Before There Were Angels (19 page)

“Exactly, except that the voices in my head weren’t just voices in my head, they were the voices of the ghosts in the house, of Zack, of Jess and of Martha.”

“Martha? Is she dead too?”

“Apparently.”

“Who killed her?”

“She didn’t say but she said that the killings at the house were carried out deliberately to lure us there.”

“Does that mean Martha was killed before the others?”

“
No. She said she killed them while her mind was being controlled by Rafaella.”

Martinez smiled.
“Yeah, right.”

“And these ghosts couldn’t tell you where Belle has gone?”

“I haven’t seen them since.”

Officer Nielsen took over. “I know we should have asked you this before
, but have you ever had to undergo any medical treatment for delusions or hearing voices or anything?”

“No, this is the first time anything like this has happened to me.”

“Do you think these visions of ghosts are real or do you think you may be imagining them?”

“I cannot tell you, Officer Nielsen. If you have ever seen a ghost
, you will know that they look just like anyone else. They are really nothing out of the ordinary except that they shouldn’t be there at all. You have met Genevieve Giraud who is dead too, so you should know what I mean. As it happens, I believe that there really are ghosts in our house and that Belle really has disappeared, and even that Zack died there. If you tell me that Zack is alive and that Belle is at home, I will have to visit a psychiatrist because there will definitely be something wrong with me. Otherwise, I will take my chances on my sanity.”

*  *  *

When I walked through the front door to hear familiar voices, I nearly turned right around to go off in search of the nearest doctor.

The voices were drifting into the hallway from the sitting room and they were those of Zack and Belle.

Belle?

I rushed in. Belle was sitting on the sofa and Zack was next to her. They were both so happy.

At first I thought they were both alive.

I had never seen, that I could recall, Zack and Bell
e sitting side by side chatting. Zack had always been off doing other things, usually with Stevie, so it was enchanting to watch them even as I agonized as to the state Belle was in.

They ignored my presence and carried on talking. Perhaps they couldn’t see me. I had the ominous sensation that I was the ghost in the room, forced to watch the living, unable to interact with them. Of course, that is what
Rafaella always claimed for me, that I was incapable of playing a full part in anyone else’s lives.

I couldn’t really make out what they were saying. I could hear their voices clearly but not the words.

They were totally engrossed with each other and, whether she was dead or alive, I was so pleased for Belle. At last she had been reunited with Zack and presumably that cavernous ache had been filled with her delight at their reunion.

I watched their outlines. They were both solid. I knew that Zack was a ghost, so that did not give me any confidence that Belle was anything other than a ghost too. And then there was the fact that they were both talking and not talking.

I wondered whether I was in the middle of some psychotic break and then back to whether I was the ghost, killed by Rafaella two nights ago and was only realizing now that I was dead.

I even got to the point where I was playing with the idea that maybe nothing I had lived through over the last few weeks had even happened,
questioning whether Zack had died, whether Belle had disappeared, whether Stevie had gone to Phoenix, whether there we any ghosts in the house. The nearest I can explain it is when you look at a word and it suddenly stops meaning anything to you at all. Is it even a word? Is it spelled correctly? Then you tell yourself that it is and it returns to something you have lived with all your life and know well. That is what happened here.

Belle looked at me and smiled sheepishly. “I got lost,” she said.

I rushed to her. “Are you alive?”

“Of course I am alive,” she said.

I held out my hand and touched her tentatively. I hit resistance. I hit flesh. “You’re alive!” I exclaimed stupidly.

“Don’t rub it in,” Zack teased me from the side.

I knelt down by Belle and hugged her as if she had been gone forever, as I had very much feared. “Where were you?”

“I was outside somewhere, wondering around. I
guess I got amnesia. I couldn’t remember who I was or where I was. At least I wasn’t naked or in my robe. I had managed to dress myself in a t-shirt and jeans – this t-shirt and jeans, and no I can’t remember doing any of that. All I can remember is Rafaella coming into our room and then the next thing I knew was that I found myself in the middle of Golden Gate Park with Zack beside me, asking me to come home. So here I am.”

“Thank you, Zack
.”

Zack smiled. “Like I
told you, we are doing our best. The rest is up to you.”

“What did happen?”

“We didn’t see anything. There was a kind of barrier at the door. You were thrown back onto the landing and we couldn’t revive you. When we tried to get into your bedroom we couldn’t. Then Mom came out already dressed and disappeared outside like she was sleepwalking and we found we couldn’t get through the front door either for several hours. After that, we hunted around the city looking for her. I found her asleep near the Rose Garden in Golden Gate Park. As you know, Mom loves that garden. I waited by her side until she woke up and I brought her home. She’s fine now. She remembers everything except what happened between when Rafaella confronted her and when I found her.”

“Thank God for that,” I said.

“You worry too much, Luke,” Belle told me.

I thought it was an odd thing for Belle to say at the time, and I should have been warned, but I was so cheerful and relieved to see Belle alive and well, I overlooked it.

It was very careless of me, but when we are really, really happy we often become really, really stupid too.

Chapter 23

When I phoned Luiz Martinez to tell him that Belle had returned unharmed, he laughed. “Let’s see who else comes back,” he said.

Predictably
it was Rafaella who came back that night. I woke up to find her sitting on the end of our bed. Belle was still asleep.

