“Our lawyer.”
Sneering, she poked him again, harder.
Wincing from the pain, he said, “Now all I have to do is convince you to go with us. And don’t try and tell me the commercial shoot is still holding you back.”
Rachel sighed. “Look, you don’t know how tempted I am. It’s just that I…I don’t think it would be a good idea, Dunc. I mean...”
“It’s not like you to avoid a cat fight,” he said. “Besides, Patricia’s not your enemy, Rachel. This isn’t about me and her.”
She threw her head back and laughed, then reached into her purse and pulled out a twenty. “Here, go buy yourself a collie and a cane.”
Duncan wasn’t surprised. When trying to make a point, Rachel often engaged the theatrical. It was an occupational hazard.
He took the money. “I don’t follow.”
She rolled her eyes. “Would you please come off your guilt trip. Even a blind man would see all the so-called coincidences piling up. I mean, I can barely walk, the synchronicity’s so deep. Aren’t you getting it yet? You and Patricia are linked somehow, someway. And I have to tell you, it’s scaring the living shit out of me.”
As far as he was concerned, the only connection he and Patricia shared was their past love affair. And, of course, the events leading up to, and including, the night he was shot. He’d only told Rachel half the story, the affair part. But what Patricia’s role in the incident, or the affair itself, could possibly have to do with doppelgangers, a dead photographer, a giant slug, and a limerick writer by the name of Gamble—
Hold on a second. From the moment he heard it, he’d been shamefully aware that the author of that jingle was referring to the night he was shot. The limerick didn’t mention Patricia, or even allude to her, but it did talk about a child. Two, as a matter of fact.
He saved a child’s life…And gained a dead one in the deal.
Just what did that mean?
True, the infant was unharmed that night, but it wasn’t so much that he saved the child’s life as it was his refusal to shoot and accidentally take it. But still...
And gained a dead one...
Patricia’s daughter had been missing for more than a decade, and was more than likely dead. So, did that mean Amy really was the reincarnation of Katherine Bently?
Suddenly, Gamble’s limerick was making a lot more sense, not that it was all that cryptic to begin with. He’d just been needing to give it some thought. Hell, maybe Rachel was on to something after all.
The twin issue was the kicker, of course. The uncanny resemblance Amy and Katherine shared, at least at their respective ages of ten, would have been remarkable enough had it occurred randomly. And the strong possibility that it hadn’t was indication—if he wanted to accept it—of some kind of discriminative motive; one reaching beyond his and Patricia’s scandalous history, yet still linked with it in a way he couldn’t begin to fathom.
Okay, so maybe there was a link. Now that Rachel knew of the affair, he supposed he was just trying to keep the matter subdued; placate her (and maybe himself) by maintaining as much emotional distance as possible between Patricia and Katherine. But those kinds of sheltering maneuvers, he had to grudgingly admit, would only estrange him and everyone else further from the truth, from what was really happening.
It was time to stop avoiding the past, as toxic as some of it was.
He thought it odd that Rachel hadn’t already accused him of being Katherine’s real father, that he’d known Patricia far longer than he was admitting. But then, maybe she’d come to the same conclusion he had: what would be the odds of fathering two identical girls, eleven years apart, from two totally different women? If he had, in fact, impregnated Patricia so many years ago, he could have probably forced himself into accepting such a fluke. But he hadn’t met Patricia Bently until a year into his marriage with Rachel. And that was a fact.
In the years before he and Rachel met, he’d been promiscuous as a cop. But there hadn’t been so many women that he’d lost count, and when he did the math he’d only been with one woman during the time Patricia could have conceivably gotten pregnant with Katherine.
But…reincarnation? C’mon, a person could dislocate something, reaching that far.
