Seeking Samiel

by Catherine Jordan

  "Verdoem," I said, slipping away from the desk, wandering aimlessly down the hall.

  Lindsey had told me to go away, to leave them alone. Well, I was about to do that because I was in over my head with a woman who I could not let go of, who could fix everything that was wrong even though she had been the source of it.

  Go to the source.

  I wanted to see Caroline again, but only to say goodbye. Eva and I were having a child together, the sonogram made that quite clear. I had chosen Eva over Caroline.

  Caroline lay in her bed, eyes open, a priest bent over her. They spoke in a foreign tongue, something I could not grasp. It frustrated me, because I had recently come to comprehend the languages I heard.

  I had always liked learning. I'd been a good student, did very well in university, watching and listening and asking the right queries at the right time, mulling over answers as they lingered in the air like smoke. At least that was how I remembered my education, no matter that it had taken me three years in this country to finally understand Afrikaans.

  I had never been able to comprehend French in college or Latin in university. Now, languages were like Pig Latin; once they clicked, I couldn't believe their simplicity.

  Africa has over two thousand languages and I understood all of them, recognizing dialects, clicks, whistles and tonal sounds. French, Greek, Portuguese, Yoruba, Somali, Maasai, Kadu, Zulu, Mande, Xhosa, Oromo, Luo, Gujarati. But I couldn't comprehend a single word those two were saying.

  It's English, but in your ears, their words aren't comprehendible because they are praying.

  I wanted to hear more. Why didn't those words make sense? The priest got up, patted Caroline on the shoulder and turned. I ducked behind the door and watched the old man go.

  "Caroline?" I called as I entered the room. She didn't respond. Taking her hand, I opened her palm and kissed it.

  I wanted to grab fistfuls of her hair and wipe my face with her strands, but I couldn't bring myself to be that intimate. Leaning into Caroline's ear, I began to tell her everything, said I was sorry, and that I had loved her, and that if I could take it all back I would. I slid the envelope of money under her pillow and left as quietly as I had entered.

  61

  "Aren't you coming?" Eva asked.

  That was a tough question. The hospital's parking garage was filled with cars and mini vans that had arrived overnight when all the true emergencies occurred. If I left right now with Eva then that would be it--I'd be leaving Caroline, for good.

  Caroline would have left you anyway. Lindsey would see to that.

  "What do you have to go back to?" Eva asked. "Taxes, bills, SARS? Lawsuits? I can take care of those things."

  Phred revved the engine.

  "Everything and anything you want. Come with me."

  Come. Come. Come.

  "I'll get the Jeep," I said.

  "Forget the Jeep," she snapped. "Come with me now. Do you want Caroline cured?"

  With what I believed to be my only choice, I slid across the black leather seat beside Eva.

  The Rolls pulled away from the curb and as we drove out of the garage Eva opened the window, reached into her pocket, and threw its contents to the wind.

  "I'm feeding the air," she said. "With seeds from my book." Mist appeared like a ghost. Thunder cracked in the horizon and the winds pushed against the car's rear. Rain pattered gently on the rooftop.

  I had read her book. Twice. The first time I skimmed it and considered it rubbish. On the second read, I read between the lines.

  Eva called for one to give up one's soul to the universe, to embrace the self and give in to all temptations. The only cure for temptation, she wrote, was surrender. Her witchcraft was thinly disguised as parapsychology as she told how to summon spirits all too willing to assist anyone who worshiped the Angel of the Night, the true God. Her chapters were a "how to" on performing incantations using geometrical patterns. Tattoo them on the body, she instructed, in order to be a constant channel for the spirits. After I read that last part, I thought of the party, and the inked markings that peeked out of long sleeves and trailed up the collars, and Lindsey telling me about the hidden tattoos on her husband's well-dressed partygoers.

  I had read in her book about specific bacteria that when mixed with plants caused a buildup of condensation and actually brought about rain. Man-made rain. Only, according to her, the bacterium was her discovery.

  Eva rubbed her belly, closed her eyes and sighed.

  "What did the doctor say?" I asked.

