Before There Were Angels

by Sarah Mathews

  Maybe next time Belle got into one her snarky moods, I would raise the topic …

  * * *

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  That night Belle wanted to talk furniture - new furniture. Since when was Belle interested in buying new furniture? She liked the type with bullet holes or ingrained blood, maybe a hangman’s gallows, but Jennifer Convertibles?

  We really were entering unchartered territory.

  “This house isn’t comfortable,” she said. “It isn’t a home. I want to make it a home for us, somewhere Stevie will want to stay when he grows up.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to throw him out of the house at eighteen.”

  Belle looked puzzled. “I did?”

  I laughed. “Yes, you definitely did.”

  Belle shrugged. “Then I have changed my mind.” She switched back to a discussion about our future furniture. “What do you want for this house? You should be involved in making this a home too.”

  I looked around our bedroom. There was a bed with blood stains and places to put our clothes - what more could we want?

  Belle was lying there, watching me intently, almost piercingly. She was waiting for me to come up with suggestions. I leaned over and hugged her. “Belle,” I said, “I thought we had agreed that we liked our rooms to be spare, not to be cluttered with stuff.”

  “That is what you wanted.”

  “Oh. So what do you want?”

  “I want paintings on the wall, some rugs on the floor, more ornaments, curtains, more places to sit. I want it to be more homey for us as a family.”

  I wasn’t exactly in shock but I was definitely confused. Since when had Belle wanted any of that? She hated rugs on floors and she loathed curtains, as I did. That was one of the first things we had spontaneously agreed on when we set up the apartment together in the city. Nothing to cover the windows and cut down the light. I had proposed it and Belle had vehemently agreed. We had agreed on everything in those days. Where was this conversation, our life together, leading to? Were we to overthrow all of our most distinctive values, the ones that defined us as being different from people living in the dreaded suburbs, the little pink houses?

  The curtains and the rugs were a small thing but in their implications for us they were huge too. It was like Belle was becoming a Republican. That, of course, would be a catastrophic change of direction, a real jaw-gaping move, but Belle wanting rugs and curtains suddenly seemed right next door to it. What was next, a contempt for homeless people, homophobia, a fear of walking the streets in case we were attacked? Where was Belle headed, and more importantly, why? Had she being wanting ‘things’ all along and been humoring my Spartan taste, waiting for the opportunity to strike out on her own, to fill the house with clutter, darkness and stupid rugs for us to trip over? Had her trauma brought her real desires to the fore, freed from their dissembling?

  This was becoming a chilling conversation. I loved it that we had always agreed on everything in every aspect of our lives. Were we hitting a new phase in our relationship where we agreed on nothing at all, where every decision became a battleground to be negotiated between us or as a meeting point for outright warfare? ‘I want this!’. ‘No, I don’t.’. ‘Why not? I have a say in this too.’. Etc..

  “I’m sure George would like a rug in the sitting room he can lie comfortably on and we need curtains so that our neighbors can’t see in all the time. I want us to be more private.”

  “George has his own coat, his own woolly rug. Besides, he only likes lying on beds and sofas, as you very well know. I don’t think he needs some stupid thing that walks around the room with a mind of its own and trips us all up.”

  Belle was visibly getting annoyed, frustrated. Frustration seemed to be the dominant motif of the entire household at the moment. Everyone was frustrated. We had all been totally harmonious before Belle’s whatever it was that had befallen her - her trauma, her accident, her illness.

  “I think I want to invest in curtains first.” She looked up at me meaningfully, determinedly. I was not going to get away with not investing in curtains.

  Then it struck me and it was as if Belle had suddenly jumped up and stabbed me. Invest. Belle never talked about investments, she talked about how our money could be used to help other people. She gave away things. There was that time in Yerba Buena Park when she gave her diamond earrings to a homeless woman, saying that Robert had given them to her and she had always hated them, that she was so happy being with me, she wanted to spread that happiness.

  ‘Investment’ was simply not a Belle word. It was an anti-Belle word, and anti-Belle sentiment, contrary to every aspect of her philosophy, and while she didn’t particularly like Philosophy as a subject, she had a precise and complete philosophy of her own, none of which was to do with investing.

  How many times had she said that buying new furniture and furnishings was stupid, that whatever you bought was worth about one per cent of what you had paid for it as soon as you got out of the shop?

  This wasn’t the Belle I had lived with for a year.

  My ears rang, my body froze, my vision blurred in its horror.

  This wasn’t Belle.

  Everything was telling me suddenly that not only this wasn’t the real Belle, but that this wasn’t Belle at all. Rafaella thought like this, Belle never did. Either Belle was becoming Rafaella, as Rafaella had predicted, or …

  … or Rafaella had already become Belle.

