1. religion and spirituality
2. islam

Yves Etienne Patak
THE HEALER
Copyright 2005 by Yves E. Patak
All rights with the author
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there
wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to
dream before
E.A.Poe – The Raven
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
H.P. Lovecraft – The Nameless City
Fair is foul, and foul is fair –
Hover through the fog and filthy air!
Shakespeare - Macbeth
Chapter One
The Desert of Libya, 1981
Friday – 5.20 p.m.
The little girl stood in the low, still blazing sun,
squinting against the first heralds of El Ghibli, the hot,
dry wind that sometimes brought the Sahara’s scalding
and merciless heat within hours. Arms akimbo, she
stood motionless on a tawny hillock, her jelab flailing
in the breeze, overlooking the Great Sand Sea, as the
locals called the magnificent rolling dunes – dunes that
spread infinitely across the vast wasteland of Marzuq
into the Sahara desert hundreds of miles to the south.
The girl’s composure spoke of royalty; her straight
back insinuated that she might one day be the proud
landlady of this plane. Far in the distance, slowly
disintegrating in the sandy whirls of El Ghibli, stood
the mighty mountains of Libya.
A more veteran and experienced desert-dweller might
have read the ominous signs on the horizon correctly.
The rapidly growing sand clouds were blending with
the pale blue Libyan sky, and the peculiar merging
nuances of opaque ocher and fading azure were an
alarming allusion of an imminent marriage between El
Ghibli and the dreaded Scirocco – an occurrence rare
and violent enough to be remembered for a lifetime.
With her mere five years, the girl was much too young
to read the skies and its symbols. Even if she had been
older and more knowledgeable in the art of
interpreting nature’s signs of danger, she wouldn’t
have seen them, for all her senses were focused with
rapt attention on what was happening in the large
excavation before her, underneath the desert’s eternal
waves.
With barely containable excitement, she watched the
four men in the dig toiling beneath the rising storm,
oblivious of the mayhem to come. They were scraping
out the stony sand with the unlimited patience only
found in true believers and the desperate, digging for
some unknown rare and ancient archeological finding,
something immeasurably precious – or at least it
seemed invaluable to their employer, the enigmatic
French archeologist Balthazar Phomette, who had
offered a stately reward for the hidden treasure. The
diggers had no clue what kind of treasure they were
after, nor did they care; the reward was a fortune, and
each of them secretly prayed to Allah to be the first to
strike on the promised gold.
When the French professor had showed them the dark
dot that symbolized the site of the digging on the
map, the information had seemed precise enough. But
once they were on the very site in the desert, the dot
on the map encompassed an area as big as a football
field. The mission suddenly appeared nearly hopeless.
Still, the money at stake was motivation enough to
encourage the impossible.
The little girl’s father, wearing the same coarse and
ragged jelab like his daughter, paused to wipe the sweat
off his brow. He readjusted his headband and looked
up to the little hillock where his daughter was
standing, making sure she did not approach the site.
According to the French professor’s strict instruction,
the excavation site was forbidden territory to
everybody except the four men he had hired, and he
knew that this rather intimidating man, the sole
sponsor of the digging, would fire him at once if he
found out he had brought an illegal visitor, even if this
visitor was just a little girl. Yet, the way she had
insisted to come along with her father had been so
unusual, her big mahogany eyes so sparkling when she
had asked him to take her to the site, that he just
couldn’t refuse her this apparently harmless wish. A
few days ago, he had tried to remember how she had
learned about the project in the first place. He couldn't
recall making a slip, on the contrary: he was certain he
hadn't told her a word. Not her, not anybody else.
Now, seeing her standing there like an Arabian
princess, her pretty face looking down at him seriously
and expectantly, his heart grew warm with love and
affection – and no little apprehension.
Abdullah Ibn Said Otuama was a poor man, and this
unexpected job as an excavation-digger meant bred for
the family for at least five months – even if he wasn't
the one who'd find the treasure. He needed the money
desperately, and he wondered if his giving in to his
daughter’s wish put his family's already dismal
existence into jeopardy.
To Abdullah, the French professor’s appearance in the
little village of Al Qatrun in the desert of Marzuq had
been like a miracle. Nobody had been searching for
archeological findings within two hundred miles from
the village for the last twenty years, and Abdullah, who
was absolutely uneducated and illiterate, had been
forced to work as an odd-job man, doing the dirty
work most people refused to do, while his wife grew
bitterer and his children thinner every year.
What largely added to his misery was his wife’s
incredible fertility. They had seven children, and she
was pregnant again. It seemed that every time he
touched his wife he fathered a child, and each time he
looked at his malnourished family, he was tormented
by ugly thoughts of starvation death. In Al Qatrun,
social welfare was a word unknown. Abdullah felt
indifferent about most of his children, for they were
frankly stupid and indisputably lazy. In his heart, there
was neither love nor hate for his offspring. Even his
son Mustafa, long-longed for after the first three
ch i l d r e n h a d b e e n g i r l s, wa s a c o m p l e t e
disappointment, like all his sons and daughters.
Almost all.
Except for my little princess, my beloved Sharan, he thought,
looking up at the child on the sandy hill. May Allah
bless my precious one. She isn’t like the others, and sometimes I
wonder if Allah sent her for some special purpose.
He still had no notion why the French professor had
chosen him of all people to dig along with the three
others for this dubious treasure. His co-laborers all
had youth, strength or endurance to offer. He assumed
that the professor had deemed him the most
experienced in the art of finding his way around in the
desert. At the age of forty-six, Abdullah was one of
the village’s eldest, and in spite of his otherwise sparse
talents, people valued his knowledge of the
unpredictable sands surrounding Al Qatrun.
A wave of dizziness went through his emaciated body,
and he shivered himself back into the sweat-driving
reality of his labor. He drove his shovel vigorously
into the stony ground under the sand, and a grating,
metallic noise resounded from beneath the steely blade
as it stroke on something hard.
Another stone, he thought wearily, his muscles cramping
up at the prospect of having to pull another heavy
rock from the deepening hole in the ground. Within a
month, the four men on the site had excavated a crater
of nearly twenty times twenty meters under the grim
sun, a crater five meters deep and growing steadily.
Since the French archeologist had arrived in Al Qatrun
four weeks before, had ridden into the village on a
strangely dark camel like a fearsome desert-specter, he
had not bothered to honor the diggers with his
presence, which was just as well with Abdullah, who
didn’t like the bulky Frenchman with the balding head
and the ponytail at all. In spite of the money he
brought, the man from Paris gave Abdullah the creeps.
He certainly had the evil eye, and Abdullah wore his
special talisman under his coarse clothing at all times.
But of course he didn't refuse the professor's pay, and
he certainly wouldn't reject the special reward. Ah,
there was a thought! Could Allah be as merciful as to
let Abdullah, the eternal loser, be the lucky dog for
once?
He bent down to examine the rock, and he frowned
under his headscarf. Were his eyes deceiving him, he
wondered, or had the brutal sun scorched his brain for
too many weeks? Under the metal blade of his shovel,
only inches from his right bellrah, he was greeted by
the dull shine of a dusty slab of marble. He nearly
cried out with joy, but wisely fought the impulse to
shout Allah-u-Akbar up to his daughter, telling her that
she could be proud of her father, telling her that they
were rich, because the professor had offered a reward
of ten thousand American dollars for the finder of the
tomb, a reward beyond Abdullah’s limited power of
calculation. Surreptitiously, he glanced at the others.
Fortunately, they were not looking his way. Feeling
weak with excitement, he put his hands on his knees,
as if catching his breath. Before he hollered out in
ecstasy, he had to be certain he was the righteous
finder of the treasure indeed, and he knew he must
avoid the other's curiosity before he was dead sure.
Once more, he looked around furtively; still, no one
paid attention to him. Slowly, he knelt down and
began to dig with his hands. Working as silently as
possible in order not to arouse the other’s suspicion,
he gradually brought to light the right corner of
something that might have been the stony lid of a
giant coffin. Abdullah had heard from travelling
salesmen that the Moroccan king’s family members
were buried in marble coffins, and he had often
marveled about this bizarre idea, for all his ancestors
had been buried in the sand of the desert, with only
their jelab and their headscarf accompanying them on
their last trip to the place where the sun never shines.
He knew that those who made it to paradise were
clothed in fantastic robes and sumptuous costumes;
what was the use of protecting a dead body from the
inevitable decay?
Coarse laughter nearly made him jump. He jumped up,
his joints creaking alarmingly. Smiling wearily, he
looked at the others. They still paid him no heed.
Apparently, Omar had cracked one of his infamous
crude jokes, and that was that.
Quickly, he went down on his knees again. Anxiously,
he put his right index finger into his mouth and drove
the wet tip over the lid. A somber, shiny surface
appeared beneath the dust, and he quickly withdrew
his finger, as if the stone had blistered his skin.
Although up in the desert the sun was already
approaching the horizon's flat line far in the west, the
stone's marble surface gleamed as if illuminated from
within. Looking at the dark marble was an entrancing
sight, and Abdullah had to pull himself together with
all his might to tear away his glance before...
– Before what?
All of a sudden, he didn’t like his discovery anymore.
The reward, appealing as it had been minutes ago, now
seemed like the phony promise of a bottle imp.
Intuitively, he knew that the French archeologist hadn’t
told them the whole story. There was an unsettling
suspicion in Abdullah’s heart that the professor’s
definition of a treasure didn’t match his own. Or was
it a treasure hunt after all? A goose ran over his grave,
and he stood up, slowly backing away from the dark
slab.
With an inexplicable feeling of dread he realized that
he would live in poverty gladly as long as he never had
to touch the cursed coffin-lid again.
He tried to call his fellow laborers, but all he could
utter was a choked croak. His mouth felt as dry as the
sand under his feet. Like a camel smelling the storm
hours before it was actually visible, he sensed that
there was something terribly wrong with this stone. It
was too regular, too even, too smooth – it didn’t belong
here, not in this desert he knew from his earliest
childhood. As if caught red-handed in a scandalous
act, he suddenly became aware of his daughter
watching him intently. From her vantage point, her
solemn gaze followed his every move. Was she smiling
at him? In the diminishing light, he couldn’t be sure,
but she seemed to be willing him to go on,
encouraging him to expose his finding. With a sinking
feeling, he realized he should never have brought her
to this doomed place. Abdullah’s mind, often working
rather on instinct than on ratio, sensed unsettling
signals of imminent danger.
He gathered some saliva in his dry mouth and yelled
hoarsely: “Omar! Alef! Abul! Come over here, pessorah,
pessorah!”
The others dropped their shovels, their faces twisting
with the acrid foreknowledge that Abdullah, the loser,
the odd-job man, had found what they had been
looking for, and their dreams of wealth shattered even
as they were running towards the skinny man. When
they saw the bleak and almost frightened expression in
his face, a glint of hope appeared in their dark eyes.
Maybe he hadn’t found the tomb after all, they
thought, praying to Allah that they still had their
chance to strike on the promised gold.
“What is it, Abdullah?” Omar inquired, clenching his
teeth to suppress a curse as he saw the marble lid.
“I think I found it,” said Abdullah, his voice thick and
not nearly as enthusiastic as it should have been.
“Allah is great”, Abul whispered, as two-faced as a fake
coin.
“I don’t like it.” Abdullah, looking miserable and
worn-out, stepped back from the smooth marble,
keeping his rheumy eyes on the heavy lid as if it were a
sidewinder snake ready to bounce.
The others, feeling that maybe they could still make
the discovery theirs, approached ever so slowly, a
feverish shine in their eyes.
“You’re a rich man now, Abdullah”, said Omar, never
looking away from the slab. “What are you going to do
with all that money?”
“I don’t know”, murmured Abdullah. “I don’t like
what I found.”
A shudder went through the wretched Libyan, as if he
were awakening from a pained dream. Peering up into
the darkening sky, his frown increased.
“I think we better move. El Ghibli is coming. And I
think he’s not alone. ”
They didn’t listen. Entranced, their faces shiny with
greed, the three younger men knelt down, as had
Abdullah minutes before, each of them examining the
smoothness of the stone with their hands. One by
one, they withdrew, an expression of dismay on their
faces.
Alef spoke up, slightly pale around his still beardless
mouth and chin. He was the youngest of the quartet,
still two months away from his seventeenth birthday.
He had been selected by the professor for his
reputation of indefatigability.
“I think Abdullah is right. We better leave, or Allah
will punish us for not respecting the time to travel
back home.”
They all knew that time was running short. To be
caught by any storm in the desert was trouble, all right;
but to defy the primeval united forces of El Ghibli
and the Scirocco was madness.
Omar, his face twitching with different emotions at
war, tried to make up his mind. He was a hulk of man,
irascible and ugly-tempered, an adversary to reckon
with, an enemy one had to fear. Nobody defied Omar,
and Omar feared nobody except for Mahmud al
Rashid, the village sorcerer, and the punitive force of
the all-mighty Allah.
Finally, avarice held victory over his inexplicable
uneasiness.
“Let us at least have a look at what we found.” Not a
suggestion, but a command. As usual, they didn’t
question his authority, fearing his volatility. Wise was
the man who avoided the powerful Libyan's
aggressively challenging eyes.
“I don’t like it”, Abdullah repeated unhappily.
A contemptuous sneer appeared on Omar’s rough and
pockmarked face. He gave up his pretended
friendliness.
“Just help me lift off the lid, and you’re free to go. I
must know what’s down there.” Omar, towering over
the others, stood like a bull ready for battle.
An awkward, dreary silence filled the space between
them. Even the moaning wind high above seemed to
hold its breath, if only for a moment. Then, without
another word, the four men bent over the lid and
swiftly brushed off the remaining sand and rubble.
When the big slab was completely uncovered, they
steeled themselves for a weight that had to be beyond
their forces. The marble lid was two times four meters
in dimension, and it looked as solid as the pyramids.
Surprise arose in their dusty faces as they lifted the
allegedly extremely heavy stone off its frame as easily
as an ant carries a leaf. The smooth and warm lid
seemed to be filled with helium, carrying its own
weight, inviting them in.
A cold draft from the forbidding depths of the
exposed cave greeted the treasure seekers, chilling their
hearts. The musty air, escaping a thousand years of
captivity, found its way into their nostrils and their
mouths, and their already shaken courage vanished as
quickly as a shooting star on a moonless night. There
was a hollow, breathing sound as the ancient air
escaped from the stony lungs of the cave far below,
like the foul belch of a dragon feigning sleep.
They stood and stared, a superstitious fear icing their
innards.
A long stair, seemingly made of the same smooth
material as the lid, disappeared into a darkness which
had remained unper turbed over uncounted
generations.
Abdullah felt an impulse to run away which was as
strong and primordial as the urge to live.
“Please, Omar”, he pleaded, swallowing what little
pride he had, “let us close this lid and go home. Let
the Frenchman take care of the tomb. We found it for
him; he’ll know what to do with it. Remember, he only
ordered us to find the tomb, not to open it!”
“If you leave now, Abdullah, the money is mine.”
Omar’s voice, barely above a whisper, was as menacing
as a snake’s hiss. He was openly daring his comrades to
leave him alone with the treasure. They all knew Omar
would claim the reward for himself, pretending he had
found the tomb, but none of them cared any longer.
All they wanted was to be back in the safety of their
huts, and it wasn’t the oncoming storm they were most
afraid of.
“The money is yours, Omar. May Allah be with you.”
Abdullah’s voice carried neither hate nor anger, but no
sympathy either. He turned his back on the three men
standing in the fading red light and walked towards the
makeshift stairs along the excavation's oblique walls.
Omar watched him climb the stairs, gleefully noticing
the older man's troublesome ascent on the creaky
wooden boards. There would be no challenge coming
from this side, the big man thought with a cold smile.
The way Abdullah crawled up the stair like one of the
village's old-timers, one didn't have to be a prophet to
predict that his days were counted. Omar knew that
Abdullah wouldn’t last another year, and he liked the
thought. He held a natural contempt for the weak and
for cowards.
Knowing he had won the battle, he turned to face his
two remaining companions, who looked as frightened
as Abdullah had. Omar thoroughly enjoyed the new
distribution of roles. Now he, Omar, was the
legitimate treasure-finder, the Croesus of his tribe, a
hero to the good people of Al Qatrun.
Suddenly, an unexpected thought wormed itself into
his covetous mind like a pestilent parasite.
Ten thousand dollars was a fortune one could hardly
conceive of. Why would anybody pay such a mindboggling sum for a simple tomb? Was it possible that
there were indescribable riches waiting down in the
musty cave, treasures unthinkable for a simple hardworking man? For all he knew, there might be a palace
of pure gold patiently waiting for a worthy treasure
seeker!
It dawned on him that Balthazar Phomette, the
mysterious French archeologist, was trying to dupe
them. However, the bastard had reckoned without his
host. He, Omar, righteous heir to the cave's
immeasurable wealth, would not be deprived of what
was his! He had toiled at the sweat of his brow, and
only he was entitled to possess whatever waited down
in the impenetrable darkness.
“Abul! Give me your torchlight!” An eager spark of
greed was dancing in Omar’s eyes as he held out his
mighty hand towards Abul. Unable to decide what to
do, Abul looked at Alef who was five years his junior.
Alef nodded imperceptibly, and Abul gave Omar his
torchlight with a pained expression, a torchlight he
had bought with the savings of three months’ tough
grind. He knew he’d never get it back from Omar, but
somehow he didn’t really care.
Grinning, Omar switched on the powerful light, and
walked down the first two steps of the marble stairs.
As the other two hesitated, he faced them once more,
and his voice was a wolf ’s growl.
“All right, you sissies. If you’re with me, you’ll get a
good share of the reward. Twenty-five percent for
each of you, fifty for me. Fair? Fair! Are you with
me?” He looked positively dangerous, like a rabid dog.
A mad, fanatical shimmer glowed in his pupils.
The two men near the lid looked at each other again,
and without wasting another word hastily followed
Abdullah’s example and climbed up the rickety stairs,
out of the crater.
Omar, seeing himself deserted, went purple with rage.
His roaring voice boomed skywards to the brink of
the excavation.
