by A. L. Mengel
Claret put her hand to Delia’s mouth, very gently. “No worries, dear child. I am here to love and protect you. That is what you need in your life. I am your war angel.”
The waves of emotions overtook her, and then she fell into Claret’s arms. There was a moment that Delia did not mind that she fell into the arms of a stranger. There were days that she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. For many days, after the funeral, she would walk through the house, tip toeing on creaky floorboards, looking outside towards the fading afternoon sunlight.
“I did not murder your mother.”
Delia stood motionless in the hallway, wearing a red, flowing dress, looking at her father. Studying him. Watching his every movement.
“You said she had it comin’”. Delia glared at him.
Her father shook his head and set the shovel down next to the door. “Yes, I did. And she did. But I did not do it. Your mother isn’t the saint you think she was.”
Delia turned and stormed back into her room.
And when inside, she kneeled on her bed and looked out the window. The moon was shining brightly, highlighting the city in pale blue and white fade; the buildings in Paris looked like stacked dominoes. But Delia knew that she wanted out. She wanted a different life. She wanted to experience the city, the country, the world. She remembered the days of her childhood. Her mother had always been there for her. But now, that she was gone, Delia wanted to move on with her life. She let the curtains fall back over the window and lay in bed.
And there was a time that she wanted to perform. She looked at the lovely ladies, their brilliant red lipstick, puffy skirts and flawless skin. Under the lights, they were beautiful. Dancing on stage, the music was playing, the lights were bright and hot, and the stage was up and above the crowd.
There was a light knock at the window.
Delia got up and peeked outside the shears. She recognized the woman from the cemetery earlier that day and raised the window. Claret bent downwards to speak. “Have you thought about my proposition?”
Delia sat back on the bed as Claret smiled. She fidgeted for a minute and then looked back up at Claret. She took a step back and looked downwards. “No, I can’t. I cannot commit my life to evil. My mother always taught me that. I don’t want to go to hell.”
Claret reached down and raised the window, and started to climb in. She looked up at Delia and smiled. “Who said you were going to hell?”
Delia looked down, sighed and shook her head. She looked back up. “Isn’t that what happens? Something just doesn’t seem right about too much success. You become rich, you must be evil.”
Claret chuckled as she entered the small bedroom. “Who taught you that?”
A light rain started to fall outside, and Claret came inside and sat on the bed next to Delia. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “A storm is coming,” Delia said.
Claret nodded. “Oh it’s been here, Delia. It’s been here for a while.”
Delia nodded.
“So now, when are you going to let me in? Into your life, Delia? When will you invite me?”
Delia paused for a moment as thunder rumbled in the sky above the apartment building. After a few minutes, rain started to pelt against the windowpane, and she looked over at Claret, who was sitting next to her patiently, smiling, her eyebrows raised.
“You seem…evil…”
Claret threw her head back in laughter. “You think that? You must really have a hard time reading people, Delia. Look at me. Have I done anything evil to you?”
Delia shook her head.
“So then. Will you consider my proposition?”
Claret smiled, revealing brilliant white teeth. “Good then,” she said. “So I will leave you for now, dear one. I will give you some more time. I will return, though, Delia. You are too special. There are too many passages already written about you. You are too special and too needed to pass up.”
Claret raised the window as Delia looked on. “I will come to you again, Delia. I don’t know when it will be. But I will always remember you. And you will always be the special one that you are. You have the gift that we seek. And one day, I will reappear to you, special one.”
*****
Delia escaped to Paris once she was more mature and took a liking to Vaudeville, which had just made its introduction to the area in the late 1800’s. She waited in the alley outside the club, leaning against the cool brick wall, and closed her eyes, listening to the muffled music, still playing strong to laughter and applause. She opened her eyes and looked around the corner.
It was well past four in the morning.
The music still thumped inside, but she sunk down the brick wall and lit a cigarette. She blew out a cloud of smoke and looked down the alley, and saw very little pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk towards the street. A solitary drunk couple staggered by. After the show, she was exhausted. She leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette, waiting for Darius.
She remembered Claret, and the days when she had visited her as a child.
And her mother, how she missed her mother so much.
Over a century after she had stood in the alley in Paris, and remembered Claret as she was waiting for her next act, she was called to Rome as well, and sat in the same office, with the same priests – Monsignor Harrison and Ramiel and Cristoph – to discuss the same issue which was plaguing the immortals.
She had looked up, wearing the same bright red lipstick that she had worn during her Vaudeville nights. Candles burned around them.
“I miss Paris.” Delia said. “I miss the Vaudeville nights. The brilliant red lipstick. The smoke billowing from my mouth. The puffy skirts. The hot lights. The dusty stage. Oh, how I miss it all. I wish I could go back to it.”
Cristoph shifted in his chair behind the expansive desk. His cassock was tight. The silence was impenetrable, but after a few moments, an organ played in a distant room above in the Sistine. “So that is when she met you? During those nights in Paris?”
