The birds were nearby in the dark, revealed by an occasional ruffling of feathers, click of beak, and thin eeeee that might have been the avian equivalent of a yawn.
Perhaps they came here every night to be safe from nocturnal predators like owls that would feast on birds as readily as on mice and rabbits. But she still believed that their interest in her was unusual, their lack of fear not common to their kind.
Finally the new day announced itself not with a bright spear that pierced roof planks, but as a lesser darkness in the dark, a shapen grayness toward the back of the sanctuary, on the right. To anyone who believed in life everlasting, this ashen light could be seen as a figure, perhaps the penitent spirit of a long-dead member of the congregation come to mourn the condition of the church and the loss of faith in general. Gradually, as cinder-gray radiance became dove gray and then pearl gray, the figure morphed into the more geometric form of a doorway, not a portal to a world after this one, but to a room beyond the back wall of the sanctuary.
Abruptly the sentinel crows sprang off their perch and winged toward the front of the church. Ophelia glimpsed the two darting into the grayness, swift and gone.
She got to her feet and switched on the Tac Light and followed the center aisle to the chancel railing. The previous night, she had not searched farther than this, saving the batteries with the hope that morning would come through a rent in the roof with enough power to cure her blindness. Now she stepped through the gap where the sanctuary gate had long ago broken away from the railing. She walked around the elevated altar platform and followed the ambulatory to the doorway through which the birds had flown.
The room beyond must have been the sacristy, where vestments, a chalice, and other ceremonial items were stored between services. No cabinets remained, no shelves, neither a vesting bench nor a prie-dieu. The barren space measured about twelve feet on a side. The ceiling sloped from a high of twelve feet beyond the threshold to ten feet at the far wall.
Part of the floor was carpeted with a thin mold sustained by what rain found its way here. The mold was slippery, stuck to the soles of her shoes, and smelled like sweaty feet; but it seemed not to have compromised the structure it had colonized, because the floorboards weren’t spongy underfoot.
Judging by appearances, the sacristy had been an afterthought. The walls weren’t of mortared stone like the rest of the building. This was wood-frame construction with plank walls.
The sun, low in the east, didn’t stream directly through the hole in the roof. However, the clear morning light proved bright enough to rinse the gray out of the sacristy and impart faint warmth to Ophelia’s upturned face.
The gap, maybe eight inches wide and two feet long, was at the high point of the roof, where the sacristy had partially separated from the back wall of the church. It wasn’t wide enough for a child to squeeze through, let alone a grown woman, but the ceiling planks and roof shingles might be rotten enough to allow her to widen the hole—if she could get to it.
Had there been a door between the sanctuary and the sacristy, she might have been able to break it off its hinges and use it as a ramp to get closer to the ceiling. The only door was in the farther wall, evidently an exit, but Optime had reframed the jamb and header with fresh lumber that he’d probably brought into this ghost town with other supplies. Then he’d removed the hinges and knob from the door, nailed it to the new frame, and fortified it with two-by-four cross braces. Ophelia had no tools with which to undo his work, and even a bull of a man couldn’t have broken through that barrier.
Turning to the slice of sky that could be seen, she stared with intense longing colored more by apprehension than by hope. Although she was hungry, she could endure weeks without food if she must. Her thirst was more troubling than her hunger. Chapped lips. Scratchy throat. Already her skin felt dry. She could live a few days without water, but her strength would fade quickly as she dehydrated.
A cool flow of air slithered down through the gap between the church proper and the sacristy, bringing with it a fluttering, soft something that had been caught on the splintered edge of a roof beam. A small feather settled into her upraised hand, testimony that the birds hadn’t merely been figments of her imagination. If a black feather was a symbol that augured anything, however, it was surely predictive of death rather than life.
“Fuck that,” she said.
She hadn’t been spared in the accident that killed Octavia just to die in the service of a misanthropic lunatic’s vicious agenda.
Casting the feather to the floor, she said, “Think, damn it, think.”