Legion by William Peter Blatty Read Free Book Online Page B

they saying to him? Something. They shimmered with a silent, mysterious cry. More than grief. Something else. “Don’t push it,” said the grocer. “You look tired.”
    Amfortas nodded. He was fumbling at a pocket of the navy blue cardigan that he wore above his hospital whites. He slipped out a dollar and gave it to the grocer. “Thanks, Charlie.”
    “Just remember what I said.”
    “I’ll remember.”
    Amfortas took the bag and in a moment the front–door chime tinkled lightly and the doctor was out in the morning street. Tall and slender, his shoulders bent, for a time he stood pensively in front of the shop with his head angled downward. A hand held the bag up against his chest. The grocer moved over beside his daughter and together they watched him.
    “All these years and I’ve never seen him smile,” murmured Lucy.
    The grocer propped an arm on a shelf. “Why should he?”
    He was smiling but he said, “I couldn’t marry you, Ann.”
    ‘‘Why not? Don’t you love me?”
    “But you ‘re only twenty–two. “
    “Is that bad?”
    ‘“I’m twice your age,’’ he said. “Someday you ‘d be pushing me around in a wheelchair.’’
    She jumped from her seat with that merry laugh and she sat on his lap and put her arms around him. “Oh, Vincent, I’ll keep you young.”
    Amfortas heard shouts and the pounding of feet and he looked toward Prospect Street on his right and at the landing of the sheer, long flight of stone steps that plunged to M Street far below and, a little beyond it, the river and the boathouse; for years they had been known as “the Hitchcock Steps.’’ The Georgetown crew team was running up. It was part of their drill. Amfortas watched as they appeared at the landing and then jogged toward the campus and out of view. He stood until the vivid cries had dwindled, leaving him alone in the soundless corridor where the doings of men were blurred and all life had no purpose except to wait.
    He felt the hot coffee on his palm through the bag. He turned from Prospect Street and walked slowly along Thirty–sixth until he came to his squeezed two–story frame house. It was just a few yards away from the grocery and was modest and very old. Across the street were a women’s dormitory and a foreign service school, and a block to the left was Holy Trinity Church. Amfortas sat down on the white, scrubbed stoop and then opened the bag and took out the bun. She used to fetch it for him on Sundays.
    “After death we go back to God,’’ he told her. She ‘d been speaking of the father she had lost the year before and he wanted to comfort her. “We’ll be part of Him then,” he said.
    “As ourselves?”
    “Maybe not. We might lose our identity. “
    He saw her eyes begin to fill with tears, the little face contorting as she tried not to cry.
    “What’s wrong ?” he asked her.
    “Losing you forever. “
    Until that day, he had never feared death.
    Church bells rang and a slim line of starlings arced up from Holy Trinity, veering and circling in a wild dance. People were beginning to come out of the church. Amfortas checked his watch. It was seven fifteen. Somehow he’d missed his six thirty Mass. He’d been going to it daily for the last three years. How could he have missed it? He stared at the bun in his hand for a moment, then slowly he dropped it back into the bag. He lifted his hands and placed his left thumb on his right wrist and two left fingers on his right palm. He then applied pressure with all three digits and began to move the fingers around on his palm. The right hand, grasping in a reflex action, groped and followed the movement of the fingers.
    Amfortas stopped the manipulation. He stared at his hands.
    When he thought of the world again, Amfortas checked the time. It was seven twenty–five. He picked up the bag and the copy of the Sunday Washington Post that lay bulky and ink–smeared by the door. They never wrapped it. He went into the gloom of his empty