Reborn

1

As she walked along the harborfront, Carol heard the refrain from Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay" through the open window of a passing car. She remembered how taken Jim had been with the song when he'd first heard it a couple of weeks ago. Now Jim was dead, just like Otis.

She tried to shake off the morbid associations, but everyplace she went reminded her in some way of Jim. And God, how she needed him now.

The heat and humidity were becoming oppressive. What breeze there was off the harbor was like a big dog panting in her face. She heard a faint rumble of thunder and looked up to see a towering mass of clouds sliding across the sky, smothering the sun. Those thunderheads seemed to be in an awful hurry. Flickers of lightning flashed against their dark underbellies. Before she knew it, the bright afternoon was gone, replaced by the still, heavy gloom that precedes a storm.

Just what I need, she thought.

Carol hated thunderstorms. But Jim had always loved them. She would cringe against him with her hands over her ears and her eyes squeezed tightly shut while he stared out a window in rapt fascination at the lightning. The more ferocious the storm, the better for Jim.

But there would be no one to huddle with in this storm, and it looked like it was going to be a whopper. She began to hurry back toward Shore Drive.

Suddenly the storm leapt upon the town. A cold wind beat against the still warm air and drove it off. The lightning narrowed from pale sheets into lancing bolts of crackling blue-white fury, the thunder rose from muttered rumbles to the sound of savage giants wielding monstrous sledgehammers against the tin dome of the sky. Then the rain came. Huge wind-driven drops, scattered at first, left silver-dollar-size splotches on the streets and sidewalks, followed by sheets of icy water that beat the swirling dust into mud and carried it away in eddying rivulets that in no time were running two inches deep along the curbs.

Carol was soaked in an instant. She ran under a tree but remembered how that was supposed to be the worst place to wait out a thunderstorm. Up ahead, half a block away, she saw her old parish church—Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. It had to be safer than this tree.

As she dashed for the front door, hail began to pound out of the sky, icy white pellets, mostly marble-size but some as big as golf balls, bouncing off the pavement, pelting her head and shoulders, making a terrific racket on the cars parked along the curb. She ran up the stone steps, praying the front door was unlocked. It yielded to her tug and allowed her into the cool, dry silence of the vestibule.

Abruptly the storm seemed far away.

Church. When was the last time she had been in church? Somebody's wedding? A christening? She couldn't remember. She hadn't been much of a churchgoer since her teens. Looking back, she thought she could blame her falling away on a reaction to her parents' deaths. Her careless attitude toward church had caused some friction with Aunt Grace during her college years, but no big scenes. She never became antireligious like Jim; it was just that after a while there simply didn't seem much point in all that kneeling and praying every Sunday to a God who with each passing year seemed increasingly remote and indifferent. But she remembered times between her parents' death and her falling away when coming to Our Lady alone and just sitting here in the quiet had given her a form of solace.

She looked around the vestibule. To her left was the baptismal font and, to the right, the stairway to the choir loft. During seventh and eighth grades she had sung in the choir every Sunday at the nine a.m. children's Mass.

She shivered. Her hair and bare shoulders still dripped with rain and her wet sundress clung to her like an ill-fitting second skin.

She opened the door and stepped into the nave. As she walked up the center aisle, the rapid-fire lightning flashes from the storm illuminated the stained-glass windows, strobing bright patterns of colored light across the pews and the altar, almost like one of those psychedelic light shows that were so popular with the acid heads.

Thunder shook the building again and again as she walked about two thirds of the way to the altar and slipped into a pew. She knelt and buried her face in her hands to shut out the lightning. Questions kept echoing through her mind: How was she going to do this alone? How was she going to raise this baby without Jim?

You are not!

Her head snapped up. The words startled her. Who… ?

She hadn't really heard them. They hadn't been spoken. They had sounded in her mind. Yet she glanced around the church anyway. She was alone. The only other human figures present were the life-size statues of the Virgin Mary standing in the alcove by the pulpit to the left of the altar, her foot crushing the serpent of Satan; over on the right, the crucified Christ.

For a heart-stopping instant, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Christ's thorn-crowned head move, but when she looked again, straight on, it seemed unchanged. Just a trick of the flashing light from the storm.

Suddenly she felt a change in the empty church. The atmosphere had been open and accepting when she had entered; now she sensed an air of burgeoning unwelcomeness, of outright hostility.

And she felt hot. The chill from her rain-soaked sundress was gone, replaced by a growing sensation of heat. Her skin felt scorched, scalded.

A sound like cracking wood startled her. She looked around, but because of the way sound echoed through the wide-open nave and across the vaulted ceiling, it seemed to come from all sides. Then the pew shifted under her. Frightened, she stumbled out into the aisle. The cracking sounds began to boom around her, louder than ever. The creaks, the groans, the screams of tortured wood filled the air. She watched the pews begin to shift, to twist, to warp and writhe as if in agony.

Suddenly the pew she had just vacated buckled and split lengthwise along the seat with a sound like a cannon shot. All around her the other pews began to crack in a deafening fusillade. Fighting the trapped, panicky feeling, she clapped her hands over her ears against the roar and staggered in a slow circle. In the flickering, kaleidoscopic light, splinters flew into the air as the pews cracked and pulled loose from the marble floor.

And she was hot! So hot! A mist rose before her eyes. She looked at her arms and saw tendrils of smoke curling, twisting, rising from her wet skin. Her whole body was steaming!

The flickering light, the rumble of the thunder, the screams of the tortured wood—it all seemed centered on her. She had to get out of here!

As she turned to run, she saw the head of the crucified Christ moving. Her knees went soft as she realized that this wasn't a trick of the light.

The statue had raised its head and was looking at her.