I went on down to the bathroom. No squid, no apparitions of any sort lurked in there, and the bedroom was cephalopod-free as well. The SAWM kept growing stronger. I was picking up Ari’s scattered clothes from the floor when the truth dawned on me: I wasn’t in any danger. Someone in my family was, and the most likely person was Maureen. I let his shirt lie where he’d dropped it and grabbed my cell phone from my shoulder bag. Fortunately, I had Kathleen’s number on speed dial.
Kathleen answered right away. “Oh, hi, Nola,” she said. “I was just thinking about you, wondering when the wedding’s going to be.”
“We can worry about that later,” I said. “Where’s Maureen?”
“Right here. Why? I—uh-oh!”
In the background I could hear the dogs start barking, howling, yapping, growling in alarm. Kathleen moved her phone away from her mouth and called out, “Jack! Something’s wrong!”
Distantly I heard Jack answer. Kathleen returned to the phone.
“Someone’s prowling around outside,” she said. “Jack’s got his rifle, and he’s going to flip on all the outside lights. We’ve kind of been expecting this. Chuck’s been too quiet lately.”
“Gathering steam, huh? Where are the kids?”
“Upstairs asleep. Well, they were asleep, but with all the dogs …” She paused briefly. “Maureen’s gone up to check on them. The kids, I mean, not the dogs.”
“I figured that. Tell her to stay away from the windows!”
Kathleen relayed the order; then there was silence, a minute or two of it, maybe, while I felt my heart pounding much too fast. I sat down on the edge of the bed and waited some more. I was just about to scream at her to say something when she did.
“Did you hear that?”
“No,” I said. “What was it?”
“A couple of shots. Jack just fired them. I could see him through the front window.”
“You shouldn’t be by the window either.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’m moving.”
“Well, for God’s sake, Kath! Did he hit him? I mean, did Jack shoot anyone?”
“No. He was firing into the ground. Oh, yeah, I should’ve told you that.”
Kathleen is not the most intelligent O’Grady, in case you haven’t guessed by now. Ari, meanwhile, had heard my side of the conversation and come into the bedroom. He stood listening with his arms crossed over his chest while I gave him a quick report.
“I’d like to talk with Jack,” he said and took his phone out of his jeans pocket.
Jack, it turned out, wanted to talk with Ari. Ari sat down next to me on the bed. We had a peculiar four-person, two-phone-calls conversation, the upshot of which boiled down to this. Chuck had been prowling around the fence. The dogs started throwing themselves against said fence and scared him off even before Jack fired, which he’d done to let Chuck know that he was armed and serious. Jack had heard Chuck’s Harley racing away a few moments after the second shot
“I don’t want Chuck shooting one of my dogs,” was Kathleen’s final comment. “Maybe we can get them little Kevlar thingies to wear.”
“Oh for God’s sake, honey!” Jack said.
They both clicked off, probably to have a fight about Kevlar vests for dogs. I put my phone down on the bedside table. Ari pocketed his.
“What counts,” I said, “is that Maureen and the kids are okay.”
“Quite,” Ari said. “I suspect that Trasker’s a coward. Men who prey on women generally are. He’ll keep away for a while, at least.”
“But we can’t know for how long.”
“True. It’s going to be hard on Maureen, wondering.”
“She should be able to go out during the day, shouldn’t she? I know she wants to look for a job. She kind of needs to. I mean, Jack’ll be willing to support her and the kids, but that’ll gripe Maureen. She’s always been the independent type.”
“It could be too dangerous. It depends.” Ari shrugged. “On how angry Chuck is, that is to say. If he’s willing to risk death to get at her …” He let his voice trail away.
I desperately wanted to cry. I squelched the impulse as not helpful. Ari put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a comforting squeeze.
“Mike’s not the only O’Grady who’s got lousy taste in partners,” I said. “Maureen’s husband was a wild kind of guy, too, but he never would have hurt her or the kids.”
