The one reflected in the waters of the fountain was an insane parody of his own face. A mask, depicting some intense struggle of mental combat between some outer and inner force over which he had no conscious control. He continued to hold the girl’s head below the surface of the fountain pool.
His other face mocked back at him.
Full of pity, horror and astonishment.
The reflected other face was distorted into the visage of some strange monster. A demented, rabid animal with bared teeth and glaring eyes.
Brent’s mentality rocked into chaos.
The outer force was saying: Put my hands around her throat. Hold her head down in the water till she dies.
The inner force was fighting back with: Take my hands off her throat. Get out of my head!
Brent groaned, mingling a gasp and a grunt, as both forces locked for possession of his soul.
With his hands still clasped about the girl’s neck, Brent’s voice tore savagely from his throat.
“Take . . . put my hands off . . . round her throat . . . hold her . . . throat . . . get out of my head . . . down in the water . . . till she . . .” his voice rose in a roar of sound, “DIES!” And then, “No . . . ! NO!”
He wrenched his hands from her throat with a Herculean effort, reeling away from her. For a terrible moment he swayed on his feet, dumbly staring. He felt an appalled sense of horror. Nova came up from the pool, splashing, choking, gagging. She sagged against the stone circular side of the fountain, goggling at him with mingled terror and amazement. Brent fought himself not to approach her. The war in his mind was still raging. Kill her. Don’t kill her. He shook his head like a confused dog, fighting the outer pressures that wanted to push him toward her, destruction-bound. But Nova remained motionless, mutely staring at him.
Brent’s lips barely moved.
“Nova, keep away from her throat . . . her bare throat in the water until you get out . . .” His hand came up in a wild wave. As if pushing something away from himself. He stopped up his ears with both hands. “Get out!” he raged at the silence all around them. “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”
He backed away from the girl frantically.
She stared up at him, her mouth hanging open.
He pushed out with both hands again.
The fountain—and Nova—receded . . .
Suddenly, his shoulders had touched something.
Huge double doors, abruptly behind him, loomed large and mysterious. Oddly unlocked. Brent’s athletic figure swung the doors open. He forced himself back, over a dim threshold, glad of anything that would keep him from harming the girl. Nova grew smaller in his erratic vision. He stopped, only for a second, to call back to her. For she was taking a hesitant step toward him, slender arms outspread.
“Wait for me—” Brent whispered, still fighting the forces engulfing him. “Nova—!” His brain was on fire. Her figure wavered in his sight. Shouting hysterically, Brent crossed the dark threshold and slammed the double doors behind him to close out the horror in his head. To block off Nova from his violence.
She disappeared from view.
Brent hung exhausted against the curved metal door grips on the inside and fought to catch his breath. For a long moment he wrestled with his inner and outer wills. Then he quietened. The strange fit had momentarily passed. He sucked air into his lungs and shuddered. Then he pulled himself erect once more. Turning, he surveyed the interior of this building he had fled into as a sanctuary from insanity.
The unrealities again ruled.
Even here.
He was in a cathedral.
In direct contrast to the bright white glare without, here was only blessed gloom. Brent’s eyes roved quickly.
He saw a row of wooden pews flanking a great arched nave. There was a threshold up front, past the choir stalls, beyond the pews. He saw a prie-dieu directly below a high altar of some kind. Brent blinked in the occult semidarkness.
There was a man standing on the sacred threshold up front.
A white-robed, white-hooded apparition, kneeling in homage or religious fealty of some kind. A figure as still as any statue. The figure had not moved when the great doors had slammed shut. Brent, for all his dazed condition, recognized in that tiny unimportant fact a universal truth and oddity: why shouldn’t a cathedral door always be open to devotees?
Brent watched the hooded figure, not daring to breathe. Or even speak. The hush of the place was emotionally demoralizing.
The hood lifted upward, the robed arms spread out like bat wings and a sonorous voice suddenly intoned: “I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!” The voice rang with the clarity and persuasion of unshakable faith and belief. Brent found his eyes ranging upward, following the direction of the stentorian declaration.
Slowly, from the space of darkness above the high altar, an eerie light appeared. Growing, expanding, as if on a rheostat; the gloom transformed from dim illumination to a full, blazing intensity. The outflung arms of the hooded figure held in a posture of crucifixion. And utter adoration.
Brent saw what the new light held.
Not a statue of Christ.
Not even some strange unknown pagan god.
The hooded figure’s exhortations were for something else.
The ultimate blasphemy.
Something mounted and enthroned and positioned with all the care and reverence of any highly esteemed religious curio.
A Twentieth-Century Atom Bomb.
Perfectly preserved and slung, like some great inverted cross, between two supporting brackets of hammered gold, it hung from the arched nave in all its illuminated wonder. On one of its impressive steel fins there were stenciled the two Greek letters: ALPHA and OMEGA.
The Beginning and the End.
Brent stared in mounting horror from the depths of the double doors. “In a church—?” His racked whisper was alien to his own ears. It was as if someone else had spoken.
A tiny scratch of sound came on the door behind him. Back to the barrier, Brent suddenly drew taut. The scratching continued. He closed his eyes. “Nova?” The scratching burbled into a flurry of sounds. Brent slid both hands into the door grips, blocking the portals with his body, his muscles congealing into lead. He didn’t budge. “Keep away, Nova,” he whispered urgently to the door. “Keep away from me—and from here . . .”
But the tapping had become almost a crescendo, punctuated with fist-pounding and low moans of appeal. Brent tightened his resolve; perspiration broke out on his forehead. He couldn’t let the girl in here, no matter what happened . . .
The hooded figure on the dais had turned.
An ornate panel at his side, with three jeweled buttons of emerald, topaz and ruby set into the top of the prie-dieu, was pressed. Brent saw the gesture, realizing that the figure had heard Nova’s attempts to get in.
The figure rose to its full height and made another gesture. Brent started. He knew somehow, with some weird sense of comprehension, that what he was seeing was the Sign of the Bomb.
An inverted Sign of the Cross. With the figure making a vertical downward gesture to depict the body of the Bomb and then two lateral gestures to indicate the fins at its base. The supreme sacrilege! A sign from Hell.
The whole cathedral suddenly flooded with new light.
Even as Nova continued to pound away, the hooded figure came down from the dais and stalked toward Brent huddled at the doors of the strange place of worship. And when the pounding stopped, with Brent blinking in the sudden fresh glare of illumination, the hooded figure advanced like a specter. Brent wondered at the silence beyond the door. He started to open it, then checked himself and turned to confront the advancing figure. Nova was forgotten.