“Look, I know this sounds crazy, Sara, but until just now, I swear to you, I hadn’t seen this medal for, what is it?” I sighed. “More than twenty-five years.” I closed my eyes. “I honestly thought it was lost forever. And now here it is again, five thousand miles from the place where I lost it, looking as clean and untarnished as the day it was minted.” I shook my head and wiped a tear from my eye. “It’s as if someone is trying to tell me something.”
“Tell you what?”
“Something pretty terrible, I guess.” My breath was unsteady now, almost as if I’d suffered a bereavement. “Something that’s as awful as anything anyone was ever told.”
Sara looked pained and suddenly very small in the seat beside me. “I really don’t know why you’re telling me this, but . . . you’re scaring the shit out of me.”
“I don’t mean to, Sara, really I don’t, but if you didn’t put the medal there, then—”
“Giles, just think about it,” she said calmly. “You must have put it in here yourself when you were looking at my driving glasses and deciding if I was farsighted or nearsighted. Any other explanation doesn’t make sense. You came out here to put the top up. Remember? That’s when you must have left the medal here.” She smiled, like she was trying to humor a madman. “Perhaps you wanted to keep me safe when I was driving. St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers, right? Yes, that’s it. If you did, that’s nice. Thanks. I appreciate the thought. No, really I do.”
The way she outlined this very reasonable explanation it sounded like one with which she’d have been well satisfied; and why not? All I had to do was nod it through and we’d have been fine; we might still have salvaged something of our relationship; but that was not meant to be.
“Honestly? I believe you’re telling me the truth, Sara. I don’t see how you could have put my medal there since I was last in this car. Unless you sneaked out while I was asleep. But of course, that just begs the question of how you came to have it in your possession in the first place. You simply couldn’t have had it. Not after so long. And from so very far away. It really was lost forever. Like me, perhaps.” I shrugged hopelessly. “And now it isn’t lost at all. That leaves only one explanation, which, however crazy it sounds, is the only explanation that works.”
“And what’s that?”
“Someone else put it there. Not you. Not me. And not some passing stranger.”
And then I spoiled everything, as if I had rubbed a half grapefruit in her face.
“I think God might just have put it there,” I said.
Her nose wrinkled with horror. “God? What the hell are you talking about?”
“God. Or perhaps God’s angel.”
Sara uttered a deep sigh and then laid her forehead on the dashboard as if we had just escaped a serious collision or, perhaps, as if we had just suffered one.
“Sara, please. Just for one minute put aside all your scientific beliefs and your understandable need for empirical evidence and consider the many strange things that have happened to you: the man who you claim was outside your apartment door and outside your ninth-floor apartment window; the feeling of dread you said you had; the bed in my room that had been slept in by someone who wasn’t there. And that ghost you mentioned? The Turn of the Screw? Yes, you know what I’m talking about. None of this makes any sense unless we admit that there are no explanations for any of this. At least not the kind of explanations that work in a laboratory and rely on hard evidence.”
“Those are the only explanations that make sense, Giles. Everything else is just bullshit. I thought you knew that, too. I thought that was our point of real understanding, you and I. That both of us were fellow skeptics.”
“Please, Sara. Try to remember that all of these things have happened since that lunatic Nelson Van Der Velden started praying for your death and mine. Except that he’s not a lunatic at all, of course. Christ, I’m beginning to realize that. Because I can’t help but believe in God now. I believe he’s not a God of love at all, but a terrible God of anger and vengeance. I believe that in a few hours’ time God’s angel of death is going to come for me. In fact, I believe I’ve already met him earlier this evening. He left these scratches on my face and chest. He bit me. You’ve seen the bite on my ass. It was God’s angel of death who was standing across the road when we came out of the house. And it was God’s angel of death who was standing outside your apartment door.”
“Stop it, Giles, please. I find all of this laughable. And really quite offensive.”
“But there’s a way out of this, Sara,” I said. “For both of us. Earlier on this evening, my uncle Bill visited the house. You might say that it was a kind of vision.”
Sara laughed. “At least it wasn’t Hamlet’s father. At least you’re not trying to tell me that.”
“Bill told me he was dead, but that he’d come to give me a warning. That’s who you heard me speaking to, Sara. It was my uncle Bill. I don’t know how, but it was him all right.”
“This is insanity.” She hugged her hands between her knees and then hooked her fingers onto the glove compartment. “Only it’s not just you who’s insane, it’s me, too.”
“It was my uncle Bill who told me that there’s a way out of all this. That all we have to do is pray to him, Sara. That’s right.”
“I’m insane for getting involved with a maniac like you. I had an idea you were crazy when you came to my office at UT. That you were looking for your own way back to God, and it looks like that first instinct was right.”
“Our only possible way out of all this is through prayer. So, please, come back into the house with me and we’ll take it to the Lord in prayer. We’ll ask his forgiveness for not believing in him. Really, I think it might be as simple as that.”
