William H. Hallahan - (10 page)

But in these practical precincts, talk of demons and supernatural
wars sounded absurd. He wondered if he should leave before he made a
fool of himself:

"Uncle Malachi, I want you to help me with this demon that's
pursuing me."

A door swung open and Malachi Davitt stood there framed.

"Brendan?" he said with joy, and spread his arms. "Look
at him. Are you that tall? You've got--let's see--two or three inches
on me. Four?" He laid a light punch on Brendan's shoulder. "How
good. I'm delighted. We'll lunch together and talk. Let me have ten
minutes to clean up a few details. Here. Sit, sit, sit Read a
magazine and I'll be back." He tapped his fingernails on the
receptionist's desk. "Reservations for two down the street in
about half an hour," he said to her.

The restaurant was as intimidating as Malachi's office. It was
very old and determinedly expensive, right in the heart of Wall
Street There was rich brown paneling throughout crystal lights
overhead, oil paintings of early Dutch figures, English generals,
sailing vessels along the New York waterfront.

Leaded windows looked down a narrow street walled by lofty office
buildings and crowded with stockbrokers and financial people hurrying
through the cold. At the end of the street a piece of Trinity Church
was just visible. Flags snapped and fluttered in the breeze that
always blew through lower Manhattan.

This was no place to talk of demons. The waiters wore white linen
jackets, and there were white linen tablecloths and napkins and heavy
silverplate place settings and ornate silver coffee pots. By the
window a huge aquarium was crowded with somnolent lobsters, gently
rocked by a rush of aerating bubbles. Periodically a chef in a tall
white hat would come and pluck one of the lobsters from the tank and
bear it to the kitchen on a silver tray.

In the adjacent barroom, practical men with pampered pink skin and
slightly flushed faces stood in expensive clothes and talked in low,
well-bred voices of money and corporate adventures. Brendan observed
them with doubt. Not one of them had ever seen a demon. They simply
never thought about such unprofitable things.

Malachi ordered a pint of stout and sat back. With his tweed
jacket and tattersall vest, he looked, as the family said, like a
squire come up to Dublin to his favorite pub for the day.

"I can't tell you how pleased I am to see you, Brendan. I've
had you in my mind for weeks. Do you ride? You have the Davitt hands,
I see. You'd make a fine horseman. Just the right carriage. You look
a little like me, I fancy. More than just a family resemblance. Well,
let's talk seriously for a minute. Are you still in that school for
social studies?"

"Yes."

"Ah, Brendan. You must get yourself out of there. You don't
want to become a threadbare mousey. I tell you you have to take care
of yourself. You've got to put some pennies by. No one else will do
it. In fact, I've some thoughts on that subject. Have you considered
another career?"

"What do you mean?"

Malachi slowly took a mouthful of stout, considering his next
words. "Listen, Brendan, have you been following this series in
the paper on ESP?"

"No. I'm afraid not."

"Well, actually the Russians have done the most important
work on this. But it's all very interesting. I've devoted
considerable attention to this subject lately, I mean--Well, you
should know what I mean." He eyed Brendan speculatively. "How
have you been?" he began again.

Brendan saluted him silently with his stout.

Malachi drummed his deformed, arthritic fingers on the snowy linen
cloth. His hands looked just like those of his sister Maeve. They
suggested the claws of the lobsters in the tank. Thoughtfully he
traced the edge of a fork with his right index finger. "How can
I begin this? You were always--when you were a child, I mean--you
were always special. Do you know what I mean?"

Brendan shifted in his chair.

"Do you know what I mean by the word special, Brendan?"

Brendan sat back, then shook his head.

"You know it's in the family," Malachi continued. "Your
mother, I recall, had the gift and there were others. Great-aunt
Rosaleen Dugan. And Danny Tyce. And--well, others also. The selfsame
gift. Do you get my drift?"

"Not yet."

"Well, these Russians--oh, they're such clever people,
Brendan! They've done all this work on ESP. You know what that is?
They fool around with cards. And someone tries to guess what card is
coming up. That sort of thing. Under the strictest laboratory
control. And they find these people with unusual gifts. Here--let me
freshen that up."

