by Lis Wiehl
“What’s it going to take?” he asked.
“I told you it was a terrible demon,” Ben said.
Tommy felt a sinking sensation, a moment not of doubt but dismay. He’d tried everything he could think of to kill the beast. He looked around the yard for anything he could use as a weapon and grabbed a baseball bat from a rack near the batting cage. His Taurus was out of ammunition. He took a deep breath. The others gathered around him.
“Okay,” he began. “Here’s the plan . . .”
The Wendigo raised itself up to its full height, leaned back, and roared. It was angry, and in a hurry this time.
“You said you had a plan?” Dani said.
“Right,” Tommy said. He reached into his pocket and handed Dani his keys, isolating one of them. “I’ll see how far I can lure it away from the house. As soon as you can, pick up the pages of the book and then get in the van and drive. Head into town, where there might be people. I don’t know if that will stop it, but it might.”
“Bad plan,” Dani said, hoisting the shotgun and handing the keys to Quinn. “I’m coming with you. Don’t even try to talk me out of it.”
“All right,” Tommy said. “Quinn, you drive. Cass, help him. Are you ready, Dani?”
She smiled bravely. “Not really,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s going to wait until I am.”
Together, Tommy and Dani walked toward the demon, Tommy with the Luger in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, Dani wielding the shotgun. They’d gone ten paces when they realized Ben was walking beside them.
“I told you I was here to help you, remember?”
Tommy saw there was no point arguing with him. “How many shells do you have left?” he asked Dani.
“How would I know?” she said, keeping her eye on the creature. “I’m not a librarian.”
“How many did you fire?”
“Two.”
“You have two left,” he told her. He closed his eyes to pray. “Jesus, please watch over us and give us the courage we need,” he said. There wasn’t time for more.
The Wendigo approached them more warily this time, sizing them up.
“Spread out,” Tommy said. “Get as close as you can before you fire. Ben, I don’t suppose you have any hand grenades, do you?”
“No,” Ben said, “but I have faith.”
“So do I,” Tommy said.
“Good,” Ben said. “Your faith has been tested. It’s stronger because of that.”
The monster took another step toward them.
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “But is it enough?”
“I also have this,” Ben said. He reached into his pocket to show Tommy what he was holding.
“A Swiss Army knife?” Dani said.
“It has attachments,” Ben said.
In an instant the pocketknife began to glow in his hand, extending until it became a brilliant flaming sword ten feet long, held by a magnificent angel standing where Ben had stood. The angel was no longer disguised in human form nor limited by it. He was almost too beautiful to look at directly, the way looking at the sun hurts your eyes. He was nearly thirty feet tall and perfectly proportioned, draped in satiny silver robes, and when he spread the massive wings on his back, the light that shone from them flooded the woods in a warm, white glow, illuminating the yard, the courtyard, the house, the garage.
“This is the form you’re probably more familiar with,” the angel said to Tommy.
Then a second angel appeared. It was Charlie, dressed in his familiar motorcycle garb. He too held a small pocketknife in his hand, and then both he and the knife transformed. The knife became a fiery blade, the kind Tommy had been thrilled to read about in the Bible as a child. The biker shed his earthly disguise and took his place beside the Angel Benjamin, both of them equally magnificent yet distinct from each other.
“That’s . . . ,” Tommy began.
“Is awesome the word you’re looking for?” Dani said.
“Awesome doesn’t come close,” Tommy said.
Confronted by the pair of angelic warriors, now revealed in their full heavenly raiments, the demon cowered and slunk to the side, head low to the ground like a whipped dog, lips curled back in fear. He snarled and held up a claw, talons extended, in petulant but futile defiance. The Angel Benjamin smiled, raised his sword, and swung it over the demon’s head. The wind from the angel’s sword bent the willow tree at the end of the driveway and sent its branches swaying. The Wendigo swung around to face its foes as Benjamin moved to one side and Charles to the other, cutting off any possibility of escape. The battle, Tommy thought, resembled a bullfight where the angels were matadors, dignified and regal against a senseless beast.
The demon tried to run. The Angel Benjamin flew forward in the blink of an eye to cut off its retreat. When the demon tried to run a second time, the Angel Charles leapt in front and spun to deliver a blow to the head that sent the demon sprawling. The angel bounced on his toes like a boxer, circling and cutting the demon off until he had it backed up against the side of the garage, where it cringed, shielding its eyes from the whitehot heavenly light.
The Angel Benjamin lifted his sword high above his head.
The demon sprang forward, lunging for the Angel Benjamin’s throat.
The angel jumped to one side with the grace of a martial arts master and swung his sword down and through, neatly decapitating the monster. At the same time, Charles swung his mighty sword to split the body in half, as easily as splitting a piece of dry wood with an ax, and then, perhaps to hasten the process of decomposition, Tommy guessed, he split the halves in half before stepping away from the putrid corpse. He looked down on the slain demon as its corrupted fluids drained into the dirt, exchanging a brief but satisfied glance with his heavenly counterpart. A moment later the demon’s body parts seemed to calcify, then turned to ash, crumbled, and blew away.
