Communion, Chapter 7

Here's the next installment of The Communion of the Saint. Things are getting serious now.

If you prefer to listen, you can hear an audio version of the book at podiobooks.com. Also free.

Chapter 7

     

      The brooch’s pin, though long oxidized away, was back in place as it once had been. The thin, soft metal rod bent slightly as I took the brooch in my trembling hand.

      This couldn’t be happening.

      I ran down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator; the light inside came on. I flicked the wall switch; the overhead fixture glowed. When I turned the tap, water ran into the sink.

      Out back, the steps now led down to a small, overgrown clearing filled with brush and tall, untrimmed grasses.

      I ran upstairs again. Everything was as I had left it a moment before. I put down the brooch, lifted the phone, and dialed the number Leslie had left me.

      “Why won’t you believe?” It was the voice in the ear piece, the voice I’d heard in the chanting, the voice that sent me to find the brooch, the voice that sent me to Mrs. Fern’s.

      I slammed down the receiver and turned. A young man, barely old enough to shave, stood before me. I let out a shriek. He wore a tunic, dirty white, with brown streaks of dried blood around the neck.

      “Now you want more proof,” he said. It was the same voice.

      I ran down the stairs again, back to the kitchen. He followed. His sandals slapped on the oak steps, then the bare floor until he reached me.

      “Will you ever have enough?” he asked. His hair was short, curly, and brown, to match his eyes. They looked ordinary, human, young.

      Mama had lost it, near the end. She talked to people who weren’t there, dead people that she should only remember. Daddy had been more tolerant than I.

      “She isn’t hurting anyone,” he told me, over and over. “Why don’t you leave her be?”

      But I couldn’t bear her being crazy, and Papa was old, too, and didn’t understand me. She didn’t recognize either of us, except on the rare good days. She spent most of her time talking to the dead.

      “But it’s not real!” I objected.

      “For her, reality is pretty awful,” Papa explained, but I wasn’t hearing any of it, then. “She’s old, she feels bad, and she’s dying. She knows all that. If you love her, you’ll let her be.”

      I loved her, but I hated her going away before she had to. I hated her flight from reality. Reality was where I lived.

      “This is not real!” I complained to the ghost.

      He shrugged and extended his hand, beckoning. “Come outside. I don’t see how you can stand to be all cooped up in here.”

      I backed away from his outstretched hand and fetched up, hard, against the refrigerator, and huddled myself to its cool, domestic solidity. The motor kicked in as I clutched the machine.

      “I won’t hurt you. Come out. I want to show you something.”

      If I went outside, anything might happen. Here, at least, some of the things were familiar, known. I tried another argument.

      “You’re not real—it’s a crazy dream, a hallucination.”

      He moved closer. I shrank back against the ‘fridge, afraid he would try to grab me, my heart thudding, sweat jumping out from my skin, but he slipped past me and disappeared into the hall. I heard his sandals on the stairs, up, then footfalls soft overhead. I dashed for the door and actually opened it before I stopped to think. To get away from him I would have to leave the house, and I couldn’t.

      When he came back, I stood locked in an agony of indecision, panting with frustration, damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.

      “You forgot this.” He held the brooch out to me. It glowed in his hand. “Take it.”

      I hesitated, afraid.

      “Why is all this happening?” I demanded.

      “God knows,” came the answer, “but he’s not telling.” He laughed, low in the back of his throat. It wasn’t a laugh I could have imagined from this slender boy. He looked too young.

      He tossed the brooch to me. I squawked in fear and caught it after a hurried fit of juggling. “You could have broken it,” I complained. “It’s old”

      “Is it? Let’s go.”

      I looked outside. The wicker furniture I should have seen, painted white, with floral cushions, was gone. The overgrown meadow confronted me. I leaned forward, to peer around the door.

      He pushed me.

      I whirled, falling, and managed to grab his hand. We fell down the wooden steps together, bumping and tumbling over each other. I scrambled to my feet and regained the steps.

      “You’re quick.” He lay on his back, propped on his elbows, and laughed his throaty laugh at me.

      My hands clutched the wood of the door frame for reassurance. “Where are we?”

      “Just where you were before, only somewhat earlier. I’ve been sent to you.”

      “By whom?”

      “Just sent.”

      “Where is everything else?”

      “Where you left it. When you lose something, where does it go?”

      “It doesn’t go anywhere. You just don’t remember.”

      “Exactly.”

      “This is crazy. Lunatic. I ought to be locked up. You’re a hallucination, and what’s worse, I’m talking to you as if you were real.”

      He glanced at the sun. The light struck him full in the face, and he glowed, like my brooch. I still clutched it, despite my tumble.

      “We need to go,” he said. “I’ve lost track of time. I’ve gotten used to not thinking about it, and now I’m late.”

