Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
My palms were still sweating as I walked up Mordechai’s driveway, never mind that I’d avoided mirrors for a full day after I’d left Mrs. Klein’s, until I forced myself to stare into the one in my bathroom this morning.
Nothing had stared back at me, lurking in my eyes. Nothing spoke to me. Not even when I’d screwed up the nerve to ask it to.
“Hey,” I’d managed, my voice dry as chalk. I’d gotten nothing but silence back.
I was just me, alone. Same as always.
I mean, sure, I’d seen...something. In the mirror. Or I thought I had. But it could have been stress, or an adrenaline crash after the exorcism. My overactive imagination combined with Mrs. Klein’s decorative mirror and bad lighting.
That made sense. That was rational.
The alternative—that there was a presence in there with me, something with a face and a voice and intentions of its own…No. I wasn’t going there. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Because if I admitted that what I’d seen was real, I’d have to admit what it meant. And I wasn’t ready for that.
I may be going crazy, but at least I wasn’t possessed.
Even stranger, I’d had no nightmares. I’d woken up this morning freaked out at what might be covering the walls, but they were white.
Pristine. The usual post-exorcism pornographic slurs scrawled in garish craft paint decrying me as a whore and a slut, a useless cunt with shit for brains…
were nowhere in evidence. Everything I’d come to expect—the bumps in the night, cold hands on my throat, needles pricking my skin, screams howling in my ears—had taken the night off, apparently.
Why?
Was it because I was stronger? More confident in myself? Because I’d shown Iris’s demon who was boss?
I had no clue.
Now, however, the huffing was back; short bursts of hyperventilation that I couldn’t seem to calm. I forced myself to stop, to focus, to huddle beneath a tree until I could breathe normally again.
Finally, I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder and peered into the shadows at the little stone house with moss growing on the roof. Mordechai’s home. I’d never been inside it, but it looked pretty nice.
The rabbi’s backyard office, however, was a dump.
Books, documents, files on back jobs, notebooks, and a lifetime of office supplies were crammed into a room the size of a mousetrap, and I doubted the place had been aired out in decades. It was as much Mordechai as his shawl and rumpled pants.
But something felt different today.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but the air seemed too cold, even for Mordechai. And there was a smell…faint, barely there, but it reminded me of Mrs. Klein’s house. Of Iris’s room.
Brimstone and rot.
I glanced around, but everything looked normal. The same cluttered shelves, the same stacks of papers. Nothing moved.
Still, the wrongness clung to me, and inside, something stirred.
Not quite a voice, not quite a feeling. But...awareness. Like I wasn’t alone in noticing.
Like something else was paying attention too.
The door to his office was shut, and I checked my newly charged phone. It was five o’clock. Nobody should be in there but him. Half the time when I knocked, Mordechai didn’t hear me anyway, so I opened the door and let myself in.
As usual, the wave of chilled, air-conditioned air made me smile. Most old people couldn’t stay warm enough… Mordechai preferred to live in a refrigerator. I could hear him mumbling to himself in his back office, and I opened my mouth to call out, then shut it again.
Why bother announcing myself?
Just go in. See what he’s doing.
The idea struck me so quickly that I didn’t stop to analyze it—it sounded like my thoughts, my own inner voice, not like some dark, nebulous entity potentially lurking inside me.
A perfectly reasonable thought from a perfectly reasonable woman, who’d conducted a perfectly reasonable exorcism all by herself yesterday. Nothing to look at here.
I didn’t even try to be stealthy. I threw down my backpack in the corner of the reception room with a loud clatter, strode the ten steps it took to get to the back office, then stuck my head in.
Mordechai was bent over a pile of file folders lying on his small meeting table, papers everywhere, along with photographs of a giant old house that screamed money and a whole lot of it.
Some of the pictures were in black and white, others in color.
All of them looked creepy as shit, but that was probably because Mordechai was looking at them.
He didn’t care about anything that wasn’t creepy as shit.
He was also so into whatever he was reading that he clearly had no idea I was even there. “Hey,” I finally said. This time, there was a reaction.
“Delia!” The rabbi jerked back. His hands spasmed on his papers, sending the farthest ones flying.
“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry.” I moved forward and didn’t miss the way Mordechai pulled everything he could back toward his body, almost like he was trying to hide contraband.
I tried not to be hurt as I dropped down on one knee, gathering up the glossy wisps of paper.
One of them featured a twenty-something frat boy with dark curly hair and a nice jawline.
My brows shot up. Who was this? Even in faded black-and-white photos, the guy’s eyes seemed exhausted, somehow—the kind of eyes that had seen too much and would never be able to see ordinary things the same way again.
Granted, I picked up odd, totally random insights from photos, the same as I did people, but this guy’s energy seemed to leap out of the photo and snatch at me, pleading for me to come, to see, to help.
