‘Careful, Gary,’ Father Lucas warned him.
‘All right, Father, forgive me, for I do not have the faintest idea what I do. Now, how can I help?’
Father Lucas held up his key. ‘The safe-deposit boxes,’ he said. ‘I understand they’re down in the basement.’
‘That’s right,’ said Gary, narrowing his eyes. ‘But it’ll cost you. You’re the second one in just a couple of days.’
Father Lucas reached into his pocket and counted out five bills. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not exactly Aaron Spelling.’
‘Well …’ said Gary. ‘Seeing as it’s you.’ He pocketed the money, unhooked the basement key from the board, and led Father Lucas across the lobby. One of the scarecrows called out, ‘Bless you, Father! Bless you!’ and dropped onto his knees on the filthy carpet, pressing his forehead to the floor. Father Lucas made the sign of the cross; and then followed Gary along the narrow corridor that led to the kitchens and the basement door.
Gary unlocked the door, reached inside, and switched on the light.
‘Just watch your step, Father, okay? There’s a whole lot of junk and trash down there. The safe-deposit boxes are way in back, by the wall. There’s some kind of an African statcher back there, they’re right behind it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Father Lucas.
‘Hey, don’t mention it,’ Gary told him.
Gary went off; and Father Lucas climbed cautiously down the steps into the basement. He paused for a moment at the foot of the steps, looking around. The basement was utterly silent, a grotesque landscape of upturned chairs, hat stands, foldaway beds, and bureaux. Father Lucas caught sight of the ‘African statcher’ and began to make his way toward it, climbing over stacks of chairs and walking along rows of bedside tables.
Down here, he felt peculiarly shut off from the world; and a small familiar surge of claustrophobia rose in his chest. He didn’t suffer from it very often or very severely; only in times of stress. But there were times when he had been forced to bite the inside of his cheek when he was traveling in a crowded elevator, to stop himself from shouting to be let out.
The worst thing was imagining the weight of the entire hotel bearing down on top of him, tons of concrete and steel, all those carpets and furnishings and staircases and people.
He gripped the back of a chair to balance himself, and hesitated for a moment, sweating. He wasn’t
obliged
to open this safe-deposit box. He could turn around and go back and nobody would be any the wiser. Yet supposing he turned around, and somebody else got here first, somebody who was dedicated to resurrecting Satan? What would he think of himself then, as the world cracked from pole to pole?
Father Lucas mopped his face with his handkerchief, took a deep steadying breath, and then carried on, stumbling over the furniture like a lame goat. At last, however, he reached the safe-deposit boxes. He struggled his way around the African lady with the bodacious ta-tas; and then managed to climb up on top of the stacks of boxes. He was panting hard; and he had to take off his Coke-bottle spectacles and wipe steam off the lenses. God knows, he could never go down a mine.
He found box number 531, with its lid still open. What he needed now was 135. He slid down the side of the stack of boxes and pushed the top bank sideways – finally managing to lever them out of the way using a brass pole with a board on one end pointing the way to the Starlight Bar.
He was lucky. The next bank of boxes was 1–199. The numbers were quite clear, too. He found 135, and took out the key that Martin and Ramone had discovered in the first safe-deposit box.
He was about to fit it into the lock when he thought he heard a noise on the other side of the basement. He listened, sweating. There it was again. A faint scratching sound, like rats tearing the stuffed-cotton entrails out of a couch; or somebody stealthily making his way nearer across the furniture. He listened and listened, his key still poised, but the noise wasn’t repeated.
‘Overactive imagination,’ he told himself, and inserted the key into the lock.
The lock was extremely stiff. He grunted and strained at it, and the key cut into his fingers. He wished he had thought of bringing a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, although he probably would have ended up breaking the lock that way. He twisted the key again, grunting with effort, and at last he felt it budge.
‘One more try,’ he gasped to himself. ‘Come on, you bastard; open up!’
