Bless the Child (55 page)

How could I know it was all a fucking scam? How could I know it wasn’t me he wanted?

Jenna fought ferociously against the ropes that tied her hands and feet; rage and fear gave her renewed strength. But the restraints were hopelessly tight and her wrists were already bloody from the struggle. What the fuck did they intend to do with her tonight? She had seen people sacrificed. She had witness the convulsive agony of their dying. She had never thought they could do such brutal things to her!

Ghania was in the doorway, dressed for ritual; an inky black djellabah embroidered with silver and gold sigils covered her body, a gold lame turban adorned her head. Symbols of some obscure kind were written in red and yellow pigment on her face and arms.

The Amah motioned four large men to follow her into the room; they, too, were dressed for ceremony. Jenna saw they weren’t servants, but members of Maa Kheru.

“John!” she whispered urgently to the young Wall Street broker who had often made lustful overtures toward her in the past. “Help me! Don’t let them hurt me,
John,
please!” She could see a flicker of doubt cloud his eyes, before he averted them.

“Do not be subverted from your task, John Menton!” Ghania thundered. “You, too, will be judged for your performance! You, too, have been bound by oath. Falter in your resolve and forfeit all you have gained.”

Menton seized Jenna’s arm with renewed vigor. There was a great deal at stake here—more than he cared to risk for a girl who’d never given him the time of day.

The Eric Vannier who entered the satanic chapel was very changed in appearance from the elegant international financer he was by day. Garbed in elaborate Egyptian robes, on which were embroidered cartouches and complex glyphs, he carried himself regally, as if awareness of his mission empowered every cell.

Ghania followed a few steps behind, resplendent in the full regalia of an Obeah priestess. She carried a large Madagascan smoky quartz crystal orb in her hands. It had been passed from High Priestess to High Priestess, since the Kingdom of Mu, and had been programmed with the evil gifts of each who’d owned it.

Eric motioned the guards who restrained the struggling Jenna, and signaled them to begin the ceremony. Roughly, they dragged her to the center of the room, and up the marble altar steps. Eric frowned at her ragged condition; she looked strung out from drug deprivation, and ravaged by a fear so primal and palpable the chamber fairly hummed with its intensity. Even her usually perfect body was blemished by scratches and bruises from her long ordeal. Jenna cried out piteously to Eric as she passed him, begging him to remember all they’d been to each other, begging him for mercy. He found her cowardice distasteful in the extreme.

The sound of chanting rose around her; Jenna recognized the magical Enochian tongue, through the haze of terror that now possessed her. She fought her captors with every ebbing ounce of strength, but they dragged her inexorably to her final destination.

Other robed figures watched her frenzied struggles with a certain jaded excitement; there was such an intensive frequency to the energy of an unwilling sacrifice. All participants in the ritual were profoundly aware of the change in the room’s vibratory rate, as Jenna’s terror energized the chamber.

“She will make a superb altar, Number Four,” said a cultivated voice, only slightly muffled by the cowled hood that shielded his face from view.

“I was frankly surprised by this summons, Number Seven,” a Parisian male voice responded. “Delighted as I am about the opportunity to enjoy an unexpected sacramental meal before the Great Sabbath, I do hope this precipitously called gathering doesn’t suggest that anything untoward has happened.”

The larger cloaked figure shrugged. “I think it was inevitable that Eric rid himself of his bride, don’t you? One can never entirely trust mothers, where children are concerned. She might have lost her nerve at an inopportune moment.”

Another hooded figure joined them. It was apparent from the robe’s topography that it housed a woman. “She was never a fitting consort for a High Priest,” the newcomer said with authority.

“But, I’d wager she was a fitting bedmate,” quipped Number Seven, to everyone’s amusement. The woman started to respond, but the piercing sound of Tibetan tsingshas called the room’s soft babble of voices to order. The bells were used to alter the chamber’s vibrations, and to presage the beginning of ceremony.

Jenna lay stretched across the marble altar slab, now chained at wrists and ankles; her head overhung the altar to the south, making it hard for her to breathe. Her feet were stretched north. She was sobbing in exhausted rasping breaths, her naked body straining convulsively against the inevitable. The full magnitude of her danger had finally stilled her pleas for mercy—she was in the wrong company to find compassion. The sounds of chanting flowed and ebbed in waves around her like an inland sea, as her mind flitted from terror to terror, seeking oblivion.

Jenna’s life flashed by her in freeze-frames, stopping perversely at every crossroad where she’d taken a wrong turn. The thought of Cody pierced her heart . . . she would save her baby from this horror, if she could. She wanted to redeem herself, wanted one small righteous act to carry to eternity.
Wanted to rob Eric of his prize.

