s go grab one more kid and take you to Christmasland! Heaven knows you’ve earned it!

He climbed the steep hill, in the smothering heat of a July afternoon. The foil flowers in his front yard—twenty-nine of them—were perfectly still and silent. He hated them. He hated the blue sky, too, and the maddening harmonic of the cicadas throbbing in the trees. Bing trudged up the hill with the news story in one hand (“Rare Condition Befalls Convicted Murderer”) and Mr. Manx’s final note in the other (“I might be a while. 9.”) to speak to God about these things.

The church stood in a hectare of buckled blacktop, shoots of pale grass as high as Bing’s knees sticking up through the cracks. A loop of heavy-duty chain and a Yale lock held the front doors shut. No one except for Bing himself had prayed there for going on fifteen years. The tabernacle had belonged to the Lord once, but now it was property of the moneylenders; a sun-faded sheet of paper in a clear plastic envelope tacked to one of the doors said so.

The cicadas buzzed in Bing’s head, like madness.

Out at one end of the lot was a big sign like they’d have out in front of a Dairy Queen or a used-car lot, telling people which hymn they’d be singing that day. ONLY IN GOD and HE’S ALIVE AGAIN and THE LORD NEVER SLEEPS. DEVOTIONS were promised for 1:00 P.M. The sign had been promising those same hymns since Reagan’s second term.

Some of the stained-glass windows had holes where kids had chucked rocks at them, but Bing didn’t climb in that way. There was a shed out to one side of the church, half hidden back in the dusty poplars and sumac. A rotting cord doormat lay in front of the shed’s door. A bright brass key was hidden beneath it.

The key opened the padlock on the sloped cellar doors at the back of the building. Bing let himself below. He crossed a cool subterranean room, wading through the smell of old creosote and mildewed books, and came up into the big open theater of the church.

Bing had always liked church, back in the days when he still went with his mother. He had liked the way the sun came through the twenty-foot-high stained-glass windows, filling the room with warmth and color, and he had liked the way the mommies dressed, in white lace and heels and milky-white stockings. Bing loved white stockings and loved to hear a woman sing. All the mommies who stayed with him in the House of Sleep sang before they took their last rest.

But after the pastor ran away with the whole treasury and the bank locked the church up, Bing found that the place troubled him. He did not like the way the shadow of the steeple seemed to reach for his house in the late of day. Bing found after he started taking mommies back to his home—a place Mr. Manx had christened the House of Sleep—he could hardly stand to look at the top of the hill anymore. The church loomed, the shadow of the steeple an accusing finger that stretched down the slope and pointed at his front yard: HERE IS A DEADLY KILLER! NINE DEAD WOMEN IN HIS BASEMENT!

Bing tried to tell himself he was being foolish. He and Mr. Manx were heroes, really; they did Christian work. If someone wrote a book about them, you would have to mark them down as the good guys. It did not matter that many of the mothers, when dosed with sevoflurane, would still not admit to their plans to whore their daughters or beat their sons and that several contended they had never taken drugs, did not drink to excess, and did not have criminal records. Those things were in the future, a wretched future that Bing and Mr. Manx worked hard to prevent. If he was ever arrested—because of course no lawman would ever understand the importance and basic goodness of their vocation—Bing felt he could talk about his work with pride. There was no shame in him about any of the things he had done with Mr. Manx.

Still, he occasionally had trouble looking up at the church.

He told himself, as he climbed the steps from the basement, that he was being a ninny, that all men were welcome in God’s house and Mr. Manx needed Bing’s prayers—now more than ever. For himself, Bing had never felt so alone or forlorn. A few weeks earlier, Mr. Paladin had asked Bing what he was going to do with himself after he retired. Bing was shocked and asked why he would retire. He liked his job. Mr. Paladin blinked and said after forty years they would make him retire. You didn’t get a choice in the matter. Bing had never thought about it. He had assumed that by now he would be drinking cocoa in Christmasland, opening presents in the morning, singing carols in the night.

The vast empty sanctuary did not put his mind at ease that afternoon. Just the opposite, in fact. All the pews were still there, although they were no longer lined up in neat rows but had been shoved this way and that, were as crooked as Mr. Manx’s teeth. The floor was littered with broken glass and chunks of plaster, which crunched underfoot. The room smelled rankly of ammonia, of bird piss. Someone had been in here drinking. The bottles and beer cans left behind littered the pews.