Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
The walk to the Holy Angels Cemetery felt longer than it should have.
It was six, and the heat of the day was finally beginning to wane.
Still, it seemed unusually cold when I slipped into the shadows and weirdly hot every time I came out from the shade and into the full sun.
For a Tuesday night, it was a fairly quiet evening.
Very few sirens, the traffic fading to a dull hush.
The whole day had seemed wrapped in a cocoon like that.
Even Claire had been a relief when she bounced into the deli where I’d picked up a shift at the last minute and treated me like her new bestie.
There hadn’t been a lot of customers, and she’d seemed brighter than usual.
Chummier. She’d offered me another card, but I told her I still had the first. That’d wound her even tighter.
She asked a bunch of questions, but I couldn’t remember her words so much.
Just that she kept talking and talking, raindrops on aluminum siding, clattering, chattering on.
Nosy bitch.
But I didn’t mind Claire so much. Not today. Mordechai had a new problem for us to solve. It was a big one, too, if he wasn’t going to tell me about it in his office. The little jobs came to him. He went to the big ones, like the Kleins.
And the Kleins had been fun, in their way.
A little too fun?
Was that possible?
I made it to the cemetery a few minutes before seven and admired the old brick wall surrounding it, with the large arched gates that looked like something out of a movie. They didn’t build cemeteries like this anymore, which was too bad. You needed a cemetery with a sense of grandeur sometimes.
This one was so old that it actually had a section devoted to people of Jewish descent, and I followed the signs to that section now, the odd chill coming over me again as I slipped in and out of the shade.
The deeper I got into the cemetery, the older the markers became, some elaborate, some simple, but all of them steeped in an ancient solitude I felt I was breaking.
I finally came to an open space where I found Mordechai.
He was in his long jacket and dark suit, his head covered by his flat-brimmed hat tonight instead of his more usual kippah.
He looked like the respectable rabbi I suppose he’d been at some point, but not an outwardly flashy one.
He wasn’t expecting to see anyone besides me tonight, clearly, not looking like that.
I fought the disappointment that curled through me.
I really needed to help someone. It was almost like a fix that I’d been deprived of too long.
“Delia.” Mordechai’s voice floated over the open space, and once again, a shiver of fear and something darker lanced through me.
I found myself narrowing my eyes at him, instantly distrustful.
Why had he brought me to this place if we weren’t going to perform an exorcism or even meet with a victim?
Why had he wasted three hours of my life just to have a conversation with me?
I halted summarily, raising my voice, though the place was quiet. He had no problem hearing me, I was sure.
“Why here?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound quite like my own, and I frowned, hoping he wouldn’t notice. And what did it matter where we met? Mordechai had been my friend for going on fifteen years. If he wanted me to meet him in a Jewish cemetery there had to be a good reason.
Mordechai didn’t respond, but he did wave me over. He was studying a cemetery marker, and I relaxed a little. Okay, so maybe there was a reason for coming here after all. Could someone have been buried here who was haunting a living person? That would explain it.
Despite my growing freakout, I forced myself to move closer to the rabbi at the far end of the courtyard. Tension mounted inside me with every step, but I didn’t stop until I stood next to Mordechai, squinting down at the marker. It was blank.
“Who’s buried here?”
“No one, yet,” Mordechai said. His hands were clasped in front of him, and he had the demeanor of a man praying. “It was placed in this cemetery years ago but was not needed so quickly. I visit it to remind myself that sometimes, the Creator has different plans for us than we might expect.”
“Okay.” I could sense there was a reason for all of this, though it wasn’t clear to me. And I was growing more nervous, not less, now that I was in Mordechai’s presence. “Does your newest call have something to do with this cemetery? Is that why you brought me here?”
“No.” Mordechai seemed to shake off whatever he saw on the smooth surface of the gravestone. “I brought you here because it seemed the best place to warn you about what is to come.” He gestured. “Walk with me.”
I fought my irritation and impatience but fell into step with him.
Mordechai thought better when he walked—he’d told me that often enough.
Movement centered him, made him feel more in control.
How he could not be in control in the middle of a freaking Jewish cemetery, I had no idea.
These were his people. If he wanted to walk, though, we’d walk.
He didn’t talk right away. I was used to that, too.
I tried to keep my attention from wandering in and out and through the headstones, but I couldn’t resist for long.
My gaze chased the shadows and the vines that curved over the ground, vines that seemed to gain hold on some of the older stones, pulling at the rock, grinding it to dust. A sort of curious fascination took hold of me as I marked their progress; nature destroying the edifices of man, time pulling things down, apart. It felt right. It felt good.
I didn’t understand why I was shivering.
The strangest part was the silence inside me—no whisper, no taunt, nothing at all. That quiet felt sharper than the wind in the trees, and I hated how much I noticed it.
“You’re not wearing your—”
“I’m not, no,” I snapped, cutting Mordechai off. I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask, but of course he had. I forced my voice into a quieter, gentler tone. “I keep losing it. I’m sorry.”
Mordechai didn’t question my lie, just sighed a little. That sigh felt like a knife between my ribs, but I couldn’t find the damned thing! It wasn’t my fault!
