Strangers

convinced it had been something good and pure. Evil. Good. Perhaps both… or neither. Just… well something. Some mysterious thing beyond the descriptive, definitive power of words.
        He knew one thing only: Whatever had happened to him the summer before last was far stranger than he had realized heretofore.
        Still sifting paper moons through his fingers, he noticed something unusual on his hands. He brought them palms-up into the direct beam of the flashlight. Rings. On each palm blazed a ring of swollen red skin, each as perfect as if the inflamed tissues had conformed to a pattern drawn with a draftsman's compass.
        Even as he watched, the stigmata faded, vanished.
        It was Tuesday, January 7.
        

    6.
        

    Chicago, Illinois
        
        In his bedroom on the second floor of St. Bernadette's rectory, Father Stefan Wycazik woke to the thump of a drum. The beat had the deep boom of a bass drum and the hollow reverberation of tympani. It sounded like the pounding of an enormous heart, although it embellished the simple two-stroke rhythm of the heart with an extra beat: LUB-DUB-dub… LUB-DUB-dub… LUB-DUB-dub…
        Bewildered and still half asleep, Stefan switched on the lamp, squinted in the blaze of light, and looked at his alarm clock. It was two-oh-seven, Thursday morning, certainly not a reasonable hour for a parade.
        LUB-DUB-dub… LUB-DUB_dub…
        After each triad of thumps, there was a three-second pause, then a set of beats identical to all the others, then another three-second pause. The precise timing and unfaltering repetition of the noise began to seem less like the work of a drummer and more like the laborious piston-stroke of an enormous machine.
        Father Wycazik threw back the covers and padded barefoot to the window that looked out on the courtyard between the rectory and the church. He saw only snow and bare-limbed trees in the backwash of the carriage lamp above the sacristy door.
        The beats grew louder, and the pause between the groups shortened to about two seconds. He took his robe from the back of a chair and slipped it on over his pajamas. The sonorous pounding was so loud now that it was no longer merely an annoyance and puzzlement. It had begun to frighten Stefan. Each burst of sound rattled the windowpanes and shook the door in its frame.
        He hurried into the upstairs hall. He fumbled in the dark for the wall switch and finally turned on the overhead light.
        Farther along the short hall, on the right, another door opened, and Father Michael Gerrano, Stefan's other curate, dashed out of his room, struggling into his own robe. "What is that?"
        "Don't know," Stefan said.
        The next triple-thud was twice as loud as the group preceding it, and the entire house reverberated as if it had been struck by three! gigantic hammers. It was not a hard sharp sound, but muffled in spite of its loudness - as if the hammers were thinly padded yet swung with tremendous force. The lights flickered. Now the thumps were separated by no more than a second of silence, not long enough for the echo of the previous fulminations to fade away. And with each powerful hammering, the lights flickered again and the floor under Stefan trembled.
        In the same instant, Father Wycazik and Father Gerrano perceived the locus of the noise: Brendan Cronin's room. They moved swiftly to that door, which was directly across the hall from Father Gerrano.
        Incredibly, Brendan was fast asleep. In spite of the thunderous explosions that made Father Wycazik flash back to the mortar fire of Vietnam, Brendan dreamed on, untroubled. In fact, in the pulsing light, there seemed to be a vague smile tugging at the young priest's lips.
        The windows rattled. Drapery hooks clicked against the rods to which they were attached. On the dresser, a hairbrush bounced up and down, and several coins clinked together, and Brendan's breviary slid first to the left and then to the right. On the wall above the bed, a crucifix jiggled wildly under the picture hook from which it was hung.
        Father Gerrano shouted, but Stefan could not hear what the curate said, for now there were no pauses between muffled detonations. With each tripartite beat, Father Wycazik retreated further from his initial mental image of a huge drum and became increasingly convinced that what he was hearing was the throbbing of some enormous and