lay beyond the archway, illuminated by a single bulb, and at the end of it stood a plain teak-plank door, which would be locked until just before daybreak.
As gently as possible, I lowered Father to the floor of the vestibule and arranged him sitting up with his back to a wall, hands gloved, face wrapped in a scarf. His clothes might have been stuffed with old tattered garments and threadbare towels and socks full of holes, and he a ragman from a children’s story in which he had been becharmed and had come alive and had known great adventures, until he stepped out of fiction into this world, whereupon the magic went out of him.
Sewn into the lining of his raincoat were long pockets in which he kept the gate key that allowed us to enter the library and other buildings from below and the combination hook/prybar with which we could manipulate a manhole cover with ease. These things were mine now, and they were precious to me not merely because they made it easier to move around the city but also, and most of all, because they had belonged to him.
In the center of the vestibule ceiling, a wire cage protected a light bulb. Although it was vandalism, though I regretted the damage, in the interest of survival, I worked at the wire with the prybar until I made an opening wide enough to thrust it through and shatter the bulb. Most of the broken glass remained within the cage, but a few tiny fragments sifted through the sudden darkness, thinner than eggshells, crunching underfoot as I returned to the archway and stood just inside it, gazing out at the street.
I had never known such stillness in the city. Stripped of wind, the unseen sky quietly shed insulation, as if trillions of cold dead stars, severely shrunken in their dying, descended now and brought with them the perfect silence of interstellar space. The eerie hush raised a dread in my heart that I couldn’t name. East Halberg was a wide, white, timeless sward, and I could almost believe that before me lay a vision of a distant era when the city still stood, but when its streets and plazas and parks were drifted over with the finely powdered bones of its former inhabitants.
If the two cops paid another visit to the block of Cathedral Avenue where Father had sacrificed himself, they did not get there by East Halberg, nor did they use a siren.
I returned to Father and sat beside him. The last dark hours of the night were cold, but the bitter air didn’t sting as much as the grief that I could not unwind and pay out, that like a woven vine of thorns cinched my heart. Self-control was essential, and I tried to think of nothing, but into the nothing came the marionette and the music box and the way the little mountain house had looked when the shotgun roared within, which wasn’t good, not good at all.
Moments in advance of the earliest blush of light, the monks daily proceeded from their monastery through the large cloister that surrounded a formal garden, unlocking the north and south doors in the great wall, at the same time that other priests turned on the cathedral lights and opened the street doors for another day.
I stiffened when I heard the clack of the lock bolt disengaged, and prepared to identify myself as a humble homeless man, head low, beside my sleeping friend. Fortunately, the door was unlocked, but the monk with the key did not linger in the cold to see if anyone had camped out, which I suppose happened from time to time.
Even we of the hidden, who have every reason—but no inclination—to be cynical, tend to believe that we are to a degree safer when unexpectedly encountering a member of the clergy than when coming face-to-face with anyone else. We are wise, however, not to expect universal mercy from the devout. All these years later, I vividly remembered the white-clapboard blue-trimmed church by the river, where one of the faithful, perhaps a deacon, had gone after me with a baseball bat—and the minister who had broken Father’s fingers.
After a minute or so, when I felt that all of the confreres would have proceeded into the church, I opened the door inward. Beyond the nearer length of the cloister immediately before me, glimpsed between the columns that encircled it, lay the garden. In the first pale light, the evergreen hedges draped in snow looked like sheet-covered furniture in a house closed for the season.
I leaned through the doorway and confirmed that the cloister was deserted. Because the vestibule offered insufficient space for me to maneuver Father onto my shoulders, I dragged him across the threshold into the cloister, closed the door, and lifted him, and went to the right along the covered walk.
The only entrance to the cathedral I dared use was the north porch, which offered four doors. I hunched farther forward to keep the ungainly weight balanced on my back while I let go of the body with one hand to open the door to my left.
From inside came chanting as sweet as song. The monks were observing matins, the first of seven hours in the Divine Office.
With the hope that they would be too involved with their prayers to notice me, I entered the north transept. During the night, I had scraped the caked snow off my boots; now I left only wet footprints on the marble floor.
Since first seeing them on a secret visit, I have always admired the fan vaults in the transept ceiling, sixty feet overhead, but burdened as I was and afraid of being noticed, I didn’t even try to look up that high.
The cathedral was large, the transept long. When I strained to raise my head a little way, I saw no one in the crossing, where the shorter transepts met the longer nave. Whether they were gathered in the choir or elsewhere, I didn’t know.
The body across my back seemed heavier by the moment. My calf muscles began to burn.
Immediately to my left, this side of the baptismal, beyond a columned archway lay a chamber that served a great spiral staircase with limestone treads six or seven feet wide, leading only down. Between two bronze stanchions hung a thick red-velvet rope, blocking entrance to the stairs, and when I managed to push aside one of the stanchions, it scraped loudly against the floor.
The chanting did not cease, and like some medieval body snatcher returning with remorse what he had taken earlier, I carried my dead father down the stairs to the crypt deep under the church, which would provide covert passage off Cathedral Hill and into the lower reaches of the city. At the foot of the stairs, under a carved-limestone tympanum featuring Christ the Redeemer, an ornate bronze gate blocked the way, but it was not locked.
At the moment, the crypt was lighted only by several torchères crowned with gas flames that burned 24/7 to attest to the eternal nature of the souls of those interred here. The space was divided into sections separated from one another only by arcades of columns, and overhead were groin vaults painted with murals. Here the bishops and the cardinals and perhaps some of the most worthy parishioners from the generations of the city were laid to rest.
The floors of the various chambers, all open to one another, had been constructed with subtle integrated slopes, which Father had pointed out to me when long ago we had entered along the route by which I would now leave with him. I passed among columns, accompanied by cowled figures in flaring black cassocks that were really shadows flung about by the leaping gas flames, enhanced by my imagination. I quickly came to the corner toward which the floors would direct the water if the crypt was ever flooded.
After putting Father down, I used the gate key and then hooked the large cover off the drain, leaving a few inches overhanging. Now and then a partial passage of a psalm sung down from the church, but I knew the monks couldn’t hear me.
A vertical shaft, four feet in diameter, dropped sixty feet to a drain line large enough for a man to pass through easily in a stoop. These were among the earliest drains in the system, made of brick and mortar but still enduring.
The shaft featured embedded iron rungs for those who needed to service it, but a few of them were loose, and caution was required to avoid losing one’s grip or footing. The hole was not wide enough for me to sling the
