by John Coyne
She leaned back and smiled knowingly, and then the camera panned the small circle of people, and they, too, were smiling, in recognition of what Kathy Dart was saying.
Jennifer set the eggs aside and pulled the small kitchen stool up close to the television set. Opening up the pad she used to jot down her shopping list, she waited for the woman to continue.
“Perhaps the best way to understand what is happening to us,” Kathy Dart went on, “is to think of our psyches, our minds, as houses with many rooms. In our everyday lives, we use only one or two of those rooms, but we do not inhabit the attic or basement, we do not know what is happening at night down the long dark hallways.”
She motioned to the group, gesturing back and forth with one hand. “We speak to each other on one level, but that is a limitation. It forces us to see our world as having only one level, one reality.”
“When I go into a trance, it is as if I am moving to another room in my psychic house. There it is possible for me to have a different state of consciousness, a different persona, different knowledge. It is possible for me to speak directly to Habasha, and to have him communicate directly with you. We came naked into this world, but our psyches, our spirits, came with the collected wisdom and knowledge of all time. Plato said that the soul has been ‘born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all.’”
Then, as the camera closed in on her face, Kathy Dart grimaced and added wryly, “So why, you might ask, aren’t we rich?”
Her audience laughed.
“We’re not rich,” Kathy said, “because we have in our present life only a certain amount of all the knowledge we possess, knowledge that Plato says we are remembering. Nothing is new under the sun, as the saying goes. We are only remembering what we already know but have forgotten.”
“Artists tells us that they create by intuition, by bursts of creativity. What is creativity?” She paused to study the circle of students. “The act of creation is drawing from within, from our heart of hearts, from the knowledge we already know. We create what we have already created.”
The kitchen telephone rang, startling Jennifer. She looked at it for a moment, puzzled by its ringing. It was not yet six-thirty.
“Jenny?” The man’s voice was soft and far away.
“David? Is that you? What is it? What’s wrong?” She suddenly felt cold and shivered in her wool nightgown. A window had opened, she thought. Or a door.
“Oh, Jenny,” David whispered. He began to cry.
“What is it, David? Has something happened?” Even as she spoke, Jennifer knew.
“She’s gone, Jenny. She’s gone. I found her a few minutes ago. I had gotten up to go to the bathroom
there was a light under her bedroom door.” He was crying, stumbling over his words. “She had taken an overdose of Valium. It was my prescription. She had said she was having trouble sleeping. I had no idea.” He kept explaining, telling Jennifer the suicide was all his fault.
“It’s not your fault, David,” Jennifer said, raising her voice so he would hear her through his tears. “Stop blaming yourself! I understand! Have you called the police?”
“Yes, yes, I’ve done all that.” He was suddenly angry. “They’re here. I have a cop in my goddamn living room. They won’t remove the body until the coroner comes and signs the death certificate.”
“What can I do? I don’t want you to be alone.”
“You can’t take the subway at this hour.”
“I’ll call a car service. Don’t worry.”
He started to cry again. “Why, Jenny, why in God’s name would she do this?”
“We’ll talk about it when I get there. Hang up so I can get dressed and call a car. ‘Bye, David. Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you, Jenny. Thank God for you,” David whispered. He sounded like a little boy.
When Jennifer hung up the receiver, her hand was trembling. She felt the cold again, a swift rush of wind, and from the dark hallway of the apartment, she could see across the living room, through the front windows and into the street. Dawn was breaking, and the very pale light of early morning was filling the dark corners.
Then she saw Margit in the room. She was standing by the door to the kitchen, smiling, motioning that everything was all right, that she was all right. She looked a dozen years younger, and beautiful in a way that Jennifer had never seen her. She moved through the dark apartment, her body a silver envelope of light. She was wearing a white dress, a long white dress that flowed around her and spread across the floor and furniture.
“Margit?” Jennifer asked, terrified by the sight of her friend.
“Hello, Jennifer,” Margit said, but she did not speak. Yet Jennifer knew just what she was saying, knew what she wanted.
“Let me hold you, please,” Jennifer asked, stepping toward her.
Margit shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jenny, but you can’t, not now.”
“Margit, what happened?”
“David
David poisoned me.”
“Oh no. Oh God, no!”
“It’s all right, Jennifer. It’s all right.” She kept smiling.
“But why? Because of that woman?”
“It was more than that. I had money. My family’s money, and he wanted it. Jenny, he’s a very unhappy man.”
“Margit, this isn’t possible. I’m not seeing you. I can’t be.” She tried to turn away but was frightened now to look away from the misty figure of Margit Engle.
“I’ve seen your brother Danny, Jenny. We’ve talked, and he wants you to know he loves you very much and that you can’t blame yourself for what happened to him. He is very happy.”
“You saw Danny?” Jennifer exclaimed. She began to smile. “Let me talk to him, please. Let me come close to you, Margit.”
“It’s not time, not yet. But I’ve come to warn you.”
“Warn me?”
“Be careful, Jenny. Someone wants to hurt you.”
“Who?”
“A woman. She was once your friend, Jenny. In another time, she was once your friend.”
“Who, Margit?” Jennifer whispered.
