‘You’ve lost me.’
Father Zapata drew back his lips to reveal his gleaming white teeth, but it wasn’t in a smile. It was more of a grimace of indecision, as if he couldn’t make up his mind how much he ought to tell me. He knew that I wasn’t a believer – not in religion, anyhow – and it was pretty obvious that he didn’t want to say anything that would make me think that the church was even more dysfunctional than I thought it was already.
‘Ghosts are the souls of people who have passed over,’ he said. ‘However, they have returned to this world for one reason or another – either because they have unfinished business or a message to impart.’
‘OK, like “the stock certificates are hidden in the dog kennel” – something like that? So what’s a “presence”? Is that like a spirit? I mean, I know about spirits, from experience. From bitter experience.’
‘A presence may not be a spirit at all, but a sign. It may appear in many different guises and mean many different things.’
‘What does it mean if it’s a nun?’
Again, Father Zapata paused. Then he said, ‘So far as we know, the appearance of nuns is a warning. I suppose you can compare it to the appearance of crows around a house when somebody is dying. It means that some disaster is imminent.’
‘Well, that’s cheered me up. What kind of disaster?’
‘It generally seems to mean that the world as we know it is on the brink of being turned upside-down. It means that people we know and trust will suddenly and unexpectedly betray us. It means a devastating reversal of social and moral values.’
‘OK …’ I said, although I still didn’t really understand what he meant. ‘Give me a for-instance.’
‘Just before the outbreak of World War One, it was reported that nuns appeared to several politicians and priests in France and Germany, and throughout history there have been many other instances. A nun was seen on the bridge of the Titanic, even though no nuns were listed on the passenger roster. Usually, however, the church has done its best to suppress appearances like these, for fear of being associated with such calamities, or even blamed for them.’
‘But what exactly are they? Are they good, or are they evil?’
‘To be honest with you, Harry, we’re not at all sure. Their first recorded appearance was in Angers, in France, just before Christmas in 1658. The mayor of Angers was visited by one of them, in the middle of the night, and so were several senior clerics There were six or seven appearances altogether. About a week later, scores of townsfolk contracted some mysterious sickness and died.’
‘That could have been a coincidence, couldn’t it? I mean, people were always getting sick in those days, weren’t they? Cholera, smallpox, typhoid. Surfeits of mussels, you name it.’
‘It could have been a coincidence, I agree. But two or three months later, one of the townsfolk who had supposedly died was seen in a neighboring town, alive and well, Then more of them were recognized in other towns, further afield. It turned out that all of them had changed their names, but that somehow they had all managed to achieve prominent positions in their new locations and had become very influential. They had done this, however, by violence and extortion and were very much feared – even though in Angers, before they were supposed to have died, they had all of them been model law-abiding citizens. As I say, there were many other similar instances recorded in church annals over the years, but most of the time they were redacted.’
‘OK, I get it,’ I told him. ‘It’s like – nuns appear – people get sick and die – then the same people pop up someplace else, not dead at all, but they’ve changed. They used to be good guys, now they’re villains.’
Father Zapata nodded. ‘In essence, yes, that’s right. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith admit that no direct link has ever been proven between the appearance of the nuns and outbreaks of sickness that followed soon afterward, but it has happened far too frequently for us to be able to dismiss it as coincidence.’
‘So what are you telling me? I’m going to get sick and then I’m going to buy the farm, but then I’m going to come back to life again as some racketeering zombie?’
‘Harry – I’m only telling you what little the church has discovered about the paranormal appearance of nuns.’
‘So what am I supposed to do about it? Do you rent out exorcists, here at Saint Francis de Sales? Should I get my cottage fumigated? And what about my cards? Look – I’ll show them to you.’
I took out the Parlor Sibyl, moved aside the bowl of withered apples and began to lay them out on the side table. To my surprise, the face of the first card was totally black. But then I dealt out the second card and that was black, too, and so was the third. I shuffled quickly through the whole deck, and every single one of them was the same. No pictures, either happy or sad. No women in aprons or men in tailcoats or fathers beheading their families at the dining table. Solid black, every single one of them.
I sat back and stared at them. Father Zapata looked down at them too, and then at me.
‘Harry – this is not some kind of a leg-pull, is it?’
‘If it is, father, then I’m the one who’s being suckered. When I checked these cards before I came here, they all had pictures on them. Pretty gruesome pictures, some of them, but pictures.’
‘These are the cards that you use to tell the future?’
‘Yes, they are. And right now I’d say that the future’s looking pretty black.’
Father Zapata did that baring-his-teeth grimace again, and then he said, ‘After the presence had vanished, Harry, did you find that anything was left behind?’
‘What do you mean? Like what? I noticed a kind of an incensey smell, but that was all.’
‘I think that I had better come around and take a look at your bedroom, if that’s all right with you.’
‘Well, sure. OK. But what do you expect to find?’
‘I hope that I find nothing at all.’
‘But what if you do?’
‘I’m not trained in exorcism, Harry. But an exorcism may be necessary. Or at least a dismissal. A dismissal is a kind of spiritual fumigation, to cleanse your home of any malevolent influence.’