“Weled el khelb! You lousy sons of dogs! You rotten
cowards! Go, run away you eaters of camel dung! Go
and starve, and I will dance one your scrawny dead
bodies, and the scavengers will scatter your bones all
over the desert, and I will be rich, and I will make love
to beautiful houris!”
There was no answer to his ramblings, and he turned
around snorting, gazing at the gaping entry doubtfully.
He knew the others were watching his next step, so he
straightened his back and walked down the smooth
stairs into the alien underworld.
Abdullah, meanwhile, was frantic. When he had
reached the comparably safe level of the desert, his
daughter was nowhere to be seen, and he felt a
burning cramp in his heart that nearly took his breath
away.
“Sharan!” he shouted into the rising hot wind, and the
stinging sand hailed onto his face like a cloud of killer
bees. “Sharan!” the other two men joined in, yelling
against the surging storm, but the twilit desert
proffered no answer.
“You go”, Abdullah said wearily, waving his
companions away. “May Allah be with you. I must find
my daughter, or she will die in this storm.”
“Good luck, Abdullah” said Abul with absolutely no
sympathy. Without hesitating, he climbed his camel,
which had been stomping around nervously,
apprehensive of the approaching tempest. Seconds
later, there was nothing but the disintegrating
silhouette of a ghostly rider blending into the hazy
darkness.
“I will stay with you, Abdullah.” Alef, not a friend of
Abdullah generally, showed an unexpected side of his
soul, and the two men resumed their futile search in
the mad whirls of the furious sands.
Omar was shivering. The chill had come quickly, with
every step that carried him further into the innards of
this ghastly ancient tomb. He tried hard to make
himself believe it was only the frosty air that made his
body tremble and his skin ripple with goose bumps.
The thin beam of the torchlight cut through the dark
like a beacon over a foggy ocean, and he utterly
disliked the fact that he saw only the tiniest fraction of
what might be hiding down here. Like most true
Moslems, he had always found comfort in the oftencited Insh’ Allah, the most popular of prayers, but
down here, in this dark and daunting place, Allah was
nothing but a myth, a shadowy memory that was
fading with each hesitant step he descended into the
forbidding tomb.
The stairs seemed to go on forever. When he looked
up, all he saw was the dim outlining of the trapdoor
he’d come through, an ominous portal into oblivion.
For a second, there seemed to be a shape, somebody
coming after him, but when he flashed his beam into
the dim corridor above, all he saw was the feverish
glow of the black marble. Seeing how far he had come
down already, he shuddered and quickly resumed his
descent into the unknown, fearing that another pause
would shatter whatever courage was left in him.
Peering into the shadows below, he realized that the
texture of the frosty darkness before him had
changed. As his burning eyes gradually accommodated
to the dark, he drew in a sharp breath: A tall door
stood before him, smooth and somber as the marble
lid their sacrilegious hands had opened.
He let the trembling beam wander over the surface,
and the temptation to leave grew almost irresistibly
strong. The stone did not seem to be cold and hard as
it should have been. To Omar, it looked eerily like the
sweaty surface of dark human skin.
As the tremulous beam crawled over a spot about two
meters high on the door, Omar yelled out in horror. In
the moist surface of the stone, he saw a face, the
somehow atrociously ordinary face of a man watching
him. It was impossible to tell the man's age, which was
a highly disturbing trait. He had well-cut features, and
his wide-set eyes seemed to mock the big Libyan, as if
he knew of a dread Omar had yet to discover. The
face was as ageless as time, and a chilling sense of
déjà-vu went through Omar’s shivering body. The
Libyan nearly lost his seriously shaken self-control
before he could persuade himself that the face was not
real but a sculptured masterpiece. Still, the inert eyes
seemed to be following him, as if filled with an
uncanny, not quite human life.
Omar wondered if the others were still waiting
outside, on the beautiful sand, in the world where he
belonged. If they saw him running away like a craven
coward, he’d become the laughing stock of the whole
village. He would lose face, the worst fate for a man.
There was no other way; he had to be brave.
Tentatively, he held out his hands until his clam and
sweaty palms touched the door. The dark marble felt
hot and feverish. The tactile sensation immediately
filled him with a dread never experienced before,
dread and disgust. It was like touching the still warm
corpse of a giant salamander. Omar, the foul tempered
and explosive renegade, decided he had enough. All
the money in the world couldn’t compensate for the
cold claw of mortal fear tearing at his very soul. To
hell with the French archeologist! He wished he had
never listened to his phony fairytales of secret vaults
and hidden treasures. But that was over now. In a few
seconds, he would be back on the warm sands of the
lovely desert, and never mind the tempest. He’d rather
endure the storm of the century without shelter than
ever set foot into this blasted crypt again.
Thus thinking, it took Omar several seconds to
comprehend that he was unable to draw back his
desecrating hands. Dumbfounded, he realized he was
glued to the stone. Trying to yank himself free, he
nearly succeeded at ripping his palms' skin off, but the
stone’s sticky surface kept sucking at his fingers as
hungrily as a litter of diabolical puppies sucking dry a
jackal’s teats. Unstoppably, his hands sank into the
carnivorous substance. Omar was a fighter, a
characteristic which proved to be fatal in his final
moments. His body, flooded with adrenaline, never
gave him the slightest chance to mercifully pass out. In
full awareness, Omar experienced the liquefaction of
his fingers and hands. The pain was excruciating
beyond words, and the big man shrieked like a stabbed
pig. Gradually, his arms vanished into the hot matter
which wasn’t stone at all, pulling his body closer, until
his nose touched the door. The nose, like his arms,
turned into a gruesome broth. In the extremity of his
panic, he put both his knees on the door to push
himself off the ghoulish death trap. Instantly, his legs
vanished in the eager matter. Arching his head
backwards in a last desperate attempt to postpone his
inescapable death, his nose-less face began to ejaculate
gibberish prayers to Allah.
Omar, in his last seconds, wasn’t aware that the entity
devouring him was as opposed to his God as anything
in the universe ever could be.
When his lips were nearly touching the voracious
door, his prayers ended.
High-pitched demented shrieks reverberated off the
timeless walls as he felt his shoulders, his thighs, and
finally his face dissolving like in burning acid, and still
the suction hauled him further into the stone. As his
head and torso submerged into darkness more
compact than a black hole in the galaxy, his last
sensation was a mind-numbing emptiness which knew
no limits. With a last shuddering echo his screams
subsided.
And Silence, Abandon’s sister, reigned once more.
The little girl watched the screeching hulk of a man
disappear in the archaic stone door, and her heart beat
a little faster.
A little.
She was excited rather than nervous, knowing that she
was close to her destination. She knew she was to
receive a gift, a very unique ability. A minor part of
her felt sorry that she had been forced to elude her
father who was looking for her desperately in the now
roaring storm, but it was evident that he would never
have allowed her to descend into the excavation. But
precisely this cavity was to change her life. She had
seen it in her dreams, dreams so vivid they never left
her mind. And even those very dreams she had
awaited since she was born. She always knew that she
would be shown the way in time. When her father had
told the family so excitedly about the job he had been
offered by the French professor, it had been no
surprise for little Sharan. Since the dreams began, she
had been waiting ever so patiently for this very
moment.
From her hillock, she had been watching the argument
between Omar and her father, and when she saw the
latter coming up the stairs, she had hidden in the sand,
her small body almost buried within seconds as the
wind blew a myriad grains of sand over her, goldenred sand from the never-ending Sahara. As soon as she
saw her father and Alef searching for her some fifty
yards away from the digging, their bodies nothing but
shades in the stinging sand-rain, she had quickly run
down the shaky makeshift stairs on the excavation’s
wall and, without pausing, down the marble stairs
where the bad man had descended, following him at a
hopefully safe distance, knowing that if he turned
around everything would be over.
She never felt the thrill of adventure, nor the
excitement of the forbidden. With a peculiarly adult
sense she felt that it was her destiny to go and find
what expected her in the desert’s secret cave – and she
knew that something frightful might try to keep her
away from it, something nasty, something with plenty
of sharp teeth. Still, this was the moment she had
been yearning for since she could think, and she
pushed away her doubts and fears.
While hurrying down the stairs, her little feet nearly
stumbled as she saw – just in time – the vile man
turning around, as if he were considering to abort his
quest.
Had he seen her?
Quickly, she flattened her small frame against the
smooth wall, holding her breath. The foul-tempered
man seemed to be scrutinizing the very spot she was
standing on. Under his hostile frown, she thought she
could see an emotion unfamiliar on this rough face.
Fear.
Finally, he resumed his descent into the alien
underworld, somewhat more hesitant than before.
She had been startled when she heard Omar’s first
scream. Nearly invisible as she was in the darkness, her
eyes had followed the wicked man’s torchlight, and her
solemn gaze had fallen upon the fiend for the first
time in her short life. The ageless, somehow familiar
face had sent spasms of nameless terror, terror and
recognition, through her small body, triggering memories
that couldn’t possibly be her own, memories of
something bottomless in its malice.
After she saw Omar drown in the stone like a
struggling dinosaur in a tar pit, she turned her
attention back on her mission. With an infant’s simple
attitude, she could accept his death quite naturally – it
was his fate, and she wasn’t in the position to question
anybody’s destiny. He had been filled with thoughts of
greed and selfishness, and he presumably deserved to
be devoured for his hungry emotions.
She looked at the door for a while, knowing that she
had reached her destination. Although she had
witnessed what the door could do, there was no fear in
her. She extended her short arms and put both her
palms firmly on the door, as the sinister man had done
before. The stone, warm and welcoming, receded
where her hands had touched it, and a circular hole
appeared, widening like the circles on the surface of a
pond, revealing a small atrium on the other side. As
soon as the hole was large enough for her to slip
through, she stepped into the room where everything
would happen.
The atrium was only four times four meters in its
horizontal measures, but fathomless in its height.
When she looked up towards the ceiling, she might as
well have been looking straight into the nightly heaven
– or into hell.
Then she saw the walls.
Another person would have cried out in anguish at
their sight. The walls were ornamented with the
extraordinarily elaborate sculptures of all the men who
had tried to trespass into this dormant hall of yore,
their faces frozen in their last moment of unbearable
agony. Sharan, wise beyond her mere five years,
stepped forward to the center of the chamber, as if
guided by some secret knowledge. As she stood, the
walls receded and the atrium grew to the size of a vast
graveyard. She never asked herself if she was
dreaming all this or if it was an amazing, somehow
distorted reality she was experiencing, for it didn’t
matter. What did was what she saw approaching from
two opposite sides of the now enormous vault.
There was a beautiful young Libyan woman who
looked familiar – and remarkably similar – to the little
girl, a woman with proud lips, a finely chiseled nose
and long black hair. Her dark brown eyes bore an
expression of serenity and sheer determination. While
the woman approached Sharan, from the other side a
handsome man, the man whose face had been
watching over the entry to the hall, came ambling by in
a dilatory way, a man with a slow smile on his nicely
curved lips, a man with uncannily intelligent eyes in a
well-cut Roman face. When the distance between the
two opponents – which they obviously were – had
shrunk to less than one meter, they stood and stared at
each other, each of them waiting for the other to make
the first move, like two gladiators whose hostility
reached back further than living memory.
As they stood, transfixing each other, a slow
transformation took place. The woman, tall and
majestic, seemed to become translucent, a white light
illuminating her slender body from within. The
scintillating luminescence pulsated through her limbs
and torso until all there was to see was her astral body,
as delicate as the filigreean mist over a wintry sea.
Meanwhile, the comely man seemed to undergo a
metamorphosis of a different kind; his physical body,
like the woman’s, became ephemeral and translucent,
but only for a moment; as the transformation went on,
he seemed to grow in size, his skin turning coarse and
crude, its surface displaying a gruesome assembly of
thorns and claws and teeth. A moment later, his final
appearance looked like a perverse crossing between a
medieval demon and a creature from the deep sea. A
raucous, guttural voice spoke in a language no human
had heard before. Acrid saliva drooled out of his
murderous jaws, each droplet leaving a fuming hole in
the stone beneath his talons.
In spite of her apprehension of the showdown ahead,
the little girl was unable to look away. While the two
protagonists concentrated on the inevitable battle, she
slowly retreated, step by tiny step, until her back was
against the wall. Her right cheek rested against the
stony head of one of the chamber's victims, its face
distorted in a ghoulish grimace of unspeakable terror.
As if in a strange and ancient ritual, the two
opponents began to circle each other, and as their
circles grew tighter and the rivals closer, the little girl
could feel a galvanizing and unbearably hostile tension
in the air. And still the warriors kept circling, both of
them pulsating with energy.
There was a detail that had escaped Sharan’s watchful
eyes. She now saw that there was a gossamer thread of
white light coming from the dark skies above the
woman, a thin filament which connected with the peak
of her head, like a lightning that refused to leave its
place of entry. The idea suggested itself that the
woman was receiving her martial force from some
unknown source of energy high above. This thought
led to another, unpleasant one; did the primordial
creature have a power source of its own?
Even as she was forming the thought, she saw the
thorny creature’s misshapen feet stomp on the stony
ground, and a small earthquake went through the hall
of conflict. A crack appeared beneath its thundering
claws, a crevice that quickly grew and soon revealed an
abyss, which was as bottomless as the dark skies above
them. Meanwhile the monster that once had been the
intriguing stranger stood in thin air, effortlessly
defying the laws of gravity. There was a fiery red
thread of solid light coming from the abyss,
connecting with the horrid creature’s grotesquely
barbed and jagged genitalia.
Time stood still as the pressure kept building, the two
rivals gathering their power like thunderheads
preparing to unload their deadly electric charge.
For the first time in her short life the little girl Sharan,
watching with eyes as big as saucers, felt a terror
beyond any nightmare she’d ever known. Something
was at work that no mortal had seen without being
consumed by its power, a power greater than nature’s
cumulated forces. There was a hideous sensation of
nastiness all around, a spirit of evil so abysmal that the
girl felt paralyzed with it. A vile vapor of wordless
animosity seemed to take her breath away. And still the
air grew denser.
Finally, with no forewarning, the two entities collided,
their intertwining belligerent energies exploding into a
cerulean fireball of pure and unspeakable might.
All hell broke loose.
A choir of a million tormented souls screamed up
from the abyss like the world’s greatest flock of
vampires, and a storm much greater than El Ghibli and
the Scirocco roared through the hall. A pestilent stench
of rot and decay arose from the fathomless depth of
the chasm underneath. Freakish ghouls with leathery
green wings fluttered across the vault like mad falcons.
The little girl collapsed to the floor, covering her face
with her hands, but peeking through her fingers,
knowing in spite of her fear that she must watch the
clash of these archaic titans, for each time she looked
away, the bright light that was the woman’s energy
seemed to weaken, and the ferocious din in the hall
exacerbated dramatically to an ear-shattering level.
When she kept her eyes on the battle, the woman’s
astral body found strength again, the delicate filament
which entered her head pulsating with fresh energy,
and its benign force seemed to keep the hellish
creatures fluttering through the hall at bay.
As the chaos ebbed for a moment, the thorny, scaly
creature that had been the ageless stranger was
nowhere to be seen. Was he hiding in the dark, using
his army of ghouls and demons as a protective shield
and a decoy, conserving his own malignant forces for
the coup de grâce?
Summoning all her courage, the girl stood up and
fought her way through the vortex of hellish specters
towards the beautiful woman with the familiar face,
the woman who now kneeled down and smiled at her,
oblivious of the mayhem, her eyes radiant but weary,
and the woman took the girl’s hands in hers and told
her something, words unknown and yet familiar,
words spoken in an arcane language long forgotten,
and then, in a blinding flash of living light, the woman
was gone.
Frightened to death, feeling forsaken, the girl looked
around, and the darkness around her was like a big
grin full of enormous demonical teeth, and the
creatures from the great beyond closed in on her,
tittering and drooling, and she could sense their
horrible appetite.
In her mind, she suddenly heard the woman saying the
special words again, and the girl recited them silently,
over and over again, like a foreign yet familiar
incantation, and, finding an utterly unexpected
dynamism in the words, yelled them out loud, adding
new words, words from a language now remembered,
a language she’d known in another time and place, and
the words shot into the darkness and its demons like
flaming spears, and she, Sharan, was the tall and
beautiful woman, a source of purest force and
luminescence, and everything changed.
The storm subsided.
The pandemonium ebbed off.
The darkness filled with white light.
She stood in the chamber of the frozen faces, and all
was calm. Dazed, she turned around, and through the
round hole in the door she saw the dark marble stairs,
inviting her back into her world, the world of sands
and people and camels and children playing in the
streets of her village.
Carefully, she stepped through the circular opening,
towards the stairs, determined not to look back.
Sensing that she wasn’t out of danger yet, she put one
little foot after the other on the steps, climbing faster
and faster. When she was halfway up, a noise coming
from the hall below stopped her dead in her tracks.
Fighting the urge to look around was futile. Like the
needle of a compass in the beam of a magnet, she
slowly turned and looked down at the entrance to the
chamber of the frozen faces.
The eerily familiar stranger with the timeless face
stood leaning against the now closed door casually, like
a cosmopolitan traveler waiting for a train, gazing at
her levelly, as if memorizing her face for eternity. His
sly eyes carried a promise of a sequel to this meeting.
Perfectly reading his mind, Sharan knew that the
stranger's greatest desire was to leap up the stairs and
devour her - but that he couldn't.
Not now.
Not yet.
Shuddering, she stood there, unable to move. Slowly,
as if relishing the moment, the fiend’s face twisted into
an anticipatory smile, revealing a mouthful of horribly
sharp teeth. Never letting go of her eyes, he let
himself sink into the door, his smile never faltering
until he had become one with the black matter he
commanded. The last she saw of him was an insidious
wink, and then there was nothing but the smooth and
even surface of the door, and the little girl ran up the
stairs as if Shaitan himself was coming after her.
But he wasn’t.
No demon grabbed her from behind as she reached
the last step, no spook breathed down her neck as she
reached the comparably safe level of her normal
world. Untouched and unharmed, Sharan disappeared
in the roaring fury of the tempest above.
From far below, the fiend’s myriad eyes were following
her escape.
Sunday – 9.00 p.m.
Abdullah looked at his sleeping daughter, his heart
torn with love and concern. What was he to do? She
still looked the same, talked the same (which was
little), and she respected her father and her mother.
