Seraphim (10 page)

Eli said nothing, could barely breathe. He hated this ambiguous shit; Gamble’s vague, circuitous approach to everything. His sophomoric insults.

Gamble sighed. “If your devotion to this whole matter is in a state of collapse, then perhaps we should start making arrangements for your dismissal.”

“No, no, please,” Eli choked. “That won’t be necessary. My allegiance is as strong as ever.”

“I sincerely hope so, because if it isn’t then you will have not only dishonored yourself, but you will have pissed me mightily off. And I assure you, Father, that the latter will pain you far more than the former.”

Suppressing his urge to scream, Eli bit hard into his clenched fist, nearly drawing blood.

“Now, pay very close attention,” Gamble said. “After you’ve recaptured the second angel, there’s something I want you to do for me. I’ve left a package for you in the pulpit. Handling instructions have been included. If all goes well, then we won’t have to worry about this sort of thing happening again.”

“If only I knew what this…
resurrection
meant?” Eli said.

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin, Father?”

Why, the same number of them it takes to screw in a light bulb
, Eli thought to say, but dared not. He reflected for a moment, then took a deep breath. “As you know, I’m more a theologian than a philosopher, but your question, of course, is an aged and rhetorical one; a metaphor to demonstrate the unimaginable, the incalculable–”

“Oh, shut up, Father,” Gamble groaned. “The answer I was looking for is: none. Because angels have much better things to do with their time than frolic on sewing utensils. Or, as I’ve just demonstrated, to try and explain calculus to a tadpole. So, just concern yourself with finding Katherine Bently, and let me ponder the whys and how-comes.”

“Yes, of course.”

“One more little detail,” Gamble said. “It’s come to my attention that you assumed some rather harsh liberties with one of the couriers.”

“Li-liberties?” Eli said, having no idea to what Gamble was referring.

“You lashed out angrily, Father.”

“Oh, yes—
that
,” Eli stammered, now remembering how he’d struck the creature’s face. “I was angry, flustered, confused—”

“If you ever touch one of my beasties again—ever so much as raise your voice to them one octave higher than the genial norm—I will unleash upon your soul the wickedest of carnivores. Are we clear on this matter?”

“My sincerest apologies,” Eli said, his voice almost a whisper. “It will never happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t,” Gamble said. “And while we’re on the subject of beastie mistreatment, I’ll remind you that your mother wields her cane like a cattle prod. If she does not cease and desist, then I will advance her state of osteoporosis so far that you’ll have to
pour
her into bed.”

“I understand.”

Before allowing himself to cry, Eli waited until he could no longer hear Gamble’s heavy, rhythmic breathing, smell his foul breath. There was no opening and closing of the door, no footsteps receding down the aisle while he whistled a catchy tune.

Mr. Gamble exited in his customary manner: without a sound.

11.

Duncan found Rachel’s photograph. On the back, stenciled in gold brush script:

FRANKY AND JOHNNIE’S OLDE TYME PHOTOGRAPHY

321 Porpoise Avenue, Rock Bay, Massachusetts

Hand-written in red ink below that was a date, and what Duncan assumed was an invoice or purchase number. If the date was factual, then the picture was just over twelve years old.

It was a trick; had to be. And a very nasty one at that.

In the damp, fuzzy-gray fluorescence of the basement, now littered with schmaltzy memorabilia, Duncan was sure that the little girl staring back from the picture was Amy. His very own daughter. No doubt about it.

But what convinced him that
she couldn’t be
was the woman next to her, an apparition herself. A beautiful wraith spooking up the past from the dark, dusty corners of his heart. Legions of black tiny wings were rushing forward, flocking, converging in the twilight. Becoming memories.

A hot blush erupted on his cheeks.

The woman in the photo was dressed like a cowgirl, sporting an old six-shooter and a villainous expression. In reality, however, she had been someone entirely different; someone who preferred only
Karan, Lagerfeld, Oscar de la Renta
, never
Levi’s
or
Wrangler
. Someone who he’d secretly loved in the shadow of his own new marriage.