“The Hinderer takes many forms in this world, all of them part of God’s plan.
” Mordechai’s words were so faint, they almost seemed to be spoken inside my head.
I shook myself back to attention, but he hadn’t actually asked a question, so no reply seemed appropriate.
“He finds ways to whisper into the ears of the faithful, to worm his way into their hearts. To take root in the innocent and profane the sacred. To play upon the prideful and trap them with their own hubris.”
“Is this what happened in that old house in the photos?” I was desperate to focus on that house, that case.
Any case. Mordechai now seemed impossibly old to me, and old in a way that marked him as feeble.
I didn’t want to think of him as feeble.
He needed to be strong. Strong enough to take on the job that involved a strange old house that clearly was far away from here, and strong enough to take me with him.
Strong enough to take me anywhere that wasn’t here.
“The affliction visited upon that house has many layers. From what the son has told me, it has lasted for at least seven years but is now manifesting in more…obvious ways.”
I felt my brows lift, though I struggled mightily to keep my voice steady. “What do you mean, layers?”
“Infestation. Oppression. Obsession.” Mordechai ticked the words off, a somber litany of evil incarnations sent to plague the righteous, each of them a progressively worse form of demonic work, but not the worst. Infestation was the least intrusive, but perhaps the best known: the haunted house.
Oppression and obsession preyed upon the minds of actual people.
They saw things, heard things, that shouldn’t be there…
and they grew more and more isolated, confused, depressed.
Damaged. But these weren’t the terms that made my own heart thump in my chest. Those levels of affliction the rabbi could handle with a phone call sometimes, a visit to the office, or a well-intended prayer.
The big house with the flat roof and the strange family didn’t just have a ghost in the attic.
“And possession, finally,” Mordechai said, sounding mournful. “Possession is the most dangerous of all the Hinderer’s work. We cannot always see it for what it is.”
“How many demons are there?” This was important to me, for some reason. Mrs. Klein’s sister had only one demon inside her, but that wasn’t always the case. Still, the most I’d ever heard of was—
“The son couldn’t say. At least six separate creatures have made their presence known, but he has heard the refrains of many more, the voices of a multitude, in fact.”
“Six.” I didn’t even bother hiding the excitement shimmering inside me now. We’d never taken on six before. I suspected that somewhere, in all those binders on his shelves, Mordechai had confronted multiple demons, but six—six surely was a lot. Six was a television series.
Six would be a fucking joy.
We were back to where we’d started in front of the empty gravestone, and I refocused on Mordechai. Once again, I was struck by his age, his fragility. He wasn’t a small man, but he seemed more bent-over than he ever had, more unsure. “Mordechai?”
I reached out a hand, but he straightened then, eyeing me with a sudden fierceness. “Everything that is good and right has its time in the eyes of the Almighty, Delia. Everything on this earth has been granted by Him, its beginning and its end.”
I frowned. “Okay, but—”
“You came to me as a gift from the heavens, a gift I sorely needed during a time of great trial. A gift, but a test as well. It was a test I didn’t pass that first day. Or any day since.”
That didn’t sound good. “Um, what are you talking about?”
Mordechai looked beyond me then, into the shadows. “It’s no longer a battle I can put off fighting, I fear. Perhaps no longer a battle I can fight at all.” He sighed, his lips twisting with a hint of bitterness. “I had prayed for more time to prepare you. I just—I needed more time.”
“We’ll have lots of time.” I really didn’t want him to devolve into one of his muttering rambles.
Suddenly, though, the strangeness of our location struck me anew.
“Why did you bring me all this way if you just wanted to talk about the guy and his photographs? We could have done that back at your office.” I looked around.
“Wait, is someone buried here who’s important to that case?
Are there members of the family in this cemetery? ”
Still, that didn’t make sense. The house had looked old, fancy, and most importantly, far away from any city.
Why would a family who lived on some sort of palatial estate have a cemetery plot in the middle of Holy Angels?
A curious excitement had taken hold of me as another thought occurred.
“Or did someone they hurt get buried here? Is that why we’re here, to discover why they’re being infested in the first place? ”
“There isn’t always an easy explanation,” Mordechai said.
His words sounded too far away though, like he seemed far away, as I searched the names on the worn-out headstones, a thousand thoughts whispering to me at once.
“Evil can find its way into even the most righteous of hearts and most sacred of places. And sometimes…it has help.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I frowned back at him, startled to find him staring at me. “Then why? You had to bring me here for a reason.”
He nodded. His gaze not leaving mine, he reached into the pocket of his long jacket and pulled out a carved spiral, one I recognized immediately.
“Your shofar,” I said. The weirdest riffle of panic sliced through me—panic and anger, too.
Mordechai was playing games with me. He’d dragged me two hours out of my way to play games with me?
“You’re going to blow that here? I thought you didn’t even believe in it. ”
Mordechai’s smile was grim as he lifted the horn to his lips. “I’m not playing it for my ears.”
He blew a single, light, clear note.
The sound pierced the twilight air—loud, raw, accusatory. A call to judgment, I thought fleetingly. A call to fight.
For one heartbeat, the cemetery held its breath.
Then it screamed back.