I slowly collected up my cards, shuffled them straight, and returned them to their box. ‘You’re taking this seriously, aren’t you, father?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, I am. Loudun Syndrome is no joke, I can assure you. As I say, it may very well be nothing of any consequence. Paranormal manifestations can be caused by anything from static electricity to mental disorder in the people who have witnessed them.’
‘Oh, thanks. Now you’re telling me I’m losing my mind.’
‘In some ways, Harry, that might be the preferred alternative. If you’re suffering from a mental disorder, it can be treated by psychotherapy. Disasters, on the other hand – disasters can be averted only by God, and only if he chooses to.’
NINE
I drove Father Zapata south to Coral Gables. To the east, a whole pile of dark cumulus clouds was building up over the ocean, with lightning flickering underneath it. The wind was rising, and sheets of newspaper came flying in a panic across the avenue in front of us, and dust-devils danced on the sidewalk.
‘Storm’s coming,’ said Father Zapata, and he crossed himself. He had changed out of his cycling gear now and was wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt with a dog-collar and jeans. He had brought a purple canvas bag with him with a gold cross embroidered on it, although I had no idea what was in it.
I glanced across at him. ‘You don’t just mean the weather, do you?’
He didn’t answer and continued to look straight ahead. He was bending forward slightly, and very tense, as if he expected somebody to come jumping out into the road in front of us.
‘You’re worried about this, aren’t you?’ I asked him as we stopped at the traffic signal at the intersection of Southwest 8th Street. ‘I think you’re even more worried than I am.’
‘I can often sense when som
ething bad is about to happen,’ said Father Zapata. ‘I’ve been able to do it since I was a boy. For instance, I knew about an hour before it was run over that our family cat was going to be killed.’
‘Wow. You ought to be in my business; you’d clean up.’
‘Psychologists say that some people’s brainwaves are phased to a higher frequency, so that they have the sensitivity to detect coming events. It’s a bit like hearing a train approaching long before anybody else can. My mother always used to say that I inherited it from my Great-Uncle Emiliano. On the day before he was shot he told his wife that this was his last day alive.’
‘You mean Emiliano Zapata? You’re actually related to him? For real?’
‘He was my great-uncle, by his son by his second wife.’
‘How about that? Your great-uncle was the great Mexican revolutionary. That’s amazing! So how come you decided to be a priest?’
‘Because I have always fervently believed what my great-uncle believed, even though I might go a different way about it. We must all stand up for what we believe in, regardless of the consequences, and that is why I chose the cloth. Emiliano Zapata said, “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”’
‘Well, I guess so. But instead of dying on your feet, you can always run away on them.’
‘What made you so cynical, Harry?’
‘I don’t know. Other people’s gullibility, I guess. Apart from the fact that I’ve seen more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than most people have ever dreamt of.’
‘You’re not cynical about this nun, though, are you? Otherwise you never would have come to ask for my advice.’
‘No, father. I am definitely one hundred percent not cynical about this nun.’
I parked on the street because the driveway was blocked with the bright pink-and-green Ford van that the Joe Morales Mariachi Band used when they were on tour. It had tinted windows and a picture on the side panel of a high-kicking girl in a crimson dress, showing her frilly panties.
We walked around to the back yard, and I unlocked the door of my cottage.
‘It’s kind of bijou,’ I told Father Zapata. ‘At least there’s no mess. There isn’t any room for it.’
Father Zapata came into the living room. He dropped his purple canvas bag on to the couch, and then he looked around. He sniffed the air, and then he sniffed it again, and again. ‘Camphor,’ he said. ‘Camphor, myrrh and agarwood. You were right about the smell of incense.’
I sniffed too, but I couldn’t smell anything. Father Zapata must have had a nose for it, or maybe they have special incense-detecting training at priest school.
‘You want a beer or anything?’ I asked him.
‘No – no thank you. It’s better if we stick to the matter in hand. Do you want to show me your bedroom?’
I opened the bedroom door, and he stepped inside, ignoring my unmade bed. After last night it looked as if I had been having a wrestling match with the sheets, and in a way I had.
He pointed to the narrow fanlight at the top of the window. ‘That was open?’ he asked me.
‘Only the same as it is now. You could hardly get your arm through there, let alone a nun.’
Father Zapata approached the window and peered out through the fanlight. ‘If you were standing in the border outside, you could easily reach up high enough to throw something through it – even if you couldn’t climb in.’
‘Like what?’ I said, looking around the bedroom. ‘There’s nothing here! And don’t try to tell me that the nun was a blow-up doll who was kitted out in a habit, pushed through that tiny little gap up there and then self-inflated to look like the real thing. Because where did it go afterward, this blow-up doll?’
Father Zapata kept circling slowly around and around, both hands raised as if he were a conductor, quietening down his orchestra before he launched into the Emperor piano concerto.
‘There’s something here,’ he said, ignoring my facetious remarks about the blow-up doll. ‘It’s faint, but I can definitely feel it.’