A lover for whom he had literally taken two bullets.

Her name was Patricia. Patty, when they’d been close.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” he whispered. “Patricia, what are you doing here?”

As he brought the picture closer to his face, a thin, silver line of light rolled across its matte surface. Radar sweeping his past.

“Wait a minute,” he said, slowing himself down. “Patricia had a daughter—” Dropping the picture, Duncan mashed his face into his hands. The name and address on the hospital admission form flashed across his mind. That star-like twinkling of recollection he’d had earlier at the hospital was now going nova.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” he barked, his right palm slapping his forehead. “Kathy! Patricia and
Katherine Bently!
”

He picked up the photo and stared again at the facsimile of his daughter. Grainy memories began sluicing through his mind; a drenching, hodgepodge, cut-and-paste reel of an evanescent life, one to which he’d been unwillingly regressed:
the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown, scoops of ice cream in waffle cones, Katherine wearing a Red Sox baseball cap, Patricia laughing in his ear, digging clams, Katherine throwing a Frisbee, a restaurant patio, lime wedges and bottles of Corona, laughter, soft kisses passionate kisses whispered promises shame love remorse the taste of salt Katherine running after him shouting, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!

Closing his eyes, a circus of memories continued unremittingly, tossed one after another like the pins of a vaudevillian juggler.

His memories of what Katherine Bently looked like could not be right. He tried to convince himself that the image of Amy was simply interfering with his recollection, was superimposing itself where Katherine’s own face should have been. Guilt, the culprit.

But if the picture and date were authentic...

Impossible.

Their affair had been brief, having lasted four months or so. Patricia had then just lost her husband, and Katherine a step-father, to a criminal and his gun. Although they’d lived in Rock Bay, Patricia’s husband worked out of downtown Boston. His body had been discovered in a parking lot two blocks from his office, dead from a single gunshot to the head. Since it was an obvious homicide, Duncan and his partner had been assigned the case. And it was during the investigation when he’d come to know Patricia, and her daughter Katherine. Like a knight in shining armor, he’d come to their rescue; had trotted haughtily up on his steed and swept them out of their mourning. It was the stuff of gallant comic strips—up to, and including, the moment he traded in his Prince Valiant costume for that of Robin Hood.

When he’d risked everything for them. Even his life.

After
The Wounds,
he never saw them again.

Until now.

God, he now remembered how much he had loved that little girl, perhaps even more so than her own mother. So, what had happened to his memories of them? Oh, they were there, but most had become like virga, wispy and vague, evaporating long before they ever reached full recollection.

Once upon a time, the constant reminders like his scars, and the “ghost pains” (at least according to his doctor) that radiated from those areas, the relevant newspaper clippings and Police Medal of Valor hanging on the wall of his study—all had invoked a daily retinue of sights and sounds and smells from that epoch. But for a long while now, he just realized, maybe even years, those catalysts had been triggering nothing but the same redundant images, tame as they were fleeting.

Selective memory? he asked himself. Survivor’s Guilt? Possibly. Were these kinds of episodes of reality going astray inevitable for victims of trauma? Again, possibly. He’d been told by some of the best shrinks in the business that he could expect some kind of stress-induced psychosis (most likely transitory, at least initially). Given that, then this very experience could be such a manifestation.

But not today, he thought. No, he firmly believed that he was still in every way, shape and form in full possession of his faculties. The only rational explanation here, he finally decided, was that he was sane and that it was the rest of the world suddenly having a psychotic break.

This dispossession of memory had occurred so surreptitiously and over such a long stretch of time that it hadn’t even dawned on him until just now that he’d been forgetting anything at all. But now it was all coming back—and so vividly that he could feel the sun setting behind him, could taste the mustard from Katherine’s kraut dog, could smell the shampoo in Patricia’s hair, could hear their laughter, see his purple windbreaker rippling in the wind.

I am not losing my mind
.

