Strange Itineraries by Tim Powers

Author:Tim Powers [POWERS, TIM]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780575117815
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

The knob turned, and the door swung inward and a little girl in blue jeans and a green sweater stepped in, Reeboks scuffing the carpet. She appeared to be about eight years old, with short-cropped dark hair.

He wondered if she had shoved in ahead of the old woman he’d seen at the front of the line. The girl’s face was narrow, with horizontal wrinkles in the lower eyelids already.

“Do sit down,” he told her.

He had forgotten to put a stick of Doublemint gum in his mouth, but she didn’t appear to notice any smell of liquor, and he’d remember to do it before the old woman came in.

She climbed into the chair, and her shoes didn’t touch the carpet.

“Bless me, Father,” she said, “I have sinned. My last Confession was too long ago to remember. These are my sins – I killed myself on Thursday.” She looked at him mournfully. “I know that’s very bad.”

He was aware of cold air on his face – his forehead was suddenly dewed with sweat.

“That’s not funny,” he said, “a woman did – was found dead – ”

“I want absolution,” the little girl said. “I want the sacrament. I came a long way to get here. I didn’t really think I’d get this far.”

Abruptly he remembered that the door to the confessional opened outward.

He turned to look at it – it was closed now, and its frame didn’t appear to have been tampered with any time lately – and when he turned back, it was a white-haired old woman who sat opposite him.

He jumped violently in his chair, inhaling in a whispered screech. High blood pressure made a ringing wail in his head, and his peripheral vision had narrowed to nearly nothing.

He blinked several times, and exhaled. “Who are you?” he asked in a rusty voice. His fingers were tingling, gripping the arms of his chair.

“And before that,” quavered the old woman, “I took Communion while in a state of mortal sin.” She had been looking down at her bony old hands, and now she looked up at him; and her eyes were empty holes in the wrinkled parchment of her face.

Through the holes he could see the fabric of the chair, bright in the afternoon light from the window at his back. She wasn’t even casting a shadow.

It’s a ghost, he told himself as he made himself breathe deeply. It’s the ghost of that woman who was here a week ago. Priests have seen ghosts before.

He flexed his legs under the surplice. He didn’t want to find that his legs had gone to sleep when he made a bolt for the door. He would say there’d been an electrical short, he smelled gas, felt faint, and if they found the Wild Turkey blame it on the Vietnamese priest.

But the old woman had reached out one papery hand as slow as drifting smoke, and now touched his knee; he shouldn’t even have been able to feel the touch, through the fabric of the surplice and his slacks, but the impact punched another shrill wheeze out of him, and numbed his whole leg.

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