She remembered the first night. The night that the mysterious woman came to the show, sat in the center of the seats, and as Delia performed, looking out into the dark seats, she could get a glimpse of her. Despite the shining hot lights in front of her face, she noticed Claret, sitting in the audience, staring directly at her.
Looking like a china doll with her neatly tucked red hair, matching lips, and light skin.
Delia looked down.
Cristoph noticed her pendant, which caught the light, and shined back in his face.
Delia looked up and brushed her silver hair back behind her ear. “No, she came to me long before that.”
Cristoph sat back in his chair, and flopped his pen on the desk. He removed his glasses and placed them on the yellow legal pad. “So tell me, Delia. When did she come to you? When did Claret first enter your life? We must know, Delia. Your relation to her is imperative.”
Delia sighed and stretched her legs out. She looked down at her legs, noticing the grey stockings she had worn on that day. And then, those were just like the same hosiery that she wore on the same night that Claret had been in the audience, and Delia had been sitting in the same position, backstage, looking down at her outstretched legs. And she’d heard a door creak open near stage left.
She looked up. But she was no longer in the Monsignor’s office. She was on the same stage in Paris she had remembered so many years ago. “Yes, may I help you?”
“I watched your show tonight.” A warm female voice, slightly raspy, but friendly sounding nonetheless. But she looked over towards the source, and saw darkness.
“I can’t see you,” Delia said, standing up from her chair. She reached over towards the makeup table for her tiny silver rimmed glasses, but they did not help. The other side of the stage, with its flowing black curtains soaring down from the ceiling, was far too dark.
“I will come out of the shadows,” she said.
She shook her head and looked around the room. She got up out of her chair
, fishing for her cane. “Cristoph, I really must return to Lyon. Antoine is there, alone. I understand my obligations. But my obligations to him come first before Rome.”
Delia rose as the Monsignor looked up at her, speechless.
“So you will not assist us with this investigation?” Cristoph asked, jumping out of his chair. The Monsignor waved and Cristoph said nothing more, as Delia exited. “I will assist,” she said. “But you will not get my assistance like this.”
*****
Delia waited for her flight in Leonardo da Vinci and considered her meeting with The Inspiriti. She questioned whether the organization was even beneficial to immortals. They had sat her in front of a conference table, asked her about knowledge of a hooded figure that she knew nothing about, and backed her into a corner.
She looked down at her notebook as she heard the rumble of a plane taking off. She looked down and sipped her coffee as someone tapped her on her shoulder.
“Delia,” a warm, feminine voice said. “I’m here. Talk to me.”
Claret was there. She sat back and smiled. Her red hair was tied back, unusual for her.
“What do you need to help me with?” Delia asked, setting her notebook to the side. She leaned back and looked over at Claret. “And how did you get in here?”
Claret raised her eyebrows and smiled. “You haven’t figured out my gift yet? Don’t you remember the days I first came to you? And your transformation?”
Delia paused for a moment and looked out at the tarmac. “Don’t try to remind me, Claret. You may have given me this gift, this immortality, whatever it may be. But to many, being immortal can be a curse.”
CLARET ATARAH
JERUSALEM
“I grew up in the times of Jesus Christ.”
“I still remember the day that my captor arrived at the hanging flap that served as my door; when I was sleeping, huddled in my bed, the single, simple and thin cover hugged up tight towards my neck, my eyes shut tight.”
Claret paused for a moment, and lit a cigarette. “But I heard his footsteps.”
“Thick, heavy on the earthen floor, getting louder and closer as they approached my bed…”
And then Claret remembered.
She remembered the night the ‘Hooded Man’ came to her, so many centuries ago, in a different time and for a different reason.
“I drew the covers up over my head and listened. The footsteps stopped. But I felt a presence up and over where I lay.”
She closed her eyes and was back in the same dusty room. In the small hut east of the market, in the stony sands of Jerusalem.
“Claret…” a deep, rasping voice pierced the silence. “Claret, wake up…”
“But I was awake.”
She lay beneath the protection of the cloth blanket, the tattered piece of fabric that secured her from the outside world when she slept, which now would serve as the only barrier between her and him.
“For I remember, now while telling you this, the night when I lay as a child, huddled under the covers, in the chill of the night air, as I covered my eyes with the crook of my arm, and waited.”
Claret shifted in her chair, her eyes remained closed, and she continued the vision.
“His breathing was heavy. But he let me lay where I was for minutes. And then the minutes felt like hours, and I watched the edge of the blanket and I waited to hear his breathing. But the night remained silent. And I waited for the covers to be pulled down from my face, waited for his hand to caress my hair, to pull it back from my forehead, but that never happened.”
*****
It was a rainy afternoon.
The blinds were open, the sunlight shone through, but the rain dampened it. The day felt like a heavy blanket. Like the sun was somewhere off in a distant place, but the light was still present.
