Seraphim

by Jon Michael Kelley

“If you ever touch one of my beasties again—ever so much as raise your voice to them one octave higher than the genial norm—I will unleash upon your soul the wickedest of carnivores. Are we clear on this matter?”

  “My sincerest apologies,” Eli said, his voice almost a whisper. “It will never happen again.”

  “See that it doesn’t,” Gamble said. “And while we’re on the subject of beastie mistreatment, I’ll remind you that your mother wields her cane like a cattle prod. If she does not cease and desist, then I will advance her state of osteoporosis so far that you’ll have to pour her into bed.”

  “I understand.”

  Before allowing himself to cry, Eli waited until he could no longer hear Gamble’s heavy, rhythmic breathing, smell his foul breath. There was no opening and closing of the door, no footsteps receding down the aisle while he whistled a catchy tune.

  Mr. Gamble exited in his customary manner: without a sound.

  11.

  Duncan found Rachel’s photograph. On the back, stenciled in gold brush script:

  FRANKY AND JOHNNIE’S OLDE TYME PHOTOGRAPHY

  321 Porpoise Avenue, Rock Bay, Massachusetts

  Hand-written in red ink below that was a date, and what Duncan assumed was an invoice or purchase number. If the date was factual, then the picture was just over twelve years old.

  It was a trick; had to be. And a very nasty one at that.

  In the damp, fuzzy-gray fluorescence of the basement, now littered with schmaltzy memorabilia, Duncan was sure that the little girl staring back from the picture was Amy. His very own daughter. No doubt about it.

  But what convinced him that she couldn’t be was the woman next to her, an apparition herself. A beautiful wraith spooking up the past from the dark, dusty corners of his heart. Legions of black tiny wings were rushing forward, flocking, converging in the twilight. Becoming memories.

  A hot blush erupted on his cheeks.

  The woman in the photo was dressed like a cowgirl, sporting an old six-shooter and a villainous expression. In reality, however, she had been someone entirely different; someone who preferred only Karan, Lagerfeld, Oscar de la Renta, never Levi’s or Wrangler. Someone who he’d secretly loved in the shadow of his own new marriage.

  A lover for whom he had literally taken two bullets.

  Her name was Patricia. Patty, when they’d been close.

  “Oh shit, oh shit,” he whispered. “Patricia, what are you doing here?”

  As he brought the picture closer to his face, a thin, silver line of light rolled across its matte surface. Radar sweeping his past.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, slowing himself down. “Patricia had a daughter—” Dropping the picture, Duncan mashed his face into his hands. The name and address on the hospital admission form flashed across his mind. That star-like twinkling of recollection he’d had earlier at the hospital was now going nova.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” he barked, his right palm slapping his forehead. “Kathy! Patricia and Katherine Bently!”

  He picked up the photo and stared again at the facsimile of his daughter. Grainy memories began sluicing through his mind; a drenching, hodgepodge, cut-and-paste reel of an evanescent life, one to which he’d been unwillingly regressed: the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown, scoops of ice cream in waffle cones, Katherine wearing a Red Sox baseball cap, Patricia laughing in his ear, digging clams, Katherine throwing a Frisbee, a restaurant patio, lime wedges and bottles of Corona, laughter, soft kisses passionate kisses whispered promises shame love remorse the taste of salt Katherine running after him shouting, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!

  Closing his eyes, a circus of memories continued unremittingly, tossed one after another like the pins of a vaudevillian juggler.

  His memories of what Katherine Bently looked like could not be right. He tried to convince himself that the image of Amy was simply interfering with his recollection, was superimposing itself where Katherine’s own face should have been. Guilt, the culprit.

  But if the picture and date were authentic...

  Impossible.

