All The Bells on Earth (39 page)

Minutes passed. He strained to listen in the darkness. He could hear water gurgling through a gutter somewhere beyond the wall and a steady, slow drip every twenty seconds or so, like rain leaking through the roof onto the ceiling above his head. After what seemed a long time, he took out the penlight and shined it on his watch, counting off the moments as the second hand revolved around the watch face. It would be a long old haul sitting here in the darkness for an hour. At least up in the tower Mahoney had something to look at….

He heard a footstep out in the church, and he held his breath, listening. The camera! He’d been fooling away his time when he should have been planning things out. He strained to hear something more, but now there was only silence and rain. Then there were footfalls again, closer now, and quiet—soft-soled shoes, someone creeping along. Up in the tower Mahoney wouldn’t hear him, but he might easily have seen him pull in off the street.

There was silence again. Had Argyle seen something, some sign that they were there? Throw the door open and shoot, Bentley thought, before he gets spooked and runs.

He felt the front of the camera with his fingers, found the trigger, and started to stand up. The chair slid backward a half inch with a soft scraping sound, and Bentley froze, listening.

There was still movement out in the church, and then the sound of hinges creaking. The tower door! Argyle was going up the ladder!

Keeping his finger on the camera trigger, Bentley counted off ten seconds, then, fearfully slowly, he opened the door and peered around it. Sure enough, the tower door stood wide open. There was no sign of anyone inside. Bentley creeped forward, looking through the viewfinder, centering the doorway and ready to shoot. The bastard was on the ladder, all right. He could hear his shoe soles scraping on the rungs.

He waited for the flash from Mahoney’s camera. Now! he thought. Take it now! Had the priest fallen asleep up there? Bentley edged closer to the open door, ready for Argyle to burst through and rush at him. A moment passed. He couldn’t stand it. He stepped into the tower and looked up into the darkness.

Argyle was on the ladder, nearly to the top! Bentley aimed the Polaroid up the ladder, and just then the tower lit up in a blinding flash of light. He pressed his finger on the camera trigger, setting off his own flash. Through the viewfinder he saw something rushing down at him, and instinctively he threw his hands up, letting go of the camera just as Argyle slammed into him, crushing him to the floor. He flung his hands out, grabbing a leg, and grunted when Argyle stood up, stepping on his stomach. He held on, twisting the leg, trying to throw him, and right then he caught a glimpse of moonlight in the tower above and Mahoney’s silhouette as the priest swung down onto the ladder, coming to help. Argyle’s foot pressed into his cheek, grinding his head into the floor. He let go of the leg, and Argyle stepped away, kicking him once in the ribs before stepping out through the door, which slammed shut. Bentley pushed himself up onto his hands and knees just as Father Mahoney stepped down heavily onto his back in the darkness.

“What?” the priest shouted. “Is it you?”

“Of
course
it’s me,” Bentley said. “Don’t
pul
verize me!” He stood up, breathing heavily and groping for the door handle. He found the latch and pushed. The door skidded open a quarter of an inch and then jammed. Bentley yanked it shut and threw it open again, pitching his shoulder into it. Then he yanked it shut hard again. There was the sound of something sliding, and a heavy object slammed into the door—a pew, probably. Bentley flung himself into the door, but it wouldn’t budge at all now. They were trapped.

“Give me a hand here,” he said to Mahoney. “Maybe together …”

There was the sound of guttural laughter, and Bentley put his ear to the panel. At that moment there was a flickering light from the crack beneath the door, and a burning slip of paper slid through—a couple of pages torn out of a hymnal.

Bentley stomped it out, and yelled, “Listen!” at the closed door. But there was laughter again, and now a curling tendril of smoke wisped up into the tower.

“Holy Mother of God,” Bentley whispered, turning toward the priest. “He means to burn us down!”

“G
RAB THESE PHOTOS,” BENTLEY
said, bending over and pressing his ear to the door. Smoke drifted upward in a sheet now, and he could hear the crackling sound of the fire.

