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 if he were sinking deeper into his mattress and pillow, and he felt grateful for sleep’s embrace, and the warmth his own body generated beneath the bedclothes.
All save the skin that remained uncovered. His throat and neck. His arm. The single foot that stuck out from beneath the covers, jutting out over the edge of the mattress. The gentle breeze that slipped through the slightly open window caressed him with chill fingers. Gooseflesh rose on his skin, and he became keenly aware, quite abruptly, of how exposed his foot and ankle were to anything that might creep out from beneath his bed.
It was not terror he felt, nor precisely even fear, but his heartbeat increased its pace nevertheless. Fool, he chided himself. Rats cannot reach your foot from the floor, nor would they wish to. But then another thought came, one that had been lurking beneath his unease. What if it’s something else? Something other than vermin?
A small smile touched his lips—a nervous smile—and now he admonished himself for the childishness of this thought. It had been many years since he had been a little boy afraid of monsters under the bed. He was a man, now. A man of God.
Even so …
Sighing, chuckling at himself, he drew his leg in, but the tangle of the bedclothes trapped him in place for a moment.
A moment in which he heard the skittering noise beneath the bed.
Cursing, he twisted and tugged the bedclothes free, pulling his leg onto the bed and sitting up straight, peering into darkness of the quiet room, the only light the dim glow of the moon that slipped in beneath the shades, which he had drawn nearly to the windowsills.
His heart thumped against the inside of his chest as if it meant to break free, perhaps to flee. For several seconds the young priest sat still, and then a wave of embarrassment swept over him. He felt more than a little ridiculous.
A mouse. Of course. He’d heard it in the wall, hadn’t he?
Shaking off the childhood fears that still lingered inside him, he reached out and turned on the small lamp on his bedside table. The idea of setting foot on the floor had no appeal to him, so he hung his upper body off the bed, hands propped on the hardwood, and peered into the dark shadows underneath.
A tiny, painted, grinning face looked back at him in jeering silence.
“Jesus Christ!” he cried, lurching back onto the bed, a hundred half-formed thoughts—mad thoughts—darting through his mind as his breath caught in his throat.
And then he shuddered, and exhaled, shaking his head in private humiliation at his idiocy, and at his breaking of the Third Commandment.
“Stupid,” he muttered to himself.
Taking a breath, he extricated himself from the bedclothes and slid from the mattress to kneel on the floor. Bending his head, he peered beneath the bed again, saw that same, garishly painted face staring back, and reached under to retrieve the puppet.
Father Gaetano sat on his knees, holding Pagliaccio in his hand and staring at the ugly little clown. He knew he ought to keep the incident to himself, but he felt sure he would share it with Sister Teresa. How it would amuse her to hear of his fear.
He set the puppet on a shelf—making sure to arrange it so that it faced away from him, not wanting its flat, puppet eyes staring at him as he tried to fall back to sleep—and crept back into bed. As he lay his head down upon his pillow once more, he wondered how it had come to be there. Had Sebastiano been playing in his room, or had one of the other boys stolen it and hidden it here to torment the little one? Either way, one of the orphans had been in his room without permission. He would have to speak with them about this transgression.
Though he had set it down with its face away from him, still, the presence of the clown disturbed him enough that, after several minutes of restlessness, he turned his back to it. Only then was he able to drift off.
* * *
IN THE MORNING, the clown was gone.