“Call me Gretch, and I have come some way to meet all of you. Max, the food smells divine. Let’s eat. My driver will be back before we know it.” The woman commanded, clapping her hands together. “Weston, you look like the barman, pour me a drink. Please,” she said with a little twinkle in her olive green eyes. The priest bowed and hustled to fix her a martini as Max dished out the food. They carried the plates into the living room and sat on the pillows facing Dr. Wendell who sat in a straight back chair that Max had set out specifically for her with an upended crate as a table for her food. “I’m sorry I can’t roll around on the floor with you but,” she tapped her leg brace, “polio took the rolling right out of me some thirty years ago.”
Marilyn thought she had never met any woman like this before, so direct, unembarrassed by her deformity, wearing a man’s suit with a crew-cut, and completely at ease. She forked a piece of chicken and wondered what the woman would have to say.
The rich peanut and chocolate notes with the tomatoes, chiles, and garlic melded and coated the chicken in an aromatic robe as Max talked about different moles and New Mexico. The food seemed to tie them together as Joni Mitchell sang about wishing for a river she could skate away on. It was at that moment as Father W, struggling in the kitchen door with the stainless steel ice tray, pulling up on the handle, Joni Mitchell wanting to skate on the ice and suddenly the ice cubes exploding from the tray, that Marilyn flashed on a bearded man’s face looking up from the ice. Elder John! It wasn’t an accident, the thought splintered through her brain. She nearly jumped out of her skin as the ice cubes slammed down on the kitchen floor shattering. She looked around at her companions who seemed frozen for a moment themselves. Then Max unfolded his long legs and stood up calmly, going to the stereo and lifting the needle on the album and Joni stopped singing. Father W looked at him and then picked up the slivers of ice-cubes. Marilyn waited. Gretch Wendell reached out from her chair and patted Marilyn’s arm in a friendly way. Max gestured for Father W to take his seat again once he had refilled his drink.
“The real conversation begins,” Max said. “Do you mind if we go over some of the events of our last session?” he asked Marilyn, who felt torn between wanting to get to the bottom of what was happening and just wanting it to go away. But something about the tough little professor with her polio leg gave her courage, so she nodded.
“Go ahead,” Marilyn said, wondering if whatever it was inside her had made the ice explode or if it was coincidental. Who was she kidding, she thought, the ice tray had nearly taken flight.
“Gretch, Weston, I think Marilyn is pursued by a being through various lifetimes who wants something from her and is willing to kill anything or anyone that gets in his way. I think he is hunting her soul, I don’t know why yet, but in both past life regressions she has been afraid for her eternal life. I’ve told Gretch some of this already and that’s why she decided to come down and see you herself,” Max said in a determined way, pulling his notebook from out his pocket and laying it on the table.
“Marilyn, is that true?” Father W asked as he struggled to hold onto a sense of reality, here and now. A being that hunted souls stirred in him the deepest fears buried underneath his faith in God. Because of God, there was also Satan. Memories of the lectures in seminary school about the devil, unholy evil, and exorcism taught by the gnarled professor Jesuit who seemed to enjoy taunting his young wide-eyed pupils with the horrors of possession came flooding back.
“I saw some things, Father W. It was like I was looking out of other eyes but yet they were my eyes, and yeah, it has to do with being pursued,” said Marilyn softly, tucking her feet under the pillow and feeling a chill creeping up her neck.
“I believe there are powerful paranormal forces at work with Marilyn. Through the hypnosis she’s holding the door open for us to look in,” said Max. “She has been a novice monk in one past life regression and an older Shaker woman in another. In both of them members of her community died when the pursuer came into that community in what on the surface appeared to be accidents…”
“Elder John wasn’t an accident,” Marilyn said in a hoarse whisper. “I just realized now when the ice exploded that his death was no accident.”
“What do you think doctor - Gretch?” asked Father W, not liking where this was going and hoping maybe the other professor would have a different take.