  Their affair had been brief, having lasted four months or so. Patricia had then just lost her husband, and Katherine a step-father, to a criminal and his gun. Although they’d lived in Rock Bay, Patricia’s husband worked out of downtown Boston. His body had been discovered in a parking lot two blocks from his office, dead from a single gunshot to the head. Since it was an obvious homicide, Duncan and his partner had been assigned the case. And it was during the investigation when he’d come to know Patricia, and her daughter Katherine. Like a knight in shining armor, he’d come to their rescue; had trotted haughtily up on his steed and swept them out of their mourning. It was the stuff of gallant comic strips—up to, and including, the moment he traded in his Prince Valiant costume for that of Robin Hood.

  When he’d risked everything for them. Even his life.

  After The Wounds, he never saw them again.

  Until now.

  God, he now remembered how much he had loved that little girl, perhaps even more so than her own mother. So, what had happened to his memories of them? Oh, they were there, but most had become like virga, wispy and vague, evaporating long before they ever reached full recollection.

  Once upon a time, the constant reminders like his scars, and the “ghost pains” (at least according to his doctor) that radiated from those areas, the relevant newspaper clippings and Police Medal of Valor hanging on the wall of his study—all had invoked a daily retinue of sights and sounds and smells from that epoch. But for a long while now, he just realized, maybe even years, those catalysts had been triggering nothing but the same redundant images, tame as they were fleeting.

  Selective memory? he asked himself. Survivor’s Guilt? Possibly. Were these kinds of episodes of reality going astray inevitable for victims of trauma? Again, possibly. He’d been told by some of the best shrinks in the business that he could expect some kind of stress-induced psychosis (most likely transitory, at least initially). Given that, then this very experience could be such a manifestation.

  But not today, he thought. No, he firmly believed that he was still in every way, shape and form in full possession of his faculties. The only rational explanation here, he finally decided, was that he was sane and that it was the rest of the world suddenly having a psychotic break.

  This dispossession of memory had occurred so surreptitiously and over such a long stretch of time that it hadn’t even dawned on him until just now that he’d been forgetting anything at all. But now it was all coming back—and so vividly that he could feel the sun setting behind him, could taste the mustard from Katherine’s kraut dog, could smell the shampoo in Patricia’s hair, could hear their laughter, see his purple windbreaker rippling in the wind.

  I am not losing my mind.

  These didn’t feel like memories of old. They were still damp with saltwater.

  Christ!

  Overwhelmed, he opened his eyes. Both faces stared back at him, their expressions having changed, questions now loitering in their eyes; questions that asked why he’d left so soon, why so suddenly, and why when they needed him the most?

  Why did Rachel want to see this photograph now? he wondered. Better yet, who did she get it from? Franky and Johnnie’s studio, or Patricia herself? Had she kept it as a souvenir after learning of his affair, to finally bring it out after all this time to blackmail him? He doubted it. Rachel, like any proud woman, he was sure, would have yanked off his cock and cleaned him out in court years ago.

  Besides, there was still the little girl, Katherine, who didn’t just resemble Amy, but could be her identical twin—assuming that the photograph was genuine, of course. That was the peculiar part, the one that segregated the entire matter from mere chance, coincidence, and placed it into an entirely different category. Something like fate or destiny—abstractions that his analytic side wasn’t comfortable with—was at work here. Perhaps something even more arcane.

  But…that was just pure nonsense.r />
  He shook his head, disgusted with himself. “There’s a logical explanation,” he groaned, dragging a hand over his soaked red hair. “Has to be.”

  The world to which Rachel had earlier alluded as being very small, given the countless occurrences of so-called coincidence, was beginning to feel to Duncan like a very cramped closet; a closet now shared with the ghost of a daughter who couldn’t be, and the ghost of a woman who should never have been at all.

  12.

  Sitting in the front pew of St. Patrick’s Church, hands folded and resting comfortably in his lap, Eli stared up at the pulpit with private trepidation. He was afraid of what Gamble had left behind. What could it be?

  There was just no telling.

