The Soul Hunter

by Melanie Wells

  He threw up his hands again. “Dylan Foster, you’re breaking my Jewish heart.”

  “The flood!” I pointed at him.

  “Precisely.”

  “So they were wiped out with everyone else.”

  “Sort of.”

  “You’re making me crazy, Eli.”

  He flipped pages until he found what he wanted. “Numbers, chapter 13.” He looked up at me. “Post-flood, of course. Moses has sent out a reconnaissance team to scout Canaan. ‘So they gave the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying ‘The land through which we have gone…’ blah blah blah…hm… Ah, okay…‘and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim (for the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim) and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.’”

  “What? What does that mean? They were giants?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Like Goliath.”

  “Goliath was Anakim.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sons of Anak. The phrase ‘part of the Nephilim’—this is translated in a number of ways. It’s not very clear.”

  “No kidding.” I took a sip of coffee. “What happened to the Anakim?”

  “Apparently wiped out by Caleb and his crew.” He shrugged.

  “And the Nephilim?”

  “No other mention of them exists in the Hebrew Bible.”

  “What about in the Christian Bible?”

  “That,” he said, closing his Hebrew scripture, “would be your department.”

  I nodded.

  “What about the Lot reference? What do you think that means?”

  “Lot’s daughters—their story is a very sad one.”

  “Do you have the Old Testament in English anywhere?”

  He shoved a book across the countertop at me. I flipped through the pages of Genesis, scanning as I read. I found what I wanted in chapter 19 and looked up at Eli.

  “I’d forgotten about the angels.”

  “Keep reading.”

  I read to the end of the chapter.

  “Oh. I forgot about that part too. They were lost, weren’t they?”

  “Most definitely. And little, one could argue, in the sense that they were overmatched by the evil around them.”

  “‘Daughter of Lot, lost and little.’” I said.

  “Makes sense, no? Now tell me. What is all this about?”

  I told him about Drew Sturdivant. About her sad life and her even sadder demise.

  “And what is her fascination with Anael?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to start calling jewelry stores after this.”

  “Jewelry stores? What ever for?”

  “Anael watches. I thought it was a brand of…” And then, of course, I realized. “‘Watches’ is a verb. Anael watches. Who is Anael?”

  “That, my dear friend, is a very good question.”

  “What about the ankh?” I pointed again at the page. “Do you know anything about ankhs?”

  “That would be a question for an Egyptian scholar, not a Hebrew scholar.”

  “The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt for centuries,” I argued.

  “Yes,” he said, pouring me more coffee. “But unfortunately for you, we didn’t take notes.”

  24

  The sun was bright, piercing, as I left Eli’s house, the cold snap officially broken. Water dripped everywhere, and the chilly air was ripe with the wet, loamy smell of thawing earth. Pansies, their petals emerging unscathed from their ice shrouds, perked up in their beds, bright little patches of optimism and resilience.

  It was almost noon. I was hungry and had work to do. I swiped my card in the touchpad and pulled my truck into the lot at SMU, grateful once again to be teaching on such a lovely campus with that rarest of commodities in university life—ample and convenient faculty parking.

  I dumped my stuff in my office and went to the kitchen to fix myself a cup of decaf herbal tea, careful not to boil the water, and stuck my Tupperware bowl of leftover chili in the microwave to heat it up. Then I settled in at my desk and ate lunch, my head spinning from my visit with Eli, my hands jittery from caffeine. Two cups of coffee was my normal quota for a year, not for one morning.

  I was just starting my research on Anael when I heard a knock at my door. I held my breath and waited quietly for the intruder to leave, hoping the tapping of computer keys hadn’t betrayed my presence.

  “I know you’re in there.”

  It was Helene.

  “Oh, all right,” I said.

  The door swung open. “You never fool me with that routine.”

  She settled her considerable bottom into a chair, looked at me over her glasses, and pointed at the floor beside my desk. “What is that?”

  I looked down. “What does it look like? It’s a lunchbox.”

  “You’re thirty-five years old and you carry a pink Barbie lunchbox?”

  “It was a gift from a friend.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Is that the purpose of this visit? To insult my taste in lunchboxes? I’m working.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Your work.”

  “What? Is there some problem?”

  “Your review is coming up.”

  I grimaced. “I hate reviews.”

  “That’s because you have a reflexive dislike for authority.”

  “Aversion. A reflexive aversion to authority.”

  “See what I mean?”

  “What?”

  She rolled her eyes again.

  “I have all your teaching reviews. I need your publication record to date. And you need to submit whatever you’re working on and a report on how it’s going. And your anticipated date of completion.”

  “I guess I’d better start working on something, then.”

  “I thought you said you were working. When I came in.”

  “I am working. I’m just not working on work.”

  “What, then?”

  “Know anything about Genesis 6? The Nephilim?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you went to Hebrew school.”

  “Only until I was thirteen. I stopped going the day after my bat mitzvah.”

  “Stayed in just long enough to get the loot, huh?”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “What’s the other way?”

