Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel)

by Laura Resnick

  Quinn, continued, “I was really . . . down after she left.”

  “Your wife?” Father Tiano asked sympathetically.

  “Yeah.” Quinn nodded. “Around this time a year ago, I was drinking myself to sleep, showing up late at work, pissing off the guys on the squad . . . and screwing up on the job in a precinct where screwups were dangerous.”

  Father Tiano was the priest that Lucky knew, the one he could get on “short notice.” Really short, as it turned out.

  Rather than getting his coat and leaving Chen’s, as he’d told Lopez he intended to do, Quinn had looked for Max and Lucky in the mortuary office and told them I was wrong, he did not want to protect this thing or give a safe home to the entity that was destroying his life. He was a little freaked out and still not sure he believed in any of this . . . but everything Max had surmised about him was true. The old mage’s statements had described, too accurately to ignore, the nightmare his life had become. And he’d realized, while he was pinned to the wall of the corridor, feeling Nelli’s hot breath on his throat as she challenged the demon, that he couldn’t go on like this.

  So if we could help him shake off this thing, then he wanted to get it done. Right away, in fact—before Lopez or anyone else started to think he was crazy, or worse.

  And, gosh, no, we mustn’t let Lopez think bad things. Imagine where that might lead?

  I was going to have a good long cry about Lopez, I promised myself, but not right now. Right now, I was in a mortuary with a corpse-reanimating demon and an exorcist, so it really seemed like I should focus on the task at hand.

  And the good long cry I was going to indulge in, I vowed, would be the last time I shed tears over Lopez. I would not, I swore to myself, spend any more weeks or months moping over him. I had to move on.

  “So I was in kind of a fog when it all started,” Quinn was saying. “It took a while for me even to notice that things kept breaking down and malfunctioning. When stuff disappeared or reappeared in my apartment, I thought I must have moved it while I was drunk and just didn’t remember. In the morning, when I remembered getting phone calls in the middle of the night with static or weird voices saying spooky shit, I figured I’d been dreaming or hallucinating.”

  Father Tiano, who occasionally interjected a question or a sympathetic comment, was taking notes.

  He was the new priest at St. Monica’s, a century-old parish church that was only a few blocks away, in what was left of Little Italy. He had replaced the (now safely deceased) mystically murderous priest there who had killed several people last year and tried to kill a few others—including me and Lucky.

  He was also a great-nephew of Don Victor Gambello, which made me think it could be unhealthy for us if anything bad happened to him tonight.

  And based on Max’s worried expression and uncharacteristic pacing, I had a feeling something bad happening was a real possibility.

  Quinn’s Catholicism was apparently not as lapsed as everyone thought. Having decided to exorcise the demon, he was adamant about wanting a priest. Since Lucky knew an exorcist who could be here in fifteen minutes, Quinn didn’t have to insist very hard.

  So Lucky and Max tied up Grace Chu’s remains securely. Just in case. Nelli remained near the body, so she could alert us if the trussed corpse got lively again—and so she wouldn’t stress Quinn, who was understandably afraid of her. Lucky also warned John that no one from Joe Ning’s wake, which was finally winding down, was to enter Antonelli’s, and he advised John to keep a sharp eye on Uncle Six’s closed casket.

  “The demon attached to you while you were vulnerable,” Father Tiano said to Quinn now, his boyish face full of empathy. “It was drawn to your despair and preyed on your sadness.”

  “I was also really angry.” Looking ashamed, Quinn admitted, “One night when I was really drunk, I called my ex and threatened her.”

  “They prey on anger, too,” I murmured. “Negative emotions.”

  “Correct.” Father Tiano beamed at me.

  “You threatened some suspects, too, I’ll bet,” Lucky muttered.

  “Why are you here?” Quinn asked him.

  “Please continue,” said the priest.