And yet he knew he was looking at a girl he didn’t
really know. Thinking so, he felt a tightness in his
chest, a pressure that over the last weeks had become
an unpleasant and constant companion.
After his escape from the excavation, he and Alef had
combed through the angry sands in vain for one more
hour, until the devastating combined forces of El
Ghibli and the Scirocco came down on them like Allah’s
fist. There was neither time for pursuing the search
nor for returning home. The two men had quickly
descended into the pit of the digging, where they were
comparably protected from the vicious power of the
storm. Still, the shelter wasn’t perfect. Every few
minutes they had to get up, crawling out of the sand
that kept raining down on them and buried them alive.
They kept striving not to lose each other in the
howling darkness, kept struggling to avoid the biting
sand that went into their noses and throats and eyes
and mouths.
Alef was whispering desperate prayers to Allah, while
Abdullah sat on the ground in a corner as distant from
the already sand-covered marble lid as possible. He sat
there stone-faced, petrified with the sense of an
unbearable loss.
The murderous madness of the storm went on for
what seemed an eternity.
The tempest subsided one hour after dawn, and in the
light of the newborn sun, Abdullah and Alef, their
eyes red and their throats sore, resumed their hopeless
quest for Sharan. As the sun reached its zenith, they
ran out of water and had to abandon the search. The
camels, which somehow always managed to survive
the desert’s outbursts, found their masters shortly later,
and the two exhausted men rode back to their village,
the oppressed silence between them heavy with
Abdullah's grief.
Two miles before they reached Al Qatrun, Alef broke
the silence.
“What will we tell them?” he asked, reluctant to
disturb the old man’s agony, but anxious to know what
to do without causing further harm.
There was a long silence before the older man spoke
up.
“I think this tomb, or whatever it is, has been cursed
by Allah. It should never have been found.”
Abdullah’s voice, which sounded dead and hollow,
suddenly grew fierce.
“Allah has punished me for finding it against His will.
He has taken my daughter, the most precious thing I
had.”
And, after another long silence, a toneless croak:
“My life has no meaning without her. She was my only
joy, my reason for living.”
Alef looked at a particularly interesting spot on his
saddle, avoiding the old man’s eyes.
“So... we never found the tomb, Abdullah?” His words
were slow and full of innuendo.
Abdullah nodded, his lips tight with suppressed
sorrow and bitterness.
Alef pushed on.
“No tomb means no money. I am sorry you lost your
daughter, but don’t forget that you have other children
to feed. You might need the money.”
Abdullah looked daggers at Alef, making the younger
man wish he had kept his greedy mouth shut – a look
so full of misery and woe that Alef squirmed inside.
“The money is cursed, Alef, don’t you understand?
This whole project has been cursed from the first
moment we dug our shovels into the sand! And this
French professor… he is not a good man. The desert
will claim back what we found within a day or two, and
nobody will ever learn about what we have wrongfully
disclosed. Nobody! I am the only one who could find
the spot of the digging again, and I’ll be damned if I
ever go back there! Do you hear me Alef ?”
There was a mad sparkle in the older man’s eyes, and
Alef decided that maybe the money wasn’t that
important after all. He knew there was no way to force
Abdullah to show him the site of the treasure once
more.
They rode on in silence, an unspoken threat replacing
the grief that had hung between them, and soon they
were lulled into an uneasy doze by the camels’ rocking
gait.
When they finally came back into the little village of
Al Qatrun, Abdullah’s lost daughter stood before their
ramshackle little hut, waiting for her father.
Abdullah, not trusting his eyes, jumped off the camel
and ran towards his beloved child. Allah is great, he
thought, running much too fast for his condition. All
he wanted was to teach me a lesson, and he was right. Oh,
Allah is great…
The emotion was too much. With the blissful relief
came an excruciating pain in his chest as one of the
small vessels feeding his aging heart clogged with a
heavy spasm. A not inconsiderable part of the
pumping muscle died, and Abdullah went down on his
knees, clutching the left side of his chest. Sharan,
looking perfectly healthy and unscathed, came running
for him, and as she hugged her father tightly, the pain
subsided – for the time being.
He had hugged and kissed her and cried and cursed,
and her face had remained calm and serene as if
everything in the whole wide world couldn’t be better.
Abdullah didn’t know much about shock, but he
instinctively presumed that the distress of being left
alone in the desert’s nightly storm might have caused
some damage in his little habibi’s head. When he asked
her how she had managed to escape the storm and to
even beat them at riding home, she looked at him with
her unfathomable brown eyes and said:
“Abul sent me his camel. It brought me home on the
safe side of the storm. It is a very good and gentle
camel.”
It was then for the first time that Abdullah wondered
if he knew his daughter at all.
Abul had never returned from the desert.
It took three days until the villagers started to notice
that something about Sharan had changed since she
miraculously survived the night in the storm. People
found that at times they were brooding over some
problem, pondering dark and fretful thoughts, and
when they walked past Abdullah’s youngest daughter,
their oppressing mood suddenly faded away, and the
skies seemed blue again. At first, this phenomenon
brought Sharan, who seemed to be patiently waiting
for something only she knew about, the reputation of
a miracle child. Some of the older folks even went as
far as to spread the rumor that she was the prophet
Mohammed’s daughter who had come back from
paradise to heal the brave people of Al Qatrun.
But, like with all uncommon phenomena, the reactions
were not solely positive. People began to talk, and
more and more often the villagers would quickly make
the sign against the evil eye when they saw Sharan
approaching them.
There was one person in particular who didn’t like the
girl’s image as a miracle worker and her strange effect
on the villagers at all.
Mahmud al Rashid, the village’s medicine man and
sorcerer, saw an unexpected and dangerous threat to
his authority in Abdullah’s beautiful little girl.
Although she used no rituals, no plants, no essences
and no herbs, and in spite of her mere five years, she
seemed to have the power to influence or even heal
people who were suffering from evil spirits.
In those days, there seemed to be a never-ending
problem with the Shnuhns, those wicked spirits who
dwelled invisibly and mischievously amongst the living.
A Shnuhn would often possess a person and make its
pitiable victim act at its whim, wantonly playing nasty
tricks on the affected man or woman. The possessed
person would hear accusing voices, see frightful
creatures, or simply fall into a deep, often catatonic
depression, which not seldom ended in suicide. Indeed
Al Qatrun, the little village in the middle of nowhere,
held the dubious record of the highest suicide rate in
Libya. Sometimes, the possessed person would act in
such a lunatic way that people, in self-defense or
superstitious fear, would lynch the poor fool.
The more powerful Shnuhns could even materialize out
of thin air, without needing another person’s body,
and haunt somebody’s house or yard. And now, as
irritating as it was to the medicine man, there seemed
to be someone who knew how to deal with this curse,
and it wasn’t him, Mahmud al Rashid, magician and
man of secret wisdom, but a five-year-old illiterate girl
from one of the lowliest families. Allah could be so
unjust!
Mahmud, who lived in a big clay hut in the center of
the village, had been the uncontested spiritual ruler of
Al Qatrun, ranking right after the tribe’s eldest, their
chieftain Aznar ben Chibul.
Mahmud held a barely concealed contempt for the
demented old goat. He knew that ben Chibul would
wither and die before the month was over. The
medicine man had been working on the chieftain’s
death for two whole years. Except for the patience it
took, it had been a piece of cake. Mahmud had to
concoct their leader’s medicine at least once a week, a
medicine that eased the crippling pain in the old man’s
swollen knees and in his bent back, and although the
medicine did act as a strong analgesic, the good people
of Al Qatrun didn’t miss the fact that their chieftain
was losing his mind, mal-coordinating the manifold
political and practical issues of their village. Only
Mahmud knew where to find the Red Gecko, the
nearly extinct reptile whose skin, if boiled in a goat’s
blood and dried over a smoldering fire of camel dung,
slowly but efficiently destroyed a human brain like a
tiny army of rodent parasites, making the cerebral
tissue porous and soft like mildew in a rotten tree.
It wasn’t against the law to rule a village both as a
chieftain and as a medicine man. Unusual, maybe, but
not unlawful. For many years Mahmud al Rashid had
been nourishing his dream of uncontested power,
eagerly awaiting the grand moment when the old man
would finally close his dispirited eyes forever.
Sharan’s inexplicable effect on the villagers turned out
to be a major menace to his plan. She was rapidly
undermining his tediously achieved authority. Over the
last months, the community had grown accustomed to
Mahmud passing judgement over most issues in Al
Qatrun, but low voices complained about his hard,
often ruthless ways. They still feared him, but that
advantage was his only as long as they believed only he
had the touch.
The girl had to vanish.
Quickly.
Unfortunately, it was impossible for him to dispose of
her in the usual way, namely by mixing some toxic
essence into his patient’s medicine. Since the girl had
never been ill in her life, and even seemed to flourish
in spite of her family’s malnutrition, it was virtually
impossible for Mahmud to approach Sharan without
attracting attention. He couldn’t afford to arouse the
suspicion of simply murdering those who hindered his
way to the summit. At least not before he had reached
it.
At some point, finding no other way out, he hired a
contract killer. There were enough people threatened
by starvation in the barren little village, and he easily
found a man merciless enough to perform the task. Ali
Ibn Muamar, a chronically broke and mostly
unemployed butcher, enthusiastically agreed to
assassinate the little girl.
The fiasco was complete.
The day after the planned murder, Ali came to the
sorcerer's hut, his eyes wet with tears, and declared
that when he had approached the girl, he'd had a
revelation; he couldn't believe that he had nearly killed
the sweetest angel he had ever seen. He threw the
sorcerer's purse with the blood money on the floor.
His eyes flaming, he said what no man had ever dared
to say to the wizard:
"You will burn in hell for this, Mahmud!"
He spat on the floor of the sorcerer's hut and left.
One week later, Ali Ibn Muamar’s name was added to
the village's suicide record.
Eventually, Mahmud al Rashid’s ever-scheming mind
was rewarded with a phenomenally easy idea, and
everything went its right course after all.
There was only one thing more poisonous than
Mahmud’s roots and potions.
Rumor.
He would let the villagers take care of little Sharan. Let
them burn her, he thought. No need to soil my own hands.
Mahmud was a hideous man. The ugliness was not
only implanted in his anatomical features; the vileness
came from within, from a character corrupted beyond
hope for redemption. He had established his high-
ranking position rather through terror and fear than by
ability and knowledge, and beneath his ungainly
appearance his venomous soul shimmered through
like toxic vapors over a haunted swamp. His round
face looked like a moldy bug-infested cabbage, his
thick unsmiling lips like two dried snails. His deep
hollow voice was predestined to utter fatal diagnoses
and proclaim doom.
His plan was simple. Each time he had to deal with
one of his patients, be it a broken arm, a sore throat
or an itchy anus, he would perform his skills, cash in
his fee, and leave the ailing person’s room, as usual.
But just before he left, he would turn around, as if
remembering something crucial, and walk back to the
patient. Speaking in low, confidential tones, he would
say:
“Ah yes, one more thing. You better keep away from
Said Otuama’s daughter Sharan. I am picking up bad
vibrations, and I don’t want those vibrations to
interfere with your healing.”
At this point, some of the braver patients timidly
objected.
“But Sidi, isn’t she said to have power over the cursed
Shnuhns?”
Mahmud al Rashid, after a short pause which was
merely for drama, would then look into his patient's
eyes like a man burdened with a heavy and forbidden
knowledge, a man who is struggling with himself if he
could trust the other with his devastating news.
“I think”, Mahmud would say, his lies oozing from his
tongue like poisonous mucus from a toad’s back, “I
think the creature we think is Sharan might be a Shnuhn
herself. I think the real Sharan never made it back from
the desert that day...”
Only then would he leave the patient’s hut, giving his
mendacity plentiful time to sink in. His words, as a
rule, fell onto fertile grounds, and the deadly semen of
doubt germinated into the ghastly flower of calumny
and defamation.
Soon the intimidated patients, afraid of chronic
sickness or worse, avoided Sharan and her family as if
they were lepers. Within a month, Abdullah’s family
became ostracized. Only a handful of close friends
kept seeing them once in a while, and even their visits
became scarce as the peer pressure came to a head.
Nobody in his right frame of mind wanted to defy or
provoke Mahmud al Rashid. Everybody knew that
consulting Aznar ben Chibul was useless. The wrecked
chieftain never left his hut anymore, but sat unmoving
in his favorite chair with an eerily empty grin on his
skeletal face, looking like one of the living dead.
In his spacey hut, Mahmud stood overlooking his
potions, vials, snakeskins and dried beetles. Time was
passing, and time was working for him. The chieftain
was moribund. The mob was whipping itself up for
lynch law, calling Sharan a witch, a Shnuhn, a monster
quite openly now. Soon, they would stone her and
bury her body in the desert.
For the first time in years, a cruel hint of a smile
touched Mahmud’s sneering lips, as misguiding as a
sparkling drop of water running down the snout of a
crocodile.
The situation in Al Qatrun had become an absurd
paradox. Although there were dozens of people in Al
Qatrun suffering from the “clouded mind”, which was
the common name for depressions and similar mental
problems, and although many still secretly believed
that Abdullah’s daughter might be able to help them,
they were too terrified to actually go and see her.
Mahmud al Rashid’s advice was not easily ignored. A
young retard named Mostafa, who had been hearing
voices for years and often got into fits of aggressive
lunacy, in one of his few lucid moments had visited
Sharan. The few passer-byes who happened to see his
suicidal act quickly covered their faces, pretending they
had never seen Mostafa’s final moments. Holding their
breath, they lingered in the balmy shade of the
adjacent houses, secretly waiting for the deadly drama
to unravel before their sensation-seeking eyes.
They didn’t have to wait long. A few seconds after
Mostafa had entered the house, they heard his
screams, and they listened with the righteous
satisfaction of those who always know better. Their
coldhearted smugness turned to astonishment and
apprehension as they realized that Mostafa was not
screaming with mortal fear, but with happiness. When
he left Abdullah’s house, he was a transformed man.
With tears in his eyes he kept telling everybody he met
that Sharan was the daughter of Allah, that she had
healed him from his eternal nightmares. In his fatal
enthusiasm he even went to Mahmud and told him
about it. There was no witness to their conversation,
but the rumor went that Mahmud was the last person
who saw young Mostafa alive. The young man was
found dead on the day of his miraculous salvation,
dead on the floor of his decrepit little hut, where he
had spent the last of his fading life smashing the skull
of a highly poisonous emerald viper that had bitten
him while he slept his first and last unperturbed sleep.
The viper was not indigenous in this part of Libya,
and people took it as a bad omen that this lethal
reptile had found its way into their village. Surely, they
thought, the snake had punished Mostafa for seeking
salvation through ungodly witchcraft!
After that incident, nobody dared visiting little Sharan
anymore. Abdullah and his family were now officially
outcasts, and they all knew it was a matter of days
before the villagers in their righteous wrath would find
the courage to burn down their house.
Abdullah, looking twenty years older than his age,
knew he was dying. The pain in his chest had become
an almost constant companion, and each time he
considered the hopelessness of his situation, there
seemed to be a purple blossom of agony spreading
through his scrawny chest. The pain would invariably
start on the left side of his rib cage, then spread up
into his jaw, his left arm, and sometimes even into his
stomach.
The French professor’s digging money, prepaid and
distributed amongst the four men one week before the
digging started, was long used up. Since Abdullah and
Alef had come back from the desert’s storm, there
had been neither word from nor sign of professeur
Balthazar Phomette, and of course there was no
reward to be expected, since they officially never
found the tomb, which by now was again buried
beneath the mighty sands of the Marzuq like a dirty
secret.
Abdullah’s children were starving, and his pregnant
wife’s belly had stopped growing. She looked like a
skeleton carrying a watermelon under a taut canvas of
skin. With the little strength left in his bones, Abdullah
dragged himself through the streets of Al Qatrun,
knocking on doors, asking for a job, any job. Most
people didn’t even open the door when they heard his
voice. Some of them spat in his face and quickly
slammed and bolted the door. People in the street
turned away or even fled when they saw his emaciated
figure approaching. Each time, when he eventually had
to make his way home, which he dreaded more and
more every day, he entered a stifling atmosphere heavy
with reproach, despair and hunger.
It happened exactly two months after the fatal day in
the desert of Marzuq. Abdullah, lying sleeplessly on
his hard cot, felt the bony hand of his wife on his
shoulder, shaking him with no love wasted. When he
looked into her face, an acrid foreboding filled his
ever-tighter chest, and the anguish in his heart flamed
up anew.
“We have to get rid of her”, his wife hissed, her eyes
like glowing embers in the semidarkness. “If she stays,
we die.”
“Get rid of whom?” Abdullah asked feebly, knowing
there was no point playing for time.
“You know who!” His wife’s lips were close to his ear
now, her eyes huge, and he could feel little droplets of
her saliva on his skin as she urged him to consider the
worst crime man could conceive.
“But habibi”, he pleaded, “There is nowhere she could
go! The next village is two days away, and we don’t
even have a camel. Who would take care of her?”
“She is bewitched, Abdullah, don’t you see?”
What her words didn’t express the mad shine of her
eyes conveyed very clearly. Fatima Ibn Said Otuama
was talking murder.
“Fatima! How can you even –“ He couldn’t finish the
sentence. The unspeakable thought kept revolving in
his head, and a dizzying spiral of despair and
exhaustion nearly made him faint. His tortured mind
was longing for the long sleep that can never be
disturbed.
His wife’s dry-mouthed hiss interrupted his ideas of
blissful oblivion.
“We must get rid of her – tonight!” she whispered
coldly. As Abdullah saw the immeasurable despair and
lunatic resolution in her face, a veil seemed to be
drawn from his failing eyes, and suddenly he could see
everything sharp and brilliant. The unutterable vision
of his wife approaching Sharan’s sleeping body with a
sharp axe suddenly gave him a terrific force he hadn’t
known before. With an iron determination he realized
that to protect his beloved daughter he could muster
the strength to fight a pack of hungry jackals.
With cold detachment, he saw his own hand rise up
like a falcon, and he smashed his palm across his wife’s
once beloved face, bringing the stunned woman down
hard. The famine had taken its toll, and there was
nothing but a soft thud as her meager body hit the
floor. Abdullah watched his wife lying semiconsciously
on the rough clay floor, horrified to find himself
wishing the unborn child in her womb had died from
the impact.
