She met my eyes again.
“Keiko Ishiguro has also been kept there. To be used. To be raped and otherwise abused.”
Sister Margaret covered her face with her hands.
When it seemed that she might remain in that posture for as long as allowed, I said, “We don’t have hands so that we can hide from the ugliness of the world, Sister.”
As she lowered the fingered veil, the look she gave me was fashioned poorly, too extreme in its representation of a shy and simple person. She was as blank faced and empty eyed as a simpleton, and she definitely was not that.
“Sister. Legis naturalis propugnator. What does it mean?”
Her pose of vacancy dissolved, her slack features grew taut, but she feigned bewilderment.
“Aluf shel halakha. What does it mean?” I asked.
She knew but would not say, as if the words were an incantation with which she would destroy herself.
I stepped in front of her and held out one hand.
She stared at it until she understood that I would not relent. Once again assuming the role of the demure and compliant servant of Truth, she did as I required and took my hand.
From his retreat under the desk, Winston was watching Sister Margaret. Now I viewed her—and she viewed herself—through the dog’s eyes. Shocked, she tightened her grip on me, and she was so unsettled by this development that her power of masquerade faltered. Winston saw, I saw, Sister saw two of her fingers morph into slender tentacles, and I felt one curl around my wrist—supple, slick, cold.
I recoiled, broke contact, involuntarily declaring, “Nihilim!”
That one word caused Sparky to take a step toward us, and it triggered a more spectacular—and unexpected—response from the thing that was pretending to be Sister Margaret. It ceased its impersonation. The penitent face of the religieuse collapsed into the greedy hookworm maw, as though it ate its own false countenance. Something pale and spiny whisked around and around deep within its toothless mouth, perhaps a sharp, rendering tongue. With a hiss, the creature shot up from the chair. The six members of each transformed hand seized the other office chair, hurled it. Sparky dodged, and we reached for our holstered pistols. The beast quickened into action, knocking Sparky aside. The old warrior’s head caught the corner of the desk as he fell in thick spatters of blood. Stranger than all the devils of all our dreams seeking whom they may devour, the Nihilim tore open the door and disappeared into the foyer.
The creature must have taken intense pleasure in its deceit, living among the sisters as one of them, singling out some of their favorite children for death and suffering. I wondered who else—in addition to Annie, Keiko, Litton—might have been victims of the thing called Margaret. And who would be next?
Half of the sisters roomed on the ground floor, but all of the orphans and the rest of the nuns resided on the second level. The beast was strong, its talons sharp, its purpose bloody destruction. Free in the building, it would kill every child it came across, to declare that no heart was sacred and that violent death was the only reward for innocence.
I found myself in the foyer looking toward the open staircase that curved through shadows up to the second floor. The creature seemed to be making for them, but then pivoted to the right, into the main ground-floor hallway, and disappeared.
When I turned the corner, I saw the nun’s habit that the Nihilim had torn off like thinnest paper and cast aside. Ahead on the left, a door was swinging shut of its own weight. I knew that beyond lay the stairs to the basement.
Pistol in hand, I stepped onto the landing. The Nihilim had gone down in darkness, evidently needing no light to see. I found the wall switch, and in the fall of light, the concrete stairs swelled up from the gloom.
I hesitated to follow my quarry. The orphans were forbidden to venture into that lower realm, though from time to time we went in little groups, more in a spirit of adventure than disobedience. A structure as large as Mater Misericordi? had complex mechanical systems, and the world below was a maze of pipes and pumps and boilers, furnaces, chillers, and much arcane machinery that I couldn’t name. There were uncountable places where the monster could lie in wait and spring upon me so abruptly that I might not have time to bring the pistol to bear.
Just then I experienced a Panthea moment, my gift maturing to include vivid clairvoyance. I saw the fiend retrieve a long-handled monkey wrench from behind a large holding tank full of superheated water, where it had stashed the tool long ago. I saw it moving through a puzzlement of water lines and waste lines and electrical conduits, slouching past an array of breaker boxes. It stooped and applied the jaws of the wrench to a hexagonal coupling at a junction of pipes. Abruptly the vision fast-forwarded. A fierce blue-orange flash. Glass exploding out of the windows on the upper floors of the building. Fire churning through the hallways. The Nihilim intended to flood the basement with natural gas. The pleasure it would have taken in the slaughter of a few children was nothing compared to the joy it would take in roasting them all.