The High Priest’s knife gleamed eerily above her in the cavernous candlelit chapel. He raised the jewel-encrusted hilt of the ancient athame and made curious sweeping signs in the air above the sacrificial body. Jenna prayed silently he didn’t intend the Death of Two Hundred Cuts, the longest and most excruciating possibility. She tried not to imagine what it would be like to be skinned alive.

Eric’s arms were raised in the ancient salute to the Powers of Evil—he called upon the Prince of Darkness and the Goddess Sekhmet by their hidden names of power, and asked them to accept the sacrifice of the vessel that had brought forth the Messenger.

The acolytes ceased swinging the censers of acrid incense, and handed two bowls to Ghania, who murmured over them before passing them to Eric. They were filled with blood and excrement, into which stolen Communion wafers had been dropped in desecration; he use the revolting substance to write arcane characters on Jenna’s violently spasmed body.

The robed audience was attentive now. They were chanting softly, and the sounds blended sonorously with Jenna’s pathetic sobs.

Eric lifted the sacred dagger above the girl’s body once again, and intoned the ancient words to evoke the ferryman of Hades, who would carry the forfeit soul of the sacrifice to the Underworld. He removed a scroll from a tabernacle on the altar—it was the demonic pact which Jenna had signed in blood, at their marriage. He read the words sonorously, but she was far past understanding them.

Eric glanced at Jenna, no hint of caring in his face, nor even genuine recognition. The girl had been a chosen vessel from with which to bring forth the Isis Messenger. He had been kind to her when that was necessary, and cruel when that was more appropriate. At the moment, her sniveling was beginning to disturb his concentration—it interfered with the beautiful ritual words, which accompanied sacrifice. Jenna didn’t mean to beg, but maybe some part of him would remember all they’d been to each other . . . maybe some memory would make him merciful. She shrieked out his name, an unforgivable affront . . .

When the knife found her tongue, her shrieks became gurgles.
I’m drowning!
She thought insanely. It seemed suddenly more important than the fear or the pain.

Jenna didn’t think at all after that. She just suffered until she died. The last thing she saw on earth was Ghania’s smiling face.

With her final lucid breath, Jenna O’Connor Vannier vowed revenge.

N
ightmares filled with blood and pain plagued Maggie’s sleep from the instant her head hit the pillow. She had tossed so fitfully, the covers lay in a tangled heap around her, when the shrill ringing of the telephone beside her bed awakened her at 3:00 A.M. “Is this Mrs. Margaret O’Connor?” a disembodied voice queried out of the darkness. She struggled to clear the sleep mist from her brain, and fumbled for the light. The voice said he was a police officer.

“There’s been an accident near the Cloisters,” the man said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. O’Connor, but your daughter’s car went out of control and plunged over the side of the Palisades. I’m afraid the body was burned beyond recognition, but her purse was thrown free by the fall. There was a business card from the Antiquarian Quest in it—that’s how we found you so quickly.”

“Oh, my God!” Maggie gasped, struggling for comprehension. “Officer, was there a child in the car with my daughter?”

“No. No child. She was alone. We’re still investigating how it happened, ma’am. We’ll have to check your daughter’s dental records to make sure of course . . . the body was pretty mangled by the explosion as well as burned. Can you tell me her dentist’s name?”. . . This man was asking everyday questions, Maggie thought, as if she would be able to answer them. But that was insane. Didn’t he know there were no answers left inside her? Maybe no answers left in the world . . .

She held the offending receiver a long while, before she could make her hand steady enough to replace it in the cradle. Maggie sat on the edge of the bed, paralyzed, clutching the phone, staring into space, trying to remember how to breathe.

Jenna was gone. Forever. Jenna would never be all right now. Never come home. Never be Cody’s mommy, or Maggie’s child. Never make up for lost time, or lost love, or lost hope. Eric had killed her, that was the simple truth, no matter what it looked like to the police. The heartless bastard who was Jenna’s husband had killed Maggie’s child.

And now Cody was absolutely alone with her mother’s murderer. A scream torn from some primitive place, far beneath the civilizing layers that have raised humanity above the other animal species, rent its way free. A secret reservoir of grief opened its floodgates and Maggie heard, with absolute horror, her own voice screaming.

Maria Aparecida raced down the hall from her bedroom at the sound. The plump, motherly woman ran to Maggie’s side, and not knowing what happened, or what to do about it, she simply wrapped her arms around Maggie and held her until she stopped thrashing and screaming. “Cry, my daughter,” she crooned, as to a baby. “Cry out all the tears you have been hiding in the secret places . . . Maria understands the sorrows of your heart . . . Maria understands . . .”

