A Cruel Season for Dying (23 page)

A band of weak electric light fell across the hall carpet from Father Graff’s suite. The priest had converted the larger sitting
room into his bedroom, and the bedroom into what Mrs. Tuminello referred to as his “secret room.” Standing in the hall, she
now vowed never to enter the priest’s room again. Never to dust the furniture or change his bed. The rugs would go unvacuumed,
the floor unpolished. It would be her small revenge against Graff for upsetting Father Kellog. For now, she would just shut
the door. However, what she glimpsed through the gaping door caused her resolve to punish the priest to instantly evaporate.

Her hand fell away from the doorknob, and she stood transfixed, eyeing the long, dark fissure in the far wall. In his haste
and anger, Father Graff had been careless, had failed to lock the door between his two rooms. All the doors inside the rectory
had old-style locks. A rusting assortment of skeleton keys found in the hall desk drawer might or might not fit any particular
lock. On the door between his bedroom and his private room, however, Father Graff had installed a sturdy dead bolt, explaining
to her that he would be responsible for any cleaning that had to be done inside. She had complained to Father Kellog, but
to no avail.

Now she slowly crossed the bedroom, stopping before the partially opened door between the rooms. She began a Hail Mary, but
it died just as she stepped inside the smaller room’s threshold. At first she attempted to make sense of the collection of
shapes and patterns in the dimness. Then she felt a brush of cold against her cheek. She jumped,
watching a brass chain swish back and forth from a bulb in the ceiling. She pulled the cord. Red light flooded the room.
Hell
was her single thought.

Her eyes took in the eely coils of discarded film, the stainless trays of clear liquid, the hump of a camera. Then her focus
moved to the collection of blown-up prints, gleaming black-and-white photographs, suspended like grotesque laundry, one piece
after another, from a taut drying wire.

The cobwebs in William Kerry’s head lifted gradually but completely. He remembered the fear, slick and cold in the pit of
his stomach. Then he remembered why he’d been afraid.

Flat on his back in the darkness, still naked from his bath, his wrists and ankles bound together with tape, he threw his
head from side to side on the bed. He couldn’t see anyone in the room now. But God, oh God, why hadn’t he acted on his impulse
to drive into the city on Friday morning as soon as Lylah had left with the children?

He lay quiet against the bedspread for a moment, his pulse racing with adrenaline. He concentrated on the nubby feel of the
fabric on his skin, tried to slow his breathing. He had to think. There was a clock on the nightstand. It showed he had been
out only a few minutes. The odorless gas he’d been sprayed with had to be something harmless like nitrous oxide. He was okay.
He hadn’t been hurt. The man was probably a burglar who specialized in houses like this. Damn good at it too, or the alarm
system would have worked.

A laugh escaped. He was flirting with hysteria. But it was a good sign that the guy was a professional. It meant he didn’t
make mistakes. It was only the rank amateurs who screwed up and killed people they found at home.

So what was he going to do now? Just lay there? The man was probably still in the house. With the nearest house so far away,
it wasn’t any use to scream. And anyway, he didn’t want to make this guy mad. Still, maybe he shouldn’t wait to do something.
He could wiggle his way across the bed and throw himself on the floor. His wrists were hog-tied in front to his ankles, but
he could still drag the phone off the
nightstand, punch out 911…. What was that smell? Shit, it was strong.

He fought to get higher on the pillows. The man was in the room. Had been there all the time, in the shadows.
Naked.
The man was naked. That was the fact his brain had forgotten to register. The
burglar
who had come at him from the deeper darkness of the closet had been nude, except for the gas mask … and the leather straps.

The mask was gone now. The face it had covered was strangely familiar. And the leather was some kind of harness. The man turned,
putting a small plate with a cake of burning incense down on Lylah’s desk. Folded on his back was a perfect pair of wings.

“Oh, my God.” The words had escaped without volition. The ones that came next were babble from some autonomic center in his
brain. He listened to them as a spectator, knowing already they were useless.

“What do you want … money? There’s a safe. You can have whatever you want. Just, please, please, don’t hurt me.” He was digging
his heels in the mattress, arching himself higher. Not wanting to see but having to. Having to know what was coming, because
imagining had to be worse.

The man hadn’t spoken. He stooped down, got something from a bag on the floor. Walked toward him with a rolled-up piece of
plastic and a small leather case in his hand.

Please…no… please…no… please…no.
The adrenaline had taken over now. He was moving, skittling like a crab across the covers. The man was strong. A hand clamped
his shoulder, pulled him back across the bed.

The case was on the nightstand, open. It held a pair of syringes. Something inside him gave up fighting. “Who are you?” he
asked.

The face above him smiled. “What I’m going to show you, Dr. Kerry, is who you are.”

