کتاب 08-09

9

Carol spun on her heel. The high vault of the nave echoed with cries for help, for Jesus, for mercy, for forgiveness. Carol stared into the long and crowded room, her gaze stricken and confused.

Some sprawled on the floor. Some huddled in the pews, holding one another. Many sat at the foot of the altar. Norma sat on the steps leading up to the stage, rocking back and forth, shaking her head.

“What are you crying for?” she cried out. “Why are you crying? You think we can’t get out of here? You think we’re trapped? The Bright is a-waitin’ for us and ain’t no one can stop us from flying into it to be free! It ain’t time to cry! It’s time to sing!”

The stained-glass windows that lined the long hall were covered with plywood sheets, nailed up on the outside of the building. One of these plywood sheets was in flames, and the rippling fire cast garish, candy-store colors across the pews.

“Time to sing!” Norma screamed again. “Come on! Come on, now!” Her wild gaze found Carol across the full length of the room, through the tumult of the crowd. “Mother Carol! You know what we need to do! You know!”

Carol looked back at her for a long moment, something like incomprehension on her face. But then she drew breath and lifted her voice and began to sing.

“O come all ye faithful—” Carol sang. It was hard to hear her, at first, over the moans and shouts.

Bullets drummed against the exterior of the chapel, falling like a hard rain.

“Joyful and triumphant,” Carol went on, her voice tragic, and terrified, and sweet. She walked into the nave, stepping around Michael and holding her hands out to either side of her. Blood dripped from her fingertips.

Gail stood nearby. She seemed to have given up looking for her sister, was just swaying there. Carol took her by the hand. Gail looked down at it in surprise, jumping a little, as if Carol had pinched her.

Carol squeezed her fingers and went on: “O come ye . . . o come ye . . . to Bethlehem.”

“Yes!” Norma roared. “Yes! To Bethlehem! To the Bright!”

A second voice joined Carol’s, someone singing with her in a frightened, off-key lilt.

Someone else was crying out, over and over, “We’re going to die! We’re going to die in here! Oh God, we’re going to die!”

Gail looked at Carol’s hand holding hers and began to weep. She wept so hard her shoulders shook. But then she began to sing as well.

Half a dozen of them now, their voices rising together, into the rafters: “Come and behold him! Born the king of angels!”

And a silvery rose-hued light raced along the ridges and whorls of Carol’s Dragonscale. Harper could see her lighting up through the thin silk of her pajamas.

In a bellowing, grief-choked voice, Norma shouted: “O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him!” It was more than an exhortation. It sounded almost like a threat.

Another Molotov cocktail crashed against the south side of the church. Flame leapt up a section of wall. Two men ran at it and began to beat at it with coats.

“It’s over,” Harper said to the Fireman. “It’s all over.”

Carol walked slowly toward the altar and as she waded into the crowd they rose to their feet and reached for her. Pews shrieked as people pushed them aside. They clambered over and past one another to get closer to Carol.

The worshippers reached for her and sang with her and many gazed upon Carol with adoration. One little boy hurried along in her wake, hopping and clapping his hands in an inexplicable fit of excitement, as if he were being led to the gates of an amusement park he had long dreamed of visiting. Carol squeezed hands as she made her way forward, not unlike a politician making her way through a crowd, sometimes leaning over to brush someone’s knuckles with her lips, but going on with her song all the while. She loved them, of course. It was a sick, spoiled sort of love—it was, Harper thought, not so different from the way Jakob had loved her—but it was real and it was all she had left to give them.

Bullets drummed into the wooden doors behind them, snapped Harper out of her trance. She turned the Fireman and half pulled, half carried him into the safety of the stone archway that opened into the stairwell. Bullets zipped and whined, chipping the flagstones on the floor behind them. Allie squeezed in beside them, holding her brother in her arms.

“Any ideas?” she asked, without a trace of panic.

“There might be a way out across the roof,” the Fireman said.

Harper knew that once they climbed into the bell tower, there would be no coming back down—not for her, anyway. She would not be escaping across the top of the chapel. It was too high. If she dropped off the steep pitch of the roof she would pulverize her legs and bring on a miscarriage.

But she didn’t say this to either of them. The thought was in her mind that Allie, at least—nimble, athletic Allie—might be able to get across the roof and down to a gutter, hang herself off the side and drop. There would be lots of smoke and noise, maybe enough to give her a chance to reach the woods and cover.

“Yes,” Harper said, but still she hesitated, stayed where she was, craning her neck to see into the nave.

The voices of all who remained rose in sweet, agonized song. They sang and they shone. Their eyes glowed as blue as blowtorches. A little girl with a shaved head stood on a pew, singing at the top of her lungs. The Dragonscale on her bare arms was glowing so bright it rendered the arms themselves almost translucent, so Harper could see the shadows of bones through her skin.

Norma was the first to ignite. She stood behind the altar, swaying in front of the cross, booming out the words of the song. Her big, homely face was pink and shiny with sweat and she opened her mouth and cried out: “Sing in exultation!” The inside of her throat was full of light.

Norma drew a deep breath for the next line. A yellow blast of flame gushed from her mouth. Her head snapped back. Her throat was red and straining as if with some terrible effort. Then her neck began to blacken, while dark smoke boiled from her nostrils. The Dragonscale on the wobbling meat of her bare arms was a livid poisonous shade of deepest red. She wore a black flower-print dress roughly the size of a pup tent. Blue flames raced up the back of it.

Gail choked, stumbled, knocked into the little boy who had been skipping up and down. She waved one hand, back and forth, through the air, as if to clear gnats away from her face. The third time she did it, Harper saw her arm was on fire.

“What’s happening to them?” cried Jamie, who had joined them in the wide stone archway.

“It’s a chain reaction,” the Fireman said. “They’re all going down together.”

“Glory in the highest!” they sang. Some of them, anyway. Others had begun to scream. The ones who weren’t burning.

When Carol went up in flames, she was at the center of the throng, dozens of worshippers reaching in to touch her. And all at once she was a white rippling pillar of fire, her head thrown back and her arms spread out as if to embrace an invisible lover. She went up as if she had been doused in kerosene. She did not cry out—it was too fast.

Bullets zinged and whistled through the nave, cutting down people at random on the outer edge of the crowd. Harper saw a teenager, a slender black kid, slap a hand to his brow, as if he had just realized he had forgotten to bring his textbook to class. When he dropped the hand, she saw a hole through the center of his forehead.

A teenage girl doubled over, grabbing herself, her whole back on fire. The lanky kid who looked like David Bowie had sunk to his knees at the back of the crowd, his head bowed as if in prayer, his hands pressed together. His head was on fire, a black match at the center of a bright yellow flame. A little girl ran up and down the aisle, flapping both of her burning hands in the air and shrieking for her mother. Her ponytail was a blue scarf of flame.

“Oh, John,” Harper said and turned her face away. “Oh, John.”

He had her by the arm, and he drew her on into the smoky gloom of the stairwell, and they began to climb together, away from shouts, and laughter, and song, but most of all, away from the screams, which rose together in a final wrenching chorus, a last act of harmony.