  As Quinn told his story, it was clear that although he had entered a dark phase after his second wife had left him, he was not an inherently self-destructive man. After a few months of wallowing, he realized that, having lost his marriage, he couldn’t go on this way without losing everything else in his life, too. He was also becoming so unnerved by the blackouts, nightmares, and hallucinations that he wanted them to stop. So he quit drinking and started applying himself to his life again.

  “But the weird shit that was happening, the stuff I didn’t dare tell anyone about . . .” Quinn shook his head. “It continued. No, it escalated.”

  He tried moving to a new apartment, but that didn’t change anything.

  “The demon was attached to you, not your dwelling,” Father Tiano surmised.

  He applied for a transfer, eager to leave behind the black cloud that seemed to hang over him at the precinct where his life had fallen apart.

  “But now this thing is screwing with my new job, too,” he said, sounding exhausted.

  And also with his new partner, who had no idea how much danger they were both in as the demon continued gaining strength and learning how to manipulate them.

  Lopez . . .

  My vision got misty. I wiped impatiently at my eyes and jumped to my feet. Quinn flinched and gave me a peculiar look, then went back to answering Father Tiano’s questions.

  I went out into the corridor and did some breathing exercises to compose myself. When I looked into the room again, I was troubled by the way Max was anxiously pacing around rather than, as I would have expected, sitting and listening intently to Quinn.

  “Max, can you give me a hand out here for a minute?” I called.

  “Hmm? Oh, of course, my dear.” Still looking distracted and anxious, he joined me in the hall.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered. “Something’s obviously bothering you.”

  He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then decided to tell me. “It’s this exorcist.”

  “You think he’s too inexperienced?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Max. “He’s fairly new to this, but he studied in Rome, and the Church’s exorcism training is thorough.”

  “Then what’s your concern?”

  “I am uncertain that this demon will respond to Catholic rites. Therefore, by attempting to expose and expel it, Father Tiano may be putting himself in terrible danger.” Max added fretfully, “Or, rather, we may be putting him in terrible danger.”

  “If the entity won’t listen to . . . um, go along with a Catholic rite, then what kind of exorcism do we need?” I asked. “Wait, you said you thought it was speaking Aramaic. Does that mean it’s an ancient Jewish demon? Do we need a rabbi?”

  “I suspect it may mean that the last time this demon had occasion to speak to anyone was some three thousand years ago.”

  “Hmm, well, I don’t think a rabbi will be of much use, after all,” I said. “Judaism has changed a lot since then.”

  We don’t still do animal sacrifices, for example.

  “Oh, Aramaic was spoken among a number of peoples in that region, Esther, over a period of centuries. It was also spoken by the earliest Christians . . . but the phrase the entity used while in Grace Chu’s body sounded more ancient than that,” said Max. “A demon this skilled at manipulating two intelligent, experienced men capable of withstanding high levels of stress would typically be agile enough to learn the language of the beings it possesses and speaks through.”

  “Ah. You suspect the last time this entity communicated verbally with anyone was—”

  “—was well before the Catholic Church even existed, let alone started developing effective rite
s to battle the demons it encountered.”

  “So Father Tiano’s rite tonight will be like throwing water on a fire: effective if it’s a wood fire, but incredibly dangerous if it’s an oil fire.”

  “An excellent analogy,” said Max.

  “Dr. Zadok?” called Father Tiano. “I believe we’re ready to begin.”

  I squared my shoulders. “I guess we’re about to find out which kind of fire this is.”

  Father Tiano was unpacking his duffel bag when I sat back down, facing Quinn. He had brought half a dozen medium-sized crucifixes that he handed out.

  I hesitated when he offered one of them to me. “I’m in a different union, Father.”

  “Take it,” Lucky urged. “It can’t hurt, right?”

