by H. G. Nadel
ETERNAL
H. G. NADEL
Copyright © 2012 by H. G. Nadel
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ISBN 978-1-937458-19-5
LCCN 2012910465
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To Abelard and Heloise. May their love live forever.
CONTENTS
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
Julia sprinted through the dark, stumbling on sharp I rocks that bit into her feet and ignoring the shooting I pain from the deep gash in her right hip. A thick stream of blood ran down her torn knee and mingled with her sweat. A woman’s body holds about eight to ten pints of blood. How much could she lose before she blacked out? Her heart beat uncontrollably. She was on the verge of hyperventilation, and blood loss was making her dizzy. But she could not stop—she must not stop. Sweat dripped into her eyes, but she couldn’t spare the energy to wipe it away. Every extremity throbbed. She wanted nothing more than to sink into oblivion, to succumb to the weariness in her bones.
Ocean waves crashed at her feet, urging her to pick up her pace. Almost there. As her legs pumped harder, the blood that oozed from both her hip and her knee pulsed faster, leaving a distinct trail in the sand. With luck, they’d be able to follow it to find her body. Don’t you dare pass out before you get there! The moonlight blurred and faded—or was that her dimming sight? She could just make out the rough outline of the pier in the darkness. Her final destination.
“Nadia!” she cried in desperation. Her voice was so cracked with fear and fatigue that she didn’t recognize it as her own. She stumbled and fell. She’d lost too much blood. She couldn’t go any further. The world turned gray.
ONE
Julia looked at her watch for the third time in five minutes. She was eager to see her dad, despite the reason for tonight’s visit. So glad this long day is almost over. That thought was immediately followed by guilt—the guilt of surviving. At least she still had long days to contend with. Her mother no longer had that luxury.
What is taking him so long? Julia shook her head and smiled in spite of herself. Her father, Morton Jones, was one of those absent-minded professor types, who could tell you the 24th digit of pi but still got lost in his own pharmacy. Kind of like Dr. Bertel, she realized. Who knew I’d have a boss so much like my own dad?
Julia sighed, rubbed the back of her neck, and pulled open the top button of her white lab coat, revealing a Beatles T-shirt underneath. She killed a few minutes tidying up her workbench, arranging the test tubes and slide trays that represented the day’s work. She plucked a strand of hair from the test tube tray and dropped it on the floor. It matched the haphazard blonde locks that hung around her face, escapees from the rubber band she’d found in a drawer of utility clamps. She caught her distorted reflection in the chrome table and wrinkled her nose at the wide-set green eyes she’d always thought of as too far apart. She assumed the only reason the boys stared at her was because she was such a geek.
She wasn’t sorry to be a geek. Her diligence had allowed her to graduate at the top of her class, and her science smarts had landed her this summer job straight out of high school—in Dr. Caleb Bertel’s forensic pathology lab at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Bertel had tapped Julia as his research assistant after a single interview, much to her surprise. She’d taken a number of AP science classes and had been offered scholarships at several stellar universities, but she still considered herself lucky to be there. There must be more qualified girls already in college who’d kill for this opportunity.
Then again, maybe the pool of applicants wasn’t as large as she thought. Dr. Bertel’s scientific reputation wasn’t what it once was. He had apparently “retired” from his position with the FBI. All Julia knew about the reason was that he’d been caught working on unauthorized research. But to Julia it seemed like a minor blemish on an otherwise successful career. Bertel had done breakthrough research in the use of DNA to solve cold cases, and he’d published three books—one of which sat on the shelf of almost every serious forensic scientist in America. Yet many of those same scientists would prefer to forget the book for which he was better known. The Devil Takes a Body: When Science Can’t Explain Superhuman Behavior was an expansive tome on demonic possession that brought him far more criticism than praise.
The criticism didn’t bother Dr. Bertel. In fact, Julia suspected that he took pleasure in it. In her eyes, it simply made him more interesting. She didn’t put much stock in spirits, but she was intrigued by the idea of a soul. In any case, Julia was eager for the opportunity to develop a close working relationship with such a brilliant scholar. Plus, she needed an apprenticeship that would look good on her application to medical school, since she had some deficits to overcome. She wrinkled her nose again at the thought of her recent fiasco at the science fair.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a large ladder floating past the lab’s open door.
“Do you need some help, Dr. Bertel?” She suppressed a smile as her mentor struggled to keep both the ladder and a carton of light bulbs suspended off the floor.
“Oh, hi Julia,” Dr. Bertel flashed a friendly grin as he set down the ladder with a thud. “I thought you left for the cemetery.”
“Still waiting for my dad,” she laughed. “There is a good chance he’s wandering the parking lot right now looking for his misplaced keys.”
“You know, I did that once,” Bertel said. “Found them half an hour later in my coat pocket.”
“Where was the coat?”
“I was wearing it!” Bertel’s uncommonly light-hearted banter was infectious, and they both laughed.
