Baal

SISTER ROSAMOND AVOIDED the child during the next few weeks; she couldn't bear to be near him because of the memory of Christopher's smiling face atop his body.

Sometimes, even while teaching her basic history pupils or at chapel with the other nuns, she would begin trembling uncontrollably. Once it happened during dinner and she dropped her tray, shattering the plates on the floor. More and more often she caught the inquisitive sidelong glances of her colleagues.

She had telephoned her parents for any news they might have about Christopher, but they'd heard nothing from him in years. That left only one other person she could call, his brother who lived in Detroit. But dialing the Detroit information operator she caught herself and slammed the receiver down. She was uncertain as to whether or not she really wanted to know; perhaps finding out it was true would be too much for her. She was caught between two poles - wanting to know yet fearing the knowledge - and at night she tossed and turned in her bed until the sheets were wet.

Perhaps this was wrong after all, she told herself in the silent darkness so many times. Yes, she'd turned her back on him when he needed her. Now she was tied in the black bindings of her mistake. He'd been right. She'd been running from something and, worse, had known it all along. She had wished to avoid the harsh trappings of reality; she'd wanted to find security somewhere, anywhere, and cling to it as if it were her dying breath.

And now she realized how she missed the physical intimacies of love. She missed the strong tender hands touching her on a wide rumpled bed in his apartment; she missed curling up in his arms while he tucked his face down and whispered into her ear about how beautiful he thought her body was. She missed the act almost as much as she missed him. This is so very unfair, she told herself, to deny myself those things I need. And here, surrounded by austere black and holy contemplation, she felt suddenly out of place and lost; she was suddenly surrounded by freaks who also denied themselves and who, if she were to dare to tell them of her feelings, would scold her severely and probably also send her to see Father Robson.

I am still young, she told herself in the middle of the night. I am growing old here before it's time, and for the rest of my life I'll wear black and have to hide my feelings. Oh God oh God it isn't fair.

Each day that drifted by reminded her of the time she could never regain; she tried to immerse herself totally in her work and she spent her free hours alone, reading, but she couldn't quell the rising insecurities. She expected every morning to look into a mirror and see tiny lines crisscrossing the plains beneath her eyes. She expected to find herself resembling the older sisters who had forgotten anything existed beyond the orphanage grounds. Soon she ate her meals in her room, refusing to participate in the little birthday parties and movie nights. She began to question the judgment of a God who would trap her here like a sleek animal, to rot and die in a bleak-walled cage.

One morning she dismissed her history pupils and, after the children had filed from the room to go to their next period class, Father Robson came through the door and quietly shut it behind him.

She sat at her desk, watching him approach. So, she thought, it's finally come to this. When he smiled she busied herself by arranging stacks of test papers.

He said, "Good morning, Sister Rosamond. Are you busy?"

"We've had a test this morning."

"Yes, I see." He looked around at the bulletin board with its exhibit on Thomas Jefferson, drawings done by the children. In one of the portraits of that esteemed statesmen Father Robson saw that his hair was green and his teeth blackened. On the blackboard were Sister Rosamond's handwritten questions on the American Constitution. He recognized the stress in the squeezed, disarrayed lettering, in the sentences that climbed from the middle of the board up toward the top. He made a mental note. "You know, I was quite a history scholar myself. Made all the history clubs in prep school, even won a few scholastic awards. I was always interested in ancient history, the beginnings of civilization and all that. Fascinating subject."

"I'm afraid the children aren't quite prepared for that."

"Well," he said, "probably not."

"I'm very busy," Sister Rosamond said. "My next class will be in a few minutes."

He nodded. "Can I talk with you for just a moment?"

She didn't reply.

He stood over her until she had glanced up. Catching her eyes, he said, "Sister Rosamond, is something bothering you?"

"Why should anything be bothering me?"

"I didn't say anything was bothering you," he said softly. "I only asked. And you know it's not fair to answer a question with a question."

"Things are not always fair," she said, and immediately dropped her eyes.

He had caught the sarcasm and now he knew that the sisters' concern for her behavior during the past weeks had some sort of basis. "No," he said. "I don't suppose so. Would you like to talk about it?"

"You're confusing me with the children. Did someone ask you to talk with me? Father Dunn?"

"No. I've noticed a sharp change in your behavior. Everyone has, even the children. And I simply wanted to know if I could be of help."

"No," she said flatly, "you can't."

"All right then," he said. "I'm sorry if I disturbed you. One more thing and then I'll go. You remember I spoke with you about the Raines child?"

She looked up from her papers and Father Robson saw the blood drain from her face for a few seconds.

The sight chilled him. "I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I'd forgotten that you'd asked me to look in on him."

"No, no, don't be. I understand. You have enough work to do and, besides, the child should really be my responsibility."

She opened a drawer and began to file the papers away.

Pursue this, Father Robson told himself. Something is very wrong. "Have your feelings changed about him? Do you still think he can be touched?"

She closed the drawer. "He's a... very difficult child."

He grunted in agreement. The stress in her face was so defined it could have been etched by a sculptor; her fingers continually clenched and unclenched. He realized with a sudden start that she had become, strangely, like the child, distant and remote and bitterly cold. He said, "Does the child have anything to do with your problem, Sister?" and instantly regretted the bluntness of the question.

A gleam of heat flashed briefly in her eyes. Just as suddenly she controlled herself and Father Robson felt the boil of anger, of confusion, subsiding. For a moment he thought she wouldn't reply but then she said, "What makes you think that?"