  "It's a girl," Eva said with a look of content. "We're having a healthy baby girl."

  "We're almost home," Phred said.

  62

  I squirmed in the car. I didn't like what I had seen, or done since meeting Eva, and I had never had the courage to ask her much. I feared her responses, that she'd say, "How can you ask such a thing?" and no longer want my services as her attorney. It occurred to me that she hadn't answered several of my questions, that she had changed the subject with such finesse that I never realized she'd done it. If she meant what she said, that I could have anything, then a few answers weren't much to ask.

  I blurted, "Some people say you are a Satanist. At first I didn't think those rumours bothered me. You're not a parapsychologist, are you?"

  "Jeffrey, what do you think a parapsychologist does?"

  "I suppose I thought you looked at the supernatural with an educated eye. I imagined colleagues from Cambridge sitting around a fireplace on leather-back chairs, sipping brandy, discussing burial grounds and specters with aloof distaste. I thought your book explained hauntings from a practical point of view. Books about magik and demons--even the classics--should be opened with care. Your book? It's not what I thought it would be."

  Eva asked, "You want to see what I do for a living? I'll show you. Phred, turn left up ahead."

  "Where are we going?" I asked.

  "A seance. It's a French word, meaning, session." Eva's mouth twitched. "We are going to have a session with a group of my colleagues."

  That last word, colleague, sounded sinister when she said it. "Anyone I've met?" I asked. "From your party?" I pictured myself sitting at a round table whilst we closed our eyes and called on a long dead aunt or grandfather.

  "These aren't a bunch of fools you'll be meeting. They are wealthy, educated friends. A parapsychologist studies the psi, or the psychic, things like telepathy, clairvoyance, psycho kinesis, and precognition.

  "Vampires do not exist. Never have, never will. But people do love to read about them, don't they? Witches? That's a tricky subject. Demons? They are real. They are tricky. People don't like to read about them. I think it's because most people believe that they are real. There is so little accurate information written about them. People want to hear that demons are capable of feelings, that demon's favours can be bought and sold, that they will do a person's bidding on a whim." She scoffed. "People. Why do they need to hear lies? It's as if they have this imbedded denial, like a program glitch in their computer brains that runs around and around the truth, even when they see it with their own eyes. I've never been able to explain their blind ignorance to myself. Oh, here we are."

  We pulled up to a large gated home, a Dutch Colonial sitting at least a kilometer off the road on a grassy field. The house was spot lighted, and the lights dimmed as our car approached. There were statues and columns and fountains and flowers announcing wealth. I was anxious to see the people behind those enormous doors.

  A uniformed woman opened the door. Nothing unusual about her. She led Eva and me into an open den. A well coiffed woman dressed in a white pant suit stood in the middle of the room. She was attractive, with a tattoo crawling onto her sandaled foot from beneath her pant leg. I would ask Eva about the tattoos, later. The woman looked like a cardboard cut-out, staring at me. Rude, I first thought. Then I thought it was arrogance. I stared back, hoping to win the contest. I gave her a flash of teeth to disarm her, but she didn't as much as blink.
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  Arm chairs sat in a circle without a table. The crystal ceiling lights dimmed. A loud bang from behind made me turn. A man with a monocle--who on earth wears those?--stood in the open doorway. He bent to pick up the book, Eva's book that he had dropped. That was the bang--I had thought it was a gun. I spotted a tattoo on his wrist. There wasn't enough of the ink showing for me to see what the tattoo was, but I saw enough to assume it was exactly like the woman's, only in a different spot. I could tell by the way his eyelids hung limp over their sockets that he was blind, that his eyes were missing. What good was the monocle?

  "Jeffrey," Eva said, "These are two of my colleagues. Now you can witness exactly how boring we people are." The woman sat down and crossed her legs, and I got a better view of her ankle. The tattoo looked like a tapered tail, and it wagged. I swear I saw that thing wag.

  The man's monocle. Instead of glass, it possessed an eye--a green eye. The eye blinked and moved, trapped in rimmed glass, looking me up and down. He opened the book he held to his chest and flipped it over. "Your book does not have seeds," he said, handing out a packet towards me.

