The Big Dark Sky (25)
16
Ophelia Poole retrieved the Tac Light from the floor of the center aisle, where Optime had left it, returned to the pew, and switched off the beam to preserve the batteries. The darkness fell unrelieved, not the slightest chink of light at any of the bricked-up windows. Of course, the day had faded to a scarlet twilight, so there wasn’t a lot of light left to penetrate the building.
She had much to think about: options to consider, if there were any; a plan of action to be devised.
From overhead came a soft noise that she could not place. After a silence, the noise came again, faint and furtive. She supposed there must be mice or even rats. Neither concerned her.
Blind, she could see nothing but her captor in her mind’s eye, his visage horrifying because it appeared so ordinary. His mind, a cesspool of ignorance and hatred, seethed with homicidal fantasies, and in his extreme narcissism, he convinced himself that his lust for power must be a noble mission of penance. His inner evil was a potent venom, so caustic that it should have left at least a trace of corruption in his face, but he was a serpent who could pass for a sincere servant.
She feared him even as she was relieved that at last he had arrived on the scene. Since a week after the death of her identical twin, Octavia, she’d believed—needed to believe—that she had been spared for an important purpose. She hadn’t known what it would be, and she had never imagined that she might be called upon to kill a murderer, one who could potentially commit mass murder. Even as she had recovered from the chloroform, however, she’d known that Asher Optime was the reason that she hadn’t died in the traffic accident that had killed Octavia.
She had been the driver of the car, and though she hadn’t been the one at fault—it had been a trucker with a drinking problem—she had been the driver of the car. In the front passenger seat, Octavia was half-crushed and beheaded. Behind the steering wheel, not three feet away, Ophelia suffered a broken index finger, a torn nail, and a scratched chin. In the aftermath, she’d had only two choices, at least as far as she could understand: Either grief and guilt would in time destroy her, or she could choose to believe that she had been spared for some important task, that in fulfilling that task, she would be redeemed and eventually earn the company of Octavia in a world beyond this one.
They had not been merely identical; they had been, as Ophelia had sometimes said, conjoined twins born detached. Ophelia had her circle of friends, and Octavia had hers, and there were friends that they shared, but they were not a fraction as close with anyone else as they were with each other. They frequently finished each other’s sentences. When one told a joke, the other often laughed before the punch line, having intuited it. They sometimes spoke three words of great affection to each other—“My sister, myself”—when suddenly they experienced the same insight or achieved the same revelation or saw something that thrilled them both. There were differences, one from the other. Octavia possessed a gentler heart than Ophelia, and Ophelia had a quicker wit than Octavia. Both had musical talent, but only Octavia had perfect pitch; she rocked the piano the first time she sat before it—and patiently taught Ophelia until student could play nearly as well as teacher. My sister, myself. After such closeness, the grievous loss Ophelia suffered in the accident seemed like an amputation that left her forever less than a whole person.
Now she sat in this deconsecrated darkness with an inner light of purpose that warmed her more than Asher Optime chilled her. The stone walls stood silent, as they had for more than one and a half centuries. The noise overhead didn’t arise again, although the wooden floor underfoot produced an occasional settling sound—a creak, a pop as a plank expanded in the summer heat.
The door to the lower room was closed. Otherwise, the stench of decomposition would be intolerable, whereas it was only unnerving.
Optime had insisted that the basement offered no way out of the church, but his clear intention had been to make her wonder if that might be a lie. He’d left the flashlight so that she could go down among the dead to search for an exit, because he imagined that the sight of the bloated and decomposing bodies would drain all hope from her and leave her ready for her second death, that of her body.
She wouldn’t put herself to that test. The day of the accident, before the first responders had torn open the buckled driver-side door with the pneumatic Jaws of Life, she had been trapped with the mangled body of her sister, a sight that had haunted her dreams for a long time. She trusted herself to respond to Optime with courage when the confrontation came, but she didn’t dare wade among the madman’s victims, where any deteriorated face that bloomed in the beam of the Tac Light would surely remind her too keenly of her sister’s distorted countenance and death-shocked eyes.
From overhead came another noise, not as furtive as before. A rustling-fluttering was followed by the thrum of wings cutting air.
Ophelia clicked on the Tac Light and swept the darkness with the beam, seeking the birds. She found them sitting on the backrest of a pew two rows in front of hers, a pair of crows. They cocked their heads, regarding her with interest.
The birds were plump enough and evidently healthy, which meant they couldn’t have been trapped in the church for any length of time. Indeed, perhaps they weren’t trapped at all, but found their way in and out of the building through a hole in the roof.
Ophelia stood up and stepped into the aisle, directing the light toward the ceiling, probing past beams, posts, and purlins, looking for a break in the rafters, a hole in the roof. After a couple minutes, she realized that she should wait for the bright light of morning to reveal how the crows found their way inside, and search the nave and sanctuary now, to see if there might be a piece of lumber or a rusty nail she could use as a weapon.