Prayer

  “Oh, I’m here all right. Wherever the fuck here is. That I don’t know and don’t ask me to explain it. Awright, fair enough, I’m not real in the way you or that nice wee lassie upstairs would understand, son. No, you could nae say I was real like she is. By the way, son, that’s a nice bit of cunt you’ve got there. Nice one. Wouldn’t mind stuffing that bird myself.”

  I looked away. “No, no, no. This isn’t happening. It can’t be.”

  “You’ve said that already. Repeating yourself is the first sign of madness. Take it from one who knows. You know what I am. And why I’m fucking here, son. It’s no good listening to your head with this one, Gil. That isn’t going to help. You have to listen with your heart. That wee still voice that we all have inside our heads. The one that gets drowned out by the all the shite that we learn in life about what’s real and what isn’t. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve heard that fucking voice yourself, Gil. You just stopped listening tae it for a while, that’s all.”

  “This isn’t real.”

  “Aye, it’s difficult. I’ll admit that. But think of it like this, if you will. I’ve returned to this world from the depths, not exactly alive but next best thing, to say just this: that what you hear is true, Gil. And you can speak and believe it all without being shamed, forever and ever, amen.”

  “Speak and believe in what?” I demanded. “I don’t understand.”

  Bill grew angry for a moment and, lifting his fist, he seemed to beat the air for several seconds before he could speak again.

  “In God, Gil,” he said. “What else would I be here to talk about? Almighty fucking God. But there’s not much time. For either of us. And I just slipped away to give you this warning, see? That you’re fucking dead unless you can get yourself back in with him. His angel of death has got you marked out, Gil, and believe me you do not want that bastard to come and get you. You’ve met him already, I think, so you must know what I’m talking about. He’s more demon than angel if you know what I mean. Look, son, it’s just best you do as I say. Make your peace with the big man. Everyone gets a second fucking chance. But not everyone is wise enough to take it. Those other poor bastards who died—the ones who got you started down this road—they didn’t have a way of seeing the truth that was right in front of their noses. But you do. You’ve got me. Frankly, I think a lot depends on the messenger. On who gets the fucking job to come back and say hello. Despite all that happened, you and I were once close. That could be it. Aye, that’s right. I was always fond of you, Gil boy.”

  Bill shook his head, which seemed to produce another fit of twitching and silent shouting before he added calmly: “Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s just that it takes a fucking loony to make any of this sound sensible. Know what I mean? Aye. Maybe that’s it, son. That it takes a fucking loony to make almighty God’s message sound sensible.” He nodded. “Aye, looking back on it—the whole religious thing—I think it probably always did. When you consider it objectively, all of the great religious leaders have been crazies like me, son.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “That’s true at least.”

  “One last piece of advice, son. Don’t think about this too long. There are three stages in your re-integration into God’s plan for mankind, Gil. There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. You’re still at the second stage. But there’s less time than you think to get to the third stage. By my reckoning, you’ve got rather less than twenty-four hours. And it might get very rough before it gets better. God’s a vindictive bastard, Gil. That’s one important truth I’ve learned already.”

  “You’re not my uncle Bill. I must be mad.”

  “Look, I’ll spell it out for you and then that’s me done and away from here. You’ll be on your own after that. God doesn’t want to destroy you, but he will if he has to.” Bill snapped his fingers; it sounded like a thick twig breaking. “Just like that. Only it won’t be as quick as that. It’ll be something horrible. The way God likes these things done. See, he wants your compliance, your obedience, Gil. He wants you back on his side, genuinely, heart and soul, but especially your soul. He wants you back in the fold like he did the lost sheep or the prodigal son. Because it is intolerable to God that unbelief should exist anywhere, but especially in one who has believed, like you. The seed that fell on the stony ground, so to speak. You have to take it to the Lord in prayer, as soon as possible, Gil. Prayer. Read that daft woman’s fucking book, if you doubt me. Esther Begleiter. She’ll tell you the same thing as I am. Prayer. That’s your only possible recourse. Sorry to sound all fucking preachy, son, but that’s how it’s got to be. No deviation is permitted. Not anymore. Not now that Pastor Van Der Velden has called this shit down on your head. God is not reasonable, Gil. God is God. He’s terrible, just like it says in the bloody Bible.”

  Bill glanced out of the window. I closed my eyes and let out a long sigh.

  “My time with you is almost up,” whispered Bill. “If you don’t do it out of obedience, Gil, then do it out of fear. And I mean fear because that’s how it will be. I would nae be in your shoes, son. Not when that fucking angel starts to plague you. Gil, you’ve no idea what Azrael is capable of, the terror he can inflict. He’s a demon, Gil. A real fucking demon. Shit, I’ve always known that. When people thought I was a loony, that’s what was disturbing me. God and all that comes with him.”

  Bill still looked like a lunatic, but the earlier ferocity of his words had gone and his voice had grown almost dreamy. That might just as easily have been me, however. And when I opened my eyes again, he had disappeared and I stood there facing a great emptiness as if there were some sort of space behind the air in front of the window where he had been standing. I reached out and put my hand into the dead silence in front of me as if to make sure that he was no longer there.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed. “What’s happening to me?” I felt such a rush of goose bumps across my whole body that I had to grab the blanket Sara had dropped onto the floor when I had first made love to her and wrap it around my shoulders to stop me from shivering. Was it the kava that made my heart feel enlarged? Or my breath so short?

