Slater had painted a slightly different picture of the young man. “Have they ever arrested him?” If they had we could use that as grounds to legally force McEachern’s release.
“No, and don’t hold your breath. His daddy managed to keep him out of jail. The girl he attacked refused to name him. It was all swept under the rug.”
“And there was an earlier attack of a woman in Victoria,” Michael added. “No one pushed to find out what had really happened to her and it just was dropped. But that’s a place to look, once we get out of here.”
We were all clinging to any hope we could lock onto.
Reginald eyed me and seemed to come to some conclusion. “Raissa, can you watch Callie? I’ll drive Michael to get his horse.”
He was going to try my plan. It was more than I’d really hoped for. “Yes. She’ll be fine. Can you get past the blockade?”
“That’s the road into town. I doubt they’ll be watching that as closely as the road to Victoria. We can try.”
I nodded. “Be safe. I’ll have everything ready for tonight when you get back.”
Chapter 22
The afternoon heat was stifling, and Callie was not her normal calm and cheerful self. The minute Reginald and Michael drove away from the house, she began to fret. I tried rocking her, walking with her, singing to her, taking her out back to watch the chickens. Normally the clucky birds, pecking and squawking, made her squirm with glee. I feared she was hungry, but she refused the sugar teat that I’d made, and I had no alternative. Elizabeth didn’t keep cows or goats. Callie was breastfed, except now her mother was unable to feed and care for her.
As a result, Callie was irritable and unhappy. I had the sense of a little shock whenever she touched me with one of her hands. Not anything unpleasant, just a vibration. I’d held her in the past and never felt this, and I worried. Something was going on with her, and I didn’t know how to help.
The watchers, both human and avian, were nowhere in sight when I looked out the windows. I’d taken Elizabeth’s rifle, made sure it was loaded, and put it in the kitchen within easy reach. If I saw or heard anything that upset me, I meant to kill it. I’d never considered myself a violent person or someone who would deliberately inflict physical damage on another person or creature. But now I knew one thing for certain. If anyone threatened Callie, I would kill them. Maternal instinct or guardian, I didn’t know or care. She came first, before the life of anyone else or my personal comfort.
Checking the edge of the woods for those silent—but armed—men one more time, I finally carried Callie out to the barn to see the horse. Mariah blew sweet breath on the infant’s face and Callie laughed out loud. The spell of discontent was broken, and Callie’s sunny nature returned. It was a relief to see her happy again. I could tell she missed Elizabeth, and dry nursemaid that I was, I made a very poor substitute. Hopefully, Callie’s mother would be home soon.
While I didn’t talk about it to the men—who carried their own share of worry—I was afraid Dr. Wainwright might try to hold Elizabeth as his prisoner, or even turn her over to Lucais and his thugs. Dr. Wainwright was involved with Lucais and the others, but I had no way to judge the depth of his commitment to their cause. Those men obviously meant to stop us from helping McEachern or even leaving town, with or without him. If Wainwright was in thick with them, he might give them Elizabeth.
In the shade of the barn, the exhausted baby finally fell asleep in my arms. When I started back to the house, she raised a hand, and the sunlight through the translucent webbing of her fingers was like a glowing map or work of art. Her hands and feet were strange, but they were also very beautiful, luminous. She touched my cheek and I had a sudden memory of playing in the roots of a huge oak tree when I was a child. I’d drawn farms and roads and used my dolls to set up my fantasy world. It was a moment of total satisfaction and safety. But it was long ago.
I took Callie inside and put her on the bed. She sucked a little on the sugar teat, and that seemed to soothe her. I was exhausted myself, and I crawled up beside her to try to catch a nap. The approaching night would prove long and dangerous.
“Your mother will be here soon,” I murmured to the baby. “She’s coming home. Just for you.” A breeze slipped in the bedroom window and for the first time in what felt like months, I was cool. With Callie cuddled against me, I embraced sleep. I felt as if I were falling, falling into the depth of a deep well, into darkness that had no limit. I knew I was asleep, but the disorientation disturbed me. I realized I was dreaming, and I slipped beneath the spell of the dream.