“What happened to him?”
“She divorced him. He had another woman on the side. Maureen kind of knew, but she could ignore it until the other woman turned up pregnant. They had the DNA test, and yeah, the baby was JD’s.”
Ari muttered something in Hebrew. “JD?” he said. “That was his name?”
“Yep. He was from Kentucky originally. Another wild Irish-American guy. O’Connor is the kids’ last name. Maureen took O’Grady back.”
Ari rolled his eyes and repeated whatever it was in Hebrew. I stretched out my arms, so tense by then that they ached.
“I want a long hot shower,” I said.
“Good idea.” He smiled at me. “I could use one myself.”
One of the good features of our flat was the walk-in shower, roomy enough for two, nicely tiled in blue and green. So we had our shower, and the inevitable activity after being so close and warm and wet together. We went to bed early, and a good thing, too, considering that we had to be up by six-thirty.
The dawn was just breaking through the ocean fog when I staggered out of bed and went into the kitchen to start some coffee. Another damn squid was floating over the sink. It scuttled away into the multiverse before I could pop it with a ward. Its prudence indicated that it was no illusion. It was either the projection of an actual sapient squid’s mind or a full-blown Chaos critter that had some capacity to think or at least to react.
Once I’d drunk my first mug of coffee, I set up my laptop for secure video conferencing. I wanted no one to have any contact with my desktop, especially not other persons with psychic talents, not even Ari’s mother, if indeed I’d guessed correctly and she did have talents. Since Shira would be able to see me, I put on the dark blue silk blouse and accented it with the gold brooch Ari had given me. I took my laptop into the kitchen, plugged it into the DSL line there, and sat at the table.
Shira called right on time. She’d dressed for the occasion, too, in a pale green shirt and an amber necklace. Her hair was as dark and softly curly as Ari’s, though she wore hers long, pulled back into a gold clip. Anyone who saw them together would have had no trouble realizing that they were mother and son. Her eyes were as dark and large as his, and there was a touch of chiseled strength to her face that marked her not as masculine, but as handsome rather than beautiful.
After the usual polite greetings, Shira got right down to the business in hand.
“I’ve written out everything I can remember about Ezekiel’s visions,” she told me. “I’ve sent this material to you as an e-mail attachment. You’re quite right to suspect him of seeing his visions as the literal truth. His dreams, as well. He insisted upon that, no matter who tried to explain about symbolism and the like.”
“That must have been irritating,” I said. “Arguing about it, I mean.”
“It certainly irritated him.” She flashed me a smile that reminded me of Ari’s rare open grins. “But it’s not the reason I left the kibbutz. One thing that every official interviewer has asked is what drove me away. They all seem to think that it must have been a sexual proposition, but it was nothing of the sort. Since you’re female, you’re more likely to believe the truth.”
“From what I’ve been told about the kibbutz,” I said, “I got the impression that women existed mostly to cook, clean, and produce babies.”
“Unfortunately, that’s accurate, but at the beginning at least we were allowed to study Torah. The Orthodox, like my family, would never have countenanced that. It’s the main reason I was willing to join Ezekiel’s movement.”
“I see. You said ‘
at the beginning.’ Did that change?”
“Eventually, yes. The last straw was his declaration that women were absolutely forbidden from studying any of the Merkabah material. After several days of arguing, I realized that the situation was hopeless.”
I had only the most general idea of the mystical system she called “the Merkabah material,” but I did know its importance.
“I can see how that would have driven you away,” I said.
“Thank you,” Shira said. “I did try to explain it to some awful little man from MI5, but he simply could not see why I’d reacted the way I had.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“To make things worse, my husband insisted that I follow our rebbe’s declaration. I left them both behind. I wanted to take Ari with me, but his father would have fought me tooth and nail in court over the divorce if I had. I did insist on joint custody.”
“That’s why Ari spent so much time in the U.K.?”
