Tales of the City 02 - More Tales of the City

Ann shuddered and stepped back into the elevator. “Burke … let’s try 2.”
    Burke shook his head. “This is it.”
    “This is what?”
    “I don’t know. It just feels right somehow.”
    “This room?”
    “No.” He nodded toward the spiral staircase. “Up there.”
    “Oh, God, Burke! Are you sure we ought to?”
    His jaw was set, but his voice sounded thin and unsure. “I have to.”
    “Maybe we could come back later or something.”
    “No. I might lose my nerve.”
    “But what if the transplant man is up there?”
    Burke looked away from her. “He had time to come back down.”
    “But what if …?”
    “I’m going up, Mary Ann. You can do what you want. You’ve helped me enough already.”
    She took his hand, silencing him. “I’ll come,” she said softly.
    Burke went first. Mary Ann followed so closely that the back of his corduroy jacket kept grazing her face. They passed through the ceiling into a darker place. A much darker place. Mary Ann tugged on Burke’s coattail.
    “We can’t even see, Burke.”
    “It’s O.K.,” he whispered. “Our eyes’ll get used to it.”
    The staircase continued to wind upwards. Some fifteen feet above the room with the prayerbooks they arrived at a kind of landing.
    “We can’t go any higher,” said Burke.
    “Burke, for God’s sake, let’s—”
    “Wait.” She heard him fumbling with something. “I think there’s a door here.”
    Suddenly, there was a door. It swung outward, blinding them momentarily with light. Both of them shrank from the sight that confronted them: A metal catwalk, stretching towards the altar. At least a hundred feet above the floor of the cathedral.
    “I can’t,” said Mary Ann, without being asked.
    “If I can, you can. Look, there’s a railing. There’s no way you can fall.”
    “It isn’t a matter of—” The word “railing” was what silenced her. “Burke! A walkway with a railing! This is the place in your dream!”
    “I repeat,” he said somberly. “If I can, you can.”
    He took her hand and led her onto the catwalk. Mary Ann checked her watch. The mass would begin in twelve minutes. Eight stories beneath them, the congregation materialized in splotches of red and blue and yellow, reduced at this height to their primary colors. A human rose window.
    They walked at least fifty yards, until they were directly above the transept of the cathedral. There, conforming to the cross-shaped structure of the building itself, another catwalk intersected the one they were on.
    And there sat a Styrofoam cooler.
    Mary Ann looked behind her, then left and right on the other catwalk. The man with the transplant was nowhere in sight. Burke stood stone still, eyes locked on the cooler. The sickly, grayish caste to his face compelled Mary Ann to be strong.
    “Burke, is this the Meeting of the Lines?”
    He nodded.
    She reached for the cooler. “Do you want me to open it?”
    “Please,” he said feebly.
    She lifted the lid. A thick cloud of white smoke billowed over the edges of the cooler. No. Not smoke; dry ice. She knelt by the cooler and blew on the surface of the cloud. It parted.
    What she saw was pale purple, mauve almost. A thin ridge of hair ran along the top of it. It was black on one end, where it had been severed, and the toenails were a horrid shade of yellow.
    But it was undeniably a human foot.
    Dropping the lid, Mary Ann lurched to her feet and fell into Burke’s arms. She tried to scream, but gagged instead, pulling away from him just in time to lean over the railing.
    The people below hardly knew what hit them.

The Cult
    W HEN MARY ANN STRAIGHTENED UP AGAIN , Burke’s distorted features filled her with fresh terror.
    “Burke … God, did you see it?”
    He nodded mechanically, his eyes fixed on the lid of the cooler.
    “It was a foot, Burke. It was somebody’s foot .”
    He blinked dumbly, never shifting his gaze.
    “We have to get out of here, Burke!”
    He gripped her wrist. “No … wait …”
    “Burke, for God’s sake! We have to tell someone. We can’t just—”
    “It wasn’t a foot.”
    “What?”
    “It wasn’t a foot.” His eyes widened as he spoke the words, as if some rare spiritual revelation were sweeping over him. “It was … something else.”
    Mary Ann’s voice grew shrill. “I saw it, Burke. There’s nothing else it could be.” She tried to break free from his hold, but his hand was like a vise. “Burke, what are you doing? Let go of me, Burke!”
    His hand