CHAPTER 10 #2
“You can really sing,” Avelyn said. That didn’t come close to describing what Jericho could do, but if he’d tried to be more accurate, he would have sounded like he was flirting again.
“Thanks.” Jericho was giving him a long scrutiny.
Avelyn wasn’t sure he had met anyone who could look at you for so long without glancing away.
It was at odds with Jericho’s quicksilver good nature.
Usually people like him were skittish. Avelyn wondered how that had happened.
More weaselling for later. “Are you sure everything’s all right? ”
Avelyn nodded, meaning to say yes, but Jericho was so open that it was easier to talk to him that way too.
“A bit disturbed, honestly. It’s a kind of running joke with Father Li that I can’t feel God.
It helps to in holy orders, you know? Everyone says you go to Mass, and you feel loved.
You get these irritating new seminarians who say that normal love is like McDonald’s but God’s love is like steak. ”
“Are they—sorry to make appalling allegations against the institution you’ve given your life to, but are they American?” Jericho said.
“They are.” Avelyn laughed at a lag, enjoying how much Jericho had trusted him with that joke.
If you said “appalling allegations” to someone in the Church, you generally meant something else.
That was sharp humour for a man who lost fights with snails.
He suspected there was a lot more to Jericho than universal goodwill.
“But . . . I never could. Here, though, there’s the ras.
You know, the grace? It feels like everyone says I should feel in church. ”
“Isn’t that good?” Jericho asked, sweeping again, as if nothing Avelyn could say could possibly be disturbing enough to pause. That was nice of him.
“No, because it’s not God. It’s the Salt King,” Avelyn said.
Jericho’s black eyes and their stars caught on him again, though the brush didn’t stop. “Don’t you like him?”
It was Avelyn’s experience that the less afraid someone was of simple questions, the cleverer they usually were. It was how Avelyn wanted to be but wasn’t quite yet.
“That’s the problem. I do.”
Jericho stopped sweeping.
Avelyn held up his rosary. “No other god but me,” he said, even though he had never even hinted at any of this aloud before.
He didn’t know why he was doing it now, except that Jericho had asked.
Nobody had asked him before—or, not in a way that would be neutral no matter his reply.
“It’s like being married to one person and in love with someone else.
He’s pleased I’m back. The King, I mean.
It’s so lovely. And it’s terrible, because he isn’t a god.
There’s only one thing that pretends to be that.
Underground. Killing priests.” He lifted his eyes, expecting Jericho to snort, and ready to say, Look: any Catholic who does not believe in demons is a heretic.
It’s in the Catechism; there’s a whole section about the fall of the angels.
Jericho was leaning against the broom. He didn’t look impatient, or scornful—just as though he was thinking. “Could I show you something?” he asked.
“What?”
Jericho led him up the steps to the pulpit. It was quite high, and bathed in a glittering beam of coloured salt light from the window of Saint Hildegard and the King, which painted spilled-petrol rainbows through Jericho’s hair. Like sunlight, it was warmer than the air around it.
“What are we doing?” Avelyn asked as Jericho steered him to the rail.
Jericho pointed across the floor. “Look at the salt. Look at what we were sweeping away.”
Avelyn looked, didn’t see anything interesting, then did.
Across the whole further half of the floor, the salt had formed patterns.
But not like frost. It had made an image.
It was eels: the way you saw them if you looked through the reflections on the lake, coiling and busy with secret eel things.
He could even see the salt-traced reflections of An El and its lights.
And very, very slowly, as new salt formed, barely faster than the unfurling of a fern, it was all moving.
“How . . .?”
Jericho smiled a sad kind of smile. “No idea. The salt makes these images everywhere. All sorts of things: real, not real, dreamy, nightmarish. There are books of them, tourists buy them. Usually it would take weeks for anything this clear to come through, but they’re forming overnight now, and this is what’s been coming up a lot lately. Can you see the reflection?”
“Of the abbey?”
“Of the boy.” He pointed to the left.
Yes. A boy, a teenager, knelt at the lake’s edge, staring into the water with a dead numbness that said something horrible had just happened to him. Even though the eels moved, the boy was still. He looked like he was thinking about drowning.
Avelyn took his hands off the rail. “That’s me,” he heard his own voice say, not in control of it.
“Yes. It’s been doing that all week. Since Matthew died. The Hreoda say the salt shows the King’s dreams.”