In an instant the night grew dark again and the angels transformed back into Ben and Charlie. As Ben walked toward Tommy and Dani, he folded his knife and put it back in his pocket.
“We told you it had attachments,” he said.
“Will the demon be back?” Dani asked.
“No,” Charlie said. “This is permanent. He’s gone forever.”
“You were here all along,” Tommy said.
“You can trust in Christ,” Charlie said, nodding. “All our power comes from him. The things you see in this world, the forms and frames, don’t last. The love of Jesus is eternal. Everything else will fade away.”
Quinn, Cassandra, and Ruth came cautiously from the greenhouse. They all gathered around the angels. Charlie let Ben speak for both of them.
“I took this form to tell you something you needed to understand,” he said. “When I arrived, I didn’t know what my task was until you found the book.” He held out his hand to Cassandra. “Do you have it?”
Cassandra had picked up the book and gathered up the loose, unpaginated sheets of calf vellum, now pressed between her two hands. She handed all of it to Ben, who took the book and the loose pages and then handed the book back to her, bound and collated and protected again by its cover. Cassandra looked at the restored book in her hands, slack-jawed.
“If you ever want a job at the library, let me know,” Ruth said.
“Do you know what’s coming?” Dani said to Ben.
“No, we don’t know the future,” the angel said. “But we’ll be there. And there are many more where we came from. Many who are far more powerful than either of us. We can’t tell you what to do, but use what you’ve learned. The strongest faith is the kind forged by challenge. Sometimes you just don’t know how strong your faith can be until it’s tested.”
“‘Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, and the living creatures and the elders,’” Tommy quoted. “‘The number of them was myriads of myraids, and thousands of thousands.’”
“There’s a reckoning coming,” Ben said. “You’ve been chosen to do the
Lord’s work. Failure is not an option.”
They heard a noise behind them and turned to see Otto crawling out from under the porch.
“You’re not very brave,” Quinn said to his dog, “but you are smart.”
When they turned around again, Ben was there, and Charlie was there, and then both faded from view.
38.
At St. Adrian’s Academy, twenty-one boys waited in the rotunda of the commons. Above them a mural, a 360-degree panorama, depicted the history of civilization, conceiving it as an unbroken sequence of wars and battles led by kings and generals, with a few scientists and thinkers (all male) and a handful of mechanical inventions added to the composition. Closer scrutiny by anyone trained in historical analysis would reveal that the inventions, suits of armor, rifles and airplanes and missiles, all had military applications or were developed in response to military needs. Close examination would also discover that next to each king or general or thinker there was a second man, smaller but in close proximity, ready to give advice.
The twenty-one boys who’d assembled wore winter clothing, coats and hats and gloves, and each boy had a suitcase. Each suitcase contained a small wooden box holding the cremated remains of a small animal. Mixed in with the ashes, something else.
The boys spoke quietly to each other, waiting. At the appointed time they were told by the porter that the vans to take them to the Westchester County Airport in White Plains had arrived. Dr. John Adams Wharton and Dr. Adolf Ghieri stood at the door as the boys filed out, each boy shaking the hand of the headmaster and the school psychologist. No words were spoken, no wishes for happy holidays or merry Christmases. The semester was over. The other boys on campus had already departed for home and the six-week-long winter break between semesters.
In the distance, work had begun on the new science center, bulldozers and caterpillars moving earth and digging holes.
Dr. Ghieri smiled. At the very same time, a motorcycle chase and a battle between good and evil were taking place. He’d sent the demon to the house where the athlete and the girl and the others had taken refuge to inflict as much damage as possible, but mainly to create a diversion. The ploy had worked. The boys were safely on their way.
Shortly after the scene in Tommy Gunderson’s courtyard ended, a lone unmarked police car pulled up to the gates and Detective Phillip Casey asked over the intercom if Tommy was home. Tommy recognized Casey’s voice and told the detective to drive on through, then pressed the button to open the gates.
The detective parked on the cobblestones and got out of the car, walking with a stiffness that made him seem older than he was. Tommy and Dani greeted him on the back steps.
“Are you all right?” Tommy said.
“My knees don’t like the cold,” Casey said. “My nephew ain’t crazy about it either.”
“Hello, Detective,” Dani said.
“Dr. Harris. They told me I might find you here.”
Dani and Tommy looked at each other.
“I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded.”
“My house is being fumigated, so Tommy told me I could stay in his guestroom for a few days,” Dani explained. She hated lying, but at the moment she couldn’t think of any way to explain to Casey what was really going on.
She glanced over her shoulder to where Quinn, Cassandra, and Ruth were clearly visible through the kitchen windows. Villanegre had recovered enough to walk under his own power to a bed in a downstairs guestroom. Dani hadn’t had a chance to call an ambulance, but he seemed to be stable and not as seriously injured as they’d first thought.
“Their houses being fumigated too?” Casey asked. “Look, this is none of my business. All I ask is that if you have a Super Bowl party, you invite me, because my wife says we can’t get a flat-screen TV until the old TV breaks.”
“Would you like to come in for coffee?” Tommy said. He saw Casey eyeing the barbecue pit where the propane explosion had singed the grape arbor. The expression on Casey’s face grew even more puzzled.