He was struggling so hard that he scarcely heard the singing. High, and clear, but oddly ghostlike, as if it could have been very close or very far away.
Apples are sweeter than lemons
Lemons are sweeter than limes
But there’s nothing so sweet as the mem’ry of you
And the sadness of happier times
.
He allowed himself to catch his breath; then with quivering fingers he turned the key all the way around and felt the levers in the lock slide rustily open.
The singing continued, but Father Lucas didn’t hear it. He lifted the lid of the safe-deposit box and peered inside. The lighting in this part of the basement was so poor, however, that he couldn’t see anything at all.
‘Well, now,’ he told himself, ‘it can’t be anything to be frightened of. Only claws and tissue paper, and more of that hairy stuff.’
He cautiously inserted his left hand, groping around the sides of the box. It seemed to be empty. Perhaps somebody else had gotten here first and taken the contents away. Perhaps the claws and the hank of hair were all that was left.
He reached a little farther; and then his fingertips touched something wrinkled and supple and faintly oily; like a sack of soft and heavy leather. He didn’t like the feel of it at all, but he ran his hand all the way around it, trying to make out what it was. He tried to lift it, so that he could see what it looked like in the light, but it was too heavy, and seemed to be fastened to the back of the safe-deposit box.
Father Lucas took his hand out. He found his handkerchief, wiped his fingers, and sniffed them. The thing in the safe-deposit box had a curious smell; rather like machine oil lightly mixed with fish.
He bent over and strained his eyes, trying to catch even the faintest reflection from the thing inside the box. ‘Now, what the hell are you?’ he whispered. ‘If you’re part of Satan, I’d darn well like to know
which
part.’
He was about to reach inside the box a second time when he heard a high, childish giggle. He looked up, alarmed, his heart pumping in huge, slow spasms. At first he couldn’t make out where the laughter was coming from, but then right across the basement, on the far side, he caught sight of a face. Or rather, the
reflection
of a face in the tilted mirror of a discarded hotel dressing table.
Father Lucas shuddered. His eyesight wasn’t very clear, but he had no doubt who it was. Those clear pale features, unnaturally white; those bright-burning eyes.
‘Boofuls,’ he whispered.
‘
Hello, Father
.’ Boofuls smiled. ‘
What are you doing here? Interfering? Poking your nose in where it’s not wanted
?’
Father Lucas crossed himself. ‘Almighty Lord, Word of God the Father, Jesus Christ, God and Lord of every creature: Who didst give to Thy Holy Apostles power to tread upon serpents and scorpions – by Whose power Satan fell from heaven like lightning –’
‘
Father Lucas!
’ cried Boofuls. ‘
You meddled in matters which were nothing to do with you, and now you have to be punished! Look after your teeth, that’s what I told you! Look after your teeth
!’
Father Lucas caught sight of a glint of glistening white down in the darkness of the safe-deposit box. He was so terrified that he was unable to move; literally unable to do anything but kneel where he was, open-mouthed. His mind told him to scramble down and run for his life, but his body refused to obey.
‘
Meddler!
’ screamed Boofuls. ‘
Meddler! Meddler!
’
His voice reached a pitch of unintelligible hysteria.
And then something reared out of the safe-deposit box that was all shiny gray gristle, a thick tangled column of unspeakable muscles and naked arteries. It was like nothing that Father Lucas had ever seen – blind, swollen, dangling with rags of slimy gray skin, reeking of oil and dead fish.
‘Almighty Lord, Word of God the Father,’ Father Lucas babbled. But then the thin skin around the top of the column peeled slowly back, revealing row after row of razor-sharp teeth, five, six – seven rows in all, glutinous with fluids. Father Lucas’ voice disappeared, and all he could do was stare at this terrible apparition; trying not to believe in it, trying to tell himself that this was only a nightmare; and that any moment now he would fall off the safe-deposit boxes and find himself in bed.
His nervous system suddenly reconnected itself. He thought,
Jump!
