Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

Confounded, Vincent stared at the weeping figure. The eyes that looked back at her seemed profoundly sad.

Vincent, who had never experienced a single mystical moment in her life, seemed at one and the same time to be kneeling on the gravel before the weeping statue and, from a distance, to be viewing the earth, shimmering jewellike in the black immensity of space. She saw the sun-bathed planet as a whole simultaneously with its individual countries and peoples. Its beauty took her breath away.

As the planet rotated, a tide of darkness enveloped it, weighing it down, gradually overcoming the light. Countries and people were swept up in blackness. The blackness brought war to Serbia, famine to Somalia and the Sudan, oppression to many nations, greed, graft, the prostitution and abuse of children. The whole unchecked power of evil raged before her.

She saw her share in that dark tide and recoiled in horror. She owed nothing to the kingdom of darkness! She had vowed herself to the light; to good, and not to evil.

A great searchlight seemed to illuminate her being. At once she became aware of many things, first among them that she should not have been here in the garden alone but at evening prayer. She had sacrificed fidelity to duty to indulge her curiosity about the statue. Duty with her often came second-best to self-will.

The evil she did was small in comparison with drug dealing, ritual Satanic murder, unjust and corrupt wars; hers was the evil of impatience, of self-importance, of failing to reach out to others in love.

She had thought herself a drop of cleansing water scouring the filth of the world. In truth she was a bit of sludgy oil creating her own tarry wake. Her evil was small because she was small, not because she was the power for good.

She wanted with all her being to oppose the forces of darkness. With astounding clarity, she saw that her only weapon was to do the little good she was capable of. At the moment, that meant answering the bell for evening prayer.

No matter that the statue was weeping. That was its business. Evening prayer was hers.

She leaped up, no longer the woman she had been even a few minutes ago, and headed towards the chapel.

She had completely forgotten the unlocked gates behind her.

Zebulon, feeling relieved now that Mary Dominic had the scoop, skipped down the stone steps from the convent with a light heart. A cautious check of the street sent him scurrying up his favorite maple. The long black car was parked at the curb outside the convent once again, and two dark-suited men were advancing through the convent grounds on the tall skinny nun with the frowning face, the nun who always spoke to Zeb rudely. She was rising from her knees before a white statue that glowed faintly in the dusk. One of the men raised his arm. Zeb saw the glint of metal as he brought it down.

The nun never knew what hit her.

Zebulon, his whole body vibrating with terror, watched the two men drag the nun across the grounds and disappear with her into the crypt in the far corner of the garden. He didn’t dare leave the safety of the tree; better to perch in it all night and risk his mother’s wrath than to descend before the menacing black car had gone its way.

It was not unusual for Vincent to appear in chapel late, but she’d never before failed to arrive at all. Mary Dominic wondered fleetingly if Vincent, like others before her in this age of irresponsibility and broken commitments, had simply put on street clothes and walked off, leaving her vows and the discipline of convent life behind. To be humble, to become a grain of sand, to put the good of the community before self-interest were goals fast being wiped out by the me-first ethic, and the community that had attracted more new vocations than could be accepted, from its founding until the 1960’s, at present had only two postulants.

Vincent’s cavalier attitude towards the rules so necessary for order in the community was not helpful in the training of new entrants, and Mary Dominic had been praying for the wisdom to broach this to Vincent as effectively and lovingly as possible after evening prayers.

Even more worrisome than Vincent’s absence from chapel was her absence from supper and recreation. Mary Dominic inquired discreetly if anyone knew Vincent’s whereabouts, but no one had seen her since the retreatants had left that afternoon.

When a quick check showed that Vincent’s cell was empty, she summoned Clare Francis, a marvel of discretion, and they made a hasty but efficient search of the convent, without success.

“She might have fallen ill in one of the hermitages, mother,” Clare suggested. Together they made the rounds of the small outdoor shrines set within three-walled enclosures, all quite near the main house. No Sister Vincent.