Kate looked away.“Then that’s your problem.”
Catherine sighed.“It always will be.”
Kate stood, collecting plates.“I should go.Early start tomorrow.”
Her mother didn’t stop her.But as Kate reached the door, Catherine said softly, “I know you have a feeling, Kate.I just hope that’s all it is.”
Kate paused, hand on the doorknob.“What if it isn’t?”
“Then we’ll face it.Together.”
Kate turned, met her mother’s eyes, and nodded once.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt.
Outside, the night had grown cold.The streetlights threw long, pale stripes across the pavement.As she walked toward her car, Kate felt the familiar weight settle over her — not fear exactly, but vigilance.
She thought of her dream again.The locked door.The voice outside.
She knew who it was.
And she knew, with a clarity that chilled her, that one day soon, he would stop knocking.
He would open the door.
CHAPTER TWO
The Church of St.Simon and St.Jude stood on the corner of 138th Street and an avenue so cracked and potholed that even the rats seemed to avoid it.Its windows had been boarded long ago; the boards now flaked, curled, and wept resinous streaks when the sun hit them.Families of pigeons occupied the belfry, and in the narthex, water from a broken roof gutter trickled down a wall in slow, deliberate lines.
Once, in the days when there were congregations, children would have been christened here, women married, old men buried.Now the place smelled of dust, candle grease, and the faint, unmistakable tang of burnt cloth.
Elijah Cox liked it.The two martyrs, Simon sawn in half, Jude beheaded with an axe; the violence of their deaths was beautifully fitting for this stage of his mission.Not to mention the fact that Kate’s father met his end at a church in Portland, Maine, with exactly the same name.She’d be shocked by the parallel, he was sure of that.Although he wasn’t sure if she’d ever find out.He liked the uncertainty of that, too.
He sat in the chancel where the pulpit had once stood, the floor littered with the relics of old sermons—splintered pews, hymnals swollen with damp, the unidentifiable husks of dead birds.Around him, the walls bloomed with images.Hundreds of them.
Man Friday had been busy.Pasting up page after page of false-breasted, pretend-smiling, older-than-advertized girls from porn magazines.Who even read such things these days?Who wanted to deal with the awkwardness, handing over your money to some smirking checkout girl, when you could download it all on to your phone in privacy?Was Friday really, truly unaware of what had happened over the last thirty years?
Cox sat in a folding chair, examining the living space that the little man had carved out of a decaying church. Artwork aside, he’d done well.Clothes hanging neat and straight on a rail.The former altar now home to a little gas stove.Prison-cosy.Everything in straight lines.
Cox had learnt his own straight lines in the army.Where everything was folded, everything was about clean corners and everything — from your boots to the unseen underside of the taps in the bathroom and the hinges on your locker-box — had to shine.
The godless rituals of the army had been the seeds of his faith.Each sunrise inspection re-enacting the opening of Genesis, each man in the platoon claiming mastery over chaos with little more than a brush, a cloth and a tape measure.
There was a peace to be found in that purity, a stillness that soothed the inner screaming.For a while.For some years, in fact.Longer than his brief, undistinguished career in the military, at least.
Outside, the sound of traffic seeped faintly through the broken stained glass, the noise of the Bronx on a Sunday afternoon—delivery bikes, children shouting, a radio playing bachata somewhere far down the block.
Sunday.
He thought about that, and he smiled.The day the Lord had rested, but the rest of humanity could not.All those little men and women who could not sit still, who felt the gnawing emptiness of the seventh day and sought to fill it up with errands and emails and phone calls and the bottomless brunch.
The Sabbath, shabbat to the Jews, stemmed from the ancient Semitic rootsh-b-tmeaning ‘cease’.Because it was as simple as that.People only had to stop.Only nobody was capable of it anymore.And this day, set apart by God for reflection and renewal, had become a day for bargains, for shopping, for gossip.
That displeased and pleased him, equally.Because Sundays revealed the sinners.He looked down at his hands, cut in the struggle, now cracked and sore from the rubbing alcohol.The sting reminding him that he was alive, and his first victim was not.
From one of the back pews came the sound of movement—soft footsteps, hesitant.
“Man Friday,” Cox said, without turning his head.
