Dark Rivers of the Heart

It is bitter and sour and sweet-and so strange that the cloying stench alone, without the ghostly figures, could make my heart pound and my blood run as icy as January rivers.
        In the unfinished wall, there's a niche already prepared for a new body.
        He has chiseled out the bricks and stacked them to one side of the hole.
        He has scooped out a cavity in the earth beyond the wall and has carried that soil away. Lined up near the cavity are fifty-pound bags of dry plaster mix, a long wooden mixing trough lined with steel, two cans of tar-based sealant, both the tools of a mason and those of a sculptor, a stack of wooden pegs, coils of wire, and other items that I can't quite see.
        He is ready. He needs only the woman who will become the next figure in the tableau. But he has her too, of course, for it is she who lost control of her bladder in the back of the rainbow van.
        Her hands have made the flock of bloody birds across the vestibule door.
        Something moves, quick and furtive, out of the new hole in the wall, among nitches as quick as now. It freezes at the sight of me as I have frozen before the martyred women in the walls. Its a rat, but no rat like any other Its skull Is deformed, one eye lower than the other, mouth twisted in a permanent lopsided grin- Another scurries after the first and also goes rigid when it sees me, though not before it rises on hind legs. It too is a creature like no other, encumbered by strange excrescences of bone or cartilage different from anything the first rat exhibits, and with a nose that spreads too wide across its narrow face..
        These are members of the small family of vermin that survives within the catacombs, tunneling behind the tableaux, nourished in part on that which has been saturated with toxic chemical preservatives. Each year a new generation of their kind produces more mutant forms than was produced the year before. Now they break their paralysis, as I can't yet break mine, and they scurry back into the hole from which they came.
        Sixteen years later, that long chamber was not entirely as it had been on the night of owls and rats. The plaster had been torn down and hauled away. The victims had been removed from the niches in the walls.
        Between the columns of red-black brick that Spencer's father had left as supports, the dark earth was exposed. Police and forensic pathologists, who labored for weeks within that room, had added vertical four-by-four beams between some brick columns, as if they hadn't trusted solely to the supports that Steven Ackblom had thought sufficient.
        The cool, dry air now smelled faintly of stone and earth, but it was a clean smell. The pungent miasma of chemicals and the stink of biological decay were gone.
        Standing in that low-ceilinged space again, with Ellie and the dog, Spencer vividly recalled the fright that had nearly crippled him when he was fourteen. However, fear was the least of what he felt-which surprised him. Horror and disgust were part of it, but not as great as a diamondhard anger. Sorrow for the dead. Compassion for those who had loved them. Guilt for having failed to save anyone.
        He knew regret, as well, for the life he might have had but had never known. And now never could.
        Above all, what overcame him was an unexpected reverence, as he might have felt at any place where the innocent had perished: from (Calvary to Dachau, to Babi Yar, to the unnamed fields where Stalin buried millions, to rooms where jeffrey Dahmer dwelt, to the torture chambers of the Inquisition.
        The soil of any killing ground isn't sanctified by the murderers who practice there. Though they often think themselves exalted, they are as the maggots that live in dung, and no maggots can transform one square centimeter of earth into holy ground.
        Sacred, Instead, are the victims for each dies in the lace of someone whom fate allows to live. And though many may unwittingly or unwillingly die in the place of others, the sacrifice is no less sacred for the fact that fate chose those who would make it.
        If there had been votive candles in those cleansed catacombs, Spencer would have wanted to light them and gaze into their flames until they blinded him. Had there been an altar, he would have prayed at the foot of it. If by offering his own life he could have brought back the forty-one and his mother, or any one of them, he would not