Decatur (15 page)

“He can cook!” she declared. “So where’s the other professor?”

Father W came in bearing the drinks and they all stood around in the kitchen like old friends as Max finished making the rice. Father W examined the plastic bag of dried dark red chile flakes with a touch of concern. “There’s nothing funny about these, right?” he asked. “You scholars are an interesting lot.”

“Funny? You mean like drugs?” asked Max sardonically. Father W shrugged sheepishly. “We have martinis, so no. Richly spicy, yes,” Max answered. The door bell rang then and they all looked at one another for a moment. Max felt like a current of anxiety and anticipation run through them. “Why don’t you get down the plates, Marilyn, while I see Dr. Wendell in,” Max said, pointing to the cupboard and loping to the door at the same time.

He ran down the apartment steps in time to see the cab driver waiting patiently like a chauffer for him to collect his guest. The driver waved and said through the open window, “Be back at eight then, Doc, and we’ll make the run over to Champaign. I’m gonna get some chow and take a nap. You have fun. I’ll have the coffee thermos full when I get back.” Then he pulled away and Max was left with Gretchen Wendell on the front step of his apartment in Decatur.

Marilyn opened the cupboard and sighed with pleasure. Vintage Fiesta ware, turquoise, orange and yellow filled the cabinet. She handed four plates out to Father Weston with a sense of solemnity. This must be a pretty important person for Max to go to all this trouble. She wondered with a pang if they were lovers and was surprised that she cared if they were.

Max opened the door to the apartment then and ushered in a limping five-foot- three figure with a brace on one leg wearing a severe tweed suit that looked like it was a man’s and short grey hair that stuck up in an almost crew-cut. “Dr. Gretchen Wendell: Marilyn Newcomb and Father Frank Weston, call him Father W or Weston, though, he hates his first name,” Max said, and the woman smiled warmly. She had to be sixty-five if she was a day, realized Marilyn, as she stuck out her hand shyly. The woman grasped it and held it in both of hers like they were old friends.

“Call me Gretch, and I have come some way to meet all of you. Max, the food smells divine. Let’s eat. My driver will be back before we know it.” The woman commanded, clapping her hands together. “Weston, you look like the barman, pour me a drink. Please,” she said with a little twinkle in her olive green eyes. The priest bowed and hustled to fix her a martini as Max dished out the food. They carried the plates into the living room and sat on the pillows facing Dr. Wendell who sat in a straight back chair that Max had set out specifically for her with an upended crate as a table for her food. “I’m sorry I can’t roll around on the floor with you but,” she tapped her leg brace, “polio took the rolling right out of me some thirty years ago.”

Marilyn thought she had never met any woman like this before, so direct, unembarrassed by her deformity, wearing a man’s suit with a crew-cut, and completely at ease. She forked a piece of chicken and wondered what the woman would have to say.

The rich peanut and chocolate notes with the tomatoes, chiles, and garlic melded and coated the chicken in an aromatic robe as Max talked about different moles and New Mexico. The food seemed to tie them together as Joni Mitchell sang about wishing for a river she could skate away on. It was at that moment as Father W, struggling in the kitchen door with the stainless steel ice tray, pulling up on the handle, Joni Mitchell wanting to skate on the ice and suddenly the ice cubes exploding from the tray, that Marilyn flashed on a bearded man’s face looking up from the ice.
Elder John! It wasn’t an accident
, the thought splintered through her brain. She nearly jumped out of her skin as the ice cubes slammed down on the kitchen floor shattering. She looked around at her companions who seemed frozen for a moment themselves. Then Max unfolded his long legs and stood up calmly, going to the stereo and lifting the needle on the album and Joni stopped singing. Father W looked at him and then picked up the slivers of ice-cubes. Marilyn waited. Gretch Wendell reached out from her chair and patted Marilyn’s arm in a friendly way. Max gestured for Father W to take his seat again once he had refilled his drink.

“The real conversation begins,” Max said. “Do you mind if we go over some of the events of our last session?” he asked Marilyn, who felt torn between wanting to get to the bottom of what was happening and just wanting it to go away. But something about the tough little professor with her polio leg gave her courage, so she nodded.

