The Mediator #4: Darkest Hour

by Jenny Carroll

  "Jack," I said from between gritted teeth. "Just reel me back in if I'm gone more than half an hour, all right?" I figured half an hour was about as long as anybody's soul could be separated from their body. On TV I was always seeing stuff about little kids who'd slipped into icy water and drowned and been technically dead for up to forty minutes, yet recovered without any brain damage or anything. So I figured half an hour was cutting it as close as I could.

  "But how – "

  "Oh my God," I snapped at him. "Just do it, okay?"

  Jack glowered at me. Hey, just because we're both mediators doesn't mean we get along all the time.

  "Okay," he said. Under his breath, I heard him mutter, "You don't have to be such a witch about it."

  Only he didn't say witch. Really, it is shocking, the words kids are using these days.

  "All right," I said. I stepped into the center of the circle of candles and stood in the middle of all the chicken blood symbols. "Here goes nothing."

  Jack looked down at his notecard. Then he looked back up at me.

  "Shouldn't you lie down?" he asked. "I mean, if it's gonna be like you're in a coma, I don't want you to fall down and hurt yourself."

  He was right. I didn't want my hair to catch on fire or anything.

  On the other hand, I didn't want to get chicken blood on my dress. I mean, it was an expensive one. Ninety-five dollars at Urban Outfitters.

  Then I thought, Suze, what is wrong with you? It's just a dress. You're doing this for Jesse. Isn't he worth more than ninety-five dollars?

  So I started to lie down.

  But I had only managed to get down on one knee when there was a terrific thumping on the door to the suite.

  I'll admit it. I panicked. I figured it was the fire department or somebody responding to to a report of smoke from someone whose bathroom vent adjoined Jack's.

  "Quick," I hissed at him. "Blow out all the candles!"

  While Jack hurried to do as I said, I stumbled to the door.

  "Who is it?" I called sweetly when I got there.

  "Susannah," an all-too-familiar voice said. "Open the door this instant."

  C H A P T E R

  14

  If you ask me, Father D way overreacted.

  I mean, first of all, I had the situation completely under control.

  And second, it wasn't as if we'd sacrificed any small animals, or whatever. I mean, the chicken had already been dead.

  So all that stomping around and calling us names was really unnecessary.

  Not that he called Jack any names. No, most of the names were hurled at me. Apparently, if I am intent on destroying myself, that is one thing. But to force a small boy to aid in my self-destruction? That is just despicable.

  And my pointing out that the small boy was the one who'd created the need for me to behave self-destructively? Yeah, that didn't go over too well.

  But what the whole thing did do was illustrate to Father Dominic just how serious I was about my plan. I guess it finally got through to him that I was going to do my best to find Jesse, with or without his help.

  So he decided that, under those circumstances, he had better help, if only to improve my chances of not hurting myself, or anybody else.

  "It will not," he said, looking all tight-lipped about it as he unlocked the doors to the basilica, "be any fly-by-night operation, either. None of this Brazilian voodoo business. We are going to perform a decent Christian exorcism, or none at all."

  Really, if you think about it, I probably have the most bizarre conversations of anyone on the planet. Seriously. I mean, a decent Christian exorcism?

  But it isn't just the conversations I have that are bizarre. I mean, the circumstances under which I have them are pretty bizarre, too. For instance, I was having this one in a dark empty church. Dark because it was after midnight, and empty for the same reason.

  "And you are going to have adult supervision," Father Dominic went on as he ushered me inside. "How you could have expected that boy to successfully perform so complicated a procedure, I simply cannot imagine …"

  He had been ranting in that particular vain all afternoon. All the way up until Jack's parents – not to mention Paul – had gotten back to the suite, as a matter of fact. Father D hadn't, of course, been able to whisk me off right away the way he'd wanted to, because of Jack. Instead, Jack and I had been forced to clean up the mess we'd made – it is no joke sponging chicken blood out from between bathroom tiles, let me tell you – and then we'd had to sit and wait for Dr. and Mrs. Slater to return from their tennis lesson. Jack's parents had looked a little surprised to find the three of us sitting there on the couch. I mean, think about it: a baby-sitter, a boy, and a priest? Talk about feeling as if you were whacked up on Scooby Snacks.

