Enthralled, a smile pushed back the creased satchels of her face. “Why, I’d be delighted to!” she declared, then disappeared into the house.
Jack chuckled slyly. “Did your mother finally break down and buy herself a pooch? I mean, that’s great, Father. I understand a pet can extend the life of its elderly owner.”
Eli returned the chuckle. “Shit, Jack, if I had known that, I would have killed her parakeet years ago.”
Jack smiled, nodded. “Seriously, though, what’s the hole for?” he said, plucking splinters from his right forearm, courtesy of the frayed lumber.
“Nefarious as it may sound, I’m going to bury two little girls alive, along with some very nasty night crawlers.”
A quizzical expression scrunched Jack’s smile. “What was that, Father?”
Just then, Josephine and Jacob appeared on the cedar deck. “Jack, meet Jacob; Jacob, Jack.” She reached down and patted Jacob’s head. “Now go crap in his tulips!”
Jack was mesmerized. “Good God Almighty! What kind of animal is that?”
Eli laughed. “The kind, I imagine, whose scent is turning the neighborhood dogs crazy.”
The creature took to the air, then careened downward, using its barbed tail to slice through Jack’s throat.
“Atta boy!” cheered Josephine.
Jack’s screams, only wet hisses, bubbled below his chin. He stumbled backward, then collapsed behind the fence.
Now gaping from the Singletarys’ kitchen window was Janet. Her face suggested that she was watching a particularly violent clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos. She appeared seconds later on the tiny outcrop of cement porch, just below the back door. Hands busily wringing the doily apron tied around her thin waist, she laughed. “Jack, what’s going on?”
Jacob circled low over the Singletary’s roof, then plunged like an osprey into their backyard, from where rending, tearing sounds immediately followed.
“Rip him up!” Eli commanded. “And when you’re through with Jack, give his wife a big howdy-doody, the adulterous cunt!”
Janet Singletary was still smiling, still fussing with her apron as urine began to stream down both legs, splotching her white polyester slacks, then puddling at the soles of her blue Donna Reed slip-ons.
Josephine cupped her hands to the sides of her mouth. “And while you’re over there,” she bellowed, “fetch back that gravy ladle they borrowed from me last Thanksgiving.”
17.
The light from the hallway bathroom eked into the otherwise dark living and dining rooms, making them negotiable.
Despite the use of some old cop techniques for stealthy prowling, Duncan’s footfalls still managed to provoke chirps and creaks from the occasionally loose flooring. When one was six-foot-three and two-hundred-and-forty pounds, sneaking was a lousy option. However, once he reached the stairs, his covert intentions would be muffled by thick carpeting.
Finally there, he tightened his grip on the hammer as he climbed.
Stopping in front of the window, he stared at the sleeping face. He felt like Dorothy confronting the Wizard. “Just follow the Yellow Brick Road,” Amy had told him yesterday, as if she’d known then that he would soon entertain such a comparison. At any other time Duncan would have considered it a fluke. But now it bore deific relevance, as if she’d spoken those words to him not from the environs of a hospital, but from a burning bush atop Mount Sinai.
The dim, orange glow from a neighbor’s porch light was leaving rich whorls as it stirred the stained glass, tincturing the reds and blues and yellow-oranges into darker, smoldering versions of themselves. These effects also gave the resident face more amplitude, more character, than had the afternoon or even the setting sun.
Standing there, he watched its nostril move with each wheezy snore. Its eye wondered behind the lid, the face apparently dreaming. Its lips were parted just slightly, and as he held his hand just a few inches away, he could feel warm puffs of breath against his skin.
Gooseflesh stippled across his forearms; not a manifestation of fear, but of absolute incredulity.
He tapped the hammer against his leg, watching.
“Wake up,” he finally whispered.
The eye fluttered. The lips parted even wider.
He bumped the handle lightly against the glass. “Rise and shine,” he whispered again, louder.
