by J M Fraser
“Not my baby. She’s grown.” Bethany paused, sobbed, gathered herself. “I followed her down the stairs three times. She jumped, she fell, a man pushed her onto the tracks.”
A sandy-haired young man swept past them and shouted down the stairs. “Carla!”
“He’s the man!” Bethany lurched forward.
“No.” Gabriella held fast to her hand. “Let me do this.” She leapt into the man’s mind.
Save Carla. Die with Carla. The man’s panicked thoughts were diametrically opposed. Gabriella dove past the chaos of his stressed-out, unreliable awareness and examined his memory. She found Brewster DeLay, an American who sometimes dreamed in Latin about another world. But unlike Bethany and Carla, he didn’t have a duplicate self in Sanctimonia. His other half lived in the kingdom of Virtus—among the fallen people Gabriella wanted to save.
She caught her breath. God had blessed her with two possible messiahs, each with a half soul in either world. First Maynya/Carla. Now Brewster and some mystery man on the other side.
Gabriella waded back into Brewster’s conscious mind and picked out whatever lucid thoughts she could find. Brewster knew Gabriella. She’d sent him on the run. But why?
No intelligible answer.
She glimpsed a date and gasped. The sands of time had formed dunes that collapsed in on themselves. She and Bethany had come forward twenty-seven years, but Brewster was traveling backward by one. God in His puzzling wisdom had pulled from both directions in bringing them to this time and place.
Damn her pounding heart. She’d lost the thread of the man’s thoughts!
Gabriella released Bethany’s hand and raced down the subway stairs after him, out of the daylight and into the gloom. She paused at the first landing and glanced around. An empty cashier’s cage. Advertisements plastered to the wall. Toothpaste, perfume, a men’s cologne. An expired movie poster—Exodus, return engagement, coming October 4.
A swarm of butterflies burst past the turnstiles. She hurried through them and started down gloomy stairs toward the tracks.
Darker. Darker still. Five steps down, only the dimmest rays of a withering sun shone at her back. Lower, nothing but a black void. She stopped short and stared into an infinity of nothingness, the far edge of Bethany’s vision.
Or her own? Perhaps this glimpse at the future was the road God had paved for Gabriella to follow.
She hurried back up the stairs. “I lost him.”
Bethany had picked up the newspaper by then. She looked up from it with an expression of fierce resolve. “None of this has happened yet. I can keep Carla from ever coming near this place. Not now. Not when she’s ten. Not when she’s twenty…” She returned her gaze to the paper and its telltale date. “Or thirty.”
Thirty. A tingle ran down Gabriella’s spine. Perhaps the dunes of time had shifted for a reason. Luke 3:23. Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. She’d stolen a glimpse of a birthdate when perusing Brewster’s memory. Carla would be thirty in 2012, but he’d only be twenty-nine. Did God pull him back from a year in his future so he and Carla would each be the same blessed age at this climactic moment?
The idea tickling Gabriella’s mind earlier in young Carla’s bedroom now flared like a thousand candles. In the case of two people sharing a single soul, the death of one should make the other stronger. The premise had such dizzying implications Gabriella had to grab a lamppost to keep from falling. Maybe Carla’s accident or suicide or murder in the subway station would merge two half souls together within Maynya. Might the rare brain lobe then come alive, igniting the power of illusion?
In that case, on October 23, 2012, the thirty-year-old daughter of a Mystic guardian could begin her ministry, ready and able to use miracles in convincing a doubting people of God’s glory.
And Brewster’s alter ego in Virtus?
A co-messiah perhaps. Or Maynya’s protector.
Except one lived in Virtus and the other in Sanctimonia. Clearly, God wanted Gabriella to bridge the gap.
But how?
Step one would be to let some things play out as intended. Carla would have to die at age thirty.
Gabriella pressed a silver coin into Bethany’s hand. A quatrant used as currency in Virtus.
Bethany looked down at it, turned it over, ran a fingertip across the symbols. “What is this?”