The rattling of the window shade draws me up, up from sleep into complete darkness. I’m no longer in bed, but upright and outside. The night is cool. I find myself in a dark garden filled with strange sculptures and hedges that take the form of predatory animals in the moonlight. There is a lion, mouth open, roaring anger at me. When I slowly turn, a large bear looms over me, paws ready to reach down to catch me. When I walk away, I find myself confronting a stone gargoyle upon a pedestal. In the distance is a woman holding a babe in her arms, weeping.
I am alone in the dreadful garden, but in the distance murmurs from a party spike the night. There is light laughter and the low rumble of conversation. When I look down, I wear a tuxedo, polished black shoes. I hold a heavy crystal glass filled with whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other. My hand is large, male, young, and uncalloused. I am not a working man, but an office man, or a man of leisure.
“Amory! Where are you?” A man calls out.
The name is familiar, and I assume it is mine. “Here, by the koi pond.” I step near the edge of the pond where large fish swim relentlessly back and forth. Though they are docile fish, they swim with the purpose and speed of sharks. One leaps from the waters and snaps at a bug, teeth clicking shut before it disappears back into the dark water.
A man steps out of the shadows. He also holds a cigarette and a drink. “Isabel is looking for you, old boy.”
“Let her look.” I don’t want to see her.
The sound of girlish laugher comes to me and my body tenses. Isabel is right outside my range of vision. She steps into the moonlight and I realize we’re on the grounds of Princeton. Nassau Hall is in the distance. I recognize it from photos Alex showed me. He’d attended seminars there, and we’d talked of maybe moving nearby so Alex could further his law education once he returned from the war. I am in a dream that mingles my past and someone else’s. Whose, I can’t say.
The woman, Isabel, is smiling as she walks forward. She is angular, slender, and I know the dress she wears. I’ve read it described somewhere. It hangs on her, draping perfectly as she moves. She is like the koi. She is one thing, but more than that.
“Isn’t it grand to be perfect?” she asks. “That’s the gift Scott gave us. We may not be nice people, but we have physical perfection.”
“Perfect?” I don’t understand.
“That’s us, perfect physical specimens. Too bad he couldn’t write us with a soul.”
I realize that I don’t like this woman at all. “Leave me alone.”
“I can’t.” She walks around me with her long strides, her predatory essence. She wants to gobble me with one bite.
“You really should go.” My temper rises, and I consider dousing her with my drink.
“I can’t.” She laughs again. “You know that if you really think. I can’t go and neither can you. We’re trapped here.” She grins with pleasure at my distress. “Don’t be a bore. Gabriel sent me. He’s been looking for you. He says you’re very naughty, hiding from him in dreams and stories. You can’t escape him.” Her voice has lowered considerably. It’s no longer light and flirtatious and feminine. Even as I watch her shoulders are hunching over. Her elegant posture is gone in a snap. Her head swings from side to side as she patrols me. She is changing into something dark and dangerous.
I look beyond her, across the campus green, and I see him. His dark wings flare and he seems to drink the moonlig
ht that filters down on him, leaving darkness in his wake. Dread fills me. I start to leave, but my feet are anchored to the ground. It’s as if they’ve grown roots. I tug and pull and twist, but I am unable to even lift a foot. Isabel sees my predicament and laughs. Her circles around me become closer, and I can smell something fetid about her.
“Don’t fight him,” she says. “You know you shouldn’t resist. He can give you things you desire, things you didn’t even know you desired.” She traces fingers across my cheek. Her hand is cold, icy. “Isn’t it lovely? We’re the special ones, the golden girls and boys. We glitter, and your friend Zelda leads the pack. This is the world of her husband. You admired her, and him. You were seduced by his writing, her self-confidence and joie de vivre. Pretense, money, privilege, all so very different from the place your body resides, in that bed, in the bedroom, in the house in that backward little town of Mission, Alabama.”
