Biblical (12 page)

A man appeared on the landing behind her. Large, broad-shouldered, with massive, ugly hands, his complexion ruddy and his auburn hair and beard framing his face with dark red fire. There was a cruel, hard handsomeness to his features and something terribly dark and violent lurked in his expression. Just as he had known the woman was Marjorie Glaiston, Macbeth knew that the man he was looking at was Geoffrey Morgan.

He wanted to call out – to warn Marjorie as Morgan started to take slow, purposeful steps down the stairs towards her, carrying his dark fury with him – but he found he could not. Unlike his experience at Christian Science Plaza, where he had worked on the injured priest and had felt himself completely detached from the experience, Macbeth felt totally involved with this reality he knew wasn’t true reality. Yet he stood frozen, his hand glued to the handrail post, his voice lost to him, as Morgan closed the distance between himself and Marjorie, his huge hands lifting from his sides and reaching towards her.

“You know what’s coming, don’t you?” The voice he had heard before spoke again into Macbeth’s ear and he turned to see standing behind him the naked, broken-crooked body of Gabriel Rees, the man who had jumped to his death. Gabriel smiled and Macbeth noticed that one eyelid was still half closed. “Just like you knew what was going to happen on the roof – the only
one other than me who knew – you know exactly what is going to happen here, don’t you?”

Macbeth nodded and turned back to see Morgan seize Marjorie. He screamed a scream that made no sound, that failed to part his tight-sealed lips, as Morgan’s heavy fingers closed on Marjorie’s slender neck. It was as if she hadn’t noticed: she still held Macbeth in her unwavering gaze as subconjunctival hemorrhages turned the whites of her beautiful eyes blood-red; her smile for him remained, the dimples still there in the fair cheeks while petechial spots bloomed purple-red as capillaries ruptured under the skin.

Morgan let go an inhuman scream as he crushed and twisted the life from his unfaithful lover: a long, roaring, animal cry of fury and pain and despair. When he let her go, Marjorie tumbled like a rag doll, lifeless and loose, down the stairs and came to rest at Macbeth’s feet.

“How real does this seem to you?” asked Gabriel, conversationally. “You’re dreaming, but it seems more real than when you’re awake, doesn’t it? Do I seem more real to you than I did on the roof?”

Macbeth still had no voice to answer Gabriel; instead he raised his silent, accusing gaze back to Morgan, who stood where he had killed Marjorie, his brow dappled with sweat, his eyes still burning, the huge murderous hands hanging at his sides. Then, moving slowly, Morgan reached into the pocket of his tweed waistcoat and pulled out a small derringer pistol. Taking each slow, deliberate step as if his feet were made of lead, he came down the stairs, holding the palm gun at full arm’s stretch until he stood in front of Macbeth, towering over him. Morgan pushed the cold, hard steel of the short barrel against Macbeth’s forehead.

And pulled the trigger.

*

Macbeth found himself again looking up at the ceiling of his hotel room. His awakening had been swift but not sudden and
something of the dream lingered, as if Morgan’s brooding malevolence loitered in some corner of Macbeth’s waking world, for a few moments. But he was not afraid. No sweats, no shaking. Despite its horrors, the dream had left him strangely calm.

Corbin sounded surprised to hear Macbeth on the phone so soon after their last conversation.

“The house in Beacon Hill you’re doing up …” asked Macbeth. “Is it in Louisburg Square?”

Corbin laughed. “Louisburg Square? How much do you think they’re paying me at Belmont? I know I told you Joanna’s folks were rich, but they’re not the Rothschilds. Our place is on Garden Street. Why are you asking?”

“I thought I’d look into the Marjorie Glaiston story,” lied Macbeth, not wanting to tell Corbin about his dream.

“I see,” said Corbin. “You’ll find stuff about Marjorie Glaiston on the Internet; that’s where I found the story.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see a picture of Marjorie before the episode?”

“Do you mean before I saw her on the stairs?” said Corbin. “No, like I told you, it was after. The pictures I found were a match for the person I saw … imagined I saw … on the stairs. But what you said last night made sense: I couldn’t have seen an accurate image of her in a hallucination before having seen what she looked like in real life. I must’ve seen her picture somewhere before without remembering it.”