But he was a fraction of a second too late. The glistening gray column swayed swiftly toward him and burst straight into his mouth, smashing all his teeth aside, dislocating his jaw, cracking his palate apart from front to back.
He couldn’t scream: the thing filled his mouth. Blood sprayed wildly across the safe-deposit boxes and onto the basement ceiling.
Choking, he thought,
Out! Out! Got to get it out!
but it slithered through his hands, greasy, rubbery, unstoppable.
It forced its way down his throat, tearing away his larynx. The agony was all the more unbearable because his lungs were full and yet his windpipe was blocked and he
couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe!
He struggled and thrashed and kicked his legs; and at last he lost his balance and toppled off the side of the safe-deposit boxes onto the floor, with the gray thing’s tail still protruding from his stretched-open mouth. It had a tail like a soft, collapsed sphincter, a sphincter that contracted and expanded each time the thing forced itself farther down his throat.
Something had jarred in his back when he fell. He lay paralyzed on top of a folding chair, his eyes bulging, his face blue, his mouth bloody. And the gray creature pushed its way with tearing teeth down to his stomach, ripping soft membranes into shreds – inflicting on him the greatest pain that it was possible for a man to suffer. It was worse than
seppuku
, the most agonizing form of Japanese suicide, because it came from deep inside him, and it wouldn’t stop, and it scissored and wrenched and ripped at every part of his vitals.
The thing’s tail disappeared into his mouth. He felt its dry palpating sphincter slide down his throat. He choked, gagged, sicked up blood and pieces of flesh. He was conscious of every expansion and contraction as the thing bulged and heaved, bulged and heaved, cater-pillaring its way into his abdomen. The most terrifying thing of all was that he knew that he was already dead. Nobody could survive this ruination inside the body and survive.
He felt his stomach straining. He looked down at himself, his eyes wide. There was a moment when he felt as if his pelvis were breaking apart; and that the whole world was collapsing on top of him. The Hollywood Divine, the night sky, everything. Ton upon ton of agony and humiliation.
‘O God, help me,’ he bubbled.
And then the gray column exploded out from between his thighs, its teeth bloody and decorated with viscera of all colors, his own torn manhood hardly recognizable among the shreds; and it stiffly swayed, nearly four feet long, the swollen member of the Lord of Darkness, mocking him, arrogant, obscene, Satan’s penis between a priest’s legs. Now he knew why the mirror had spat semen at him. Satan relished the sexual degradation of the clergy.
‘O God …’ Father Lucas whispered.
One by one, the rows of teeth were concealed by sliding skin. Then the gray thing dragged itself away from Father Lucas, its body rustling on the dusty floor, and burrowed itself deep beneath the stacks of folding chairs, into the darkest corners, where it shrank into dryness, like an abandoned sack, and waited for the day that was near now; nearer than ever. The day that was almost here.
And Father Lucas’ blood slid stickily across the basement floor and in between the painted toes of the African statue. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home.
That morning at eight o’clock sharp, Boofuls danced and sang for June Lassiter at 20th Century-Fox.
They used the set which had been built for the television mini-series
Ziegfeld Follies
, partly because nobody else was using it, and partly because it included a mock-up of a theater stage. June Lassiter sat right in front in her director’s chair, dressed in an off-white suit by Giorgio Armani. Beside her sat her executive assistant and the bearer of her Filofax, Kathy Lupanek, all frizzy hair and huge spectacles and radical opinions.
Morris Nathan was also present, of course; with Alison. So was Chubby Bosanquet, the Fox finance director; John Drax, the choreographer; and Ahab Greene.
Martin sat at the very back, in darkness, feeling tired and withdrawn. He was praying in a way that ‘Lejeune’s’ audition would prove to be a complete flop. If that happened – if it was obvious that nobody wanted to remake
Sweet Chariot
– maybe Boofuls would retreat back into his mirror and let Emilio go.