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By Root 563 0

room of the rectory, and the sun flooded in the large front windows in bars that looked thick enough to slice. Watching the dust motes that danced dreamily in the sun shafts, Callahan was reminded of an old cartoon he had seen somewhere. Cleaning woman with a broom is staring in surprise down at the floor; she has swept away part of her shadow. He felt a little like that now. For the second time in twenty-four hours he had been confronted with a stark impossibility-only now the impossibility had corroboration from a writer, a seemingly levelheaded little boy, and a doctor whom the town respected. Still, an impossibility was an impossibility. You couldn’t sweep away your own shadow. Except that it seemed to have happened.

‘This would be much easier to accept if you could have arranged for a thunderstorm and a power failure,’ he said.

‘It’s quite true,’ Jimmy said. ‘I assure you.’ His hand went to his neck.

Father Callahan got up and pulled something out of Jimmy’s black bag-two truncated baseball bats with sharpened points. He turned one of them over in his hands and said, ‘Just a moment, Mrs Smith. This won’t hurt a bit.’

No one laughed.

Callahan put the stakes back, went to the window, and looked out at Jointner Avenue. ‘You are all very persuasive,’ he said. ‘And I suppose I must add one little piece which you now do not have in your possession.’ He turned back to them.

‘There is a sign in the window of the Barlow and Straker Furniture Shop,’ he said. ‘It says, "Closed Until Further Notice." I went down this morning myself promptly at nine o’clock to discuss Mr Burke’s allegations with your mysterious Mr Straker. The shop is locked, front and back.’

‘You have to admit that jibes with what Mark says,’ Ben remarked.

‘Perhaps. And perhaps it’s only chance. Let me ask you again: Are you sure you must have the Catholic Church in this?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘But we’ll proceed without you if we have to. If it comes to that, I’ll go alone.’

‘No need of that,’ Father Callahan said, rising. ‘Follow me across to the church, gentlemen, and I will hear your confessions.’

9

Ben knelt awkwardly in the darkness of the confessional, his mind whirling, his thoughts inchoate. Flicking through them was a succession of surreal images: Susan in the park; Mrs Glick backing away from the makeshift tongue-depressor cross, her mouth an open, writhing wound; Floyd Tibbits coming out of his car in a lurch, dressed like a scarecrow, charging him; Mark Petrie leaning in the window of Susan’s car. For the first and only time, the possibility that all of this might be a dream occurred to him, and his tired mind clutched at it eagerly.

His eye fell on something in the corner of the confessional, and he picked it up curiously. It was an empty Junior Mints box, fallen from the pocket of some little boy, perhaps. A touch of reality that was undeniable. The cardboard was real and tangible under his fingers. This nightmare was real.

The little sliding door opened. He looked at it but could see nothing beyond. There was a heavy screen in the opening.

‘What should I do?’ He asked the screen.

‘Say, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."‘

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ Ben said his voice sounding strange and heavy in the enclosed space.

‘Now tell me your sins.’

‘All of them?’ Ben asked, appalled.

‘Try to be representative,’ Callahan said, his voice dry. ‘I know we have something to do before dark.’

Thinking hard and trying to keep the Ten Commandments before him as a kind of sorting screen, Ben began. It didn’t become easier as he went along. There was no sense of catharsis-only the dull embarrassment that went with telling a stranger the mean secrets of his life. Yet he could see how this ritual could become compulsive: as bitterly compelling as strained rubbing alcohol for the chronic drinker or the pictures behind the loose board in the bathroom for an adolescent boy. There was something medieval about it, something accursed-a ritual act of regurgitation. He found himself remembering a scene from the Bergman picture The Seventh