“Go ahead,” Marilyn said, wondering if whatever it was inside her had made the ice explode or if it was coincidental. Who was she kidding, she thought, the ice tray had nearly taken flight.

“Gretch, Weston, I think Marilyn is pursued by a being through various lifetimes who wants something from her and is willing to kill anything or anyone that gets in his way. I think he is hunting her soul, I don’t know why yet, but in both past life regressions she has been afraid for her eternal life. I’ve told Gretch some of this already and that’s why she decided to come down and see you herself,” Max said in a determined way, pulling his notebook from out his pocket and laying it on the table.

“Marilyn, is that true?” Father W asked as he struggled to hold onto a sense of reality, here and now. A being that hunted souls stirred in him the deepest fears buried underneath his faith in God. Because of God, there was also Satan. Memories of the lectures in seminary school about the devil, unholy evil, and exorcism taught by the gnarled professor Jesuit who seemed to enjoy taunting his young wide-eyed pupils with the horrors of possession came flooding back.

“I saw some things, Father W. It was like I was looking out of other eyes but yet they were my eyes, and yeah, it has to do with being pursued,” said Marilyn softly, tucking her feet under the pillow and feeling a chill creeping up her neck.

“I believe there are powerful paranormal forces at work with Marilyn. Through the hypnosis she’s holding the door open for us to look in,” said Max. “She has been a novice monk in one past life regression and an older Shaker woman in another. In both of them members of her community died when the pursuer came into that community in what on the surface appeared to be accidents…”

“Elder John wasn’t an accident,” Marilyn said in a hoarse whisper. “I just realized now when the ice exploded that his death was no accident.”

“What do you think doctor - Gretch?” asked Father W, not liking where this was going and hoping maybe the other professor would have a different take.

“There’s a temptation among people in the Church to say that these things don’t exist, but I have been an archeologist for a long time and while I have an academic study I also have a working practice; helping people protect themselves and understand the forces they reckon with. Let me say clearly that there are beings that are paranormal. For example I believe that there are vampires and have had the experiences to back it up. However I am convinced that the blood sucking type are not present here. Why? They hunt locally, and while repellent they are not always deadly. In many cases they feed on their victims, taking fresh blood and move on. This thing is scaled darker and more dangerous. If you believe that good and evil exists then believing in the paranormal is no leap. I don’t frighten easily, but I had to bag an entire expedition in the thirties at a dig in Peru at the temple site of a sect of particularly violent Incas as a sensible precaution against a possible rarer breed of vampire.” Gretchen Wendell spoke softly but her eyes said even more than her words. Marilyn felt drawn to the curious woman; in spite of the frightening things they were talking about she seemed completely unflappable.

“I’m sorry, you’re telling me that blood sucking vampires exist but while nasty whatever type that is pursuing Marilyn is worse? You came in a taxi from Chicago and this is what you’ve got to offer?” Father W couldn’t help feeling panicky.

Marilyn looked up at the group then, with those ancient eyes that Monsignor Lowell had seen.

“A soul-hunting vampire is the most feared dark being in any religion or legend so much so it is rarely directly identified, but Gretch is the real authority,” Max said.

Gretchen Wendell sucked in her breath. “Max may through his work with Marilyn become the foremost chronicler of this type of being, which can be classed widely as Destroyers, which come in both human and non-human forms. They co-exist with the darker entities of the life force, and are extremely dangerous, because a soul hunter not only takes the current mortal life of its prey but the prey’s immortal life as well.”

“What are you talking about?” Father Weston’s voice was sarcastic and strained. “I think given the circumstances of your career, Max, suddenly finding evidence of these things - it’s just too self-interested for me to take on face value.”

Max felt like he had been punched in the gut by his friend and he recoiled from the table, closing his eyes for a second. “It’s not true,” he whispered.

“I don’t think Max is like that,” Marilyn said, her own voice low as Gretch Wendell looked at Weston with an appraising gaze, clearly sizing him up.