A deadly silence filled the room. Slowly, the skeletal
woman with the bloated belly stood up. There were no
tears. A thin line of blood was trickling from the
corner of her mouth.
Fatima looked at him with absolutely no emotion in
her vacant eyes. Swaying, she turned around and
shuffled towards her own cot. She sat down heavily,
her emaciated torso heaving with the exertion of
moving. Looking at her husband blankly, she gave him
an eerie, expressionless smile and said:
“Sleep now, habibi. I will take care of everything.”
It was then that Abdullah new his wife was going to
kill her own daughter.
He never closed his eyes, not for a minute. He
watched his wife twisting and turning as she dreamed
what no mother should ever dream. Finally, her
breathing became deep and regular. A dark stain of
blood on the coarse fabric of her sheet stood witness
for their broken relationship, a grim blotch of blood
heralded horrors to come.
When the gaunt woman didn’t stir for nearly half an
hour, Abdullah carefully got up and walked out of the
parents’ and into the children’s bedroom, where six of
his children were sleeping, some of them immobile,
nearly comatose, as if they had starved to death
already, others restless. In a grimy corner, lying on the
floor for lack of cots, he saw the only child he had
ever cared for. Sharan was resting on her back, her big
eyes looking up at her father earnestly. Somehow, she
must have known the time to move had come at last.
Was it this she had been waiting for so patiently all
these years? The thought was deeply unsettling, and
again he wondered if he knew his daughter at all.
Abdullah nodded his head toward the door, and she
silently stood up and followed him out of the ranksmelling bedroom.
They walked out into the dark street, the sole light
being shed from the stars and the fragile sickle of the
new moon. They walked in silence, leaving the main
road and following a maze of small and zigzagging
footpaths, which were weaving through the poorer
section of Al Qatrun. After a while, they reached the
domain of the few better-off people, those who could
afford sheep and camels and daily food.
Abdullah didn’t know the penalty for stealing a camel,
and he didn’t care. Since nobody had stolen one of the
robust desert’s mounts in Al Qatrun for over twenty
years, nobody except for Mahmud al Rashid
remembered that for such a crime capital punishment
impended.
In front of a large two-story house he saw several
camels fastened to wooden poles. Around the
mansions left-hand corner, he could see a dozen
fenced-in sheep sleeping on the parched soil.
With an experienced look, Abdullah selected a stronglooking camel from a group of five, unleashed it
quickly, and mounted it with his daughter in his arms.
The camel, which had carried dozens of different
masters before, didn’t mind two more unfamiliar
passengers on its back. At a leisurely pace, it rode the
two fugitives out of Al Qatrun, heading for the
balmier regions in the north of Libya.
As usual, Abdullah was acting on instinct rather than
intellect. He had no precise plan for their escape, no
strategy to reach a safe haven. He didn’t know how to
get to the great cities in the north, nor how to find a
new home for his adored daughter. Their water supply
would last for two days, which meant that within fortyeight hours Abdullah had to find the next village and a
heaven-sent family that would give them food and
water and shelter for the night – for free. If he failed,
they were both going to die in the merciless heat and
inhospitable draught of the desert. The thought of
leading his daughter into a death much more painful
than the one her mother had reserved for her brought
up new spasms of pain in his chest, and this time the
agony lasted almost an hour during which he sat bent
like an exhausted and wounded warrior on his stolen
camel. Sharan, sensing his distress, turned around on
the saddle and hugged her father fiercely. He felt a
love so strong and unnamable in his failing heart that
all fear left him. Whatever happened, he new he would
die gladly for his daughter.
They rode the whole night through, and the
temperature kept dropping. Sharan, cradled against her
father, slept peacefully. Strangely wakeful and vigilant,
Abdullah rode the camel north, gently holding his
sleeping daughter. Feeling her so close to him, he felt a
blissful serenity in his mind, and he knew that all
would be well after all.
At dawn, they paused and drank some water. Sitting
on a small hillock, they watched the magnificence of
the rising sun, the golden light painting the honeycolored dunes that spread into infinity.
“Where are we going, baba?” It was the first time she
spoke up since they had fled from their doomed
home.
Her unexpected question caught Abdullah off balance.
He stuttered pathetically, wanting to comfort his little
darling so desperately, knowing she’d detect the lie
even before it was spoken.
“I don’t know, habibi,” he said at last.
“Why does mama want to kill me?”
This second question baffled him completely.
Speechless, he stared at his daughter.
“Sharan... what exactly happened in the desert?”
The girl looked at the still cool sand beneath their feet,
frowning.
“I met a beautiful woman. She was fighting against a
terrible man, but he wasn’t a man. She gave me
something –“
She trailed off, completely lost in thoughts. Two
months earlier, Abdullah wouldn’t have wasted a
second on this story, dismissing it as a child’s fantasy.
Now he wasn’t sure anymore. He wanted to ask her
who this man was, but before he could open his
mouth he realized he didn’t want to know. Thoughts
of Shaitan filled his mind, and he quickly stood up
before his daughter could see the gooseflesh on his
arms.
They rode on, their coarse jelabs protecting them from
the rising sun’s fierce impact. Many hours later, as the
shadows grew longer again, Abdullah finally gave up
his hopes of reaching the next village before they ran
out of water. He felt the last of his strength run out of
his limbs like sand in an hourglass.
“Look there baba”, Sharan said calmly, pointing
northwest. Abdullah, his eyes not as sharp as his
daughters, couldn’t see what she meant. They followed
the direction she was pointing out, and only one hour
later he could see it too.
A little group of tall palm trees.
The heavenly sparkle of water.
An oasis!
With a last effort, the exhausted camel galloped
towards the delicious source of life, and Abdullah
muttered mute prayers to Allah, hoping not to be
deluded by a fata morgana.
Later, they were immerged in the clear fresh water of
the oasis, and it was one of Abdullah’s best moments
in his otherwise bleak life. Neither of them could
swim, and so they remained in the shallow parts of the
natural pond. It was the first time Abdullah heard his
daughter laugh out loud and giggle with pleasure. They
feasted on the delicious sweet dates they found under
the palm trees. The post-prandial fatigue and the
journey’s exhaustion made them fall asleep in the
shade of the tall plants.
When they awoke, they found themselves circled by
half a dozen grim looking Bedouins.
A short and chubby man with a long pepper-and-salt
beard, sitting on the largest camel, seemed to be in
charge. When he spoke up, Abdullah knew all hope
was lost. Judging by their dialect and manners, they
had to be headhunters or bandits. The leader bellowed
something guttural, and his men jumped off their
camels and seized the two fugitives. Soon, they felt the
bite of raw ropes around their wrists and ankles. The
leader kept barking, apparently interrogating Abdullah,
but he could hardly understand the Bedouin’s harsh
accent. Another ejaculation of unpleasant sounding
abuse, and Abdullah knew their fate was sealed. They
would take his daughter away and sell her to some
trader, who in return would sell her too – if she were
lucky, to some childless family on the other side of the
Mediterranean Sea; if she was not, to a pedophilic
Sheik with a taste for young flesh. As for Abdullah,
they would simply kill him because he was an old man,
useless to them. One of the Bedouins grabbed Sharan
and put her in front of him on his saddle, holding her
brutally. They left Abdullah standing in the desert, his
hands bound, food for the vultures.
The brigands mounted their camels again, and
Abdullah had to watch them take away his daughter,
who was craning her neck to see her father one last
time. The unresisting, resigned sadness in her strangely
calm face was the last thing he saw of her.
Although the headhunters had decided not to kill him,
but to simply leave him to die in the desert, Abdullah’s
life was fading quickly. The tightness in his chest had
reached a new breathtaking climax. The pain exploded
like a giant red firework in his heart and in his head,
and then the agony was gone, and he felt at peace, and
he watched his daughter riding away on her caravan
into the unknown, wishing her well, and he saw his
own lifeless body in the warm sand, and then he was
gone.
The leader of the desert bandits grinned behind his
pepper-and-salt beard, a grin no one was supposed to
see. Allah is great, he thought. He has sent me a present
worth more than a hundred camels. This little girl is the prettiest
thing I’ve ever seen, and the white trader will be more than
pleased. Oh, I wouldn’t mind playing with the little girl myself
before I hand her over to him, but she’s too old already, she
might tell... – never mind. She is worth so much more than a
few fleeting minutes of pleasure, and I shall have my share of
young girls and boys after I get the money. Allah-uh-akbar!
Not losing any time, the caravan moved on, heading
northwest for Tripoli.
Sitting straight on her saddle, Sharan was mourning
her father the way only an ancient soul would grieve.
Feelings of parting filled her heart, a sad acceptance of
a maturity far beyond her age. On a deeper level, a still
subconscious part of her realized that her fate,
unstoppable as the planets' revolution, had come into
motion, sending her out onto a mysterious journey
towards an unknown
Chapter Two
Paris, 1999
Sunday – 3.43 p.m.
The Eiffel Tower was nothing but a dark shade
looming out of the dense mist that held Paris in its
grip eight hundred meters below. It was a dismaying
sight, and Marc Lynch didn’t like it a bit. The simple
derivation stated that his plane was shortly going to
land in conditions usually found in a pot filled with
pea-stew. He hated flying. Since his older brother had
talked him into joining him on a roller-coaster ride at
the tender age of six, he was suffering from an
incurable high anxiety. Clenching his teeth, he
wondered if his cursed but career-wise inevitable
overseas congresses might cost him his life some day.
Peering down at Paris from his window-seat, this fatal
day suddenly seemed too close for comfort.
Yearningly he remembered the bright and sunny
weather a few hours before, when the plane had left
JFK airport under postcard conditions.
He decided to finish his potentially last gin and tonic
before it was too late. It could only hurt less.
While tilting the plastic cup he cautiously gazed at the
fat man sitting next to him. With an air of aloofness
that was close to sheer arrogance, his corpulent
neighbor was reading the New York Times, radiating
all the self-confidence of one who lands in pea-stew
twice a day. Marc hated him for this. His
psychologically trained mind told him that this was a
useless emotion, an affection that certainly wouldn’t
help him overcome his anxieties, but then again, he
wasn’t in the mood for being reasonable. Fatty sure
looked like a compatriot to Marc, and he prayed to
heaven that this insolent beefcake would refrain from
trying to draw him into any kind of pre-crash
conversation.
It was April, the most unpredictable of months. Fair
weather alternated with vicious tempests, warm sun
with glacial rains. Wondering if Paris had this kind of
fog often enough to grant the pilots plenty of
practicing the art of flying in dire conditions, Marc
tried to focus on the vanishing Eiffel Tower as the
plane rushed over the city and towards Charles De
Gaulle Airport. A gust of wind hit the plane violently,
and Marc, to his own embarrassment, gasped in
horror. Fatty gave him a condescending look, silently
stating that he found people suffering from high
anxiety pretty pathetic. Marc ignored him and tried
hard not to shiver with the aftermath of the shock. He
should have swallowed a tranquilizer after all, he
thought.
A little bell rang, and the “fasten-your-seat-belt” sign
went off, then on again – an unmistakable omen that
the plane was in trouble indeed. The pilot informed
the passengers that there was a rather severe turbulence
ahead, and he emphasized the point to keep the belt
tightly fastened. Marc vowed to travel by ship next time,
even if it cost him three weeks – if he survived this
trip that was. Trying to look calmer than he felt, he
locked his hands together to conceal his tremor, but
his white knuckles betrayed him, and the fat guy
happened to look his way just when another squall
shook the plane. Marc gritted his teeth in the futile
attempt not to wince.
“Don’t worry,” said fatty in an offensively patronizing
tone, and Marc knew his prayer had gone unanswered.
Fatty was going to babble some useless chitchat until
the plane landed – or crashed.
He was American, all right; worse still, a Texan.
“This baby can take hurricanes ten times worse than
this little gale here. Never mind the shakin’. Have
another drink, sport. First time in a plane?”
Marc prepared himself to retaliate against him for this
obnoxious arrogance, but the hardest squall yet rocked
the plane hard to the left, then to the right, and then
the plane was falling. Several passengers screamed, and
Marc couldn’t tell if he was one of them. Even fatty
suddenly looked pale and stared straight ahead, as if
he expected the pilot to rush out of the cockpit and
yell at the passengers to grab a parachute and jump.
Outside the window, there was nothing but blurred
grayness, and fragments of fuzzy clouds zoomed by
like giant ragged marshmallows. Just when all hope
seemed lost, the unbearable feeling of falling into thin
air subsided, and Marc, who had stopped breathing for
over ten seconds, got a terrible fit of hiccup. Hopping
and bumping, the plane regained some kind of
stability and kept its unsteady downward course. Marc
closed his eyes and wished he had gotten himself a
bad case of shingles that would have forced him to
cancel his trip to Paris.
Five minutes later, the plane landed smoothly on the
moist tarmac, and a frenetic applause and cheering
went through the Boeing 747. The pilot apologized for
the slightly rough flight, and hoped to see his
passengers again in more pleasant weather.
Wishful thinking, Marc thought grimly. As soon as the
belt-sign was off, all passengers made a rush for the
door, and fatty, sweating profusely, tried hard to avoid
Marc’s eyes. As they walked out, Marc could see big
wet patches under the Texan’s armpits, which gave him
not little satisfaction. Smiling smugly, he overtook fatty
and made a rush for the conveyor belt carrying his
luggage.
After the customs control, a multicolored crowd
awaited the incoming travelers, many of them carrying
signs with the names of expected passengers. None of
the signs bore Marc’s name, though, and since his
pocket book on Paris said that the RER train was the
transport of choice, he followed the signs. After a
twenty-minute walk, he finally reached the RER desk,
which was empty and looked closed. Since his French
was pretty fluent – a fact he owed to his old friend and
colleague Dr. Philippe Dubois – he asked a middleaged woman who was rearranging magazines in a
kiosk if she could help him. She told him the RER
was on strike, and that he had to take the Roissybus to
the city.
With that began another odyssey, with a dozen people
giving him a dozen different directions. He finally
decided to follow a young red-blond girl who was
chatting permanently on her cell phone and who
looked extremely in charge of everything. According
to her professional yet fashionable composure, the
only possible destination for her had to be the heart of
Paris. Ten minutes later he lost sight of her in the
teeming crowd. Half an hour later, he found her
sitting on a bench near a bus terminal, looking
exhausted and at least as lost as he felt. He sat down
next to her, told her he needed to get to Paris, and she
cascaded a fast-forward speech in French on him that
left him breathless. It had mostly to do with the rotten
government, the rotten socialists and the rotten world,
and when she was through she offered him a cigarette,
which he accepted just because it came so unexpected,
and she fiercely began to push the buttons of her cell
phone again.
The bus station turned out to be the right one, and
one hour after his landing in CDG Airport, Marc
finally collapsed onto a comfortable seat in the
Roissybus. The fog had turned into a warm Aprildrizzle, which in its turn became a heavy rain that
battered the dirty windows of the bus. There wasn’t
much to see except for traffic jams and outskirts as
ugly as any big city’s. At the Place de l’Opéra, he
stepped out of the bus and found himself standing
ankle-deep in a filthy puddle. Cursing under his breath,
he decided that so far he absolutely failed to see the
legendary charm of Paris, city of love. With his spirits
rather low, he hailed a taxi, which at a snail’s pace
drove him through the thick traffic to the hotel Les
Trois Etoiles off Boulevard Malherbes. He had booked
a room from New York, and they had promised him
an elegant hotel that would meet his expectations
perfectly. The entry looked refined enough, and Marc
could hardly wait to take a nice warm bath. At the
check-in desk, the clerk didn’t seem to be able to find
his name, and reluctantly informed him that
unfortunately all rooms were taken. Losing his
patience, Marc asked for the manager. They told him
to wait. Ten minutes later he was informed that the
manager wasn’t available before seven thirty. It was
five fifteen, and before the debate could get nasty,
Marc stomped out of the hotel, fuming. He jumped
into the next taxi and asked the driver to take him to
any decent shelter, and the driver, who seemed
amazingly unaffected by the lousy weather and the
honking cars, told him enthusiastically about the cute
little auberges and the wonderful view on Montmartre.
Another tedious hour later, Marc checked in at the
Timotel near the Place des Abesses, which was a mere
five minute walk from the glorious Sacré Coeur
cathedral on top of the hill. Another few minutes
downhill stood the famous Moulin Rouge cabaret. The
weather was clearing, and he found the place quite
charming indeed.
He took a quick shower, singing an out-of-tune
version of I love Paris, then checked his face in the
mirror. For the first time, he found he looked his
thirty-eight years. His boyish good looks seemed
strained, and he detected the first strands of gray hair
on his temples. Travelling by plane definitely didn’t
become him.
Marc was a bright man when it came to academic
thinking, and he had concluded an impressive career
for his years, with a whole collection of important-
looking diplomas standing witness for his enthusiasm
and skill for his profession as a psychiatrist. No
problems on the intellectual side.
As opposed to his romantic life. Although he looked
like an Americanized version of Hugh Grant and
couldn't complain about a lack of advances from the
female world, his relationships were a soap opera of
fiascos. He kept falling for the kind of girls who’d
abuse him shamelessly, and then he’d forgive them and
they’d do it all over again. The scars in his heart only
showed at times when Marc was either lost in thoughts
or very drunk. Then a slight shine of melancholia
could be seen in his deep azure eyes, and if he was
unlucky, a lone predator of a woman would approach
him and try to soothe him, and the standard drama
would start anew. He had tried to analyze this fatal
pattern of ill-fated relationships in as detached a
manner as he could, but to no avail. With every
woman he met came the certain feeling that he was
heading for a new fall. It was irritating and depressing,
but mostly pathetic.
He stepped out of the small shower and toweled his
dark hair, lay on his creaky bed and immediately fell
asleep with a puzzled expression on his face.
He awoke to the sound of a lone saxophone, which
came from the little courtyard in front of the hotel.