“It’s the obvious explanation,” said Macbeth, not wanting to share that he had put a face to Marjorie Glaiston in his own dream. “Anyway, I’ll check it out. Let me know if you hear anything more from the cops about Gabriel or how the priest is doing.”

*

Macbeth was annoyed that he was relieved.

Not the Marjorie Glaiston he had dreamt about. He looked at the face on the screen of his laptop and knew it was not the
face he had seen in his dream. The real Marjorie Glaiston had had raven-black hair, not blonde, and although her outstanding beauty was equal to that of the woman in his dream, it was of a different kind: dark, arch, smoldering; vaguely wicked. The image he had found had been a portrait painted by her murderer, Geoffrey Morgan. Another picture – a grainy, primly posed black-and-white society photograph – confirmed the accuracy of Morgan’s canvas capturing of lover and muse. Macbeth could see that this Marjorie Glaiston had been the kind of woman to drive men out of their senses with lust and envy.

What the hell had he expected to find when searching the Internet for an image of Marjorie Glaiston? Proof that he had developed some kind of psychic link with the long-dead? Even if the face had been the same, it would simply be, just like with Corbin, a case of cryptomnesia – a forgotten memory unconsciously remembered. He was a psychiatrist, after all, and knew that there were few mysteries that could not be answered by looking at the one-hundred-billion-neuron-packed, three-pound-weight human brain: each individual brain a complete universe of inexplicable complexity.

But the picture Macbeth found of Geoffrey Morgan did shake him. It wasn’t quite the face of the murderer his sleeping brain had invented, but there were distinct similarities: a broad, pale brow above darkly brooding eyes and framed with thick hair and beard. And although his hair looked black in the photograph, the description in the text told him that Morgan had, indeed, possessed a head of dark red hair. But, Macbeth told himself, it was not a stretch to imagine a violent, brooding Irish painter with some kind of accuracy.

*

After he showered and dressed, Macbeth sent an SMS to Casey to confirm their meeting at seven and got an almost instant reply.

During his stay in Boston he had spent as much time with
his brother as possible; Casey had, of course, made the offer that Macbeth could stay with him for as long as he was in Boston, but they had both known that Macbeth would say no: his environment had to be of his choosing.

Macbeth felt good that he was seeing his brother that evening: he was still tired and emotionally drained by everything that had happened in the previous eighteen hours, but Casey always managed to brighten his moods. Looking through the hotel-room window, Macbeth could see that a warm, bright day had taken shape beyond the glass and he decided to take a walk to shake off his lethargy.

*

The cab dropped him at the Tremont Street entrance to the Common. Macbeth knew he had come here for more than a stroll in the park: Louisburg Square was less than a three-minute walk away on the other side of the Common. Again he became angry at his own folly, knowing he would end up standing in the spot he had stood in his dream, convincing himself … convincing himself of what?

Getting out of the taxi, Macbeth felt the effects of stress and lack of sleep take the form of a vague but pervasive déjà vu. It was a feeling he had experienced a lot, throughout his life, and he hated it, mainly because it often preceded one of his episodes. He shook it off and headed into the Common.

A small, rectangular box of a building stood at the Common’s entry, looking like some Art Deco mausoleum. It was actually the exit from Boylston T Station and housed the head of the stairwell that led up from the subway. As he passed, Macbeth saw workers in Transit Authority uniforms using brushes and a spray tank of cleaning solution to scrub off a graffito that had been sprayed onto the side wall of the usually pristine station building. The words, in a deep red impervious to the workers’ chemicals and scouring, were still legible on the building’s flank.

We are becoming
 …

Ellipsis included. He’d seen the line all over Copenhagen, in both English and Danish, as well as here in Boston. It was probably just a line from some pop song, but Macbeth found it strangely profound and laughed to himself at the thought of gangs of philosophers prowling the streets of Boston in corduroys and backwards hip-hop hats.

Nodding hello to one of the workers who in turn ignored him, Macbeth walked on, along the main path through the Common. He mused his way through the park, sinking deep into his thoughts and only half-aware of his surroundings. Despite the sunshine and the sounds of play and laughter drifting from various corners of the park, Macbeth found himself haunted by the dark of the night before.

