Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel) (16 page)

Quinn wouldn’t appreciate my candor, but I didn’t care anymore.

Lopez looked at me like I’d confirmed his worst fears about my sanity. I didn’t care about that anymore, either.

The man I’d been obsessed with since last spring was dumping me, and I just wanted to curl up in a ball and hide until the pain passed. His opinion of my statement didn’t seem important right now, not compared to the ache in my chest and the roaring in my ears.

“Okay, I don’t think there’s much point in us talking about that,” Lopez said after a long moment. “So we’ll skip it. I’m just going to tell you—
very seriously
, Esther—that you need to—”

“Oh, need to do
what?
” I snapped. “Seek psychiatric help? Get drug testing? Give up my friends? Commit myself to a mental ward?
What?
”

“You need to stay away from Detective Quinn,” he said, keeping his voice level.

“You’re making it awfully tempting,” I muttered.

Fine, I’ll let the demon do whatever it wants to you. And to him. What do I care?

“I hope I’m making it awfully
clear,
” he said. “You can’t mess around with people like this, Esther. Something terrible could have happened here tonight. Something that can’t be fixed.”

I looked at him, my heart breaking, and said, “Something terrible
has
happened here tonight. Something that can’t be fixed.”

I
t was a relief when the door to Antonelli’s opened, carrying a gust of cold wind and breaking the mood.

A very tall, very skinny white man entered the funeral home. “What a night!” he said from the doorway. “The Almighty is really testing our mettle, isn’t he?”

He came down the corridor toward us carrying a large duffel bag. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his curly, dark hair was damp and very windblown. His smile was broad and cheerful, and his cheeks glowed rosily.

As the newcomer approached us, I wiped at my eyes where tears had just gathered. “Please go now,” I said to Lopez in a choked voice.

His face creased with concern, doubt, and regret. “Look, why don’t I call you and we can—”

“No,” I said tightly. “If you’re serious about—about this . . .”

“Esther . . .”

“Don’t make it worse,” I said faintly, trying to control my voice. “Please.”

“I never wanted . . .” He let out his breath and nodded. “Okay. You’re right. I’ll just go.”

He turned away from me, then paused briefly to examine the other man, hesitant about leaving me alone here with a stranger.

“Good evening,” the man said cheerfully. “Are you on your way out? Better bundle up!”

There was something so good-natured about the man that it put me at ease, despite the pain roiling through me as I watched Lopez walk away from me.

He agreed quietly, “Yes, it’s a grim night . . . Father.”

“Take care out there,” the man said, turning to one side to get his duffel out of the way as Lopez moved past him. “Watch out for the ice.”

When the man turned back in my direction, I saw then what Lopez had seen—the white clerical collar of a priest peeking out of the top of his coat.

“Hello.” I asked doubtfully, “Are you looking for the Ning wake?”

I glanced beyond him for a moment as the door closed behind Lopez, who didn’t look back at me when he left.

“No, indeed.” Smiling at me with boyish enthusiasm, the priest said, “I understand you’re in need of an exorcist?”

 • • • 

“I’m not really sure when it started,” Quinn said, sitting in the main reception hall of Antonelli’s.

Above us, on the wall that faced the street, were three attractive stained glass windows of modest size, glowing warmly in the mellow light cast by the streetlights outside. Quinn sat below them on an armchair upholstered in dark red fabric, while Lucky, the priest, and I sat in a semicircle facing him. Max was pacing nearby.

Quinn, continued, “I was really . . .
down
after she left.”

“Your wife?” Father Tiano asked sympathetically.

“Yeah.” Quinn nodded. “Around this time a year ago, I was drinking myself to sleep, showing up late at work, pissing off the guys on the squad . . . and screwing up on the job in a precinct where screwups were dangerous.”

Father Tiano was the priest that Lucky knew, the one he could get on “short notice.”
Really
short, as it turned out.

Rather than getting his coat and leaving Chen’s, as he’d told Lopez he intended to do, Quinn had looked for Max and Lucky in the mortuary office and told them I was wrong, he did
not
want to protect this thing or give a safe home to the entity that was destroying his life. He was a little freaked out and still not sure he believed in any of this . . . but everything Max had surmised about him was true. The old mage’s statements had described, too accurately to ignore, the nightmare his life had become. And he’d realized, while he was pinned to the wall of the corridor, feeling Nelli’s hot breath on his throat as she challenged the demon, that he couldn’t go on like this.

So if we could help him shake off this thing, then he wanted to get it done. Right away, in fact—before Lopez or anyone else started to think he was crazy, or worse.

And, gosh, no, we mustn’t let Lopez think bad things. Imagine where
that
might lead?

I was going to have a good long cry about Lopez, I promised myself, but not right now. Right now, I was in a mortuary with a corpse-reanimating demon and an exorcist, so it really seemed like I should focus on the task at hand.

And the good long cry I was going to indulge in, I vowed, would be the last time I shed tears over Lopez. I would not, I swore to myself, spend any more weeks or months moping over him. I had to move on.

“So I was in kind of a fog when it all started,” Quinn was saying. “It took a while for me even to notice that things kept breaking down and malfunctioning. When stuff disappeared or reappeared in my apartment, I thought I must have moved it while I was drunk and just didn’t remember. In the morning, when I remembered getting phone calls in the middle of the night with static or weird voices saying spooky shit, I figured I’d been dreaming or hallucinating.”

Father Tiano, who occasionally interjected a question or a sympathetic comment, was taking notes.

He was the new priest at St. Monica’s, a century-old parish church that was only a few blocks away, in what was left of Little Italy. He had replaced the (now safely deceased) mystically murderous priest there who had killed several people last year and tried to kill a few others—including me and Lucky.

He was also a great-nephew of Don Victor Gambello, which made me think it could be unhealthy for us if anything bad happened to him tonight.

And based on Max’s worried expression and uncharacteristic pacing, I had a feeling something bad happening was a real possibility.

Quinn’s Catholicism was apparently not as lapsed as everyone thought. Having decided to exorcise the demon, he was adamant about wanting a priest. Since Lucky knew an exorcist who could be here in fifteen minutes, Quinn didn’t have to insist very hard.

So Lucky and Max tied up Grace Chu’s remains securely. Just in case. Nelli remained near the body, so she could alert us if the trussed corpse got lively again—and so she wouldn’t stress Quinn, who was understandably afraid of her. Lucky also warned John that no one from Joe Ning’s wake, which was finally winding down, was to enter Antonelli’s, and he advised John to keep a sharp eye on Uncle Six’s closed casket.

“The demon attached to you while you were vulnerable,” Father Tiano said to Quinn now, his boyish face full of empathy. “It was drawn to your despair and preyed on your sadness.”

“I was also really angry.” Looking ashamed, Quinn admitted, “One night when I was really drunk, I called my ex and threatened her.”

“They prey on anger, too,” I murmured. “Negative emotions.”

“Correct.” Father Tiano beamed at me.

“You threatened some suspects, too, I’ll bet,” Lucky muttered.

“Why are
you
here?” Quinn asked him.

“Please continue,” said the priest.

As Quinn told his story, it was clear that although he had entered a dark phase after his second wife had left him, he was not an inherently self-destructive man. After a few months of wallowing, he realized that, having lost his marriage, he couldn’t go on this way without losing everything else in his life, too. He was also becoming so unnerved by the blackouts, nightmares, and hallucinations that he wanted them to stop. So he quit drinking and started applying himself to his life again.

“But the weird shit that was happening, the stuff I didn’t dare tell anyone about . . .” Quinn shook his head. “It continued. No, it escalated.”

He tried moving to a new apartment, but that didn’t change anything.

“The demon was attached to you, not your dwelling,” Father Tiano surmised.

He applied for a transfer, eager to leave behind the black cloud that seemed to hang over him at the precinct where his life had fallen apart.

“But now this thing is screwing with my new job, too,” he said, sounding exhausted.

And also with his new partner, who had no idea how much danger they were both in as the demon continued gaining strength and learning how to manipulate them.

Lopez . . .

My vision got misty. I wiped impatiently at my eyes and jumped to my feet. Quinn flinched and gave me a peculiar look, then went back to answering Father Tiano’s questions.

I went out into the corridor and did some breathing exercises to compose myself. When I looked into the room again, I was troubled by the way Max was anxiously pacing around rather than, as I would have expected, sitting and listening intently to Quinn.

“Max, can you give me a hand out here for a minute?” I called.

“Hmm? Oh, of course, my dear.” Still looking distracted and anxious, he joined me in the hall.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered. “Something’s obviously bothering you.”

He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then decided to tell me. “It’s this exorcist.”

“You think he’s too inexperienced?”

“Not necessarily,” said Max. “He’s fairly new to this, but he studied in Rome, and the Church’s exorcism training is thorough.”

“Then what’s your concern?”

“I am uncertain that this demon will respond to Catholic rites. Therefore, by attempting to expose and expel it, Father Tiano may be putting himself in terrible danger.” Max added fretfully, “Or, rather,
we
may be putting him in terrible danger.”

“If the entity won’t listen to . . . um, go along with a Catholic rite, then what kind of exorcism do we need?” I asked. “Wait, you said you thought it was speaking Aramaic. Does that mean it’s an ancient Jewish demon? Do we need a rabbi?”

“I suspect it may mean that the last time this demon had occasion to speak to anyone was some three thousand years ago.”

“Hmm, well, I don’t think a rabbi will be of much use, after all,” I said. “Judaism has changed a
lot
since then.”

We don’t still do animal sacrifices, for example.

“Oh, Aramaic was spoken among a number of peoples in that region, Esther, over a period of centuries. It was also spoken by the earliest Christians . . . but the phrase the entity used while in Grace Chu’s body sounded more ancient than that,” said Max. “A demon this skilled at manipulating two intelligent, experienced men capable of withstanding high levels of stress would typically be agile enough to learn the language of the beings it possesses and speaks through.”

“Ah. You suspect the last time this entity communicated verbally with anyone was—”

“—was well before the Catholic Church even existed, let alone started developing effective rites to battle the demons it encountered.”

“So Father Tiano’s rite tonight will be like throwing water on a fire: effective if it’s a wood fire, but incredibly dangerous if it’s an oil fire.”

“An excellent analogy,” said Max.

“Dr. Zadok?” called Father Tiano. “I believe we’re ready to begin.”

I squared my shoulders. “I guess we’re about to find out which kind of fire this is.”

Father Tiano was unpacking his duffel bag when I sat back down, facing Quinn. He had brought half a dozen medium-sized crucifixes that he handed out.

I hesitated when he offered one of them to me. “I’m in a different union, Father.”

“Take it,” Lucky urged. “It can’t hurt, right?”

I shrugged and accepted it. Going along with that same theory, I also let the priest hang a smaller crucifix around my neck. He had brought a very large cross, too, which he set up on a stand in the middle of our group, directly in front of Quinn. Father Tiano asked Quinn if the crucifixes were making him uncomfortable; Quinn shook his head. The priest proceeded to unpack several small bottles of holy water in different little glass vials, a large book bound in old red leather, and a very pretty censer—a large, decorative metal incense burner that hung from a heavy chain.

“I may have overdone it with the supplies,” he admitted sheepishly. “This is my first exorcism since I returned from Rome last year. I’m so excited!”

“Knock yourself out,” I said, thinking I’d like to turn the censer into a hanging lamp for my apartment.

What followed thereafter was so boring that, far from being on the edge of my seat in fear of demonic attack, I wound up having trouble staying awake.

First, Father Tiano explained that tonight’s rite would be merely an exploratory process. He could not proceed with a full-blown exorcism, he said, not even for a friend of his Uncle Victor, without first getting his bishop’s permission.

“I’m not a friend of your scumbag uncle,” Quinn said darkly.

“That’s Mr. Gambello to you,” Lucky snapped.

Seeing that Quinn was about to snap back, I reminded him who had found an exorcist for him on such short notice.

Soldiering on, Father Tiano explained that in order to seek his bishop’s permission, he would need to be convinced that Detective Quinn was actually possessed by a demon.

“Not possessed,” said Max. “Oppressed. I don’t believe this demon intends to possess Detective Quinn. It is using him to find a suitable host, which would be a cadav—”

“Oppressed, then,” Father Tiano said with a nod to Max. “It is not that I doubt Andrew’s account of his experiences, but we must determine whether these experiences are demonic in origin.”

Recalling Grace Chu’s glowing eyes as her corpse reached out for me, I said, “I’m pretty convinced.”

Then Father Tiano started praying. He invited us to join him. Quinn tried to, but it turned out that he was pretty lapsed, after all, and didn’t know his prayers. Lucky knew his, and he hung in there for a while, but he dropped out as the praying went on and on. And
on.

I didn’t know any of the prayers, despite having played nuns on two different occasions, so I just sat quietly and held my crucifix. Max observed Quinn and the priest with concentrated attention.

An hour later, Father Tiano was
still
praying, and I was starting to wonder if I could leave the exorcism early without being rude.

Then we heard footsteps in the corridor, approaching this spot.

Quinn, who looked like he’d been dozing off, sat bolt upright and whispered, “That’s it.
That’s
what I hear when I’m alone in my apartment. And there’s never anyone there. That thing is
here
now.”

The words gave me a chill. I clutched my crucifix tightly as I looked over my shoulder, riveted by the soft, menacing sound of those approaching footsteps.