She quickly opened the glove compartment and then the Walther was in her hand. It was pointed at me.
“Get out of the car,” she said firmly.
“Sara, please,” I said. “I really mean you no harm.”
“Get out of my fucking car, asshole.”
“But your only chance now is prayer.”
I saw her thumb move on the safety.
“Don’t make me shoot you, Martins,” she said. “But if that’s what it takes to get you out of this fucking car, I will.”
The last part of her sentence came out in a loud and violent scream that was also quite eloquent and more than enough to persuade me to do what I was told. I elbowed open the Bentley’s heavy door and stepped quickly out.
“Now back away from the door,” she said. And pressing a button, she lowered the top, which made it easier for her to climb across the central console into the driver’s seat. Then with the gun still pointed my way, she reached over and pulled the door toward her. “Stay back or I swear I’ll shoot.”
“Don’t leave, Sara,” I said, backing up toward the porch of the house. “You’re in danger. I think you know that, too. I realize it sounds crazy—I was every bit as skeptical about all this as you—but prayer is our only chance.”
“You bet it sounds crazy, you loony fuck! To think I actually went to bed with a creep like you. Jesus Christ, it makes my skin itch all over just to think about it. You know something? I hope that angel does fucking kill you, you creep. I hope he tears you to fucking pieces.”
She started the engine and her curses were lost in the sound of the Bentley’s powerful engine for a moment.
“You know what I think? I think it was you all along. Who creeped me out. Who put these stupid fucking ideas in my head. I think you’re some kind of fucking stalker, Martins. And as soon as I get back to Austin, I’m going to report you to your superiors.”
“Please, don’t go like this. I can help.”
“I’ll leave your fucking guns up the street. I suggest you use one of them on yourself and save me the cost of the phone call.”
But she
was crying as she drove away in a loud squeal of tires. And I wondered if I would ever see her again.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dawn crept up onto the edge of the horizon like a thin trail of blood seeping slowly through a dull gray blanket.
It had stopped raining. but my shirt was still wet and I was acutely aware of my own mortal coldness and the sense that I might never again be warm. If Nelson Van Der Velden was right, this was to be my last day on God’s earth. That was beginning to seem like a good thing because my own company had become a burden to me. For a moment, I actually contemplated fetching the guns Sara had thrown out of the Bentley up the street and using one of them on myself as she had suggested.
I’m not sure what stopped me; perhaps it was the St. Christopher’s medal I still held in my hand; or perhaps it was the birds in the overgrown trees above my head. It certainly wasn’t any sense that suicide was wrong. More likely what stopped me was that I was hardly in a hurry to meet a God who now filled me with such dread.
I hung the medal around my neck, recovered the abandoned weapons, including her little Walther P22, and went back to the house; I moved quickly because thoughts of suicide were soon replaced with the idea that I might pursue Sara in my own car; however, I couldn’t see how doing that wouldn’t end badly. She was scared enough without my driving after her. A car chase along the Gulf Freeway could only have resulted in an accident. Besides, I hardly thought that my own car was up to catching a speeding Bentley. The best I could hope for was that when she had calmed down a bit I might speak to her on the telephone. Assuming I was still alive, that is. There was the small matter of almighty God’s angel of death to consider first. Because he was there. I knew that now, as certainly as I felt the skin on the palms of my own hand or the inside of my mouth. He was outside somewhere, and he was waiting for me.
I shivered, but it wasn’t just from feeling cold. Being restored to my former belief in God was like finding that an infection I thought I’d thrown off and to which I thought I’d developed immunity was still there. But what I mainly felt was fear. It was the wrath of God I believed in, not his peace and understanding.
I do his will. As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.
As soon as I was inside the house, I switched on the lights and went through what remained of Father Dyer’s priestly possessions. If I was going to pray again, I was going to need some of the props that went with it. There was a drawer in a rolltop desk that contained a Bible, a rosary, a few candles, some vestments, and a vial that looked like holy water, which was what you might have expected in a priest’s desk drawer. I took the Bible and the rosary, and knelt down on the floor of the sitting room and bowed my head to pray. Or at least I tried to pray. My head was still brimful of Sara Espinosa.
“Lord . . .” I muttered. “Lord, hear my prayer.”
It still wasn’t the Lord I was thinking of, however. Not by a long shot. I shook my head and tried to rid my mind of these insistently erotic thoughts, and yet I hardly wanted to give up the taste and smell of Sara so soon. Not now that she had gone, possibly forever. How could I close my mind to the thought of her naked, pliant body when the chances were I wouldn’t ever see her again? I closed my eyes tight and knocked on my own skull with a hard knuckle.
“Come on, Martins,” I said. “You have to concentrate on putting your mind right with God.” I paused and then began. “Heavenly Father . . .”
