The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (19 page)

As she turned right on Eighth Street, she felt the nagging sensation that someone was following her again.

I smiled and crossed the street behind her, pulling my jacket tighter to brace myself against the chilly evening air, ducking into the shadows of an abandoned storefront as she climbed the stairs of her stoop, opened the door and went inside.

As soon as she entered her apartment, Rose turned on some music to chase away her jitters. When she was calm enough to think, she thought about Martin and how nice it would be to see him again. She almost ran downstairs and ding-donged his bell, then remembered why he gave her all that gold in the first place. “I’ll make some curtains first,” she decided, just to show him how nice everything would look when it was all…finished.

I stared up at her window and watched her dance with a cascade of unrolled fabric bunched around her waist like a party dress. She pranced and reveled like she was the luckiest girl in the world. She looked so ridiculous. All I could think about was how foolish she was to feel even the least bit excited about seeing Martin again and how infinitely better her luck would have been if she never met him in the first place. Or me for that matter.

“Lucky,” I snorted derisively. “The luck of the Irish.”

My suitcase is full of dreams. I take it out whenever I need to go far away. It weighs a lot. I saw it in a thrift store in San Francisco. It was a big, old- fashioned suitcase from the thirties or forties, the kind some dandy would take on a cruise ship, beige and tan with shiny brass hinges. At first, I used it to keep my journals inside. Soon there were so many I had to keep them somewhere else. I needed more room for my other treasures. My collection.

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I’d never found all that stuff. Or bought it. Or stole it. I guess I’ll never know, because I did. Still, maybe even that wouldn’t have been so bad. Everyone has a hobby. No, like most people, my biggest mistake wasn’t what I’d done
.
It was telling somebody about it.

“Hi, Rose,” I said to the spiky black hair on the back of her head when I walked into the St. Mark’s Tattoo Parlor. As usual, I was right on time for my appointment, unlike Rose, who was half an hour late for her tarot card reading. Punctuality wasn’t one of her virtues. Neither was facial recognition.

“Heyyyy…” she replied, forgetting my name when she finally turned to look at me. She wiped the blood off the back of some dude who was so skinny his shoulder blades looked like amputated wings. I got so excited watching her that I could barely wait for her to finish and start on me.

“I liked the card reading. It was a little creepy though. What was all that shit with the Wheel of Fortune and The Devil?”

“You might get obsessed with someone who tempts your darker urges.”

“My darker urges. Yeah…now I remember. Is it someone I already know?” she asked, looking at me like I couldn’t possibly be a worthy candidate.

“I don’t think so,” I said, hoping I was wrong. “Remember the man and woman chained to the Devil’s throne? This is someone who knows all your fears and desires. You could become a prisoner of your own compulsions.”

“Sounds kinky…I hope he’s cute,” she said, turning her attention back to her bony customer. She wiped up the last red droplets from his back. He eased off the table and into the changing room/toilet. After he vacated the chair, she adjusted it so I could lean forward with my back exposed.

“Let’s get started,” she announced. It was the same thing I said to her before her card reading, which felt a lot eerier than I let on. The reading took almost as long as our first tattoo session, about an hour and a half. That’s where the similarities ended. When she finished Phase One of her ink work, my teeth hurt from clenching them so much. When I finished her tarot reading, we had a nice glass of Zinfandel on a cozy, overstuffed couch.

During her reading we talked a lot about her work. I
saw
her poking and drilling into all that voluntarily exposed flesh before I even turned over the first card. I hate to admit it, but I got a huge hard-on almost instantly. Was it because she was so pretty? So sexy? Or was it because my vision of her was so clear, and so clearly a vision of someone at play, not work? She loved it, loved it, loved it! And I loved her, so sadly, at first sight.

Am I an idiot? A complete and utter idiot? Without a doubt. Has there ever been anyone in the history of creation who claimed to fall in love at first sight that didn’t lay an exponentially greater claim to mental derangement? My tested and frequently retested I.Q. ranges between 162 and 165, depending on my pre-quiz caffeine intake. Yet once Rose Turner walked into my tidy, bookshelf-crammed apartment, I was dumber than a hand puppet.

I justified my lunacy, like any good, non-God-fearing, divination practitioner would. Fate was my profession. Being a big (so big you’d have to call it religious) believer in synchronicity, I absolutely, positively
knew
Rose had been sent to me and me alone by all the interconnected, romantically scheming powers of the universe. She was an angel, my very own spiky-haired angel. I could hardly wait until I flipped over the last card so I could stop talking about her and tell her how I had been searching high and low for precisely the right person to execute (poor choice of words?) my epic tattoo/body-mod scheme. And gee whiz, guess what? That extra-special, perfectly perfect person simply has to be you, Rose!

Sigh. The wine helped a lot. It calmed me down and loosened me up enough so I was able to behave like a reasonably intelligent person with reasonably interesting things to say. If she sensed my desperate heart-thumping attraction, she didn’t act like it. I’m sure she was used to guys falling head over heels for her. I’m equally certain she was kind enough not to squish my teeny heart like a bug if she caught a whiff of my wafting pheromones. My mind-reading radar dish was tuned to Planck wavelengths, yet the only thing I sensed in the two hours and twenty-two minutes we spent together was that she genuinely, happily enjoyed my company. She liked me. And that, dear reader, was more than enough.

