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He was looking out at the city, at the million lights spread across four hundred square miles.
How did you get here, I wondered. How did you get past the guard at the gate or, no, what? over the wall! Yes. A ladder and the graveyard wall!
I heard a ballpeen hammer strike. I heard a body dragged. A trunk lid slammed. A match lighted. An incinerator roared.
I sucked my breath. The Beast turned to stare at me.
I stumbled and almost fell off the cathedral rim. I grappled one of the gargoyles.
Instantly, the Beast sprang up.
His hand seized my hand.
For a single breath we teetered on the cathedral rim. I read his eyes, fearful of me. He read mine, fearful of him.
Then he snatched his hand back as if burned with surprise. He backed off swiftly and we stood half-crouched.
I looked into that dreadful face, the panicked and forever imprisoned eyes, the wounded mouth, and thought:
Why? Why didn’t you let me go? or push me? You are the one with the hammer, aren’t you? The one who came to find and smash Roy’s terrible clay head? No one but you could have run so wild! Why did you save me? Why do I live?
There could be no response. Something clattered below. Someone was coming up the ladder.
The Beast let out a great heaving whisper: “No!”
And fled across the high porch. His feet thudded the loose planks. Dust exploded down through the cathedral darkness.
More climbing noises. I moved to follow the Beast at the far ladder. He looked back a final time. His eyes! What? What about his eyes?
They were different and the same, terrified and accepting, one moment focused, one moment confused. His hand swung up on the dark air. For a moment I thought he might call, shout, shriek at me. But only a strange choked gasp unraveled from his lips. Then I heard his feet plunging down step by step away from this unreal world above to a more terribly unreal world below.
I stumbled to pursue. My feet shuffled dust and plaster of paris. It flowed like sand seeping through an immense hourglass to pile itself, far below, near the baptistery font. The boards under my feet rattled and swayed. A wind flapped all the cathedral canvas around me in a great migration of wings, and I was on the ladder and jolting down, with each jolt a cry of alarm or a curse trapped in my teeth. My God, I thought, me and him, that thing, on the ladder, running away from what?
I glanced up to see the gargoyles lost to view and I was alone, descending in darkness, thinking: What if he waits for me, down there?
I froze. I looked down.
If I fall, I thought, it’ll take a year to reach the floor. I only knew one saint. His name popped from my lips: Crumley!
Hold tight, said Crumley, a long way off. Take six deep breaths.
I sucked in but the air refused to go back out of my mouth. Smothered, I glanced at the lights of Los Angeles spread in a four-hundred-mile bed of lamps and traffic, all those people multitudinous and beautiful, and no one here to help me down, and the lights! street by street, the lights!
Far out on the rim of the world, I thought I saw a long dark tide move to an untouchable shore.
Body surfing, whispered Constance.
That did it. I jolted down and kept moving, eyes shut, no more glances into the abyss, until I reached and stood, waiting to be seized and destroyed by the Beast, hands outraised to kill, not save.
But there was no Beast. Just the empty baptismal font, cupping a half pint of cathedral dust, and the blown candles and the lost incense.
I looked up a last time through the half facade of Notre Dame. Whoever was climbing had reached the top.
Half a continent away, a mob on Calvary hill let go like a Saturday-afternoon football reunion.
J. C., I thought, if you’re not here, where?
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