      I sat on the top step, folded my legs underneath me, and shut down—eyes, mouth, ears and mind. For days now, people and events had pushed me in one direction or another. It was time to stop. I still couldn’t explain the brooch I clutched in my hand. I couldn’t explain the voice, now embodied, that continued to coax me deeper into whatever it planned for me. I couldn’t explain the obsession and series of coincidences that had brought me far from home, but I could stop.

      The young man’s voice now came from a distance. He still tried to persuade me, but I heard him as a bird chattering in a faraway tree, then he fell silent.

      When I opened my eyes, I would be back in my office, I’d shake the cobwebs of dream from my mind, and get to work. My breathing slowed. The fear receded. The sweat that had gathered on my forehead dried.

      I opened my eyes, but I was still at the edge of the small rough meadow. Disappointed, I reached to open the door.

      It didn’t budge.

      I leapt back down to the ground and found a rock. I heaved it through the glass, ran back up, and reached through the new opening in the door. The bolt was already open. I twisted at the knob and pulled at the door. Again. Another time. Nothing. The house resisted, refused me entrance. I collapsed on the steps and cried in frustration.

      Voices intruded. A quick babble in the distance deepened as it approached, then passed me by. It drew me out of my funk. Wherever I was, something was happening. I could not resist the pull. I followed.

      Then I was running. My feet slapped hard on the turf, then the shadow of the woods swallowed me, but I kept running, pulled toward the mob ahead. I caught up with them from behind.

      We burst into another clearing. I was somehow at the front of the crowd. My left hand held a thick, fibrous rope. I jogged, pulling my prisoner along. My right hand held a sword—the gladius of a Roman soldier. My hands were huge and rough—a man’s fist curled around the handle of my sword. Black hair grew out of the back of my hand and up along my heavily muscled, white-skinned arm. An alien weight flopped between my legs, a heaviness that I had never felt before. My chest was flat with muscle, wrapped in leather armor that squeaked with every movement.

      My prisoner was the young man, the young man with the voice that had been talking to me for days.

      The meadow was our destination. We trampled a carpet of wildflowers, their juices staining the earth with sweet perfume. The odor overwhelmed the rank smell of the hundred or so people who milled about.

      In the middle of the clearing, a single ash tree grew.

      The young man looked up at me. His eyes watered. Sweat ran down his face.

      “Pay attention,” he whispered. “You’ll learn something.”

      An official barked an order. We stopped under the shade of the ash. The crowd milled around the center of the clearing, jostling each other for a good view. Shadow dappled us from the branches above.

      I couldn’t pay attention to all that was happening. I was worried about my body—where had it gone? Why was I inhabiting another, decidedly male, human form?

      “Bring the prisoner forward.”

      The guard holding the young man’s opposite arm dragged us to the official, a man in his forties, balding, with a grizzled fringe of hair around his skull. His nostrils flared in time with his breath. His jaw quivered with anger. He wore a tunic edged with gold thread and stained with sweat.

      I glanced past my young man to the other guard. He shifted from one foot to the other and spent more time with his eyes on our prisoner than on the magistrate.

      “Alban,” proclaimed the latter, “you are accused of atheism and impiety, and of harboring a fugitive from the emperor’s justice.”

      He was talking to my young man.

      The other guard, in his late teens like the one I now knew as Alban, kept his eyes on our prisoner, with no regard to the official in front of us. Those eyes burned with an intensity I had never seen before. Something mattered to the seer behind those eyes, unremarkable in themselves, a dusty brown peering out from black, Mediterranean brows. Like me, he wore leather armor. A gladius hung from his waist. In his free hand he carried a longer sword, the length of a baseball bat. The blade glittered silvery-gold in the afternoon sun.

      The official leaned closer to Alban. His eyes brimmed with unshed tears. The stubble of a day’s growth of whiskers roughened his lined face.

      “Give this thing up,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to kill you. Your father and I—”

      “I can not,” Alban said. “I can not. You do me a favor by killing me, uncle.”

      “What favor?” The official roared in frustration. “Aren’t you afraid?”

      “Yes.”

      “Then give it up. Your father’s ghost will never forgive me.”

      “But I do.” Alban looked up to the sky, leading my gaze. Through the branches, it was as blue and clear overhead as sapphire. “I am ready.”

      The magistrate raised his hand. The crowd jeered. Alban knelt to receive the sword. I stepped back, to be out of the range of the stroke, but held on to my rope.

      The other soldier was to be the executioner. He moved to stand over Alban. The long sword rose against the blue sky.

      The intake of a hundred breaths came from the mob, then silence. The sword trembled in the broken sunlight. The young soldier’s muscles tightened; the sinews of his hands and forearms bunched up from the bone.

