| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 13 in case things really got out of hand, presumably you were supposed to grab one of these and start digging.) "Now," said Mother Superior, "is everyone here?" "Not Sister Gorgonia," said somebody. And a hush descended upon the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration. Old Sister Gorgonia had volunteered herself for the seeming suicide mission of staying aboveground by herself, adoring in the chapel. In order not to break 968 years of perpetual adoration, Gorgonia alone among the nuns had offered herself up to the Horror. The Horror was no ostensible tornado nor even a flaming H-bomb, but was the Intruder, who, for all of this century and most of the last, ever since the inception and consecration of this convent, had shown himself to certain nuns careless enough to spend any time at all alone in the chapel. Sister Gorgonia's timid little cellmate - whose name-in-religion Polycarpana had permanently forgotten in the most powerful and inexplicable mental block she'd ever experienced - sat alone in the gloom. She trembled visibly in her giant black balloon of woolen habit, her eyes bugged upward in the direction of the chapel. She kept moaning, "I hope Gorgonia will be all right." Though terrified by the sirens, this ancient nun had maintained the presence of mind to rescue the reliquary case from the wall outside the infirmary, and now hugged it to her dry old chest, where it rattled with her spasmodic breathing and trembling. It must have been terribly heavy there in her lap. It was carved from a single chunk of thick rosewood, its front thickly glassed and encrusted with jewels of various worths. The |
