Seraphim (15 page)

Its optical tentacles telescoped out and fixed upon the photographer. It was nearly upon him now.

“Get out of its way!” Duncan squealed, his voice pinched with fear.

Mitch began stomping the ground again. “We had a deal, Gamble!” he screamed at the sky. Then he turned in Duncan’s direction: “I think he’s coming for your daughter, McNeil! I think it’s Gamble who knows where Amy’s flown—”

The gastropod seized Mitch by the head, and quickly imbibed him. Duncan watched the man’s progression through the slug’s diaphanous body, from esophagus to stomach. During the violent ingestion, Mitch’s pajama top had been pulled from him and was now floating in the creature’s jellied throat.

To foil a tactless urge to laugh, Duncan slapped a hand to his mouth.

There once was a Detective named McNeil
…

Everything in the picture, even the slug, remained black and white – except for the blood now rising like steam off the photographer’s entire body, effusing a wispy crimson aura.

But Mitch was not dead. Duncan could see the facial contortions, the torpid movements of his limbs, as if he were pushing out against a million rubber bands. Craggy holes were already blossoming outward in his pajama bottoms, exposing muscle and bone. Then the tissue on his chest began to flare. Within moments, his sternum began peeking through, then the connecting ribs...

The photographer’s screams were strangled, but ever-present.

A gust of wind stirred a distant copse of pine, the sound traveling across the lake like a fizzling pop bottle rocket.

In a cumulus of blood, Mitch’s right leg slid away from the hip, buoying grotesquely in the loose gel.

He was being digested.

…A suitcase full of money he did steal…

Duncan bolted for the front door, his right hand still covering his mouth. He was no longer stifling a laugh, but was now fighting back the urge to vomit.

…Amid the moral strife, He saved a child’s life…

…And gained a dead one in the deal.

Duncan stumbled off the porch and onto the photographer’s dirt lawn. Nausea had already paled and slackened his face, and was now working on his stature.

The rain had stopped, and a breeze cooled his sweaty cheeks and forehead.

Doubled-over, Duncan dropped to his knees.

“A salt shaker,” he mumbled, laughing amid tears. “If only I could’ve gotten a salt shaker.”

Then he leaned forward and reintroduced to Los Angeles some of its finest mandarin cuisine.

“May the universe in some strange way be ‘brought into being’ by the participation of those who participate?”

–John Wheeler, physicist

Part Two

Windows

1.

A fetid stink crowded the basement; had blossomed overnight, it seemed.

Beneath each of the six stained glass windows rested a large plastic dog dish. And from these the stench of rotting meat had once again risen to levels that would, according to his crass mother, “knock a vulture off a shit wagon!”

Eli would have to get her down here to clean up. She would once again rant and rave about his compulsion to feed the “monkey-bats,” reminding him that they obviously didn’t like Mighty Dog or chicken livers or Nine Lives, and why couldn’t he just get that through his depraved skull, blah, blah, blah.

He teasingly tapped the glass murals as he walked by them, inciting their blurry occupants into wild Pavlovian responses.

Except for those of the developing room, and a lengthwise section in the middle for his Wall of Faces, all the basement walls remained unfinished. Two bare, hundred-watt bulbs hung from either end of the ceiling, casting dark, distorted twins of every stud left exposed by the absence of sheet rock, lending each undeveloped chamber the look and feel of a cold, drab penal cell.

Moodier still were the shadows ogling from those confines; the ghosts of inmates past, recidivists even after death, and still the rubbernecking bunch they were before the warden pulled their numbers.

Head bowed, eyes closed, Eli knelt before the sixth window in the procession. His lips moved silently, hurriedly, appealing to the window’s inhabitant to once again seek out the last angel, to fetch and bring her back to this very sanctum.

This same errand had been attempted yesterday, but was foiled when the courier inadvertently stumbled upon the Bently girl in Los Angeles, alive and no worse for wear according to rumor. He would dispatch another courier for her today, as well, and shuddered to think of the consequences should the runty, trouble-making bitch slip by him
this
time.

