by Noel Hynd
It was followed by impact and pain.
His body broken and draining of life, he endured a final image in the two agonizing minutes that it took him to die. He saw an old-time movie actor standing over him, looking down with empty, mocking, vengeful eyes, eyes that pitied him but condemned him at the same time.
And in the final few moments of his life, the man hired to kill Rebecca heard something strange. It wasn’t a chorus of angels, and it wasn’t his own heartbeat. It was instead a strange tune played on an old piano.
Chapter 46
On the rooftop, Billy Carlton knelt by Rebecca’s side. He unbound her with a gentle touch of his hands. She looked at him imploringly.
“Why?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”
“You want to know?” the ghost asked. “You’re ready to know? Ready to accept?”
She looked up. His face was in shadows, but as she latched upon his eyes, she again felt their pull. It was again as if she had known those eyes for more than a lifetime.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Then come with me,” Billy Carlton said.
He placed his hands on her shoulders then raised them slowly until her face was in his hands. He cradled her head. He knelt forward and brought his brow to hers.
She closed her eyes. She felt a little tremor of fear, and then felt reassured by what was happening. Her spirit intersected with Carlton’s. She traveled with him.
First, there was an incredible darkness, as if she were tumbling through the blackest of nights. This seemed to last forever. But then a brightness beckoned.
More images spun before her. It resembled her hour under hypnosis, but this was more intense. Visions flashed in her mind, all of them horrifying, exactly what her lover Billy wanted her to see.
A time in North Carolina, when her husband completed a transaction for a pound of hashish. The receiver was the man in the wraparound sunglasses, the man who would attempt to kill her…
A time in Connecticut this past February, when the man who had tried to kill her met with Bill Moore, and her husband paid him even though he had failed to complete her execution…
A time in California when her husband met with her would-be executioner again, bragged of the huge insurance policy he held on his wife, and again handed over money in prepayment of a long overdue, long desired murder…
And a time that same evening, practically time present, when her husband sat at home and typed out a suicide note in his wife’s name, to be presented to the police when she was found dead the next morning…
She held her tearful eyes as tightly closed as possible. But when the ghost kissed her on her forehead, she felt her eyes come open again into the darkness of the rainy night, and in the bleakness of the death scene on the roof of a warehouse.
“It’s all right now,” Billy Carlton said. “It’s almost over. Bring your husband to me.”
“Where?” she asked.
“There’s only one place,” he said. “The Cemetery of Angels.”
Then, before her eyes, he again disappeared.
Chapter 47
“Becca?”
“Uh huh,” she said.
Bill Moore stepped out of his car in front of the gates to San Angelo Cemetery. His wife was seated on the bench near the front gate. Her clothes were wet. She looked as if she had been waiting for a while. She had telephoned him twenty minutes earlier.
“What in God’s name is going on, Rebecca?” he asked. He looked at her quizzically. “I thought you were going to a movie.”
“I was. I did.”
“So why are you here?” He looked her up and down. And, yes, she decided, he was looking for evidence that she had been attacked. As she searched his eyes, she saw the same expression as she had seen that night in Connecticut nine months earlier. He was shocked that she was alive. He was shocked because he had paid good money to have her killed.
“I have a new insight,” she said. “I called Detective Van Allen also. He should be here shortly, too.”
“So what? He’s a pain in the ass. He treats us like suspects.”
“I know where Patrick and Karen are,” she said.
“What? Would you mind sharing it with me instead of making melodramatic gestures?” he snapped.
She didn’t answer. He looked at the cemetery gates. “This place gives me the creeps,” he said.
“It should. It’s haunted, you know.” He looked back at his wife.
“Where are the children?” he asked.
“Protective custody. Someone took them and hid them so that they and their mother wouldn’t be harmed.”
“Rebecca, you’re acting like you’re crazy,” he said. “Can we go home?”
“I can. You can’t,” she said.
“Becca!” he snapped, losing all patience. “Would you make some sense?”
“I’ll make a lot of sense,” she said. “I’m finally surrounded by friends.”
“What the…?”
He never finished his question, though in his mind the question was never answered. The chains slid free of the cemetery gates and clanked onto the brick driveway. Rebecca walked to the gates and pulled free the bar that kept the gates shut. She pushed the gate opened enough to admit them.
She walked in. Her husband hesitated.
“Rebecca?” he asked.
“Come on along, Bill,” she said. “You owe it to me.”
“You’re acting like a mad woman!” he yelled. She waited within the portal.
“Are you coming or not?” she demanded. She held out her hand to beckon her husband. Finally, he joined her. There was still a drizzle in the air, but a half moon was visible over them. The clouds broke, as if on cue. The slight clearing in the sky allowed enough light to illuminate their path.
Rebecca was more than at home with what followed.
She followed the path that led toward the central burial ground of San Angelo.
Her steps led directly toward the overturned marker of Billy Carlton. She passed it.
She led Bill Moore on the same path. He walked quickly behind her. Her vision was lowered, fixed upon the ground, just as Billy Carlton had asked. And as she walked, she began to sense what Carlton had promised.