Margit shook her head, whispered that she couldn’t, and then her image began to fade from sight. Jennifer did not cry out to hold her on earth. She watched the image dissolve and then disappear. And then Jennifer realized it was daylight, and she was standing in the bright sun. Margit was gone.
She turned from the window and walked back into her bedroom. The sun filled that room, too, spreading light across the unmade bed. Jennifer glanced at the digital clock. It read 11:47. She had been talking to Margit for over five hours.
Book Two
Each of us is responsible for everything to everyone else.
—Fyodor Dostoevski
“It is absolutely necessary that the soul should be healed and purified, and if this does not take place during its life on earth, it must be accomplished in future lives.”
—Saint Gregory I
CHAPTER TWELVE
TOM GRABBED JENNIFER WHEN she came up out of the subway at Columbus Circle.
“We’ve got to talk,” he told her, seizing her wrist.
“You’ve heard?” she asked.
“About Margit? Yes. David phoned me yesterday. Where were you? I’ve been calling.”
“At home.”
“You didn’t pick up. I went to Brooklyn; you didn’t answer. “
“I didn’t want to talk to you.”
“Jesus Christ, Jenny, what’s happening? Why did you sneak out of my place?”
They were standing at the top of the subway escalator and morning-rush-hour commuters were pushing past, glancing at the obviously angry couple but keeping their distance.
“You were calling the police when you thought I was asleep.”
“I was not,” he said outraged. “I was calling your office. Talking to What’s-his-name
Handingham.�
�
“Come on,” Jennifer said, taking his hand. “Let’s get a cup of coffee.”
“Margit and I talked for over five hours,” Jennifer explained to Tom, “and when I called David back, it was almost noon. The police were still there. Margit’s body was on the floor of her bedroom, where she told me she had died, and everyone was waiting for the coroner to come. Tom, I’m telling you: David killed her!”
Tom put down his pastry and stared at her.
“Jennifer, she died of an overdose. The coroner found evidence in her body. David told me. Besides, she died at approximately five o’clock yesterday morning. How could you have seen her? What are you talking about anyway?”
“She had traces of Valium in her stomach. Of course! David got that for her, but he wasn’t stupid enough to poison her with it. He’s a doctor; he’s smarter than that.”
“Well then, how did he kill her? How did Margit say she died?” He was treating her as if she were a child who needed to be humored. She kept her voice slow and steady. “He killed Margit with lidocaine. It’s used in emergency situations to slow down the heartbeat where there’s been a coronary seizure.”
“I know what lidocaine is. But how do you know?”
“I don’t. I don’t know any of this. But Margit does—or did. She was a nurse before she married David. That’s how they met. She told me about the lidocaine.” Jennifer leaned over the restaurant table and continued in a whisper: “It comes in a disposable syringe called a Flex-O-Jet. There’s one gram of lidocaine in twenty-five cc’s of fluid. When a person has a seizure in a hospital, they inject it directly into a bag of sugar and water that the patient is getting intravenously. You never inject lidocaine directly into the vein in a concentrated form. But that’s what David did. She had fallen asleep in bed, and David came into the bedroom, injected the lidocaine, and then pulled her onto the floor, so it would look as if she was trying to reach the door.”
“And Margit told you all this?”
Jennifer nodded. “When we talked, she was in her afterlife—that’s a nonphysical reality we all enter following death. All souls or spirits go there between incarnations.”
The waiter returned to refill their coffee cups, and they both fell silent until he stepped away. Then Tom spoke without looking up. “I think maybe you should talk to someone, Jennifer.”
“I agree.” Jennifer sighed, feeling relieved. “Do you know the detective on the case? What precinct is it, anyway?”
“Jen, I’m not talking about cops. I’m talking about a doctor. A shrink.”
Jennifer stared at him. “Tom, we’re talking about a murderer.”
“Sure—who was also her husband, and your doctor, and a physician on the staff of New York Hospital. Honey, you’ve been under a lot of stress. And I haven’t helped matters with my behavior about getting married. I was thinking that maybe we should fly down to the Caribbean for a few days and let all this blow over. My case against the dealers will go down soon. I’ll have time off. And you can get a long rest.” He spoke as if he had decided to take over her life.
Jennifer stopped listening. Tom didn’t believe her, but how could he? She had been on an immense journey in the last few days, and she had left him far behind. She could barely believe it ail herself—but when she doubted, she remembered Margit and the envelope of light around her, and she believed again.
Tom was watching her. “Jenny, you’re not well,” he said softly. “You have to understand that. It’s not a sign of weakness. I know you. I know how you never want to be caught with your guard down, but all of us have some bad patches. You’re going to be okay.”
“I’m okay!”
“No, Jenny, you’re not,” he answered patiently. “You’re going through something, I don’t know what. I wish to God I did, but, honey, I love you, and I’m going to take care of you, regardless of what you say. Okay?” He smiled, trying to dull the hard edge of his pronouncement.
Jennifer nodded. She had learned in the last few weeks that it was never any good to argue with Tom; it was better to go around him.
“So you’ll come to the Caribbean with me?”