“There’s a temptation among people in the Church to say that these things don’t exist, but I have been an archeologist for a long time and while I have an academic study I also have a working practice; helping people protect themselves and understand the forces they reckon with. Let me say clearly that there are beings that are paranormal. For example I believe that there are vampires and have had the experiences to back it up. However I am convinced that the blood sucking type are not present here. Why? They hunt locally, and while repellent they are not always deadly. In many cases they feed on their victims, taking fresh blood and move on. This thing is scaled darker and more dangerous. If you believe that good and evil exists then believing in the paranormal is no leap. I don’t frighten easily, but I had to bag an entire expedition in the thirties at a dig in Peru at the temple site of a sect of particularly violent Incas as a sensible precaution against a possible rarer breed of vampire.” Gretchen Wendell spoke softly but her eyes said even more than her words. Marilyn felt drawn to the curious woman; in spite of the frightening things they were talking about she seemed completely unflappable.
“I’m sorry, you’re telling me that blood sucking vampires exist but while nasty whatever type that is pursuing Marilyn is worse? You came in a taxi from Chicago and this is what you’ve got to offer?” Father W couldn’t help feeling panicky.
Marilyn looked up at the group then, with those ancient eyes that Monsignor Lowell had seen.
“A soul-hunting vampire is the most feared dark being in any religion or legend so much so it is rarely directly identified, but Gretch is the real authority,” Max said.
Gretchen Wendell sucked in her breath. “Max may through his work with Marilyn become the foremost chronicler of this type of being, which can be classed widely as Destroyers, which come in both human and non-human forms. They co-exist with the darker entities of the life force, and are extremely dangerous, because a soul hunter not only takes the current mortal life of its prey but the prey’s immortal life as well.”
“What are you talking about?” Father Weston’s voice was sarcastic and strained. “I think given the circumstances of your career, Max, suddenly finding evidence of these things - it’s just too self-interested for me to take on face value.”
Max felt like he had been punched in the gut by his friend and he recoiled from the table, closing his eyes for a second. “It’s not true,” he whispered.
“I don’t think Max is like that,” Marilyn said, her own voice low as Gretch Wendell looked at Weston with an appraising gaze, clearly sizing him up.
“Hitler and Stalin I would call human Destroyers, but perhaps you are unaware of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction?” Gretch said, working hard not to let her anger at the priest show. She knew she had trouble with male authority figures, and had spent a lifetime developing complex defenses not to let them win by belittling her or making her into the punishing ball-busting crone as they often sought to. “I know this can be frightening, and for a priest it may prey on some of your deepest fears, but if you believe that there is a soul, then you must believe that it can also be destroyed, taken, and the being that would have had an eternal life has nothing, no purgatory, no heaven, nothing, it falls like husk into what we call the great howling. Where evil grows.”
“Myths,” Father W shot back, but inside he felt a shaming anxiety. He had always hated the classes on exorcism and the dark arts, because they did scare him. Satan, if he was real, and he was real, knew that Father Frank Weston was a sinner just as surely as God did.
“Careful throwing stones in glass houses, Father. The positive opposite of thes
e are Guardians, who can be human and non-human as well. Saints, shamans, holy persons, white witches, all the forces for good, including angels. Your religion is dominated by its belief in Guardians - again like Destroyers they can be human or non-human. Marilyn is what I would call an Instrument, these are generally human in my experience and they can channel the life force, both good and evil. And usually they are more attuned to one side. Soul-hunting vampires need Instruments to feed on or eventually they perish. Which is why they hunt globally until they find one. Weston, surely you appreciate cosmology as a Jesuit. In literature, Dante had an acute understanding of the rings of hell and paradise. I want you to imagine a sphere with light and dark at the top and bottom.” Gretch’s hands made a cupping shape, conjuring an imaginary sphere. “Now, Marilyn, I’m going ask you to just listen, all right? The sphere is a metaphor for the life force, alright? And there are bands or rings climbing and descending the sphere. In the middle there are the Instruments, people like Marilyn who can channel some of the mystery of what alchemists called the fifth of the elements. Then descending into the dark from there are Destroyers, Demons, and then the Infernity itself.”