Katherine Bently aside, Eli never knew who he was getting until she arrived, and only that the girl would be ten years old and fatherless. And in this day and age, that left a lot to choose from. But whether the child was picked at random or was pre-selected, he did not know. His hunch, though, had always been that each one was singled out for possessing special qualities; qualities Mr. Gamble himself must have looked highly upon, as it was he who made the shopping list.

Besides, he imagined that the couriers did a fine job leaving the FBI and local authorities with nothing but the Jersey Devil to investigate. And any witnesses—no matter how compromised the authorities might come to consider them—were dealt with personally by Gamble.

Some of his fondest moments, Gamble had once told Eli, were the times when he questioned the witnesses himself. “I tell ya,” he’d bragged, “I can shake down a snitch like you wouldn’t believe.”

Eli could only imagine Gamble’s methods of interrogation.

Then again, maybe he couldn’t. And that was probably for the best.

Although Eli had been kept in the dark all these years about what Gamble was truly up to, he couldn’t help but wonder on occasion what his good mentor hoped to harvest from seven dead girls. But the restless nights when he pondered such mysteries had grown rarer with time, and he was more content now than ever to remain in the closet. For the most part, he was satisfied to be left alone to build and cherish his window collection, and perfect the incomparable craft of angel-making.

Most important of all, though, was the gratuity he’d earned for his unflagging devotion to Mr. Gamble and his cryptic cause. That being, he’d been given full artistic control over his imminent rebirth. He could be whoever or whatever he wanted when the time came—given the thumbs-up, of course, from his mentor.

That’s what Eli was hoping
his
side of the crop would yield.

He desperately wanted his own wings, had ever since he could remember, and thus had set out creating the Wall of Faces. He figured even the most reserved connoisseurs of contemporary art would admit to seeing the obvious corollaries between a black-and-white montage of dead, winged little girls and a mad priest’s obsession to fly.

If they could see starving Ethiopian children in a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, he thought, then they could see anything. And if the critics
were
to ever come back nay-saying, then he’d just kindly direct them to the dome of St. Patrick’s Church.

Let Andy Warhol top that!

Satisfied that his wishes had been made clear, he opened his eyes and slowly rose before the window. He then touched the glass with one finger, dispatching the entity from its multicolored, puzzle-pieced medium and into a similar world where edges come together almost as dramatically; where borders and margins are sharply pronounced, separating color and demography. Into a world where scenery is now more often segregated by manmade lines and boundaries than allowed to naturally blend.

Man’s need for structure was evident in everything he touched, Eli knew. Especially his faith.

Unleashed, the apparition swiftly grew distant behind the glass, fluttering like a leaf down a well.

Eli then walked the length of the basement wall and hesitated before the second window in the series; the second one he’d obtained. “The Dawning,” he’d named it long ago; appropriately so, for the bottom of the window portrayed a black sun rising beyond a horizon blazing with orange-red flames. Farther up in the mural, near its center, those tongues of fire eerily metamorphosed into vaulting demonic figures, the higher and more complete ones bending and arching downward like divers off of springboards, cannon-balling and belly-flopping back down into the flames that had given birth to them.

But the image he adored most was near the top, the likeness of a little girl-angel falling headfirst from a golden sky, her feather wings tearing apart in her swift descent, her white gown rippling like a mast in a squall. Her face was terror-stricken; mouth agape, eyes wide. And there were many hands reaching down from the sky, trying to catch her, to snatch her up before being consumed by the fires below.

Until yesterday afternoon, it had never occurred to him that they might prove successful.

Perhaps those hands have managed some kind of desperate clutch after all
, he thought.

“Kathy, Kathy, Kathy,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Someone has clipped your wings. But who?”

He stared at “The Dawning,” then into it, focusing on its inhabitant, whose wings fluttered then, as if in eager anticipation of his impending instructions.

“And you, my old and ornery friend,” he commanded, “will once again bring back to me the little bitch called Katherine!”