He opened his window and saw a young black man
hugging his huge golden saxophone, while now a
bearded fellow tuned in with his banjo, and the jazzy
music got merrier, faster, and the gathering crowd
grew dense and denser. The rain had stopped, and the
air was full of fragrance and noticeably warmer than
before. All of a sudden, there was a hint of the Paris
Marc had anticipated. People started to sit down on
the stairs that led to the Timotel, stairs that were not
even markedly wet thanks to the dense tree-tops over
the courtyard. Citizens and tourists were listening to
the soulful music, while others sat in front of a little
bar with the funny name Le Bar Bar, chatting, drinking
Chardonnay or Badoit, the local mineral water.
Gradually, the stress of the journey began to fade
away, and suddenly it almost felt like the beginning of
a holiday. For the first time since his arrival Marc
regretted he’d only be in Paris for the five days of the
congress.
With his spirits positively higher than before, Marc
picked up the phone next to his bed and dialed the
clinic number of Philippe Dubois, his French friend
and colleague whom he hadn’t seen for over two years.
Philippe had spent a sabbatical at Johns Hopkins
University five years ago, while Marc worked there.
They had become close friends due to – or in spite of
– their different ideologies and patterns of thinking,
from which often ensued endless conversations when
they were on duty together. Philippe, with his patriotic
enthusiasm for everything French, female or esoteric,
had even managed to teach Marc the essentials of his
language during the uncounted hours they spent
together on night-shifts, and Marc had liked the
romantic sound of it so much that he seriously and
intently started to follow French courses even after
Philippe had returned to Paris. They had kept in touch
mostly through cyberspace, in addition discussing their
lives and particularly interesting cases on the phone at
least once a month. Once to twice per year, they had
met on international congresses all over the world, and
they always had a hell of a good time, at least in
between hangovers.
It was the first time Marc came to see Philippe in
Paris, and he felt guilty for having postponed this
long-planned trip for so long, as if he needed a
congress as an excuse for finally visiting the famous
city and his gregarious friend.
Philippe had gotten married a year ago, which had
been a great surprise to Marc. The Frenchman had
been such a heartbreaker that Marc hadn’t believed his
friend would ever change his ways and settle for one
single woman. When Philippe had worked at Johns
Hopkins in 1994, there had been an epidemic of
heart-broken nurses and female interns, and the chief
resident had summoned the irresistible Frenchman on
different occasions to give him some serious words of
warning. Marc had secretly envied him for his ease
with everything female, and although he had felt
happy to hear that Philippe had found his true love at
last, his apprehension about his own love life and
marital future had grown.
Then, half a year ago, Philippe had sent Marc an
unusually short email. Suzette, his wife, had pancreatic
cancer. Marc spent many hours on the phone,
consoling his friend, hating his own incapacity to really
do something useful for Philippe and Suzette. With
this fatal diagnosis, the tragedy at least didn’t grant
much time for suffering. Eleven weeks after the
ominous email, Suzette died in a private hospital while
Philippe sat next to her, asleep, almost comatose
himself.
Because of a lack of personal in Marc’s clinic in New
York, he couldn’t come for the burial, and Marc had a
beautiful wreath made of white roses sent to Paris.
After that, they had been out of touch for almost four
months, Philippe in a deep depression, mourning his
late wife, and Marc suffering from yet another case of
lovesickness after the umpteenth crash-and-burn with
Megan, his all time favorite trouble bringer.
Later, when Marc read about the psychiatry congress
in Paris in some medical journal, it wasn’t his
unrestrainable urge for education that finally made
him sign in – it was the certain feeling that Philippe
needed him. On a more complicated and confused
scale, he also hoped that the trip might have some
curative effect on his own chronically cracked heart.
After his last and rather embarrassing quarrel with
Megan just around the time of Suzette’s death, he had
decided to expel her from his life like the thorn in his
side she was. Oh, but hadn’t he vowed this a dozen
times already! Theirs had been a muddled kind of
relationship with more crashes than highlights, a soap
opera which on and off had lasted for too many years.
Each time she had walked out of his life after some
hysterical and tragicomically boisterous finale furioso,
Marc had predictably fallen prey to some predatory
single woman, which in return invariably rekindled
Megan’s fading feelings for Marc.
Well, it was over now, case closed, no more questions
your Honor. When Marc had purchased his ticket for
Paris, he had secretly prayed that the geographical
distance would clear his mind of Megan, and the
French spirit heal his chronically wounded soul.
“Dubois!” a deep voice boomed on the other side of
the line, and Marc, who had been completely lost in
thoughts, nearly dropped the receiver. He quickly
caught himself and spoke in fluent French:
“Salut mon potte – it’s me, Marc. Any chance to see
you one of these days?”
“Marc, mon vieux! Where are you calling from?”
“I’m about two miles from where you’re standing. I
thought you were going to pick me up at the airport?”
“Mon dieu, you are in Paris already? I thought you
were only arriving tomorrow! I had totally forgotten!
Merde alors, where do I have my head? I wanted to pick
you up at the airport. With your sense of direction I
thought you’d end up in Marseilles otherwise. How
was the flight?”
“A nightmare, thank you. I survived the trip against all
odds and in spite of your horrible weather. Next time
I’ll take the ferry from Manhattan to the Normandy.
This wretched plane nearly dropped like a leaden duck
instead of landing in Charles de Gaulle. I think I’ll
need a lot of Pastis to help me forget that blasted
flight.”
There came a booming laugh from the vigorous
Frenchman.
“Ca c’est mon potte! Still as neurotic as a menopausal
chicken when it comes to flying! Good to hear your
voice! Where are you staying?”
“Timotel, near Les Abesses. Those morons at the
Trois Etoiles have deleted my reservation, so I decided
to reside in a more pleasant neighborhood before I get
arrested for strangling the manager. How about
meeting somewhere here on Montmartre? The mood’s
fantastic.”
“Great idea! And I think that your honored presence
calls for a drink indeed. My throat feels like a dry
sponge at all times, it’s running in the family. What’s
that lovely music I hear in the background? Ah,
Montmartre, always perfect for a chill out! Let’s have
dinner somewhere near your hotel, so you won’t have
to worry about our bloody traffic-jams anymore today.
I’ll meet you at your hotel in half an hour.”
“Easy, man, I don’t want to rip you away from your
revered clinic! Are you sure they’ll let you leave
already? It’s still a long way till midnight...”
“Well, I’ve been in this blasted building for thirty-six
hour now, and I think it’s high time my dear colleagues
take over. Oh, by the by, I must tell you about my
latest case. I urgently need your opinion on that one.”
“Over some Chardonnay and foie-gras, anytime. I’ll be
waiting.”
Philippe’s half hour turned out to be fifty-five
minutes, something the French generally interpreted as
flexibility, since the word unpunctuality simply didn’t
exist in their vocabulary. Long forgotten was Louis
XIV who had claimed that punctuality was the
politeness of kings.
When he arrived at last, Philippe nearly crunched
Marc’s ribcage with a bear hug, and when they had
time to look at one another, Marc felt an unpleasant
pang as he realized how old Philippe had grown since
their last meeting. Only now he understood that
Suzette’s death must have been a nearly fatal blow for
his unfortunate friend. It was admirable how the
Frenchman seemed to accept that life went on even
though his soul had been chopped in two by the grim
reaper. With an effort, Marc succeeded at hiding all
those thoughts from his friend.
They walked out of the hotel, instantly swept away by
the jazz band’s irresistible tunes. A young man with a
keyboard and a fat drummer had joined the musicians,
and the mood became progressively elated.
Philippe, jolly and loud like Cyrano de Bergerac in his
battle-mood, got them two Pastis with iced water at
the Bar Bar, and they sat down on the already crowded
stairs.
There never had been much small talk between them.
After a short preliminary chitchat about the trip and
details of the morrow’s congress, the conversation
took on a more serious note.
“How are you coping with Suzette’s death, Philippe?”
The Frenchman considered the question as if hearing
it for the first time.
“I think I am getting there, mon ami. When I learned
about the diagnosis, a part of me died. This part went
straight into the vault, along with Suzette. But even
though it sounds like a blasphemy, life goes on. After
withdrawing from all social events for nearly three
months after she... after she had gone, I told myself
that Suzette wouldn’t like me, her belligerent old
Gaulois, hanging around in gloom for the rest of my
life. Maybe she’s waiting for me someplace, but if she
were here, she would kick my balls if I let myself
drown in depressions. I’ve tried one or two
antidepressants, but they make me feel like a eunuch,
which probably would suit her just fine...”
He paused to take a big sip of his ice-cool Pastis.
“Suzette and I had such a good time together, and I
am determined to only look at the positive side of
that. She loved me most when I was happy.”
There were tears in the Frenchman’s eyes. He wiped
them away with an oblivious gesture.
Philippe was a big and passionate man with all the
rough charm of the archetype Gauloise-smoking
Frenchman. Whatever he did, he did with vigor and
elan, no matter if it was eating, drinking, smoking or
making love. Only when dealing with his patients, he
showed a subtle understanding and emphatic
gentleness one hardly expected from a man with such
elemental zeal.
Marc was relieved to see that all those qualities that
made Philippe Dubois had not been carried to grave
along with his wife. Although he seemed slightly
subdued when talking of his tragic loss, he still
appeared to be a power plant humming with energy.
Marc cleared his throat.
“I didn’t mean to make our reunion some funeral
obsequies, but I – well, I wanted you to tell you once
more how sorry I am about all this. The last few
months I felt like shit, of course mostly because of
Megan-the-bitch, but also because I was so little help
to you. I think it’s ridiculous that even a super-shrink
like me can’t do anything spectacularly helpful in such
a situation.”
Philippe gave him a wry smile.
“I’m afraid you are still the one who needs serious help.
I think that by now your tragedy with Megan has great
hopes to become the most pathetic soap opera in
history.”
Marc sighed in resigned exasperation.
“I figured that out by myself. Maybe we should analyze
this, doc.”
“Haven’t we already a zillion times?”
“Don’t laugh. This time it’s abso-fucking-lutely over.
Finito. We’re through. Megan’s history, and you know I
nearly flunked out of high school because of history.
Ain’t got no memory for the past.”
“The day Megan will be history to you, I’ll win the
Nobel Prize.”
“Who’s Megan?”
“Stockholm, here I come!”
Over the years, Philippe had specialized – among
other matters – in the pathophysiology of sleep,
especially rare and unusual sleep disorders. He seemed
strangely eager and surprisingly fretful to tell Marc
about his latest case, one that had kept him sleepless
over the last few days.
In spite of the cheerful noises all around, Philippe
lowered his voice to a nearly conspiring whisper.
“It’s the weirdest and most remarkable case I’ve seen
since I worked with Paul Rostand. She was admitted to
our special care unit three days ago, after having
swallowed just about all tablets she could find in her
apartment. I think she even gobbled down the
dishwasher tabs. After we got all that toxic waste out
of her body, she soon turned out to be a very sober
and reasonable girl who happens to suffer from
unusually terrifying nightmares. There is no history of
psychic trauma, alcohol, drug abuse, personal stress or
any other reason for those nightmares. Of course, all
that doesn’t mean much, and at first I didn’t think her
nightmares a remarkable thing to explore. But there
are other oddities, and little by little those oddities
seem to fuse into a disturbing picture.”
“What oddities do you mean?”
“For one, the girl’s suffering from total amnesia for
everything that happened before she was five.”
"How much do you remember about your lives and
times before the age of five?" Marc interjected
sardonically.
"Zilch, but her amnesia or bad memory doesn't matter
much anyway. It’s other things I worry about."
“Tell me her background data. Like, how old is she,
where does she come from, et cetera.”
“She’s twenty-four. Probably born in Libya, she
doesn’t remember for sure. Her stepparents, sweet and
simple folks from some place near Marseilles, adopted
her at the age of five. The whole story about her
adoption is a little foggy, especially since it is usually
quite difficult to adopt orphans from Northern Africa,
but never mind that. She left them at the age of
twenty-two, because she “just knew the time had come
to move on”. Interestingly, I usually hate such cliched
crap from anybody else, but coming from her mouth,
it seemed to make perfect sense.”
“And she moved here, to Paris?”
“Yes, to study archeology at the Sorbonne.
Interestingly, also because of dreams – not because of
her nightmares though. She says that since her earliest
childhood – the part she remembers, that is – she has
recurrent dreams of a tomb she found in a huge
desert when she was a small child, and what she found
seems to be essential to her life – but whenever she
gets near the entry of the crypt, she wakes up with her
heart racing. So, instead of consulting us shrinks she
decided to go into archeology and find out if her
dream will eventually lead her back to this place she
saw in her dreams. Again, I must emphasize that she
gives me the impression of being a perfectly
reasonable young woman, despite her rather strange
ideas.”
Philippe pulled out a pack of Gauloise bleu and lit one
of the toxic cigarettes.
Frowning, Marc said:
“Apparently, archeology didn’t lead her to her goal, but
to suicide. What happened?”
“Be patient, my friend. I will tell you in time, but let
me first explain the situation at hand. Since she’s in the
Saint Joseph, we’re dealing with dreams of a totally
uncategorizable kind, and you know I’m well versed in
dreams. Wait, don’t interrupt me now; I know that
nightmares might not seem too fascinating a case to a
New York shrink, but let me tell you about the other
findings.”
Marc sipped his Pastis with growing interest, as
Philippe carried on with his report of a very odd case
indeed. Apparently, those nightmares had started quite
unexpectedly and forcefully only three days before her
admission to the Hôpital de Saint Joseph, which in its
turn had been three days ago. When the paramedics
found her at home, she was in a coma, and there were
deep scratches all over her face. As she told Philippe
later, she had dreamed of purple worms crawling
through her facial flesh, and in the maw of this horror
she had tried to rip them out with her fingernails.
There was an interesting, precisely outlined detail: all
worms had worn the same inconspicuous, yet familiar
face, and all of them displayed a nice collection of
small, razorblade teeth; the whole thing was
accompanied by an uncanny sensation of déjà-vu.
This dream had been the first of her nightmares six
days ago, and after that she hadn’t left her apartment
anymore. Paralyzed with fear, she hadn’t even dared
calling for a doctor to look after her wounds. She was
afraid he might have the same face as the worms.
“Sounds like classic paranoia to me” Marc interjected,
seemingly disappointed.
“I told you to shut up and listen. All right, so far, so
unspectacular. Just nightmares, and a maybe not
entirely adequate reaction on the girl’s side. Don’t you
yawn, I’ll come to the juicy bits shortly.
The second night, she found herself bound tightly to a
cold stone altar in an eerily dark church, and a circle of
monks was closing in on her. On a secret command,
they all dropped their cowls to the floor, and she saw
that all the monks had big breasts and large erect
penises, like spears ready to stab her. The monks stank
of sulfur and sweat and camphor, yes, camphor, don’t
ask me why. I must admit that her description was
oddly vivid, and although I made her repeat her
narration three times, she didn’t get tangled in
contradictions. Everything she said sounded as if she
really had experienced it, and she could give me details
which indeed made me shudder.”
“What did the monks do?” Marc asked, interested at
last.
“Ah, are we curious now? All right, for entertainment’s
sake I’ll tell you. Well, the hermaphrodites drew nearer,
and when they reached her she felt dozens of hands
caressing her, and wherever they touched her, her skin
blistered and burst open, and she watched in dazed
terror as the blood trickled down her skin in little red
streams. And then the pungent transsexual monks
were all over her, big heavy breasts and hard pulsating
penises brushing over her bleeding body, and the
chants were requiem of lunacy and evil. By all gods,
none of my patients ever gave me such a detailed
report on a dream! Of course I checked her through
the credibility procedures. She got 20/20. There’s no
way she’s making up those dreams, at least not
purposely.”
“Heavy stuff ” Marc mused, pensively gazing at the
smoke drifting from Philippe’s cigarette.
“I told you. But I’m not even nearing the remarkable
bits yet. Right. Where was I? Ah, yes: she told me that
in hindsight she can’t explain why she didn’t call for
help, but she was terrified beyond rational thinking,
terrified that any attempt to call a doctor or a cop
would immediately attract the monks’ attention and
trigger some horrid punitive action. So she stayed in
bed most of the time, hiding under her cover like a
little girl, hardly daring to even go to the toilet. She
had no problems to accept that this is a strange
behavior, but she also says that she had no choice.
After each nightmare, a little part of her seemed to
have died, and she felt her drained of strength as if a
million mosquitoes had sucked her dry.
The third night finally drove her suicidal. That night,
she dreamed she was in a forest, paralyzed and naked
on the cold earth. A huge slimy slug the size of a bull
terrier was crawling over her, chewing the skin of her
belly away. While gnawing at her, the bloated slug gave
birth to dozens of baby slugs that instantly swarmed
over her inert body, sucking and chewing on her with
their thousands of needle-sharp teeth. Again, all had
the same familiar faces, the worms' faces. When three
of those ghastly slugs began crawling up between her
legs, she somehow managed to wake up with a
breathless shriek on her lips. At last, she decided to
call a doctor, the police, whoever. Before she got to
the phone, she saw that her belly was growing like a
fast-forward version of a pregnancy. The labors
started without preamble, the pain quickly became
excruciating, bringing her to the floor, while
monotonous, soul-less chants filled the room. The
monks again? I asked her, but she doesn’t know. See
what I mean? She doesn’t just know things, but only
those things she experienced. Have I mentioned all
blood and urine tests on drugs, especially LSD,
mescaline, magic mushrooms, XTC and other designer
drugs were absolutely negative? Well they were.”
“The dream” Marc interrupted impatiently, “what
happened in the dream?”
“The dream... ah yes, the dream. So she was on the
floor, convulsing with pain, and when the pain became
unbearable, she started to scream – and then the
enormous head of a freak-creature that looked like a
perverse cross between a tyrannosaurus and a spider
pushed itself out of her womb, displaying an armada
of razor-sharp fangs and twenty-odd spidery legs with
tiny, yet deadly claws. But the creature was too big for
its mother’s size, and the girl had to watch her belly
being ripped open from her crotch to her sternum.
The monster jumped out of the bloody mess, buzzing
with evil energy, running around the room like a mad
dog.”
Marc opened his mouth to say something terminally
cynical, but Philippe quickly raised his hands.
“I know this sounds like so much pulp, but please let
me finish!”
Another eager sip of Pastis. The Frenchman was
talking himself into one of his notorious fervors.
