by Nic Widhalm
She had been drawn to the run-down bar because of its proximity to Saint Catherine’s. That, plus her overwhelming desire to get blissfully, stupidly drunk. Drunk enough to drive away any lingering thoughts of priests and angels and a murderer with an impossible birthmark. It might be four in the afternoon, but Jackie was intent on patronizing the watering hole until the sun set and a taxi could take her home to her microwave dinner.
She’d had better days.
“Another one, honey?”
Jackie frowned at the heavy-set man hovering on the other side of the counter. He had a sad, hang-dog look about his eyes, exacerbated by long, droopy jowls. “Do I look sweet to you?”
The bartender blinked. “Um…”
“I don’t raise bees, I don’t live in a hive. You get where I’m heading?”
“Sorry, just trying to be friendly,” The bartender lowered his eyes to the bar.
Jackie sighed. “It’s fine. Sorry, look, it’s not your fault. I…” She watched the bartender, weighing her options. Another bourbon would free her into tipsy abandon. But too quick and she wouldn’t last another hour, much less until the sun set and she no longer felt guilty about calling a cab.
Fuck it. “Just get me another,” Jackie said.
“Sure hon…er, miss.” The bartender started to walk away, stopped, and looked back at Jackie. “You look kinda familiar. You come in here before?”
Jackie snorted. “Yeah. ‘The Drinking Midget.’ I’m here all the time.”
“Jeez, just asking,” The bartender’s sad cheeks dropped another inch. “You look familiar is all.”
God, I’m not nearly drunk enough to go for a line like that. Not yet.
She gave the heavy man a tight smile and returned to her glass, watching the last drops of bourbon swish across the bottom, forming intricate twists and swirls. It reminded her of Friskin’s birthmark.
When she returned home three mornings ago—after the weird interviews at the hospital, and her first glimpse of Enochian during Father Valdis’ questioning—she expected to fall right to sleep. But instead, after she shut the blinds, slipped under the covers and closed her eyes, she was greeted with eldritch symbols playing against her eyelids.
Sleep remaining elusive, she hopped online, hoping to sate her curiosity by investigating the symbols Valdis had been researching. Eight hours later, she had twenty sites bookmarked and printed out enough hard-copy to drive an environmentalist crazy. Somehow, Jackie had known in the back of her mind what she would find. She should have been surprised, or at least marginally shocked, but instead she just felt…certain. What she found, what she spent eight hours highlighting and printing, were angels.
And it hadn’t gotten better from there. Three days later and here she was, ignoring real, honest, down-and-dirty police work in favor of a wild goose chase down the corridors of Catholic dogma and Christian mythology. All because a priest let a book slip.
“Honey, you going to drink it or stare at it?” The bartender gave her another droopy smile. Jackie glared back. The bartender, mistaking her frown as an invitation, came closer and leaned his elbow on the bar. “Men problems?” He asked.
“What makes you think it isn’t ladies?
The man’s eyes lit up. “Well…no reason it couldn’t be both.”
“That’s not an invitation,” Jackie’s frown deepened, and the bartender took a step back. Easy tiger, she admonished herself. He’s just bored and trying to pass time. She forced her frown into a careful smile. “I’m just fucking with you. It’s not guys or girls, just work.”
“Ah,” the bartender nodded sagely. “The other mistress. I knew I’d seen that look before. Whaddya do, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m a cop,” Jackie decided to be honest. Best case, the guy had a sweet spot for the force—maybe an officer had busted up a bar-room brawl—worse case, he hated cops and would leave her to get shit-faced.
The bartender raised an eyebrow. “The fuzz, eh? Yeah, I saw a few of you guys down here the other night. You making it a thing now? Not that I mind,” he added quickly. “Business is business, you know. And I wouldn’t mind having one of you guys around next time a couple of these lowlifes,” the bartender’s voice lowered conspiratorially, “decides to start trouble again.”
Jackie held up a hand. “Wait. What other night?”