  “It was important to my father. He was dying of cancer.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  She waved off my apology. “This will be peer review. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Who’s on the committee?”

  “The tenured faculty. Harold.”

  “Francine?”

  “Yep. Crazy Francine. She’ll go easy on you.” She named a few more. “And John.”

  “Mulvaney?”

  “He’s the only John we have.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  Lord help me, she didn’t.

  “How did John Mulvaney end up on my committee? The man knows rats and mice. That’s it.”

  “He’s tenured, Dylan.”

  “That’s absurd. I don’t want John Mulvaney anywhere near my review.”

  “That’s not up to you.”

  “Who is it up to?”

  “The committee. You’ll have to petition to get him removed.”

  “I have to petition the committee John Mulvaney sits on? That committee?”

  “Yep.”

  I sighed. “Helene, in addition to the fact that he knows nothing about my work and is therefore not qualified to evaluate it, the man has strange, delusional fantasies about me. I don’t want him on my committee.”

  “Then you’d better start practicing the fine art of kissing up.”

  “Tell me who to kiss up to and I’ll do it.”

  “I’d start with Harold, if I were you. He likes you. Save John for last
. Maybe the others will help you with him. None of us can stand him either.”

  “Done.”

  She eased herself out of her chair.

  “How are your knees?” I asked.

  “This is Texas, not New York. It’s supposed to be warm.”

  “You should have picked San Antonio. Winter lasts, like, two weeks down there.” I handed her a bottle of aspirin. She shook a couple into her hand.

  “You need to suck it up and get the knee replacement,” I said.

  “Your doctor told you that two years ago.”

  “I don’t need your advice, Dylan.”

  “Coward.”

  “And I don’t want to be laid up for a month to recover.”

  “Oh, it’s not a month, you big baby. Do it this summer. I’ll bring you casseroles.”

  “I can make my own casseroles. And my own medical decisions.” She turned to leave. “Go see Harold. He’s in this afternoon.”

  An Internet search on Anael turned up a strange underworld of angel worship I knew nothing about. I looked at dozens of websites, most of them ominously black, with drawings of gaunt, sneering beings. They all hailed the power of angels, making little if any distinction between angels in service to God or to Satan. To the angel worship crowd, it seemed, the difference was inconsequential.

  I scrolled past references to angels with names I’d never heard of—all ending in “el.” Elaborate organizations of angels were described, a detailed pecking order. Many of the sites referenced spells and incantations. One actually referred to night feeding. As in vampire-like night feeding.

  I pulled my concordance off my shelf and looked up angelos and its Hebrew equivalent, malak, then spent most of the afternoon looking up every reference to angels in both testaments, scribbling pages of notes.

  I found two strange New Testament passages I’d never noticed before. In 2 Peter, angels that sinned were “committed to the pits of darkness,” which sounded pretty unpleasant to me. Since other demons are free to roam the earth, according to most of what I’d just read, I took this to mean that a particularly wretched batch of losers had, at some point, gotten themselves chained up in some sort of fiery hoosegow. The book of Jude seemed to back this up, referencing angels “who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode,” and had gotten themselves incarcerated for their trouble.

  All four commentaries I checked suggested that these passages pointed to the demons in Genesis 6, who had forced themselves on unfortunate human women and spawned the weird race of half-breed giants.

  I wondered if Peter Terry could be one of the demons in the Nephilim scheme. Seems like he’d be locked up with the rest of his foul cronies. Unless he’d broken loose somehow. Surely God had posted some sort of celestial guard duty down there. Still, what of their reappearance in Numbers 13?

  My phone rang, jolting me out of the ether and back into my decidedly earthly office.

  “Dylan Foster.”

  “I got some dirt for you.”

  It was Eli.

  “What?”

  “I called my friend Menachem Levy.”

  “Let me take a wild guess based on the name. He’s Jewish, right?”

  “Better than that. He’s a rabbi. A real one with credentials. Not like me. And an expert in Jewish mysticism. He teaches at Ben Ilon in Tel Aviv.”

  “That’s a university?”

  “The university. At least on this topic.”

  “Jewish mysticism. What is that exactly?”

  “Apocryphal literature. Angelic lore. Kabbalah. Like that.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. Except Madonna and Demi Moore and that ugly red bracelet. Seems a little hootie-hoo to me.”

  “Oh, that all comes from some nut factory in California. The real Kabbalah is an ancient tradition of rabbinic teaching. You’re not even allowed to study it until you’re forty years old. It’s considered to be too powerful, to require too much maturity for a simpler mind to handle.”

  “I’m out on both counts. What did he say?”

  “I asked him about the Nephilim and the Anakim. I got a whole slew of stuff for you.”

  I grabbed a pen and a clean notepad. “Shoot.”

  “According to Levy, Anakim are traditionally thought to be from a race that includes Rephaim, Nephilim, Emim—there’s a whole bunch of them. Emim, I think, is referenced in Deuteronomy 2 and 3. I haven’t looked that up yet.”

  “Slow down and spell them all for me.”