      He flung the long blade far into the meadow, over the heads of the witnesses. Light flashed as the shining blade tumbled through the air, end over end. Finally, it fell beyond them, among the wildflowers.

      Alban released a long sigh.

      “Get the fucking sword,” the official screamed. “Go get it!”

      It took a moment to realize that he was talking to me. I ran through the crowd. The blade stood upright, its point buried in the earth. It made a soft, gritty sound when I drew it from the soil. The juices of the flowers melted over the blade. I ran back to the tree.

      “Kill them both.” The official wiped his face with both hands. “Get it over with.”

      Both young men knelt before me. I didn’t want to do this thing, but my arms moved, my feet planted.

      “Father, forgive them—”

      Alban never finished what he meant to say.

      The blood was awful. It gouted from the stump of his neck, splashing over me, the trembling guard, even the official.

      “Hurry!” the magistrate shouted.

      I stepped to the young man. Sweat, blood and tears dripped from him. “Hurry,” he hissed from between clenched teeth, “before I shit myself.”

      I struck off his head, too. The strength it took surprised me even more than the blood had, and God knows there was enough of that.

      Both heads lay among the trampled flowers. The crowd released its breath and disappeared, giving way to background. The magistrate and the guard vanished likewise. I must have been in shock. The next thing I knew, Alban’s voice was in my ear and I was back in my own body, no longer a hairy-armed Roman soldier, but myself.

      “Oh, God, forgive me—I didn’t mean to—” Revulsion flushed through me. I had the clearest memory, down to the metallic smell of blood, of performing the murder. I scraped at my skin, but the splashes of blood disappeared along with the other people. Alban and I were alone in the clearing, under a single ash tree.

      The shade still covered us from the heat of the sun. The smell of blood had disappeared. His head was back on his shoulders.

      “Oh, God, I’m confused,” I said.

      “You’re going to have to watch that tendency toward understatement.” He grinned like a wild man. The smile split his young, unlined face. He looked even younger—sixteen, maybe fifteen.

      He knelt again in a cluster of wildflowers and bent his head to drink in their smell.

     

* * *

     

      I came back to myself in a wicker chair, under bright sunshine. It was like waking from a dream—not a nightmare, precisely, because I didn’t feel panic, not at first. The memory of the double execution was vivid, as strong as the fear that made my heart thump in my breast and drove me through the back door of the cottage.

      The door’s window was unbroken, but I remembered smashing through it. The latch turned easily in my hand. I hurried through the house to the front door. Outside, the sleepy street was back in all its everyday-ness. At a distance, traffic hummed through the town.

      From upstairs, the abbey’s spire showed through smog that had migrated from London. The ancient, corroded brooch was still where I had left it, next to the quietly humming computer. I was back.

      But what was I back from? I desperately wanted to talk to someone, but whom could I trust? I couldn’t just walk up to my employer’s door and confess to a mental breakdown. Or to a vision that it was impossible for me to have.

      While I was staring out the window, a large, black taxi cab pulled up to the house. The driver got out first, opened the back door, and helped a heavyset woman emerge. He steadied her for a moment before she handed him the fare. He waited while she lumbered up the short flight of steps and out of sight.

      My doorbell rang.

      Please, I prayed, though I didn’t know to what, please, let this be real.

      My feet slapped against the bare oak of the stairway. I opened the front door.

      The woman was even larger than I had thought. Her skin was pale, with an unhealthy flush in the cheeks. She was stuffed like a sausage. “May I help you?” I asked.

      She studied me even more closely than I was looking at her. Her eyes moved over me, slipping through my pretense of normality.

      “I am Christina—of Markyate,” she said, as if in explanation. Her voice was high, yet somehow authoritative. A slight wheeze thinned her speech.

      I had heard of Markyate. It had been a tiny village near Saint Albans in the Middle Ages. A local hermitess, also a Christina, had lived there. A wave of caution swirled inside me. She might be crazier than I.

      “Please, come in.” I stood back from the door and led her into the parlor, where the magazines were still perfectly fanned on the coffee table. “I’m Clio Griffin.”

      She ignored my gesture toward the couch and perched daintily, in spite of her bulk, on a stiff wingback chair. I settled on the edge of its mate.

      “So it’s to be you.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “You are not at all what was expected.” Christina had to pause in mid-phrase to catch her breath. “Still, what’s done is done, and there’s no use worrying.” She studied me, as a zoologist studies a creature under her microscope.

      “I’m sorry, I—”

      She shushed me and closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. I could only sit there, dumbfounded.

      “I apologize,” Christina said. “I have been rebuked. You are the one. Again, I apologize.”

      Then she told me what I had just been through. I do not often lack for something to say, but when her recital was over, I was speechless. Thoughts raced through my mind. No one could know what I’d seen and felt this morning. None of it could be happening anyway.