  That was it. The woman lying beside me wasn’t Belle at all, it was Rafaella. The body was Belle’s, its usual model’s tall, slim frame, but the mind was now almost completely Rafaella’s. That is what had happened in this bedroom that night. Rafaella hadn’t chased Belle out of the house; she had invaded her, taken her over. It wasn’t that Rafaella wanted to live with me as such - I was sure she was far more contended living on her own within her own dominion - but she was determined to be right, even if she had to fabricate all the evidence, all the data, to make it so. For Rafaella, being right about everything was essential to her survival. If she was right, she could control things. If she could control things, she could survive in a relentlessly hostile word. Rafaella saw the world as her enemy, intent on undermining and destroying her. She wanted a bullet-proof jacket to protect herself from it and that jacket was a sense of infallibility. Rafaella had taken over Belle’s mind to prove to me that she had been right about everything all along. Maybe she had done the same with Martha DeGamo’s mind in order to get her kill the rest of the family and to lure Belle here to this house.

  I had always known that Rafaella would go to almost any length to get her own way but I had never included murder in the equation while I was still living with her. I was always apprehensive as to when the next attack would be launched against me, knowing that it was always only hours, if not minutes, away but I had never expected that attack to be life-threatening. Sometimes physical, yes, but not potentially lethal. I had not recognized Rafaella as having the potential or even the ruthlessness to kill.

  However, when the possibility of Zack having been murdered by Rafaella had arisen, it hadn’t seemed so far-fetched to me. When Martha DeGamo had said that a quadruple murder had taken place in this house to get us here, that hadn’t seemed too far-fetched either.

  When I thought of Rafaella as being willing to go to any lengths to get her own way, to impose her will on the world around her, I had better start believing just that, recognize that there really were no limits and that Rafaella had almost certainly killed our beloved Zack merely to take a prized possession away from us, because she almost certainly considered Zack, and Stevie, as possessions rather than as human beings in their own right with a right to their own future, with us or away from us, as they chose.

  To kill a family of four to get us where she wanted us, that was really something. That was deranged. That was psychopathic. That was narcissistic to the extreme. That was Rafaella.

  This was Rafaella.

  And s
he was staring at me, calculating.

  I leaped from the bed, all too aware suddenly that I was naked, and not in front of the person I loved being naked with.

  “What?” demanded Belle, irritated. “What is wrong with you?”

  “I have just realized something.”

  “What have you just realized, Luke?”

  I should have got out of the room, I should have grabbed Stevie and George and got out of the house. I should have kept my mouth shut at least until we had all hit the street, but I couldn’t contain myself. “You know exactly what I have just realized, Rafaella.”

  “Rafaella?” Belle glared at me scornfully but all I could see was Rafaella now, not Belle.

  “Yes, Rafaella. You are Rafaella.”

  “You’ve gone mad, Luke. Can’t you tell the difference between me and Rafaella? Do you wish you were back with Rafaella? Go to her, then.”

  There wasn’t pleading in her eyes as I would have expected from Belle. There was triumph. Belle was now Rafaella and there was no getting away from her, no getting back to Belle. I was surrounded.

  “How do I get Belle back?” I asked. “Stop playing games, Rafaella. Why are you always playing games? I’m sorry, but I want Belle not you. I have had all I am ever going to want of you. That is why I left you. I want Belle.”

  “So you used me and spat me out?” she challenged me, her fury overwhelming her to the point where she had no choice but to rip off her mask and face me as the person she truly was.

  “No, Rafaella, I gave you every chance. Every chance. And you took everything you could from me, never giving an inch. My life was not my own, it was yours, exactly the same way as Belle’s life is no longer her own either. You have invaded it, first from the outside, now from the inside. You have killed her. You threatened to kill her, now you have done it, albeit not the way any of us was expecting. And you killed poor Zack too. And the DeGamo family. You are evil, Rafaella, to your core. You are not right. You don’t have archangels or Kumar guiding your every saintly step. I doubt you even have the devil in your soul. There has never been any need. You were evil from the start. All these stories you told about what an adorable and affectionate child you were …” I couldn’t help but notice Belle’s hand slipping under the pillow where Belle’s knife was, “… they weren’t true, were they? They have never been true. You were neither adorable nor affectionate, you were just mean, mean from the very beginning, possessed, not by any external force but by your own force.”

  I placed my hand on the door handle, preparing to remove myself from the bedroom fast when Rafaella lunged at me, as she inevitably would.

  “How you blight all our lives, everyone’s lives. You are obsessed with world domination, Rafaella, or at least of everyone who has the misfortune to inhabit your world.”

  Rafaella was rising from the bed, knife in hand.

  “What are you going to do now, Rafaella, kill me? I’m not sure that you can.”

  I pulled the door open, darted around it, and pulled it shut the other side, clinging on to the handle. There was a thump from the other side - presumably Rafaella burying the knife in the door. She then started heaving at the door to force it open as I braced my knee against the door jamb to get the leverage to keep it shut.

  “Stevie,” I screamed. “Stevie, come here, quick.”

  The ladder dropped from the attic and he was beside me within less than 30 seconds.

  “Phone 911. Tell them there has been an attempted murder and that I have the murderer trapped in my bedroom.”

  He didn’t even question me. He raced straight back into the attic and I heard him talking to the emergency services as the door juddered frantically.

  Stevie came back down. “They’ll be here in a minute,” he said.

  “Great. Could you get the key to this bedroom from behind the kitchen door?”

  “Sure.”