  But what was I supposed to do? Father D wouldn't leave without me. He didn't trust me not to try exorcising myself.

  So the three of us sat there while Father D lectured us on the fine art of mediation. He talked for two hours. I'm not kidding. Two hours. I can tell you, Jack was probably regretting ever having told me about the whole I see dead people thing by the end of it. He was probably all, Uh, yeah, about the dead people? Joking, guys. I was joking....

  But I don't know, maybe it was good the little guy got the do's and don'ts. God knew I hadn't been too lucid with my own Intro to Mediation. I mean, if I'd been a little clearer on the finer points, maybe this whole thing with Jesse would never have –

  But whatever. You can only beat yourself up so much. I was fully aware the entire mess was my own fault. That's why I was so intent on fixing it.

  Oh, and the part about my being in love with the guy? Yeah, that had a little something to do with it, too.

  Anyway, that's what we were doing when Jack's parents walked in: listening to Father D drone on about responsibility and courtesy when dealing with the undead.

  Father Dominic dried up when Dr. and Mrs. Slater, followed by Paul, came into the suite. They, in turn, stopped chatting about their dinner plans and just stood there, staring.

  Paul was the one who came out of it first.

  "Suze," he said, smiling. "What a surprise. I thought you weren't feeling well."

  "I recovered," I said, standing up. "Dr. and Mrs. Slater, Paul, this is, um, the principal of my school, Father Dominic. He was nice enough to give me a ride over so that I could, um, visit Jack …"

  "How do you do?" Father Dominic got quickly to his feet. Like I said, Father D's no slouch in the looks department. He cut a pretty impressive figure, all snowy-topped six feet of him. He didn't look like the kind of guy you'd feel funny about finding in your hotel suite with your eight-year-old and his baby-sitter, which is saying quite a lot, you know.

  When Dr. and Mrs. S heard that Father D was affiliated with the Junipero Serra Mission, they got all chummy and started saying how they'd been on the tour, and how impressive it was and all. I guess they didn't want him to think they were the kind of people who came to a town with a historically significant slice of Americana attached to it, and then spent the whole time they were there playing golf and downing mimosas.

  While his parents and Father D schmoozed, Paul sidled up to me and whispered, "What are you doing tonight?"

  I thought about telling him the truth: "Oh, nothing. Just having my soul exorcised so I can roam around purgatory, looking for the ghost of the dead cowboy who used to live in my bedroom."

  But that, you know, might have sounded flippant, or like one of those made-up excuses girls use. You know, the old "I'm washing my hair" put-down. So I just said, "I've got plans."

  Paul went, "Too bad. I was hoping we could take a drive up to Big Sur and watch the sunset, then maybe grab something to eat."

  "Sorry," I said, with a smile. "Sounds great, but like I said, I've got plans."

  Most guys would have dropped it after that, but Paul, for some reason, did not. He even reached out and casually draped an arm around my shoulders … if you can do something like that casually.
Somehow, though, he pulled it off. Maybe because he's from Seattle.

  "Suze," he said, dipping his voice low, so that no one else in the room could overhear him – especially his little brother, who was clearly straining his neck in an effort to do so. "It's Friday night. We're leaving day after tomorrow. You and I might never see each other again. Come on. Throw a guy a bone, will you?"

  I don't have guys pursuing me all that often – at least, not hotties like Paul. I mean, most of the guys who've liked me since I moved to California . . . well, there've been some serious relationship issues, such as the fact that they ended up serving long prison terms for murder.

  So this was pretty new for me. I was impressed in spite of myself.

  Still, I'm not a dope. Even if I hadn't been in love with somebody else, Paul Slater was from out of town. It's easy for guys who are leaving in a couple of days to give a girl the rush. I mean, come on: they don't have to commit.