“The girl looked into her open belly and saw the
remains of two fetuses in her lacerated uterus, their
tiny bones bare of flesh, their faces devoured by the
ghastly monster that now stood near her, breathing its
foul breath into her face, and again it was that ageless
face with the dark, treacherous eyes, and suddenly
there came a real memory from another life, a terrible
fight, and something she didn’t want to remember,
ever.
Her mind nearly snapping, she took the creature’s
throat and pushed as hard as she could, strangling it,
and while she tried to kill the vile abomination she
realized she wasn’t strangling the monster, but
squeezing a small tube of Valium in her hands, and
although she didn’t know where it came from, for she
had never taken tranquilizers in her life, she
inexplicably felt compelled to swallow all the pills, and
after she had finished one tube, she found more, and
more, until everything turned dark.”
Philippe paused. Another generous sip of the cold
beverage went down his gullet.
“The only good thing about the whole mess was the
scream which alerted the neighbors. That’s how they
found her in time. Strangely, she was comatose already,
although the time between her scream and our team’s
arrival was hardly long enough for the drugs to act. I
don’t exclude a hysterical fainting or a nervous
collapse entirely. But when you meet her, you won’t
think of this possibility anymore.”
Marc winced ostentatiously.
"Seems like the girl has a terrific fantasy, or maybe she
simply watches the wrong kind of movies. I once read
a case about a girl who couldn't distinguish what she
saw on TV from real life. Maybe that's her problem."
Philippe irritably waved him off.
"Meet her, and you'll think differently."
Marc sighed, then, giving the story some serious
thought, began to frown.
“Those dreams seem pretty bad, all right. But why
should someone commit suicide because of a dream,
no matter how dreadful? There are millions of people
suffering from nightmares, and even those unfortunate
fools who take LSD and end in the fangs of a horror
trip usually don’t jump out of windows as often as
rumor has it. All this only leads to the conclusion that
the girl has to be psychotic, maybe schizophrenic.
What makes you think her dreams are so special?”
Philippe had been waiting for this.
“I will tell you, mon vieux. She told us very soberly
that she knew normal nightmares very well. She had
suffered enough of them, especially as a child, but
even the worst one she could remember didn’t carry a
millionth part of the horror those new nightmares
brought. It was, as she put it, the same as if you tried
to compare a Chinese firecracker to a nuclear bomb.
After the third night, she knew she would embrace
death gladly if only she didn’t have to dream once
more. Like in most nightmares, it wasn’t the scenario of
the dream that created the unspeakable terror, it was
the mood. And that’s where the pathology of this
phenomenon might come in: she is absolutely positive
that these are not her nightmares, but that they are sent
by somebody else!”
Phillip took a long sip, looking at his friend over the
rim of his glass meaningfully.
Marc gazed at the darkening sky, as if looking for
flying saucers.
“What exactly does she say? Influence from outer
space? Malignant radiation from alien sources? Sounds
like the classical delusion of impairment to me. Come
on, don’t tell me that’s all you got!” He smiled almost
apologetically, as if to say that he was sorry the story
wasn’t that prodigious after all.
“Absolutely not!” Philippe protested. “She is
convinced that those dreams are man-made – at times
she can almost sense a presence of some kind, a
presence of a human, yet incredibly evil being.”
“Paranoid schizophrenia in its standard description.
What’s wrong with you, are you in luv with her, or are
you running out of ammunition for publications in
The Monthly Madman?”
Marc faked a stifled yawn, but his sarcasm didn’t stop
Philippe for a moment.
“Woe betide you if you interrupt me once more
before I'm through!” he declaimed in a Shakespearean
way. “As you well know, we do not define
schizophrenia by only one symptom, even if this
symptom may allegedly carry the signs of paranoid
thinking. I have spent many hours with this girl, my
friend, and there are absolutely no other signs of
paranoia, bipolar affective psychosis, mythomania,
agitated depression or other mental disturbances.
There is no hint of neurotic behavior. During the day,
that is. But check her at night, and you’ll find another
person. We tried to monitor her during her
nightmares. They invariably start as soon as she falls
asleep. Although we had to tie her to her bed, she
managed to rip off the EEG electrodes three times,
once even her IV line. If ever someone spoke of a
person going berserk – I think I finally know what that
means. She screamed so loud we had to use earplugs.
Her blood pressure went over 250/130, and her EEG
showed curves I have never seen before. If mortal fear
causes them, then I’ve never seen anybody as
frightened as this girl. Her panic gives her an
incredible strength, a phenomenon which is quite
common – still, when we tried to restrict her, it took
four strong men to do so.”
“Did you sedate her?”
“Benzos, barbiturates, neuroleptics, you name it, we
tried it. And in high doses, believe me. Effect: zero.”
“And you sincerely tell me she’s not a junkie?” Marc
asked doubtfully. In spite of his demonstrative
skepticism, he was enjoying their old game of
argument-until-you-drop.
“As far as we can tell she probably never swallowed a
pill in her life.”
“And during the day she’s as docile as a lamb, right?”
“Right.” Philippe looked at Marc defiantly, ready to
nip any attack in the bud.
“Quite intriguing. So what’s your diagnosis?”
“Ah! Here we go. I assume you have suspected that the
young lady falls into my private field of interest? Of
course you have!”
Philippe’s private field of interest had been the tinder that
in the past had often blazed into heated and often
fierce discussions between the two colleagues.
In an instant Marc was on his guard, sharpening his
slightly vacationed spirit like a pencil, preparing for
another unconventional combat of ideologies and
belief.
In spite of the Frenchman’s western medical training
and his working in a clinic believing in allopathic
medicine, he had a strong penchant for the gray zone
between psychiatry and the paranormal. Although very
much disputed, he had often stood up for the fact that
phenomena like telepathy, pyrokinesia and telekinesis
seemed to occur more commonly in so-called mentally
disturbed patients than in the normal, which led to his
theory that many of those patients might not be
mentally ill in the classic sense after all. Philippe was
intelligent and prudent enough not to risk being
expelled from the French medical board, although
some of his colleagues jokingly called him Dr. Jekyll
behind his back already.
Years ago, he had written a very controversial and
much discussed article on Dr. Paul Rostand, the
enigmatic professor who – after having worked as a
psychiatrist in different countries for over fourteen
years – had turned his back on the rigid and stubborn
classic psychiatry and started performing exorcisms in
the outskirts of New Orleans and the West Indies.
Rostand was a critical and sharp-minded man;
formerly a scientist, he had prepared this new step in
his life very thoroughly, living in a convent near Baton
Rouge for over two years, learning the art of this
ancient and disputed – if not disparaged – art of
healing. He was painstakingly careful at selecting the
right patients for those not entirely inoffensive rituals,
while he kept administering the traditional psychiatric
care to the ones he considered ill in the purely organic
sense.
In his article, Philippe very carefully documented all of
Rostand’s cases and his working procedures, and he
came to the phenomenal conclusion that within three
years Rostand had cured more than seventy-eight
allegedly schizophrenic patients – without any drugs,
electroshocks or customary psychotherapy. The
patients' diagnoses had been established by over eight
renowned psychiatrists from Louisiana. The board of
American Psychiatrists rejected this report as
statistically non-significant and non-provable. Philippe,
frustrated with the narrow-mindedness of his own
guild and hot on this case, had contacted Rostand
immediately. Rostand, a loner, had refused to see the
French doctor for over half a year. He didn’t want any
opportunistic colleagues earn their laurels on his back.
Eventually, through Philippe’s persistence and honest
interest, Rostand accepted to see him. He had to fly all
the way to the Bahamas, because Rostand was working
on a not categorizable case of multiple personality that
seemed to be calling for an exorcism.
Philippe, taking an unpaid holiday, became his
assistant and spent three months working with the
professor, brooding over cases on the borderline
between scientific reality and the occult, watching
Rostand perform strange rituals on people apparently
possessed.
Rostand explained to him that obviously the West
Indies and South States were not the only places
where people suffered from possession – it was a
problem endemic to the whole globe. But there
weren’t many locations where archaic rituals like
exorcism were accepted, or at least not prosecuted by
the government.
Over the months, Philippe's indefatigable and honest
interest in the occult side of medicine had earned him
his mentor's friendship. Rostand, an introvert and
taciturn man, by and by showed him numerous
absolutely baffling and mind-numbing cases.
At the end of their three months together, Rostand
had told him that he could become a true exorcist
himself, but that for the last stage of his education in
this antediluvian art he'd have to turn his back on the
lies and incompetence of scholastic psychiatry for
good. Philippe, although sorely tempted, felt too
obliged to his clinic and eventually returned to Paris
with a heavy heart. He was fully aware that he had
consciously closed a door that would probably never
open again.
Philippe never told anybody more than superficial
anecdotes about his time with Rostand – except for
Marc, who had a critical, but open mind, and his late
wife Suzette. Once he was back in France, Philippe
mentally labeled all his endeavors with the exorcist
strictly confidential. A word to the wrong ear would
certainly have caused very unpleasant reactions from
the scholastic side of medicine. After running into
walls too many times, he had given up the silly hope to
try and persuade his allopathic colleagues to review
their own prejudice and intolerance. Instead, he dug
deeper into this realm forsaken by traditional scientists
by his own means, scanning his mentally deranged
patients for signs of potential possession. Yet, he had
never dared performing an exorcism himself. Through
Rostand he had learned that it was venture that
required not only long years of experience and a
strong personality, but also an exceptional talent.
Trying to purge a hapless victim of a malignant spirit
as a thrilling experiment was tantamount to suicide.
From Rostand he had learned that within the last three
years there had been no less than one hundred and
thirty-six well-documented cases of healing through
exorcism in the West Indies alone, cases which would
have remained just another lot of chronic lunatics or
Haldol zombies if treated the traditional western way.
At first, Philippe had tried to persuade Rostand to
share this incredible knowledge with the ignorant
world, thus abolishing the old prejudices of academic
science over the ancient arts, but Rostand, older and
much wiser than Philippe, had resolutely shaken his
head, reminding his younger colleague of King
Sophocles’ words: how terrible is wisdom when it
brings no profit to the wise. Most of their colleagues,
alas, were not looking for wisdom, but control and
dominance. Philippe had never forgotten the older
man’s parting words:
“The circles which formed us in our younger years are
not ready to rethink their views– and I am afraid that
some forces are presently taking advantage of this
fact. There is nothing we can do but to keep doing
what consider right, fair and good. I’d be glad to
welcome you to the ancient craft of exorcism. I think
you have the potential, Philippe, and, moreover, the
zeal it takes.”
This had been two years ago, and Philippe, irresolute
in spite of his burning interest, had not had the heart
to burn all bridges and start a brand-new life as an
occultist and miracle worker, as his colleagues would
certainly call him. On second thought, they probably
wouldn’t; they’d call him a quack.
Philippe ordered some Chardonnay and pickles,
gathered his thoughts for a second, than looked at
Marc with a wantonly fanatical shine in his eyes.
“She thinks she’s being influenced. Officially, on the
paper, in my files, it is paranoia indeed. As a senior
resident, it isn’t difficult for me to keep this diagnosis
up, while sparing her all those useless sedatives – we’ve
proved already they don’t work on her. The way I
described her symptoms in her file, nobody thinks
she’s a very unusual case, not even the chief resident –
not even you. Presently, I’m her only treating doctor.
And now, my Yankee friend, I want you to meet her.”
Marc gave him his best John Wayne drawl.
“I guess it is 'bout high time I looked at aynother
woman.”
“Before I introduce you to the aynother woman: were
you really serious about the low tide with Megan?”
“O-oh, you said the M-word!”
“Right. So, tell me. Transitional closedown or definite
burial?”
“Burial. No comebacks. It is over, mon ami. Case
closed. File lost." Marc gazed into his glass as if into a
crystal ball.
"Presently, she is making love to the wallet of some
wealthy lawyer." And, as an afterthought: "It's strange.
In all those years, for the first time it was I who left
her, instead of the other way round. Each time she
walked out my door with a bang I started missing her
even before I had the time to down a whiskey or two.
But this time – this time I closed the door, and I
closed the chapter. I don't miss her. It's like having the
Empire State Building off my shoulders.
Actually, this final breakdown of our relationship is
part of the reason why I decided to visit the congress
here... you know, the need for distance and all that
crap. I’ve often wondered why a shrink is not immune
to this kind of futureless liaisons. Anyway, I hope
she’ll die of boredom and rot in his four-hundred
square meter penthouse.”
Smiling innocently, he added: “So, this lady of the
nightmares... is she pretty?”
“She’s not ugly. Actually, far from that. But never mind
her appearance. It’s her mind you should be interested
in and explore."
Philippe turned unexpectedly serious.
"You know, I really hope you can help me with this
case. What I so cynically call a case is in fact a very
special young woman, and this woman probably won't
live to see the weekend if we don't find a remedy for
her condition. She's nearing terminal exhaustion."
Sighing deeply, he added:
"I’ll introduce you to her tomorrow at noon, right
after the congress, if you don’t have any other plans.”
“No plans.”
“Good. How about some fish-food now? La mère
Catherine serves excellent oysters. Oh, sorry, I forgot
you’re American.” Philippe faked a pained grimace.
“We also have MacDonald's, if you want.”
Marc punched his friend’s shoulder good-naturedly.
“Ah come on! We’re not the ones who gobble down
slimy frog-legs or stuff ourselves with nightingaletongues and all those goodies. I prefer a good old
Angus steak anytime of the year.”
“Yankees! When will they ever learn?”
Grinning, they walked uphill, mingling with the
multinational crowd coming down from Sacré Coeur.
Sunday – 7.45 p.m.
The tall red-haired woman in the dark cowl stood
perfectly still, as if lost in a reverie. With her arms
folded, she tenderly caressed the coarse fabric with a
long slim finger. As a constant over the years, she
loved the feeling of the rough textile scrubbing her
naked skin as she went through her priestly
performance at the Coven's monthly mass.
In the semidarkness of the desecrated church, twelve
equally unmoving figures stood in a circle, all of them
wearing the same dark cowls and hoods. They all
looked at their master of ceremony, the woman with
the luxuriant cascade of crimson hair, their eyes filled
with expectation, adoration, and fear.
She was their uncontestable and awe-inspiring leader
in those difficult times. The winds of change were
approaching, and they knew that under their leader's
guidance, they would soon witness the beginning of a
brand new era. An ancient book of long forgotten lore
had spoken of an epoch when the skies would be
afire, and sulfurous rains would soak the pestilent
earth.
Eagerly the disciples had awaited the prophecy to
fulfill itself, and they knew all would be well as long as
they could depend on Michelle Daflon, the Witch of
Paris. Rumor had it that she had been there all along,
taking care of all matters concerning the Coven,
making it prosper and thrive. Seemingly older than
time, Michelle was a force of nature that deserved the
disciples' undivided confidence and fearful respect.
Of all the sorcerers who had ever worked for the
Great Master, she was the superlative, and she had
kept her infamous reputation untainted. Nobody knew
that once in a blue moon, when a source of trouble
had become too strong too rapidly, she had reluctantly
turned to the Vice, or, in extreme emergencies, to the
Master himself. But who could remember the rising of
the last blue moon? She could be deservedly proud
that since she was taking care of most of the Master's
earthly business, things had run rather smoothly.
Once, a thousand years before Michelle's time, the
situation had gotten precarious. A man from a dump
called Nazareth had publicly challenged the Master.
His message of peace on earth, mercy and charity had
implanted a terrible seed of sheepish belief into a
breathtakingly large number of humans. This man had
been more powerful than any other man before him,
and even the Master, for the first time in history facing
a serious menace, had been forced to let the
procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilatus, murder the
physical shape of this self-styled but dangerous
messiah. It had been one of the master's rare errors. It
was always dangerous to kill the mere body of a
powerful being, for such a soul had a tendency to
come back.
Michelle had often fancied the idea of having met the
Christ, had she been born a millennium earlier – oh,
how she would have seduced him! He would have
been clay between her devious fingers. Like a cat
animated by coldhearted curiosity, she would have
toyed with him to his last breath. Death through her
methods would have made his crucifixion seem like a
weekend trip.
Like a general on a battlefield, Michelle scrutinized her
disciples. No trace of rebellion there. She knew that all
of them would gladly die for her if that were her wish.
Tonight, only a small selection of her minions was
present. If necessary, she could mobilize an army of
nearly a million devotees who'd go through fire and
water for her.
At the age of officially thirty-three – no human being
knew her real unspeakable age – hers was a career that
hardly found its equal in history. From a mere semiorphan with a strange gift, she had climbed one of
two possible ladders to the very top.
Step by step.
Novice. Scholar. Disciple. Member of the Inner Circle.
After a certain point, there had been no more
classifications. No more titles. Without transition,
there had been no more competitors disputing her
rights or obstructing her comet-like ascent. After
countless years of ruthless struggle and mad ambition
for the dark side, Michelle Daflon, the French Kali,
had become one of the most powerful beings on
earth.
Still, she had an appetite for more.
Since her most tender age, there had been bizarre
things happening in her life. She soon understood that
her mother had a gift that no other people had, and
that her mother, a clever woman, was trying hard to
hide those talents.
Watching her mother perform strange rituals almost
every day, little Michelle had tried to do the same, like
all children learning by copying.
It had worked.
Very easily, she had at first imitated her mother's secret
performances - and then, growing bored with them,
started inventing tricks of her own. She did her magic
secretly, sensing that her doing wouldn’t please her
mother.
One day, when Michelle had done something awful
with a stray cat she had found in the medieval streets
of Paris, her mother had confronted her. In fact,
mother had been watching little Michelle performing
disquieting conjurations for quite a while, watching her
with growing concern. It wasn't the fact that Michelle
had supernatural talents which unsettled her mother,
for those talents were running in the family; it was the
child's natural inclination for cruelty and malice.
In the simple way a mother explains something to a
small child, Sandrine Daflon had given her daughter a
lecture, a sermon about right and wrong, good and
evil. She told Michelle that even her own magic,
though always good and helpful, had to be kept secret
or she’d burn on the stake.
Her mother’s words had brought a terrible turmoil
into Michelle’s juvenile soul. She felt that her mother,
in her own way, was right – but on the other hand,
Michelle sensed that her own destiny was different
from her mother’s. Although she didn’t know how to
verbalize her feelings, the quintessence was that they
didn’t share the same belief. Still, the little girl
remained confused for many weeks, wondering if her
instinct was guiding her the right way after all. There
had been but few moments of doubt in her life.
