The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (18 page)

I shielded my eyes against the searing glare and canted my head away—and saw it.

“Look,” I said, thrusting a finger. “There’s a window open on the third floor. You see it? There, behind that—the—”

“The buttress?” said Sawyer.

“—Yes, the buttress. Up there.”

We assembled at the base of the wall. It was a sheer vertical drop of thirty, maybe forty feet from the window to the ground. The sand-colored bricks used to construct the building were easily as large as any cinder block, if not larger. They seemed to have been mortared so that there was a horizonal gap of an inch or so between layers.

The face of each block was rough and uneven, presenting ledges and crags here and there along the wall surface.

I glanced back at the others and wedged a couple of fingers into the gap between the bricks as an experiment. Then I hopped up and put a foot on a thin ledge that protruded just enough to catch the edge of my shoe.

“Oh, I know you’re not doing what I think you’re doing,” said Sawyer. “Are you seriously going to climb that?”

“I’ve climbed worse,” I said, hugging the wall and reaching up to another gap.

I hopped down and rubbed my hands, and took off my jacket, handing it to Noreen. It was a nice one, a recent purchase, made of coffee-colored leather, and had a gray hood sewn into the lining that made it look as if I had on a sweatshirt underneath. “I need some kind of dust. My hands are sweaty and they’re only going to get sweatier.”

“You’re in luck,” Noreen said, but took two steps in the opposite direction and threw her hands in the air, making a frustrated noise. “Never mind, I don’t have my talcum powder with me because I don’t have my
car
with me.”

“Why do you have talcum powder?” I asked.

Sawyer made a snipping motion at his scalp with his fingers. “She cuts hair back home in Florida.”

“Oh,” I said, after a beat, and started climbing the wall anyway. We were in an alley deep between two parallel walls, so I wasn’t too concerned with being spotted by police officers that might take offense to me breaking into a church.

I forced my fingers into a crack and hoisted one foot onto a ledge. A thought occurred to me and I spoke over my shoulder, “Do either of you know how to pick a lock?”

A beat of silence, and then a simultaneous, “No.”

“Then onward and upward it is,” I said, and continued climbing.

I stood, lifting myself onto the bottom-most windowsill. I braced myself inside the windowframe and sat on the flat stone, then pulled my legs up, planting my feet on the narrow platform heel-to-toe Egyptian hieroglyph-style. That gave me a solid base to push off the inside of the window behind me and stand up, crouching like a gargoyle in the window.

I reached over the arch above me and found a new grip, then kicked my right leg up and found a new place to step, used it to lift myself. I traded hands and reached upward.

“This is crazy,” reiterated Sawyer below. “What if you fall and get hurt? I’m guessing you probably don’t have insurance.”

“I figured you would catch me if I fell,” I grunted. I was now just above the bottom window, clinging to the wall, a giant spider in a shirt too thin for the weather.

“Thou dost assume too much,” he replied.

I made it to the second floor window and grasped the sill edge with both hands, preparing to pull myself inside like I’d done with the first one. As I began to drag myself upward, my foot slipped and my heart roared in my chest. My face grew hot with the rush of adrenaline as I dangled from the rim of stone. I gasped, scraped my left cheek hard across the rough brick.

The edge of the sill dug painfully into the tendons of my flexed fingers.

“Shit,” said Noreen, her voice echoing faintly off the walls around me. “Watch out, I’m not taking you to the hospital. If you fall, you’re fired before you hit the ground.”

“Thanks, boss,” I said, my shoe regaining traction on the wall surface. I clambered slowly into the second window and perched again. This time I stopped to rest, and as I turned to regard the church’s back parking lot, I was nearly overcome by the vertigo of height.

From here, I could see into the residential neighborhood one street removed from Main Street. The narrow mouth of the alley only afforded me a view into the side windows of two houses, but that was enough. I could see a man standing at a kitchen sink washing dishes. At the other house, a teenager bundled in a heavy blanket was curled tightly in a bay window reading a book by the wan light of the cloudy day. She squeezed her nose with the wadded tissue in her free hand.

I shut my eyes tight and leaned my face against my own window behind me, calming my nerve with the shock of the wind-chilled glass. It was colored a dark bottle-green, which made it easy to see my own pallid expression.

“I can’t believe this,” I said to myself. “What am I doing?”
Do I really want to go back there? Back down into that dirt cellar, maybe even back through that mirror?
A faint thrill of terror flared inside me as I considered it.

Suddenly, I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid of falling, or getting caught breaking into a church, or of going back to that dark pueblo-city of weird ghosts.

I looked down, which was a mistake, and closed my eyes again.

“I can see my house from here,” I called down, my voice breaking.

Sawyer swore long and low. “Be careful. This grass ain’t as springy as it looks.”

I reached over my head and grabbed the keystone again, and pulled myself up. My mind reeled back to my days as an MP, climbing up and down the obstacle walls on Fort Leonard Wood, and to the several months I spent on Fort Hood the year before I deployed, climbing the false wall at the gym down the street from the Transition Barracks.

I envisioned my grasping hands and feet on the pods screwed into the faux rock wall outside the basketball court, looking so much like giant wads of chewed bubble gum pressed onto the stone.

I surprised myself by sweating. It was so cool outside. A trickle of moisture crawled between my backbone and hip. My feet were freezing, my toes like icy monkey paw fingers in my shoes, slick with sweat and chilled. My fingers were raw and felt like the gnarled claws of Death.

As soon as the topmost windowsill was in reach, I grabbed it and scrambled toward it. I almost lost my balance at the last second, and I felt my center of gravity slide backwards, but I found the lock-handle on the inside of the windowpane and caught myself.

