"What do you mean, downstairs? Where're we going?"

"Will you just come on?" Luke countered. "Jesus, what's wrong with you?"

"I-I just don't feel so good," Jared replied.

Luke turned to look at him, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. "Well, you don't look like anything's wrong," he said. "You trying to stick me with all the work?"

Jared glared at him. "I just need to use the can. No big deal."

As he followed Luke down the aisle, his queasiness getting worse, he prayed that he wouldn't puke or have an attack of diarrhea right here in the middle of the church. Luke would never let him forget that. Everything inside him was churning by the time they got to the sacristy, and when he saw the stairs at the back of the small chamber, he hurried down them. At the bottom, there were three storage closets and the rest room.

"Start getting the stuff," Jared said. "I'll be out in a minute." Going into the rest room, he groped around until he found a light switch, turned it on, then closed and locked the door. As his guts continued to churn, he pulled down his pants and sat down on the toilet.

A plume of vomit spewed from his mouth, and as he turned to throw up the rest of the contents of his stomach into the toilet, the diarrhea struck.

Jared was drenched in a cold sweat and thought he was going to pass out. But a moment later the attack began to pass. His vision cleared, the pain in his stomach eased, and the chill that had seized his body released its grip. Easing himself back onto the toilet, he lowered his head between his knees.

There was a knock at the door, and Luke said, "Hey, Jared-you okay?"

"Yeah," Jared grunted. "I'll be out in a minute."

He sat up straight. The last of the queasiness had faded, and he didn't feel any different than he had before the attack had hit him. Using most of the roll of toilet paper that hung from the wall of the one stall, he cleaned himself up, then pulled up his pants. As he was washing his hands, he looked at himself in the mirror, and for a moment he didn't recognize his own face.

His complexion was chalk white, and his eyes were bloodshot and looked as if they'd sunk deeper into their sockets.

Dead, he thought. I look dead!

But then the color began to creep back into his face and his eyes cleared.

Still, he didn't look quite right. In some weird way he couldn't describe, he looked different.

On the other hand, why wouldn't he? Hadn't he just puked and shit his brains out? It was a wonder he could stand up at all!

Turning away from the mirror, he set to work with the paper towels he found on a shelf over the sink, cleaning up the mess on the floor. When he was done, he looked at himself in the mirror. He was still pale, but he thought he looked better.

"Jeez, Jared, what took you so long?" Luke asked when he finally came upstairs ten minutes later.

"The runs," Jared said. "Never had anything like that happen before."

"You still trying to get out of this?" Luke asked suspiciously.

Jared glowered at Luke. "Let's just get it done and get out of here, okay?" His eyes wandered over the church, and again he felt the sickness building inside him. "I think I'm starting to hate this place."

They worked steadily for the next two hours, alternately scrubbing, polishing, and dusting until at last there was nothing left to be done.

The brass gleamed; the statues shone.

Luke shook his head. "I never want to see another can of Brasso in my life."

Jared, though, said nothing, for while Luke was surveying their work, he'd been staring at something in one of the niches set into the sanctuary's walls. It was a shrine to one of the saints, the altar on which the statue stood constructed of ornately carved marble. Surrounding the statue were more than a dozen crosses of various sizes.

"What's the big deal with that one?" Jared asked, tipping his head toward the statue.

Cocking his head, Luke gazed at it. "I don't know. I guess maybe she was someone's favorite saint or something."

Jared moved closer to the statue, which now seemed to be looking straight at him.

Looking at him, and accusing him of something. "She looks like she thinks she's better than the rest of us," he said. His eyes swept over the rest of the figures that adorned the church. "They all do."

"So?" Luke countered. "They're saints. They were better than the rest of us. Whatcha gonna do about it?"

Jared smirked. "Oh, I've got a couple ideas." Stepping over to the altar on which the figure stood, he reached out and broke off one of the crosses.

"Jeez, Jared," Luke breathed. "What are you doing?"

Jared's eyes locked on Luke's. "What does it look like I'm doing? I'm taking one of these things. There's so many of them, they'll never miss one. Bet they don't even notice it's gone."

"But what are you going to do with it?" Luke asked.

"Just wait," Jared said softly. "You'll see."

Monsignor Devlin rose slowly to his feet, his joints aching from the hours he'd spent sitting motionless within the confines of the tiny confessional. Although it had been years since he'd last heard any confession but Cora Conway's, the closeness of the partitioned booth still offered him a peace of spirit he found nowhere else. With the shutters to the grille closed against any penitent who might wander into the other side of the stall, he often sat the whole afternoon, following the wanderings of his mind wherever they led, knowing nothing would disturb his peace.

But today his peace had been disturbed. While he'd tried his best to close his consciousness to the sound of the two boys cleaning the church, their profanities destroyed his contemplation. Momentarily, he'd felt an urge to drive them from the sanctuary, but quickly thought better of it-a sanctuary from which two such obviously troubled souls could be driven was no sanctuary at all. In Monsignor Devlin's mind, the church should be as fully dedicated to the profane as to the devout, so he kept his silence, and quietly prayed for the boys' salvation.

Once, as he'd been silently repeating his rosary, he'd felt a draft seeping through the confessional's grillwork, and glanced up to see one of the boys passing his retreat.

Though he'd never seen the boy before, he recognized him at once-he had the features of all the Conways, so that even the tiny glimpse of the nephew reminded him of the great-uncle.

The great-uncle, and all the Conways who had gone before.

After Jared Conway passed his way, Monsignor Devlin was unable to concentrate on his devotions any longer, for no matter how hard he tried to keep his mind on his prayers, the words written in the Bible that Cora Conway had entrusted to him kept rising up from his memory, chilling his soul. After finishing Loretta Villiers Conway's last words, he'd put the Bible aside, feeling he'd somehow violated the privacy of the long-dead woman, never intending to open it again. Yet today, after glimpsing Cora Conway's great-nephew, he had come to realize that Cora must have wanted him to read the words her husband's ancestors had written, wanted him to understand something about her family. Why else would she have entrusted the family Bible to him?

Leaving the boys alone in the church and returning to the rectory, he climbed laboriously to his room on the top floor, opened Cora Conway's Bible, and set to work. The entry after Loretta Villiers Conway's was written in a hand so unsure it was barely legible. He had to decipher the words one at a time, but after an hour he was done. Rubbing his rheumy eyes and stretching against the pain that had settled into his back, the old priest reread the laboriously inscribed message, the text only slightly easier to decipher this second time. A date, almost obliterated by an ink blot, was scrawled at the top of the page…