Father Gaetano's Puppet Catechism: A Novella by Mike Mignola Christopher Golden

Author:Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden [Golden, Mike Mignola, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-10-16T06:00:00+00:00

11

FATHER GAETANO FIRST BECAME AWARE of the chill breeze sliding across his neck and bare arm. This sensation reached him even before he grew conscious of the fact that he was awake, and then the tactile knowledge of his surroundings resolved itself. His bed at the orphanage. The musty smell of his feather pillow. The bedclothes in disarray. In the night-dark room, the gossamer curtain billowed gently in the light wind coming off of the ocean, and he smelled the delicious salt tang of the Mediterranean. He had tossed around and contorted himself as he always did, and now he lay in a jumble not unlike his puppets in their box. One arm lay across his face; one leg jutted out from beneath the blanket, hanging off the edge of the bed.

The young priest rarely remembered his dreams, even if he was roused in the midst of one of them. Sometimes he awoke with his heart thrumming, or with an overwhelming feeling of sadness. Once upon a time, at the age of seventeen, he had awoken with a fierce, overpowering sensation of love and duty, but he could not recall with whom, in his dreams, he had fallen in love.

But most of the time, the process of sleep felt to the young priest like waking from nothing to be born again into the world. Rising from death. Resurrection.

Tonight he lay in his tangled sheets and listened to his own heartbeat, felt his chest rise and fall with breath, inhaled the salt tang of the sea air, and then burrowed a bit more deeply into his pillow without bothering to adjust the disarray of his limbs. It seemed like too much trouble to move, particularly as the silence and the darkness beyond his eyelids told him that it was still night. And not merely night, but the deepest part of the dark, when the world seemed to have forgotten the sun.

Any other night, he would have fallen back to sleep in moments, and in the morning he would have only a vague recollection, if any, of ever waking at all. But as he lay with his left arm still across his face, he heard a scratching at the head of the bed.

His eyes opened to slits and his brow furrowed in irritation at the distraction from his descent back into sleep. The scratching came again, but it had a muffled quality so that it seemed to be coming from the wall rather than the headboard.

Mice, he thought. Or rats. And he shivered, for he had always despised vermin.

For the first time it occurred to him to wonder why he had come awake at all. Had it been this noise, haunting his dreams, drawing him from slumber?

Father Gaetano lay listening for the sound, waiting for it to come again. A minute passed, and then two, and the softness of sleep began to envelop him again, easing his mind, releasing the tension that had begun to turn his muscles taut. It felt as

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