  "Gosh," I said. "That is just so sweet. But you know what? I really do have other plans." I stepped out from beneath his arm and totally interrupted Dr. Slater's in-depth description of that day's golf score – bogey, bogey, par, par. "Can you give me a lift home, Father D?"

  Father Dominic said he could, of course, and we left. I noticed Paul giving me the old hairy eyeball as we said our good-byes, but I figured it was because he was hacked at me for turning down his dinner invitation.

  I didn't know it was for entirely different reasons. At least, not then. Although, of course, I should have. I really should have.

  Anyway, Father D lectured me all the way home. He was way mad, madder than he'd ever been with me before, and I've done some stuff that's gotten him plenty peeved. I wanted to know how he'd figured out I was at the hotel and not back at the paper helping Cee Cee write her story, like I'd said I'd be, and he said it hadn't been hard: he just remembered that Cee Cee was a straight-A student who surely wouldn't need my help writing anything, and turned his car around. When he found out I'd left ten minutes earlier, he tried to think where he would have gone under similar circumstances, back when he was my age.

  "The hotel was the obvious choice," Father Dominic informed me as we pulled up in front of my house. No ambulances this time, I was relieved to note. Just the shady pine trees and the tinny sound of the radio Andy was listening to in the backyard as he worked on the deck. A sleepy summer evening. Not at all the kind of night you'd think of when you heard the word exorcism.

  "You are not," Father D went on, "precisely unpredictable, Susannah."

  Predictable I may be, but it has apparently worked to my advantage, since right before I got out of the car, Father D went, "I'll return at midnight to bring you down to the Mission."

  I looked at him in surprise. "The Mission?"

  "If we're going to perform an exorcism," he said, tersely, "we're going to do it correctly, in a house of the Lord. Unfortunately the monsignor, as you know, is sure to frown on such a use of church property, so while I dislike having to resort to subterfuge, I can see that you will not be swayed from this course, and so it will unfortunately be necessary in this case. I want to make certain there's no chance of Sister Ernestine or anyone else discovering us. Therefore, midnight it will have to be."

  And midnight, therefore, it was.

  I can't really tell you what I did in the meantime. I was too nervous, really, to do much of anything. We had takeout for dinner. I don't know what it was. I hardly tasted it. It was just me and my mom and Andy, since Sleepy had a date with Caitlin, and Dopey was with his latest skank.

  The only thing I know for sure is that Cee Cee called with the news that the story on the dysfunctional de Silva/Diego family was going to run in the Sunday edition of the paper.

  "It'll reach thirty-five thousand people," Cee Cee assured me. "Way more than our circulation during the week. More people subscribe to the Sunday paper, because of the funnies and all."

  The coroner, she informed me, had come through with a tentative confirmation of my story: the skeleton found in my backyard was between one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy-five years old, and belonged to a male of twenty to twenty-five years of age.

  "Race," Cee Cee went on, "is difficult to determine due to the damage to the skull from Brad's shovel. But they were certain about the cause of death."

  I clutched the receiver to my ear, conscious that my mother and Andy, over at the dinner table, could hear every word.

  "Oh?" I said, trying to keep my tone light. But I could feel myself getting cold again, just like I had that afternoon in the photocopy cubicle.

  "Asphyxiation," Cee Cee said. "There's like some bone in the neck they can tell by."

  "So he was …"

  "Strangled," Cee Cee said matter-of-factly. "Hey, what are you doing tonight, anyway? Wanna hang? Adam's got some family thing he has to go to. We could rent a movie – "

  "No," I said. "No, I can't. Thanks, Cee Cee. Thanks a lot."

  I hung up the phone.

  Strangled. Jesse had died from being strangled. By Felix Diego. Funny, I had somehow always figured he'd been shot to death. But strangling made more sense: people would have heard a shot and come to investigate. Then there'd have been no question about what happened to Hector de Silva.

  But strangling someone? That was pretty much silent. Felix could easily have strangled Jesse in his sleep, then carried his dead body into the backyard and then buried it, along with his belongings. No one would have been the wiser …

  I guess I must have stood there looking down at the phone for a while, since my mom went, "Suze? Are you all right, honey?"