  Up until now, the only things Gamble had ever left him were six bags of feathers. “Plucked from man’s own personas of grace, as diminutive as they are fragile,” he’d once told Eli. More cryptic bullshit. At least that’s as far as it got with him back then, back when his innocence was blinding. But he believed he’d since deciphered its meaning, that Gamble had literally scalped the feathers from the wings of angels. Those created by the collective mind, of course: Gamble’s very own mother. And Gamble often crowed about how he’d killed them all, those angels.

  Eli grinned. It was fratricide, if one got right down to it.

  The interior of the church echoed with the deafening stillness of a mausoleum. Even the sounds of his own breathing drifted upward and were quickly lost, perhaps to seek out and inflate the inert lungs of the angels cast upon the domed ceiling; to give them a dimensional quality that the painter’s brush could have never achieved.

  He recalled with fondness his adolescent years when he had fallen in love with angels. Though no longer that naive little boy, the captivation was still there, but a more grounded one, the years having washed over that puerile enchantment, smoothing out its rough edges and boyish imaginings the way a river does a stone.

  On their first meeting, Gamble had enlightened Eli, had confided in him—albeit equivocally—things that were contrary to popular Christian beliefs, things antithetic to Holy Scripture. In fact, Gamble had advised him to find a flatulent hippopotamus, take the “Good Book” firmly in hand, and shove it up the hippo’s ass, as that was all it was good for.

  More truth could be found at a liars’ convention, Gamble had said.

  Eli, however, had become no more disillusioned than he already was. He’d long suspected as much.

  But now Gamble had insinuated—contrary to Eli’s long-standing belief—that there might be a God after all. The real God of infamy. And that He might even be responsible for Katherine Bently’s return.

  Shaking his head, chuckling to himself, Eli supposed he shouldn’t be so surprised. Gamble, after all, was just being Gamble—the enigmatic asshole.

  He found himself once again coveting the winged and haloed figures above, each one a representation of the nine orders of God’s angels. In descending order: the mighty six-winged Seraphim, nearest to God; then the Cherubim, Dominions, Thrones, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels, and Angels. This was the choir ranking according to St. Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, and the first great Latin doctor of the Church. A few centuries later, pseudo-Dionysius had switched the orders around some and divided them into three groups, expounding upon individual duties.

  Eli, however, had decided to go with St. Ambrose’s arrangement, given the man’s heritage.

  Taking his interpretations of this man-made order to their colorful limits, Eli had nonetheless created a virtual masterpiece, as if Michelangelo himself had possessed every brush stroke, for their brilliant gowns and adorned wings flowed with an archaic fluidity reminiscent of the Renaissance artist.

  It had taken him nearly three years to paint them, the first two months alone spent erecting the scaffolding. Funded primarily by the diocese, this stupendous effort was not only followed by a broadening congregation and heftier collection plates (at least for awhile, anyway), but had satisfied the bishop, among others, to no end.

  This artistic achievement had come on the heels of a truly inspiring visit to St. Michael’s Church, some eight years earlier. The St. Michael’s in New York City, famous for its seven magnificent stained-glass windows. Created by Louis Comfort Tiffany, each long window portrayed an Archangel (Michael, Gabriel and Raphael being the most notable) and placed them into illustrious, angel-filled scenarios. When all were lit at the uppermost levels by daylight, it appeared that the Light of God shone down upon them. The lower portion of the central window had been Eli’s favorite, depicting the Archangel Michael freeing the Court of Heaven from the disobedient angels who’d raised their wills to their Creator.

  And just as Michelangelo was now long-extinct, so were the heavenly beliefs that Eli once entertained as a child, that when people died they became angels and were issued their golden haloes and white, gossamer wings at the Pearly Gates by old St. Peter himself—if, of course, they were fortunate enough to have gone that northerly direction.

  But the figures on the ceiling still enkindled absolute awe. It was, and would always be, their loftiness that invited him.

