He crept on, towards the end of the alley. The church’s spire pierced the blowing clouds above him. The small domed hexagon of an apse grew huskier and more imposing as he neared. His senses were all electrified, his nerve ends naked and snaking like live wires. He could smell things—not just ordinary things, but everything. Not just the rotting garbage and the grainy sting of old exhaust, but the dirt of shoe soles and cigarettes ground into the pavement over time, the edge of seawater in the southwestern breeze—and something else, some citrusy smell, which was mighty like the aroma of his own fear. And he could hear—the sussurus of the city, a burst of laughter from far away, a baby crying—but also, he was almost certain of it, a portentous undertone of voices through the heavy stones of the church walls, the burr of a conversation within. And the weird blue glow—he could see now: it was light filtering out through a stained-glass window. He could even make out the figures on it and guessed they were Christ with Lazarus rising. And he could see that the thin line of yellow light did not come through a shrouded window but through a fissure in the apse. Its narrow panes were clear and, though the light was faint, his eyes were so wide, so receptive, that the glare of it seemed to scorch his pupils. And to draw him on.

He was stopped. He had reached an iron railing close against the church wall. He grimaced, intensely aware that the wisest course was to turn and run for it. Instead, he grasped the heads of two spikes and vaulted his long legs over the rail with a single, swinging motion. He landed on the opposite strip of pavement without a sound.

Now the spire stretched up out of sight above his head. One angle—two sides—of the apse pushed in towards him. He reached out and his fingertips touched the damp stone, glided over it as he stepped around the angle’s point to the lit fissure. Slowly, he stretched his body up to peer through the window’s bottom half.

The murmur of conversation still reached him, not much louder than before, no clearer. But he couldn’t find the source of it at first. He was looking slantwise across a vault in the end of a stunted transept. Whatever the source of the light was, it was out of sight. All he saw was the dim yellow glow of it, spreading from somewhere up the aisles, dying within his field of vision. By pressing far to one side, he could take in some of the front pews running up to the altar. But the scene was mostly in shadow.