Boys in the Valley(84)

I notice Johnson shift his body at Finnegan’s words. He looks at me directly, that one gruesome eye focused on me with a devil’s interest.

“Well then, it sounds like congratulations are in order. By the looks of it,” Bartholomew says, looking at the carnage around us, “we’re going to need some new priests around here.”

Simon snickers, and a few others are grinning now. I begin to feel uneasy.

“But I wonder . . .” Bartholomew says, eyeing me ruefully. “Is it what you wanted, Peter?” He lets his words linger as he studies my face. “No, I don’t think it is,” he says finally. “Sad, really. Smart boy like you. Nothing but another bootlicker.”

“Stay back,” I say, but my resolve is wavering.

“Put down the cross, you fool,” Bartholomew says roughly, his voice a snarl. “You’re embarrassing yourself. We’re nothing but flesh and blood, Peter. Like you.”

“Stay back,” I repeat, and am astounded that they do.

For now.

“You don’t believe me?” Bartholomew says, slowly stepping closer, knowing there’s nothing I can do to stop him. “You don’t think I can be merciful?” He turns and motions to one of his followers. “Close those doors and bar them. I don’t want anyone leaving.”

The boy nods. He runs to the doors and jams his own weapon—a long iron candlestick—through the handles.

Bartholomew turns back to me, lip curled. “Let me prove it to you,” he says, then spits out a final word, as if he’d tasted something rotten. “Priest.”





51


DAVID OPENS HIS EYES BUT FORCES HIMSELF TO LIE STILL. He doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to breathe. He’s afraid that if he does, the miracle will evaporate. The pain will come. The damage—the injury—will be made clear.

Because I have to be injured. Right?

And yet.

He looks around slowly. The wind drives against his face, snowflakes cling to his eyelashes. He feels the cold on his back, his legs . . . and realizes.

“Thank God for snow!” he shouts, a gust of hard wind dissolving his words.

He pushes his hands into the deep snowbank, the one he luckily landed in after being thrown—with shocking, brutal power—through the window by Johnson. He’s fallen over twenty feet and landed in a drift he assumes is at least three, maybe four feet deep. A newly formed bank curled up along the side of the orphanage. Standing up, buried in snow past his knees, he experimentally bends one leg, then the other. He lifts his arms, flexes his fingers.

There’s a nasty cut on one forearm, which he assumes has something to do with being thrown through a closed window, but otherwise . . .

“I’m fine,” he says in disbelief, and begins the slow, careful process of walking.

He looks around, shocked at how completely the storm has covered the land surrounding their home, and still the flurries whip around his face, fill the air with fresh cover. He steps out of the drift into snow no deeper than a foot and knows his fate could have been much worse.

From above, he hears screams, the sounds of children in pain, likely dying. He turns to stare up at the orange-lit windows. The sounds seem distant, quickly whisked away by the brutish, icy wind, a wind which carries its own screams, its own threat of pain. The longer he stands still, the more he feels it.

I must get back. I must help them!

He pushes himself from a cautious walk to a shuffling jog, and finally to a run. When he reaches the front doors, he prays they’re not bolted, and pushes on one of the large handles.

It opens with ease.

He stumbles into the foyer, the howling wind at his back. The screams from the dormitory are louder now. Horrible.

I need a weapon.

He starts running for the kitchen, but stops short when he sees a dull, flickering glow of candlelight coming through the open doors of the chapel. He steps cautiously forward, wondering if there are more of the others inside, waiting. He pokes his head around the doorframe, studies the interior. He sees no orphans and is about to turn away when something moans from the front, something splayed across the altar. Realizing, David gasps.

“Father?”

David steps into the chapel tentatively, eyes flitting anxiously from shadow to shadow.

Father Poole lies, unmoving, atop the altar. He’s turned onto his side, his back to David.

He’s breathing, I can see him breathing.

“Father Poole? It’s David.”

The priest’s voice is weak, tentative. “David?” The old man lifts his head. “Are you . . . with them?”

David walks slowly—carefully—forward. Luckily, the chapel is not large, and there are few places to hide. It stinks like burned wood and smoke and blood, but there is no one else visible.

“No,” he says. His heart is beating, he wants to run, to help the others, but there’s something about Poole’s frailty, the eeriness of the chapel, that holds him. “I was in the dorm with Father Francis, Peter, and the others. I’ve got to get back.”

David is close to the front of the chapel now, only a few feet from Poole’s body.

“I think they’re being killed, Father.”

“Most assuredly, my boy. Come closer. I need help.” Poole groans and begins the process of shifting his body, trying to turn himself over. “We have much to do.”