  I shrugged and accepted it. Going along with that same theory, I also let the priest hang a smaller crucifix around my neck. He had brought a very large cross, too, which he set up on a stand in the middle of our group, directly in front of Quinn. Father Tiano asked Quinn if the crucifixes were making him uncomfortable; Quinn shook his head. The priest proceeded to unpack several small bottles of holy water in different little glass vials, a large book bound in old red leather, and a very pretty censer—a large, decorative metal incense burner that hung from a heavy chain.

  “I may have overdone it with the supplies,” he admitted sheepishly. “This is my first exorcism since I returned from Rome last year. I’m so excited!”

  “Knock yourself out,” I said, thinking I’d like to turn the censer into a hanging lamp for my apartment.

  What followed thereafter was so boring that, far from being on the edge of my seat in fear of demonic attack, I wound up having trouble staying awake.

  First, Father Tiano explained that tonight’s rite would be merely an exploratory process. He could not proceed with a full-blown exorcism, he said, not even for a friend of his Uncle Victor, without first getting his bishop’s permission.

  “I’m not a friend of your scumbag uncle,” Quinn said darkly.

  “That’s Mr. Gambello to you,” Lucky snapped.

  Seeing that Quinn was about to snap back, I reminded him who had found an exorcist for him on such short notice.

  Soldiering on, Father Tiano explained that in order to seek his bishop’s permission, he would need to be convinced that Detective Quinn was actually possessed by a demon.

  “Not possessed,” said Max. “Oppressed. I don’t believe this demon intends to possess Detective Quinn. It is using him to find a suitable host, which would be a cadav—”

  “Oppressed, then,” Father Tiano said with a nod to Max. “It is not that I doubt Andrew’s account of his experiences, but we must determine whether these experiences are demonic in origin.”

  Recalling Grace Chu’s glowing eyes as her corpse reached out for me, I said, “I’m pretty convinced.”

  Then Father Tiano started praying. He invited us to join him. Quinn tried to, but it turned out that he was pretty lapsed, after all, and didn’t know his prayers. Lucky knew his, and he hung in there for a while, but he dropped out as the praying went on and on. And on.

  I didn’t know any of the prayers, despite having played nuns on two different occasions, so I just sat quietly and held my crucifix. Max observed Quinn and the priest with concentrated attention.

  An hour later, Father Tiano was still praying, and I was starting to wonder if I could leave the exorcism early without being rude.

  Then we heard footsteps in the corridor, approaching this spot.

  Quinn, who looked like he’d been dozing off, sat bolt upright and whispered, “That’s it. That’s what I hear when I’m alone in my apartment. And there’s never anyone there. That thing is here now.”

  The words gave me a chill. I clutched my crucifix tightly as I looked over my shoulder, riveted by the soft, menacing sound of those approaching footsteps.

  And then John appeared in the doorway, looking handsome in his somber formal suit. “Uncle Six’s wake is over, we’ve closed for the night, and . . . Sorry, am I interrupting?”

  Father Tiano, who was holding his large, red leather-bound book open in his arms, reading from it while he prayed, looked up from the passage he was reciting.

  I was about to ask if we could stop for the night when that heavy tome suddenly shot straight up in the air, about six feet above Father Tiano’s head, and snapped itself shut with a resounding thud! Then it swooped back down and whacked the priest in the head so hard that he went tumbling across the room.

  I leaped out of my chair. Having no idea what else to do, I held up my crucifix, hoping against all the teachings of my own religion that it would actually protect me.

  Lucky reached for his ankle holster—and cursed in frustration when he found nothing there. Father Tiano had insisted that a firearm could not be brought to the rite, so Lucky’s gun was sitting in a drawer in Nathan’s office.

  The heavy red book flew at Lucky and thudded heavily into his solar plexus. He doubled over, gasping for air as he clutched his torso.

  “Uncle Lucky!” John dashed into the room, heading toward the old mobster.

  “John, look out!” Max cried.

  The big cross the priest had set up in the center of our little circle jumped out of its holder and flew like a missile, heading straight for John. An experienced martial artist, he dived to one side to avoid it, landed on his feet, and dived again when it took another shot at him.