  "I don't even have that book anymore," I said.

  The woman spoke up and asked, "Are you here to summon your father?"

  "Don't you have to be dead to be summoned?" I asked.

  "That's debatable," Eva finally said.

  I left the room. The maid was at the front door, holding it open for me, ready and waiting for my escape. Phred was at the car, door open. Shit. They all knew I wouldn't stay. This was a trick, to scare me. Fuckers. All of them.

  Eva had followed me out the door. "I want to get out of here," I said, feeling sick. Eva stepped inside the house, maybe to say goodbye. I heard the car door close, and Eva was seated beside me.

  "Why did you do that?" she asked. "No one wanted to hurt you. We were going to talk, that's all."

  I didn't believe her. Not then, not now. There was no intention other than to frighten me. And it worked. The scares had been piling up and I was beyond frightened. I was in shock. I had been hot, almost feverish for a long time but whilst sitting in that car, I began to shiver. I couldn't remember yesterday or the day or the month before.

  "Where is my father?" I asked.

  "Off on Safari. Or backpacking up a mountain," she said.

  I snorted. "Fine. What about the monocle?"

  "He had a glass eye."

  "That's not what I saw," I said.

  "Would you like to go back inside to see it again?" she asked.

  "No. I want to go."

  Eva knocked on the partition, telling Phred it was time to leave. When we pulled away from the house, I said, "I want you to tell me why the people around you wear tattoos."

  Smug--that was the look on her face. "You noticed them. They are exactly what you think they are."

  "Snakes." I shook my head and said, "I won't get one."

  "No one is asking you to. It's their choice to do that. I have asked very little of you."

  "You've asked for everything," I said, shock giving me the courage to say the things popping into my head. "My father--gone. Caroline--gone. My house and home--gone."

  "It's you who wants from me. That's why you came to my house. You wanted it all back. And I am a giver."

  "Will I waste away, like Edward?" I asked. "Go missing? Go blind? Live the rest of my life miserable and frightened?"

  She answered immediately. "Only if you fight me. Do not fight me, Jeffrey. Go along, like the river without trying to build a dam."

  "I want to go home," I said. "To England."

  "No," she said with a sigh. "You can't leave Africa. Neither can I. It is the only restriction we both have. We cannot cross the water."

  "I'm stuck here?"

  "Stuck?" she asked, turning back to me. "Africa is huge. Africa has deserts, tropics, beaches, forests, mountains. Luxury beyond compare. People from all over the world come here. You're not stuck. You're privileged."

  "Are you ever going to tell me what happened to Edward?"I asked.

  "In time," she said. "You will find out on your own."

  63--CAROLINE

  Caroline, in the hospital room with forty-seven ceiling panels, five machines, and thirty-three white plastic slats on each of the two blinds, had awakened to bleeps. So far, she had counted 376 bleeps. Where was her mother, she wondered, and who was this doctor?

  Six days ago, alone in her room, there had been only one in the corner of her room. Five days ago, there were two. Four days ago, there were three. Two days ago, there were five. Then, there were seven. Mr. Granger was no longer amoungst them, though Granger had been the first one out through the hole.

  The doctor flicked a small torch inside the wall's opening behind her bed. The hole was about half his height. Those devils would follow her no matter where she went. The doctor flicked off his torch, seemingly satisfied with what he had seen.

  "Caroline, did you notice this?" he asked. She recognized that high, effeminate voice the second she heard it. She didn't answer. "I wonder if your mother noticed. Or that police officer." The nametag on the doctor's coat said, "Dr. Rhymes". Rhymes was an ugly looking man. Thinning hair wrapped around the base of the skull and wiry eyebrows floated over those eyes like hairy little monsters.

  Mena had said her body would reject the drywall. Eva would torment her, she would kill their father, she would kill her mother, and then Jeffrey.