But still none of my thoughts were at all conducive to coming before him. It was as if I had almost forgotten how to pray. Or as if something insistently human was preventing me from doing so. Perhaps that’s what Paul meant in the Acts of the Apostles when he says, “And why now do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name,” or in Galatians when he says, “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality.”
If Ruth could only have seen me, her triumph would have been complete. Why hadn’t I listened to her? Why had I ever doubted in his existence? She was right about that, of course, although not without some qualification. He was hardly the God of love she thought she knew so well; he wasn’t the heavenly father most people imagined him to be. Yes, I could see that there had to be a God because there was so much misery in the world; a God who was indifferent to all human suffering—it couldn’t have worked any other way. He was a God who demanded total obedience; a God who punished unbelief as cruelly as the cruelest tyrant ever did.
I stood up and poured myself a stiff drink and tried to think of how I had prayed as a boy, before I came to America and discovered the childlike evangelical faith in the benign, paternal God of Lakewood Church. That was no good. It was no use praying to him like he was someone who loved me. He didn’t. That much was obvious. He was going to kill me before the day was ended. His angel was going to come for me and tear me to pieces unless I managed to persuade God to relax the hand of his angel, as it says in Samuel II 24:15–16.
If I doubted that, I only had to look out of the window.
I do his will. As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.
“Jesus Christ.”
The man I’d seen across the street was back; he was certainly the naked man I’d seen in the garden of Mr. Hindemith except that now, in the early-morning light, I could see he was a little less of a man and a bit more of a beast. Certainly there was some animal-like power in his musculature, but it was his face that seemed particularly bestial and that reminded me of a hungry-looking wolf. And when he moved, he moved on all fours. It was hard to imagine this creature relaxing his hand for anything. Instinctively, I knew he wasn’t going away and that each time I looked he would be a little closer than he was before, as if he was biding his time before he killed me; and I understood the real stomach-churning fear that had possessed those others before me—Richardson, Davidoff, Ekman, Osborne, Durham.
“No wonder Davidoff tried to climb that tree,” I murmured. “Or that Ekman locked himself in his panic room.”
I turned away and made two strong fists and pumped the air in front of me as if I’d been holding the reins of a chariot.
“I have to pray. I have to fucking pray.”
But how? Perhaps, after all, it was better to pray in the old Catholic way.
“I need help. The help of Mary the Mother of God, perhaps. Surely she will help me.”
I lit the candle and, with the rosary wrapped tight around my fist, I knelt again.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Uttering a quiet sigh of satisfaction that I’d managed one prayer at last, I brought the rosary to my lips and kissed it and then snatched my hands away as the smell of something foul stayed in my nostrils.
“What the hell?”
I sniffed my hands again and recoiled once more as the strong smell of shit filled my head. Sara’s smell had disappeared completely and, worse, had been replaced with such an awful fecal stink that I was obliged to go immediately to the bathroom to wash my hands. I had to do this several times, and it was only when I had virtually scrubbed off the skin with soap and a nailbrush that the smell of shit finally disappeared.
God was hardly satisfied with that, however. When I tried to picture Sara in my mind’s eye, her naked flesh seemed vile and degraded, like that of a leper; her beautiful body was covered in warts and boils and hairs; it was as if suddenly he had made all memory of her disgusting.
“No,” I shouted at the ceiling. “Please don’t take her away from me so soon.”
But it was too late. All human traces of my former pleasure in her body were gone.
Exhausted, I sat down on the floor and allowed myself the respite of a brief moment’s recollection of happier times with Ruth and Danny. It seemed so long since I had
seen my son and I wondered if he was missing me. What had Ruth told him about me? That I was a godless sonofabitch? I would have given anything to see his sweet face again and hear him call me Daddy.
I frowned and shook my head.
“No,” I said. “This isn’t fair at all.”
A terrible series of images now afflicted me with even greater suffering. I saw myself twisting my son’s hair in my hand and slapping him hard on the cheek so that he cried with pain; kicking him down a whole flight of stairs; burning his eyeball with a hot cigarette; stamping on his face; punching him on the side of his head; and knocking out his teeth with my fist.
I knew these images were false, and yet I could not get them out of my mind. I knew where they came from, too, and as I tore my shirt, I heard myself say, “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return: the Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
I knew he would hardly be satisfied with that, so I smashed a cheap-looking vase on the mantelpiece next to the still burning candle and rolled up my shirtsleeves and, using a piece of broken pottery, began to scrape the skin of my arms until the blood was running down my hands onto the floor, just like Job’s had.
“You want to fill my mind with your hate. You want me to curse the day I was born, don’t you? Well, I do curse it. You want to rob me of everything that makes me a man.”
I glanced up from this position of abject self-pity as I saw something appear on the sidewalk right in front of my house. I stood up and saw his demon waiting there, closer now, closer than before; and in a horrible way it was as if I had always known this creature from a time before I’d even existed; he stared back into my face through the window and then bared his sharp yellow teeth in what might have been a smile but was more likely a snarl.