“The what?” Marilyn asked not sure she had heard right.
“Infernity,” Gretch repeated.
“That’s what I thought you said,” Marilyn inhaled a deep calming breath to steady herself.
“You’ve heard the word before?” Gretch asked, keeping her tone neutral as Max nodded slightly.
“My mom’s old employer, J. J. Charlesworth, used it, but I never heard anyone else, he was kind of strange, collected relics and things, his wife committed suicide and he turned even stranger after that.” Marilyn replied.
“Strange indeed, he must have been a well-read collector. Anything more you want to tell us about Mr. Charlesworth?” Gretch asked. As the question hovered in the air, a heaviness descended on the room.
“No, just coincidence I guess. Keep going with sphere, Gretch, it’s interesting, isn’t it?” Then Marilyn laid down one of her killer smiles, the kind of smile that had a way of bursting in and messing with a person’s mind, because she didn’t want Gretch to keep asking her about J. J. and sure enough the heaviness popped. Gretch nodded vigorously and re-cupped her hands, warming to her subject even more.
“On the other side of sphere climbing up into the light from the Instruments in rings are Guardians, the Archons, and finally Divinity itself. You see? Now in the archives of the British Museum I discovered this cosmology first in ancient texts copied down by the monks in 7th Century Ireland. It was intended to be an encyclopedic guide, I think, of the spirit world as understood at that time. While incomplete, these same texts identified a being called an ‘animphage’, one that eats souls.” The professor stuck her hands in the pocket of her suit coat and leaned forward with intensity.
“These vampires are powerfully strong and according to the texts have lifetimes that last over three centuries but then it seems they need periodic renewal which can only be granted by rare powerful religious relics, or by taking the soul of an ‘Instrument’- an extraordinarily luminous being. The threat of their death and the end of their demonic soul drives them in ways that are ferocious.” She sat back then, and pulled a silver engraved cigarette case from her pocket, offering it about, before taking one herself and lighting it.
Father W felt the hairs on his neck rise at the thought, wondering if he had the strength of faith to cope if what the mannish professor was saying was true.
“When I first met Dr. Wendell she took me to those archives in the British Museum. She had attended a lecture of mine in London where I argued for the Presence in everyone and she said she had something she wanted to show me. I saw the 7th Century text and it reminded me that for all the white light in the world, there are forces that are just as dark. I think we’ve found them here,” Max said.
“ Max, I don’t know that I want to know,” Marilyn said in frightened voice, feeling a throb in her temple. Father W put his hand over hers on the table for just a second.
“I’ve seen my own share of ancient texts too you know. They’re not exactly like reading the telephone book, bound to be interpretations,” said Father Weston with more assurance than he felt.
“In some of the tribes of the Amazon there are pictographs that show a hunter taking souls from the living. The Egyptians had a cult that was so secret that it was certain death to speak of their practices, but we believe it also centered on the soul hunter.” Gretch Wendell took a deep drag on her cigarette.
Max jumped in, “Ask yourself why so many religions’ burial rituals focus on protecting the dead from evil spirits and making sure they cross over with their souls intact. The practice of putting a coin in the mouth of the deceased was a way of stopping the soul from being sucked out.”
“I’m advising you to keep an open mind, at least,” Gretch said firmly to the priest and then turned all of her attention to Marilyn. “Tell me about the pursuer.”
“The so-called soul-hunting vampire,” Father W got up and began pacing. The seated Buddha statue on the stereo was serene at least.
“Marilyn?” Max prompted.
Marilyn felt queasy. She wanted to leave and go back to her apartment and Rowley. She wanted to think about the day, with the petals snowing on the paths, and the lake with Gar. She shook her head and took a sip of her water. “I’m not sure where to begin,” she said softly, trying to keep the questions at bay.