  “Holy shit.”

  I don’t know how long I stood there. After what I’d seen—or what I thought I’d seen—I wasn’t sure that time had any real meaning, but when I glanced at my wristwatch, I saw that I couldn’t have been there longer than a minute or two. I was still holding the candle in my hand as if it were a heretic’s taper. Sara’s gun was on the mantelpiece where I had placed it. Everything except my loudly beating heart was now quiet. It was the quiet that made everything now seem more horrific to me. Even the rain had stopped.

  Surely I had imagined it all. Like Bill, I had become the victim of my own crazed mind. Wasn’t the clue to that the very fact that I was on leave to see the FBI psychiatrist? I was nuts. This was beyond OCD and playing solitaire with sugar packets. This made me almost certifiable, within the meaning of the law. I was the one—not Gaynor Allitt—who needed to obtain a magistrate’s order for emergency mental health protection; for all I knew, it wasn’t just me who was at risk of harming myself in some indefinable way, it was the poor beautiful woman upstairs. Assuming Sara really was upstairs and was not, like Bill, a figment of my own imagination. Yes. Hadn’t there been a certain wish fulfillment about the way she had arrived and jumped into bed with me? And a dreamlike quality about the perfection of our lovemaking?

  I sniffed my fingers, which to my relief still smelled of her. I could hardly imagine that, could I? Sara had to be real. Surely she was still waiting upstairs in my bedroom and all I had to do was fix the fuse and go back to bed with her.

  As I turned to go and look for the fuse box, the lights came back on. I looked around the room and found there was very little that was as different as perhaps it ought to have been. I blew out the candle, picked up the gun, tucked it back under the waistband of my trousers, and trudged back up
stairs, not really knowing what I expected to find there.

  But Sara was exactly where I had left her, still sitting up in bed, her head resting in her forearms. She looked up as I came in the room and bit her lip, and I saw that her exquisite face was pale and full of concern.

  “You fixed it then?”

  “The fuse?” I said innocently. Surely she would leave if I told her the truth. Anyone sensible would. “Yes. I fixed it.”

  She nodded. “You were a long time doing it.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not an electrician.”

  “I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

  I took off my trousers and my shorts, and climbed into bed beside her, smiling as if nothing were wrong and my heart did not feel as if it were about to appear on the roof of my mouth.

  “Myself. I always talk to myself when I’m trying to fix something. Mostly it’s just swearing on account of the fact that I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing.”

  “Kevin was the same. My second husband. He couldn’t change a lightbulb without swearing like a trooper. I think he took the failure of all household appliances personally. As if they’d insulted him.”

  “I can understand that. We can leave the light on if you like.”

  “Yes, please,” she said, throwing back the covers to reveal her nakedness. “Yes, I think you should see it all.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Making love to her took my mind off a lot of other things, the way it does—for both of us, I shouldn’t wonder. It was a way of forgetting and I badly needed to forget almost everything that had happened to me. From the noise Sara made while my impudent tongue played around with her, I don’t suppose she was thinking very much about what had persuaded her to drive all the way down to Galveston. In fact, I don’t think she was thinking about very much at all. She just lay there on the bed in front of me, her back arched like a longbow, trembling with helpless abandon as if possessed by some insistent, gentle spirit or like a beautifully undulating landscape that was being affected by some long, slow earth tremor. When I was satisfied that she was satisfied, I climbed back up between her cool creamy thighs and, with her kisses smothering my intimately perfumed face, I took care of my own pleasure.

  When I’d finished, I yawned loudly.

  She kissed me fondly on the head and then added, “You may put the light out now, if you want.”

  “Are you sure?” I wasn’t sure about this myself. I feared the darkness as if I were a small child.

  “I’m here with you. What can happen?”

  She was right. What indeed? What could possibly happen that had not already happened? And if anything else did happen, then at least we would try to meet it together. At least that was my thought, although I was trying very hard not to think of anything much other than Sara and when I was going to fuck her again.

  I leaned across the bed and switched out the bedside light. I thought of the diocesan house and how long it had stood on that street and how it had withstood the battering of Hurricane Ike and the biblical flood that had followed. Could I withstand as much? It was beginning to seem unlikely. Nelson Van Der Velden’s calmly uttered threat that I would be dead before twenty-four hours had elapsed was beginning to seem quite possible—my heart already felt like someone had used a defibrillator on me while the blood in my veins must have been pure adrenaline. I thought of Philip Osborne and Peter Ekman and what had happened to them, but somehow I gradually fell into a restless, troubled sleep that was full of shadows and dread and foreboding, not to mention Uncle Bill and the loathsome creature I had wrestled with in Mr. Hindemith’s overgrown garden.