Claret leaned back in her chair. She wanted a cigarette. She started to fidget. Her fingers drummed on the arm of the chair, and she shifted her legs back and forth from one crossed position to another. “So do you understand what I was saying?”
A silver haired man sat in the expansive desk before her. He thumbed through a file. After a few minutes, he reached out and pressed stop on a tape recorder. “This sounds pretty far-fetched.”
She leaned back in her chair and let out a deep sigh. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
The silver haired man gestured with his hand and she lit up. He continued to look through the file.
Claret lit up, inhaled, and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Far-fetched?”
The silver haired man looked up from his paperwork and adjusted his tie. “Um…yes. It seems pretty supernatural.”
Claret scoffed and took another deep drag on her cigarette. “What am I paying you for again?” She shook her head. “You clearly do not understand any realm other than basic reality.”
“Maybe you should try the Church, or maybe a medium, then. Psychiatrists tend to lean towards reality and the human interpretation of it, ma’am.”
Claret shook her head and stood, walking over to the door. She looked down at the man who looked up at her. “Well then you recommend some to me,” she said. “Because I need some spiritual assistance. I came to you because I thought you could help. And clearly, you don’t have the spiritual knowledge to assist in these matters. And by the way – I’ll be disputing my credit card charge.”
*****
Claret stood outside One Brickell in Miami and thought of her appointment. She dialed her phone and spoke after holding it to her ear for a few moments. “Clearly these mortals are useless,” she said, as she lit her cigarette as the traffic roared by. She shook her head. “I don’t know why I thought that psychiatry would provide good direction. It doesn’t. ”
Claret pressed the button to unlock her car doors, but did not get inside. She tossed her purse on the seat and slammed the door, staying outside the car, and leaned against the door, looked up Brickell Avenue towards downtown.
It was a rainy afternoon. The rain was light, and the clouds lent a brightness that filtered the sun, and the wet pavement still shone with the reflecting daylight. She didn’t want to return to Andelusia Avenue. With Antoine’s estate now a burned out shell, she could not afford to enter through the portal there. But she closed her eyes, the roar of the traffic silenced, and she was there again.
*****
Darkness befell the city of Jerusalem.
In the days when Claret had been newly transformed, after she had experienced the nights with her own ‘Hooded Man’, she had decided that every immortal should do the same.
The tiny box cutter houses, with their clay walls and straw roofs, rose from the rolling, barren desert landscape like building blocks, stacked neatly against one another, rising up the hills towards the center market square.
It was the same time, the same city, the same Jerusalem that Claret had remembered so long ago; the time when she had been captured in the night, as a little girl, before she was transformed into darkness. But those were so many years ago. In the times when the Messiah – the one they called the Son of God – walked the land, and on the same night that he was betrayed with a single kiss on the cheek.
“The Judas Kiss,” she had said to Antoine, one night in Sacrafice, in Miami, shortly after the nightclub opened. Antoine had stood at the bar swirling a glass of bourbon and ice.
“The ultimate betrayal, that same kiss, the one that you gave me when you took the cup. When you took it!” Claret slammed her drink down on the bar.
Antoine shook his head and looked at Claret. “I don’t have the cup,” he said. “It was lost in Cairo, not long after the earthquake. You should have known this.”
Claret leaned in closer. “I have been following you for years, Antoine, and I have been watching you. And I know, now, when you are lying to me.”
*****
Claret remembered the days when Christ walked the land so vividly, but when she returned, so many centuries later, it was not the same Jerusalem that she had remember
ed. For so much had happened since that night, her life had taken so many directions, there have been so many descendants, and so many battles fought and wars waged, and now, the battle that she was fighting, she did not even know why she was even waging it any more.
She remembered the night that she first felt the cup in her hands – as she stood on a small, wooden stepstool outside the window, a weathered, white piece of fabric hung over the window, blowing in the passing light breezes, which blocked her view.
But through the tapestry, she could see the figures moving. Hovering around, she could see their movement in the blurred, dark figures through cloth, lined on either side. And when she had peered through the edge of the cloth, she saw the men gathered around a table. It was a small, wooden table along the floor.
And He was in the center of the table, speaking with the men. And He had passed the cup around the table, the bread was shared, and when they adjourned, she climbed up the side and hoisted herself on the dusty ledge, and peered inside.
There it was.
The Cup – the figure of salvation, of eternal life. And she would have it. For the one who drank from the cup and shared called Himself the King of Kings.
She must have it.
The ‘Hooded Man’ demanded it.
And then she hoisted herself up on the ledge, shuffling her weight on the ledge, and rested her abdomen on the stone, and peered inside. Her head was inside the room, and the tapestry hung over her small body like a mosquito net. But her eyes remained transfixed on the prize. The cup. The cup.
And then a hand tugged at her robe.
“Claret! Will you take it? Will you seek its power?”
And then she paused, hanging in the window, and turned her head around. She could see the silhouette of the man’s hood and robe in the moonlight. She saw the man pull the tapestry down from the window and toss it to the ground.