She realized that her mother used her gift uniquely to
give people good advice, or help them with some
benign conjuration. Sandrine Daflon was a persuasive
woman with a strong personality, and she nearly
managed to discourage Michelle from following the
unhealthy track the young girl had chosen.
Nearly.
One week before her sixth birthday, Michelle woke in
the middle of the night, woke with a start. She sensed
that her mother was going to commit a terrible deed,
sensed it with the clear and unerring impression of
watching an accident happening. A few days before,
she had gotten wind that there had been a talk with a
priest. There had been whispered words of a hasty
plan to take Michelle away to some convent, a plan
with the pious intention to force the erring girl back
onto the righteous path. How she knew about her
mother’s plan, Michelle could never explain, nor did
she care. It came to her like a revelation. Her mother,
she understood, was not on her side any longer. She
had become a danger to her life and to her very
mission, a mission she had only vaguely begun to
understand.
As Michelle contrived a scheme to make a move
against her mother, inexplicable thoughts of her father
entered her mind, thoughts of the father she never
knew. Her mother had told her once that her father
had died when Michelle was only one year old, had
died under the heavy wheel of a carriage, but all at
once Michelle knew that this had been a phony lie, a
lie conceived to hide a terrible truth. All at once, just
as Michelle’s resentment against her mother solidified
into a murderous plan, the shocking truth came to her.
Her father had been a passing stranger who had raped
her mother in the backyard of the farm where she was
washing the clothes of the rich people in their
neighborhood.
This had been in Paris, 1066 A.D.
The powerful stranger had raped Sandrine Daflon,
clasping his callous hands around her neck, trying to
strangle her as he was nearing climax. Sandrine had
been unable to resist the man's superior physical
strength, but as she felt the foggy sensation in her
head that heralded unconsciousness, as she realized
that there would be no awakening from this dark sleep,
the uncanny talent that inhabited her spirit soared to a
terrible life.
As the rapist stared into his asphyxiating victim’s eyes,
an act his sick brain considered the culmination of his
predatory ventures, something made him halt.
The scenario was running through little Michelle's
head as if she were actually watching the horrible act.
She stood transfixed, "watching" a situation which had
happened six years before.
The stranger tightened his grip around Sandrine's
neck, preparing for the kill. When the ravaged woman
felt a pressure in her skull she knew she couldn’t
endure much longer, her blurred vision suddenly
focused, focused on the eyes of the brute who was
strangling her, and abruptly the big man let go of her
neck, clasped his hands over his bleeding eyes and
rolled off the battered woman. Both of them were
screaming, the woman in hellish fury, the man in
agony. Then he vanished into the night, leaving
Michelle’s mother on the muddy ground, bruised,
shocked – and pregnant.
Michelle, miraculously enlightened about the past,
wondered if the rapist's evil soul had inseminated the
seed of darkness into her – a seed now thriving for
nine-hundred-thirty-three years.
That night, knowing that her mother planned to betray
her, intended to put her away into some secluded
convent to force her soul into the right shape, she had
sneaked into her mother’s bedroom, where the still
beautiful woman slept soundly. The red-haired girl
stood by her mother’s bed and stared at the familiar
face, dark anger boiling in her juvenile heart. As she
stared, her mother abruptly opened her eyes, instantly
knowing her daughter was trying to complete the task
the rapist had failed at almost two decades before.
Michelle felt a blazing beam of pure energy smash
into her very mind like a fiery fist. She nearly tumbled
backwards, but then something in her head lit up, a
somber spark of hatred, and she directed a thought at
her mother
(how could you betray me!!),
a thought as crushingly heavy as a giant obelisk, and
her mother’s whole body sank into the mattress as if a
mighty carriage were bulldozing her. All candles in the
house fired up and melted within seconds. Half
blinded by the flashing luminescence, Michelle walked
away from her mother's mangled body, never turning
back.
That night, she slept soundly, no dreams marring dark
soul.
The day after Auguste Millefeux, one of medieval
Paris’ doctors, pronounced Sandrine Daflon dead –
without proffering a possible cause. He knew Sandrine
had been a perfectly healthy woman. The physician,
one of the few competent ones in a Paris with still less
than ninety-thousand people, was an experienced man
who had seen a lot of fatalities, both natural and
accidental. He examined Sandrine Daflon's body
lengthily, baffled by the multiple fractures and crushed
muscles. For a moment, he wondered if there could be
an epileptic attack drastic enough to be capable of
breaking human bones, but he quickly rejected the
thought.
There were no tracks of any kind which indicated that
Sandrine had been dragged from somewhere else into
her bedroom. There was no evidence of a battle.
Nothing hinted at murder or manslaughter.
Michelle, standing behind him, watched him with cool
interest.
When the doctor had finished his investigations, he
turned to face the pretty young girl. Scrutinizing her,
he felt an intensifying uneasiness, an anxiety that filled
him with the urge to get out of the girl's presence as
fast as he could.
Fighting the impulse, he recalled his interrogation of
Michelle some twenty minutes before. There hadn't
been much reaction from her side. At first, the
physician had attributed the girl's lacking grief to the
shock she'd suffered. Still, she seemed strangely
unemotional about the tragic event, whatever had
happened. When questioned about previous fits,
something hinting at severe epilepsy, the girl, as if
tired of the doctor’s investigation, had only shrugged
and said:
"Mama's never gotten much fun out of life. I think
she simply didn't want to live anymore."
Like a blow to the head, the doctor suddenly felt,
simply felt, that the girl was bad to the bone. She had
killed her mother, although he had no clue about the
way she had done it. There was witchcraft involved, of
this he was certain. He wanted the girl put away into
perpetual confinement.
Or better still: this devilish girl would burn on the
stake! He knew a priest who had a reputation for
getting all information he needed in no time. No witch
had ever eluded him. Auguste Millefeux, a Godabiding man, would make sure the priest got word
before sunset. With righteous satisfaction, the
physician decided that the little witch’s fate was sealed.
Michelle, looking at him levelly, probed his brain like a
surgeon’s scalpel. Oh how easily she could read his
thoughts!
Not liking what she found in his mind, she decided to
offer him a new idea instead; an idea he couldn’t
possibly refuse.
As if hit by a heavy club, the doctor flinched back. His
eyes glazed up with unspeakable dread as he slowly
retreated towards the door. Somehow, the satanic girl
had entered his mind and was now commanding his
every move and thought!
He walked home in a mind-numbing daze, his head
nearly bursting with a vicious headache never
experienced before. Hardly able to keep himself on his
feet, he barely made it into the safety of his little
house near the place the once would become the Place
de la Concorde. He sat down, a mortal fear making his
breath come in harsh gasps.
The stroke had the devastating effect of Thor’s
hammer. Within a second, he couldn't move. There
was no pain, but the horrid defenselessness resembled
the feeling pigs go through after the butcher has
severed their throat, spilling their entire blood, until
the screaming swine budged no more.
Paralyzed from his head down, unable to speak, the
Auguste Millefeux sat in his chair. Obscure chanting
rang through his head, obscene figures danced before
his eyes, and then he saw her, the red-haired girl who’d
cast a deadly spell on him, saw her grinning a
monstrous sharp-toothed grin, and his mind snapped.
Auguste Millefeux, a good Christ and physician, lived
on as a functional vegetable, drooling, unable to speak,
and quite insane. Only a few months later, precisely six
lunar months after the stroke, Michelle Daflon
mercifully allowed him to die.
Michelle, growing up in the municipal orphanage
thereafter, never spoke of her mother again – ever.
Her talent for the craft was enormous. Virtually
drawing information out of thin air, she kept
developing her various talents. With those talents, a
remarkable intelligence and an insatiable sexual
appetite, she quickly advanced first into bourgeoisie,
than became a mademoiselle of the upper class. In no
time, she was in great demand as a mistress, and many
men would have died gladly for a night with her.
Actually, many did.
By the age of twenty, several rich men in high places
had either committed suicide over her, or died under
strange circumstances.
Soon, Michelle Daflon knew more about men,
manipulation and power than most beings on earth.
Her role in society became a mere camouflage. She
was a dame de la grande societé during the day, and an
avid sorceress at night.
As she expected, envied by too many people, one day
Michelle found herself accused of witchcraft. Still a
long way from the height of her power, a group of
frustrated men, rejected by the red-haired beauty,
managed to ambush her in the rue seize, the street
where she kept her favorite hideaway. It was a remote
street, unlit and in a neighborhood with a sordid
reputation. On her way to her secret apartment, five
angry men clubbed her down, raped and brutalized
her, and finally turned her over to the Pater
Ambrosius, the notorious witch-hunter the late
Auguste Millefeux had intended to inform.
She was formally accused of witchcraft and sentenced
to death by burning at the stake.
Other witches had burned before. Most of them had
been screaming, spitting abuse over the priests and the
parish, or just begging for mercy.
But not Michelle Daflon.
The panther-eyed woman saw this first gross attack on
her as a personal offense. Although not part of a real
witch’s coven yet, she had vast secret knowledge of
the ancient art of magic. It would have been a child’s
play to escape, but that was not her goal.
Over the years, she had indulged herself in a good
deal of activities involving excessive physical injury;
yet no one ever saw the wounds on her flesh, because
she learned to heal quickly. By the age of twenty-two,
no lesion ever marred her flesh for more than seconds.
She would give Pater Ambrosius and his minions a
lesson he wasn’t about to forget.
The day of her execution was scheduled for the
following Sunday, which gave the clerics plenty of
time to practice the noble art of torture.
This week, unforgotten in Paris’ long and remarkable
history, brought the clergy brand new aspects for
many decades of superstitious fears and gory
nightmares.
The witch, never losing her seductively beautiful smile,
let them tear off her fingernails, brand her flesh,
submerge her in icy water – then laughed at the
torturers’ shocked faces as her nails grew back in
seconds, her flesh healed in the flash of a moment,
and she reappeared after ten minutes under water
without so much as a visible gasp for breath.
They tried new tricks on her, performed the most
complex and vilest tortures seen in human history,
tormented her with instruments no man or woman
had ever survived – in vain. Michelle Daflon, a cold
smile on her lecherous lips, asked for more.
And she wasn’t faking.
In fact, she enjoyed physical pain as much on herself
as she loved to perform it on others.
The day before her execution, seemingly tired of their
futile attempts, she proclaimed theatrically:
“You impotent fools – haven’t you seen enough?
Don’t you see I’m innocent? No?”
Then, in mock misery: “Oh, you wicked, wicked men!
So I shall burn at the stake then! Poor, poor me!
What’s to become of my immortal soul?”
And then, in a happily lunatic voice that had all of her
torturers flinch back: “All right – you want to see me
burn? So burn I shall. But before I go up into flames, I
will take all of you with me. May Lord Satan bear
witness to what I’m saying: you shall burn in hell for
your blasphemous acts!”
Screaming out the last sentence, all of the tough and
hardened torturers were seized by a superstitious fear
never experienced before. The noise of running
sandals filled the musty dungeon, and Michelle was left
alone, hanging from two solid chains fixed into the
moldy ceiling.
Easily sliding out of the cuffs, she landed on the floor
with feline grace. Casually, she ambled over to her
single cell, locked the door from within without using
a key, and stretched out on the cold stone floor.
Two minutes later, her pulse was down on five beats
per minute, and her entranced mind was accumulating
power like a hellish battery.
By the Sunday of her execution, she had reached a
notoriety unmatched by any other witch or sorcerer
before in Paris. Pushing and shoving around the soonto-be-lit pyre, half the city was watching as two
extremely nervous guards tied up the serenely smiling
Michelle Daflon and tightened the knots with
trembling hands. The crowd, mostly roisterers and
good-for-nothings, didn’t seem able to incite
themselves into the usual pre-execution frenzy that
day. They wanted to see the witch go up in flames all
right, but no one seemed eager to approach too
closely. From a distance they assessed as fairly safe,
they watched the sorceress with unconcealed mindless
hate and superstitious fear in their eyes.
Pater Ambrosius approached, carrying a flaming torch
in his right hand, a dark-clad symbol of righteousness.
As he stood before the still unlit pyre, he paused for
drama and cleared his throat noisily. He didn’t like this
witch, not a bit. He didn’t know why, but looking at
her made him feel weak and vulnerable – as if she
were a circling vulture and he a scurrying mouse on an
open field. Burning her would be a real treat, ridding
himself of her a bliss. Furthermore, this righteous act
would consolidate his power for years to come.
When he opened his mouth to begin his sermon of
condemnation, he was appalled to find his tongue no
longer obeyed his will. Like a dead snail, it lay limply in
his mouth. A rapid panic was building up in his chest,
but he didn’t have much time to mourn his loss of
speech. The torch in his hand, once an inanimate stick
of dead wood, began to drag him towards the pyre!
A murmur came from the crowd as the dark-robed
priest struggled to keep control over the fugitive torch.
Of course he could have let go of the possessed stick,
but his dignity was at stake, and he chose to pretend
he was carrying the flame towards the pyre without
losing time with silly ceremonies. But as he reached
the towering pile of firewood, his fear got the better
of him, and he decided to let go. Alas, his hand, just
like his tongue, betrayed him. His fingers were
clamped around the torch in a death-grip, and the
priest was dragged onto the pyre like a puppet on a
string.
From the stake she was bound to, Michelle smiled
mockingly at the approaching Pater Ambrosius.
“Come and join my suffering,” she whispered, and the
priest understood he was lost. His legs and feet joined
in to the high treason of the limbs, heaving him onto
the very top of the wooden peak.
At last, he came to stand next to the witch. Winking at
him, she blew him a kiss, and a hiss of indignancy
came from the fearful crowd.
"You have preached hell from your altar for too long,
my dear", the witch whispered to the priest. "Time to
experience it…"
In helpless panic, Pater Ambrosius watched as his
right hand against his will lifted the burning torch
towards the sky – and suddenly thrust it into the dry
firewood beneath his own feet. A few seconds later, a
paralyzed Pater Ambrosius stood stiff and mutely in
an inferno of fiery tongues licking up along his robe,
turning his flesh into charcoal parchment.
Dumbfounded, unable to comprehend what was going
on before their incredulous eyes, the crowd watched
the fire’s merciless fury consume the shriveling priest.
Bound to the long pole next to the burning priest,
Michelle Daflon stood in a conflagration of sizzling
flames, completely unscathed by the hellish heat.
Listening to the melody of the crackling fire, she
watched the mayhem around her with cool interest.
When the crowd’s paralysis finally broke, several fellow
priests and guards hurriedly approached the pyre with
long steely pokers, trying to remove the already
scorched priest from the holocaust. Michelle, coldly
contemplating their futile struggles, waited for just the
right moment the let the pyre crash down on the
sweat-covered fools below.
It was a sight to behold as the pyre collapsed like a
sparkling avalanche. Numerous victims found instant
death. Many more were set on fire by the blast. They
blindly ran into the crammed up masses of people. In
utter panic, the crowd began a stampede like a herd of
crazed buffaloes, ruthlessly trampling anybody into the
muddy ground who hindered their escape.
Under Michelle’s malignant influence, the hungry
flames jumped from priest to guard, from maid to
farmhand, from beggar to aristocrat. In a spectacle
never seen before, the fleeing crowd, jammed by the
narrow streets of Paris, went up in flames. It seemed
as if all people of Paris had been imbibed in resin:
although most of them succeeded at ripping off their
burning clothes, their very skin seemed to keep on
smoldering like humid leaves in a campfire.
The ubiquitous screams were heard in the remotest
parts of the city, and rumors of the tragedy spread to
the most isolated parts of Europe.
Like a queen graciously descending from her throne,
Michelle Daflon stepped off the fragrant pyre, the still
hungry flames not as much as blackening her clothes.
Watching the uncountable writhing or silenced bodies
scattered around with great satisfaction, she walked
away. Down in Marseille, a ship was awaiting her. Her
journey on the dark path had only begun.
Of the escapees, few survived. Of those who did,
most chose to forget.
The mass cremation never made it into recorded
history, and all that survived was a hazy legend.
Life on earth went on. Time passed, and people died,
while Michelle Daflon lived and thrived like a strange
and poisonous plant.
Michelle easily mastered painful rituals in different
covens and exotic countries, sharpening her powers
like a surgeon hones his scalpel. Some uncanny
magnetism brought her to all eminent warlocks and
forgotten lore the world had to offer, and she kept
learning with a cannibalistic eagerness. Year after year,
decade after decade, century after century, she roamed
the world, a legend of darkness in herself.
Inevitably, she found the most powerful coven in the
world, and moving up the hierarchy like a highly
volatile rocket, she didn't hesitate when it came to
eliminating other powerful opponents.
Two years before, when she was going through a
mortal rivalry with Ezon, an old magus aspiring for
First Apostle and the only serious contestant aside of
her, she didn’t know if she would come out of this
combat alive. The very fear of failure was new to
Michelle, who was a born winner.
Ezon was cunning, terribly strong, gifted, and
experienced. His weak point, pitiful as it was, turned
out to be his sex. Michelle had many skills, and she
was an unsurpassed expert about all things fleshly. She
spread a rumor that had Ezon believing that the way
he was pushing her off the road in this contest had
left her devastated, and that she had developed a
nearly fanatical admiration for him.
Certain of his impending victory, Ezon discovered
that Michelle could be more than a beaten contestant
to him. He no longer seemed immune against
Michelle's intoxicating sex appeal, and in due course
and mysterious ways, his notoriously dangerous
intelligence seemed to wane, and the motley crew of
the Coven began to whisper. Unthinkable as it was, he
seemed to turn deaf to the warning words of
Michelle’s other opponents in the Coven.
Ezon the dreadful turned into the proverbial moth
nearing the combusting flame. He couldn’t resist
Michelle’s bodily promises any longer.
One day, he disappeared, like a drop of dew vanishes
into thin air as the sun licks it from its leaf. Under
normal conditions, nobody would have been alarmed,
since it was his habit to vanish from the face of the
earth and suddenly reappear weeks or months later.
But this time, the entire Coven was well aware of the
price that was at stake, and of the ruthlessness of the
only two competitors remaining in this final stage of
the race. They knew that somewhere in this world a
terrible showdown was taking place. Everybody
seemed to be holding their breath. It took seven days
until they learned who was the new First Apostle.