“I think I’ve had enough caffeine for the day,” Casey said. “Looks like maybe you have too. Is there someplace we can talk? The three of us?”
Tommy led him to the greenhouse. The air outside was cold and dry, but the temperature inside the greenhouse was over eighty, the air humid and fragrant with the aromas of hothouse tomatoes and marigolds. There were benches in the center of the greenhouse, but when Tommy suggested they sit, Casey declined.
“I’ve just got a minute,” he said. “Dani, I looked into Jerome Leonard, last seen in Portland, Maine, like you asked. I’m afraid it’s not good.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you in private,” Casey said. “You remember the condition of the body when they found Abbie Gardener? How she seemed to have been crushed, like those submarines that dive too deep and implode? That was how they found Jerry Leonard. Same COD: not yet determined. Same sort of crime scene, except this time, the guy was inside a locked room.”
“When was this?” Dani asked.
“About six months ago,” Casey said. “Jerry Leonard was Julie’s father. That makes the whole family either killed or dead under suspicious circumstances. Any thoughts?”
The way Casey eyed her, Dani understood that he suspected she knew more than she was saying.
“What do the Portland police say?”
“They don’t say much,” Casey said. “He was living alone in a crummy apartment by the waterfront. Using a fake name. They just called it cause of death unknown and closed the case.”
“Huh,” Dani said.
“Huh?”
“You’re thinking someone might be going after the whole family?” Tommy asked.
“It certainly looks that way,” Casey said. He looked at each of them again before realizing they weren’t going to tell him anything.
“Okay, look,” Casey said. “I like you both. I don’t know what’s going on here, but right now, since there apparently aren’t any other members of the Leonard family we need to worry about, I’m going to put this aside and move on. I don’t know you very well, Tommy, but you seem like a straightup guy, so if you have your reasons not to talk to me right now, I’m going to respect that. But I want you to know I’m on your side and I can work with you on this if you want my help. Meanwhile, I got your backs. Okay?”
“Okay,” Dani said.
“And I meant what I said about the Super Bowl party,” he told Tommy, opening the door to his car. “My brother-in-law Vinnie runs a pasta tailgate at Foxborough where guys pay $20 a head for all they can eat, and I know all his recipes.”
“We’ll definitely invite you if we have a Super Bowl party,” Tommy said.
After he left, Tommy turned to Dani. “How much do you think he really knows?”
“He’s like an iceberg,” Dani said. “What he lets you know he knows is just the tip. He’s really smart.”
“He’d be good to have on the team,” Tommy said.
“We might need to include him, eventually,” Dani said. “You realize that the more people we bring on board, the more we’re going to look like a bunch of kooks. Radical religious extremists, predicting the end times.” “It crossed my mind,” Tommy said. “We should be careful.”
“You can say that again.”
“We should be careful.”
39.
The next two days were quiet. They regrouped and discussed how to proceed. The immediate danger had passed, but the greater danger had not. Villanegre was taken to North Westchester Hospital, where he was treated for a punctured lung, broken ribs, and a bruised kidney. He smiled through the pain and tried to dismiss his condition, adding that his belief in the eternal life palliated any concerns as to his immediate future. “I’ll be all right,” he told Dani. “But I won’t mind a few days in a hospital. Stay calm and carry on, as they say.”
Ruth went back to her house to collect the small arsenal she’d inherited from the policem
an. Cassandra called her agent and told him she was entering rehab, and that she couldn’t tell him where she was because she didn’t want the paparazzi to find her, hanging up before he could protest. Quinn spent the time developing a pair of simple colorimetric protein assays using dyes that would bind with the compounds they’d found in the pill Dani had taken from Starbucks and with the Provivilan sample. The first dye test would turn a glass of water blue if it contained Provivilan. The second dye test would turn a sample red if it contained the Doomsday Molecule. Quinn’s work gave them the ability to detect the presence of a threat. It was a good start.
Knowing Carl had betrayed them (“death by drowning” was the official version of events), they looked back and wondered why they’d failed to notice something that should have been obvious. The way he’d failed to translate simple Latin words or make jokes from obvious setup lines, or turned down Ruth’s strawberry-rhubarb pie after saying it was his favorite—they’d known he’d been acting odd, but they hadn’t put it together, even when they’d been explicitly warned. The message was clear: think the unthinkable. They were fighting an enemy that would stop at nothing to defeat them. It was agreed that they would monitor each other and speak freely if they noticed any aberrations.
“They’re evil and we’re not,” Tommy said. “We need to try to understand how they think. ‘Be wise as serpents but harmless as doves.’ So says Scripture.”
“Good advice,” Dani agreed.
Detective Casey told Dani that the case on Abbie Gardener was closed. As far as Irene Scotto was concerned, a 102-year-old woman had died alone in her room of unknown causes. The papers said only that Abbie had died of “old age.” Casey told her the report on the reptile scale Banerjee had sent to the FBI came back marked Cannot identify.
“I think I’m going to have trouble sleeping over this one,” Casey said. “I might call you for a prescription. I’m going to call my guy in Portland and see if they found any reptile scales near Jerome Leonard. You never know.”