Chapter 167: Kept By Grace

The rectory kitchen was cold, the stove banked, with a single bulb over the sink, and he hung the lantern on its nail by the door and his coat under it.

Beside the coat, on the next hook, hung a choir robe, blue, with a white collar, hemmed up twice at the bottom for a girl who had never gotten tall.

The photographs stood along the windowsill over the sink where they had always stood, in their mismatched frames.

A girl of eight with a gap in her front teeth and his pink face, holding up a trout.

The same girl at twelve in the blue robe with her mouth open, singing, in the front row of the choir.

Her mother, ten years in the churchyard now, holding the girl as a baby in the stone font with Stroud’s hand under her back.

And the last one, from the March before the world ended: the girl at eighteen at this exact kitchen table, a cake in front of her with GRACE spelled out on it in blue icing, both hands over her mouth and her eyes shut, laughing at the joke he had made.

Stroud touched the glass over the cake with one finger, as he did every night, then washed his hands at the sink and went to bed for four hours, with the alarm set for a quarter to three.

The stars were out when the alarm went.

The snow had stopped during the service, and the clouds had gone with it by midnight.

The churchyard lay white and blue under a sky so clear that the bell tower stood black against the stars at the west end of the church.

Bert Coyle was waiting at the vestry door with Dwight Mears, a quiet, thick-necked man of fifty with a grey mustache and a canvas coat, who had driven a feed truck before the world ended and had never missed a night on the tower.

Dale stood a step apart from both of them with the hooded lamp in one hand, the binoculars from his cockpit around his neck, and his free hand wiping itself on his thigh.

"Did you eat, Dale?"

"Yes, Pastor."

He hadn’t, and Stroud let it go.

The cage stood in the vestry where it always did, the rangers’ cage, built for moving tigers and bears, steel bars on a steel floor with a door at one end that slid up and down on a lever, with the grey tarp lashed down over every side but the front.

Stroud went down the nineteen steps ahead of it, alone, as he did every night. Ronnie drew the bolt and stood behind the door with his rifle, and Stroud went into the dark by himself, talking to her low and warm the whole way, and slipped her chain off its ring. Then he came back and stood in the open doorway with his back to her, filling it, while the men brought the cage down.

They brought it down four of them on the carrying bars, with the door cranked up on its lever, and the moment Stroud stepped aside they set its open end square against the doorway.

Then every man on that stair turned his face to the wall.

Stroud said her name once, and she came. She walked out of the dark and into the cage on her own, and the moment she was in, Bert let go of the lever without looking, and the door slid down shut behind her with a clang that went all the way up the stairwell, and Dwight dropped the front of the tarp over the bars.

The smell came up the stairs with her, sweet and strong, strawberries in a cold stone church in November.

Then the four of them took the bars and lifted on Bert’s count, and the cage came up off the flagstones a great deal slower than it had gone down.

At twelve she had been the smallest girl in the choir, and she was still all bone at the wrists, but she weighed more now than any one of the men carrying her.

The armor the demons grew had come in thick and dense under her skin, across her back and her chest and her skull, with more of it every week.

Stroud had taken a corner of the cage himself in the first week, before the men would touch it, and he knew every pound of her.

Up the nineteen steps, out through the side door, along the outside wall to the far end of the church, through the low door at the base of the tower, and up.

The tower stair climbed the four inside walls in short stone flights, turning at every corner, with a slit window at every turn.

Dale went first with the lamp, throwing their shadows down the stair behind them, with Stroud behind him and the four men and the cage behind Stroud, their boots slipping on the worn steps and the cage grinding against the wall at every corner as they brought it round.

At the last turn, where the stairs opened into the bell chamber, Stroud lifted the binoculars from around Dale’s neck and put his hand on Dale’s shoulder, and Dale shuttered the lamp without a word.

The top of the tower was the one place at St. Jude’s that Walter Hart’s farm could see, or the farm’s guests, or anyone else with eyes in the valley, and a light up here at three in the morning was a question Stroud did not intend to answer for anyone.

So they did the last of it in the dark, as they did every night.

The bell chamber was a square stone room with the bell hanging silent in the middle of it, its rope tied off to a cleat on the first night, and louvered openings in all four walls, and the one on the west side had its slats taken out.

The four men set the cage down on the stone in front of it, with the tarp still hanging over the front, and went back down to the turn below with Dale to wait, faces to the wall, as they did every night.

Nobody but Stroud had ever seen her face, not on the pad, not in the crypt, not up here, and not one of them had ever asked to.

Stroud knelt down in front of the cage alone, lifted the front of the tarp, and folded it back over the top.

"There..." he whispered. "There we are, Gracie."

The two red eyes opened in the dark behind the bars, rim to rim, and turned up to his face, and he smiled at them in the starlight, the wide wet smile that nobody in the camp ever got to see.

He put his hands in through the bars and into her matted hair, and turned her head toward the opening, as he had turned it toward the font eighteen years ago.

From the top of the tower, over the willows along the brook, the whole valley lay open under the stars.

The white fields, the black line of the Dunmore road, the lake flat and pale, and far off in the west, the dark block of Walter Hart’s farmhouse against the snow.

Stroud kept one hand on her head and lifted the binoculars with the other, and through them the demons came up out of the dark around the farmhouse, black on white, and every one of them was facing it.

"Look, Gracie..." His hand stayed on her head. "Look at them."

And across the whole valley, every demon in the snow lifted its head at once, the ones on the road below him and the ones at the lake and the ones in Walter’s fields, two kilometers off.

Every night he watched it, and every night it stopped his breath.

A thousand shall fall at thy side. He had never known what that verse meant until the second week of the end of the world, and he knew now that it meant this.

His girl at the top of a tower, and a valley full of demons that would not move a step without her leave.

The Lord had taken her mother, and left him Gracie.

Then the Lord had taken Gracie from him too, in the first week, and given him back this.

By the second week he had stopped asking what she was. He had looked into those eyes and found her still there. He knew the Lord did not explain Himself to pastors.

An hour up here each night kept the valley for a day. Two, if she had fed well, and she had fed well on Arnie Voss.

He thought about Walter, out there in his dark house with his wife freezing and his boy in a hole in the yard and a stranger on his drive with a cat that knew.

Three times the Lord had offered Walter Hart his protection, and three times Walter had said no.

Stroud bent down until his mouth was at the bars beside the matted hair, and the smell of strawberries filled his head.

"Closer," he whispered.

And two kilometers away, out in the starlit snow around the Hart farmhouse, every demon took one step in, stopped, and waited for the next word.