Seraphim

by Jon Michael Kelley

  Sure, he thought, and if you put enough monkeys and typewriters together you’d eventually have some of Shakespeare’s finest pushing up the slush pile.

  Maybe Amy had heard the name Katherine Bently elsewhere, he desperately reasoned; had overheard Rachel while in some fit of rage over learning of his affair, mention it, and from her mother’s tone had somehow inferred its disastrous meaning on a subconscious level, only to be recalled in a state of delirium like the one she’d experienced today.

  But the address, too? No, that was stretching some already thin speculation. It was preposterous, really. Besides, it still wouldn’t explain Amy and Katherine’s uncanny resemblance.

  Or would it? What if the picture was a forgery? What if Rachel had hired an expert to inlay a photo of Amy next to Patricia’s...? Oh, hell, who was he kidding? He shook his head. Rachel would not have gone to all that trouble and expense, not when a simple “Get out you no-good rotten son of a bitch!” would have sufficed. And when he got right down to it, she would have to be a certifiable lunatic to even attempt such a thing. Though occasionally showing promise, like signing contracts to do hemorrhoid commercials, he was sure she was nothing of the sort.

  He continued to use the sheer art of deduction, trying to shape and form all potentialities like dough into neat, palatable cookies. And so far none of them tasted logical. Not remotely so.

  Though he didn’t want to listen, his old cop instinct—that intuition that he would have normally embraced with every ounce of his trust—was telling him that something beyond his comprehension was at work here; something so far beyond rational explanation that to try and figure it out with just these few puzzle pieces would be an exercise in futility.

  Any answers—reasonable answers—would have to remain forthcoming until Rachel got home.

  He picked up the phone and tried the photographer again.

  Nadda. Probably moonlighting at Foto Mart.

  14.

  Amy McNeil was startled awake by the sound of thunder. It wasn’t the blast that did it so much as it was the rattling window before her. She was on her knees, her thin hospital gown feeling like nothing but an oversized paper towel around her body.

  Droplets of rain, as big as quarters, pelted the glass with wind-driven force, melting away the city lights over and over.

  Lightning impulsively stung the night.

  She glanced around, confused. No one else was in the room with her, as best as she could see. The lighting was dim, coming from a pair of Yosemite Sam night lights glaring at each other from across opposite ends of the room, poised in gunslinger fashion.

  Strange machine-shapes occupied the shadows.

  The silhouettes of other Looney-Tune characters danced on the wallpaper. There was Elmer Fudd chasing that “wascally wabbit,” Bugs Bunny. There was Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, all her favorites. There were red and green dots of light above the bed next to her; her bed, she presumed. There was another bed, as well; one with a curtain pulled all the way around, like a shower.

  The smell of alcohol was faint, but unmistakable.

  I’m in a hospital, she concluded with little effort.

  She’d been having a dream, could recall it vividly. The strange thing was, in the dream her name was Kathy.

  In a bewildered gesture, she raised her hands to her face, wanting to inspect them, to make sure that they were free of injury. On her right forearm was some kind of splint (to keep her lower arm immobile, she suspected. But why?), and she noticed a plastic tube, secured with transparent tape, jutting from the back of her hand. Further inspection found two small round tags with silver nipples stuck to her chest, then two more on her lower abdomen.

  With puzzled scrutiny, she examined her legs, then poked subtly at her stomach, her chest. She methodically ran a hand through her hair, then tugged a few strands as if to make sure they were securely embedded.

  Relief slowly washed over her after realizing that she was, as she suspected, all right. At least as far as her eyes and fingers could tell. She felt okay. Almost. There was a slight tingling, burning sensation on her upper back, as if someone had just sprayed Bactine on her sunburn.

  But she didn’t have a sunburn. And as she considered this, the feeling on her back dwindled away.