The eye flew open. It stared at him for a moment, cloudy with sleep. “What...Duncan? What’s going on?”
“Keep your voice down,” he ordered. “Now listen up. I want some goddamn answers.”
Blinking out the cobwebs, it said, “What kind of answers?” It was now staring distrustfully at the hammer.
“What part of Chris are you?”
“The slumbering part.”
Duncan raised the hammer.
“Okay, okay,” said the face. “You could say I’m his psychic conscience.”
“What, like you make sure he doesn’t peek clairvoyantly into women’s locker rooms, stuff like that?”
“Even I wouldn’t discourage that,” it said. “No, I’m referring to a much higher level, like keeping him from going into people’s minds, and elsewhere, and doing harmful things.”
“Well, you sound like a moral kind of guy, then,” Duncan said with feigned delight. “How about telling me where my daughter is.”
“She’s just down the hall—”
“Not Kathy, smart ass,” he said, raising the hammer again. “Amy.”
“Look, I swear I don’t know Amy’s whereabouts.”
“Really? Then how is it that you and the rest of Chris found out all those things about Patricia?”
The lone eye looked away. “Well, um, you see...I...we...Look, it’s very complicated—”
“Tell me where Amy is!” Duncan snarled, leaning in. “Tell me who she is!”
“I’m not sure I should tell a brute like you. I’m bound by a conscience of my own.”
Duncan brandished the hammer. “Yeah? And I’m bound by Craftsman Tools.”
Just then, down in the dining room, the kitchen doors squealed open. A voice whispered, “Who’s up there?”
“It’s just me, Mrs. Pendleton,” Duncan said.
“Are you talking to that window?”
“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” he admitted.
“Alright, but you boys don’t stay up too late, or you’ll be the dickens to get up.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Duncan.
As Joan let the doors swing shut, Duncan cocked the tool over his shoulder. “Unless you want to become a draft, start talking.”
“Alright!” it said. “Look, all I know is that Katherine and Amy are your daughters.”
“They have different fathers, Einstein.”
“Really? Looks to me like they just have the one.”
“Hey, just in case you’re insinuating what I think you are, I didn’t even know Patricia Bently when Kathy was conceived,” he stated. “And even if I were Kathy’s father, what would be the odds of her and Amy sharing identical likenesses at their respective ages of ten from two different mothers—with over eleven years between their births?”
“The odds?” said the face. “Astro-fucking-nomical.”
“Oh, I’m thinking even beyond that.”
“Agreed,” said the face. “Now, I want you to pay very close attention. Where was Amy when Katherine was killed?”
Duncan sighed as he bent over and propped the hammer against the wall. “She was either still a twinkle in my eye,” he said, “or had just been recently conceived.”
“I’d stick with recently conceived. So, what does that tell you?”
“Christ, I don’t know. That maybe...that maybe when Kathy was murdered, her soul reincarnated through Amy?” He shook his head. “I know where you’re heading, but it doesn’t work. It might—might—explain to someone else why Amy looks like Kathy, but it wouldn’t explain why Kathy carried my resemblance before Amy was ever born.”
“Sure it w
ould,” said the face, “if you knew which came first, the chicken or the egg.”
Duncan tipped his head as if he hadn’t quite caught the remark.
Grinning, the face said, “I was making an analogy—”
“I know that!” Duncan snapped. “But while you’re waxing metaphoric, I’m getting a nosebleed standing here on Mount Coincidence!”
“Alright, alright. It’s like this—Amy doesn’t look like Katherine. Katherine looks like Amy.”
Duncan reached down for the hammer.
The eye widened. “Look, I’m not trying to screw with your brain. I just want to get you on the right path of thinking. You were there just a second ago, when you mentioned reincarnation.”