  Caroline groaned. The bigger the hole the busier they became. Mother had intervened whilst in her bedroom at home. After listening to the tape Caroline had given her, she tried to pull Caroline out of bed. The room imploded, sucking everything into the center. Caroline was yanked from her mother's grasp and thrown under the bed, which spun and flipped. From underneath she felt the impact of each item that landed on top, the mattress being her only protection. Granger had wanted Mother, but she had escaped. She would not be so fortunate a second time around.

  "I have something stronger for your pain," the doctor--it--said. "Just give this plunger here a squeeze on the end. Right there. Yes, push that button. Normally there is a shut-off switch on these things to prevent overdoses. I'm going to bypass that for you, and get you started. One, two, three, four. You want to count some more? Go ahead; press it as much as you want.

  "You won't need this," Rhymes said, slipping a hand under her pillow. It removed an envelope. "Heavy," it said, dropping the envelope into its coat pocket. The pocket sagged, pulling the coat down the doctor's shoulder. "The more it weighs the more evil it carries. That's why you weigh as much as you do. Eva has minion inside her. It's a wonder she can lift her own legs to walk. "Mmm," Rhymes said, sniffing the envelope. "Smells like her. I have to give this back."

  When Dr. Rhymes left, her doctor entered. Her doctor turned towards the door, furrowed his brows and asked, "Who was that?" Caroline did not bother answering.

  His warm hands were on her stomach, pressing around her bellybutton, the hole in the wall going unnoticed. He watched her belly rise and fall, the skin around her naval pulling tight. He scraped her stomach, collected the juices and white powder into a box, and then asked her thirteen questions. Did he really think she'd crumble drywall and stuff it into her bellybutton?

  64--LINDSEY

  Caroline's blank eyes stared at Lindsey. In her hand was a plunger, and the tube connected to it hung from a drip bag that read, "Morphine".

  "Oh no. No. No, no, no." She curled up alongside her daughter's body feeling for a pulse she knew would not be there.

  Lindsey heard a deep sigh from behind.

  An older, tall man dressed in black with a white collar stood in the doorway. "I was praying with her not even an hour ago," he said. Lindsey put a shaking hand to her open mouth and let a wail escape from between her fingers. The priest approached, unyielding, unafraid, so much unlike all the distanced people she had been dealing with in the hospital. He wrapped his arms around her, holding Lindsey tight as she released her muffled sobs into his chest.

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sp; 65--JEFFREY

  I lingered by the doorway, watching Guert pass in and out through the swinging dining room doors with lidded tureens in her hands. "Evening sir," she said as she laid platters on the sideboard.

  She had addressed me as 'sir', and not for the first time. But this time I smiled, taking a likening to the title, as if I now deserved it. "I'm on my way to bed," I said.

  "But you just got up," Guert replied as she placed large spatulas alongside the serving bowls.

  Phred had just dropped me off at the door. Hadn't he? Fuck me. Wrist with no watch. Walls with no clocks. If only there was something to measure time with since my own internal clock was so fucked up.

  You went to bed, slept through the day. Now, it's evening.

  I coughed into my fist as Guert poured from a decanter filled with her burgundy liquid. She handed me the glass; I needed that drink. It hurt just to swallow my spit. All the water I'd been drinking did not quench my thirst. Emphysema, acute asthma or some other rare disease must have been festering inside the walls of my throat.

  "I made it for you."

  Guert made my favourite drink. She knew I would be there and had anticipated my needs. Yes, I liked it.

  The drink is specifically for you--it will heal you. It will coat your throat, just as it coats your eyes.

  The elixir slid down my throat with ease, coating the walls and snuffing the burn. I drank more, swallowing the contents with a gulp. Then I noticed the package.

  It sat on the table as a centerpiece, its red silk bow tied and curled over a small, square white box. A slip of paper peeked out of the ribbon and my eyes caught the, "To: Jeffrey".

  Guert lifted the decanter and refilled my glass. The package had to be from Eva. Guert smiled knowingly then pushed through the swinging doors, leaving me alone.

  I wanted to wait for Eva, yet temptation would not allow for patience.

  My finger stroked the ribbon, massaging the silk. Finger and thumb pulled at the bow. Eyes widened.