I turned around too, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. On the nightstand beside the bed there was only a digital clock, a glass of stale water with bubbles in it and a paperback copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Magic Tricks, with the spine broken and the corners of the pages all turned down. I had been seriously thinking about starting an alternative career.
Underneath the wicker chair there was a rolled-up pair of dirty green socks, a single Nike sneaker with no laces and a S’mores wrapper, but that was all.
‘There’s something here,’ Father Zapata repeated. ‘As I say, it’s very faint. Its power has almost completely decomposed, but I can still feel a sense of ill-will. It’s like overhearing somebody whispering behind your back. You can hardly make out what they’re saying, but it sounds as if they’re set on getting their revenge on you and they intend to hurt you badly.’
I thought about that, and then I said, ‘When you say “you”, do you mean that generally, or do you mean me personally?’
Father Zapata stared at me with those near-together eyes. The way he looked was almost as scary as what he had just said. ‘Yes, Harry, you personally. Whatever it was that visited you here in your bedroom wanted you to know that they bear you a grudge.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘It’s not easy to explain. But all of the malice was concentrated here, in this room. I don’t think there’s any question that the nun appeared here as a warning – and a warning specifically directed at you.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But if he, or she, or it, or whatever it was – if they had the power to make a nun appear out of thin air, why didn’t they take their revenge on me then and there? Like, the nun just stood there. She didn’t try to stab me or strangle me or jump on top of me and suffocate me, or however it is that nuns kill people.’
‘I can’t answer that, Harry. I simply don’t know. I can only tell you what I’m feeling, and it’s only a feeling, after all.’ He sniffed again. ‘There is something here, though. Something lingering. Not only incense, although I can still smell that. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the week after a funeral, when all of the flowers that the mourners have heaped on a grave begin to go rotten.’
I didn’t know what to say to him. To be truthful, I was almost beginning to regret that I had gone to the church to ask him about the nun. Maybe he really could feel the resonance that her spooky appearance had left behind. On the other hand, he could simply be a nut job. A well-meaning nut job, for sure, and perfectly harmless – like some of those geeks who get obsessed with The Lord of the Rings and role-playing games and Second Life avatars, but a nut job all the same.
He got down on to his hands and knees and peered under the bed. He sniffed again, and then he reached under the bed and drew out a small bunch of dead pink roses, maybe six or seven of them, tied together with thin frayed cord.
He climbed back on to his feet and held them up in front of me. I could faintly smell them myself. He was right; they smelled rotten.
‘What?’ I said. I have to admit that I was baffled. ‘I didn’t put those there. Why would I? I never even saw them before. The last time I bought flowers was when I was taking Zoë Salinger to the high school prom.’
‘Oh – I’m quite certain you didn’t put them there,’ said Father Zapata. ‘They were probably thrown in through the fanlight and bounced underneath the bed. It was these roses that caused the nun to manifest herself here in your bedroom. It’s a classic tell-tale sign of Loudun Syndrome.’
‘You mentioned that before, Loudun Syndrome. What the hell is that, anyhow?’
‘It’s quite complex. I’ll explain it to you later. First of all we have to deal with any traces of malevolence that might still be clinging to this bouquet and purge this bedroom.’
‘Yes, right,’ I said. Now I seriously was beginning to believe that Father Zapata was several beads short of a rosary.
He
went into the living room and came back with his purple canvas bag. He loosened the drawstring and reached inside, taking out a shiny silver cross, a glass bottle of water with a silver stopper, a small copper bowl and a thick, yellowish candle.
‘This cross came from Rome and has been kissed by the Pope himself. The candle is beeswax and came from the Ursuline convent in Loudun, in France. Every Catholic parish possesses at least one of these candles, sometimes more, in the event that something like this occurs.’
‘OK,’ I said. I was growing more and more skeptical by the minute, but what would you have thought if some skinny young priest had found a bunch of roses under your bed and told you straight-faced that they needed to be exorcized?
Father Zapata said, ‘What I’m going to do is light the candle and drip it on to the roses until they are completely encased in solidified wax This will effectively trap any remaining malice that they still contain, and I shall then be able to take them away and incinerate them according to the proper ritual. I suppose you could compare it to burning a heretic at the stake.’
‘I see.’
Father Zapata took off his dog-collar and started to unbutton his shirt. ‘By the time I have finished, this bedroom will be spiritually cleansed of any ill will toward you. Before I leave, I will also give you a list of precautions that you can take every night to protect yourself from any future appearances. Dismissals that you can recite, herbs that you can fasten to your door, simple but effective measures like that.’
‘Father—’ I began. I was going to say that I didn’t doubt his good intentions for a moment, but in all honesty I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about. How could a bunch of dead roses pose any kind of threat? Why didn’t he simply take them away and toss them into the trash? And why was he taking off his shirt? Jesus – now he was unbuckling his belt, too, and tugging down the zipper of his pants.
He looked at me very seriously as he stepped out of his pants. He was left wearing nothing but a blue-striped pair of boxer shorts and a pair of black socks. He was cyclist-skinny, with a crucifix of black hair on his narrow chest and hairy, muscular legs.
Plague of the Manitou Page 9