A memory struck him then. His late partner, a real UFO buff, had once said to him: “If aliens landed on the White House lawn, millions of people would still not be convinced that extraterrestrial life exists. Why? Simply because those people don’t want to believe, they don’t want their cozy little lives threatened. And you, my friend, are one of those inflexible chickenshits who’d switch from CNN’s live coverage of such an event to The Dukes of Hazard simply to avoid the trauma.”
Okay, so he was pigheaded.
Rachel walked up to him, holding out a can of soda. “Here, be a Pepper,” she said.
Christ, he hadn’t even realized she’d left him.
He took the can, popped the top. “I’ll try and be more open-minded,” he promised.
“Please do.”
Amy and Juanita were waiting at the nurses’ station. Juanita—Amy in one hand, a duffel bag in the other—looked like she was going to war.
“Let’s get lunch,” he said to Rachel.
She held out her hand. “Not so fast.”
“What?”
“Give me back my twenty.”
He reached into his trousers and brought out the folded bill. “I thought I was supposed to buy a gimp outfit with this?”
She snatched the bill from his fingers. “You don’t need a costume. And from now on, you’re mine. You’ll be staying in my house, eating my food, driving my car, taking my daughter to New England, kicking around my maid.” She took his hand. “Think of it as a surrogate divorce.”
They began walking.
“Whatever happened to that sweet, innocent little lady I married back East?”
“She grew up.”
“She got rowdy.”
Rachel looked up into his eyes. “I have a feeling I’m going to have to.”
“Maybe. Besides, you’re right to be angry with me. I’ve had an ass-whipping coming.”
“Long overdue,” she agreed.
8.
It realized itself. It knew what it was, and what it wasn’t.
It was what it wasn’t. It wasn’t what it was.
But it took great pleasure in its current form; liked the feel of the air, the snow upon its wings.
Oh, the pleasures I have known!
What it was was anything man wished it to be, chiseled from his own hard interpretations of evil. Literal personifications of any current and widely accepted illusions of malevolence. It could duplicate itself, masquerade as many, with each conjured form acting independently from the whole.
It was one of any number of spokes subservient to a new and evolving hub.
But it was no illusion. Man breathed life into it, sustaining it with his own belief in its existence.
It drew its life from man, and breathed life back into him.
It could hibernate without man. It had in the maelstrom before him. Man, though, could not exist without it. Man would perish without it, just as surely as he would without other forms of sustenance, spiritual and otherwise.
It was man. And it was not.
It could not remember not being. It had lived before man in nebulous, static form, but had nevertheless been conscious of itself. Only then had it known its true guise. Since, man had given it many, just as he is inclined to give physical, polar forms to those he calls Good; to give semblance to Jehovah, Christ, Buddha, God, and a host of others.
Man’s preoccupation with putting faces on things best left faceless.
Despite whatever forms man imagined it to be, though, its essence remained unchanged.
It wasn’t what it was. And it was what it wasn’t.
But very soon it would become something different, was going to metamorphose into a revelation, a truer, more mature image of itself. Was going to a
lter forever man’s naive interpretations of Evil. And, in consequence, it knew that man’s exegeses of Good would have to also change. Of this it was sure.
For it was both Good and Evil.
And it was not.
A “monkey-bat” indeed!
Investing itself within the white weather, it circled above the small Iowa town, waiting for the little girl.
The last one.
The seventh angel.
9.
It was close to noon when they exited the hospital.
Amy shielded her eyes from the brightness, as if she’d just been rescued from an ogre’s dungeon rather than the stark fluorescence of an infirmary. It was hot, the temperatures already well into the eighties. Large puddles of rainwater from last night’s storm mottled the alleyway’s east graveled shoulder, their edges slowly receding, still in shadow. Once the sun passed from behind the eclipsing structure, however, they would implode in quick fashion.
“Piggyback!” Amy instructed.
Duncan stopped, squatted. “Last train to McDonalds, have your tickets ready!”
Clearly distressed over the idea, Juanita nevertheless dropped her bag of items and hefted Amy onto Duncan’s shoulders.