“Yes, exactly. Not enough time, to my way of thinking, but there you are. It was the best I could do. I wept every time I put him on the plane to go back.”
Her voice shook, remembering. I paused to give her a chance to compose herself.
“Now, about the Messiah,” I said next. “Did Reb Ezekiel think he was the Messiah himself?”
“No, not at all. He wasn’t that daft.” She paused, thinking. “Ezekiel hated to be wrong, you know. Being ignorant was even worse. He had absolutely no idea who the Messiah might be, so he preferred not to speak of him at all.”
“The prudent course, huh? I tried to find copies of his books. But I couldn’t, not even on the Internet.”
“Not even for ready money,” Shira said with a faint smile. “They went ‘oh pee’—that means out of print—a very long time ago. For a while one could find them on the occult collectors’ markets, but about ten or twelve years ago, someone bought up all the remaining copies. It was very odd. Rumor had it that an Orthodox religious fanatic in Japan wanted to destroy them. He must have been fabulously rich, because his agent bought copies from individuals for very high prices.”
“I’ve never heard of any fabulously rich Orthodox Jewish Japanese people.”
“Neither have I. I have no idea what the truth behind all that was.”
“Did you sell your copies of the books?”
“Unfortunately, I’d already burned them in a fit of pique when I left the kibbutz, or I’d send them to you.” She sighed and looked away from the camera. “I was still so young then. I hope I never feel so bitterly disappointed again.”
“You’d invested a lot of yourself into that kibbutz.”
“Yes, too much. Well, things like that do happen.” She shrugged with a little shake of her shoulders. “One must go on. Do you have any other questions?”
“Well, speaking of books, your husband’s written one, hasn’t he? About the lost continent of Mu.”
“Oh, yes.” Her look of long-suffering reminded me strikingly of Ari’s expression when he felt martyred by something I’d done. “At least he has an original thesis.”
“What’s that?”
“That Mu never existed above the water. He thinks the legends, such as they are, refer to an underwater civilization of—” She sighed and braced herself. “—of psychic squid.”
I gaped and stared. She misinterpreted.
“I know it’s mad,” Shira said. “I love him anyway.”
“I understand.” I hesitated until I’d found just the right words. “Are copies available? I love to read science fiction and fantasy, you see, and actually that sounds like a good story.”
“You know, you have a point. Huh. I wonder if he’d care to rewrite it from that angle?” Her eyes gleamed, and I saw the editor in her soul. “That really might sell, you know, as a novel. But, at any rate, about copies. We have twelve cartons of them sitting in the upstairs bedroom. Please allow me to send you one. A single copy, of course, not a carton, much as I’d love to unload one. Even the Oxfam bookshops have taken to refusing them.”
We shared a laugh.
“That would be lovely,” I said. “Do you have our mailing address?”
“Oh, yes, Ari sent it to me. I hope that’s acceptable?”
“Yes, that’s fine, though please don’t spread it around. After I read the vision material, can I contact you again?”
“Oh, yes, please do. But at this e-mail address. I don’t know what’s wrong with Lev. He’s being so grumpy about my talking with you. Of course, knowing you want to read his book might improve his mood.”
We shared another laugh, mine forced, because I suspected that he’d be less than pleased.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Don’t tell him, and I’ll write him a fan letter as if I’d found it for myself.”
“He’ll love that. Thank you!”
“In the meantime, can’t you tell him that you mostly want to get to know your son’s live-in girlfriend?”
“That might work.” She considered me for a moment. “Do you really want to marry Ari? You seem so intelligent.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, “but that’s not because of him. I don’t want to marry anyone.”
“Wise of you, my dear. Very wise. He won’t listen, of course.”
“Very true. We have the occasional argument about it.”
“Well, as long as they’re only occasional.” She paused, and her eyes went slightly out of focus, and her mouth, slightly slack. “I don’t know why,” she said in a soft voice, “but this is important. You really should read the Book of Enoch. It’s online, I believe. Read about the Beni Elohim.” On the last sentence her voice rang.