“You’re in a good mood today, Dr. Bertel,” Julia said. “What’s the occasion?”
“Oh, no occasion,” he said mysteriously. “Just going to change a light bulb in my supply closet, then I’m off to dinner. Have a good night.”
“You too.” Julia heard his footsteps echo softly as he walked down the hall to his office. She waited a few more minutes for her dad then decided to go upstairs and meet him by the entrance to the building.
Julia grabbed her purse and started down the basement corridor of Research Building Three, where the pathologists kept their offices. Although the sun stayed up late on summer evenings, the corridors were cast in a perpetual bluish glow made creepier by the insect-like hum of the few working fluorescent tubes. Pathologists needed no reminder that they were at the bottom of the medical food chain, which made her all the more aware of the office location.
As she walked past Dr. Bertel’s office, the lights suddenly flickered and went dark. Then she heard an explosive sizzle and bang, like a large firecracker or maybe an M-80—the kind her boyfriend, Tyler, bought last Fourth of July. When she heard the loud thump following th
e sizzle, she panicked.
Julia’s heart raced as she tried to push open the door, but there was something in the way. She shoved as hard as she could. As the shadowy object gave way in the dark, she realized the obstruction was Dr. Bertel’s body. Then the lights turned back on, and she could see everything.
Dr. Bertel had been thrown across the office. The ladder was lying across his legs, and tiny shards of glass were scattered everywhere. The track lighting on the ceiling over his desk was ringed in black. The room smelled like a cross between barbecued ribs and burned metal. Bertel’s face and hands were covered with splotches of charred black skin and blood-red flesh. But what freaked her out the most were his eyes, wide open and unblinking. Bertel was dead, the victim of an electrical shock. But how?
Her widening eyes mirrored his as she whispered in horror, “Dr. Bertel, what did you do?”
TWO
Julia dropped quickly to Bertel’s side to verify what she already knew. “Dr. Bertel! Dr. Bertel!” she shouted as she shook him fiercely. She put her hand to his mouth. Nothing. She laid her head atop his chest. Nothing. He wasn’t breathing, and his heart had stopped. She ran to the closet just outside his office, where he kept the defibrillator they’d ordered a few weeks ago.
Julia grabbed the defibrillator, ran back into the room, and turned it on. She ripped open Dr. Bertel’s shirt and stared for a moment at his chest hair, wondering if the defib paddles would make close enough contact with his skin. She wasn’t about to waste time trying to shave it. She applied gel to the defib paddles, then put one in each hand. The paddles shook. Then she realized it was her hands that were shaking. She took a shuddering breath, pressed the paddles against his chest, and leaned into them, muttering, “Twenty-five pounds of pressure.” Even though she knew no one was in the room with them, she looked around, shouted, “Clear!” just as Dr. Bertel had taught her, and pressed the discharge button. She felt the shock vibrate through her arms as his chest rose toward her. She sat back and watched the cardiac monitor. Still no heartbeat.
Tears streamed from her eyes as she pressed the paddles to his chest and shouted again in a choked voice, “Clear!” Still nothing. But out of desperation, she kept going. On the sixth try, the cardiac monitor finally emitted a series of beeps, and she turned to watch the jagged little lightning bolts rise and fall across the screen.
She heard a sudden gasp, like a swimmer coming up for air. She turned back to Dr. Bertel. His eyes fluttered; but instead of closing or blinking or looking at her, they seemed to be staring at some faraway place beyond the ceiling. Then Julia watched in horror as his eyeballs seemed to fill with blood, turning a darker and darker crimson, until the crimson turned into a deep black that engulfed his entire iris. She wondered if he had broken blood vessels in his eyes. But then the phenomenon disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, and his eyes returned to their normal gray and closed.
Still on the floor, Julia reached up, fumbled the office phone’s receiver from the cradle, and dialed the emergency room. Luckily, their research facility was on the same campus as the hospital. Still, Doctor Bertel had been without a heartbeat—dead—for at least five minutes, maybe longer. “I need emergency medical assistance in Research Building Three, basement level, Room 24. I think Dr. Caleb Bertel was electrocuted.”
“Is he breathing?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.
Before she could answer, a hand clutched her arm. She shrieked and dropped the phone, as Dr. Bertel took hold of her other arm too. This was not the flailing grasp of a man who had just died and been revived. The hand that gripped her felt like that of a trained killer eager to break her arm in two. His nails broke through her skin.
“You’re hurting me, Dr. Bertel! Dr. Bertel, stop!” She tried to pull back, but instead he pulled her close to his face, close enough to kiss. His eyes, usually so shy, were wild and bulging and bloodshot. They were the eyes of a madman.
Bertel pressed his cheek against hers and whispered in her ear in an unnatural, foreign voice, “Tu m’appartiens!” Then he lapsed back into unconsciousness, his head falling back to the floor and hands letting go of her arms so suddenly that she fell backward.
