That had to be what it was. Those who experience mania, and bipolar disorder, are just as bright, and as stupid, as those who don’t have those problems. They come in a wide variety of intelligences and backgrounds. Wendy was intelligent. I confirmed she could speak all those languages with some doctors and nurses I found who spoke the languages she claimed to know, and she was a fellow of the University—a quick internet search revealed her affiliation.
Another point of interest I confirmed, however, and found rather disturbing was that she had no history of mental illness. This bothered me because at her age (she was in her thirties), bipolar and/or depression have shown up by then (in most cases). It can happen late—but that’s rather rare. There are often hints at it even before an official diagnosis.
That fact still disturbs me at this writing. She claimed no family history of mental illness, either, and though she might have been prevaricating, I can’t imagine what she would have thought to gain by doing so. Perhaps more credibility to her story, but I cannot say for certain.
“So what happened?” I asked. Even though I remained skeptical, there was more.
“I felt like my heart had stopped and couldn’t catch my breath. The only sounds in the room were the sounds of me gasping for air and the grandfather clock ticking behind me, which seemed like it was louder than ever. I’ve never seen that much money in one spot. I mean, we weren’t poor when I was growing up, but there were piles of it in there.”
Here she paused and looked out the window again, eyes glassy with tears she blinked away. I sat in silence.
She took a block of funds out, closed the lid, and examined it. It was a bundle of $20,000.
On a whim, a crazy whim, she’d said, she bought herself a bunch of new clothing. That suggested a late onset of bipolar disorder had occurred, due to the impulse spending. Then, she went home, and checked back in the box to see if it was still all there, minus her block.
It was. She had about eight million dollars; somewhere around that amount. It was all legitimate currency, as far as she could tell—FDR on the hundred-dollar bills, and Woodrow Wilson on the fifties. The threads of blue and red fibers in the paper and the hologram on the back all intact.
“That’s a huge amount. No wonder you couldn’t lift the box.” I guess I must have sounded less skeptical because she remained relaxed.
“I know.” She brushed an imaginary hair from her forehead and shook her head. “It was insane. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.”
Her demeanor wasn’t excited, as I thought it would be, but that could have been an effect from the sedative.
“I was about to faint from hyperventilating,” she said, then took a drink of water. “But I stayed conscious and thought about what I needed to do with the money.”
She contacted her mother’s debt holders, paid for her expenses, and set her up with a private nurse. The elderly woman’s health care came to a little over a million dollars.
Wendy bought the home outright, donated a large amount of money to her favorite charity, and spent the rest on herself, paying off her mortgages. The sum of the money in the crate was around five million dollars after she settled her and her familial debts.
How could I believe her?
“I consulted an accountant,” Wendy said. “I wanted to pay my taxes on it like legitimate income. He helped me through the process, citing things that I didn’t understand as the source of my income—related to unclaimed inheritance, blah, blah. I paid my taxes, and he set up accounts for me to use at my discretion.”
There was one thing I could fact check now—the money.
I have a good friend (former companion) who works for the Tax and Revenue Service. I contacted him. After a few minutes of banter about how he never got to see me anymore, and how we must get together some time, he was happy to give me the information.
Her taxes the year before reflected a graduate student struggling to pay her bills. She made around $58,000 that year (which in Grace City, isn’t enough to afford anything). The following year—the year she was telling me about, saw an increase in her tax bracket. She was a millionaire.
“Where did all this money come from?” I asked my friend.
“According to the paperwork, she made all of this money in ‘investments—after a found inheritance,’” he said. “That was quick. Should I go in and audit?”
As much money as I have, I know better. You don’t invest a few hundred dollars and become a millionaire overnight. This isn’t cinema. It takes longer than that unless you invest a lot more money into it, or hit something that booms, which is rare. At any rate, it takes thousands to get to that level. Hundreds of thousands depending on the market. “No, darling. I’m sure it’s legitimate. Behave yourself.”
He laughed. “Only for you, Mistress.”
“Ha-ha.” We parted with cordialities and I sat there, gathering my thoughts.
So there was a hard fact to support her claim—something legitimate. I suppose it could have been a gift from a benefactor and admirer (a real one, not a mythical beast), but that’s just speculation on my part. Perhaps she received an inheritance which she invested. That could happen. But why concoct such a story?
I figured a psychotic break was to blame. Yet she seemed lucid in every other way. This tale seemed to be the exception to the reality rule.
So in the harsh fluorescence of Mercy Hospital, the smell of antiseptic and the steady beeping of monitors in other rooms, I sat by her bedside and listened to her tale continue.
“Doctor Cross?”
“What is it, Wendy?”
“You seem like a lady who has a lot of money. Like your accent is from the nicer part of Albion, and your clothing is expensive. I mean, I know it’s rude to point out stuff like that, but I can just kind of tell when people were born into money. You were. You carry yourself like it.”
I shifted in my chair, tensing up in my shoulders. “I guess so.”
“It’s not a bad thing, Doctor,” she said, sitting up a little. “You can’t understand what it’s like to struggle and then, well, just not have to anymore.”