At each of the markers, at the fringe of her perception, she began to see things. Or perhaps, she knew they were there, more than she actually physically saw them.
First there was one winged figure. Then another. And not from every tomb, only from some. Carlton’s friends. In death as in life. Angels. Or something very much resembling them. Rebecca didn’t care which. She kept walking. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness there were more of them. They were in every direction. Risen — or descended? — from God knew where. Returned on a mission. A mission of vengeance or mercy, or mercy combined with vengeance.
She was deep in the cemetery. She passed the fallen marker from Billy’s tomb, and she quickened her pace. Her husband ran after her until he reached for her arm. But she pulled her arm away and wouldn’t stop.
“Rebecca!” he called. “Rebecca!” He chased her.
“Look around you, Bill,” she said. “Look around and tell me that you didn’t try to have me killed. And God knows what you were planning with Karen and Patrick!”
There was something large, oblong, and dark sitting upon the earth where Billy Carlton’s grave had been. It was near the big gaping hole that had remained in the earth since the coffin had been brought up. Rebecca reached the spot and turned. Bill Moore had stopped several feet behind her. She stared at him.
“This is insane,” he said breathlessly. “This isn’t really happening.”
“Yes, it is,” she said.
He shook his head. Then he looked around. The same vision that brought her such tranquility and reassurance brought him a terror that no man could ever measure. There were more whitened figures than anyone could count. An army of them. An armada. Shimmering. Opaque. Gliding forward. Small images reflecting the grand angel on Billy
Carlton’s marker.
Billy’s friends. Rebecca’s allies. A spiritual army guarding her.
They surrounded Bill Moore. The expression on his face was twisted with horror. “I want to get out of here,” he said. He looked beyond her and his horror doubled. The large object near the grave was the unearthed coffin, returned from the medical examiner’s office. The lid was open. The interior was waiting.
“You’re staying here,” Rebecca said. “It’s the only way. And it’s what you brought upon yourself.” Bill Moore shook his head.
“I’m dreaming. I’m hallucinating…” He muttered.
But when he tried to move, there was some strange field of force around him. His feet wouldn’t obey. He was fixed in place.
A moment later, Rebecca felt something in her hand. It was warm and reassuring. Bill Moore’s eyes widened a final time when Billy Carlton came into focus next to her.
Billy Carlton. Dead seventy-odd years. More substantial than the other angels, but a ghost nonetheless.
Rebecca’s eyes shifted. Beyond the gates shone the headlights of a motor vehicle. She recognized the car as Van Allen’s. She turned and looked at Billy Carlton.
He nodded. Rebecca let go of Carlton’s hand. The ghost released her and receded. She walked past Bill Moore as Moore screamed obscenely at her.
She lowered her head and walked through the angels. They formed a protective corridor and allowed her to pass.
Ahead of her she saw Ed Van Allen slipping through the open gates, proceeding into the cemetery. She wondered how much he could see.
Van Allen stopped several feet onto the path. Obviously, he could see her approaching. And he could hear Bill Moore screaming. But Van Allen, she knew, was wise enough not to interfere.
She felt a pulsation behind her, a growing sense of shock that built with incredible suddenness. She kept her head down and walked toward the policeman.
She dared not look.
Behind her, it happened. Hell on earth combined with Heaven on earth. It was like an explosion that took place in her head and in another dimension. As she neared Van Allen, she saw him avert his eyes, too, the way a man looks away from the flashpoint of an explosion to prevent being blinded.
Van Allen’s face was white, reflecting some strange light from somewhere, and there was also a tremendous sound of earth being moved and disrupted.
She met the policeman. He opened his arms and held her. Neither looked. The disturbance in the atmosphere was so strong that both their bodies shuddered and pulsated. But they remained standing, and they waited.
There was no way to measure the time. But it must have been over within a few seconds. Suddenly everything was still. Rebecca wanted to look backward but, Van Allen stopped her. “No,” he said. “Not yet. Just wait.”
Then, after another half minute, they were both visited by a thought. It was all right to look. In fact, they should look.
The graveyard beyond them was dark. And they dared not venture into it. But they waited upon the path. Van Allen held Rebecca’s hand for support.
She looked into the darkness and two small figures began to take shape.
“Oh, my God,” she said softly. “Oh, my God…”
“Go get them,” Van Allen said. “Go get them before anything else happens.”
But she was gone long before he finished his second sentence.
Two small voices. Two small human forms.
“Mommy?”
“Mom?”
Rebecca rushed forward and embraced Patrick and Karen. They were warm as life, spattered here and there with dirt and wearing the same clothes in which she had last seen them. But they were alive.
“Where are we?”
“What happened?”
She couldn’t explain even if she had wanted to. She cried uncontrollably, this time with joy. And she embraced them as she had never embraced them before.
Van Allen’s eyes meanwhile began to settle into the darkness and his gaze traveled far into the Cemetery of Angels.
