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lust and all too obvious horror with which he had stared at the tinted glass. The women, disrobed, symbolized wanton humanity, but Venn had found them more of an enticement than an indictment.
    Remembering the window now made him think of the shadowy winged figure he had glimpsed through the stained glass window of his own cathedral, as it exploded into flame and began to topple all around him. And atop him.
    With a disturbing mix of lust and fear, like that he had experienced as a boy, Venn realized that the window—the imperiled, naked women—also called to his mind the image of Susan Brook.
    He roused himself from his reverie. He had chosen another path long ago, and how could he now rediscover the flesh that was no longer even his substance? He must not give himself over to these feelings. He had denied himself them in life. The time for them was buried.
    He willed himself instead to concentrate on what lay out in the night, unseen, but looming all the same.
    The church of the Reverend Trendle.
    It seemed unthinkable, insupportable. He remembered what Lodge had suggested, that he was acting as delusional as the dying witch, Baptista. That he might be seeing lies where he thought he was uncovering truth. And yet, no matter how he might struggle against the conclusion, he returned again and again to the vicar of Candleton. The man who had won over, through misfor-tune, the bulk of the town’s Catholic congregation to his own church.
    Would a man of God be capable of what Venn suspected?
    And then he thought of the Inquisition. The Jews, heretics, the alleged sor-cerers whom Popes had seen tortured with hot irons and thumbscrews, chairs of nails and molten lead. He thought of the Crusades, the Templar Crusaders, and the Templars’ own executions when the Church grew jealous of their power. He thought of the mischief of the little girls of Salem , Massachusetts who caused innocents to be hung and crushed under stones. And similarly, of Father Urbain Grandier, tortured then burned alive for supposedly bewitching the nuns at Loudon , France , when in fact his offense was speaking out against the Cardinal Richelieu.
    He thought of what the Savior had told His followers. To turn one’s cheek and love one’s neighbor. And Venn wondered if perhaps he had been reading another version of the book these bloody-handed men had read. If the words had magically appeared different to his own untrustworthy eyes.
    No—it was not unthinkable to suspect that his church’s old rival had brought down the roof of his own. Why should it be impossible to imagine that a man of God might as easily wield a demon against his enemies, as to wield a Torquemada?
    There was a flash that Venn first mistook for a blink of his eyes, but then a rumble of thunder rolled into the vale from its far end, and Venn felt the faintest of vibrations carried through the very wall he leaned against.
    Distantly, he heard a dog begin to howl. As a boy, his own dog would jump up into bed with him during thunderstorms. Perhaps this was one of the farm’s sheep dogs, though Venn decided it was too far away to be that.
    Another flash made the sky silver for a moment before it again became black. In that instant, Venn had seen the church of Reverend Trendle starkly silhouetted, as it had been at sunset. In the quick glare, the leaning stones in the churchyard had looked like the fangs lining the bottom jaw of some vast behemoth, spreading wide its maw.
    But no rain had begun to fall. Just another, heavier peal of thunder rolling into the gentle valley like an avalanche of boulders, rattling in its frame the window Venn stood at.
    Venn turned away from the pane, looking toward the mason jar, which he had placed atop a small writing desk. He went to the jar, and for the first time opened its lid. The stink he released was like some unseen wraith in itself.
    Before he lifted out the dripping, pickled lamb’s head, he first lay down his coat so as not to dribble the