“Payment for your daughter, but I owe you twenty-nine more.” She pulled Bethany back to Syracuse, erased the vision from the woman’s mind, and left.
Gabriella had hard thinking to do.
Carla, Brewster, Maynya, and a Virtus mystery man. The hazy outlines of a plan began taking shape in her mind.
PART II: WATER INTO WINE
CHAPTER 7
The town of Dubris in Western Virtus
Twenty-two days after harvest moon 3414 (October 1, 2013, in our universe)
Quintus rose earlier than his companions and crept out of camp without waking them, moving on foot in the gray light of early dawn. He followed a maze of narrow streets past the still-sleeping marketplace, around weathered dwellings ranging in quality from mud hovel to adobe splendor, and up to a place of worship nestled just inside the town’s sweeping walls.
He’d found this place three years earlier when moving in the opposite direction, away from his brother, Albus, and the circle of debauched followers who clung to the man like a dirty cloak.
This crude temple had been referred to as a church by a group of pilgrims loitering on its steps that day. They claimed to be the designers of the steep-roofed structure and the large, wooden cross hanging above the entryway. But upon further questioning, he learned they’d gotten the plans from legendary Saint Gabriella in Sanctimonia. She’d taught them all she knew about the one true God, as well.
Quintus had been impressed by the humble devotion exhibited by those pilgrims and by the logic of their beliefs, for the most part, not counting their fantastic claims about a girl who never aged. But mostly, he’d been drawn in by the ethereal calm that came over him when he entered this church and sat on one of its wooden benches.
Today, he didn’t find calm. Or any of the pilgrims. Instead, grubby moneylenders had already set up their stations at the base of the stairs, sitting on wooden crates before small tables, eagerly waiting for the most vulnerable borrowers—those who had such urgent needs they’d come at the earliest opportunity and pay the highest rates.
These thieves or their kind had removed the cross and scrawled crass messages on the church’s adobe walls. The cost of money. The price of wine. The rates charged by local whores.
And the pilgrims? He’d heard the tale. They’d been caught in the wide net of a pogrom. Some had been enslaved. Others crucified.
Quintus shuddered. Why return to this desecrated site? What did he hope to find?
“Ho there! Have you come in need of coin?” A cloaked lender hurried out from behind his table, approaching close enough for Quintus to smell his sour breath.
“I’ve come to remember what was lost,” Quintus said.
Yet how to recall such a thing? Virtus had never been a benevolent kingdom in his lifetime. Nor had he heard it to be one at any point in its long, violent history. Overwhelming sadness almost made him sob. He turned his back.
The lender persisted, grabbing Quintus’s sleeve. “You’ve no money at hand? Perhaps you left your purse at home? Come, we’ll set down your name and strike a deal for later.”
His name? He’d lost it in the clouds of gloom now choking him from throat to heart.
Who am I?
The clouds parted. I am Quintus, Quintus, Quintus…no…
I am—
Dut-dut-dut DAH!
The opening of Beethoven’s Fifth buckled his knees.
Brewster shot up in bed and groped for his bearings in the mental shadows between dreams and reality. Static electricity must have triggered the doorbell. Or wind. Either way, he remembered his name now.
He was Brewster DeLay,
a businessman and part-time writer living in Northbrook, Illinois, a place where smart phones, Twitter, Facebook, and Roku ruled the land. He hadn’t been summoned from the front to journey across a desert nation where angry mobs crucified pilgrims.
He didn’t live in a world where everyone spoke Latin.
He’d first had these nighttime episodes as a boy, but his dad, a professor of language studies, explained them away at the time. You’ve heard my lesson rehearsals, and they’ve gotten stuck in your head, the old man had said.
What would he say now, some twenty years later?
He’d say, you are Brewster, Brewster, Brewster—
Dut-dut-dut DAH!
The blasted musical chime sent him sliding back down beneath the covers. The list of midnight visitors a man hoped to find on his doorstep was short.
