Celeste slipped the brass loop over the nail, and once more St. Thomas's had a crucifix behind and above its altar platform.
Glancing at the rain-streaked windows and the unrelieved night beyond, Joey wondered if P.J. was watching them. What interpretation might he put upon their actions? Did he find these developments laughable — or alarming?
Joey said, "The tableau that he seems to want to create here — a mockery of the twelve apostles, arranged in a deconsecrated church, at the expense of twelve lives — it's not just an act of madness. It's almost… an offering."
"A while ago, you said he thinks he's like Judas."
"The Betrayer. Betraying his community, his family, his faith, even God. And passing along the corruption wherever he can. Pushing thirty dollars into my pocket in his car that night before sending me back to school."
"Thirty dollars — thirty pieces of silver."
Returning to the altar platform and putting aside the hammer, he grouped the six Christmas candles at one end of the white sheet. "Thirty dollars. Just a little symbolic gesture to amuse himself. Payment for my cooperation in letting him get away with her murder, making a little Judas out of me."
Frowning as she picked up the pack of matches and began to light the candles, Celeste said, "So he sees Judas Iscariot as — what? — like his patron saint on the dark side?"
"Something like that, I think."
"Did Judas go to Hell for betraying Christ?" she wondered.
"If you believe there's a Hell, then I guess he has one of the deepest rooms there," Joey said.
"You, of course, don't believe in Hell."
"Look, it doesn't really matter what I believe in, only what P.J. believes in."
"You're wrong about that."
Ignoring her comment, he said, "I don't pretend to know all the twists and turns of his delusions — just maybe the overall design of it. I think even a first-rate psychiatrist would have trouble mapping the weird landscape in my big brother's head."
As she finished lighting the six bayberry candles, Celeste said, "So P.J. comes home from New York, takes a ride around the county, and he sees how weird things have gotten here in Coal Valley. All the abandoned houses. The subsidence everywhere. More vent pipes than ever. The open pit of fire out on the edge of town. The church deconsecrated, condemned. It's as if the whole town's sliding into Hell. Sliding pretty fast, in fact, and right before his eyes. And it excites him. Is that what you think?"
"Yeah. A lot of psychotics are very susceptible to symbolism. They live in a different reality from ours. In their world, everyone and everything has secret meanings. There are no coincidences."
"You sound like you've crammed the subject for a test."
"Over the years I read lots of books about aberrant psychology. At first I told myself it was all research for novels I'd write. Then, when I admitted I'd never be a writer, I kept reading — as a hobby."
"But subconsciously, you were trying to understand P.J."
"A homicidal sociopath with religious delusions, of the sort that P.J. seems to have, might see demons and angels masquerading as ordinary people. He believes cosmic forces are at work in the simplest events. His world is a place of constant high drama and immense conspiracies."
Celeste nodded. She was the principal's daughter, after all, raised in a house full of books. "He's a citizen of Paranoialand. Yeah, okay, so maybe he's been killing for years, since he went away to college if not before, one girl here, one there, little offerings from time to time. But the situation in Coal Valley really gets his juices up, makes him want to do something special, something big."
Joey placed the ceramic statuette of the Holy Mother at the far end of the white sheets from the candles and plugged the cord into a socket on the side of the altar platform. "So now we'll screw up his plans by opening the door to God and inviting Him back into the church. We'll step straight into P.J.'s fantasy and fight symbolism with symbolism, counter superstition with superstition."
"And how will that stop him?" she asked, moving to Joey's end of the altar to light the three votive candles in the ruby glasses, which he had carefully arranged in front of the statuette of the Virgin.
"It'll rattle him, I think. That's the first thing we have to do — rattle him, shake his confidence and get him to come in out of the darkness, where we have a chance at him."
"He's like a wolf out there," she agreed, "just circling beyond the campfire light."
"He's promised this offering — twelve sacrifices, twelve innocent people — and now he feels he's got to deliver. But he's committed to setting up his tableau of corpses in a church from which God's been driven out."
"You seem so sure… as if you're in tune with him."
"He's my brother."
"It's a little scary," she said.
"For me too. But I sense that he needs St. Thomas's. He has no chance of finding another place like it, not tonight. And now that he's started all this, he feels compelled to finish it. Tonight. If he's watching us right now, he'll see what we're doing, and it'll rattle him, and he'll come in here to make us undo it all."
"Why won't he just shoot us through the windows, then come in and undo it all himself?"
"He might have handled it that way — if he'd realized soon enough what we were up to. But the moment we hung the crucifix, it was too late. Even if I'm only half right about his delusions, even if he's only half as deeply lost in his fantasy as I think he is… I don't believe he'll be able to touch a crucifix on a sanctuary wall any more easily than a vampire could."
Celeste lit the last of the three votive candles.
The altar should have looked absurd — like a playhouse vignette arranged by children engaged in a game of church. Even with their makeshift stage furnishings, however, they had created a surprisingly convincing illusion of a sacred space. Whether it was a function of the lighting or arose by contrast with the starkness of the stripped, deconsecrated, dusty church, an unnatural glow seemed to emanate from the bed sheets on the altar platform, as though they had been treated with phosphorescent dye; they were whiter than the whitest linens that Joey had ever seen. The crucifix, lighted from below and at an extreme angle, cast an absurdly large shadow across the back wall of the sanctuary, so it almost appeared as though the massive, hand-carved icon that had been removed during deconsecration had now been brought back and lovingly re-hung. The flames on the fat Christmas candles all burned strong and steady in spite of myriad cross drafts in the church; not one guttered or threatened to go out; curiously, the bayberry-scented wax smelled not at all like bayberry but quite like incense. By some fluke of positioning and trick of reflection, one of the votive candles in the ruby-red glasses cast a shimmering spot of crimson light on the breast of the small bronze crucifix.
"We're ready," Joey said.0
He put the two shotguns on the floor of the narrow presbytery, out of sight but within easy reach.
"He saw us with the guns earlier," Celeste said. "He knows we have them. He won't come close enough to let us use them."
"Maybe not. It depends on how deeply he believes in his fantasy, how invincible he feels."
Turning his back to the altar steps, Joey dropped to one knee behind the presbytery balustrade that overlooked the choir enclosure. The heavy handrail and the chunky balusters offered some protection from gunfire, but he wasn't under the illusion that they provided ideal cover. The gaps between the balusters were two to three inches wide. Besides, the wood was old and dry; hollow-point rounds from a high-caliber rifle would chop it into kindling pretty quickly, and some of the splinters would make deadly shrapnel.