Father Mahoney retrieved the two snapshots that the cameras had spit out, along with the camera itself, which lay on the floor where Bentley had dropped it. He started awkwardly up the ladder, holding onto the camera and the rungs both, and Bentley started up behind him, hand over hand. Halfway up the camera slipped, falling ten feet to the floor where it smashed into several pieces. Mahoney stopped and looked down, and Bentley shouted, “It’s junk! Leave it!” and pushed on the priest’s calf, hurrying him up.

Mahoney stepped clear of the ladder, and Bentley followed him onto the little landing that encircled the single bell. The windows on the four sides of the tower were covered with angled wooden slats, and Bentley had to look down through them to see the street. At the Church of the Holy Spirit, the bell was used only to toll the hours of the day. Above, hidden in the top of the tower, were four loudspeakers, which broadcast tape-recorded hymns and Christmas carols. Apparently it didn’t matter that the bells were recorded and not played live. Devils and their minions couldn’t appreciate the difference. They didn’t have any kind of ear for it.

“We’re safe up here,” Bentley said, “at least for now. Let’s see those photos.”

Mahoney took them out and shined the penlight onto one of them. For a moment Bentley thought that it was blank, but then he saw that it had some vague out-of-focus color to it—probably tan trousers. He had managed to snap a picture of Argyle’s rear end, just about to fall on him. “Give me some light on the other one,” Bentley said, taking the second photo from Mahoney and holding it up.

“Got him,” the priest said, illuminating the face in the photo.

Bentley’s breath caught in his throat. The upturned face was hideous. It was Argyle all right, although it might have easily been Argyle’s animated corpse. His eyes were rolled back, like the eyes of a dead man, and there was something drawn on his forehead—something unintelligible, scrawled on as if with a soft crayon and then smeared. His mouth was wide open, and his teeth were streaked with black, as if he’d been eating burned things.

Bentley nearly dropped the photo down the well, just to get it out of his hands, and at that moment he saw that he was wrong about being safe in the brick tower: dense smoke rose around them now, and it was noticeably warmer. Mahoney coughed, breathing through his coat. He took the photo and shoved both of them into his coat. Bentley grabbed one of the slats in the window arch and jerked at it. At the bottom of the arch the ends were slid into grooves, like the panes in a louvered window. He wiggled one out of its groove and dropped it onto the floor of the tower. Now there was enough open space to get his hands in, and he yanked out four more, so that they had a ventilation and a view. The wind gusted through the opening, but somehow, just when they needed it in buckets, the rain had let up.

“Let’s wake someone up,” Father Mahoney said. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted “Help!” at the empty street, but the wind, shuddering through the tower, blew the words away as if they were leaves.

“He-elp!” Bentley yelled. “Fire!” But it was pointless, like yelling under water. He felt thick-headed and stodgy from the Scotch, as if his blood were half congealed, and he remembered now why he didn’t drink. Of all the nights to throw caution to the damned wind!

The smoke was suddenly thicker, and Bentley’s eyes smarted. He thrust his head out through the hole he’d made in the side of the tower, sucking in the rainy air. There was a noticeable crackling now, and smoke gusted up the well. We’ll asphyxiate, Bentley thought. We’re dead. Argyle has murdered us too.

“Tear these out of here,” Bentley shouted, and immediately yanked out more slats, dropping them down onto the ground. Mahoney pulled a couple out, and in a moment they were looking straight down at the lawn below. Bentley was suddenly dizzy, and he held on tight to the window frame. There was a ledge outside, a foot-wide brick frieze a couple of feet below the line of the roof. There was the yellow glow of the fire behind them now—the ladder burning, the tower door, wood paneling—and the wind through the hole they’d made seemed to feed the fire.

“Out,” Bentley said. “Hold onto my hand and step out onto the ledge where you can hold onto the roof.”

Mahoney squeezed his shoulder in a gesture of thanks and bent out through the arch without a word. He stood teetering there, gripping Bentley’s wrist like a vise, looking down at the lawn and the street.

