"Hey, kiddo, don't you see who you're talking to? This is your brother here. What's wrong with you? Am I your brother, the one who always fought all your fights with you, took good care of you? Am I ever going to hurt you? Hurt you? Does that make any sense at all?"
Celeste rose from her knees to stand beside Joey, as though she sensed that any small show of courage on her part would help convince P.J. that she and Joey were confident about the protection provided by the symbols with which they had surrounded themselves. Their confidence might feed his apprehension.
"If you're not afraid of the church, why won't you come farther in?" Joey asked.
"Why's it so warm in here?" P.J. tried to sound as self-assured as always, but doubt tainted his voice. "What's there to be afraid of? Nothing."
"Then come on in."
"There's nothing sacred here."
"Prove it. Put your fingers in the holy water."
P.J. turned his attention to the marble font at his right side. "It was dry before. You put the water there yourself."
"Did we?"
"It hasn't been blessed," P.J. said. "You're not a damn priest. It's just ordinary water."
"Then put your fingers in it."
Joey had read of psychotics who, swept away by delusions that they possessed Satanic power, were capable of literally blistering when they put their fingers into holy water or touched a crucifix. The injuries they suffered were real, although induced entirely by their own powers of suggestion, by the depth of their belief in their own sick fantasies.
When P.J. continued to regard the shallow pool of holy water with trepidation, Joey said, "Go on, touch it, go on — or are you afraid it'll eat into your hand, burn like an acid?"
P.J. reached hesitantly toward the marble bowl. Like a dragonfly, his spread fingers hovered over the water. Then he pulled his hand back.
"Jesus," Celeste said softly.
They had found a way to use P.J.'s madness to protect themselves from him.
The first time that he had lived through this night, Joey had been little more than a boy, just out of his teens, up against not merely an older brother but a psychopath of extreme cunning and high intelligence. Now, he had twenty years of experience on P.J., which gave him the psychological advantage this time.
"You can't touch us," Joey said. "Not here in this sacred place. You can't do anything that you planned to do here, P.J. Not now, not since we've let God back inside these walls. All you can do now is run for it. Morning will roll around eventually, and we'll just wait here until someone comes looking for us or until someone finds the Bimmers."
P.J. tried again to put his hand in the water, but he couldn't do it. Crying out wordlessly in fear and frustration, he kicked the font.
The wide marble bowl crashed off the fluted pedestal, and P.J. took sufficient courage from that destruction to rush forward into the nave while the font was still toppling.
Joey stooped and reached for the 20-gauge.
Even as the contents of the bowl spilled onto the floor, P.J. stepped into the spreading puddle, and a cloud of sulfurous steam erupted around his feet as if the water had indeed been blessed and had reacted with fierce corrosive power upon encountering the shoe of a demon-ridden man.
Joey realized that the floor must have been much hotter at the back of the nave than in the sanctuary, fearfully hot.
Having noticed the extreme and increasing heat in the church, P.J. should have realized as much himself; however, in his dementia, he reacted not with reason but with superstitious panic. The gush of steam from the "holy" water reinforced his bizarre delusion, and he screamed as if he'd actually been burned. In fact, he surely was suffering, because to anyone afflicted with psychosomatic pain, it seemed as genuine as the real thing. P.J. let out a shriek of abject misery, slipped and fell in the water, into more steam, landing hard on his hands and
knees, wailing, squealing. He raised his hands, fingers smoking, and then put them to his face but tore them away at once, as though the beads of water on them were indeed the tears of Christ and were searing his lips, his cheeks, half blinding him. He thrashed to his feet, stumbled out of the nave into the narthex, to the front doors, into the night, alternately shouting in rage and bleating in purest anguish, like neither a man nor a man possessed but like a wild beast in excruciating torment.
Joey had only half raised the Remington. P.J. had never come close enough to warrant the use of the gun.
"My God," Celeste said shakily.
"That was amazing luck," Joey agreed.
But they were talking about different things.
She said, "What luck?"
"The hot floor."
"It's not that hot," she said.
He frowned. "Well, it must be a lot hotter back there than at this end of the building. In fact, I'm wondering how long we'll even be safe here."
"It wasn't the floor."
"You saw—"
"It was him."
"Him?"
She was as deathly pale as one of the distorted, ghostly faces of condensation on the church windows. Staring at the shallow puddle that was still lightly steaming at the far end of the center aisle, she said, "He couldn't touch it. Wasn't worthy."
"No. Nonsense. It was just the hot floor meeting the cool water, steam—"
She shook her head vigorously. "Corrupt. Couldn't touch something holy."
"Celeste—"
"Corrupt, foul, tainted."
Worried that she was on the brink of hysteria, he said, "Have you forgotten?"
Celeste met his eyes, and he saw such an acute awareness in her that he dismissed all concerns about panic attacks and hysteria. In fact, there was a curiously humbling quality about her piercing stare. She'd forgotten nothing. Nothing. And he sensed that her perception was, in fact, clearer than his.
Nevertheless, he said, "We put the water in the font."
"So?"
"Not a priest."
"So?"
"We put it there, and it's just ordinary water."
"I saw what it did to him."
"Just steam—"
"No, Joey. No, no." She spoke rapidly, running sentences together, frantic to convince him: "I got a glimpse of his hands, part of his face, his skin was blistered, red and peeling, the steam can't have been that hot, not off a wooden floor."
"Psychosomatic injury," he assured her.
"No."
"The power of the mind, autohypnosis."
"There's not much time," she said urgently, looking around at the crucifix and then at the candles, as if to make sure that their stage setting was still in order.
"I don't think he'll be back," Joey said.
"He will."
"But when we played straight into his fantasy, we scared the bejesus —
"No. He can't be frightened. Nothing can scare him."
Even in her urgency, she seemed mildly dazed, in shock. But Joey was overcome by the odd certainty that she was not distracted, as she seemed, but was functioning at a level of awareness and with a degree of insight that he had never known. Heightened perceptions.
She crossed herself. " … in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti… " She was spooking Joey worse than P.J. had done.
"A homicidal psychotic," Joey said nervously, "is full of rage, sure, but he can be as susceptible to fear as any sane person. Many of them—"
"No. He's the father of fear—"
"— many of them live in constant terror—"
"— the father of lies, such inhuman fury—"
"— even when they're on power fantasies like he is, they live in fear of—"
"— fury driving him for eternity." Her expressive eyes were glazed, haunted. "He never gives up, never will, nothing to lose, in a perpetual state of hatred and rage ever since the Fall…. "