A supercharged storm must have pressed its angry thumb on his doorbell. Gusts still buffeted the house, humming through every crack in the frame. Thunder rumbled in the distance and flashes illuminated the window shade, but halfheartedly now and at decreasing intervals. After pausing to punk him, nature had moved on.
But what if somebody real rang the doorbell twice?
Brewster manned up and got out of bed. He padded on bare feet into the hallway and peered over the railing into the foyer. He couldn’t see anyone through the little panel of glass near the top of the front door.
He shifted his attention to the living room and stared straight out the picture window behind the couch. A streetlamp at the edge of the driveway cast enough light to provide a shadowy portrait of his lawn, the cul-de-sac, and the neighbors’ lawns across the street. At first, no doorbell-ringing soldiers of the night marred his view, but as he started turning toward his bedroom, he caught a hint of motion.
Someone approached from a few houses down—coming not going, and therefore not guilty of ringing his doorbell, but out there all the same. A woman just visible in the dim lighting ambled across a neighbor’s lawn, stepped over the curb onto the pavement of the cul-de-sac, and looked up at his house.
Brewster shrugged off a baffling stab of foreboding. An unexpected stranger could seem creepy in the dead of night, but come on. The recurrence of the Virtus dream must have set his nerves on edge.
Virtus, Latin for power. What an odd name for a nation, even in one’s dream. What was his subconscious trying to tell him? Probably that he longed for those pre-recession days when a man didn’t fear losing his job, doorbells didn’t ring on their own, and mysterious women didn’t come calling in the dead of night. And yet, that last item wasn’t necessarily undesirable.
He headed into the bedroom, stripped off his pajamas, and hurried into jeans and a shirt. Then he grabbed a pair of sandals from a shoe rack and rushed back to the hallway.
By the time he returned to the railing and glanced out the window, the woman had settled into a sitting position in the middle of the street. Her dress formed a circular pool of dark fabric beneath her, not quite touching the puddles on either side but close enough to suggest she didn’t care.
She could join the club of stressed-out middle-class recession victims. Brewster counted himself a member. He’d earlier handled a flurry of emails and phone calls about yet another unsolvable problem at his failing day job. The office had been following him home with increasing frequency lately. A home in need of repairs he could barely afford. Was it any wonder his subconscious had fled the known universe yet again this night?
Still, problems of his own or not, he’d always been a sucker for damsels in distress. He got his sorry ass in gear, headed downstairs and out the front door.
Heavy summer air hadn’t headed south yet despite a turn of the calendar into early October. The thick atmosphere could have fogged a mirror and provided every indication the evening’s pyrotechnics hadn’t ended. The rain had stopped for the moment, but its damp odor lingered in the heavy air. A second storm flashed strobe-light glows in the western sky, accompanied by so many individual rolls of thunder they combined into a single low growl.
He hesitated. A seemingly helpless woman might have an accomplice waiting in the shadows. Together they could take him down, break into his house and…what? Handle some of those annoying emails from his workaholic office manager? His priceless art collection amounted to a few cheap prints he’d picked up at local fairs, and the strongbox in his bedroom closet—an oversized flowerpot full of loose change—weighed in at about a hundred bucks.
He gazed beyond the cul-de-sac down a winding street lit here and there by driveway lamps. Nothing about the scene struck him as suspicious. He left his porch, followed the short sidewalk cutting across his lawn to the curb, and stepped around a puddle into the street. “Are you okay?”
The woman looked up at him with a foggy expression at first but returned to planet earth with remarkable speed. She scrambled to her feet and brushed her hands down a dress as dark as her hair. “I’m fine.”
She could have leapt from the pages of a failed Brewster DeLay novel—a quirky heroine dressed for a cocktail party but wandering the rain-slick streets after some misfortunate event cast her into the midnight shadows. Her spicy perfume intoxicated him. He lost himself in her shaggy hair, gray-green eyes, high cheekbones, half smile, then drifted his gaze down a longish black dress tight enough to reveal all the right curves. He plunged lower still and discovered wildly impractical three-inch heels.