"It's only half done," Brendan protested.

"Come, come." Malachi signaled the waiter, then watched
him carry the two pint glasses to the bar for a topping. Once or
twice he cast a furtive glance at Brendan. The waiter returned in a
minute.

"Now there," Malachi said. "That's better. Where
was I?"

"In Russia. With a deck of cards."

"Yes, of course. Well, you see, there are some people who can
really guess the cards to an extraordinary degree. It's a form
of--well, of predicting the future, don't you see?"

"No."

"Well, damn it, man! You have that gift!"

"What gift?"

"To predict the future!"

"Oh," Then Brendan frowned. "Can I predict the
future?"

"Of course you can! The whole family knows that. You
predicted a number of things."

Brendan was perplexed. "Are you afraid I'm going to predict
something about you?"

"You're not, are you?"

"No."

"Then that's not what I mean. Not at all. Nothing bad. I
mean--well, you see. I'm sure if you thought about it, you would
recall times when you saw things coming. Like knowing in advance that
someone was going to meet someone before they did. Or finding
something someone lost."

"Precognition."

"Exactly!" Malachi smote the tabletop with an open palm.
"There's a place here in the city--a bona fine scientific
laboratory, no gimmicks--that can take people with a gift like yours
and sharpen it, don't you see?--so that you can foretell the future
even better."

"Shouldn't you be talking to a fortune-teller?"

"Oh, no. No, no. No, thank you. That's not what I had in mind
at all--floating trumpets and voices from the grave. No. I want the
future, not the past."

Brendan shrugged indifferently. "I don't know much about it."

"Now wait, Brendan. Let me finish. I have an important point
to make. Listen. It doesn't have to be anything specific, if you get
my drift. In my time I've been in so many markets--stocks,
debentures, commodities, then recently the gold market, and for a
while your cousin Terry O'Grady and I did some good business in
stamps. I even got deeply involved in horses--thoroughbreds. You
see?"

Brendan felt his face beginning to redden? He glanced around the
room to see who was marking his embarrassment Malachi plunged on,
unaware.

"Suppose you got a feeling about the wheat futures market. I
could sit down with you and try to draw out what it is through my
knowledge of that market. Or maybe you can get a glimpse of a future
stock market report in a moment of--"

"Precognition."

"Exactly. Exactly. What do you think? We could make a
fortune."

Brendan shrugged. Brendan the banana, Brendan the freak. Guessing
the lottery number. The inanity of it: Malachi obsessed with money
and babbling about it into his ear while Brendan sits obsessed by
some pursuing demon.

"Money," Malachi said into his stout, "answers
everything."
 
 

He'd lost his rabbit hole: Uncle Malachi couldn't help
him--couldn't even understand him. Who else--what else--could aid
.him in his battle with a demon? Now there was truly no place to
hide.

Sunlight made him hesitate: During daylight hours and in the
mundane streets, the supernatural seemed a mental aberration to him.
Demons didn't thrive when the sun was shining. But then he would have
a dream or a premonition that Would leave him terrified. He had to
find help somewhere.

To complicate his problem, he was in love with Anne O'Casey. He
wrote her name everywhere on the margins of his lecture notes. He
stared after girls whose hair was the same color. He gazed at wedding
ring displays in jewelry store windows. Whenever he was to see her,
he would arrive far too early and then wander the streets to kill
time.

But he couldn't consider himself a serious suitor. He was feeing a
terrible fate, who knew when? He couldn't ask Anne to share that with
him. She should find another to marry--not a freak. He decided to
break off with her. It was too selfish of him to keep up the
friendship. So for a long period he tried to avoid her. Yet whenever
she called him, he always went and grinned like an ape when he saw
her.

He yearned to hold her just once, to touch her hair, to feel her
in his arms, to enwrap her warmth and softness. He knew she wanted
him to; her fondness for him was obvious. If he proposed marriage,
she would accept instantly. And he ached to marry her.