“Grab the roof!” Bentley yelled, but Mahoney waved his free arm wildly, trying to balance himself, knocking his spectacles off and bending forward at the waist. Bentley, holding on tight to the edge of the window, and with the toe of one shoe wedged under the sill, swung himself out into the air like a man swinging around a post. With the hand that held Mahoney’s wrist, he thrust forward hard, shoving the priest backward and onto the roof.

Mahoney shouted, releasing his grip on Bentley’s wrist, his arms flailing, and sat down across the curb that ran around the perimeter of the roof. His feet flew upward and his rear end landed in the dark water pooled in the rain gutter. Bentley followed him, scrambling out onto the ledge and over the curb without looking down.

“Are you all right?” he asked the priest, who pulled himself out of the water and sat down.

“I … Yes,” Mahoney said. He put a hand on his chest and heaved a deep breath.

Smoke poured out of the open arch now and threaded out between the wooden slats. “I thought you were going down for a moment,” Bentley said. “I couldn’t think of anything else but to push you over backward.”

“I’m fine. That was … that was close. Thank you.”

“Is there a roof access door?”

Mahoney shook his head. “We keep it padlocked underneath.”

There was a ringing sound somewhere below, and by the time Bentley realized what it was, it had stopped—three rings, the all-clear from Mrs. Hepplewhite. Argyle had gotten home safe.

At that moment there was the sound of a siren, and Bentley could see a paramedics truck and a hook and ladder pulling around a distant corner, heading toward them up Almond Street. They were saved.

Mahoney took the two Polaroid snaps out of his coat. “We’ve got him dead to rights,” he said. “What do we do?”

“Save it,” Bentley said, taking the photos. “At least until tomorrow or the day after. I want to talk to him first. It’s my duty. That’s the face of an insane man, and it was me who set him down that path. I’m going to pay him a visit. I’m going to shake him up.”

W
ALT LOOKED AROUND FOR
the newspaper, which would have last night’s Lotto numbers in it, but it was too late, past seven, and Henry had long since grabbed it.

He climbed into the Suburban and headed for Satellite Market, wondering what he would find. Would the bluebird pay off? Part of him wanted to throw the ticket into the trash without looking at it, and not even check the winning numbers. But it was too late to think about that now. Ivy would check the numbers herself, and then she would ask him where the ticket was.

There was something about actually knowing the results, though, that was a little like the knowledge of good and evil, biblically speaking. It was a thing better left unknown, he told himself. But there was the market, looming up on the right, and he pulled into the nearly empty parking lot, got out of the truck, and went inside. Toni, the woman who worked the liquor counter, was just opening up, and the Lotto machine wasn’t switched on yet, so he browsed through the racks of liquor, idly looking at the bottles of flavored gin and oddball creme de menthes.

Then abruptly he turned around and walked outside again, where he stood on the asphalt and looked up at the cloudy sky and at the foil Christmas garland strung across Chapman Avenue between the streetlamps.

Of course Henry had been right. Walt saw it all clearly—a real insight. This was no good, this wishing on a bluebird. Once you started to develop an interest in damnable things, the interest was liable to grow like a milkweed vine until it strangled you. One day you’re satisfied with sixty bucks, and the next day you’re Nebuchadnezzar or somebody, King of Babylon, and all you’ve bought for yourself is regret.

He went back into the store, his mind made up and made up solidly. He would look this demon in the face, size it up, and knock it down like a pot-metal milk bottle.

“Big winner?” Toni asked, taking the ticket from him.

“Just might be.”

She slipped it into the slot in the machine, which sucked it in, whirred a little bit, and spit it back out.

“Sixty dollars!” she said, handing him the winning ticket so he could see for himself.

He found that he couldn’t speak. He took the ticket but didn’t look at it. It was all true. What he feared had been proven true. The bluebird was
exactly
what it was advertised to be. Maybe that made it a demon, like Bentley thought it was. And here he’d been playing around with it, turning it into a prank to goad Argyle.