Then came the inevitable fit of insecurity. How would he measure up under her scrutiny? He kept himself reasonably fit, although halfheartedly, but he didn’t dress well, and he seldom bothered to use a brush or comb. Hopefully she’d agree light hair looked best in a state of mild disarray. He’d been getting away with the excuse for years.
Brewster dragged his gaze back up her figure. She’d arched her brows by then, evidently having recovered sufficiently to notice him undressing her with his eyes. He tried to feign innocence with a shrug. “Sorry, I’m not all the way awake yet.”
Her smile widened to full amusement. “That’s one of the better excuses for leering I’ve ever heard.”
She had him there.
“You need to be more gentlemanly on our first date,” she added.
“Is that what this is?”
She glanced down at herself. “I am dressed for a date, but we’d probably know each other’s names if we were on one, wouldn’t we?”
“I’m Brewster DeLay.”
“Carla Summers.”
“How’d you keep from getting drenched in the storm that blew through here?”
She motioned toward a house with a wraparound front deck. “Those people have an old-fashioned porch swing. I might have been tempted to spend a little time on it even in good weather.” The thunder in the distance grew louder, closing in on them, although she didn’t seem hurried by it.
“I’m always looking for ways to slow the world down, too,” he said.
“You’re fine. I’m the one who was sitting in the puddles.” She looked down at her dress again and ran a hand across a damp patch by her hip.
“Yeah, what’s with that, anyway?”
“I got lost taking a walk. Your streets are twisty.” She shifted her gaze to the wet pavement. “I decided to sit there until I evaporated with the steam of leftover rain.”
He couldn’t write a line that good if his life depended on it.
“You’ve got a she’s crazy look in your eyes,” Carla said.
“I’m clumsy on first dates.”
“How are you with directions? Can you tell me which way Sanders is?”
“The road?” He pointed west. “It’s miles from here.”
“That’s where I live.”
“You sure took a hike.”
“Tell me about it.”
Lightning flashed. A sharp crack of thunder soon followed, and a fat, chilly raindrop struck the back of his neck. “We need to get you out of this weather. Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Thanks, but I’m meant to be alone toni
ght.” She turned away and headed back across the street.
Carla had wandered into his cul-de-sac, probably without any ID—she didn’t have a purse—and wearing shoes that didn’t fit her story of having walked three or four miles. A scam of some sort was certainly possible. Maybe the most sensible action would be for him to head back into his house, grab his cell phone, and call the cops. They’d hustle her out of his life, taking her drop-dead looks, her easy humor, her air of mystery… “Wait.”
She stopped and turned. Another splat of rain came down, and another. The skies threatened to open at any moment.
“Come on in and wait out the storm.”
“You won’t try to…”
“Believe me, the most I’ll do is offer you a drink.”
“That’s a slippery slope,” she said.
“Just coffee then.”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“How about tea?”
CHAPTER 8
While midnight rain soaked the neighborhood
Brewster swirled a glass of vegetable juice in his hand, trying to reshape it into something more appealing. He glanced across the kitchen table at the dark-haired beauty who’d wandered into his cul-de-sac like an offering from the god of thunder. Behold Carla, and happy birthday.
“I knew you’d never drink that.” She’d teased him into trying the juice earlier when she discovered the can in the fridge next to a six-pack of beer.
“I’m saying a little prayer over it first.”
“More like a novena.” The hint of humor in Carla’s expression defeated a comic, crossed-arm attempt to come across as a stern schoolmarm type. A plunging neckline also betrayed her intended image, although he supposed if she wore glasses and kept a straight face, she could play a stern, naughty librarian like a champ.
He hated to back down from a challenge. Maybe if he closed his eyes and gulped this slop down, he could get on with his life and never shop healthy again. But what about the aftertaste? Carrots? Beets? Probably not beets. Otherwise the drink would be red. Cauliflower? He shuddered.