“Hitler and Stalin I would call human Destroyers, but perhaps you are unaware of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction?” Gretch said, working hard not to let her anger at the priest show. She knew she had trouble with male authority figures, and had spent a lifetime developing complex defenses not to let them win by belittling her or making her into the punishing ball-busting crone as they often sought to. “I know this can be frightening, and for a priest it may prey on some of your deepest fears, but if you believe that there is a soul, then you must believe that it can also be destroyed, taken, and the being that would have had an eternal life has nothing, no purgatory, no heaven, nothing, it falls like husk into what we call the great howling. Where evil grows.”

“Myths,” Father W shot back, but inside he felt a shaming anxiety. He had always hated the classes on exorcism and the dark arts, because they did scare him. Satan, if he was real,
and he was real
, knew that Father Frank Weston was a sinner just as surely as God did.

“Careful throwing stones in glass houses, Father. The positive opposite of these are Guardians, who can be human and non-human as well. Saints, shamans, holy persons, white witches, all the forces for good, including angels. Your religion is dominated by its belief in Guardians - again like Destroyers they can be human or non-human. Marilyn is what I would call an Instrument, these are generally human in my experience and they can channel the life force, both good and evil. And usually they are more attuned to one side. Soul-hunting vampires need Instruments to feed on or eventually they perish. Which is why they hunt globally until they find one. Weston, surely you appreciate cosmology as a Jesuit. In literature, Dante had an acute understanding of the rings of hell and paradise. I want you to imagine a sphere with light and dark at the top and bottom.” Gretch’s hands made a cupping shape, conjuring an imaginary sphere. “Now, Marilyn, I’m going ask you to just listen, all right? The sphere is a metaphor for the life force, alright? And there are bands or rings climbing and descending the sphere. In the middle there are the Instruments, people like Marilyn who can channel some of the mystery of what alchemists called the fifth of the elements. Then descending into the dark from there are Destroyers, Demons, and then the Infernity itself.”

“The what?” Marilyn asked not sure she had heard right.

“Infernity,” Gretch repeated.

“That’s what I thought you said,” Marilyn inhaled a deep calming breath to steady herself.

“You’ve heard the word before?” Gretch asked, keeping her tone neutral as Max nodded slightly.

“My mom’s old employer, J. J. Charlesworth, used it, but I never heard anyone else, he was kind of strange, collected relics and things, his wife committed suicide and he turned even stranger after that.” Marilyn replied.

“Strange indeed, he must have been a well-read collector. Anything more you want to tell us about Mr. Charlesworth?” Gretch asked. As the question hovered in the air, a heaviness descended on the room.

“No, just coincidence I guess. Keep going with sphere, Gretch, it’s interesting, isn’t it?” Then Marilyn laid down one of her killer smiles, the kind of smile that had a way of bursting in and messing with a person’s mind, because she didn’t want Gretch to keep asking her about J. J. and sure enough the heaviness popped. Gretch nodded vigorously and re-cupped her hands, warming to her subject even more.

“On the other side of sphere climbing up into the light from the Instruments in rings are Guardians, the Archons, and finally Divinity itself. You see? Now in the archives of the British Museum I discovered this cosmology first in ancient texts copied down by the monks in 7
^th
Century Ireland. It was intended to be an encyclopedic guide, I think, of the spirit world as understood at that time. While incomplete, these same texts identified a being called an ‘animphage’, one that eats souls.” The professor stuck her hands in the pocket of her suit coat and leaned forward with intensity.

“These vampires are powerfully strong and according to the texts have lifetimes that last over three centuries but then it seems they need periodic renewal which can only be granted by rare powerful religious relics, or by taking the soul of an ‘Instrument’- an extraordinarily luminous being. The threat of their death and the end of their demonic soul drives them in ways that are ferocious.” She sat back then, and pulled a silver engraved cigarette case from her pocket, offering it about, before taking one herself and lighting it.

Father W felt the hairs on his neck rise at the thought, wondering if he had the strength of faith to cope if what the mannish professor was saying was true.

“When I first met Dr. Wendell she took me to those archives in the British Museum. She had attended a lecture of mine in London where I argued for the Presence in everyone and she said she had something she wanted to show me. I saw the 7th Century text and it reminded me that for all the white light in the world, there are forces that are just as dark. I think we’ve found them here,” Max said.