“Let’s see…three night ago, I guess? What was that…Friday?”
It must have been Donaldson and Jacobs. Or shit, maybe just some rookies grabbing a drink after working their first homicide. It didn’t matter, cops drank just like other people. Jackie was proof of that. Not everything in the world connected to Friskin, even if it felt that way presently. She needed to sit here and drink her whiskey, that was it. Didn’t need to get involved.
“Let me ask you a question…uh…”
“Frank,” the bartender said helpfully.
“Frank. Right. I’m Detective Riese, by the way. So Frank, these cops…you catch what they were talking about?”
The bartender’s smile faded. “Look, Detective, it’s not like that. I don’t—”
“Relax. We’re just talking, right?” Jackie’s fingers brushed Frank’s elbow. “You know, forget those guys. Let me ask you another question,” she dug around in her bag and pulled out a small, wallet sized picture of Friskin dressed in his ridiculous vampire costume. “You ever see this guy?”
Frank laughed, shaking his head, then stopped and looked closer. He began to nod. “Yeah, yeah, I recognize him. But he wasn’t dressed like that,” Frank pointed at the costume. “Pretty sure it was last Friday.”
Jackie leaned closer, trying to hide her delight. Carefully she said, “You remember anything else? Did he stick around for awhile?”
“Nah. Kinda funny, that one. Good looking guy, not that I’m into that you know? But something was…off. Rubbed me all kinds of wrong. He was dressed like a priest for one thing, and for a second I thought he actually was one—some of the Fathers come down after church to knock back a few—but this guy was acting weird, and the outfit fit him about as well as my Cub Scout uniform.
“What do you mean, ‘dressed like a priest?’” Jackie’s voice dropped, her eyes steel.
Frank didn’t seem aware of the change.
“…even had that little priest tie, you know?” He said. “The white one that looks all funny?” He finally met Jackie’s eyes, and stopped, his gulp comically loud.
“Anything else?” Jackie asked quietly. Frank shook his head and walked away, his hand seeking a glass, any glass, that he could pretend to clean. Jackie watched him, her blood boiling.
I knew Valdis was lying, but this…this is beyond stupid! Jackie took another deep breath, trying to follow her doctor’s advice and keep her blood pressure down. Helping a murderer; giving him clothes, money, lying to a cop…beyond stupid.
And Jackie couldn’t do a thing about it. If she went to the captain, he’d want to know what she was doing looking into the Friskin case, and that conversation ended with Jackie out of a job. Stohl had made that abundantly clear. Plus, it was possible she could face charges herself; harassment might not carry the same time as first-degree murder, but it would end any chance of pursuing a career in law enforcement. She was screwed.
Jackie killed her bourbon in a neat gulp, and grabbed her jacket. Before she could reach the door, though, Frank said, “Wait, hold on a sec.”
The bartender scuttled over. “Something you might want to know. I run a clean place.” Jackie did her best not to look at the dingy bar, keeping her face straight as Frank continued. “There’re a few fights now and then, but it wouldn’t be a bar without that, right? But if this guy did something, and I’m not saying he did…” Frank looked over his shoulder, then leaned close to Jackie and whispered, “But if he did, you may want to talk to that one over there. She left with him that morning. Only remember because she made a fuss over it. Yelled at him about getting grabby, and some of the guys took him outside.” He gestu
red over his left shoulder with his head, and Jackie saw a woman in a navy business suit seated at a corner table. Her head was turned to the side, watching a game of pool played by a couple of college kids, but even without seeing her face Jackie could tell that she was extraordinarily beautiful.
“Thanks,” she said. Frank nodded curtly and went back to the bar. Watching the woman, Jackie briefly entertained letting the whole thing go. She was in way over her head, and the last thing she needed was someone else to corroborate Valdis and Frank’s story when the captain brought her in for harassment charges.
Plus, Jackie had to admit, the lady scares the shit out of me.