Maggie opened her swollen eyes and squinted at the early-morning light. For one blessed moment she thought it had all been a hideous dream, but Maria Aparecida’s face, looking anxious beside the bed, brought reality with it.

“Dona Maggie, forgive me. I would never have awakened you . . . you slept but an hour or two, God help you. The man, he said I must give this to you right away. He said it has to do with Jenna.” She lowered her voice and made the sign of the cross, as she spoke the name of the newly dead.

Maggie nodded, uncomprehending. This made no more sense than any of the rest of it. How could any man know about Jenna . . . Her head pounded as she sat up. She couldn’t remember falling asleep. Only crying. Only screaming. She could remember that And the phone call.

Shakily, she got up and pushed her feet into the slippers next to the bed. There was a taste in her mouth like blood, and she felt sick everywhere.

Maggie tore the brown paper from the package. It revealed a videotape with no identification. She looked up at Maria, puzzled, then walked to the armoire facing her bed, and turned on the TV set, to see what it might be. She sat on the edge of her bed and motioned for Maria to sit on the little boudoir chair, to watch the cassette with her.

The videotape had the production value of a bad home movie; the picture was dark at first, the action barely discernible. Tiny points of light seem to bob and weave across the blank screen, and then the sound came up—an eerie chanting, that made Maggie peer closer.

Suddenly, the focus cleared sharply, as if someone had turned on a klieg light, and Maggie recognized the tear-streaked, terrified face of her daughter, hanging over the edge of an altar, her glorious flaxen hair, heavy with sweat like a palomino’s mane after a hard ride. Eric Vannier, in a bizarre outfit, was doing something . . . she couldn’t quite see . . .
Oh sweet Jesus!
He was slicing her body with a jeweled knife! Like a butcher dressing a side of beef, deftly slicing, plunging his hands into the open wounds of her dying child! Maggie watched the screen, completely immobilized by shock.

Was that Maria Aparecida’s voice among the chanters? No, no! This was some terrible mistake.
Hail Mary full of Grace . . .
she was saying the rosary!
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us. Now and at the hour of our death . . .

Maria Aparecida recited the prayers, assaulted into shock by what she’d seen. Blot out the butchery . . .
Now and at the hour . . .
Blot out the butchery . . .
The lord is with thee.
She stared, paralyzed, at the now darkened TV screen ahead of her, but she did not see it. She saw instead, a laughing baby girl named Jenna, on the way to her Baptism, pure precious, close to God. And the young mother who held her so proudly outside the church, in love and hope and blessed ignorance of what the years would plunder and destroy.

Maggie barely made it to the bathroom before she vomited. She sat on the white tile floor, clinging to the toilet, tears of unutterable anguish rolling down her face. There was nothing on this earth that would ever erase the memory of what she had seen.
Sweet Jesus, have mercy on her,
she said over and over and over in her head, so no other merciless thought could break through.
Sweet Jesus, have mercy on her.

Sweet Jesus have mercy on me.

Numb with grief, Maggie stumbled up the steps of the Sixth Precinct. She was barely coherent with the desk sergeant, but he finally managed to get Devlin. Sobbing uncontrollably, she blurted out the story of the videotape she clutched in her hands. Devlin called in Garibaldi, who handed it to another detective to set up the VCR that sat in the corner of the interrogation room. He disappeared with it down the hall, while Gino and Devlin tried to calm Maggie down enough to understand what had happened.

“You let us take a look at this tape, Maggie,” Garibaldi said, glancing significantly at Devlin. “You just wait for us in the Lieutenant’s office here, while we see if this can help us in any way. It’s bad enough you had to see it once.”

Devlin took the sobbing woman into his arms, her head resting dispiritedly on his chest; Maggie was disturbingly limp, as if all the life-force had been siphoned off. He sat her in a chair in his office, as gently as he could, and followed Garibaldi down the corridor to the interrogation room.

The two men sat down grimly, without speaking; they pushed the play button and waited. Only snow filled the screen. The two exchanged puzzled looks, and Garibaldi fast-forwarded, several times. The tape was completely blank.

“She’s not so overwrought she could have imagined it, Lieutenant?” Garibaldi asked with real concern.

“Not a chance. Nobody makes up a story like that one. You know her, Gino. She’s been run over by a train.” He sat silently, a moment, the image of Maggie’s sobbing figure, in his office, vivid in his own mind.

“Send the damned thing to the lab boys,” he said hoarsely, “and see if they can figure out what those sons of bitches did to erase the video. And tell them I’m not prepared to buy any stories about Black Magic.”