Julia rubbed her arms, which were sticky with the blood he’d drawn with his nails. But she didn’t notice that just yet. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. “Tu m’appartiens!” Her mother had spoken French to her since she was a baby, so Julia was almost fluent. She had no trouble understanding what Bertel had said:
“You belong to me!”
THREE
Julia left the room to make way for the paramedics to work on Dr. Bertel. Now that there was nothing left for her to do, all that had happened during the last minutes slugged her in the stomach. Clutching her abdomen, she stumbled into the bathroom, rushed into a stall, let her trembling legs give way, and vomited into the toilet, until nothing would come up but the last of that day’s Americano—the drink her mother always made fun of. “As if Americans know anything about making proper coffee,” she would say. At that moment, she felt a cool hand on the back of her sweaty neck.
“Thanks, Mom.” The sound of her own voice saying those words jolted her to awareness. She jumped up, banged open the stall, and careened out of the bathroom, leaning against the door as if to keep whatever was in there trapped inside. Julia shook her head violently. Dr. Bertel had convinced her there might be a soul, but she drew the line at ghosts.
It wasn’t the first time she’d had to redraw that line. The first time had been shortly after her mother, Michele, died of cancer. Was it really only a year ago? Julia supposed there wasn’t any good age to lose your mother, but during senior year seemed particularly unfair. Her mom’s death had sparked her determination to become a doctor. Julia couldn’t save her, but maybe someday she could save someone else’s mother.
Michele had warned Julia not to turn her whole life into a battle against death. “Remember that no one ever really dies. The spirit lives on,” she’d said. Although Michele Jones had respected science, she’d been deeply spiritual. She had only been a casual churchgoer, but she had believed herself to have a personal relationship with God.
For years, Michele had tried to share her beliefs with her daughter, but Julia had always been skeptical—not because she was a rebellious teenager, but because she was a devotee of the scientific method. From the time she was five, her father had taught her to question everything.
Julia could still remember the day she noticed a bowl floating in dishwater in the kitchen sink and asked, “Does everything float?”
“Let’s find out,” her father said.
“As long as you clean up the mess,” Mom told them. Then she sat back and watched, laughing as they turned the kitchen upside down.
But Dad didn’t just show her what floated and what didn’t. He asked her to come up with theories about why things worked and then to come up with experiments to test her theories.
So when Michele told Julia about God, the five-year-old demanded evidence. “Is God a solid, a gas, or a liquid?”
“God isn’t something physical that you can see or touch or smell.”
“Then how do you know he’s real?”
“You can feel him, inside.”
“I don’t feel him.”
When Michele died, it only made Julia more skeptical. If there were a god, why would he let her mother, someone who never hurt anybody, suffer through cancer? It made no sense.
Julia had known that her mother was disappointed in Julia’s lack of belief. So, after her mom died, Julia had compromised and made a go of giving in to one of Michele’s other passions: fashion. Michele Jones, née Michele Dedieu, had been a Frenchwoman through and through—and she’d believed in style almost as much as she’d believed in God. On the day of the funeral, Julia had stood at the bathroom mirror, her mother’s makeup and hot rollers lined up on the counter, a black suit hanging on the doorknob instead of her usual jeans and T-shirt. She’d cocked her head, tried to picture her
self through the eyes of her fashionable mother, and plugged in the rollers.
“I don’t know how much good it’ll do,” she said to the mirror. “But this is for you, Mom.” Julia had rarely worn makeup, and she had no idea what she was doing. So she moved very slowly as she rolled her hair and applied lipstick, blush, eye shadow, and mascara. At one point, she blinked and jabbed her eye, smearing a black trail across her left lid. She had been forced to wipe off that eye and start over.
An hour later, Julia stared at the results. Beautiful curls framed her thin, oval face and flowed down her back. Her lashes had always been long, but now they looked almost false. Her green eyes looked downright tropical. She addressed the mirror again: “Who do you think you’re kidding with this mask?” But she could almost hear her mother’s delicate French accent tickling her ear, “You are sooo beautiful. You see? Just a little eye shadow makes those gorgeous green eyes pop.” The way her mother said the word “pop” always made her laugh.
The rain was unmerciful that day. At the cemetery, black umbrellas stretched in a large swath around her mother’s gravesite, keeping the stoic attendees dry. Michele had been well liked. Julia didn’t recognize most of the people.
When she came home that night, she ran into the bathroom, where she tore off her wet clothes and stared at herself in the same mirror. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, and most of her makeup had washed away from the rain and tears, except for two black circles of mascara under her eyes. She nodded in grim approval. “That’s more like it. Now you look like you feel.” The curls that had framed her face that morning now hung limp despite her mom’s extra-hold hairspray. “Now for a curl’s best friend,” her mother used to say as she sprayed a toxic cloud around her daughter’s head. Julia would pretend to sneeze, and they’d both giggle.
