And everything centered on the cathedral. It soared above the complex of boxlike ancillary buildings that surrounded it, above town and plain. The pictures I’d seen of it had not conveyed the enormity. Those flat, bone-white walls went up and up and up, till the roof climbed farther yet to make the vast central cupola. From afar, the windows looked like nailheads, one row to a story; but then I saw the stained glass air, each filling half the facade it occupied with murky colors and bewildering patterns, Mandala at the west end and Eye of God at the east. From the west, also, rose the single tower, which in a photograph only looked austere, but now became one leap into the stars.
Light played across the outside of the cathedral and shone dimly from its glass. I heard a chant, men’s voices marching deep beneath the wild icy sweepings and soarings of women who sang on no scale I could identify, in no language of earth.
The music was so amplified as to be audible to the very outskirts of town. And it never ended. This was a perpetual choir. Priests, acolytes, pilgrims were always on hand to step in when any of the six hundred and, one wearied. I failed to imagine how it must be to live in that day—and-night haze of canticle. If you were a dweller in Siloam, perhaps not even a Johnny, you’d soon stop noticing on a conscious level. But wouldn’t the sound weave into your thoughts, dreams, bones, finally into your soul?
I couldn’t interpret the extrasensation I felt, either, more powerful for every yard I approached. Wrongness—or rightness of a kind that I was simply unable to fathom?
After all, the attendant at the gate was a pleasant young man, his tow hair and blue eyes right out of folk who’d been hereabouts for more than a hundred years, his friendliness out of Walt Whitman’s own America. When I had parked my broom in the lot that stretched wide and bare into the dark, approached him, and asked, “Okay to go in?” he regarded me for a moment before answering lightly, “You’re not a communicant, are you?”
“N-no,” I said, a bit taken aback.
He chuckled. “Wanna know how I can tell? They’ve got to the Elphue. We’d wait till Mary’s invocation was finished before we entered.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“S Okay. Nobody minds, longs you’re quiet. In theory, you’re damned anyway. I don’t buy that myself, know what I mean? My girl’s a Methodist. I’ll go along with the red tape the priests want before they let me marry her, but I can’t believe she’ll burn.” He realized he might have spoken too freely and added in haste: “How come you’re this late? The tourists arrive in the daytime.”
I decided he wasn’t a lay brother, just an employee, and no more fanatical than the average Christian of any type-in short, one of the decent majority you find in all organizations, all countries. I was prepared for his question. “I travel in ankhs,” I said. “Got an appointment in town early tomorrow morning before moving on. Got hung up today and didn’t reach here till now. Your choir is so famous I didn’t want to miss it.”
“Thanks.” He handed me a leaflet. “You know the rules? Use the main door. Take a seat in the Heath-uh, the Spectators’ Corner. No noise, no picture-taking. When you, want to leave, do it quietly, same way as you came.”
I nodded and walked through the gate. The auxiliary buildings formed a square around a paved yard centered on the cathedral. Where they did not butt directly on each other, walls had been raised between, making the only entrances three portals closable by wire gates. The offices, storerooms, living quarters were plain, in fact drab. A few cenobites move about, male scarcely distinguishable from female in their robes , and overshadowing cowls. I remembered a complete absence of any scandals, anywhere in the world, though the Johannines mingled the sexes in celibacy. Well, of course their monks and nuns weren’t simply consecrated; they were initiates. They had gone beyond baptism, beyond the elementary mystery rites and name-changing (with the old public name retained for secular use) that corresponded to a Petrine confirmation. For years they had mortified the flesh, disciplined the soul, bent the mind to mastering what their holy books called divine revelation, and unbelievers called pretentious nonsense, and some believers in a different faith called unrecognized diabolism . . .
Blast it, I thought, I’ve got to concentrate on my. job. Never mind those silent sad figures rustling past. Ignore, if you can, the overwhelmingness of the cathedral you are nearing and the chant that now swells from it to fill the whole night. Deny that your werewolf heritage senses things it fears to a degree that is making you ill. Sweat prickles forth on your skin, tuna cold down our ribs and reeks in your nostrils. You see the word through a haze of dream and relentless’ music. But Valeria is in hell.
I stopped where the vague shifty light was and read the leaflet. It bade me a courteous welcome and listed the same regulations as the gatekeeper had. On the flip side was a floor plan of the basilica section of the main building. The rest was left blank. Everybody realized that an abundance of rooms existed on the levels of the north and south sides, the tower, and even the cupola. It was no secret that great crypts lay beneath. They were used for certain ceremonies, some of them, anyhow. Beyond this information: nothing.
The higher in degree you advanced, the more you were shown. Only adepts might enter the final sanctums, and only they knew what went on there.
I mounted the cathedral steps. A couple of husky monks stood on either side of the immense, open door. They didn’t move, but their eyes frisked me. The vestibule was long, low-ceilinged, whitewashed, bare except for a holy water font. Here was no cheerful clutter of bulletin board, parish newsletter, crayon drawings from the Sunday school. A nun standing at the middle pointed me to a left entrance. Another one at that position looked from me to a box marked Offerings and back until I had to stuff in a couple of dollars. It might have been funny except for the singing, the incense, the gazes, the awareness of impalpable forces which drew my belly muscles taut.
I entered an aisle and found myself alone in a roped-off section of pews, obviously for outsiders. It took me a minute to get over the impact of the stupendous interior and sit down. Then I spent several more minutes trying to comprehend it, and failing.
The effect went beyond size. When everything was undecorated, naked white geometry of walls and pillars and vaulting, you had nothing to scale by; you were in a cavern that reached endlessly on. God’s Eye above the altar, Mandala above the choir loft, dominated a thick dusk. But they were unreal too, more remote than the moon, just as the candles glimmering from place to place could have been stars. Proportions, curves, intersections, all helped create the illusion of illimitable labyrinthine spaces. Half a dozen worshipers, scattered along the edge of the nave, were lost. But so would any possible congregation be. This church was meant to diminish its people.
A priest stood at the altar with two attendants. I recognized them by their white robes as initiates. At their distance they were dwarfed nearly to nothing. Somehow the priest was not. In the midnight-blue drapery and white beard of an adept, he stood tall, arms outspread, and I feared him. Yet he wasn’t moving, praying, anything . . . Smoke from the hanging censers drugged my lungs. The choir droned and shrilled above me. I had never felt more daunted.