Rafaella
held her finger to her lips, indicating that she wanted me to be quiet and not wake Belle. This conversation was to be a private one, just her and me.

“So nice to see you two so happy again,”
Rafaella observed. “Quite the perfect couple.” There was a sneer in her mind no doubt but not in her voice. A neutral onlooker would have thought that she was pleased for us, tinged with an envy for what Belle and I had that Rafaella and I had never achieved as a couple. That would have made sense. At base, Belle and I had everything; we were living through somewhat literally a nightmare but as a couple we were golden.

However, I was not a neutral observer and I doubted that
Rafaella was pleased for us in any way whatsoever. Indeed, I had no doubt that Rafaella had every intent to smash us up and to tear us apart in any way she could. The operative word was ‘execute’. She wanted to execute us but had not worked out how to do that definitively yet, or had she? Did she know exactly what she was going to do to us next and was spinning things out so that they would be that much more devastating to us? I was under no illusion that there was nothing either Belle or I could do now to satisfy Rafaella’s blood lust except to suffer horribly for as long as possible and then to die.

Belle and my joy in each other was an affront to
Rafaella, an affront that struck at the heart, if that is the right word, of Rafaella’s conception of who she was and of her belief in her own infallibility.

I could never tell with
Rafaella. Did she really believe that she was perfect and never made any mistakes or did she ever recognize that she was deeply flawed in her relationships with people, insecure, angry, manipulative and vengeful but could never admit to any of that because it would undermine her strategy to force her will on the rest of the world and especially on those closest to her?

Rafaella
wanted it all but what ‘it all’ meant for her I suspected had never been defined in her mind in any detail. There was no point where she would think to herself ‘I have everything I want’ and relax. There was always the next thing she wanted, on whim, that day, for the next few months.

When we were together,
she always had a list of stuff she wanted next - usually things. It was a long list and it kept getting longer because it almost seemed to be an ambition of hers to add new items to that list daily and then complain that hardly anything was getting checked off. I kept asking her to prioritize the list in terms of what was realistically achievable and what she wanted the most, but she insisted on picking things randomly from it and then bitching ceaselessly that I had done nothing to make it possible for her to have it. For some reason it always came down to what I had not done rather than to what she was doing to get whatever she wanted.

In her mind
or, more precisely, in what she said, she had done everything possible to move towards her goals and I was the one standing in the way of our achieving them, resisting her justifiable wishes, frustrating her at every moment, simply for the cruelty of it.

I suspected that deep down the things on her list
were not really what she wanted, that she was still a little girl, or perhaps a teenager, confused by the world, doubtful as to her place in it, desperate to develop great friendships and to be loved and admired for who she was. Her problem was that, like a young girl or a teenager, she wanted everything on her terms. She wanted to be loved absolutely, to be admired absolutely, to have every one of her achievements recognized, and to be considered absolutely a force for good in the world, exemplary.

She wanted to be special and to have everyone envy her specialness and strive, probably in vain, to be like her.

But in what way was she special? There was no doubt that when Rafaella was in a good mood, she was wonderful, close to peerless. She laughed, she was playful, she challenged conventions and she was loving. Nothing seemed wrong with who she was capable of being. But she could never keep her good moods running for more than a few hours, usually in public, and not always then. She was acutely sensitive to people’s reactions to her and would start spinning out of control if she felt one person among a roomful of people was harboring critical opinions of her. She visibly disintegrated, pouring more and more energy into becoming the center of attention, to batter down her antagonist until she surrendered to the general admiration of the room for Rafaella. Except that Rafaella’s hyperdrive behavior did not draw admiration, it provoked uneasiness. Those around her would probably play along with her but they became watchful, wary, and I knew that on the way home they would be dismissive of her behind her back.

Behind her back.
That is what Rafaella hated most, people doing and saying things behind her back. If things happened in front of her, she could confront the problem and try to force a change of behavior or attitude, but when she couldn’t see what was happening or being said, everything was beyond her control, beyond her ability to address it and to put it right.

According to my assessment, that is why she was so keen to work on her psychic abilities, so that nothing ever happened behind her back, so that everything was subject to discovery and corrective action. S
he started by claiming to be able to intuit negative thoughts in people that she would then want to flush out and neutralize. After a while it was no longer a question of her intuition but of her growing psychic insight. She claimed that she knew that so-and-so was plotting against her because her archangels were telling her so or because she could see straight into their souls, no longer because she was merely sensing dislike in a human way.

Whatever I may have thought of her pretension to cosmically derived knowledge, the fact that she was sitting on the end of our bed, both here and not here, was irrefutable proof that she had mastered some techniques
beyond most of our understanding, she had achieved greatness of a sort, even if her application of these techniques was almost exclusively to bolster her power over everyone around her. There again, that is what personal power usually comprises - the reliable ability to bend everyone to one’s will.

“Now you have had a taste of what it is like to lose Belle for a day or two,” she continued, suggesting that Belle’s temporary disappearance had been part of her plan all along, co-opting the accidental to her purpose. There again, maybe it was true. Maybe she had deliberately deranged Belle, stripped her of her memory, to make a point.

“We have already suffered enough loss,” I said. “We are still trying to cope with Zack’s death.”

She ignored my implied plea.

“So what are you going to do to protect Belle in the future? How are you going to stop it happening again? She is probably going mad, you know. People don’t suddenly get amnesia. It is a loss of brain function.”