I’m not completely certain where I am. Or even if I’m asleep or awake. Is this merely a nightmare, a terrible dream of helplessness and fear? Or is this the real world that Gabriel offers? That idea is terrifying, and yet I can’t move or run or stop what is about to happen. At any minute, Isabel will leap at me and take my life. She is becoming more craven, more animalistic as she narrows her circle, and I cannot move away.
When Isabel stops in front of me and faces me, her eyes are glazed by death. Clumps of hair begin to slip from her skull and dust the ground at her feet. When she grins, it is a death rictus. She reeks of death.
“Oh, dear, Amory, you’re just a character created by your friend’s husband. Raissa is gone, replaced by a shallow man.” She laughs and I gag at the smell of her breath.
“Gabriel can take you anywhere he chooses in your dreams. Even into a book. Even into a book where he’s re-written the characters and the storyline. Here, in this place, Amory Blaine is merely fodder for Gabriel’s dark fantasies.”
I know where I am now. Somewhere in the pages of a fictional world of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. I’m a character I can’t know or control in a world that bears no resemblance to the book or reality. Panic sets in and the woman laughs at me.
“What do you want?” My voice rises. “Tell me what you want, damn you!”
“Oh, I am already damned.” She walks around me and leans to whisper in my ear. “I have everything I want, Raissa. I have you. And soon I’ll have Elizabeth. But the greatest treasure of all will be little Callie.”
“Have us? How? The minute I wake up, I’m free of you.”
“Are you? Are you sure about that? What if you never awaken? What then?” She is whispering at my ear, and her breathe harbors the odor of rotted meat. She is a dead thing masquerading as a character in a story. Gabriel controls this. All of it.
“You have no power over me. None.” I brazen it out, hoping that someone will come home and wake me up, or that Callie will cry. I have to escape, but as long as I’m asleep, I am Gabriel’s victim.
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.” The creature that had once been Isabel, a polished character in a modern novel, drops to the ground. She crawls on all fours across the moonlit green. Her body moves in ways that give me anguish, her back arching in an imitation of a scorpion’s tail. Any minute her spine will snap. Her head spins around backwards and watches me as she lopes away across the grass.
For a moment I am alone in the darkness, and I am glad. The gentle breeze flaps my dress hem against my calves. I am no longer a man, no longer Amory Blain, Fitzgerald’s fictional character. I am Raissa James, wearing my proper dress. The man walking toward me is Gabriel, someone I had once supposed to be an angel. He has a terrible beauty in the magnificence of his physique and the handsomeness of his face. I realize now that Michael told the truth. This is no angel. I don’t know what he is, but he is dark and dangerous and capable of blending the real world with the fantastic in dreams. He is fully capable of ensnaring me in his nocturnal machinations and I have no power to hold him at bay. I don’t know who or what he is, but he is very dangerous.
“It’s easier to give in,” he says. “Trust me. You will eventually. They all do. Once I’m in your dreams there’s no escape from me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Madam will be able to help me. I know she will. I just have to get out of Mission—with my friends—and get to her for help.
Gabriel’s wings flap lazily behind him. His eyes have taken on a strange yellow cast. “We’ll see about that, Raissa. I have all the time in the world. And if you think leaving Mission will make a difference, you’re wrong. Should you actually escape, you merely take me with you. Between you and Elizabeth, I have a free ride, until Callie is old enough to accept me. It won’t be long, and I’ll be waiting. Always, waiting and watching.”
The back door slammed and I sat up in bed, sweat pouring off me. Callie was wide awake, watching me. She put a hand on my chest, and the panic stilled. The terror was still there, but my heartbeat slowed to the point that I didn’t feel like my chest would explode.
“Raissa?” Reginald called.
“In the bedroom,” I composed myself as best I could.
He came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you okay?”
“No. I’m not.”
“It’s Gabriel, isn’t it?” he asked.