If someone had held her at gunpoint and forced a reason, Jackie would probably have said her terror was a mixture of dim lighting, cheap bourbon, and too little sleep. That’s what she would have said, but her gut was saying something else. Jackie knew trouble. She knew it the same way every cop did; knew when to reach for her gun and when to let it lie. You either developed that skill or you ended up working a desk. And right now her gut was screaming to get the hell out of the Drinking Midget.
But the detective couldn’t stop watching the stranger.
The lady’s suit was obviously expensive, hugging each curve of her wide chest, her long legs, filling Jackie with a guilty lust. Auburn hair draped across her profiled face, and Jackie guessed the woman’s eyes were a vivid green. She was strikingly beautiful, no question. But sitting in that dark corner, the shadows gliding sensually over every curve, and Nine Inch Nails throbbing from the bar’s cheap speakers, the woman exuded an erotic, frightening intensity. Now that Jackie saw the lady she didn’t know how she had missed her in the first place; the entire bar seemed to revolve around that corner of the room.
Then, with a quick, almost preternatural twist of the head, the beauty was staring at Jackie. The room spun for a moment, the walls twisting, pulling at Jackie’s stomach, and suddenly the woman was standing next to her. Jackie couldn’t keep a small gasp from slipping out as the stranger cocked her head, giving the detective a once over.
“You…you…” Jackie stuttered, then closed her eyes, took a breath, and squared her shoulders. Pull it together, Riese. You’ve faced three-hundred pound drunks with nothing but a flashlight—you can handle a red-head. Jackie opened her eyes, assuring herself the woman’s sudden appearance could be attributed to the afore-mentioned bourbon, and said, “I’m Detective Jackie Riese. Mind if I ask you a few questions.
The woman’s eyes slid up Jackie’s body in a long, languid glide that the detective found unsettling and annoyingly sensual. She pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes, and gave Jackie a dazzling smile. “How can I help, Detective?”
“Uh…this man…” Jackie fumbled for her pocket, distracted by the lady’s vibrant eyes—green, like she expected—and pulled the picture she had shown Frank. “The bartender says he saw the two of you together this past Friday?”
“Did he?” The woman’s smile didn’t falter.
“Yeah. Anything you can tell me about him, uh…?”
“Karen.” The woman looked at the picture and pursed her lips. “Last Friday? Honestly, Detective, I was way too inebriated last Friday to know who I was talking with.”
“The bartender said he saw you in the morning. Little early for cocktails, isn’t it?”
Karen giggled, a jarring school-girl sound that sent shivers up Jackie’s spine. “You know how it is. Long work week, four day weekend…”
“So you don’t remember talking with this man?” Jackie asked.
“Nope. Sorry.”
Jackie nodded slowly, trying to keep the bourbon from her voice. “Well, if you change your…if you remember anything please give me a call.”
Karen giggled again. “I’m sure I’ve never met him. Honestly, a man like that you’d remember.” She took Jackie’s card and turned back to the table. Her hair swished aside for a moment, following her twisting body, and Jackie let out a small gasp. Karen looked back and met Jackie’s widening eyes. Then, before the detective could reach for her gun, the red-headed woman simply vanished.
Jackie blinked, staring at the spot Karen had occupied a second ago. She should have been surprised, but a part of her had almost expected this. Her hands trembling, the beginnings of tears in her eyes, Jackie pulled her notebook from her bag and opened to the page she had shown Valdis.
There, near the top of the page marked “Enochian Alphabet,” she found what she was looking for. Clutching the notebook tightly, Jackie returned to the bar and ordered another bourbon. The bartender tried to start up a conversation, but the detective waved him away. The bourbon traced fire down her throat, and the cheap, acrid aroma burned her nostrils. Drink or go home? Drink or go home?
She needed a computer. She needed a fucking army of computers. She needed something, anything, that would explain what she had just seen. An answer for a woman disappearing in front of her eyes, for a man taking on five drug-addicts with nothing but his bare-hands and surviving.
