There, panting, dazed, he lifted the lighter. The flameglow spread over the arches, over the vaults, over the entire space. His gaze fell at once on a small white mound of flakes and powder that had collected on the floor at the base of one wall. With another cognitive flash, he knew that the debris had fallen from one of the stones above it.

Looking up, blinking through his sweat, through the haze of his own mind, he could see the place. One of the stones in the wall had been chiseled. The mortar that held it was dug away, the block’s edges frayed and chalky.

Before he had time to think, he was moving forward, one hand holding the lighter high, the other stretching towards the stone. His fingers were at the jagged edge of the rock. He gripped it, pulled. The stone shifted easily, wobbled, rolled free of its position. It slipped from his grasp and there was a loud crash as it dropped to the floor at his feet.

Storm hardly knew where he was, hardly knew if he was awake or asleep. He thrust the lighter forward into the opening. He felt as if the walls were shuddering around him, the whole house above him quaking to its foundations.

For there, in the niche revealed by the displacement of the stone—preserved in a clear plastic wrapping so covered with dust that the face underneath seemed transparent, distant, ghostly—there, before him, was the body of an infant.

Rhinehart’s exquisite Nativity.

Storm stared at it a long moment, the lighter scorching his thumb, his free hand raised to his scorching brow.

And then they grabbed him.

27

“Why, Mr. Storm, I’m so glad you could make it. I left Sir Michael to show you the way. You’re just in time to witness my final apotheosis.”

The lighter had fallen from his hand, gone out. For a moment, the darkness was complete. But Storm heard that voice, heard those words, those half-familiar, half-remembered words. He felt as if he were sinking, sinking from the surface of the real into a whirlpool of his own imaginings.

And yet he couldn’t sink. The grip that pinioned both his arms was so powerful, the form that hulked above him so enormous, that it was as if the walls themselves had come alive to take him prisoner. What felt like the muzzle of a gun was being jammed into his temple. It hurt. And then, a flame pierced his eyes, sent a blinding awl-point of pain straight into the middle of his forehead.