“But that just doesn’t work,” Duncan adamantly declared. “Assuming that the literature on reincarnation is true, since when do progressing souls take on the physical appearance of their progenitors? Besides, what’s the common denominator here? That reincarnation advances onwardly. For Kathy to look like Amy, Amy would have had to—” He stared at the face.
The eye widened. “Yes?”
“Amy’s soul went back? In time?”
“Hmmmm.”
“Oh, give me a break! Kathy is some kind of...of relapsed copy of my daughter?”
“Wild, huh?” said the face. “Gives your mind a wedgie just thinking about it.”
“Okay, if Amy went back in time,” Duncan said, “and occupied Kathy’s embryo—” He stared at his toes, stymied. “Wait a minute, back up. In theory, Amy would have had to die at some point for her soul to be released for this bass-ackwards reincarnation to work at all. Right?”
“Right—if that’s the only way you’re going to approach it.”
“You’re starting to piss me off again.”
“No, really. Consider this—what if Amy’s not entirely human?”
“Well that’s rather evident, isn’t it?”
“Radically so,” agreed the face. “But what’s her non-human part?”
“Maybe something like...an angel?” Duncan offered pendulously.
“Something even grander than that, perhaps?” requited the face.
Leering now, Duncan said, “What do you know about seraphs?”
“Only that they once existed in greater numbers than they do now.”
“You know,” Duncan said, “I was muddling through just fine until you threw time travel in the mix. Are you aware of the dilemmas involved with that?”
The face smiled. “I saw this bumper sticker once. It read, ‘Do it with a seraph. They take their time without creating any paradoxes.’”
Duncan sighed. “Cute. But if this is all true, then why Kathy?”
“You’re assuming that Katherine was already in existence when Amy went back?”
“Then how the hell could Amy hope to influence any changes if Kathy hadn’t even been conceived yet?” Then his eyes narrowed. “Oh, unless...”
As if Duncan were a baby attempting his first steps, the face said, “You can do it, come on, you can do it, I know you can...”
“Alright,” Duncan insisted, “try this on for size. Amy goes back in time. Her soul enters Patricia’s womb just before one of Jack Fortune’s little guys scores a hit and somehow manages to plant her own essence in the egg.”
“Now you’re talking,” said the face. “Go on.”
Scrunching his face, he said, “Look, hold on, I’ve got to walk this through. Now, at the moment Kathy dies, her soul enters Rachel’s womb. But if Amy had already gone back in time to inseminate Patricia’s egg with her divine essence, or whatever...”
“Yes?”
“Then it wasn’t Katherine who died at all, but Amy. It was Amy who returned back to Rachel, her original mother, her original womb. Katherine Bently is nothing but the embodiment of Amy McNeil. He looked down in the direction of Kathy’s room. “By any other name...”
“A rosary is still a rosary is still a rosary,” the face agreed
“But...shit...No, I just don’t buy it. I mean, do you realize that we’re talking immaculate conception here?”
“What else would you call it when a half-breed seraph goes back in time to fertilize a human egg? A Thursday night quickie? I hate to burst your bubble, but I can guarantee that whatever kind of hanky-panky was responsible for at least half of Katherine’s conception will not be found in the Kama Sutra.”
“Hold on, Duncan said. “What do you mean ‘half of?’”
“I’m afraid Jack Fortune scored a bull’s eye, after all.”
Duncan rolled his eyes. “So, now what you’re telling me Katherine has two fathers—Jack Fortune and a half-breed seraph?”
“No,” said the face. “Jack Fortune’s daughter is living inside Katherine as a separate entity.”
Duncan ran a hand down his face. “I’m confused, again.”
“Look at it this way—one of Jack’s little swimmers fertilized Patricia’s egg, this is true. But his little swimmer isn’t anything like the item you learned about in Biology 101. It has a lot more in common with the same kind of essence that Amy used to fertilize the egg. Jack Fortune’s daughter is occupying a different space inside Katherine. And he’s going to do everything he can to get custody. If he does, it may have fatal ramifications for Katherine. She may not survive the separation.”