I nodded. “No, I’ve never experienced it myself, but I have empathy for it.”
“I’m glad. But you must know how it feels to have pressure on you if you’re from Albion.”
This was territory I didn’t wish to explore. “Right,” I said. “But enough about me. Tell me more about how things changed for you. How you got here.”
Wendy nodded. “I wanted to let you know that I get where you’re coming from, and that I’m glad you get me, or are trying to, anyway.”
“Well, that’s kind of you.” I shifted around in my seat.
“I was living the high life. Without having to worry about finances, I could devote all my time to translation of the tome. All that money helped, and I was obsessed even before that happened, but having things come to fruition just fueled me forward. I don’t know what’s worse than obsession, or greater than obsession, but I had it.”
There was that feverish look in her eyes again. Just for a moment.
“I was comfortable enough to get rid of the second job and focus on my duties as a lecturer at the University and on my dissertation. Now I one of the lucky ones—and I invested a large chunk of the money, kept the rest in bonds and savings, and lived off the interest. I got to do what most people in my position can only dream about, and I didn’t take it for granted. This opportunity let me dedicate myself to my passion, and I immersed myself in the tome.”
But she kept some of the pages to herself. The useful spells like money spells. She also continued to treat it as if it were a work of pure fiction and myth, written by magi who believed the spells to be true. At least to the outside world.
That seemed almost a hint of reality peeking though. She knew it was a ridiculous notion, this supernatural nonsense, and I believe that perhaps she recognized she had gone mad, and knew to hide it from others.
“Did your mother or siblings ever question you on your sudden windfall?” I asked.
“Yeah, they did,” she said. “I told them the same story we did with the Union Revenue Service. I’d taken a ‘nest egg’ of vague origins and invested it. Then I gave them gifts and helped paid their bills. That stopped their questions.”
Denial is a powerful tool for people. They can sit there with something obvious right in their faces, but if they don’t want to see it, they won’t. They’ll construct an entire reality around that denial. All of us go to great lengths to deny objective reality when it doesn’t fit into our comfortable scheme of things. Even me.
Now, back to Wendy’s tale.
“For a long time, I carried on with my life, forgetting having to spend a night with—with him.” She swallowed hard and let out a deep breath. “The texts had led me to believe it would happen soon after the money, but since it didn’t happen, well, I figured that part was just a myth to scare people from using such a powerful spell. If that was the case, people must have feared that god, or demon, a great deal.”
Wendy shrugged. “After nine months and no Undaga, I relaxed.” She winced at speaking his name. “I went back to my translations and got to an entire chapter of the tome dedicated to these demons mentioned throughout the many spells and incantations. One section was devoted only to Un—Undaga.” Her breath hitched on the name again, but she spoke it without wincing so hard this time. Her hands shook, and she gripped her cup of water to steady them.
“I laughed when I read his description. The pages described him as a tall, slender man with no face—just like the modern Slender Man urban legend. You’ve heard of that, right?”
I grimaced. “Yes I have,” I said, trying to cover a shudder. I had a terrible encounter with two children in the ER in Grace City who got carried away with the urban legend and one stabbed the other multiple times. The kid survived, and his ‘friend’ went to juvenile detention. “He’s quite a popular made-up figure. Something awful.”
Wendy nodded. “Terrible, even. The translation also described how many times he had shown up throughout the history of the lost culture. This guy was like every other urban legend—told by the friend of a friend of a friend who saw him firsthand. That kind of thing. I shrugged it off. This was just a simple, but ancient, folk legend used to scare people into obedience, keep thieves away, and protect secrets.”
She shrugged. “I knew it had worked, the spell came to fruition, and there were no signs of the demon.”
After a few weeks, things got harder for Wendy.
“Nothing good lasts forever, right?” Her brows knitted, and she put one hand to her forehead. “About a month later, my mother died. This wasn’t unexpected, you know? But it was a difficult time for me. I still had a chest full of money and provided a good service for her. That was the normal part. That was the only thing that was normal, but I grieved too hard to think about it in any depth. The weird part was the phone call from Grace City Coroner I got. Well, that’s where the weirdness started. And yeah, weirder than what had just happened.”
I nodded, trying to show her I understood and was sympathetic. The GC Coroner—another fact I could check. She told me his name. An old colleague of mine, in fact. That made it easier.
“He called to let me know that my mother had died clutching a piece of paper and pencil, and when they wrested it from her hand, they discovered it was a note for me. The coroner said he had read it, because it was his job to investigate, but he knew it was a personal note devoid of meaning to anyone else but mother and daughter.”
A single tear slipped down her cheek, and Wendy picked up a tissue. I sat. There is nothing that a person can say to comfort a grieving person. The only thing I could do was listen.
He sent her the note via courier, hand delivered that evening.
After a long space of silence, I gave her a little push. “What did the note say, Wendy?”
She closed her eyes and I thought she might not answer me, but after a moment, she opened them again, and in a shaking voice, recited it as though verbatim. “Wendy, I have met Undaga. He will collect his debt soon. Love, Mother.”
