Max nodded in understanding. “Well, in any event, I hope the chair was not too incommodious last night.”
“I wouldn’t want to make a habit of sleeping in it.” I rolled my head around as I tried to ease the kinks out of my neck and shoulders. “But it was a blessing to be able to sink into it a few hours ago, believe me.”
“I am most distressed by your misadventure, Esther! Did your assailant harm you?”
“My assail . . . Oh, the mugging.” I paused in mid-stretch to meet his gaze as I recalled things about those gargoyles that disturbed me all over again: the dirty claws, the fierce growling, the rotten breath, the physical strength . . . “Max, the strangest thing happened last night. Lopez thinks it was a prank, and maybe he’s right—but it all seemed so real!”
“Lopez?” Max sat up straighter. “Detective Lopez was present?”
“That was later. After the mugging. He was helping me.”
Max lowered his eyes and absently patted Nelli on the head as she sat beside him, her wistful gaze fixed on the bagels and cream cheese. “And, er, how was Detective Lopez?”
“Fine,” I said, trying to figure out where to start my account of the night’s events.
“Ah. Good. I’m glad to hear it. Good.” Max kept his gaze lowered as he asked, oh-so-casually, “And he was . . . much like his usual self? You observed nothing . . . unexpected?”
I shrugged. “Well, it was about three o’clock in the morning, so he wasn’t
quite
his usual . . . Oh!” My dry, sleep-deprived eyes flew wide open as I realized what Max meant.
“Oh.”
Staring at his face, I took another long sip of my coffee. “Oh.”
“Hmm.”
I said, “You mean . . .”
“Yes.” He met my eyes. “Well?”
I thought it over. “No . . .” I shook my head and said more firmly, “No.”
“I see.”
“So you still suspect . . .”
Max and I hadn’t talked about it. Not since the last time we had seen Lopez, when he had told me he couldn’t date me anymore. I had occasionally thought about it since then, of course; but I mostly tried not to think about Lopez at all, and when I did think about him . . . Well, I’m only human, so, in all honesty,
that
wasn’t what I thought about. But looking at Max now, I realized that . . . “You’ve been thinking about it.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “However, since the young man caused you some heartbreak, it seemed to me that my mentioning his name would be insensitive. And since my thoughts on this matter, in any case, are mere speculation based only on suggestive circumstances . . . Well.” He gave a little shrug. “But since you happened to see him last night, I must admit to some curiosity.”
I again remembered that night, more than two months ago, at the Church of St. Monica in Little Italy. I was in the clutches of a ruthless murderer who was handling me brutally and threatening to kill me unless Lopez allowed him to flee to safety, with me as his hostage. The prospect of stopping the killer was thwarted by the pitch blackness inside the church, where all the lights had been disabled. . . .
I was choking, close to blacking out, with my captor’s hand around my throat as chaos ensued in the darkened church, with Lopez frantic to find me. I heard his voice . . .
“Esther! Goddamn it, where are you? Esther!” And then Lopez screamed, “I want
LIGHTS
!”
And the lights came on, blazing throughout the church.
That sudden shift from darkness to light may well have saved my life that night.
There was no logical explanation for how or why the deliberately sabotaged electrical system had revived at the very moment that Lopez demanded light. Max, however, thought there might be a mystical explanation for it: The sudden illumination could be the unconscious imposition of Lopez’s will on matter and energy at a moment when he feared for my life.
(He cared about me; he just wouldn’t date me.)
“As I confided to you during the funeral of our enemy at St. Monica’s,” Max said to me now, “I believe we need to keep our minds open to the possibility that Detective Lopez has talents of which he is unaware.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” I admitted. I knew that on a good day, Lopez would be amused and dismissive if I mentioned Max’s vague suspicion to him. And on a bad day? He’d go back to threatening me with remand and a psych evaluation. “But apart from estimating the age of a severed hand, he didn’t evince any unexpected talents last night.”
Max blinked. “A severed hand?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That has a lot to do with why the subject you mention didn’t cross my mind. Other things were claiming my attention.”
“Whose hand was severed?” Max asked, aghast.
“Well . . .” I shrugged. “He told me his name was Darius Phelps.”
I recounted the night’s events to Max. He listened with focused interest, interrupting only to ask for clarification or additional details, a faint frown of concentration on his face. When I was finished, I realized I was hungry, and so I picked up a little bagel and started spreading cream cheese on it. Nelli’s eyes followed my movements as intently if the fate of this dimension depended on what I would do next with that bagel. Avoiding her gaze, I bit into it and chewed while I waited for Max’s reaction to my tale.
“I don’t wish to alarm you . . .” he said slowly.
“Too late now,” I said. “A guy with a sword, an attack by gargoyles, a severed hand, arrest, and imprisonment kind of took care of alarming me.”
“What you experienced may not have been, as Detective Lopez thinks, a mundane prank.”
“Actually, he thinks it was an elaborate prank.”
Max shook his head. “By ‘mundane,’ I mean—”
“Ah. Right. The opposite of mystical.”
“Yes.” He stroked his beard as he pondered the ramifications of my misadventure. “What intrigues me is that the man you met is reputedly dead.”
“That intrigued the police, too.” I paused, recalling the cops’ merriment as they released me last night. “Well, no, I suppose ‘intrigued’ is the wrong word.”
“Your encounter with Darius Phelps may not be unrelated to the thorny problem which has lately been keeping me awake until late at night and making my sleep restless.”
“Oh? Is this problem the reason you say you were ‘barely asleep’ when I got here around four o’clock in the morning?”