  I wrote them all down and underlined the common suffix. “Cherubim and Seraphim end the same way. Do you think they could all be angelic tribes or orders or something?”

  “I guess it’s possible.”

  “Most of the tribes you see in the Old Testament end in ‘ite.’ Canaanite, Hittite, Jebusite.”

  “Good point. I never noticed the distinction.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “Hang on a second. I’m taking notes.”

  I sipped tea while I waited for him to catch up. It was tepid by now.

  “Okay. I got it,” Eli said. “There are lots of strange stories that describe the Anakim. Do you know about the books of Enoch?”

  “Book? Or books?”

  “Either. But technically there are five parts—written in…some language. Transcribed eventually into Latin and Greek.” I listened while he scanned his notes.

  “Is it part of the Apocrypha? The Catholic Bible?” I asked.

  “It’s apocryphal, but Jewish, not Catholic.” He flipped through pages. “I can’t summarize all this for you. I’ll fax you the references. It’s pretty freaky stuff. Levy said that Enoch references the rape from Genesis 6. And that the demons taught the women spells and sorcery and stuff like that.”

  “Did he mention Anael at all? Anything about angel worship?”

  “Anael is associated with Anakim. That’s all he said. But he did mention the Watchers.”

  I felt the room get cold. Cold and dead.

  “Who are the Watchers?”

  “It’s the word for demons in the book of Enoch.”

  “Watchers? Am I hearing you right?” I asked, scribbling furiously.

  “Yes. Watchers.”

  I wrote the phrase “Anael watches” in the margin and underlined it.

  “I found a few things,” I said. “But this was all on Internet sites, so who knows if it means anything?”

  “About Anael?”

  “Listen to this.” I scanned my pages. “Anael is supposedly the angel of the second heaven, whatever that is.”

  “That’s from Enoch. He went through all seven of them.”

  “Is that where ‘seventh heaven’ comes from?”

  “Search me.”

  “Anael is apparently the guardian of Friday. And the angel of love.”

  “Please don’t tell me the moon is in the seventh house.”

  “Sadly, yes. And Jupiter aligned with Mars.” I laughed.

  “Is this the dawning of the Age of Aquarius?”

  I groaned. “I hope not. I barely lived through it the first time.”

  “Make love, not war, baby,” Eli said.

  “Speaking of war…Anael is also apparently one of seven archangels. I think there are only two mentioned in the Bible. Michael and Gabriel.”

  “Write down Uriel,” Eli said, spelling it for me.

  “Uriel? Never heard of him.”

  “He’s the one that led Enoch around in heaven. His tour guide. According to the book of Enoch, anyway. And he’s supposedly the one that delivered the message to Noah about the coming flood.”

  I wrote it all down, took another sip of tea, grimaced, and pushed the cup away. “Enoch sounds important.”

  “I’d spend some time on him if I were you.”

  “I’ll go down to Perkins this afternoon.”

  “Oh. One more thing about the Anakim.” I heard him flipping papers.

  “What?”

  “They were known by some phrase…” h
e kept flipping.

  I tapped my pen against the desk, impatient as usual. “And the phrase would be?”

  “Wait for it… I’m looking, I’m looking… Ah! Here it is.” He cleared his throat. “Wearers of necklaces. The Anakim were known as the wearers of necklaces.”

  25

  The thing about ghosts and haunts in the movies is that they’re easily satisfied. Basically they’re interested in geography. You’ve built your house on a graveyard, or some kid was murdered in the bathtub upstairs in your Victorian-era dream home. Or maybe one twin got whacked and keeps wandering around your living room in a permanent bad mood, playing Blue Skies in the middle of the night on your aunt Betty’s upright piano. Something like that. The point is, their primary goal is for you to leave them alone so they can haunt their little square of land in peace.

  They’re parasitic, not predatory.

  Demons, it seems, have far grander ambitions. They’re not content to scare you half out of your mind. Or out of your house, for that matter. They do seem interested in forcing you to forego your concern for your property values and give them their space. But they rarely have the courtesy to announce the rest of their agenda. And, perhaps worst of all, unlike ghosts and other less formidable spooks, demons are portable. Like my sanity, it turns out, they can come and go at will.

  And that, among other things, is what makes the little devils so dangerous.

  I stared out my window at the sun, which was giving up the fight and slipping behind the trees for the day, and thought about Peter Terry, picturing the sky full of creeps like him.

  It was five thirty. My normally tidy desk was littered with open reference books and pages of hastily scribbled notes. I sighed and slumped back into my chair. I had arrived at information overload. I couldn’t crack one more book tonight. Bridwell library down at the other end of campus at Perkins School of Theology opens at ten on Saturdays. I promised myself I’d be first in line in the morning.

  I needed to call it a day and go home to my new pet. Melissa was probably sick of her hutch by now and craving organic carrots. I cleaned off my desk, organized my notes and stuck them in my bag, and locked my office for the night.

  I considered calling Jackson and McKnight on my way home but decided quickly against it. What was I going to say? I think a demon killed Drew Sturdivant? Quite possibly she was being watched by an angel named Anael? This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius?