Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel) (17 page)

And then John appeared in the doorway, looking handsome in his somber formal suit. “Uncle Six’s wake is over, we’ve closed for the night, and . . . Sorry, am I interrupting?”

Father Tiano, who was holding his large, red leather-bound book open in his arms, reading from it while he prayed, looked up from the passage he was reciting.

I was about to ask if we could stop for the night when that heavy tome suddenly shot straight up in the air, about six feet above Father Tiano’s head, and snapped itself shut with a resounding
thud!
Then it swooped back down and whacked the priest in the head so hard that he went tumbling across the room.

I leaped out of my chair. Having no idea what else to do, I held up my crucifix, hoping against all the teachings of my own religion that it would actually protect me.

Lucky reached for his ankle holster—and cursed in frustration when he found nothing there. Father Tiano had insisted that a firearm could not be brought to the rite, so Lucky’s gun was sitting in a drawer in Nathan’s office.

The heavy red book flew at Lucky and thudded heavily into his solar plexus. He doubled over, gasping for air as he clutched his torso.

“Uncle Lucky!” John dashed into the room, heading toward the old mobster.

“John, look out!” Max cried.

The big cross the priest had set up in the center of our little circle jumped out of its holder and flew like a missile, heading straight for John. An experienced martial artist, he dived to one side to avoid it, landed on his feet, and dived again when it took another shot at him.

From the depths of the building, I could hear Nelli barking furiously, no doubt sensing the dark energy that had been unleashed in here. But out of consideration for Quinn, we had left her behind a securely closed door, and that prevented her from coming to our aid now.

“Holy shit!” Quinn also instinctively reached for his gun; but, like Lucky, he had been instructed to leave it in the office. “Goddamn it!”

I held up my crucifix as a talisman as I shouted, “Stop!
Stop
this!” at the unseen force that was attacking us.

John dashed behind a standing lamp to avoid the big cross’s next attempt to skewer him, then he tore off the lampshade, picked up the lamp, and starting using it like a (very unwieldy) staff to fight back.

The leather-bound book clobbered Lucky over the head then knocked him sideways. As he staggered past me, the cross in my hand turned into a hissing snake. I screamed and dropped the thing, leaping away—and when I looked at it lying on the floor, it was just a wooden cross again.

I turned around and tripped over Father Tiano, who was on his knees and praying with all his might.

Max was shouting in another language as he swept up the small vials of holy water into his hands and starting flinging them at the wall, one at a time. The glass bottles smashed when they hit the wall, spraying broken glass, and the water splashed and then dribbled downward.

Directly above this mess, one of the lovely stained glass windows suddenly shattered. A fierce, cold wind blew into the room with a force much greater than made any natural sense, even on a blustery night like this one.

My hair was whipping all around my head, interfering with my vision. The red-bound volume was still beating the stuffing out of Lucky, so I picked up the censer and swung it by its chain like a medieval mace. What with the wind, my hair in my eyes, my terror, and my inexperience with medieval maces, I missed the first few times I took aim—and I accidentally grazed Lucky’s knee once, which he didn’t like. But then I connected with the red-bound book and managed to hit it hard enough to stop its next attack on him in midflight.

When the book fell to the ground, though, it turned into a horde of rats that started skittering over our feet.

I shrieked and jumped around, trying to keep my feet away from them. So did the tough old gangster. (
Everyone
hates rats. Which was no doubt why that was the prank the demon chose.)

Father Tiano leaped off the floor when he saw the rats, jumped up on a chair, and kept on praying as he stood there.

“Give me that thing!” Quinn yanked the censer out of my grip and started using it to kill rats, swinging it with violent abandon and bringing it down hard with a heavy
crash!,
again and again.

But each rat he hit turned into a bat, and the little winged creatures flew at me, Lucky, and the priest, tormenting us while leaving Quinn alone as he kept trying to kill more of the things that were scurrying around the floor.

“Stop, Quinn!
Stop!
” Being dive-bombed by bats was definitely the worse of the two available choices.

I saw John stagger back and cry out when the big cross hit him hard on the hand, then he regrouped and kept on fighting it. While I dodged rats and bats, Max flung the last vial of holy water against the wall, still shouting in another language, his white hair blowing around his head in the fierce wind that whipped through the reception hall.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “What should
we
do?”

The dripping water that was all over that wall suddenly started curling around in circles and swoops, rather than just rolling down the wall. It steamed, bubbled, and hissed, moving rapidly over the surface, forming itself into specific shapes with obvious intent.

When it was done, a few distinct shapes were painted on the wall in flowing lines made by steaming, hissing water.

Then without warning or fanfare, the bats and rats disappeared, as if they had never existed. The red-bound book appeared hovering in the air over Quinn’s head for a moment, then it fell to the floor. The large crucifix that was attacking John also fell to the floor and just lay there. At the same moment, the wind stopped blowing and howling through the room, though the window remained shattered.

Our crucifixes lay scattered on the floor, but now they were charred pieces of wood, damaged by unseen fire. I touched the crucifix that Father Tiano had put around my neck . . . and it seemed to have melted like wax. It was just an indistinct little lump of metal now.

Breathing hard, Quinn tossed aside the censer and looked around the room, his expression shocked.

Max stood staring at the letters on the wall while the priest, standing on a chair, continued praying frantically. John tossed aside the lamp, tucked his injured hand against his chest, and went to help Lucky. I joined Max and stared up at the steaming letters on the wall under the broken window.

They just looked like abstract doodles to me. I said, “Let me guess. Aramaic?”

“A very old form.” Max’s voice was a little hoarse.

“Does it mean anything to you?”

The letters were already evaporating and fading away, disappearing as if they had never been there.

Max turned his troubled blue gaze on me. “I asked the entity what it wants. Why it’s doing this.”

“And?”

“If I have interpreted those symbols correctly, it has given us its answer,” he said. “‘To live again.’”

F
ather Tiano left rather precipitately, not even pausing to take his gear with him. I had the impression he had just decided that exorcism wasn’t his vocational path, after all.

Although Lucky must have been tired, he decided to go straight to Victor Gambello’s house and tell him what had just happened, since it had involved the Shy Don’s great-nephew. It was late by now, but I knew from previous incidents that Don Victor was a night owl and the two men often conferred at unconventional hours.

Quinn, the only person in the room whom the entity had not directly attacked (probably because it still needed him), decided he should leave the funeral home before anything
else
happened tonight. We all enthusiastically supported this plan.

Max wanted Quinn to return to the bookstore with him, so he could keep him (and the demon) under observation. But Quinn had had enough revelations for one night about the true nature of his problem. He said he just wanted to go home and pretend, if only for a few hours, that he was merely crazy, rather than suffering from demonic oppression.

“But I’ll be in touch soon, Max,” said the detective. “Believe me, I want this thing
gone.
”

John quietly closed up Antonelli’s and said he’d explain the ruined stained glass window to his father in the morning. “I think that Dad’s had enough stress for tonight,” he said, “and I’m sure that
I
have. It can wait until tomorrow.”

He insisted on driving us home. It was a suggestion we welcomed, since it solved the problem of transporting Nelli and I was way too tired to take the subway.

“This was a challenging day,” Max said on the ride home, as John drove the hearse through dark, slippery streets. “But we have learned a great deal.”

“Such as, the entity attached to Quinn is very powerful and unbelievably scary?” I said.

“We have learned what it wants,” said Max.

“To live again?”

“Yes. And we know the peculiar medium through which it is attempting to do so.”

“Dead bodies.” I frowned. “I still don’t understand. Why does it want a cadaver? Why doesn’t it just possess Quinn?”

“I postulate that although it can oppress and manipulate the living, it can only invade and possess the dead.”

John said, “That seems pretty inconvenient for a being that wants to live again, in the biological sense.”

“Indeed.”

“Why only the dead?” I wondered.

“Because it’s a house without an owner?” John guessed.

“Well put, John.” Max said, “This entity is apparently unable to move into an ‘inhabited dwelling,’ so to speak.”

“I agree it’s an inconvenient limitation, but even so,” I said, “three thousand years, give or take, seems like a long time between houses.”

“Not to a formless mystical entity for whom time is a meaningless construct—at least when it is not functioning in human form,” said Max. “We also don’t know whether it has been steadily attaching to the living for eons in search of its next host, or whether it has been drifting through dimensions and absent from this one for centuries at a time.”

“What was it doing before it attached to Quinn, do you think?”

“It may have been attached to someone else, someone who was not servings its goals—a person who did not come into contact with fresh corpses,” said Max. “Or it may have been long dormant and inert. In any event, when it encountered Andrew Quinn at some scene of death or despair, it felt an attraction, found his vulnerabilities, and attached to him.”

“You make it sound like a relationship,” John said with interest.

“It is, in a sense,” said Max. “But a very negative, destructive one in which Quinn’s participation is not voluntary and was, until today, unwitting.”

“Hmm.” I pulled my coat more tightly around myself as I thought about everything I had seen this evening. I tried to imagine Quinn’s feelings as he realized all that disturbing
stuff came from something which was attached to
him.
“You know, Nathan’s description of Mr. Capuzzo was eerie, but it didn’t sound menacing. Yet Grace Chu was definitely menacing, don’t you think?”

“She also got a lot farther from her resting place than Capuzzo did,” John added.

“Yes, the entity is rapidly getting stronger,” Max noted.

“And it certainly got plenty of sustenance tonight,” I said sourly. So many negative emotions had been generated in the past few hours, the demon could probably animate all the residents of a large cemetery at this point.

“We must prepare promptly for our next encounter with it,” Max said. “Now that it knows we have identified its nature and mean to exorcise it, it will be very intent on finding a host. And it seems clever enough to manipulate Quinn into situations that are propitious for its own intentions—and probably very dangerous for him.”

“You mean it might try to get Quinn killed?” I asked in alarm. No, I hadn’t really warmed up to the guy—but
still.

The old mage nodded. “It is an opportunistic entity, and it seems to be learning quickly.”

“So
how
do we prepare for our next encounter with this thing?” I asked with growing dread.

“I vote against summoning another priest,” John said as he steered the hearse around a tight corner. “I’m not being anti-clerical. Just practical.”

“The message we saw on the wall tonight was very useful,” Max said. “Writing changes over the centuries, and its evolution is easier to trace than that of oral language. By analyzing the entity’s script, I may be able to narrow down the era when it last ‘lived’ to within a century or two. That, in turn, will give me a region and a timeframe in which to search for references to it—and, I hope, an indication of how to combat it.”

“Good. We need that information.” Like Quinn, I wanted this thing
gone.

John dropped Max and Nelli off at the bookstore. Max intended to go straight to bed, get a good night’s rest, then start researching Quinn’s problem in the morning.

Then we drove up to my apartment in the West Thirties. But unlike Max, I expected to toss and turn most of the night, fret in fear of the demonic entity, and weep over the loss of my stormy almost-relationship. Not looking forward to any of that, I felt like lingering in the car to chat.

So John pulled the hearse over and parked. The spot wasn’t exactly legal; we were blocking the entrance to a construction site at the end of my street. But I hadn’t seen anyone working there since before the holidays, never mind late at night, so I figured we were okay.

“What do you think of all this?” I asked him.

He had seemed to be a skeptic when we met, and he was never quite on board with the theory of the cursed fortune cookies. But he certainly wasn’t trying to explain away the weird incidents in his family’s funeral home tonight.

“Well, speaking as a scientist,” he said, “it’s all pretty freaking weird and really creeping me out.”

I smiled. “Good summary.” After a moment, I asked, “Does it change how you view the world? What you think the nature of reality is?”

“Well, sure,” said John. “But that’s something that changes all the time, anyhow.”

“It is?”

He nodded. “That’s why I like science—if you survive your undergraduate education, then after that, it’s mostly about asking questions you don’t already know the answers to.”

I thought that was something Lopez liked about police work, too. That, and helping people.

Stop thinking about him.

“What we’ve seen lately doesn’t seem very scientific,” I pointed out.

“Maybe that’s just because we don’t even know the questions yet,” he said. “I mean, sure, Max talks in mystical terms, but what if that’s just another point of view? For centuries, astronomy and astrology were basically the same thing, for example, with people observing the heavens and recording what they saw. Whether what they observed up there was magical or ‘mundane,’ they were all looking at the same things. And whether what they saw foretold fate, explained human nature, or threatened the foundations of the Catholic Church with scientific principles . . . that all depended on how they
interpreted
what they saw.”

“How do
you
interpret that big crucifix repeatedly trying to run you through tonight?”

“I interpret it as cause to celebrate that I’m still alive.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t amused now. “Agreed.”

“Look, Max interprets these events in terms of a demon, an evil entity. But when I recover from my terror, which may happen in a week or two,” he said wryly, “then I’ll start asking myself, what if it’s something else? And I’ll try to figure out what else it could be. The world is an amazing place full of mysterious things we still can’t explain scientifically—like what happened tonight. It’s also full of things we couldn’t explain a thousand years ago, or even ten years ago, that we
can
explain now—because we kept looking for the right questions.”

“I like that perspective,” I said. “It’s got balance.”

“Well that’s life, isn’t it? Going from day to day, trying to find a working balance between faith and intellect, instinct and reason, hope and experience.” After a moment, he looked at me and said in a different voice, “The spiritual and . . . the physical.”

I sensed a shift in the atmosphere between us. Less relaxed now. After a moment, he said softly, “Maybe you’ll tell me it’s none of my business, but I feel like I really need to ask, Esther.”

I thought I already knew the question. “What?”

“Is it over between you and him?”

“I’ve got to stop, Esther,”
he’d said.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?” John shifted a little. “I just mean . . . he doesn’t look at you like it’s over.”

“I have to be stronger than this.”

“It’s over,” I said.

“Okay.” John nodded, accepting my word. “Then I . . . Okay.”

Avoiding his eyes, my gaze landed on his hands, which were still resting on the steering wheel. The right one had two angry cuts across the knuckles, and there was some fresh bruising and swelling.

“Whoa! That thing really hurt you, John.” I took his hand and pulled it closer to me, trying to see the damage in the dim light from the streetlamps.

He flexed his fingers, then drew in a sharp breath through his nostrils. “Yeah, I guess it stings a little.”

“You should put something on this.”

“Oh, it’ll be okay,” he said dismissively.

“What
is
it with guys? You’d better come upstairs with me,” I said, getting out of the car. “Germs breed like rabbits in this city, even in winter. I’ve got lots of first aid supplies, and I don’t want your father blaming me for your hand turning gangrenous and falling off.”

“He wouldn’t blame you,” John said as he got out of the car. “He’d blame Uncle Lucky, who’s supposed to look after me when Dad’s not there.”

I smiled at that. John’s mother had died while her two sons were still young, and what little I knew about it was that Lucky had been there for the family then—and ever since.

A bone-chilling wind whipped down the street as I picked my way gingerly over the icy sidewalk.

“Here.” John offered me his good hand, which I took, and we kept each other from falling down as we made our way down the slippery street, going toward my building.

I knew what I was doing. Of
course
I knew. It was after midnight, and I had just invited a man up to my apartment. A man who had made his interest in me clear, and to whom I was attracted. And I was doing this under the influence of a wounded heart and a bruised ego, having just been dumped by my lover (though we’d only spent that one night together, almost a month ago).

I didn’t have any specific intentions, and my judgment wasn’t as its finest just then—but I knew what I was doing.

We got to my building and climbed the steps, then I let go of John’s hand to unlock the door. Once we were inside, he took my hand again, hesitantly, and met my gaze. There was no pretense now of helping me balance. He just wanted to touch me, and he let me know it—and silently asked if this was all right.

“So you’re saying you want to walk away from this?”
I had asked.
“From me?”

“No, I’m saying I think I have to.”

I stared at John uncertainly, my feet frozen to the spot.

“Esther?”

“It’s convenient for you that I’m so crazy about you I keep kicking things under the carpet for your sake.”

Memories were crowding in on me. Surrounding me, taunting and hurting me.

“Are you okay?” John asked.

Get out of my head,
I thought.
I want you out of my head!

I wanted him out of my
heart,
which suddenly hurt so much it felt like it was screaming.

Seeing me standing there before him in numb paralysis, John said, “Maybe I should go, huh? I’ll call you and—”

“John. No.” I grabbed his coat collar as he turned away and pulled him toward me.

A tall, strong man, and an agile, experienced martial artist, he fell against me without resistance and let me have my way with him.

His cheeks were cold from the bitter night air, his mouth warm, his tongue soft. I slid my arms around him and clung, kissing him hungrily, beating back the bitter hurt inside me. I chased his warmth like it would save me, stroking his soft black hair and closing my eyes so I wouldn’t think of another man’s equally dark hair. We kissed and clung and kissed harder, and he fumbled through the folds of my coat to touch my body, no longer hesitant or asking permission.

I was dizzy, warm, and breathing hard when he finally pulled away.

Laughing a little as he nuzzled me, he said, “You don’t actually live here in the hallway, do you?”

“Oh! No. Hm.” He kissed me again. “Upstairs.” And again. “One flight.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s about all my legs can handle right now.”

I took his hand and led the way, practically flying up those narrow, uneven stairs to the next floor. When he reached the landing, he pulled me into his arms again, and we slumped against the wall together, kissing dizzily and fumbling at each other’s heavy clothing.