These didn’t feel like memories of old. They were still damp with saltwater.

Christ!

Overwhelmed, he opened his eyes. Both faces stared back at him, their expressions having changed, questions now loitering in their eyes; questions that asked why he’d left so soon, why so suddenly, and why when they needed him the most?

Why did Rachel want to see this photograph
now
? he wondered. Better yet, who did she get it from? Franky and Johnnie’s studio, or Patricia herself? Had she kept it as a souvenir after learning of his affair, to finally bring it out after all this time to blackmail him? He doubted it. Rachel, like any proud woman, he was sure, would have yanked off his cock and cleaned him out in court years ago.

Besides, there was still the little girl, Katherine, who didn’t just resemble Amy, but could be her identical twin—assuming that the photograph was genuine, of course. That was the peculiar part, the one that segregated the entire matter from mere chance, coincidence, and placed it into an entirely different category. Something like fate or destiny—abstractions that his analytic side wasn’t comfortable with—was at work here. Perhaps something even more arcane.

But…that was just pure nonsense.

He shook his head, disgusted with himself. “There’s a logical explanation,” he groaned, dragging a hand over his soaked red hair. “Has to be.”

The world to which Rachel had earlier alluded as being very small, given the countless occurrences of so-called coincidence, was beginning to feel to Duncan like a very cramped closet; a closet now shared with the ghost of a daughter who couldn’t be, and the ghost of a woman who should never have been at all.

12.

Sitting in the front pew of St. Patrick’s Church, hands folded and resting comfortably in his lap, Eli stared up at the pulpit with private trepidation. He was afraid of what Gamble had left behind.
What could it be?

There was just no telling.

Up until now, the only things Gamble had ever left him were six bags of feathers. “Plucked from man’s own personas of grace, as diminutive as they are fragile,” he’d once told Eli. More cryptic bullshit. At least that’s as far as it got with him back then, back when his innocence was blinding. But he believed he’d since deciphered its meaning, that Gamble had literally scalped the feathers from the wings of angels. Those created by the collective mind, of course: Gamble’s very own mother. And Gamble often crowed about how he’d killed them all, those angels.

Eli grinned. It was fratricide, if one got right down to it.

The interior of the church echoed with the deafening stillness of a mausoleum. Even the sounds of his own breathing drifted upward and were quickly lost, perhaps to seek out and inflate the inert lungs of the angels cast upon the domed ceiling; to give them a dimensional quality that the painter’s brush could have never achieved.

He recalled with fondness his adolescent years when he had fallen in love with angels. Though no longer that naive little boy, the captivation was still there, but a more grounded one, the years having washed over that puerile enchantment, smoothing out its rough edges and boyish imaginings the way a river does a stone.

On their first meeting, Gamble had enlightened Eli, had confided in him—albeit equivocally—things that were contrary to popular Christian beliefs, things antithetic to Holy Scripture. In fact, Gamble had advised him to find a flatulent hippopotamus, take the “Good Book” firmly in hand, and shove it up the hippo’s ass, as that was all it was
good
for.

More truth could be found at a liars’ convention, Gamble had said.

Eli, however, had become no more disillusioned than he already was. He’d long suspected as much.

But now Gamble had insinuated—contrary to Eli’s long-standing belief—that there might be a God after all. The real God of infamy. And that
He
might even be responsible for Katherine Bently’s return.

Shaking his head, chuckling to himself, Eli supposed he shouldn’t be so surprised. Gamble, after all, was just being Gamble—the enigmatic asshole.

He found himself once again coveting the winged and haloed figures above, each one a representation of the nine orders of God’s angels. In descending order: the mighty six-winged Seraphim, nearest to God; then the Cherubim, Dominions, Thrones, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels, and Angels. This was the choir ranking according to St. Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, and the first great Latin doctor of the Church. A few centuries later, pseudo-Dionysius had switched the orders around some and divided them into three groups, expounding upon individual duties.

Eli, however, had decided to go with St. Ambrose’s arrangement, given the man’s heritage.