  I jumped and went, "Yeah, Mom. Sure. I'm fine."

  But I hadn't been fine then. And I certainly wasn't fine now.

  I had only been to the Mission after dark a couple times before, and it was still as creepy now as it had been then . . . long shadows, dark recesses, spooky noises as our footsteps echoed down the aisle between the pews. There was this statue of the Virgin Mary right by the doorway, and Adam had told me once that if you walked by it while thinking an impure thought, the statue would weep blood.

  Well, my thoughts as I walked into the basilica weren't exactly impure, but I noticed as I passed the Virgin Mary that she looked more particularly prone to weeping blood than usual. Or maybe it was just the dark.

  In any case, I was creeped out. Above my head yawned the huge dome you could see, glowing red in the sun and blue in the moon, from my bedroom window, while before me loomed the chancel in which the altar glowed, swathed in white.

  Father Dom had been busy, I saw when I entered the church. Candles had been set up in a wide circle just before the altar rail. Father Dominic, still muttering to himself about my need for adult supervision, stooped down and began lighting the wicks.

  "That's where you're – I mean, we're – going to do it?" I asked.

  Father Dominic straightened and surveyed his handiwork.

  "Yes," he said. Then, misreading my expression, he added dourly, "Don't let the absence of chicken blood fool you, Susannah. I assure you the Catholic exorcism ceremony is highly effective."

  "No," I said quickly. "It's just that …"

  I looked at the floor in the middle of the circle of candles. The floor looked very hard – way harder than the bathroom floor back at the hotel. That was tile. This was marble. Remembering what Jack had said, I went, "What if I fall down? I might conk my head again."

  "Fortunately, you will be lying down," Father D said.

  "Can't I have a pillow or something?" I asked. "I mean, come on. That floor looks cold." I glanced at the altar cloth. "How about that? Can I lie on that?"

  Father Dominic looked pretty shocked for a guy who was about to exorcise a girl who was neither possessed nor dead.

  "For goodness' sake, Susannah," he said. "That would be sacrilegious."

  Instead he went and got some choir robes for me. I made a nice little bed on the floor between all the candles, then lay down on it. It was actually quite
comfortable.

  Too bad my heart was pounding way too hard for me ever to have been able to doze off.

  "All right, Susannah," Father D said. He wasn't happy with me. He hadn't been happy with me, I knew, for some time. But he was bowing to the inevitable.

  Still, he seemed to feel one last lecture was necessary.

  "I am willing to help you with this ridiculous scheme of yours, but only because I realize that if I do not, you will try to do it on your own, or with, God forbid, that boy's help." Father D was looking at me very sternly from where he stood. "But do not think for one minute that I approve."

  I opened my mouth to argue, but Father Dominic held up one hand.

  "No," he said. "Allow me to finish, please. What Maria de Silva did was wrong, and I realize you are only trying to correct that wrong. But I am afraid I cannot see any of this ending happily. It is my experience, Susannah – and I hope you will agree that my experience is significantly greater than yours – that once spirits are exorcised, they stay that way."

  Again I opened my mouth, and again Father D shushed me.

  "Where you are going," he went on, "will be like a waiting area for spirits who have passed from the astral plane but have not yet reached their final destination. If Jesse is still there, and you manage to find him – and you understand that I consider this a very great if, because I don't think you're going to – do not be surprised if he chooses to stay where he is."

  "Father D," I began, rising up onto my elbows, but he shook his head.

  "It might be his only chance, Susannah," Father Dominic said somberly, "of ever moving on."

  "No," I said. "That's not true. There's a reason, see, that he's hung around my house for so long. All he has to do is figure out what that reason is, and he'll be able to move on on his own – "

  "Susannah," Father Dominic interrupted. "I'm sure it isn't that simple – "

  "He has a right," I insisted through gritted teeth, "to decide for himself."

  "I agree," Father Dominic said. "That's what I'm trying to say, Susannah. If you find him, you must let him decide. And you mustn't . . . well, you mustn't attempt to use any sort of, er …"