  Again, within about thirty seconds he was back. It took about six goes to find the right key as we had never marked them, and then I had to hold the door flat shut to allow the key to turn in the lock, but between us we managed it. I let go of the handle and felt my biceps sag in relief.

  “What’s happening?”

  I paused. How could I possibly convince Stevie of what had just happened. Oh well … “You were right, Stevie, that wasn’t your mom. Rafaella had somehow possessed her.”

  At first there was shock on Stevie’s face as he resisted, then considered, what I had said. Then he collapsed on the floor and started laughing.

  “Let me out,” came Belle’s voice. “Why are you doing this to me? Luke? Stevie? What’s going on?”

  Stevie managed to catch his breath. “I can’t wait to see you tell the cops that. A naked man standing outside his bedroom hollering that his wife is somebody else. I’m sure you’re right but I think they’re going to be taking you away somewhere on a 5150 after they hear that story.”

  I shrugged. “It can’t be helped. What can be helped is that you mustn’t stay in this house alone with Rafaella, or Belle, or whoever she is now. Can you take George and go to a friend’s house. I can’t leave you here.”

  Again he didn’t question me. He climbed up the attic ladder again and began to get dressed in appropriate haste.

  Seconds later the police arrived. I had nothing to cover myself with except a tea towel from the kitchen.

  They were two cops I didn’t recognize.

  “We got a call to say that you had an attempted murderer trapped in your bedroom …”

  “Is there any way you can get hold of either Officer Martinez or Officer Nielsen?” I asked.

  The lead cop shook his head. “They are both off-duty at the moment. Why, do you know them?”

  “More importantly, they know us. You are not going to believe a word I tell you.”

  The other cop smiled, probably at my pathetically clutching the tea towel around my groin. “Try us.”

  Chapter 28

  I ushered them into the living room.

  “Are you sure there is no way we can contact Officers Martinez and Nielsen?” I asked.

  The second officer laughed caustically. “They have been talking about putting us on twenty-four hour shifts. The City would like that. We have been resisting it. We have families too and not always broken ones.”

  That sounded like it was aimed at me.

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll tell it how it is. As I say, you won’t believe me -“

  “We’ll come to our own conclusions on that one, Sir,” the first office retorted sharply.

  “OK … “ I took a deep breath. “Do you know that there were four murders in this house before we moved in?”

  “Oh, it’s that house,” the first officer replied immediately.

  “Yes, it is that house.”

  “We all know about this house. Four murders, a suicide, and a bunch of ghosts and evil entities, and a wife who keeps disappearing and reappearing again. It is all we have been talking about around the station for weeks.”

  “I don’t suppose you believe in ghosts …”

  “Everyone has seen a ghost or knows somebody else who has,” said the second officer.

  “Hmm,” I continued. “The trouble with ghosts is that everyone believes in them but no one believes they exist.”

  The officers made no response to this comment. They waited.

  “What I am going to do is to suggest a solution first, then tell you the story.”

  They still said nothing.

  “The solution is that my son Stevie goes to stay with friends and that you take me away on a 5150. That will leave Belle or Rafaella, or whoever she is, in the house, but that is OK. Neither of us can stay in the house with her. It’s not safe. She will be here but we can decide what to do about that later on. Maybe we deal with the situation or perhaps we abandon the place and move somewhere else …”

  Silence.

  “The problem is,” I continued, “that the mind of my sweet wife Belle has been taken
over by my psychotic ex-wife Rafaella who seems to have mastered astral travel.”

  The second officer raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t they all?”

  “My ex-wife certainly has.”

  The officers were listening. Whether they were listening intently or derisively it was impossible to tell. All San Fran cops are philosophical by nature, so metaphysics are well within their grasp.

  “Tonight I suddenly realized that Belle, my wife, was in fact Rafaella, my ex-wife, and I challenged her.”

  “That would be a scene well worth buying tickets for,” mused the first officer appreciatively.

  “Then she attacked me with a knife.” Stevie walked into the room, ready to leave. “Hi, Stevie. Grab George and go. I’ll catch up with you soon.”

  “Wait a minute,” said the first officer. “Was your son a witness to what happened?”

  “No,” I assured him hurriedly. “He phoned you and helped me lock the bedroom door but he didn’t see anything that happened prior to that. Off you go, Stevie. It’s getting late.”

  “Bye, Dad,” he said. “Good luck.” He grinned at the cops.

  Dad?

  “Bye, Stevie,” they said and waited for Stevie to leave the house with a visibly reluctant George whose only idea of a walk was one down to the nearest bar.

  “Then what happened?” asked the second officer.

  “I got out of the bedroom fast before she could meet me. She plunged the knife into the door instead. So now you can take me away. I am guessing that the person behind that door is Belle, that Rafaella will have left her, but it could be Rafaella pretending to be Belle, and that is far too high a risk for me to take. If I were to stay here, she could easily try to kill me again, and that wouldn’t be fair on Belle, never mind me. Belle will be heartbroken when she realizes what she has done, even if she wasn’t responsible for doing it. So, it’s best that I get out of the house too.”

  The first officer frowned. “You say that she attacked the back of the door with a knife?”