I felt my jaw drop and snapped it shut. I shivered. Despite my disbelief, it was still a chilling tale.
“Yeah. That was my reaction, too,” Wendy said, pointing with her chin in my direction. “You can imagine this gave me the shivers, too. I just about pissed myself, in fact. How in the world could Mom have known about Undaga? I never mentioned him, not even once. I still hate saying his fucking name. Even then I didn’t like it.”
“It sounds like an exotic disease,” I said.
“Huh, I suppose it does.” Her tone was cold. “But I told no one about him. That’d just make me look like I was bonkers, and would cause a scare for nothing. I talked about some of my translations, but naming any of the demons? My family wouldn’t have given a shit. Excuse my language.”
I waved her off. “I’ve heard worse.”
“The more I told them of my discovery the more they wanted me to shut up about it, anyway, so I know I didn’t mention him.”
I nodded. “Why would you?”
“Right.”
But this wasn’t something the woman could shake off with ease. This was her mother having knowledge of something she shouldn’t have, and to let her know—to warn her, of an impending collection. A night with Undaga.
“All that week, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I kept the lights on and tried to figure out ways to protect myself—brought a knife from the kitchen and put it on the nightstand so it was within reach at all times. I slept in jaunts—just an hour at a stretch. It would exhaust me and I’d fall asleep, only to pop up an hour later with my heart racing and feeling like there was something in the room with me. I’d stay that way for about ten or twenty minutes, then crash again.”
“Sounds like a classic nocturnal panic attack.” I should have kept that to myself so she wouldn’t think I was doubting her story, but Wendy nodded.
“I’m sure it was. It felt like he was around every corner just waiting for me.”
She fidgeted, tapping the side of her cup, then poured herself more water. Tap, gulp, sip. Tap, gulp, sip.
“Well, I forgot all about doing the translations, called out from my obligatory lectures, leaving it to the TA to take over for me. Since I had plenty of money in the wooden box, and I used that to my advantage, and became a shut-in. I had my groceries delivered, and I never ventured out, I didn’t even answer the door. Not until I was sure it was just the delivery guy and all that. I took a leave of absence from work and hired an attorney over the phone to do all the paperwork for me. My mentor tried to look after me, but I gave him the brush-off. I told him I was grieving and needed time to myself. He was sympathetic and told me to contact him whenever I needed something. I promised I would.”
There wasn’t much I could offer, so I nodded for Wendy to continue.
After a moment, she did. “I didn’t care and had no plans to call him,” she said. “I wasn’t going to let this demon get me. At that point I was beyond doubt. I was in danger, and there was no other explanation for it.”
“How did you know you were in danger?” I asked. “I mean, I know you said all that about his appearance, but it was just spending a night with him, right?”
“Would you want to do it?”
I gave her a wry chuckle. “No. I guess not. He’s not sounding like my type.”
“Well, that was part of it, but when I read that chapter about him—about what he does—what he was—I knew it was a threat.”
Right. She said nothing specific, and she didn’t talk about that part any longer. I wouldn’t push her further.
“So after everything I’d studied I was sure that leaving my house would be the one way he’d get me. So it became my sanctuary. The safety zone. My fort.”
“Supernatural or not, you thought it was some kind of safe ground,” I sai
d, just to show her I got it and she needn’t keep repeating herself.
In my career, I have seen agoraphobia develop with patients in short periods of time, and if allowed to continue, it can become a lifelong problem. Wendy seemed to develop multiple mental disorders from this incident. Checking the locks on her doors and windows to excess, pouring saltpeter on all access points to the house, and blessing herself with holy water she ordered online from some cult store. I didn’t ask. These were all the activities she did five times a day to keep herself safe. Check, pour, bless. Repeat. It was OCD brimming on the horizon.
“How long did this continue?” I asked.
“About three weeks,” she said. “I’d never been a shut-in before, and even though I was still paranoid and fearful, I had cabin fever. You know it’s bad when you go online and stare at a blank page for five minutes. I couldn’t amuse myself and I wouldn’t leave, so I negotiated.”
At this point I asked her if she wanted a break, but she shook her head.
“I’m good for now. Anyway, I tried taking a shower and cleaning the house. That didn’t help. I played spider solitaire. Got bored after a few hands, and didn’t feel like playing any of the other games. I looked at the tome, but I couldn’t put my head to doing translations. I compromised by opening the patio door out back and letting fresh air inside. If that worked out, then maybe I’d venture out into the yard for a while.”
“That was brave of you,” I said. “Most people who are that scared wouldn’t have dared.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t good at being that scared. This was the worst I’ve ever been.”
I checked the recorder to make sure it was still working. Satisfied everything was in order, I told Wendy to continue.
“The air was cool but not too cold, and there was this gentle breeze wafting in from the wide-open door. I set myself up with a sleeping bag, a plush futon mattress from my guest room, and a bucket of ice to hold my sodas. With some soothing music playing on my sound system, I just sat there, enjoying the summer air and watching the sun set—the light in the sky changing from bright blue to washes of gray, lavender, pink and gold. It looked like there were gold bars against layers of cotton.”
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