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stationed Orson immediately inside the bedroom door, with a clear view
of the ladder.
Averting my face from the light around the bed, crossing the room
 toward the writing desk, I glanced through the open door of the
adjoining bathroom. No one was in there.
On the desk, in addition to the journal, was a decanter of what
appeared to be Scotch. Beside the decanter was a double-shot glass
more than half full of the golden liquid. The priest had been sipping
it neat, no ice. Or maybe not just sipping.
I picked up the journal. Father Tom's handwriting was as tight and
precise as machine-generated script. I stepped into the deepest
shadows in the room, because my dark-adapted eyes needed little armed
the last paragraph on the light by which to read, and I scanned the
page, which referred to his sister. He had broken off in mid
sentence:
"en the end comes, I might not be able to save myself I know that I
will not be able to save Laura, because already she is not
fundamentally who she was. She is already gone. Little more than her
physical shell remains-and perhaps even that is changed. Either God
has somehow taken her soul home to His bosom while leaving her body
inhabited by the entity into which she has evolved--or He has abandoned
her. And will therefore abandon us all. I believe in the mercy of
Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe because I have
nothing else to live for. And if I believe, then I must live by my
faith and save whom I can.
 If I can't save myself-or even Laura, I can at least rescue these
pitiful creatures who come to me to be freed from torment and
control.
Jesse Pinn or those who give him orders may kill Laura, but she is not
Laura anymore, Laura is long lost, and I can't let their threats stop
my work.
They may kill me, but until they do Orson stood alertly at the open
door, watching the hall.
I turned to the first page of the journal and saw that the initial
entry was dated January 1 of this year:
Laura has been held for more than nine months now, and I've given up
all hope that I will ever see her again. And if I were given the
chance to see her again, I might refuse, God forgive me, because I
would be too afraid of facing what she might have become. Every night,
I petition the Holy Mother to intercede with her Son to take Laura from
the suffering of this world.
For a full understanding of his sister's situation and condition, I
would have to find the previous volume or volumes of this journal, but
I had no time to search for them.
 Something thumped in the attic. I froze, staring at the ceiling,
listening. At the doorway, Orson pricked one ear.
When half a minute passed without another sound, I turned my attention
once more to the journal. With a sense of time running out, I searched
hurriedly through the book, reading at random.
Much of the contents concerned the priest's theological doubts and
agonies. He struggled daily to remind himself-to convince himself, to
plead with himself to remember-that his faith had long sustained him
and that he would be utterly lost if he could not hold fast to his
faith in this crisis. These sections were grim and might have been
fascinating reading for the portrait of a tortured psyche that they
provided, but they revealed nothing about the facts of the Wyvern
conspiracy that had infected Moonlight Bay. Consequently, I skimmed
through them.
I found one page and then a few more on which Father Tom's neat
handwriting deteriorated into a loose scrawl. These passages were
incoherent, ranting and paranoid, and I assumed that they had been
composed after he'd poured down enough Scotch to start speaking with a
burr.
More disturbing was an entry dated February 5-three pages on which the
elegant penmanship was obsessively precise:
 I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I
believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I
believe in the mercy of Christ. . . .
Those seven words were repeated line after line, nearly two hundred
times. Not a single one appeared to have been hastily penned; each
sentence was so meticulously inscribed on the page that a rubber stamp
and an ink pad could hardly have produced more uniform results.
Scanning this entry, I could feel the desperation and terror that the
priest had felt when he'd written it, as if his turbulent emotions had
been infused into the paper with the ink, to radiate from it
evermore.
I believe in the mercy of Christ.
I wondered what incident on the fifth of February had brought Father
Tom to the edge of an emotional and spiritual abyss. What had he
seen?
I wondered if perhaps he had written this impassioned but despairing
incantation after experiencing a nightmare similar to the dreams of
rape and mutilation that had troubled-and ultimately delighted-Lewis
Stevenson.
 Continuing to page through the entries, I found an interesting
observation dated the eleventh of February. It was buried in a long,
tortured passage in which the priest argued with himself over the
existence and nature of God, playing both skeptic and believer, and I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]