Gino nodded, and left with the offending tape. Devlin took a very deep breath and wondered what in this sorry world he could do to convince Maggie she was not going insane.

She was sitting in the chair beside the desk, when Devlin returned to his office. She was folded over, like a rag doll, her knees drawn up protectively to her chest, arms around them, head despondently resting on her knees. He had seen this instinctive survival posture before. Kicked in the solar plexus by Fate, people folded in on themselves, escaping to a secret landscape. Sometimes they never come back.

He longed to reach out and touch her, comfort her, but he knew this was a desperate, private sorrow on which he must not intrude. “Come with me, Maggie,” he said gently. “I’m getting you out of here.”

She followed him on autopilot, all the way to his car, then balked at getting in. “I need to walk,” she said, turning away, so he had to follow.

“Years ago,” she said faintly, without looking at him, “when Jack and I were first married, we lived in the South for a year, so he could go to graduate school at Washington and Lee. We had this cleaning lady, who came in once a week—black, poverty stricken—but a great beauty. She was tall and thin as a flute, I remember, but with high proud breasts, like a jungle princess . . .” her voice was hoarse and distant as a sleepwalker’s.

Devlin wondered where on earth Maggie was headed with this strange train of thought; what had it to do with Jenna’s death? Who could blame her for coming unhinged by what she’d witnessed? He took her arm, and she neither protested, nor responded, but continued in the strange rambling monotone.

“I was pregnant with Jenna,” she said with a sigh, answering his unspoken question, “and reveling in all the smug pride of early womanhood. I’d felt life move within me for the first time, and I was intoxicated with the splendor of my remarkable achievement.” She laughed shortly, at her own expense and Devlin saw how close to tears she was, and listened very carefully.

“The brokers use to pick up truckloads of poor blacks from the rural areas, and drop them off in the city to do day labor. They’d work dawn to dark for three dollars a day.” Maggie sighed again. “I really liked this woman, I admired her courage . . .” This memory obviously had genuine pain it and Devlin gripped her arm tighter, but she didn’t notice. Tears slid down her cheeks and she ignored them.

“She had five children and there wasn’t a moment of her life not filled with drudgery. Cook, clean, scrub, kowtow to her useless husband . . . he used to get drunk and beat her, unmercifully. Then she got pregnant again, so we’d talk about babies together, and we had a sort of tentative friendship going . . . Then one day, she missed coming to work, and of course she had no phone, so I didn’t find out till the following week, that she’d given birth to her baby, and it had died a day later. Three dollars a day doesn’t go a long way toward prenatal care when you’re feeding five already.

“Anyway . . . in my twenty-one-year-old ignorance I said to her, ‘I guess it’s really for the best, isn’t it, Emmy? Last thing you need is another mouth to feed.’” Maggie took a deep purgative breath, then looked at Devlin for the first time, tears streaming down her cheeks. “She didn’t say a single word to me, Dev . . .” Her voice broke with bitter sorrow of the memory.

“But I read it all in her eyes. Her anger at my incalculable stupidity in thinking it could ever be
better
to lose a child. Her resignation to the unfairness of life that had given me a good husband, money, and a healthy baby-to-be. And, a sort of lofty pity for me. As if to say, ‘I know you don’t mean to be dumb, you’re just a pampered fool and life hasn’t ravaged you yet. One day it will and then you’ll know what I know.’ We never really spoke again. She’d written me off, and I deserved it.” Maggie paused, wiped her eyes quickly, then plunged ahead.

“This morning Maria told my next-door neighbor about Jenna’s death, and the woman said to me, ‘Oh Maggie, I was sorry to hear about your daughter . . . but I guess in some ways it frees you.’” She took a deep, convulsive breath. “I felt those
same
emotions flood me, Dev, the ones I saw in Emmy’s face. It isn’t freedom! It’s the most monumental failure in the world. And it’s forever.” The confession had wrenched the plug from the bottleneck of sorrow, and Maggie began to sob, softly, convulsively, as if her heart would break.

A line from some Greek poet was suddenly in Devlin’s mind, so clearly he could not escape its words, and so he spoke them softly. “‘. . . In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God . . .’”

He pulled the suffering woman to a halt, turned and took her into his arms, unmindful of the stares of the passersby. “Oh, Maggie, Maggie, my Maggie,” he breathed into her hair as he held her, patting her like a child, rocking her like a lost child. “I love you so.”

After a while, she let him take her home. Listless, all life-force spent, she simply curled up on the couch in the parlor and fell asleep with her head on his lap.