"There you are," he said, trying to maintain a smile, "answering a question with a question. I asked you to speak with him; almost immediately after that you began acting very... depressed and withdrawn. I believe the child radiates a disturbing presence. So..."

"I told you," she said. "I haven't spoken with him." She tried to look him in the eye but her gaze wavered.

"You're holding back on me, Sister," he said, "and if you can't talk with me about it then you might speak with one of the others. I don't like to see you upset."

Several children had begun to come in for the next period's history class. They ground their pencils into the sharpener on the wall and took their seats in the classroom.

"I have to give a test," she said.

"Very well, then," Father Robson said, exploring her eyes once more in a final attempt to discover what was hidden there. "If you need me you know where I am." He smiled one last time at her and then stepped toward the door.

"Father Robson," she said as he reached for the knob.

The desperation in her voice stopped him. There was something in it that was about to break like a fragile bit of glass. The grinding of the pencil sharpener abruptly ceased.

His hand on the doorknob, he turned to look at her.

"Do you think I'm an attractive woman?" she asked. She trembled; beneath her desk her leg struck wood.

He said very softly, "Yes, Sister Rosamond. I think you're attractive in many different ways. You're a very kindhearted woman."

The children sat still, listening.

"I don't mean that. I mean..." But suddenly she didn't know what she meant. She let the sentence falter and die on trembling lips. Her face burned. Several of the children giggled.

Father Robson said, "Yes?"

"I have a test to give," she said abruptly, looking away from him. "If you'll excuse me now..."

"Of course," he said. "Forgive me for taking up so much of your time."

She shuffled through a stack of papers and he knew she would say nothing else.

In the corridor he wondered if her involvement with the children was too much of a responsibility for her; perhaps her emotional nature was such that the orphans were depressing her. Or it could be something else entirely... He remembered the way her face had become ashen at the mention of the child. Something was wrong, terribly, possibly irreversibly wrong. All is not as it seems, he told himself. All is not as it seems. He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked away down the dimly lit corridor, unconsciously counting the linoleum tiles on the floor.

And soon, locking herself away from the curious stares and whispers of the others, Sister Rosamond began to fear herself. She had trouble sleeping; often she dreamed that Christopher was shrouded in a white robe and standing amid high golden dunes in a swirling desert. His arms reached out for her and, as she approached, she was nude and wet. As their fingers entwined she saw his skin turn the cold gray of wet sand, his lips draw back in an obscene grimace. And then he drew away his robe to reveal his grotesque nakedness and, throwing her down across the golden expanse, wrenched her thighs apart. And slowly slowly the features changed from those of Christopher to someone else, someone with pale flesh and burning dark eyes like fires at the bottom of black wells. She recognized the child and awakened with her breast heaving for air, he had been heavy as he lay across her belly with slavering tongue lapping at her swollen nipples.

Autumn lost its colors for the bleakness of winter. The trees gave up their leaves with a desperate finality and stood fragile under gray snow-laden skies. The grass became brown and harsh; the orphanage itself was a dark stone capped with glistening frost.

She suspected she was losing her mind. She was increasingly forgetful and would sometimes, in mid-sentence, forget what she was talking about. Her dreams became more intense; the child and Christopher became interchangeable. Sometimes she thought she had always known Jeffrey's face; she dreamed she was stepping onto a bus on a street in some city and as the bus pulled away she looked back to see the child, she thought, waving from the curb, but she wasn't certain. She was never certain. She shuddered and burned and knew she was insane.

Sister Rosamond would have to be assigned somewhere else; Father Robson observed that her dark moods, her preoccupation and listlessness, had affected the children. Now it seemed to him that the children whispered behind his back; it seemed to him that they had grown older, more secretive, even in a few months. Their childish horseplay natural at this age had almost entirely ceased. Now they spoke and moved as if on the brink of manhood and their eyes mirrored a feverish intelligence that seemed to him terribly, terribly out of place.

And apart from them all, above them all, was the child. He walked alone in the bitter wind on the playground, his hands slowly clenching and unclenching at his sides. He spoke to no one, at least as far as Father Robson could tell, and no one spoke to him. But Father Robson saw the child's eyes sweep the faces of the others. When they drew back, cowering, Father Robson dropped his own eyes and pretended not to see.

There was only one word for it. Father Robson knew it: power. He sat behind his desk in his paper-cluttered office and chewed a pencil as he flipped through psychological journals he had already read and reread. Power. Power. Power. Rising, rising up like a shadow, intangible. Perhaps, like - and the thought chilled him - the shadow he had seen in the eyes of Sister Rosamond.

And the child's power was growing. Father Robson could sense it rising like a cobra from a wicker basket, undulating in the dirty sunlight. Inevitably it would strike. But... at what? At what?

He put aside his journals and sat with his hands folded. The numb disbelief when the child had forced him back with a single sentence, the cold terror when the child had burned his handprint into the bookcover with an eerie inexplicable force had returned. Perhaps now it was time to send the child into New York for examination by a psychiatrist who had experience with problem children, who could explain the things that had haunted Father Robson for so long. And perhaps also it was time to unlock the safe, to disclose the scorched Bible. Yes. It was time. It was past time.

Out in the yard he stood alone.

The freezing wind whipped around him. He watched them approach; two children, one limping, nearing him from across the yard. They shivered in their coats and hunched to warm themselves from the wind. He waited without moving.

The weather was wild, unsettled, vicious. The thick layer of clouds alternated white and black, all washed-out bright and deep bottomless pits. They reached him, the wind tangling their hair.

They did not speak.

Baal caught their eyes. He said, "Tonight."