  From the depths of the building, I could hear Nelli barking furiously, no doubt sensing the dark energy that had been unleashed in here. But out of consideration for Quinn, we had left her behind a securely closed door, and that prevented her from coming to our aid now.

  “Holy shit!” Quinn also instinctively reached for his gun; but, like Lucky, he had been instructed to leave it in the office. “Goddamn it!”

  I held up my crucifix as a talisman as I shouted, “Stop! Stop this!” at the unseen force that was attacking us.

  John dashed behind a standing lamp to avoid the big cross’s next attempt to skewer him, then he tore off the lampshade, picked up the lamp, and starting using it like a (very unwieldy) staff to fight back.

  The leather-bound book clobbered Lucky over the head then knocked him sideways. As he staggered past me, the cross in my hand turned into a hissing snake. I screamed and dropped the thing, leaping away—and when I looked at it lying on the floor, it was just a wooden cross again.

  I turned around and tripped over Father Tiano, who was on his knees and praying with all his might.

  Max was shouting in another language as he swept up the small vials of holy water into his hands and starting flinging them at the wall, one at a time. The glass bottles smashed when they hit the wall, spraying broken glass, and the water splashed and then dribbled downward.

  Directly above this mess, one of the lovely stained glass windows suddenly shattered. A fierce, cold wind blew into the room with a force much greater than made any natural sense, even on a blustery night like this one.

  My hair was whipping all around my head, interfering with my vision. The red-bound volume was still beating the stuffing out of Lucky, so I picked up the censer and swung it by its chain like a medieval mace. What with the wind, my hair in my eyes, my terror, and my inexperience with medieval maces, I missed the first few times I took aim—and I accidentally grazed Lucky’s knee once, which he didn’t like. But then I connected with the red-bound book and managed to hit it hard enough to stop its next attack on him in midflight.

  When the book fell to the ground, though, it turned into a horde of rats that started skittering over our feet.

  I shrieked and jumped around, trying to keep my feet away from them. So did the tough old gangster. (Everyone hates rats. Which was no doubt why that was the prank the demon chose.)

  Father Tiano leaped off the floor when he saw the rats, jumped up on a chair, a
nd kept on praying as he stood there.

  “Give me that thing!” Quinn yanked the censer out of my grip and started using it to kill rats, swinging it with violent abandon and bringing it down hard with a heavy crash!, again and again.

  But each rat he hit turned into a bat, and the little winged creatures flew at me, Lucky, and the priest, tormenting us while leaving Quinn alone as he kept trying to kill more of the things that were scurrying around the floor.

  “Stop, Quinn! Stop!” Being dive-bombed by bats was definitely the worse of the two available choices.

  I saw John stagger back and cry out when the big cross hit him hard on the hand, then he regrouped and kept on fighting it. While I dodged rats and bats, Max flung the last vial of holy water against the wall, still shouting in another language, his white hair blowing around his head in the fierce wind that whipped through the reception hall.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted. “What should we do?”

  The dripping water that was all over that wall suddenly started curling around in circles and swoops, rather than just rolling down the wall. It steamed, bubbled, and hissed, moving rapidly over the surface, forming itself into specific shapes with obvious intent.

  When it was done, a few distinct shapes were painted on the wall in flowing lines made by steaming, hissing water.

  Then without warning or fanfare, the bats and rats disappeared, as if they had never existed. The red-bound book appeared hovering in the air over Quinn’s head for a moment, then it fell to the floor. The large crucifix that was attacking John also fell to the floor and just lay there. At the same moment, the wind stopped blowing and howling through the room, though the window remained shattered.

  Our crucifixes lay scattered on the floor, but now they were charred pieces of wood, damaged by unseen fire. I touched the crucifix that Father Tiano had put around my neck . . . and it seemed to have melted like wax. It was just an indistinct little lump of metal now.