I nodded. I wanted to cry but it would do no good. “I don’t know what he is or what he wants. He says he wants Callie, but what would he want with an infant? What is he?”
Reginald grasped my hand, worried at my obvious distress. “You’re going to be okay. We’ll figure this out. He told you he was an angel?”
I shook my head. “He has wings, but they’re dark. Elizabeth told me he was an angel, but he’s not.”
“I’ve given this some thought, and while I was in Victoria, I stopped by one of the churches. I’m glad we have a few minutes alone so I can tell you.”
“You don’t trust Michael?”
Reginald shook his head. “I don’t trust anyone here. Not even Elizabeth. Something evil resides here in Mission, and until we know where and who all is involved, we can trust no one but ourselves.”
“Tell me what you learned in Victoria.” I had recovered my balance, for the moment.
“I talked to a priest.” He squeezed my hand. “The Catholics are better versed in demons and exorcisms. What I found there was…unexpected.”
“Meaning what?” I swung my legs off the bed and stood. Callie had settled back to sleep, and the smile on her face told me that whatever Gabriel was up to, he hadn’t yet infected her sleep.
“I grew up in an orphanage.”
“I remember.”
“Actually two different orphanages. One was Catholic, and there was an old priest there who told us stories about the different creatures God created. That’s what gave me the idea to stop and talk to Father Kilroy.”
“What are you talking about?” I had a terrible thought that I was caught in yet another dream, this one with Reginald.
“According to some Biblical scholars, God’s first creation was the angels, immortal beings. Their beauty was equal to God’s, and their every wish was met with fulfillment. It was God’s pleasure to provide for his winged creations. He gave them many gifts, from the power to heal, to the gift of music, and on and on.”
I’d done some time in Sunday school so I knew the Christian story of creation, but I didn’t interrupt Reginald. He was headed in a specific direction and he would get there.
“According to the old priest in the Catholic orphanage, everything was fine until God created man, also in his image, but without the wings. But man was also mortal and needed more care, more attention, more nurturing, and when a man died, it grieved God. Some of the angels hated God’s new creation of man. They were jealous, and they disobeyed God by tempting man with forbidden things. Each time man disobeyed God’s rules, he was punished by the angels. They afflicted man with illness and greed and violence, hoping that man’s behavior
would disgust God and He would turn away from them.”
This wasn’t exactly the doctrine I’d been taught, but it was a parallel.
“Some angels were sent down to Earth to live among the mortals. God charged the angels with being examples to man, to show man the way of goodness and compassion. What God didn’t realize was that his angels were as flawed by weakness as the men he’d created. The angels found the daughters of men to be fair and enchanting. These angels were tempted by the forbidden, and they slept with human women.”
This hadn’t been part of my religious upbringing, and I was shocked. I had to be sure I understood what Reginald was saying. “The angels slept with mortal women?”
“Yes.”
I’d never heard of angels bedding humans until Elizabeth made her claim, which I still had trouble grasping. With her, I’d assumed there was love, but the way Reginald made it sound… The idea was…terrible. It made a mockery of my understanding of the winged creatures of heaven, the golden, shining angels with their halos and beautiful choruses. “This can’t be.”
“I spoke with Father Kilroy in Victoria about this, and he believes it to be true. He confirmed that this doctrine exists. From the union of human women and these angels, these fallen angels, the Nephilim were born.”
“Nephilim?” I’d heard the word but couldn’t place it.
“The offspring of fallen angels mating with a human female. In ancient times, the Nephilim were thought to be giants, but whatever they are, they are an abomination.” Reginald’s words were soft, almost sad.
“Lucifer is the only fallen angel I’ve heard of.” And Lucifer ruled Hell and the fiery pit.
“Lucifer was not the only angel who disgraced himself, but Lucifer was the Morning Star. God’s favorite angel and his greatest betrayal. Lucifer’s beauty was greater than any other angel.”
“You learned all of this in a Catholic church?” I was a little shocked at the things I’d never been exposed to.
A Visitation of Angels Page 19