  Initially in her dream she’d been standing on the edge of a very high cliff, looking out over a violent ocean where waves crashed thunderously against black, volcanic-like rock. A feeling that someone was standing behind her had caused her to turn around. Finding no one, she’d turned back to the ocean. Instantly, it had changed. The water had flattened, had turned glassy, and mirrored the blue sky above and its gauzy streams of clouds without a single, rippling blemish. It was as if God had suddenly inhaled. And that calm had set upon her a feeling like no other she had ever known. A wonderful, magnificent peace had settled within her heart, her soul, warming her internally.

  Now, while recalling it, it felt as if she’d been standing there and staring out over that blue expanse for hundreds of years.

  And then, deep within the water, she had watched a shape slowly rise; a dot at first, gradually growing bigger and bigger, as if a great whale was on its way to the surface for a breath of air. Then a breeze had begun to stir, which quickly turned into a mighty wind that whipped her sandy-blonde hair across her forehead and eyes. Then a roar, like hundreds of trains speeding toward her, engulfed her ears.

  The water below, however, had remained crystalline, undisturbed.

  Then, as she glanced upward to find the source of the thunderous noise, she’d realized that the shape in the water below could not have been a whale but was actually the reflection of something coming down from the sky. Something staggeringly huge. Something charging headlong on the power of gigantic, multiple, luminous wings.

  Then someone had called out a name: “Katherine?”

  The voice kept calling the name, over and over; frantic, like a mother searching for her lost child. In the dream she had truly believed that Kathy was her name, had responded to it without hesitation, just as if it were the name given to her at birth.

  Just as she would have reacted now if someone were to call out “Amy?”

  “I’m here,” she had replied. “I’m here, I’m here.” But she and the voice never found one another. The storm outside had roused her awake before they could meet.

  At no time in the dream had she been scared. Not the slightest bit.

  But she was scared now.

  What happened to me? she wondered. Why am I in front of this window?

  The last thing she remembered before waking in this room was sitting in front of a man who was going to take her picture. Where was her mother? Her Daddy? Juanita?

  She began to rise to her feet, being extra quiet just in case someone was in the other bed. She didn’t think there was because she couldn’t hear any breathing or moaning, but just in case...

  She placed a hand on the window sill to steady herself, then put her other hand on the glass. And the moment she did, a blinding flash of light erupted from the window, so immediate and intense that the pane of glass might have been a cloud shedding a bolt of lightning.

  Then the dream resumed.

  15.

  Rachel stared at the photograph while pensively twirling a finger through her wet hair. She and Juanita had gotten drenched in the short distance between the driveway and the front door, having been unable to go through the garage because the opener in Juanita’s car was on the fritz.

  As she studied the picture, Duncan thought her poise was laudable.

  Of the two windows in the room, the one closest to them faced west, confronting the storm. Lightning flickered habitually across the glass, as if the window sat in the periphery of a welder’s arc.

  Thunder reverberated throughout the house, reminding Duncan of the earthquake they’d all sat through just a few days earlier. A minor one, five-point-two on the ol’ Richter scale.

  Now, deep in his heart, he could feel the rumblings of a
nother; this one powerful enough to split continents.

  “She’s a dead-ringer,” she finally said. “I mean ...wow.”

  Duncan leaned forward in his chair. “When and where did you get that picture?”

  “Well,” Rachel said, “I’ve been putting dates and events together since remembering the photograph earlier today, and I believe...”

  “Yes?”

  She straightened in her chair. “Do you recall when we first found out we were pregnant?”

  Although quite sure only one of them had been with embryo, Duncan nodded.

  “Right before we left Rock Bay, to come here?”

  “Yes, yes, I remember,” he insisted.

  “Well, I was in town one day and ran across this picture. Actually, it was right before we left for LA. Anyway, this picture kind of grabbed me from the start. I felt…compelled. I mean, I had to have it. The guy behind the counter thought I was crazy. He didn’t want to sell it to me at first, but I put on the waterworks, probably said something like they were long lost relatives, and he finally gave in.”

