Chapter 12
In woodland that did not truly exist, by a lake that did not exist either, stood Jennifer Parker.
She inclined her head and listened, as though the sound of Louis’s finger tapping on the bar had carried to her even here, crossing the barrier between the living and the dead as easily as Jennifer herself.
Beside her, the dead priest named Martin waited, unwilling to disturb her concentration.
Jennifer Parker frightened him, and not without cause, but he had allied himself with her nonetheless, because a war was coming.
He could have elected to do what so many of the dead did while he and Jennifer watched from the woods: enter the water that was not water, immersing themselves until, finally, it covered their heads and they were gone.
It must have been soporific, he thought, since the dead did not struggle. Some even smiled at the last.
There was a time, not long after he arrived in that place, when Martin was tempted to join them.
The water called to him. It promised peace, and an end to any recollection of human suffering.
When, in life, Martin had spoken at the funerals of men and women going to their reward, this was a version of what he imagined.
So why, then, had he chosen not to embrace it?
That was a question to which he still struggled to find an answer.
The best he could offer was doubt, the same doubt that had plagued him during his years as a priest. It was not uncertainty about the existence of God—indeed, when violent death finally came for him, Martin was given dramatic confirmation of the reality of transcendental evil in the world, and if such evil was real, so too was its opposite—but he had qualms about God’s nature.
As part of his vocation, Martin was witness to the terminal sufferings of many and struggled to offer any meaningful consolation to them beyond the possibility of a divine plan, the purpose of which would only become apparent once their agonies ceased.
Then, at the time of his own death, he endured appalling pain, and though he pleaded with God for the torment to end, it did not end soon enough.
So it was that when he took his place by the lake, he heard the summons of the water less as a guarantee of eternal tranquility than a siren call, and whatever it promised rang hollow to him.
In common with a handful of others, he turned away.
He had never encountered any of his fellow exiles again, but they were out there somewhere.
Like Martin, they were waiting; like him, they had seen the young girl by the water; but unlike him, they feared her too much to approach.
Here, Martin had the advantage. He knew who she was, because he had once met her father; and if the daughter was troubling, the father was terrifying.
“What did you hear?” Martin asked. “One of them?”
They had not glimpsed an angel since the last of the three—a destroyer, a killer—had come to the lake, seeking to draw from the woods the girl so intent on keeping her distance.
She was a disturbance, an anomaly, but so far, not a threat.
Were they to construe her as such, they would arrive in force, and while they could not compel her to go with them—free will endured, right up to the moment the waters closed over one’s head—they could, in sufficient numbers, work on her so that the line between compulsion and impulsion was blurred, and she would yield, if only to make the voices stop.
“No,” said Jennifer. “I heard Louis.”
She had lately been visiting her father’s confederates, Martin knew, just as she visited her father.
As a consequence, she was more aware of Angel and Louis than before.
She was preparing the way, but it was a delicate affair.
The machine was out of phase, and it was important that it remain so.
Were it to be jarred inadvertently, it might return to true, and all their waiting, all her efforts, would be for nothing.
What would happen then? Would there be a punishment?
Would he—they—be damned? Martin thought not, but he saw himself being led to the water, subdued by the whispering of angels, there to drown.
“Is he in trouble?” Martin asked.
“Someone is.”