Amy threw her arms around her dad’s neck, then spurred his sides. “Giddyup!”
Grabbing her ankles, Duncan slowly rose. “I’m a train, not a horse,” he reminded her.
“I beg to differ,” Rachel said to Amy. “Your father bears many equestrian likenesses. One in particular comes to mind.”
“Si,” Juanita heartily agreed.
Duncan ignored them. Out of the three women in his household, he could handle Rachel and Juanita thinking him a horse’s ass. But not Amy.
“Tickets, please,” he hollered in true porter fashion.
Amy promptly kissed the top of his head.
“Paid in full!” he announced, smiling proudly.
As it had so many times in the past, especially the last twenty-some-odd hours, it struck him that if he were to lose Amy to illness, accident or goblin, he was confident that his remaining days would be few, tortured by an emptiness more agonizing than any medieval paring of the Cat’s Paw, braiding on the Wheel, or skewering by the Iron Maiden.
His heart went out to Patricia Bently. No instrument of torment then or now could ever inflict the ferocious pain as the one that steals children. And he was in awe of those parents who still managed to persevere despite such inconceivable suffering.
Surely they were mad.
Mussing his hair, Amy said, “Can’t you go any faster?”
“No faster,” Juanita pleaded.
Abandoning the train idea, Duncan whinnied, and began to trot. “Go easy on your old man, he’s lame.”
A dark shadow rippled across the alleyway. Rachel and Juanita immediately tipped their heads skyward.
“Was that a hanging glider?” Juanita said, squinting.
“Hang glider,” Rachel said. “And not likely. Not here in the city.”
The long, narrow alleyway was flanked by two multistoried buildings that comprised the entire hospital. Bonaventure-esque in style, the two structures loomed on either side like sleek glacial walls. A moat of gray-blue sky bowed between the structures, where it was then captured and imparted downward to each building’s hundreds of reflective windows.
Another shadow (or perhaps the same one) rolled across the pavement, this time from the opposite direction.
Cupping her eyes, Rachel said, “That’s strange. I don’t see a damn thing.”
Duncan, too, was tightly pivoting now, gazing upward. As he searched between the two buildings, sunlight burst across the windows’ chromed edges, flashing like paparazzi at a celebrity gala.
“Vultures,” he offered. “It wouldn’t be the first time Juanita was mistaken for dead. I mean, have you seen the house lately?”
“Ignore him, Juanita,” Rachel advised. “God knows I try to.”
“It’s here,” Amy said excitedly.
“What’s here?” Rachel said, still squinting skyward.
“My ride!” Then her voice turned glum: “But we’ve got a visitor, too.”
Wide-eyed, Juanita looked up at the girl. “What is this visitor?”
The tag of a dark specter began to pull across the sky, unzipping the dirty blue veil. And spilling from the seam came something resembling a dark shroud, billowing out like the cloak of a famed horseman fast afoot, whose head was no more apparent now than it had been during his moonlit haunts.
No, not a cloak, Duncan now realized, but large, black wings.
There was a perceptible tink, as if a pebble had been tossed against their glass reality.
Then, as the wings fully unfolded, Duncan could make out the suggestion of a body, a head. Then a long, thrashing tail.
Within seconds, advanced twilight had settled upon Los Angeles. The sky was now the pitted, undulating rind of a moldy orange. An almost palpable hush swept through like an enchanted wind, and the temperature dropped a good thirty degrees.
The creature circled as it descended from the unearthly awning, finally alighting next to a steel Dumpster some twenty feet away. It folded its wings and squatted, regarding them with a vile grimace. Duncan thought it looked like something straight off the lofty precipices of Quasimodo’s immortal belfry. But more slim and sharp, like a hood ornament. One leading the charge on Satan’s Seville.
Duncan turned to warn Rachel and Juanita—but they were no longer there. And for a strange instant he wondered if they had ever been there at all. He called out to them, but his voice sounded vacuous, seeming to travel no farther from his face than the length of a cigar.