  Eli knew of another brotherhood of lofty being, a fraternity where a mortal man could ascend in status and rank. Then into a pair of wings, if he so desired. And Eli so desired. And so what if it was for nothing but vain, aesthetic reasons. All his life he’d longed for his own wings. They were symbols of power and strength and seniority, but most of all they were tokens of flight. And he truly wished to fly; to achieve an altitude that would finally let him look down upon all that existed and gloat in his supremacy. To be where destiny wanted him. Needed him.

  And he was so close now. Just one more angel.

  Two, he reminded himself. There’s the matter of the Bently girl in Los Angeles.

  The City of Angels.

  “Touché”, he whispered, glancing craftily at the Holy Virgin centered in the reliquary above the altar.

  Eli rose and walked over to the pulpit; looked inside. Gamble had left him an ordinary, rectangular cardboard box, one large enough to comfortably fit a pair of running shoes. A harsh, loamy smell wandered from the package.

  He leaned in and listened. Its contents made faint, squishy sounds.

  “Oh shit,” he mumbled; a phrase, he often argued, that should have been the real shortest verse in the Bible. “Jesus wept?” Huh-uh. He cussed that night, baby. Like a sailor.

  A limerick, written on a plain 3x5 index card in Gamble’s traditional old-world flair, was taped to the box:

  There once was an angel named Katherine

  Ten years old and full of Saccharine

  She flew the wrong way

  On a dark, stormy day

  So get the bitch before she starts a’yackin’!

  Inured to such verse, Eli just shook his head.

  He removed the lid. Inside was a mass of what appeared to be earthworms in a shovel-full of black, wet soil, writhing and squirming as if electrically charged. On top of the dirt rested another limerick:

  This is a box of night crawlers

  They do nothing but squirm for hours

  But if placed in the ground

  Where flesh, blood and bone abound

  Then they’ll demonstrate their nasty powers!

  This time Eli let out a giggle, a shifty little titter reminiscent of a bully who, from nearby shadows, has just witnessed the finale of a vicious and well-orchestrated prank.

  Deciphering years of this kind of acrostic, nonsensical instruction, Eli knew instantly what he was supposed to do.

  And he couldn’t wait.

  13.

  Back in his study, sitting frumpily behind his desk, Duncan finally shifted his eyes from the photo to his half-eaten dinner. The smells had begun to make him nauseous, and those red Chinese dragons undulating around each box weren’t helping matters. Unheedingly, he pushed an arm out and, as if they were a trio of reluctant lemmings, swiped the containers over the
edge and into the wicker wastebasket below.

  Rachel had called again, this time giving him the CAT scan results. The tomographies, she’d said, had been examined by three resident specialists, and all had passed Amy’s head with a clean bill of health. She’d gone on to say that Doctor Strickland was now under the firm belief that Amy had suffered a seizure, and that it was a transitory episode and would most likely not happen again.

  Worst case scenario? The attacks would continue to occur, but infrequently.

  He’d felt ashamed for not sounding more excited by her good news, having still been numbed by the photograph. He had lied to her when asked if he’d found the picture, not wanting to discuss the matter over the phone. He’d listened intently, but there had been no tell-tale inflections in her voice, no hint that she was on to him. Just wonderful relief that Amy was going to be all right.

  She’d told him that she was going to stay a little while longer, that it wasn’t necessary to come get her, that she would hitch a ride home with Juanita.

  And for him to please, please continue searching for the photograph.

  Once again the name and address on the hospital admission form floated to the surface of his mind, drifting there like slicks of crude oil, threatening the nearby pristine shores of reason.

  Katherine Bently, 1402 Hawthorne Avenue, Rock Bay, Massachusetts.

  Why in God’s name had Amy told the medics and ER staff that her name was Katherine Bently? The very name of the daughter of a mistress for whom he had once risked everything? And why had Amy given them that particular address in Rock Bay? Though he was no longer sure that he could fully trust his memory, that address sounded, well…more than familiar.

  And now a picture of Patricia lay before him, as young and pretty as he remembered her, with Kathy Bently, her daughter, staring back at him with his own daughter’s face.

  Coincidence? A fluke?