“Indeed,” Max said. “There has been a recent change in the normal current of mystical energy here. The familiar flow seems to be . . .” Max made a vague gesture, trying to explain an esoteric sensation in ordinary terms. “. . . Turning in the wrong direction. Or being turned.”
I took another hearty swallow of coffee and thought this over. “Max, I have no idea what you’ve just said.”
“That’s understandable, since I’m finding it difficult to explain it adequately.”
Nelli watched with mournful longing as I finished my bagel.
I said to Max, “Well, I know that you can sense things that mundanes can’t—such as supernatural disturbances in this dimension.”
“Strictly speaking, the word ‘supernatural’ is inaccurate. Virtually all phenomena are natural, but some are mystical and some are not.”
“Yes. Whatever.” We had talked about this before. “What I mean is, I realize that you’re sensitive to phenomena that others don’t even know exist.”
Max’s ability to sense mystical changes or imbalances in his environment had saved me from a fate worse than bad reviews. We first met when he had prevented me from becoming the next victim in a series of mysterious disappearances. He had sensed a disturbance in the fabric of this dimension when performers began involuntarily vanishing during disappearing acts onstage, and this had led him to me—right before I would have become the next disappearee.
So if Max was again experiencing a sensation that he identified as a disturbance in the mystical energy of this dimension, then I took it seriously. Even more so if he thought it related to what I had seen last night. So I urged him to take another stab at explaining it.
“Picture the energy of life,” he said, “as a river that flows steadily in one direction, ever onward, from its source to the sea. It may become a dangerous torrent in spring, it may dry up during a drought and nearly disappear, it may swell and flood the surrounding landscape after heavy rains, but it always continues flowing in the same direction.”
Unable to withstand the burden of Nelli’s longing gaze, I slipped her a bagel as I said to Max, “Go on.”
“Now imagine that while boating on the river, or fishing in it, or while wading through it at a ford, you notice that certain portions of the river, against all experience and logic, are suddenly moving in the opposite direction. From the sea to the source, as it were.”
Nelli finished gulping down her bagel, wagged her tail, and gazed hopefully at me. “No,” I said to her. And then to Max: “Okay. I get it. If this is happening to the river of life-energy, so to speak, then that means . . . Um, what does that mean?”
“Instead of a consistent flow of energy traveling, as it should, from birth to life to death, some energy lately seems to be moving in the reverse direction.”
I frowned. “From death to life?”
“Yes. I cannot explain it or account for it. But that is what I sense.”
“And then last night . . .” I shuddered as a sudden chill passed over me. “I spoke with a man who has supposedly been dead for three weeks.”
“Hence my suspicion,” Max said, “that your strange experience may be related to this mysterious mystical matter, and that Detective Lopez, though an undeniably astute young man, is quite possibly mistaken when he characterizes last night’s events as a prank.”
“You think the man I saw last night was really dead?” I said with dread. “Even though he was, you know, moving around and talking?”
“No, my dear, I don’t think he was really dead.”
I sighed with relief. “Thank goodness.” I found the idea too disturbing.
“Not anymore.”
“Huh?”
“I suspect it would be more accurate,” Max said, “to classify him as reanimated.”
“What?” I was disturbed all over again.
“Or perhaps resurrected? Though that word has religious overtones which it would perhaps be best to avoid. I had a most unpleasant encounter, you know, with the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily. It was still relatively early in the eighteenth century, not long after I realized that I was aging at an unusually slow rate and, though in my seventies, I still looked like a young man. And the experiences which I endured in Palermo have made me wary, ever since, of—”
“Max,” I interrupted. “So you’re saying that you think Darius Phelps was dead? But, er, making his way back? Traveling in reverse, so to speak?”
“Based on what you’ve told me—a disoriented man matching the name and description of a recently deceased person who experienced dismemberment without bleeding—yes, I think that may be the case.”
“Recently deceased,” I repeated faintly, remembering something else now “He, uh . . . he smelled weird.”
Max looked at me intently. “Can you be more specific?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It was an unfamiliar smell. I suppose it was a bit like . . .” I felt queasy as I realized what Darius’ odor brought to mind. “Like when you pull food out of the fridge and realize you should throw it away. It doesn’t smell rank yet, but it just doesn’t smell quite right anymore.” I decided not to eat another bagel.
“Hmm.”
“But I don’t really know what a dead person smells like. Or someone not quite dead. Let alone some who used to be dead and isn’t dead anymore.” Now I wished I hadn’t eaten even that one bagel. “Oy.”
“I’m puzzled by the involvement of the gargoyles,” Max mused. “Did the individual whom you encountered seem harmful or malevolent?
“No.” I shook my head. “Darius seemed endangered, not dangerous.”
“Despite their grotesque appearance, the traditional function of gargoyles is to protect us from evil spirits or harmful forces—such as demons.”
“Well, keep in mind that I’m not expert on supernat—uh, mystical creatures, Max. Those hideous beasts reminded me of gargoyles, but that doesn’t mean they
were
gargoyles.”
“Ah. Yes. That’s an excellent point. Nonetheless, it’s well worth asking: Did Mr. Phelps seem demonically possessed, by any chance?”
“My knowledge of demonic possession is limited to what I’ve seen in movies,” I said. “But at a guess, I’d say no. The man I saw seemed dazed, confused, and helpless. If he were possessed by a demon, wouldn’t he—I don’t know—pulverize the little creatures that I managed to fight off and chant the Latin Mass backward, or something?”
“Well, yes. Although generalizations are misleading, it’s nonetheless true that impressive strength is a common attribute of demons. Then again, perhaps Mr. Phelps—or some entity possessing him—had already been weakened by an encounter with the sword-wielding young huntsman whom you encountered elsewhere in the vicinity.”