  My heart had stopped beating altogether. I was quite certain of that. I had no breath, nor the possibility of breathing. I tried to cry out for help, but not the least sound came from my mouth. There was just a silent, cold, all-enveloping blackness that threatened to stifle me as though I were at the bottom of a very deep well, with something pulling me down into thick and slimy silt. I tried to push myself up and found myself sinking deeper, with strong, sharp hands pulling at my feet and then my legs. I kicked hard and tried to swim my way back to the surface that I instinctively knew was life, for I had the strong sensation that if I did not quickly escape the place I was in, I would certainly die. I sank and kicked again. And this time I felt a strong jolt and, taking a deep loud breath that could have been heard out at sea, I knew I was suddenly alive and awake.

  Seconds passed and I just lay there panting loudly like a dog and enjoying the feel of air in my chest, which was lathered with sweat. A ringing in my ears gave way to what was happening in the room.

  Sara had got up and was washing herself in the bathroom. But I knew I was wrong about that because I turned over and, finding some strands of her long hair on my pillow, stretched out my hand and patted her small skull. In the very same moment that I put my hand there, I thought her head seemed a little colder than I was expecting so that I half wondered if a window was open; then I heard someone moving again in the bathroom—a toilet flushed and then a tap was running—and, leaning across her inert, sleeping body, I fumbled in the darkness for the Walther I had left on the bedside table.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  Sara stirred underneath my body and then seemed to shrink against my side. She moaned a little, too, as if she was already crying with fear.

  “Ssssh,” I whispered close to what felt like her ear. “There’s someone in the bathroom.”

  Her tall, muscular body hardened noticeably as if it was now prepared for flight.

  “Who’s there?” I asked again, louder now because I had the gun in my hand.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you, Giles,” said a quiet but cheery voice from in the bathroom—it was Sara’s voice. “It’s just me. You were having a nightmare, I think. Your legs were moving like you were a dog in a race. Hey, I’ll be there in a minute. I’m afraid I couldn’t find the light.” She hesitated. “Wait a minute. I think this must be it.”

  As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.

  “No,” I cried. “Don’t.”

  Even as she spoke, I felt with absolute, revolting certainty the awful knowledge of a different human figure next to me—not hers—and then a cold, clammy mouth descended onto my hip. I leaped from the bed as if it contained a rattlesnake; hearing a loud cry of horror that turned out to be my own, I flew to the bathroom as Sara switched on the light. Turning back to face the bed, I fired three shots at the space I had just vacated.

  “Holy shit,” she yelled, cowering on the floor and covering her ears with her hands.

  I stood there staring at the bed that the bathroom light now revealed to be empty, unless you count the three bullets that must have been lodged somewhere in the mattress. Gunsmoke and some feathers from an exploded pillow hung in the pungent air, which seemed to be mixed with something earthy and old. The smell reminded me of an exhumed grave I’d once witnessed.

  “What the hell?” screamed Sara. “Have you gone fucking crazy?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, trembling with fear. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s honest, I suppose. Jesus Christ. You might have fucking killed me. And with my own gun.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean, killed you? You were in here. I was aiming at whatever the fuck was in the bed.”

  She paused, becoming less irate now as she realized that I had an automatic weapon in my hand that was cocked and ready to fire. “Please, Giles. Please put down the gun. It’s making me very nervous.”

  “Believe me, you can’t be nearly as nervous as I am.”

  “Put it down and tell me what happened.”

  After a very long moment, I eased the hammer down to make the gun safe, flicked on one of the Walther’s two safeties, and placed the gun back onto the bedside table. Then, as best as I was able—I was still shaking with fear—I t
old Sara what had happened.

  “You must have dreamed it,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? In the same way you dreamed that someone had slept in our bed?”

  “You’d been asleep. So perhaps you were still confused. Suppose that it had been me in the bed.”

  “Sorry, but I’m still trying to deal with the idea that if it wasn’t you then what the fuck was it? Jesus. What the fuck was that?” I wiped my arms with my hands—I could still feel the touch of the thing on me.

  “What do you think it was?” she asked calmly.

  “I don’t know, but I am certain of this: it was something—repulsive. I had my fucking arms around it thinking it was you for about ten seconds. And I felt something bite my ass as I got out of bed.”

  “Here, let me see.”

  I twisted around to look at my bare ass. There was a large human-size bite on my hip. The sight was enough to make my hair stand on end. My heart did a pretty good job of trying to stand on end, too.

  “Christ,” said Sara, shaking her head. “That couldn’t have been me.”

  “I didn’t say it was you, did I?”

  Horrified, I staggered weakly into the bathroom and put my head under the cold tap for a long moment. The cold water seemed to slow my feverish brain. While I kept my head under the water, I felt Sara’s hand on the bite mark.

  Sara turned away from looking at my ass to examine the catch on the bathroom door.

  “You don’t think you could have done it on this?” she asked. “When you came barging in here?”

  “It’s a bite, not a scratch.”

  “Sure about that?” She shrugged. “Could be a bruise. Perhaps you banged yourself on the door?”

  “Does that look like a bruise to you?”

  She touched my behind with her finger. “No, not really.”

  “Listen, sweetheart, it’s my ass and I can still feel whatever it was—its goddamn clammy mouth on me. I just shot the fucking mattress on account of that feeling. What happened to me just now—it was like being in bed with a corpse.”