“So, in all likelihood, we’re going to meet up with this guy, this Jack Fortune?”
“You can count on it.”
“Alright, if Jack Fortune is some kind of incubus knocking up women, then what does it make me when my daughter’s part seraph?”
“Well—”
“I mean, if Amy really is some kind of angel, then what the hell am I? Her own father?”
“Maybe you’re—”
“And what about Rachel? Is she an unsuspecting partner in this? Or is she the one who’s passing along the angel gene? And let’s just say for the moment that I am some kind of angel. Don’t you think I would have at least suspected something by now? Like experiencing a twinge of regret every time I bite into an apple? Or ponder for hours over the fleshy nubs growing out of my back? A passionate urge to play a harp every time I see a funeral procession?”
“You’re babbling.”
“Look, I don’t care what you say, I am not an angel, a seraph, a sentinel, a cherub.” He felt on the verge of tears. “I’m just plain old Duncan McNeil.”
“Alright. But regardless of who’s humping who, doesn’t it seem a bit odd to you that the seraph is breeding on some level with human beings?”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Duncan said. “Like the rest of what you’ve told me, that concept’s shining through with crystal fucking clarity.”
“No, seriously,” it said. “Why would a seraph want to start reproducing through man?”
“Wait,” Duncan said, “Amy said something about a place where angels are born. And that I’d have to deliver one. Any idea what she meant by that?”
“Not really,” it said. “Perhaps she was speaking metaphorically.”
“Gee,” Duncan said, “that wouldn’t surprise me, seeing how straight answers are like charity lately—a guy has to beg to get any.”
“Look, I’m not being stingy, just purposely obscure,” it said. “I want to get you thinking on a different level.”
Duncan nodded. “Fair enough. So, why is a seraph breeding with humans?”
“Just think about it. Man has something it needs.”
“What could it possibly need from peons like us?”
“Something that didn’t come in the original box.”
“Halo polish?”
“Moxie.”
“Moxie?” Duncan said. “What do you call destroying cities and killing first borns? A gut check?”
“Myth.”
Duncan folded his arms. “So what you’re saying is, it’s nothing like we’ve been told.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Duncan grabbed the hammer. He said, “You know,
Chris was right about us. Man, I mean. I brought an instrument of destruction to talk with a miracle in a stained glass window, meaning to bust it if it didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.” He shook his head. “Even when God wraps us in shrouds of wonder, the first thing we ungrateful bastards do is piss and moan about the quality of the weave.”
“And to see what applications any of it might have militarily,” the face reminded. “Now that’s the kind of moxie I’m talking about. Besides, I had the impression that you didn’t believe in God.”
“There are no atheists in foxholes,” Duncan said. He placed his hand gently on the window. “Thanks for humoring me and not compromising your conscience.”
“Do me a favor,” it said. “Don’t tell Chris what we talked about. I want to be the one to tell him. You might say he has a learning disability when it comes to things divine.”
“Poor bastard,” Duncan said, shaking his head pitiably. “Well, there’s one in every crowd.”
“Trust me,” said the face. “It’s even worse than yours.”
Duncan pointed to his own head. “But...won’t he find out from me anyway?”
“Not likely,” it said. “Chris’s already tried entering your mind. I won’t go into any details, but something in there scared him awfully bad.”
“Scared him?”
“Well, as we’ve just discussed, he doesn’t think you’re entirely human.”
“So, neither does my wife.”
“I think you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do,” he said. “And you’re full of shit. I’m no angel. Rachel, on the other hand, just might be your man. And Amy, of course.”
It smiled. “Before you go, remember…you might not be able or willing to change the past, but the past might be willing and able to change you.”
That fateful night isn’t through with you, Daddy.
Staring at the face, Duncan said, “You’re not really a part of Chris, are you?”
“Try not to think so hard.” It smiled. “Just go with the flow.”
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