“In a dream.”
It took a moment for the answer to compute, then her eyebrows went up. “And how exactly does that work?”
“Sometimes I dream things. See people.”
“And your wife was one of those people?”
He nodded. “I was a graduate student at Princeton then. In the dream I saw Rebecca standing on the steps of Nassau Hall and was a little shocked when she turned and stared right back at me. Said my name. I found out later that she was psychic, too.”
Callahan looked confused. “I don’t follow.”
“We were sharing the same dream.”
Batty remembered that dream with great clarity, and the sudden stab of excitement he’d felt when he later saw Rebecca standing on those very steps and realized that she recognized him.
Dream sharing wasn’t uncommon between sensitives, but it usually took a coordinated effort to make it work, and this one had been spontaneous and exhilarating. It didn’t hurt that the girl he’d shared it with was breathtakingly beautiful.
Callahan said nothing, but Batty knew she was adding another item to her growing list of absurdities.
The waiter finally brought him his drink and he took a sip before continuing. “Anyway, back to Ithaca. Rebecca and I had settled in and she was feeling restless, but she’d always had this vast curiosity-another trait we shared-and she turned it toward the occult and angelology.”
“Angelology? That’s a new one.”
“Not really. People have been studying angels for centuries.”
“Is this where all your good angel/bad angel stuff comes from?”
Batty nodded. “There are as many theories about angelic spirits as there are tires in a junkyard, but Rebecca never did anything half-assed, and when she dove into it, what she discovered was that these so-called ‘beings of light’ are really no different than their dark brethren.”
“How so?”
“They’re all fallen angels. Cast out of heaven by their creator.”
“Even Gabriela’s favorite?”
He nodded again. “Michael, Raphael, Uriel-all of them. At one time they were right down there in the fire alongside Beelzebub, Mammon and Moloch. The only difference is that Michael and the others decided to ignore Satan’s call to arms and go their own way. Decided to honor their creator rather than fight against him. So a myth was born, promoting them to Archangels. The same myth that’s sold to schoolkids every Sunday. But the truth is, they’re not much different than us. Just struggling to do what’s right.”
Callahan took a healthy sip of her wine, then sighed. “I think my brain is about to implode.”
“Imagine how I feel. Rebecca became more and more obsessed with this stuff and told me she’d started hearing voices in her head.”
Callahan stiffened slightly. “That’s exactly what Gabriela’s boyfriend told me. But he claims a lot of people hear voices when they pray.”
“A lot of sensitives hear them, too. So I didn’t really give it much thought until she came to me one night and said she was afraid she might be in danger. She’d been experimenting with conjurations and was worried she may have summoned up a malevolent angel.”
“Or maybe attracted some psychopath who
“You go ahead and hang on to that, if it makes you feel better. But I was there, and I’m here to tell you that this was no human stalker. There was a presence in our house. Something watching us.”
He remembered waking up next to Rebecca and feeling that presence right there in the darkness of their bedroom, the faint smell of sulfur in the air. But oddly enough, the malevolence didn’t seem to be directed at him. Only at Rebecca. And as he watched her sleep, he knew something had to be done.
“So we dove headfirst into the literature,” he told Callahan, “looking for an incantation to rid the house of any dark spirits. But we were working with the original Latin text and we were both a little rusty at that point.”
“So you got it wrong,” she said.
He nodded. “
He was quiet a moment, mentally reliving that night. The dark angel plaguing Rebecca had become more aggressive in the last several hours, rendering her confused and nearly incoherent, begging for the thing to leave her alone.
He told Callahan this. Then he said, “I can’t imagine it was much different for Gabriela.”
Callahan didn’t respond, but it was evident by her expression that he’d struck a chord.
“It must have been two in the morning by this time. I kept trying the incantation, even tried the standard Catholic exorcism rights, but this thing had grabbed hold of her and wasn’t about to let go until she gave in.”
“Gave in?”
“That’s how they operate. They can’t make you do anything you don’t want to. So they work on you from the inside-tempt you, seduce you, play mind games with you, throw hallucinations at you, scare the ever-loving crap out of you . . . It’s like they’re waterboarding your brain until you finally succumb. And the weaker you are, the faster you fall.”
Batty had known that Rebecca was about to crack and had been desperate to stop it. What she was experiencing wasn’t the same as a dream, but he tried to share it with her, to get inside her head, and when he finally did, he’d heard his
The room around him began to shake then, the windows rattling, the bed rolling, and before Batty could duck, a drawer shot out from the dresser, slamming into his head, knocking him cold.
“When I came to,” he told Callahan, “the room was back to normal. Looked as if it had never been touched, except for her body on the bed, and that symbol burned into the mattress beneath her.”
He closed his eyes, trying now to push the image from his mind, tortured by the knowledge that Rebecca’s last moments had been filled with words of hatred, spoken in his voice. Had she known it was only a trick? He could only hope so.
He grabbed the glass in front of him and drained it. “I don’t know why
“I assume there was an investigation?”
“Not much of one. I knew my story sounded crazy, so I called the police and told them I had just come home and found her like that, knowing full well that they’d consider me a murder suspect. But without a motive or even a workable theory about how she got that way, they never bothered charging me. They got a look at the books she was reading, then chalked it up to a freak accident and called it a day.”
“Section had to know about this,” Callahan murmured. “So why didn’t they tell me?”
“Section?”
“Never mind,” she said. “But you’ve gotta know I’m clinging to the lifeboat right now-one with the letters WTF stamped on the side.”
“Like I said, I don’t blame you. And you may think I’m certifiable, but I know what I saw. Put a goddamn straitjacket on me, lock me up in Chabert Memorial, and my story won’t change.”
He considered ordering another drink, but decided against it. For the first time in recent memory, he didn’t want one. As if finally telling his story had somehow purged him of the need.
He watched Callahan drain her own glass and could see that she was struggling with all of this. Should she take that leap and believe him? Or simply fall back on what she knew, like the cops in Ithaca had?
But Batty wasn’t done yet. “With Gabriela, we’ve got a whole new wrinkle in the fabric. She was
“How many are there?”
“I’m not sure. I only know of one.”
“Who?”
“An antiquities dealer named Koray Ozan. But until today, I thought his involvement was just a rumor.”
“What changed your mind?”