When I told her about the tattoo I designed to cover my entire back, she sat up like a fox sniffing blood. When she saw the sketches I’d made, she was more than enthusiastic. She was blown away. “What is all this stuff? All these lines and slash marks?”

“That’s Ogham,” I said proudly. “This variation is a cipher script I invented, but Ogham was created by the Celts. Irish legends say Fénius Farsaid went to the Tower of Babel and made Ogham from the best of all the confused languages when the tower fell. Personally, I think it was invented by Irish druids trying to keep their secrets hidden from Christian missionaries.”

“Cool,” she said, amazingly not rolling her eyes like I was a pompous, asshole geek. “I’ve got some Celtic tattoos from a book my dad gave me. He said they were the marks of a druid priestess and they would protect me.”

Her mood darkened, but only for a moment. She pulled up her pant legs and showed me the intricate spiral patterns etched into golden bands around both ankles. “See?” she said, her face beaming, clearly delighted to show off her tats. Her legs were fantastic.

“Nice work,” I said, genuinely impressed. “It’s in the La Tene style.”

“That’s right! I learned about that stuff ‘cause so many people want Celtic tattoos now. My mom had them too. I guess that’s how I got into tats in the first place. Hers were amazing. She was doing it years before everyone thought it was cool. Mom was from the O’Neil Clan. They go all the way back to this king called Niall of the Nine Hostages. My dad gave me a book about him. Said he kidnapped Saint Patrick when he was a kid, during a raid he led on Britain. Twenty-six of his descendants were High Kings of Ireland.”

I laughed. Irish people are soooooo into their genealogy. “My mom was Irish too,” I said, flexing my pedigree. “I’m not sure about my dad.”

“You said
was
,” she pointed out, catching it like I did when she said it.

“Yeah. Is your mom dead too?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. That single syllable hung uncomfortably in the air for a few silent seconds—then she abruptly reached for her coat. “Make sure to bring those drawings when you come by the parlor.”

I came the next day. We worked together for months. Even after we finished, we would still get together, making modifications and additions. Most of that later work was done in my apartment. We’d drink some wine. Talk about Celtic lore. But whenever I spoke too much about the occult, she’d cut me off, saying something like, “My dad was way too into that shit. It freaks me out a little.”

It didn’t freak her out so much that she didn’t want more card readings. Every time she came over she’d ask for one. I always put a positive spin on the gloomy stuff. There was lot to hide. There was a lot of incredible stuff too—so incredible I thought she must be either the luckiest or unluckiest person in the universe. It would shift back and forth between positive and negative poles almost every reading, like God kept flipping a coin that landed heads one day, tails the next. I began to think I was losing my touch, or that she had some really weird surprises in store. Looking back, I’m still shocked by how lightly I took it.

When she told me she did palm readings, I wasn’t very surprised. “But never for money,” she added. Was that a dig at me? If it was, she didn’t keep digging.

“Wow!” she shouted, gaping at my left palm.

“Good wow or bad wow?” I asked, wondering if she was going to give me the censored version like I’d been giving her.

“It’s your lifeline…”

“If it’s short, don’t tell me,” I interrupted.

“No, it’s the longest one I’ve ever seen. I guess you’re going to live for a very long time.”

“Great. Does it say if I ever get happy?”

She laughed. I laughed. We had fun. Strangely, I never had a single vision when I was with her, like that part of me was sealed inside a genie bottle. I didn’t care, hardly noticed. It was so nice just to be in the same room with her and bask in the pleasure of her company. I’d never been with anyone else who really
got
me like she did. I even thought we might have ended up in bed together, if only I hadn’t grown so trusting.

Trust? How could trust be my downfall?

It happened one night after too many glasses of wine. I knew this was going to be the night something happened between us. Too bad I didn’t
see
what. She’d always been enthralled by my book collection, at least the parts of it on display. The more it felt okay to show her, the more I wanted her to see. So I showed her one of my “skin books”—the trial transcript of a hanged horse thief covered with his skin.

She thought it was cool. Said she loved that morbid side of me. Said she had her own dark side. Sure she did. She was a Goth chick. Anyway, I was drunk and a voice in my head that didn’t even sound like mine kept nagging me to go all the way, telling me I was
really
safe with her, saying I could completely open up and show her who I was.

So I asked: “Want to see something
really
cool?”

“Sure,” she said, a little drunk too.

Then I made the biggest mistake of my life. I took out the suitcase and showed her. She didn’t run, or curse me or call the police. But she gave me
that look
. And she never came back, or even talked to me again.

Yes, I was in love. I guess I still am. So you can understand how I felt when I saw her and Martin together. When I thought about Paul and what he wanted me to do. I know you’re not going to like it, but I’ll tell you anyway. I had some very mixed feelings. Part of me wanted to help her. And part of me wanted to end all that pain.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Paul said, ushering Michael to a large oak chair at the end of a long table that consisted of two sheets of raw plywood supported by sawhorses.

Michael stared at the two half-globes of roasted meat in the middle of the table and the paper plates and long bowie knives sitting in front of the four big chairs and realized how loudly his stomach was grumbling. He looked from his plate to Paul, wondering how he could broach the topic of his vegetarianism.