All The Bells on Earth Read Free

Avenue and simply taking in the rainy darkness. A car rolled past the end of the block, its tires humming on the wet pavement, speeding up to beat the light at the corner. The neighborhood was dark and silent, and the sky was like something out of a painting, full of clouds illuminated by moonglow. What a morning! He was thankful all of a sudden that the wind had woken him up and lured him outside, as if it had something to show him.
    A flock of birds rose into the air from the roof of St. Anthony’s Church a block away, and for a moment they glowed impossibly white in the moonlight, flying in a circle around the bell tower before alighting again. Then he saw a movement on the roof—a shadow silhouetted against the darker hedge of trees beyond. In an instant it was gone.
    A man on the roof? At this hour? Walt stood watching, waiting to see it again. Except for the birds, the church roof remained empty of movement now.
    He seemed to have prowlers on the mind. The neighborhood was apparently alive with them. There was probably some kind of cat-burglar convention over at the Twin Palms Motel. The wind blew straight through the flimsy cotton of his pajama shirt, and he thought about his bed upstairs, about how Ivy would yell at him when he climbed in with frozen feet.
    Rain began to fall, and he turned and hurried toward the porch. Then, on a whim, he stopped at the steps, bending over to pinch through a half dozen pansy stems before going in through the door, locking the dead bolt behind him and carrying the little bouquet upstairs.
    Back in the bedroom, he watched Ivy sleep for a moment. She lay tucked up in the heap of blankets she’d stolen from him in the night. She was a restless sleeper, and had a sort of tidal effect on blankets, which invariably shifted to her side of the world by morning. His side of the bed was pitifully bare except for the corner of the top sheet. He glanced at the clock: quarter to five, nearly time to get up anyway. He looked around for somewhere to put the pansies so that Ivy would find them when she woke up. An idea came to him, and he turned around and headed into the bathroom, where he dropped a pansy into each of the toothbrush slots in the brass holder on the wall, entwining the handle of Ivy’s toothbrush with the flimsy stem of the last flower.
    Satisfied, he went quietly back out into the bedroom, took his shirt and sweater off the chair, and found his shoes and a pair of socks. He thought again about what he’d seen on the church roof. Something had startled the birds; he hadn’t simply imagined the shadowy figure. Still, what could he do about it? Call the cops? It was raining like in the tropics outside now. There wasn’t a chance in hell that they’d be interested in his observations. And it occurred to him that if someone
had
been on the roof, it was good odds that they were simply patching a leak during a lull in the storm—probably the minister himself. Surely it wasn’t someone breaking in; you didn’t break into a church by burrowing through the tile roof. He pushed the matter out of his mind and slipped downstairs again, anxious to put on a pot of coffee out in the garage.
    W HEN HE SAW the intruder in the doorway, Father Mahoney stood up, his throat constricting, a rush of fear slamming through him. For a single terrible moment he was certain that the man wasn’t wearing a mask at all, that he actually had the face of a goat. He fought to control himself, but he simply couldn’t speak, even when the moment passed and he knew he was wrong. There was something odious about the mask, something filthy that he simply couldn’t abide, and without thinking he lunged forward, snatching at it, suddenly wanting to jerk it off the man’s head. He felt himself struck hard in the chest and he fell heavily back down into the chair. There was a low laugh from within the confines of the mask, and he threw up his hands and ducked his head as the intruder drew a homemade blackjack