      Christina must have read my mind. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth...’” she quoted. “You would do well to accustom yourself to the idea.”

      “How do you—” I stopped, wondering just what my question for Christina was.

      “Why, dear one, don’t you know?”

      I shook my head. “I hardly know my name, today.” It came out in a whisper. I was more frightened than I had let on even to myself.

      “I know just what you mean. It came on me strangely, too. And I was even more of a child of reason than you; my mother was a Victorian lady, and I was her daughter, in mind as well as in body. Science, reason—these were all the world in the days of my childhood.”

      Christina paused for breath and inhaled the scent of the house.

      “Do I smell an open tin of butter biscuits?” She frowned. “It’s dreadfully rude of me to ask, I know, but I must keep this old body fully fueled.” She touched her ample stomach and smiled. “It will be the death of me some day, I imagine. The medical profession would have us all live forever, if they could just whip this nasty aging business. Can you think of anything more ghastly than never dying, always going on, growing older and older, more and more filled with experience? It won’t do. I look forward to dying almost as much as I look forward to eating, which, you can see, is my besetting temptation.”

      “The cookies are upstairs in my office. I’ll be right back.”

      Christina bounced to her feet; the flesh on her arms jiggled. “May I see where you intend to work?”

      “It’s up the stairs,” I warned.

      “Oh, I don’t mind. It’s just a little huffing and puffing.”

      Christina seemed immune to the discomforts of her weight. She followed me up the stairs, even hurrying the pace slightly in her eagerness. She panted, her face turned red, and she grinned in anticipation.

      “Splendid!” she exclaimed on entering my office. “They’ve done it right, then. Trust Leslie Phelps.” The tin of biscuits found its way into her hand as if it sought her out, rather than the other way around. She wandered the room, and touched each piece of electronic equipment, each piece of furniture. She reminded me of an old lady I’d known who walked around my childhood neighborhood, touching things, patting them, as if to reassure either them or herself that everything was okay. The old lady of my girlhood had mainly specialized in trees and telephone poles, at least while outdoors, but Christina bestowed her caresses more widely.

      “You simply must get to work, doctor. I know you feel emo-tionally wrung out, and find the whole business quite unbelievable. That’s exactly why you must get it down on paper. You are being given these insights so that they can be shared. Of that I am quite certain. And the writing will fix it in your memory, too.” She held out the tin. “Biscuit? They’re quite good.” A film of butterfat glistened on her lips; a stray crumb clung to the corner of her mouth. I must have made some kind of gesture, for she excused herself and brushed it away immediately.

      “If you pretend not to know what you know—” Her hand hovered over my brooch, then touched it, ever so gently. “—if you refuse the gift, you won’t be scoring any points in heaven.”

      I hadn’t expected a sports metaphor from her.

      “I don’t believe in—”

      “Sshh!” Christina raised a buttery finger to her lips. “Don’t hurry to declare your unbelief. Say rather, I don’t know. Or better, say, Surprise me, God. And write it down.”

     

* * *

     

      The proposition: The saint was talking to me.

      The counter-proposition: I was talking to myself.

      I was alone, days later, sitting in my office, trying to make some sense out of the mass of paper lying on my desk, when Alban came back.

      That is not true, he reminded me. And he was right. I had been staring off into space, dreading the mind-numbing necessity of trying to make some sense out of what had happened, what I was doing there. Avoiding the issue.

      Satisfied? I asked.

      For now.

      Thanks.

      Honesty has its perils. I never knew self-deception held such pleasure, until deprived of it.

      You’re wasting time, he said.

      You should have plenty of that.

      But you might not.

      Thanks for the reminder.

      Silence.

      I couldn’t see him. He didn’t sit in the visitor’s chair and nibble at the butter biscuits, like Christina. But I could “hear” his voice as clearly as Joan d’Arc could hear hers.

      Those poor, deluded people, I thought—schizophrenics all, who in their madness turned to the most powerful myth of their time for explanation—Francis, running naked through the town square in front of his parents’ home, giving his clothing to the poor; Paul, racked with guilt on the road to Damascus; poor, sad Maria Goretti, wrestling with her libido.

      And now, me. It could have been worse. Luther had his visions on the toilet. At least Alban comes at more seemly times. What I want had nothing to do with it.

      A soft tsk-tsk emanated from the neighborhood of the visitor’s chair, a sound impossible to write down, made by the clicking of the tongue against the palate, and therefore impossible for an incorporeal spirit.

      He was right. What I wanted had everything to do with it. I wanted to understand. I wanted it—the gigantic, incomprehensible IT—to make some kind of human sense. I wanted the gaps filled in. I wanted the story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like Eve, I wanted to understand.

      Impossible, I knew. Human pictures are fragmentary, distorted, broken. No one ever understands. IT never makes sense. Failure is inevitable

      But one must try.