  “What compelled you?” Duncan said, then wondered if he might have sounded a bit too suspicious.

  “I…I don’t know. I do remember that I almost fainted at one point.” She looked up at him, bemused. “And that I saw an angel.”

  “I’m sorry, did you say an angel?”

  “Funny, huh?” she said, looking down at the picture again. “God, she really does look like Amy.”

  “That is Amy. Has to be,” Duncan said, still not really believing it but wanting to solicit a reaction from Rachel.

  She considered him carefully. “That’s not possible, Dunc. I bought this—”

  “Over eleven years ago,” he finished for her. “But why? What on earth would force you to buy this photograph? And why have you kept it hidden from me all these years?” His tone was sharp now; accusatorial. “Are you keeping something from me, Rachel?” The question crashed in his chest, hurling sharp, icy debris into his heart. He was now convinced that Rachel was just as mystified by the picture, at least by the image of Amy, and that if anyone was keeping secrets, it was him.

  What a miserable hypocrite, he thought.

  “I wasn’t intentionally keeping it from you,” she snapped, meeting his hostility. “I simply tucked it away because later I felt foolish for buying it. I did run across it five or six years ago while going through some old stuff, but it didn’t leave any particular impression because Amy was still too young, I suppose, for the resemblance to strike me. I boxed it up with a bunch of other odds and ends and once again forgot about it.”

  “Okay,” Duncan said, tempering his voice. “If it means nothing to you—if it was simply a compulsive, spur-of-the-moment thing way back when—then why didn’t you just throw it out when you came across it again those five or six years ago?”

  This time, she considered him suspiciously. “Why the third degree, Dunc?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I just—I just want to know why this picture is so important to you,” he entreated, “and why you just happened to remember it today.”

  With some diffidence, Rachel related the conversation she’d had earlier with the paramedic.

  Nervously, Duncan laughed. “What a load of horseshit.”

  “He was telling the truth,” she insisted.

  Before Duncan could rebut, Juanita crept through the doorway carrying cream, sugar, and three cups of steaming coffee on a circular tray. It was obvious to Duncan that she’d not even toweled herself dry, given the shiny black octopus squatting on her head.

  The china clinked dangerously together as she abruptly paused. “Excuse, Mrs. McNeil, but should I come back—”

  “No, Juanita,” Rachel said. “Please, come in.”

  Juanita set the tray down on the edge of Duncan’s desk and began putting the customary amounts of sugar and cream into Rachel’s coffee. Duncan preferred his black, though he was sure that if rat poison were an available condiment, Juanita would have added enough lumps to guarantee convulsions, then coma, after the second sip.

  “This picture,” Juanita said. “It is the cause of your argument?”

  Rachel held the picture up for Juanita to see.

  “It is Amy,” Juanita said confidently, “but I do not recognize the woman next to her.”

  “Neither do I,” Rachel said. “And that’s not Amy.”

  Juanita stared down at Rachel as if she’d just confessed to having opened the city’s first free abortion clinic. “Pardon me, Mrs. McNeil, but I know my Amy, and that girl is her.”

  “If I didn’t know where it came from, and how old it is,” Rachel said, “then I would have to agree with you.”

  “This picture is not new?” Juanita said, exasperation in her eyes.

  “Rachel found it before Amy was ever born,” Duncan said. “Back in Massachusetts.”

  Juanita crossed herself, mumbled a short prayer. “God help us, she has a doppelganger.”

  “Apparently,” Rachel agreed.

  Duncan knew what a doppelganger was, but was surprised as hell to hear such a word come from Juanita’s mouth. In fact, it even seemed a bit too exotic for Rachel’s vocabulary.

  “Did have a double,” he reminded them. “Their likenesses would have to be contemporaneous to qualify that noun. Besides, you both watch too much daytime TV.”

  “Alright, Professor McNeil, then you explain the uncanny resemblance,” Rachel said. “In fact, why don’t you just neatly square the whole thing away for us right now.”

