Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(113)

My head jerked up. I was eye to eye with Reverend Davis, robed as black as the floor and ceiling and walls, wherever those walls might actually be hiding. His hands were covered in gloves, but the gloves were too long, or else his fingers were too long—he’d been changed, too, just like everyone else. Not in the same way, I don’t suppose. The high priest never dresses like the mere supplicants, after all.

He did not move. He only stood there across from me, this window to another world between us, and the groaning music of some vast machine or entity or instrument filling the air with the incense, the smoke, the simmering hiss of settling coals in the planetary offering places behind me.

“What do you see?” he asked me.

“A madman,” I said.

“What else?”

At least he had the decency not to argue with me. “I don’t know.”

“At least you have the decency not to lie.”

“Are you reading my thoughts?” I asked quickly. I know how to tamp them down if I need to; I’ve spent so long in an office with psychics that it long ago became a necessary skill.

He shook his head. “No. But He is. And He tells me what he sees.”

“Rather roundabout way of doing things.”

“This is no place for mockery.” He frowned at me, and I didn’t really blame him. But self-restraint has never been my chiefest virtue, now has it?

“And it’s no place for a young woman who’d rather be elsewhere.”

“This is exactly where she ought to be. It’s where she will be, sometime before dawn. It’s been written in the stars, or in the ledgers that describe them.”

I thought of Lizbeth above, and Ruth—who’d already escaped them once tonight. I fervently wished them the best, and I didn’t care if this mysterious “He” knew about it. I didn’t know where they were. There was nothing It could glean from my optimism.

“We must agree to disagree.”

“I’d rather that we come to some kind of . . . understanding.”

I wanted to laugh in his face, but I couldn’t. I’m not sure why. “I doubt that’s possible.”

He paused. “No, you don’t. You’re deathly afraid that it is. Look,” he urged, gesturing at the perfectly round window in the perfectly spherical altar. “Let me show you what I mean.”

I wanted to look away. Or did I? Well, I couldn’t look away.

I’m sorry. I wish I’d been stronger. (Or do I?)

On the other side of the window I saw the whole universe, and that’s the goddamn truth. I saw all the stars that had gone missing over the last couple of nights; and I saw the arms of galaxies undulate like tentacles, like an octopus spinning in a slow, amazing circle. I saw spirals made of light—no, made of stars. Made of suns. I saw the hints and blinking flashes of other spirals, other clusters, other tentacles dancing across the void, which was never a void at all.

I could lie to you, in this report. If I wanted to, I could say that it was all a mirage caused by the mesmerizing powers of that reverend with his slick black hair, his slick black hands (I don’t even know if they were gloves at all), his slick black robe that must have been made of silk.

But that wouldn’t be true. It wouldn’t be true to say that it was only a clever magician’s ruse, and that the noise that filled the chamber did not come from something enormous on the other side. I could say that there was no great He, nothing to read minds and speak in numbers. Nothing that waited for an invitation to come through that window and join our world.

Lies, all of it.

Theoretical lies, since I never offered them up as anything else, and since I’m giving you the whole story here, now, and I don’t care how it makes me look. Does it make me look mad? Is that what you’ll tell me? Save your breath, for I know that already. If you think I’ve gone around some bend, then you could be forgiven. All I can do is assure you of the contrary.

I didn’t know what I was seeing, when it swung into view. I saw it only in passing as it floated, bobbed, wandered. I sensed that it was more asleep than awake—that the reverend had stumbled upon something with worse than infinite power, and he thought that it was interested in him, in his little human thoughts in his little human church.

But what I saw had no interest in mankind, not in the slightest. What I saw was a slumbering organism of absolute inscrutability and apathy, and if it had some passing fancy to visit Earth, none of us would live long enough to regret the visit.

I saw something that could hold a fistful of galaxies and swallow them, like a man would take an aspirin. It had no shape except every shape; it was too large to describe, and again, my vocabulary fails me anyway.

I was Moses, glimpsing the backside of God for an instant and going blind. And if this astonishing entity can be called Our Father, we are all a terrible accident of stardust and electricity, and there is no meaning for any of us. We may as well let Him swallow us, too, for all that it would matter.

I’d forgotten the reverend was there, until he said, “The portal only goes one way. We can send Him gifts and prayers, but He cannot join us here. Ruth will change that. She will be the door through which He enters, tonight—before the last rumble of His heartbeat fades away.”

“That . . . this noise . . . ? It’s the beating of that thing’s heart?”