Jackie needed something to explain what the symbol on Karen’s neck—a glyph that matched the same pattern as Friskin’s birthmark—meant for the world around her.
Part Two
TESTING
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“No way. You’re not coming.”
“But it won’t make any sense to you! Don’t you think someone with knowledge and…and…maturity should witness this? Someone who can interpret what it means?”
Hunter sighed. “No. I don’t.”
“Oh, now you’re just acting like a child,” Valdis threw up his arms and stormed out of the room.
“Who’s acting like a child now?” Hunter muttered. He waited to see if Valdis would come back, then returned to packing his bag. His room was musty and damp, but over the last three days Hunter had made it into a sort of temporary home. The space, part of a series of discarded rooms in the cathedral’s catacombs, was mostly stone, so Hunter had begun by having Valdis spirit a few old carpets and moth-eaten sheets from the pantry, and had draped the cold rock walls with as much insulation as possible. There was no window in the tiny cell, so Hunter had fixed the walls with dozens of candles—which created something of a problem until he devised a make-shift chimney to shuttle the smoke under the door—and spent most of his time straining his eyes and reading under the dim light. Now, after only a few days, he had to tear it all down and pack away as much as he was willing to carry.
Three days had come and gone with agonizing slowness. Hunter had always considered himself patient—had to be when you were coaxing the illusion of life back into a corpse—but under his current conditions he had begun to dream of freedom with a restless obsession.
His dreams had taken on an unusual urgency, racking him with visions and nightmares at all hours. With no cell phone, or reception even if he’d had one, Hunter had no idea what the outside world thought of him. His wife—Ex-wife, start getting used to it—his job, the police—Valdis would tell him nothing. Only that the world still existed, people still went to work, and the only thing Hunter needed to focus on were the readings the priest left him each day.
It was enough to drive a man mad.
And the reading material—that was something else. Hunter had never been one for books—or sports, math, politics, or music—but the manuscripts Valdis assigned had put even his normal apathy to the test. “Tedious,” did not begin to cover it. Long treaties on the nature of heaven, the spirit world, the existence of celestial beings, not to mention four different translations of the Bible, the Catholic Apocrypha, the Qur’an, assorted collections of Gnostic teachings, and a healthy dose of Old testament scriptures in the original Greek. Never-mind that Hunter had a hard enough time reading English.
Valdis also felt the need to include some of his own work; publications from various magazines—of the stack, Hunter only recognized Newsweek—and periodicals dealing with a variety of religious subjects. The priest was especially proud of an essay he had written on the m
isinterpretation of the word “Hell,” stemming from the Greek translation of Tartarus, and…that was about as far as Hunter got.
The common theme in Valdis’ writings was a re-examination of “angels,” and their relationship with scripture. There was also a liberal sprinkling of conspiracy theory, which helped market his research to magazines and online publications. The priest liked to hint—he never outright said it, for fear it would damage his credibility—that there was a kind of secret society of men and women who studied angels and their activities on Earth. A group that had spent the last two thousand years in hiding, afraid to reveal their secrets to the world. Whether this was an actual theory or just a publicity stunt, Valdis never said. He just insisted Hunter read the stack.
At first it had been exciting. Hunter had thrilled when Valdis told him the cryptic markings in the ancient basement had referred to him. Finally, an answer for the dreams, the sense of foreboding, an explanation for the fever dream of angles, Apkallu, and talking corpses. But after that tantalizing hint, Valdis sealed shut tighter than a snare drum. Muttering about needing to finish his translation, Valdis had thrust Hunter into his cell, and spent the last seventy-two hours trying to cram a life-time of Catholic dogma and angelic lore into the large man’s aching skull.
All of it had come to a head tonight.
“Alright, let’s go over it one more time,” Valdis had implored Hunter earlier that morning, referring to the large man’s original discussion with Bath and Karen three days previous.
“That’s it,” Hunter bellowed, releasing all the pent up frustration and cabin fever he had been holding inside. “Get me out of this place, now.”
“We will, we will. But we need more—”