One Saturday he agreed to meet her in the Citicorp building, where
they stuffed themselves with French pastry and hot chocolate before
going off to a movie.

It was uncanny to him how she understood; there was a line neither
of them crossed. If their hands touched, if he brushed her thigh, if
their eyes met with too much frankness, they both retreated into
light banter. Thin, worn Alphonse and Gaston jokes. It kept a cordon
sanitaire between them.

"How's business?" she'd ask him when she found him
staring at her, over the hot chocolate.

"Sales are off. No one buys buggy whips anymore."

"You need a new line."

"Like what?" he'd ask.

She'd shrug. "Horse collars. Looks like they're here to stay,
don't you think?" And they'd smirk and giggle at each other and
avoid the real subject between them.

It was the memories of her that would be most difficult to live
with. During rehearsal for a cousin's wedding she put on the bridal
veil.

"You'll make a beautiful bride," he blurted.

"When?" she asked softly. And she waited for an answer.
She watched his face redden. Then she lifted the veil and turned the
joke. "It's not for me, sport Can't smoke my cigars under all
that damned lace."

They went to a Davitt christening and she held the baby and smiled
radiantly at him. At another family gathering out on Long Island she
came closest to raising the forbidden subject She proclaimed National
Reincarnation Day and required everyone to select a new identity in a
future rebirth.

At the height of the hilarity, one cousin seemed to have won the
palm by saying she wanted to be reincarnated as the world's most
pampered creature, the dog in her family's home.

Anne stole the prize, though, when she said she wanted to come
back as Mrs. Brendan Davitt, then turned the joke by saying, "because
it won't happen in this lifetime." Everyone pointedly applauded.

He ached when he watched her. She had a fine carriage with long
legs and a long neck that gave her ineffable grace. "A smashing
girl," an uncle said. The family considered them engaged.

How could he not see her anymore? He cast about in his mind for
some other source of help with his problem.

There was only one other mortal Brendan could turn to: his
confessor, Father Breen.

This was his last hope and he was doubtful of it For all the man's
ecclesiastical saturation, Father Breen, Brendan felt, was a profound
skeptic. There was enough evil stored up in the hearts of men without
blaming a legion of imaginary underworld creatures drawn from an
early Christian mythology. Brendan sensed that Father Breen really
didn't believe that Satan existed.

He delayed a long time before seeing the priest This was his last
sanctuary: He dreaded to lose it The autumn had worn into winter
before anxiety and a need to have done with it all drove Brendan to
Father Breen's office.

The priest had recently been ill. There had been an operation and
he was still gaunt and slow-moving. The care of his parish had
pressed deep lines in his face. The church was in disrepair; it
needed a new roof. And do you know how expensive slate is? And the
heating system and--well, it's an endless tale, Brendan.
How
can I help you?

Brendan began to tell him--a small piece at a time. He told the
priest things he'd never told him in confession, things he'd never
told another mortal. And the priest's eyebrows kept rising to meet
his receding hairline. Indeed. I see. And then what? I see. Imagine.
Go on.

Brendan never managed to tell him the whole story. The old priest
was too stunned with the little bit he'd heard. Father Breen got up
and paced along the long-worn carpeting of his floor. He stood at his
casement window and looked out at the distant church spire of the
Episcopal Church, then at the people in the street hurrying through
the cold. He came back to his battered oak desk and drummed his
fingers lightly on it and said:

"Let me sleep on this. I'll call you." And he led
Brendan by the arm to his door.

"How old are you now, Brendan?"

"Eighteen."
 
 

A few days later, after dinner, his aunt sat with her hands in her
lap. "I have to talk to you," she said.

There was a ship loading down on the pier under arc lights in a
high wind and the ship's horn had sounded. Something was going on in
one of the holds and the horn was like a warning.

She drew in her breath. "Have you been talking to Father
Breen lately?"

"Yes."

"He spoke to me. He's very fond of you. He feels in a way
like a substitute father to you."

He knew what she was going to say, could in fact see and hear
Father Breen saying, "The boy is deeply disturbed and needs
psychiatric counseling immediately."