He didn’t know how far he had walked when the nearer-at-hand noise of barking and laughing snapped him from his thoughts and drew his attention to a group of pre-teen girls throwing a Frisbee to each other above the head of a leaping, overexcited dog. The girls were running about and moving with that early-adolescent carelessness that would all too soon be gone, making such innocent activities uncool and childish. The scene sparked a melancholic feeling that seemed to intensify his déjà vu, and in that moment, he resented their innocence and carefreeness. But Macbeth the psychiatrist knew that childhood was often anything but innocent and carefree, and he walked on.

It was pleasant and warm and the sun through the trees danced and dappled the path, but he still could not place himself in the moment and the vague feeling of déjà vu followed him through the Common. Again his thoughts forced him back to the dark roof of the Christian Science Church. What had chilled him most was the calm – the certainty – in Gabriel’s expression as he threw himself and Father Mullachy over the parapet edge.

As he and the others had run to the roof edge, Macbeth had
half-expected Gabriel and the priest to have disappeared, as if it made as much sense for them to have vanished into thin air as it did for them to lie smashed on the ground below. Like Schrödinger’s Cat, maybe Gabriel hadn’t been definitely, definitively dead until Macbeth saw his body.

Macbeth didn’t know how far he had walked. He was, as always, deep in thought and only half-aware of his surroundings as he made his way along the path through the Common. The nearer-at-hand noise of barking and laughing drew his attention to a group of pre-teen girls throwing a Frisbee to each other above the head of a leaping, overexcited dog. The scene sparked a melancholic feeling that seemed to intensify his déjà vu and, in that moment, he resented their innocence and freedom from care. The girls were running about and moving with that early-adolescent carefreeness that would all too soon be gone, making such innocent activities uncool and—

Macbeth stopped dead in the path.

This had all just happened. He had seen all this, had had exactly the same thoughts, only minutes before.

He stared at the playing girls, at the park, at the trees and the sun coming through them, at the overexcited dog. Macbeth had learned to live with his bizarre memory, his dissonant sense of time and his habit of detaching himself completely from the moment and becoming lost somewhere outside time and place. Countless appointments had been missed, countless destinations arrived at with no sense of transit from his point of departure.

But this was different.

He had been here, exactly this same spot in the Common, minutes before. He had walked – moved on – but somehow now found himself back. It was absurd, but it was more than a spatial absurdity: not only was he back in the same place, he was back in the same moment. In the same thoughts. The same dull envy of the girls’ innocent, careless youth; the same feeling of déjà vu.

Seeing him standing there, the girls stopped playing and stared back suspiciously. They could see him, meaning this was no delusion. He wasn’t observing a past event, and he couldn’t have witnessed a future event minutes ago. So what the hell just happened?

Déjà vu. That’s all it was, he told himself. Déjà vu made particularly acute because of the stressful events of the last twenty-four hours. That must be it. Or some other short-circuit between his prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobe, creating the illusion of having remembered something. Again he thought back to the Christian Science roof and Gabriel questioning his own memory of having been on the roof fifteen minutes before.

Avoiding the suspicious gaze of the now huddled-together girls, Macbeth walked on, sinking deep back into his mind again, but trying not to think about what had just happened.

*

As he knew he would, Macbeth found himself on the corner of Mount Vernon and Louisburg. He made his way along the Square to where the house he had dreamed about stood. His pace was slower now; an itchy small trickle of tepid sweat in the nape of his neck telling him he must have walked quickly from the Common, as he tended to do whenever his mind was occupied, which was most of the time.

Unlike in his dream, the building had been subdivided into luxury condos. But there were other differences: significant, structural differences from the house in his dream. As he stood before it, he tried to work out both why he had dreamed about this particular house and why he seemed to have a need to validate his dream in some way. After all, this wasn’t the house Corbin had bought, the house in which Marjorie Glaiston really had been murdered. Perhaps it was simply that Louisburg Square represented the stereotype of historical properties in Beacon Hill. Yet this house seemed so familiar. Maybe he had
seen it before, in childhood even, the memory idealized then lost, only to be stimulated years later by Corbin’s talk of his new home.