The last of summer. Leaves along the highway already growing brittle, whispering like children in the dark. The man could
remember the drive to the city. Too often, like tonight, he dreamed of it. The good part about it was Marian. In the dream
he could see her, could hear her
laughter. That night she had laughed like the old Marian before her obsession with the Church. Her head thrown back. Her blond
hair whipping her face and throat.

She’d been turned toward him, still smiling, when he’d gone around the curve, half looking. Although it wouldn’t have mattered.
The oil on the road was invisible in the darkness, the loss of control inevitable at his speed. He remembered his first startled
impression of the truck jackknifed along the shoulder, I beams jutting from its broken trailer. Remembered the Land Rover
spinning, the sickening uselessness of trying to steer. And the noise of Marian’s screaming, slow motion like the rest, cut
off in the moment of impact.

They said it was impossible. That her head had been gone in that instant, smashed beyond recognition. But real or not, he
knew it was her head he had seen bouncing at his feet on the floorboard. Not pain but surprise in her eyes.

His own pain he didn’t remember, not even in his leg. He felt only the constriction of his chest, and the gathering blindness
that might have been the blood flowing from the head wound into his eyes. The tunnel was what he remembered next. The light
at the end. And Marian, miraculously whole, moving ahead of him. In the dream it was real again. The tunnel was here and now.
He fought the pull of Earth. The claim of new flesh. He cried for Marian to wait, clawing, scrabbling his way minutely toward
the light.

The barrier was a subtle thing. Invisible. Sensible only in his inability to make any real progress. And in the moment when
he finally understood that he could not follow Marian, he had remembered … remembered who he was.

He sat up, gasping for the air to fill his lungs. A cold, sour sweat filmed his body, the flavor of tears. He sat rigid and
still, trying to hold on to Marian in the moment she had turned to him smiling. But that part of the dream was gone, and he
jammed his palms into his eyes to block what came instead.

He increased the pressure of his hands, fighting away the image, thinking of that moment in the hospital when he’d first come
to consciousness, of the confusion that had been but a momentary blessing. For that split second he had remembered nothing
of the accident or the tunnel. It was his last human moment, when he had only wondered
why he had not awakened in his own bed, wondered where was Marian.

Her name forced the horror back, just as it had that day. The insanity of her death, a vacuum that sucked him back to the
tunnel and the knowledge that could not be escaped. He was
ma’lak Elohim,
to give it the name he had read so long ago in the ancient Jewish texts. He was a fallen angel, one of a host who had rebelled
in their desire to experience matter.

It was all allegory, of course, for concepts beyond human terms. But close enough. Though what his grandfather’s books had
not explained was the true nature of the punishment for such an unnatural desire—a karmic justice to fit the crime. The Fallen
had been granted their wish for human bodies … forever. Barred from Heaven, they remained trapped eternally in human flesh,
in body bags, prisoners of the cycle of death and rebirth.

But one … he … Gadriel … had cheated God. He had not died, to be reborn with the memory of who he was, lost or fading in an
infant’s brain. Paramedics had arrived at the scene and resuscitated his body. He had returned to Earth
awakened.

In the long months of rehabilitation, he had had time to reflect on the hopelessness of his condition and to think of what
might be done to free himself and the other Fallen. And he discovered that he could identify the others of his kind by the
auras that shone about them, an essence that human flesh could not contain.

At last he had begun to plan. He would find and awaken the most powerful of the Fallen, duplicating for them his own awakening
experience. Armed before death with the knowledge of their true identities, they would be prepared to fight reincarnation.
Resisting the pull of Earth, they could remain instead in the place between, gathering in strength, till enough of them had
assembled to destroy the barrier and regain what had been lost.

He let his hands drop. Sat in the dark with his breathing, waiting for the clearing of his vision. After a moment he got up
and threw on a robe. He walked into the familiar red glare of the darkroom and lifted one of the prints from the developing
tray. This one had been taken before the moment of awakening, and the eyes of what had still been William Kerry stared back
at him in horror.

T
he room was bright, expensive, perfect. The charcoal letters, an offense. Nearly a foot high, they crawled brokenly on the
wall above the bed.
Rumel
was what the letters spelled out, and Sakura spoke the name aloud. He had read the passages in
The Book of Enoch,
the ones that mentioned the fallen angels. The first four names that the killer had written had been listed as leaders of
the rebellion against God. He figured the name Rumel would also be among them.

In the harsh morning light, Dr. William Kerry didn’t look like an angel. He looked like a man who’d gotten used to being dead.
The wings were obscene. The drawing on his chest a primitive horror. Circles, lines. It still meant nothing to Sakura.

Like most of the rooms in the house, the bedroom had floor-to-ceiling glass. From where he stood near the bed, Sakura could
watch members of the task force working with borough detectives in a grid search of the grounds.