He touched the glass: “To the City of Angels!”

2.

Duncan sat at his desk, staring at a Chagall lithograph on the opposite wall. He’d not slept a wink since having returned from the photographer’s place, but already it had begun to feel like a dream; that point where reality elbows its way in as the eyes flutter open, and a sigh raises the drawbridge, leaving any monsters in fast pursuit to the discretion of the mote’s black, bottomless waters.

Duncan’s eyes were open, but he hadn’t yet exhaled; was still holding that breath, wanting to sift a little longer through the macabre flotsam.

Although the likelihood was good that someone had stopped payment on his reality check, it had by no means reached a foregone conclusion. In fact, he was feeling quite lucid, despite some cheap tequila that now had his brain shimmering like a patch of sun-baked asphalt.

Not too long ago, Rachel had finally come out and accused him of being an alcoholic. Insulted, he’d quickly countered that he was a drunk, not an alcoholic. Alcoholics, he explained, went to meetings.

In his right hand was a cordless phone, one he’d been caressing, fondling, petting for the last four hours or so. In a few minutes he would have to call the college and talk with Matt Doyle, Dean of Criminal Justice, and advise him that he would not be in today, as he was sick. Although
psychotic
might be the better clinical term, he had no desire to leave his good friend and boss with mental pictures of him naked and apish on his roof, throwing feces at passing cars. And Matt Doyle was just the sort of guy to drudge up those very images, being an ex-cop himself.

His idle cuddling of the phone was not manifest anticipation of that call, but rather for another he would very soon have to make.

The morning sun was just now snooping through the vertical blinds, revealing upon each burgundy slat Juanita’s streaked endeavors with a damp sponge.

Lazy as well as loco
, he thought.

“You look like something the cat dragged in,” Rachel observed from behind a mask of facial cream the color of jade. She was in a knee-length blue silk robe with big white orchids. Little balls of cotton were pinned between her painted toes.

Duncan thought she looked like a geisha with a sheep-kicking fetish.

“You didn’t come to bed,” she said. “Been down here all night?”

He nodded, a bit bewildered. Last he checked, “down here” was the Dog House. And after having confessed his love affair with Patricia Bently, he was damned surprised that he wasn’t staring down at a Motel Six continental breakfast.

“It’s a bit early for that, don’t you think?” she said, pointing to the shot glass and bottle of tequila on his desk.

“Early?” he said. “In dog years, it’s practically dinnertime.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, looking at him curiously. “How did it go with that Mike Dillard guy?”

“
Mitch
Dillard,” he said, more suspicious than surprised. “And what makes you think I saw him?”

She smiled. “I just know.”

Well, Super Sleuth she was not. After all, it had been his very intention to do just that. He was still a little jumpy, he supposed. No. A lot jumpy, and the last thing he needed to be right now was paranoid. But he was definitely not going to relive those events with Rachel; not now. He didn’t need his wife placating him with phony smiles and goo-goo talk while she phoned the state hospital.

“The guy was okay”, he said, staring again at Chagall’s stone-signed litho. “He had nothing to do with what happened to Amy.” He clucked, then added sourly, “Whatever
that
might have been.” Then, more chipper: “Got a joke for ya. Two nuns are bicycling through town, as they often do. One says, ‘Hey, I’ve never come this way before.’ And the other nun says, ‘Yeah, it’s the cobblestones.’”

“Uh-huh,” she grunted, obviously too afraid to laugh lest she fragment the moo goo gai pan on her face. “So, what was it like playing detective again?”

“The flood of sweet sentiment was more than I could bear.”

“Great,” she said. “So, what’s with the Chagall?”

“The what?” Duncan said, baffled.

She pointed: “The Chagall. You’ve been staring at it. Is it crooked or something?”

Duncan ignored her question. “I have to call her, Rachel.”

Rachel grew silent, then disappeared back into the bathroom.

What am I going to tell Patricia?
How
am I going to tell her?
Duncan had been asking himself those questions all morning and, so far, had not heard back with any sane suggestions.