“I will, then,” I said. “For sure.”
Shira shook her head and shrugged with a little off-center twitch. She had psychic talents, all right. She looked at me with a puzzled frown that told me she didn’t quite remember what she’d just done.
“You delivered a message,” I said, “about the Book of Enoch.”
“Ah.” Shira reached up and fussed with the collar of her shirt while she recovered herself. “Oh, yes, Ezekiel was quite taken with that, and with the Apocalypse of Abraham, too. Noncanonical, both of them, and really rather odd.” She smiled briefly. “At times I wonder why it took me so long to realize that he was quite mad.”
“Lack of experience?”
“Quite possibly. Youth! I was just eighteen when I married Ari’s father. He was much older. I think he turned twenty-nine that year. My family approved of him, you see, and my father was quite keen on the marriage.” She smiled again. “But Yosh Nathan did have gifts, in his own way. I think that’s what finally convinced me to accept him.”
“Psychic gifts, you mean?”
“No, artistic. He was a very talented musician, a pianist, but working on the kibbutz ruined his hands. The calluses, and then he lost a finger in a tractor accident.”
Even though I’d never met the man, I felt as if this information had punched me in the guts. A talented pianist, doing grunt farm work, ending up working in the insurance business—I shook my head to throw off the feeling it gave me. I may even have uttered a small moan.
“Yes,” Shira said. “I felt so bad for him. Once the kibbutz collapsed, he’d given up everything for nothing.” She sighed. “Yosh has his good points, and he did give me Ari. Only the one child, but considering what a handful he was, one was probably enough. Speaking of whom—”
“I’ll fetch him. I’ll bet he’d like to talk with you, too.”
I left them having a mother-son chat on my laptop in the kitchen. I returned to my desktop computer and picked up her e-mail concerning the visions. When I downloaded the attachment, I realized she’d sent me over thirty pages of single-spaced material. Although I’d need to study it in detail later, I gave it a quick scan. Most of it concerned figures from the Tanakh, fellow prophets as Zeke called them, but toward the end I found a piece of crucial information.
In a rainbow-colored sea of light,
metal bubbles moved through the stars, each of them a gleaming silver sphere. When Reb Ezekiel called upon an angel to reveal their secret, one of the spheres became transparent.
Concerning the spheres, Shira had written, “I wish I could remember his exact wording, but it’s been too many years. I do remember that he saw beings inside the transparent one, strange beings floating in water. They had tentacles. I mentioned this to Lev, who told me that Ezekiel must have been receiving sendings from the last giant squid mages of the Muvian civilization. I rather doubt that.”
So did I. The question remained: what were the wretched Venusian squid up to? And why had Reb Ekeziel seen them in vision? They certainly posed no threat to Israel. Why would aquatic creatures want to invade the Negev Desert? They also didn’t match the rebbe’s other visions about aliens who looked like cherubim invading in ships built like the Ark of the Covenant. I decided that later, once I had more time, I’d do some concerted meditations and aura fieldwork on the images.
There remained a possible threat to other parts of our planet, Terra Four. Could the cephalopods actually present one? Spare14 had mentioned once that the cephalopods had well-developed psychic powers that did make them a threat to other species through, most likely, their ability to influence the other sapients’ actions. I made a note to pry more information out of him.
While I waited for Ari to finish chatting with his mother, I printed out the material she’d sent so he could have a copy for himself. This way he’d know what lay behind his memories of the rebbe’s ideas, which were as muddled as childhood memories always are. A few minutes later he carried two steaming coffee mugs into the living room to join me. He handed me mine, for which I thanked him profoundly.
“I’ve logged off and shut down,” he said. “Mother said you might have printout for me.”
“I do, and here it is.” I made another note to run security programs on my laptop, in case Ari had loaded something on to it. “She’s got very strong talents, by the way.”
Love on the Run Page 17