I could hear the pane’s hinge groan under the strain, but it held until I could lift myself into the window.

Immensely relieved, I sat on the windowsill as if it were a park bench and exhaled a slow stream of vapor-smoke, feeling for all the world like a dragon gazing out of his aerie.

“I made it,” I said, and scooted backwards into the third floor of the church.

I was in some sort of office. Luckily, there was no one in it other than myself. I stood behind a richly-appointed cherrywood desk with a calendar blotter on it, scribbled with various dates and short scripture passages. A clergy office, though which one, I had no idea. I wasn’t even sure if Atterberry was the only clergyman in Walker Memorial, nor was I sure how it all even worked, to be honest.

The room was spacious, with walls and wainscoting the color of snow, and a dark red carpet. An American flag stood in one corner next to an ancient green filing cabinet. I checked the nameplate sitting on the desk:
Pastor’s Assistant Janice Evers.

The name made me feel even guiltier. I got out of there in a hurry.

Atterberry’s office was next door, but I didn’t go in, had no reason to. I went straight down the long hallway, past doorways labeled with positions like
Music Director, Educational Ministry Assistant,
etc. The Berber carpet under my feet muffled my steps as I moved into silence, isolated from the outside world and traffic by so much stone.

The wallpapered walls were lined with framed reproductions of what were probably historical architectural sketches from the county clerk’s office, as well as landscapes and portraits of previous clergy. They eyed me from under their bristly brows as I walked, rolling my feet to stay silent.

At the end of the corridor was a creaky old wooden staircase. I went down to the ground floor and came out next to the nave. Instead of going down to open the door for Sawyer and Noreen, I succumbed to the temptation of curiosity and went into the nave to see if the mirror was still in the cellar.

The nave was virtually unchanged from yesterday except for the angle of the sunlight limping in through the stained glass. The room was slightly darker, which in my solitude made it ominous and agoraphobic, especially when I looked up at the Big Brown Brooding Jesus looming over the altar.

He stared straight ahead with his dead, colorless Roman bust eyes, somehow oblivious and judgemental at the same time.

In this cavernous chapel, gutted hollow by the guilt and listlessness of a million parishioners, even my carpeted footsteps seemed to echo.

I went straight to the door in the vestibule. I wasn’t surprised to see that it was locked, which I remedied with the key in my pocket. I stepped inside, and as before, I turned on my cellphone—or, at least, I tried, and remembered that it was dead. I stood there in the shadows for several seconds, confused about how to proceed, feeling like an idiot—worse, a
blind
idiot.

When I went back to the nave, I was walking slowly up the center aisle toward the altar, wondering where I could find a candle in the church (and something to light it with), when I heard a deep, eloquent voice from the darkness at the far end of the pews.

I spun to discover a man sitting in one of them, barely visible in the gloom behind the soft beam of sunlight. His feet were kicked up on the back of the pew in front of him. I squinted into the light to make out his features.

It was Maxwell Bayard. “Kid, I think we need to talk.”

Naturally, I was shell-shocked, locked into place by indecision and confusion. I eventually said, “What are you doing here?” which sounded completely stupid as it came out of my big dumb mouth. My face burned with embarrassment and anticipation at being caught trespassing.

“Come here and sit down with me, amigo,” said my father’s agent. “I had a feeling I might run into you here.”

I went over to his pew, my legs wooden and loose, and took a seat. My hands were shaking.

“Atterberry called me yesterday, told me he thought he’d seen you and that Winton kid in here after services,” he said in his nasal, gravelly Kojak voice from the heavens, and paused for emphasis.

He was smoking a cigarette, and the blue curls of his smoke hung motionless in the air around his head like the rings of Saturn. “Now, to anybody else, that might or might not look shady, but luckily, as it goes, I might know a thing or two about why you might be in here. And why you’re here now. How did you get in here, anyway?”

“I climbed in through a window in the assistant’s office,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

“Damn,” Bayard said, his brow arching, frowning like an old catfish. “Third floor? That must’ve been a hell of a climb. I didn’t even check up there. You’re a tougher man than I thought. Chip off the old brick.”

I heard a knock on the front door. Sawyer’s faint voice came to us from outside. My new friends wanted in. “They can wait,” said the old man. “What I’ve got to talk to you about, they may not be too inclined to hear.”

I blinked.

He seemed to be searching for the right words. “I’m guessing you’re here looking for what your father called ‘the Burrow’—a door to another place. Would I be wrong...or would I be right?”

I didn’t know what to say—so I told him the truth. “Yes.”

“Hmm,” he said, nodding. He took a drag off the cigarette, held it, and let the smoke ease out of his mouth and up his nose, then tilted his head back and blew it back out again like an enraged bull from a Looney Tunes short. “What convinced you to come here to begin with?”

I produced the key to the cellar door. “I found this in one of my dad’s boxes. It opens that door over there.”

“I’m not even going to question the dots you connected to get from Point Nowhere to Point Church. Your father was prone to similar jumps of logic,” said Bayard. His head lowered again and he regarded me with those heavy-lidded hound dog eyes. “You share a lot with him, you know. You two have a lot in common. Moreso than you think.”

I put the key back in my pocket and folded my arms, letting my silence urge him to continue.

“It took about a decade for your father to admit to me his...clandestine trips to this church, after I took him on as a client. It was another several years before he eventually decided to let me in on his secret. Or what I should say he thought was his secret.

“That there was, in fact, a secret door underneath this building that led to another world that he claimed was real. The world that he’d been writing about for half his life.”

The old literary agent looked at me sadly and took a little Maglite out of his jacket pocket. “Come with me,” he said, and rose to his feet. I heard something in him crackle as he put his hands on his knees and stood with a soft groan. “Indulge an old man.”