He wanted me—needed me—and something hard and angry lurched deep in my gut at that thought, making me gasp.
I coughed to cover the punch of pain, flipping the photo around casually to Mordechai. “Well, at least he’s cute,” I managed. The pain twisted deeper, possessive and furious. Something inside me didn’t like that observation. The sheer rage of its reaction startled me into response.
“Get a grip,” I thought at it. “And not on my guts.”
Instantly, the sensation eased, and I blinked. Since when could I negotiate with my inner voice? How had that become a thing?
“Give that to me.” Mordechai plucked the photo out of my hand.
Feeling abashed at his rebuke, though I had no reason to be, I gathered up the rest of the pictures, scanning them rapidly before dropping them into his open file folder.
Quite a few of them featured a house. The same house as before, big and made of stone, with at least twenty windows on the front, an overlarge door, and a flat roof, which made it seem oddly fortress-like.
There were also pictures of a field full of horses, a lake with a gazebo, and a much smaller house set back into the trees.
Silver-spoon hottie guy showed up again, too, this picture in color, not fifties-era black and white, so it could be he was still cute and not a million years old, tottering around his sad lonely castle.
“Sorry,” I tried again, my hand dropping to my belly to rub away a renewed spasm. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
Mordechai didn’t respond to that, simply took the folder and set it with the others, most of them still open, while I turned and looked at his shelves to give him a moment to figure out how to yell at me.
I’d memorized these bookcases a long time ago. They were filled with files, dating back fifty years. Back to when he’d been an official rabbi, and before that, a consultant to the Vatican. I suddenly wondered: Who had Mordechai been as a young man? What kind of kid actually grows up to become—
“Why did you go?”
His words pulled me back around. The rabbi had composed himself.
Now he studied me from his customary position, rocked back in his ratty old green suede upholstered office chair, his hands clasped together on his belly.
He usually wore long jackets and woven scarves when we visited peoples’ houses.
But, like the scrolls, the horn, and the ornamental cases, I knew those clothes were a prop.
Something he used to strike equal parts fear and reassurance into both the possessed and the possessor.
Today, however, Mordechai wore his more usual office attire: ragged-edged khakis and a button-down plaid shirt, with a thick green cardigan over top that sort of made him blend in with his chair.
His curly gray hair hung a little past cool and well into eccentric, and his face was clean-shaven.
That meant he’d gone to see the Klein sisters, I knew.
Rabbi Mordechai didn’t shave unless he had to see people. Real people, not me.
But he was waiting for a response, so I sat in my customary armchair, too, fatigue all of a sudden weighing me down.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, surprised at my own honesty.
“At first, I thought for sure that we were supposed to meet yesterday. Like, it was completely locked in my head that yesterday was the Klein’s appointment.
My phone was dead, you hadn’t texted me anything else that I knew of, so I just—went. ”
“You frightened Mrs. Klein.” As usual with Mordechai, there was no judgment, no censure in his words. Somehow, that made me feel even worse, and I squirmed a little in my chair.
“I didn’t mean to.” I leaned forward, and something flickered in Mordechai’s gray eyes.
Interest? Curiosity? Surely, he wanted to hear my side of the story too.
“Is that what she said? That I scared her? Honestly, I just wanted to help. I was standing right there on her porch and there was all this noise inside the house, and she looked so scared, and I thought if I could go inside and see what was going on, that maybe I’d be able to—”
“You shouldn’t have gone in without me.”
Mordechai’s voice had turned slightly harsher, and I sat back again, nervous now. “Well, I was already there. I thought you were inside.”
His eyebrows were the kind that seemed to be constantly sprouting new hairs, most of them dead white. And now those brows drew up in a bushy question mark. “You knew I wasn’t inside.”
“Not at first, I didn’t. I came up the steps and there was all this noise, and it stopped when I banged on the door, and then she answered, and—”
“And she told you I wasn’t there.”
“That’s not the point.” Anger seared through me.
How could he not see this? “The point is that even though you weren’t already inside, she was clearly in trouble, or her sister was, and I could help.
I wanted to help. I wanted to ease her pain, her sister’s pain.
I don’t see why that’s so wrong. And it’s not like I could stop once I got started. You know that better than anyone.”
Mordechai’s hands had shifted a little higher on his belly as I spoke, but they were still clasped together.
He wasn’t a fat man, but he seemed spongier now than when I’d first met him.
A little more stooped and tired. He should be welcoming the assistance I was giving him, not constantly putting me off.
Instead, he simply looked at me, and after a moment or two, I felt a sudden easing of my own stress. All the anxiety, pain, and hard-sharp angles were softening like he was soft, rounding under the cadence of his words.
“So, then, tell me, Delia,” he murmured. “How was your first experience confronting evil all alone?”