She nodded. “But I have to go back to my office. You go downtown; I’ll come and meet you as soon as I make my arrangements with Handingham.”
“I’ve already talked to him about it,” Tom said.
“You did?” She pulled away, looking surprised.
“Yes, that’s what I called him about the day you thought I was on the phone to the police. I said you’d been under some stress, and he agreed you could have some medical leave. It’s no big deal, honey, your job will be there when you return.”
“Well,” she said, controlling her anger, “then you can also call the coroner and ask him to go over the autopsy results again.”
He shook his head. “Darling, I love you. I think you’re wonderful, but there’s no case there. I can’t do anything. You can’t do anything. I know you’re upset, but I’m telling you, your mind is playing tricks on you. Lidocaine stays in the blood, in the skin tissues. If it was there, they would have picked up traces in the autopsy.”
“Sure, if they were like the doctors on TV. But they’re not. Why is the mayor always firing coroners if they’re so good?”
Tom was being rational, but she no longer trusted his cool logic, his faith in the system, in the rational world. She thought of what Phoebe Fisher had told her, how people were trapped inside their logical world and couldn’t accept the mystical. But she wasn’t. Not any longer. She had seen Margit in her living room, and she realized there was only one person now in New York City who would listen to her story and believe what she had to say.
ECCLESIASTICAL INVESTIGATION
RELATING TO THE VISIONS AND
MIRACULOUS CLAIMS OF VERONICA
BORROMEO MISCELLANEA MEOICEA
THE YEAR 1621 STATE ARCHIVE OF FLORENCE
Account of the visions, miraculous claims, and sins of the flesh as related by the Abbess Veronica Borromeo
to the Papal Nuncio, Giuseppe Bonomo, Bishop of Siena,
on the thirteenth day of September, 1621.
On the First Friday of Lent of the year 1620, while in bed between the fourth and sixth hours of the night, I contemplated the sufferings of Our Lord the Most Holy Jesus Christ, and our Master appeared to me in the flesh, holding in His bleeding hands His most Holy Cross. Our Saviour was alive, and he asked me if I would suffer His own crucifixion and death.
I made the sign of the Cross, thinking that the Devil had come upon me, but our Lord said to me that He was God and he wished me to suffer His death. He instructed me to get out of my cot and lay upon the stones in the form of the cross, as He wished to implant the wounds of the crucifixion upon my body.
When I followed as He had told me, I felt great pains in my limbs and breast and saw that blood was oozing from my flesh, but afterward, I felt only peace and contentment.
During the following week, from day to day, each morning, I studied my limbs and saw nothing, no marks or signs, but on the Friday next, from twelve until three, the hours that our Lord hung upon the cross, I, too, bled from my hands and feet, and from the right side of my breast, and the nuns of the convent came and ministered to me, and I begged them, beseeched them in our Lord’s name not to tell the laity of what had occurred to me here within our monastery walls.
Each Friday I joyfully suffered as our Lord had suffered, and then on Easter Sunday, after our Saviour had risen and ascended into Heaven, I was praying in the cloister garden when suddenly there appeared to me an angel dressed in a blue garment. He had long white and gilded wings, and he said to me, “Our Lord is well pleased by your sufferings, and He wishes you to surrender your body to him again, living on in this world the life of a saint, and suffering, as the saints have, for the greater glory of God.”
Afraid that I was being sorely tempted by the Devil himself, I fell upon my knees and begged for God’s guidance. The white angel took me to our church, to our humb
le priest, Father Giovannetto, who told me on behalf of Jesus Christ that I was not being deceived by the Devil, and I knelt before him and received the Holy Eucharist. The angel revealed himself to me again and said that his name was Gabriel, the archangel Gabriel, who brought great joy to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that he would stay with me now in my hours and days of great need.
From that day forth I suffered many travails, as I had wished. I was visited by the Devil in the form of a handsome young man who sought to corrupt my body and soul. In my vigils in our chapel, the stones beneath my bare feet were set ablaze by the Devil and his minions, but still I kept the name of Jesus on my lips and prayed incessantly for the strength to keep my faith.
And then our Lord came upon me another time, and said I was to be His bride.
I opened my arms to him, then, and Jesus raised his golden sword and cut away my simple heart and took it to his own, and said to me, “Lovely lady, I give you my heart, as any bridegroom must,” and slipped his heart into my breast, where it lodged, too large and glorious for my body, and then he took my left hand in his and slipped upon my finger a wedding ring, and in all my life I have never felt such great contentment.
Account of the visions, miraculous claims, and sins of the flesh of the Abbess Veronica Borromeo
as related by Sister Maria Sinistrari to the Papal Nuncio, Giuseppe Bonomo,
Bishop of Siena, on the second day of October, 1621.
I saw her open her arms and then kiss the fourth finger of her right hand and mumble her thanks to God, saying over and over again, “I am not worthy, O Lord. I am not worthy, O Lord.” Then I heard her say, “I want to have her sit on that first chair and to explain her life,” and she quickly went to where our Lord sat. And she told me the candles she had lit symbolized the thirty-three years that Jesus lived in this world, and the three largest ones were the three years closest to his death.