“Marilyn, if there is a vampire chasing you through lifetimes, you are in terrible danger until and unless you can figure out why it so persistently seeks you out,” Gretch said in a determined way. “That’s what we need to focus on.”
Max read from his notebook, “Notes from a novice monk in Siam sometime before the Burmese overran the ancient city of Attyahuya: ‘He came to us as an elephant trainer. It was our tradition during the water festival to take in those who wanted to be with us and the elephants and he said he could train them for battle. He was a fearless fighter…’ but then the monk begins to be afraid when a fellow novice is killed by an elephant at the monastery but that the stranger really was responsible for his death. The monk said he began to fear for more than his life and he had escaped using an underground passageway. And then this, from Sister Ellen in Hancock Shaker Village: ‘The winter was hard, we took in those who needed our help… Young and strong, he could do things that the older Shaker men could not.’ But after two mysterious deaths it seems an Elder warned her that this stranger was dangerous and she was being taken in by him. The Elder then goes missing and the stranger claims he has found him trapped under the ice in the mill pond. The sister had a warning vision that he had come after her in another realm and by dressing as a man and having her Shaker sisters distract the stranger through a spirit sing she narrowly escaped again.”
“So you can see some patterns emerging here. What I think has Gretch and I both concerned is that your recent telekinesis and recurring dreams could be signaling something’s going on now, the hunter may have picked up the scent of the trail again. Weston, you’ve got to count yourself in now, we need you. ” He put the notebook down and silence seemed to fill up the room then.
“Hmm. Max, you know I want to help but…” Father W inhaled through his nose and exhaled slowly. This was more than he had bargained for. He wanted to say the whole thing seemed far-fetched, but in some ways it really didn’t, he thought, as the cosmology that Gretch Wendell laid out resembled things he already knew. If only it was in theory, if only it wasn’t Marilyn that was in the center of this.
Gretch Wendell got to her feet with a clumsy little struggle. “We don’t want to frighten you but information is your best defense at the moment, Marilyn. Should the time come, we will marshal others. Max, I will expect you to keep me informed. My watch says it’s eight, my yellow pumpkin of a coach waits for me. I need to check in with my hosts in UI. I’ll only be forty-five minutes away for the next week or so. If you need me, I’ll give Max the n
umber of Steward House where they’re putting me up. Max, see me out. Marilyn, listen to your instincts.”
The professor then limped to the door and with a brisk nod was gone. Max lifted his eyebrows, as if to say, see? And followed. Unable to help themselves, Marilyn and Father W lifted the bamboo blind and peeked out of the picture window onto the entrance of the building. There a yellow cab waited. Max saw the professor to the cab and bent over. It seemed like she was giving him something. Feeling overexposed, they both let the blind down and turned back to the living room so that when Max entered they were both reseated.
“It’s been a long day. Marilyn, you want a lift?” asked Father Weston when the door had shut. Suddenly the plain parish house seemed like a haven from these dark and troubling visions.
“That’d be great, Father,” Marilyn said getting to her feet, “It’s a lot to take in.” Her head was buzzing with images of the map room and what they had talked about in it. It was interfering with thinking about Gar, his eyes, the husky way he spoke to her, how he seemed to really know who she was.
“Max, you know I respect your intellect but I’ve got to take this past life regression thing a step at a time, no matter what Gretch Wendell says or thinks she knows. I want you and Marilyn to be careful not to let your imaginations run away with you because the water you’re talking about is very deep and I don’t know that any of us can swim there.” Father Weston spoke with the easy scolding authority that his roman collar gave him even though inside he felt anything but secure.
“Will you at least think over what we talked about?” Max asked them both as they headed towards the door. Marilyn and Father W looked at each other then, and back at the tall thin professor with deep worry lines around his fine eyes.
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