  Duncan sighed. “I can’t. At least not...”

  “At least not what?” Rachel said, her eyes narrowing.

  As the land masses of his life began to buckle and grind, he averted his eyes.

  “Spit it out, Dunc,” Rachel insisted. “You’re not the only one around here who can read people like a book, you know.”

  He still couldn’t look at her, but could feel her eyes drilling into the top of his skull as he stared into his lap.

  Did he dare tell her?

  “Fess up,” she urged. There was already a shaky quality in her voice, as if she were prodding a hesitant doctor to reveal the results of her mammogram. “Now!”

  He finally looked up at Juanita. “Would you excuse us?”

  Juanita glanced expectantly at Rachel, as if she might invalidate Duncan’s order. She didn’t, though, and a few moments later Rachel and Duncan were alone.

  “Well?”

  “You’re not going to like me very much,” Duncan promised.

  Sighing, Rachel nodded her understanding. “Alright, who’s the woman?”

  16.

  Amy was back, standing on the edge of the cliff, but was now observing rather than experiencing the same dream she’d had earlier. And this time from a different perspective. She was watching it unfold in the window directly before her, as if the pane of glass had turned into a kind of television screen, one capable of three-dimensional imagery.

  She did not have the wide panoramic view of the cliffs that she’d had previously, but was now standing on their very edge, if she was to trust her eyes. She felt that if she were to step forward, up and over the window sill, she would surely fall the hundreds of feet down to the tranquil ocean below.

  She could still hear the rain outside pecking against the glass, but could no longer see it. Unlike her emotional state in the previous dream, she was frightened.

  Shakily leaning forward, she peered down, and was instantly overcome with that woozy, wavering feeling that she got when riding in elevators.

  As hard as she tried, she could not remove her hand from the window. It was the weirdest feeling. Her sense of touch told her this was a solid object; smooth glass. But her eyes and stomach were telling her something entirely different.

  Her name was Amy McNeil, not Katherine, and she was sure this was not a dream.

  Then, just as before, the multi-winged image appeared, reflected on the mirror-like surface of the water below.
Small at first, it quickly grew in size as it descended from the sky.

  She looked up, and again the sounds of many approaching trains filled the air, rapidly becoming a deafening blare.

  The immense shape plummeted directly in front of her, and for more than a second blocked out her view entirely. A blinding flash of light and hot gust of wind rushed instantly through the window, the concussive force literally blowing her off her feet. Had her right hand not been so bizarrely anchored to the glass, she believed she would have been thrown clear across the room.

  At once her lips became chapped, her mouth and eyes sucked of moisture. Her hair whipped crazily about her face.

  She cried out.

  Then a thunderous, crashing noise erupted from the water below. She looked down. The multi-winged creature had plunged into the water—which wasn’t water anymore, but glass. A volcanic eruption of glittering fragments, like the silvery pieces of a mirror, sprayed into the air.

  Seconds later, a conglomeration of remnants sailed past her, heaven-bound. She saw that each one was an individual segment of either body or wing, exquisitely detailed, capturing every aspect and minuscule feature of scale and feather as if cast from the most delicate of molds. She even saw, in some of the closer ones, portions of her own astonished reflection.

  The soaring fragments did not dive back to earth, as she’d expected. Instead, the pieces kept soaring upward, twinkled like stars for a moment, then vanished altogether.

  Glancing back down at the ocean, she saw that there was now a gigantic, craggy hole where the impact had occurred. And she instantly knew with all of her soul that within the infinite blackness beneath…there waited monsters.

  Monsters preparing for a feast of man.

  Then the vision became a rain-splattered window again, so suddenly that it jarred her backward. No longer stuck to the glass, she fell butt-first to the hard floor.

  Dazed, she glanced around the shadowy room. Very near her, something twinkled on the floor.

  In the hallway outside, there was a scramble of soft footsteps. Careful not to cut herself, she snatched the piece of glass, then hurried to the open bed.