imagine that, at the sight of me, Father Tom would scream for Jesse Pinn, and that the undertaker would fly back, black suit flapping, with the inhuman caterwaul vibrating between his thin lips.
Besides, Pinn and his crew evidently were holding the priest’s sister somewhere. Possession of her gave them a lever and fulcrum with which to move Father Tom, while I had no leverage whatsoever.
The chilling music of the torquing chains gradually faded, and the sword of light described a steadily diminishing arc.
Without a protest, without even an involuntary groan, the priest drew himself to his knees, gathered himself to his feet. He was not able to stand fully erect. Hunched like an ape and no longer comic in any aspect of face or body, with one hand on the railing, he began to pull himself laboriously up the steep, creaking steps toward the church above.
When at last he reached the top, he would switch off the lights, and I would be left here below in a darkness that even St. Bernadette herself, miracle worker of Lourdes, would find daunting. Time to go.
Before retracing my path through the life-size figures of the crèche, I raised my eyes for the first time to the painted eyes of the lute-playing angel in front of me—and thought I saw a blue to match my own. I studied the rest of the lacquered-plaster features and, although the light was weak, I was sure that this angel and I shared a face.
This resemblance paralyzed me with confusion, and I struggled to understand how this Christopher Snow angel could have been here waiting for me. I have rarely seen my own face in brightness, but I know its reflection from the mirrors of my dimly lit rooms, and this was a similar light. This was unquestionably me: beatific as I am not, idealized, but me.
Since my experience in the hospital garage, every incident and object seemed to have significance. No longer could I entertain the possibility of coincidence. Everywhere I looked, the world oozed uncanniness.
This was, of course, the route to madness: viewing all of life as one elaborate conspiracy conducted by elite manipulators who see all and know all. The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut. Cosmically speaking, we are barely able to tie our shoes. If there is, indeed, some secret order to the universe, it is not of our doing, and we are probably not even capable of apprehending it.
The priest was a third of the way up the stairs.
Stupefied, I studied the angel.
Many nights during the Christmas season, year after year, I had cycled along the street on which St. Bernadette’s stood. The crèche had been arranged on the front lawn of the church, each figure in its proper place, none of the gift-bearing magi posing as a proctologist to camels—and this angel had not been there. Or I hadn’t realized that it was there. The likely explanation, of course, was that the display was too brightly lighted for me to risk admiring it; the Christopher Snow angel had been part of the scene, but I had always turned my face from it, squinted my eyes.
The priest was halfway up the stairs and climbing faster.
Then I remembered that Angela Ferryman had attended Mass at St. Bernadette’s. Undoubtedly, considering her dollmaking, she had been prevailed upon to lend her talent to the making of the crèche.
End of mystery.
I still couldn’t understand why she would have assigned my face to an angel. If my features belonged anywhere in the manger scene, they should have been on the donkey. Clearly, her opinion of me had been higher than I warranted.
Unwanted, an image of Angela rose in my mind’s eye: Angela as I had last seen her on the bathroom floor, her eyes fixed on some last sight farther away than Andromeda, head tilted backward into the toilet bowl, throat slashed.
Suddenly I was certain that I had missed an important detail when I’d found her poor torn body. Repulsed by the gouts of blood, gripped by grief, in a state of shock and fear, I had avoided looking long at her—just as, for years, I had avoided looking at the figures in the brightly lighted crèche outside the church. I had seen a vital clue, but it had not registered consciously. Now