Except for the exotic sky, and the insane addition of the creature before them, the world had not noticeably changed. However, Duncan felt that they’d been relocated, that he and Amy and this section of LA had somehow been scooped up and transported to another world and were now the main attraction for some curious race of aliens. An episode of the old Outer Limits came to mind.
“Not again.” He closed his eyes. “Somebody please pinch me.”
“You’re not dreaming, Dad,” Amy said. “But you’re not too far from there.”
Duncan was struck by the sudden acumen bridling his daughter’s voice. She still sounded like a ten-year-old girl—but now there was an additional identity behind that pubescence, as if some guru had hopped aboard and grabbed the reins of her innocence.
He opened his eyes. The creature was still there, now rubbing itself lithely against a corner of the Dumpster, grinning like a wolf. He thought there was something profane about the way it moved; suggestive of something…lecherous.
And its teeth, as black and deep as his shame.
“Okay,” he said, heart thrumming in his chest. “Any idea what kind of animal that is?”
“Don’t worry. It wants Kathy, not us.”
“Katherine Bently?”
Cat-quick, the creature leapt, voicing an eerie cry, and took flight. It flew down the alleyway, rising to maybe a hundred feet, turned, then dove at them. Just as it was aiming its sharp talons at Amy’s shoulders, something unseen swatted it to the ground as if it were an insect.
The creature struck the asphalt hard, tumbling along like a napkin in a gale. It finally rolled to a stop and lay there for a moment, lifeless. Then it tottered to its feet and hastily made its way back to the Dumpster, apparently wanting something large and heavy to put between itself and the next invisible punch. Bloody scuffs of road rash were visible, as was a long tear in its left wing.
Lifting a leg, the creature regarded them with contempt as it peed, more blood than urine, onto the receptacle. It stayed there, at the edge of the trash bin, licking its wounds.
“Coward,” Amy accused.
Duncan knelt, allowing Amy to slide from his shoulders.
Now face-to-face with her, he said, “Any idea what’s protecting us?”
“A friend.”
Duncan was reminded of the way Doc
tor Strickland had similarly accentuated the word friend when she’d earlier explained to Amy the origin of her silver necklace.
He remained on his knees. “Well. That’s, um, some kind of friend.”
She sniggered. “Now you know why nobody picks on me at recess.”
“You’ve got your old man’s sense of humor,” he said reprovingly. Then, glancing back at the creature, he said, “So, where’s Katherine Bently?”
“She’s right here,” she said, poking at her chest. Something flittered across her eyes then, and the same voice as his daughter’s—the same yet cusped with a new, genuine delight—spoke from her lips: “Hi, Donut!”
More amused than shocked, Duncan just stared at her, as if that bombshell had only ejected party confetti instead of the intended shrapnel.
“You just can’t see the forest for the trees. But don’t worry, the answers will come soon enough.”
“But…I want the answers now.”
Sighing, she said, “Dad, you don’t even know the questions yet.”
“Alright. Alright,” he said, mustering his wits. “Just a clue then. Please?”
For once, her face was fretful. “Something’s happened. Something that maybe even God didn’t anticipate.”
“What, God made a boo-boo?”
“It’s really hard to know. But in a nutshell, there’s an additional reality now, and we have to erase it.” She shrugged. “If we can’t, then we’re screwed.”
Duncan let the expletive slide. “Define we.”
“Well, it’s going to kind of depend on me, but it’s going to depend on you, too.”
“On me?”
“And Mom, Juanita, and Kathy. There will be some other people, too. You’re going to make a journey.”
“Our Juanita?”
Amy smiled. “She’s okay, you’ll see.”
“A journey, huh. To where?”
She whispered in his ear: “A place where angels are born, among others.”
“Sounds messy.”
“Only when you have to deliver one.”
Seraphim Page 15