He broke a cold sweat when he saw what had transpired. Billy Carlton’s grave was sealed again, the earth back in place. The big oblong shape that had been near the grave was gone. So was Bill Moore.
And the huge, hulking, granite angel, Billy’s tombstone, was back in place. Its seraph wings wide, its head proud and its one arm raised in greeting.
Or warning. Or judgment.
Van Allen blew out a breath. He led Rebecca and her children from the yard. And he knew that as long as he lived, he would never be able to describe the events that he had just witnessed, much less speak about them.
Chapter 48
On a warm afternoon, Ed Van Allen sat on a bench in Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, trying to put the proper spin on his life and, to a lesser degree, the events surrounding the various incidents at the Cemetery of Angels.
Three weeks had passed since the reappearance of the Moore children. The same amount of time had passed since the disappearance of Bill Moore. And once again, Van Allen was looking at contradictions, contradictions as vast as the ocean in front of him.
There were no answers. Only speculation and haunting suspicions, theories of the occult and supernatural that he could mention to no one. Then there were the frequent re-awakenings each night from an uneasy sleep, and a scanning of his room to reassure himself that he was alone.
That he had seen a ghost and had interacted with one, he had no question. Exactly what explanation lay beneath that encounter, he had no way of knowing. His previous life experience had no way of interpreting it, nor did his religion.
Christianity and spiritualism were sometimes at loggerheads, though perhaps they shouldn’t have been. In the time left to him on this earth, he would spend much of it trying to re-order what he believed.
He watched the ocean water before him. Christmas was coming. More contradiction. The weather in the Southland was warm. Low seventies. He thought of the Christmas card images of the Anglo-German-American concept of Christmas snow on fir trees, Santa with a sleigh, holiday shoppers in heavy coats in northern cities.
A smile came to his lips. He was watching girls in shorts rollerblade. Christmas in California. Oh, well, he thought to himself. If he didn’t appreciate the lifestyle just a little, he would have moved away two decades ago. He knew that he lived here, belonged here, and would die here.
Of course, then what? After death, what?
Seeing Billy Carlton, meeting a ghost, being yanked out of bed by one, was both the best thing that could have happened to him as well as the worst.
On the one hand, the existence of the ghost suggested the euphoric notion of a spiritual life transcending death. And yet on the other hand, it called into question everything he had ever believed.
He sighed. More contradiction.
That’s all life was: contradiction. His ex-wife had even phoned him that morning. She wanted to have lunch with him, and wondered if he would accompany her to a social event. But she wanted to remain divorced, also.
Did anything, anywhere, he wondered, make any sense?
A few small parts of the puzzle began to take shape for him. The Cemetery of Angels was some sort of enchanted place, he reasoned, one of those quirky places in the universe where the accepted norm does not apply. That Billy Carlton could have risen from a grave and performed the role of a latter-day guardian angel did not necessarily contradict Van Allen’s own spin on his Christian beliefs.
On a darker note, that Bill Moore could have plotted to murder his wife and stepchildren did not necessarily run against the grain of the worst cases of human behavior that Van Allen had witnessed in twenty years as a cop.
That Billy Carlton had interceded and protected Rebecca’s children tested even Van Allen’s new orthodoxy. However, if he believed that Carlton’s spirit was real and tactile, then he had to make the logical leap to believe that an angel could have become the protector of Patrick and Karen.
Other issues nagged him: What
about the explosion of the grave several weeks earlier? The disappearance of the coffin from the medical examiner’s warehouse? The restoration of Carlton’s tomb, with the granite angel returned to its proper position? The steadfast insistence of both Karen and Patrick that they could not recall where they had been for five weeks, and Van Allen’s every inquiry being met by a headshake or a “no”?
It was as if, they said, they had been in a pleasant dream, which once they were awakened, they could not remember.
And what of Rebecca Moore’s willingness to take a final polygraph? During it, she had described the events following the silent movie, and had described this bizarre encounter with angels in the cemetery. She passed her second polygraph so perfectly that Van Allen had wondered if an invisible hand had been guiding the needle.
In his mind, events spiraled. The effect of all the past weeks’ events settled upon him as a melancholy haze. Through it, he tried to find some light, some illumination to guide the rest of his life. He figured it might take years, if ever, before he would make that discovery.
A gentle breeze from the Pacific caressed Van Allen’s forehead as he sat in perfect physical comfort on the bench. A final contradiction: on the desk in his office, the Moore case and the San Angelo desecration had remained open. In his mind, however, both inquiries were closed.
A woman’s voice intruded, jostling him slightly from his reverie.
“I thought I might find you here,” she said.
Van Allen shielded his eyes from the sun. Rebecca stood before him.
“I called your office,” Rebecca said. “Alice said you’d be spending time down here. So I took a chance.” He smiled.
“A good chance,” Van Allen said.
“I wanted to speak with you. Off the record. Know what I mean?” she asked.
“I know what you mean.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” the detective answered. Rebecca sat down on the far edge of a bench.
“We never really had that much time to talk, you and I. First the case was closed. Then the children were back.” She shrugged.
