Vicious Circle

There are churches that people will travel a thousand miles out of their way to see. St. Michael’s wasn’t one of those. Don’t get me wrong—it was old, and impressive enough in its way. Early Gothic, very early, taking its shape from Abbé Suger’s original prescription, which meant that it was straight up and down and plain as a pike. A colossal ecclesiastical doghouse on which the Holy Spirit could sleep like Snoopy until the day of judgment.

Some people would argue that he’d overslept.

This was where Juliet had told me to meet her, but she was nowhere in sight. All I could do was wait—and while I did, I became aware of a very faint presence somewhere close by. It was something immaterial and shifting, so faint that just the act of focusing my attention on it made it roll back out of reach as though my mind were a searchlight. Whatever it was it had strongly negative overtones for me—like the psychic equivalent of some bitter medicine I’d taken long ago and never forgotten.

Curious, I laid my hands on the church door again, closed my eyes and listened with my extra sense.

Nothing at first—except for the discomfort of the cold wood against the palms of my hands. Maybe I’d been mistaken in the first place, and all I was feeling was the remains of that psychic hangover I’d had the day before. I considered taking out my whistle and seeing if I could refine the search a little, but just then a woman’s footsteps stirred a recursive symphony of echoes on the flags behind me. I turned with a witty and slightly obscene quip ready to launch, but it died before I could even open my mouth, because this wasn’t Juliet walking toward me. It was a young woman with bookish spectacles and shoulder-length white-blond hair. She was slight and petite, pale-complexioned, and she walked with her shoulders hunched up as if against heavy rain. Except that the rain had rolled away westward: it was a fine night in late spring, and if it weren’t for the cold under the shadow of the church I might even be feeling overdressed in my heavy greatcoat. As it was, she clearly felt that her beige two-piece was too skimpy, even though the sleeves were full and the skirt was demurely calf-length; hands folded, she rubbed her upper arms nervously as she approached me.

Lashless black eyes blinked at me from behind those “I am serious” glasses.

“Mr. Castor?” the woman said, tentatively, as if the question might give offense.

“That’s me,” I said.

“I’m Susan Book, the verger. Umm . . . Miss Salazar is around the back, in the cemetery. She asked me to show you the way.”

Her voice had that rising inflection that turns statements into questions. Normally that irritates me a little, but Susan Book was so clearly anxious to please that resenting her, even in the privacy of your own mind, would have felt like taking a hot iron to a puppy. She held out her hand diffidently. I took it and shook it, holding on long enough to listen in on her feelings. They were dark and confused: something was clearly weighing on her mind. I let go, sharpish; I’d had enough of that for one day.

“I’m all yours,” I said, and I threw out my arm to indicate that she should lead the way. She started and spun around as though I were pointing to something behind her. Then she recovered, blushed, and darted me a quick, flustered glance.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m really nervous today. All of this—” She shrugged and made a face. Not knowing what she was talking about, all I could do was nod sympathetically. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she’d come. I fell in alongside her.

“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” she said wistfully.

“Juliet?”

“Yes, Jul—Miss Salazar. She’s so strong. I don’t mean physically strong, I mean spiritually. The strength of faith. You can tell just by looking at her that nothing can shake her, or make her doubt herself.” There was something in her voice that sounded like yearning. “I really admire that.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Well, up to a point. Self-doubt can be useful, too, though.”

“Can it?”

“Definitely. Prevents you from jumping straight off a cliff because you think you can fly, for example.”

She laughed uncertainly, as though she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I was joking. “The canon says that doubts are like workouts,” she said. “If he’s right, I ought to be benching two hundred and fifty pounds by now. I seem to get doubts all the time. But this—maybe the—maybe I’ll get stronger by dealing with all of this. Good comes out of evil. That’s His way.”

I caught the capital “H” on “His,” which my brother Matthew uses, too, but there was an almost equally weighted emphasis on “all of this,” and I was tempted to ask her what the hell it was that had happened here. But I assumed there was some reason why Juliet hadn’t briefed me in advance, so I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say a word about Juliet herself, either, although I wondered what Susan would think if she knew what Miss Salazar’s real name was, or where she hailed from. Best to leave her with her illusions intact.