day earn forgiveness for her. Agnes whispered:
“Dinumeraverunt omnia ossa mea.”5
Lucy mustered the strength to grab her heels and put them on to protect her feet from further injury caused by debris, and hobbled over to Agnes. Before she could grab her hand and hair away from the flame, Agnes turned and faced her. She held her hand up, palm facing Lucy, a silent sign to stop where she was.
“You’re sick,” Lucy insisted, hoping to bully some sense into her. “This isn’t you.”
“It is,” Agnes said. “It’s all of us.”
Agnes looked right through her as if she wasn’t there. A thousand-yard stare to cover a matter of inches.
The room was a split screen of pain and suffering, and Lucy didn’t know which way to turn, who to help first when she couldn’t even help herself. She understood how insanity could pounce on even the soundest and sharpest mind, which she always considered to be hers. The closeness of madness was overwhelming and keeping it at bay, a losing battle. Insanity beckoned. She kept telling herself deep breath, to put herself back in her body, but she couldn’t manage to take one.
“Seeing is believing,” Agnes mocked and started to giggle, her bloodstained face and hands almost disappearing in the dimness, giving the impression of a headless, limbless torso floating in space. “How do I look?”
“This is supposed to be a holy place!” Lucy cried. But her pleas were stifled by an explosive pain, the worst of them all. Molten wax from the candelabra rained down, droplets of fire splashing Lucy’s eyes, face, and hair. She was glazed, coated, like a mold. She felt as if her eyelids had been glued closed and her eyes cooked into gooey marbles in their sockets.
Blinded.
Suffocating.
Without mercy.
“I . . . can’t . . . see.”
Her instinct was to rip it away, but she didn’t. Instead she ran her trembling fingers along the cooling ridges of textured mass, the second skin that covered her. She had the sense of molting, but in reverse. Of being encased, like a wick inside one of the tapers, waiting for a match to ignite her, set her aflame and consume her.
Lucy fell to her knees.
Agnes’s recitations became more manic, more urgent.
Pleading.
“Petite et dabitur vobis quaerite et invenietis
pulsate et aperietur vobis.
Omnis enim qui petit accipit et qui quaerit
invenit et pulsanti aperietur.”6
“Sebastian!” CeCe cried desperately with what little strength she had left.
“Somebody, please. Help us!”
Suddenly, a shrill wail from the other side of the chapel pierced the silence.
“God,” Agnes screamed, as if waking from a horrible nightmare, in desperation. “Help us.”
Agnes cried out a final time:
“Adtendite a falsis prophetis qui veniunt ad vos in vestimentis
ovium intrinsecus autem sunt lupi rapaces.”7
The room fell silent as each lost consciousness. They couldn’t be sure how long it was before they came to. Both time and their suffering seemed to have stopped in that very moment.
A hand beneath her head and another clawing at her eyes awoke Lucy. They were Sebastian’s hands. She didn’t need her eyes to tell her that. She heard Agnes and Cecilia coughing and calling out for each other as he gently removed the last bits of wax. At least, she thought, they were alive.
“I’m with you,” he said. “You are with me.”
“Sebastian,” Lucy said, gratefully. “I can see.”
“Up?” the cheery elevator operator asked.
Jesse nodded and stepped in nervously. This elevator cab looked ancient to him. Art deco tiling on the floor and walls, deco lighting fixture attached to the ceiling. Polished brass railings. Reminded him of the elevators in his grandparents’ fancy Park Avenue prewar building, which always smelled vaguely of musty carpet and old people.
Jesse was dripping, his carefully coiffed ’do flattened, puddles forming at his feet. The momentary lull in the storm that had seduced him over to the hospital to meet Dr. Frey in person was nothing more than a meteorological headfake. But even the sudden cloudburst that assaulted him as he approached the hospital lobby couldn’t dampen his curiosity. He had to find out about Lucy.
The operator smiled. “Brought the storm inside with you I see. Floor?”
Jesse was put off, suspicious even. He figured the guy was trained to keep it light for the incoming patients’ benefit. Which was fine, except he wasn’t a patient and wasn’t keen to be seen as or treated as one.
“Top.”
He didn’t know the exact number and couldn’t bring himself to name it.
The operator slid the collapsible gate closed, pushed the car switch forward, and engaged the pulley motor. The cab jerked upward and