Ezon was found dead in a small grove of olive trees
near Palermo, his genitals stuffed in his mouth, his
heart removed, his skin scorched. The corpse
remained an unidentified victim of murder in Palermo,
the police being doubtful whether the crime could be
ascribed to the Mafia. The victim’s identity was never
established, for the particulars Ezon had adopted were
those of a Venetian nobleman deceased two hundred
years ago.
Michelle came back looking fresh and vital as a Persian
rose.
And so, at the tender age of four-hundred-twelve,
Michelle became part of the Unholy Trinity. This had
been in the year 1478 A.D., the year the Spanish
Inquisition became a national institution. The sudden
flare up of the witch-hunts was mostly due to
Michelle's doing. There was no need for unnecessary
competition, really.
With no rivals left, and with all of her enemies fearful
of her powers, all she needed to do was to prove
herself worthy to the Master, whom she had not seen
in any of His appearances yet.
She was fully aware that the Coven couldn't teach her
anything she didn't know already. But she knew what
she wanted. Her goal was to use the Coven's united
power to become Satan's right hand: the new Vice.
And there lay the problem.
Satan's present Vice was an ominous man or creature
most people didn’t dare talk about. Very few of the
Coven’s members claimed to ever have seen him, and
the general impression was that no human knew his
present appearance for sure. Rumor had it that one of
his current manifestations was the ill-famed Balthazar
Phomette, former professor of archeology at the
Sorbonne, but no one could clearly prove or dismiss
this rumor.
Michelle, dealing in higher knowledge, was the only
who knew for sure that Phomette was the Vice indeed.
Ranking highest in the Coven right after him, she
received direct orders from Satan’s man or creature of
confidence. She rarely saw him in person. Their
contacts were mostly of spiritual nature, and those
were troubling enough. Although she couldn't wait to
see the Phomette wriggling in the dust like the worm
she would squash, she had to acknowledge his
incredible supremeness. His powers were of such
unbelievable nature that she strongly doubted he was
of human origin, and in spite of her own indisputable
forces, she knew her time for mutiny had not come
yet.
Meanwhile, she was part of the Unholy Trinity, and
that was almost good enough – for the time being.
Courtesy to her prodigious mind, her inherited talent,
and a character viler than any swamp-creature, she had
grown to a size no witch or sorcerer could challenge.
Burning to prove her worthiness to the Master, she
soon found that this was the hardest hurdle by far.
Suddenly, her meteor-like ascent seemed to come to a
grinding halt, and the unexpected stagnation nearly
drove her berserk with aimless fury.
There were no enemies to smite, no dragons to
slaughter. She had no clue what she was supposed to
be looking for, although her most secret heart knew
that the Crimson King expected something more than
extraordinary before he’d even waste another thought
on her.
The vacuum of fatuous watchfulness was worse than
any particular adversary she could have fought. To
make things worse, a punishment in the manner of the
“cold treatment” seemed to have been sentenced over
her: for many decades, there was no word from Satan
or Phomette.
Never in her life Michelle Daflon had felt so forsaken.
After uncountable nights of self-inflicted atrocities,
she swallowed her pride and prayed to the Unholy,
begging for guidance. Lord Satan kept ignoring her
prayers, as she’d known he would.
Aimlessly roaming the world, she eventually decided to
contact an entity with a reputation worse than her
own. Consciously committing a sacrilege towards
Satan’s league, she conjured an insidious and rarely
wicked demon from the Balinese tree of spirits, a foul
but uncannily powerful incubus from the lesser levels
of demonology, and the prize she paid for his service
was higher than she cared for. In the course of the
imp’s atrocious and gory ritual she experienced the
unspeakable agony of losing part of her immortal
soul; the incubus, eager like a poisonous swamp,
dissolved a part of her essence, thus performing a rite
uniquely reserved for the Crimson King.
It took her many months of total seclusion to recover
from the wound inflicted upon her soul, and her
condition remained critical for many weeks. But when
she finally emerged from her sequestration, a miracle
occurred. Whether by chance or through the evil
spirit’s help she never learned; all at once, she came
across the opportunity of her life, the chance she had
been waiting for. Inadvertently she found a trace
worth more than all the money in the world: she had
come within reach to expose the still unwitting and
unknown archenemy of the Coven, Satan’s nemesis par
excellence, whose return they all had expected and
feared for so long.
All at once, she held the ticket to her final destination
in her hand. And didn’t she deserve it! Pain and
frustration had been her chief companions over
innumerable decades, solitude her kingdom, agony and
madness her lovers.
But she had endeavored to reach her goal with
preternatural zeal, always knowing deep in her dark
heart that she was the chosen one, and she had
followed her path with the impetus and ruthlessness
of the world’s most uncompromising contract killer.
Still, there was no reason to get prematurely excited.
The fiend was not in the Coven’s hands yet. At first, all
they knew was that she was female, and that she came
from Libya. Not much info to start an international
manhunt. But the hunt soon began, nets were cast,
and Michelle, like a wise old cat sitting before the
mouse-hole, patiently waited to see what the catch
would bring.
And her patience, this time, was rewarded.
Like blood-hounds, her minions had followed the
Libyan trace from a dismal little place called Al Qatrun
to Tunis, from Tunis to Marseilles, and from there to
Paris. With its sophisticated methods, the Coven was
an organization much swifter and more efficient than
the CIA, the MI6 or any other so-called secret service.
Their investigation left over sixty witnesses dead in its
track, but that of course was firm policy. Cold-eyed
native Libyans came into the village of Al Qatrun, and
the self-elected new chieftain and former medicine
man suddenly disappeared. They combed through the
unending desert, and a group of notorious
headhunters soon fell pray to the vultures’ insatiable
appetite. In Tripoli and Tunis, two hospitals reported
staff people and patients missing.
One week ago, they had found her. Michelle, dying to
terminate the still naive messiah herself, prepared to
strike. To her utter bafflement, Phomette ordered her
back. For nearly five hundred years there had been no
sign from the Vice, and now, as she was getting ready
for greatest victory ever, he had the nerve to call her
back! Her bewilderment was complete when the Vice
told her that nobody – no one! – was to approach the
Libyan directly.
The new order was to terminate the Libyan’s soul
through the united forces of the Coven’s most
powerful members – but from a distance. Everybody
knew that the destruction of a human soul through
long-distance rituals was an endeavor almost fated for
defeat. Why would the Vice risk such a disaster? If
they failed their first attempt, the enemy would be
warned, and a dangerous process could be triggered.
The Libyan, now a sitting duck, might understand her
true vocation, and the situation could turn precarious
like it had two thousand years before.
For the first time since the manhunt had begun,
Michelle Daflon wondered if she had underestimated
the Libyan’s power after all.
Her worst premonitions soon came true. After three
consecutive nights of the most vicious attacks on their
victim, the nefarious ceremonial known as
Tanatosation failed. In spite of the nightmares –
which in fact were nothing but smoke screens for the
ritual’s true effect, the one of soul killing – their prey
survived.
But the disaster had its good side – at least for
Michelle. The Vice had outrageously miscalculated the
situation, and that was the starting shot for Michelle
who knew her time had come. She would dispose of
the Libyan through her own means, and after her
victory, she would openly challenge the Vice. She
knew she could count on Satan’s support. The only
thing the Crimson King truly detested was a loser. The
Vice had wasted his chance, and he would burn for it.
In all eternity.
Turning her mind away from her reveries and back to
the Sabbath ahead, she felt a slight uneasiness spoiling
her anticipation. There was a newcomer in their group,
a sissy novice she didn’t like a bit. Not only did he look
like an angel, he even seemed to be weak as a seraph.
Gideon was his name, and although he seemed eager
enough to prove himself a worthy member of the
Coven, he didn’t seem to have the backbone to be an
efficient and merciless agent in times of trouble. She
knew a potential loser when she saw one. But he had,
alas, passed the tests required by the Coven, and he
deserved a chance. Most members thought the
newcomer’s angelic and innocent face might be an ace
up their sleeve in case the Tanatosation definitely
failed.
Never mind this Gideon, she thought. Maybe the little
seraph would suffer a terrible accident soon enough.
Maybe he’d tragically jump to his death from his
squalid little apartment near the defense tomorrow,
after being charged with pedophilia blackmailing. All
Michelle had to do was snap her fingers.
The witch focused. The ritual had begun. Soon,
thirteen dark minds were assaulting a young Libyan
girl in a French mental asylum, their atrocious
thoughts creating nightmares acidic enough to dissolve
a human soul.
Two hours later, in her small apartment in the Rue de
Sèze, the witch stood before her baroque-framed
mirror, still wearing her cowl, like a bride would wear
her bridal dress the eve before her wedding. Her
devotion to the dark side of life didn’t clash with her
developed sense of vanity. Over the years, her feline
grace had grown along with her phenomenal talents,
which she used to conjure a physical appearance as
attractive and deluding as a rose with poisonous
thorns. Her immaculate white skin was always a little
cooler, her firm flesh slightly fresher than other
women’s. She knew how to hide from view the
gargoyle she was inside, and her beauty made heads
turn and voices whisper. Wherever she went, she
broke hearts and marred souls.
Gently, she took off her cowl, the garment’s rough
cotton still tingling her skin, and switched off the
lights. Naked, she ambled through the stillness of the
apartment. As motionless as a nocturnal predator she
stood by the open window overlooking the deserted
Rue de Sèze, her silhouette like a dark specter
brooding evil.
Monday – 10.15 a.m.
The congress presented itself on a high academic
level. There were, as expected, many authorities in the
field of psychiatry lecturing about new methods of
diagnosis and therapy. There was, not unexpectedly, a
lot of controversial opinion on the new ICD, the
international classification of disease. Interesting cases
were presented, often with even more enticing new
methods of therapy.
Marc, jet-lagged and foggy-headed, found it hard to
concentrate, and his notepad remained empty safe for
some listless scribbling. He had slept badly due to
different factors. Another concert in front of his hotel
until two in the morning, then a noisy couple next
door – a very noisy couple indeed! – and finally the
phone at five in the morning, with a wino’s voice
asking for Suzette. After that, he gave up his futile
attempts to sleep and went for an early morning walk
which turned out to be spectacular. The steep streets
leading up to Sacré Coeur were deserted, the air felt
fresh and crisp in his lungs, and the various fragrances
of the new day titillated his nostrils.
From the top, he could overlook Paris awakening in a
soft mist. Giddy with the excitement of being in this
famed city of history lived and relived, he had walked
around the Montmartre for two hours, before he
happily sat down on the tottering stool of a bistro,
where he devoured a croissant and a pain au chocolat,
rinsing it all down with a strong coffee. He decided
that life was beautiful after all, wished Megan to hell
one more time, and went back to the Timotel to get
ready for the congress.
Fatigue hit him after the second lecture. To keep
himself from dozing off, he turned his thoughts to the
lady of the nightmares. Had Philippe mentioned her
name? He thought not. The case was intriguing. Of
course he hadn’t shown Philippe his interest too
eagerly, knowing that with feigned ennui he’d lure the
Frenchman into spilling all his secret knowledge about
the mysterious woman.
Marc knew that Philippe was wading through
dangerous waters when he tried to introduce the
paranormal to the usually strictly orthodox ways of
Western medical thinking. Although there were more
things between heaven and earth than medical school
would teach, there also were a lot of trapdoors for
those who dared to venture further than they should –
before they knew it, they carried the stigma of heresy
and quackery, even in these enlightened times of
genetic cloning, cat scan and microsurgery.
The thought that maybe some mental disorders didn’t
follow the strict order of medical science but rather
bizarre pathways had been totally unthinkable to Marc
– until he met Philippe and his unusual way of
perceiving things. Philippe was impressive with his
mentality of granting any thought the possibility of
being true, yet without missing to scrutinize the
situation with a sharp mind, very much aware of the
likelihood of fraud and deception. Through many
long nightshifts in hospital, the two of them had dwelt
in the most interesting conversations, usually with
Philippe standing up for the more daring and out-ofthe-way interpretations of some – mostly medical –
cases, while Marc acted as the advocatus diaboli,
defending the allopathic and so-called academically
rational point of view of Western physicians, even
when he felt defeated by Philippe’s eloquently
presented evidence and didn’t believe in his own dull
rationalism any longer.
And now, there was this Libyan girl, confronting them
with yet another odd and ambiguous situation.
Philippe’s narration of the case had been eerily
exciting, but Marc wasn’t going to let himself being
dragged deep into the realms of esoteric before he
had seen the mystery child.
Most probably in bright daylight there won’t be the slightest
evidence of anything paranormal, Marc thought. She’s
probably just another schizophrenic after all, no matter what
Philippe is trying to make of it. Or is she?
During the short lunch break, he slept soundly on his
seat, and later on managed to concentrate on the more
interesting new facts of psychiatry. The first day’s
main topics were on the genetic factors of
schizoaffective disorders, the role of different
serotonin receptors in the limbic system, intrauterine
trauma and intoxication and its consequences on the
psychological evolution of the individual. The day’s
final applause was loud, and everybody left chatting
about the implications of what they had learned. Like
on many congresses before, many of his fellow
colleagues turned out to be pompous and arrogant
smart-asses when discussing medicine, and Marc
walked away quickly, before someone could draw him
into some unwanted and futile conversation.
From a public phone he called Philippe, who hadn’t
been able to attend the first day of the congress
because two of his colleagues were suffering from a
bad case of gastroenteritis, and he had to fill in for
them. Marc called him at the clinic, and the
receptionist paged him. Philippe sounded positively
exhausted, but he insisted on Marc coming to the
clinic right away. He gave him directions and told him
how to take the Metro to the Saint Joseph, since the
traffic in the streets once more was jammed.
When Marc was sitting in the rattling subway train, he
noticed an old gypsy woman staring at him. Her dark
beady eyes made him uncomfortable, and he looked
away. When he turned his eyes back to look at her
again, determined to stare her down, she was gone.
Monday – 6.10 p.m.
The Hôpital de Saint Joseph was a rather bulky and
unattractive end-of-the-century building, with some
discreet stone ornaments and coats of arms. It wasn’t
directly affiliated to the university hospital, but it was
involved with many studies which might never have
been possible on university level, because of its special
selection of patients. Although officially the university
took care of the unusual and severe cases, the Saint
Joseph was an unofficial research center for those
incurable patients the university hospital sooner or
later had to send on.
After the Libyan girl had been found comatose by one
of her neighbors, it had been just another coincidence
that Philippe had been on call and had to turn out.
When he saw her, he informed the university hospital,
which was in a total chaos because of a terrible bus
accident with over fifty casualties and an epidemic of
salmonella in the psychiatric ward. So he admitted her
to his own clinic, the Saint Joseph, knowing that they
had the facilities to pump out her stomach. The empty
tubes of Valium told him enough about the cause of
her coma. Retrospectively, Philippe was glad he had
taken her to the Saint Joseph. As it turned out after
the girl’s resuscitation, he found himself confronted
with a case he could handle better than any hospital
indeed.
Marc arrived half an hour later at the Saint Joseph and
identified himself at the reception. A nurse took him
to the restricted ward, where the unpredictable
patients resided – mostly attempted suicide or murder,
self-mutilation and public danger. A heavy-set nurse
opened the massive wire-glass door, and he had to
walk through a metal detector, which gave him an
uneasy feeling. The worldwide fear of terrorism had
wormed itself across the borders of France, which to
Marc seemed oddly alarming.
All at once he realized that the idea of meeting that
“interesting case” somehow didn’t appeal to him any
longer. Instead of feeling like a foreign consultant who
came to help a competent colleague narrowing down a
diagnosis, he felt like an intruder, a gaper looking for
the ravaged victim of an accident. What was he to do
with this woman anyway? He knew that Philippe could
handle the case by himself. It didn’t feel right to
expose the girl to further distress just to satisfy his
curiosity. Idle thoughts and lip service – he was here
now, and he would meet her. He vowed to keep the
transgression into her privacy to a strict minimum.
The nurse knocked on an inconspicuous white door. A
stained copper plate stated that this was Dr. Dubois’
office.
“Entrez!” a deep voice boomed, and Marc stepped in.
The nurse’s pager beeped, and she hurried to the
nearest wall phone.
Philippe Dubois was sitting in front of a small
computer, hammering away on the keyboard,
mumbling to himself. Then he turned around with a
weary now-what expression, recognized Marc and
beamed. He jumped up from his chair, nearly tilting it.
“Ah, you are here already!” The big Frenchman gave
his old friend a bone-breaking slap on the shoulder. As
Marc had expected, Philippe didn’t beat around the
bush but came straight to the point.
“Ready for Sharan?”
“So that’s her name?”
“Mais oui, that’s her name, haven’t I told you? Her full
name is even lovelier: Sharan Ibn Said Otuama.
Formerly, Sharan Devalle, courtesy to her stepparents,
but she decided to take her old Libyan surname again
when she was eighteen. Quite to her stepparents’ grief,
but that often happens, you know, back to the roots
and all that crap. Shall we go?”
“Does she know that I’m coming?”
“Yes, I informed her that an American colleague who’s
very specialized and competent might be able to help
her.”
“Philippe! How the hell...? The pathology of sleep is
your field! I’m just a neurotic New York shrink, and
you’re a schmock!” Marc gave him an exasperated
look, which the Frenchman waved off.
“You are neurotic and competent. I wouldn’t have told
you about her if I didn’t believe that maybe you could
help in this case! Ah, ces Amerloques! You’re way too
modest. What has Megan done to your ego?”
“Megan who?” Marc growled.
“Ah! That’s the way I like it!” Philippe gave him
another thunderous slap on the shoulder.
They left the office and walked down a long corridor.
A solid white door, identical to the one of Philippe’s
office, bore the number 48. Philippe had a quick look
through the spy-hole, then knocked and stepped in.
As they walked into the room, Marc could sense
something was amiss, but he quickly pushed aside the
thought when his eyes fell on Sharan Otuama, who lay
in bed like a forlorn child, staring at the ceiling. The
first thing Marc noticed were her beautiful, strangely
haunted eyes– eyes that spoke of sleepless nights and
unspeakable terror. Her face was exquisitely
sculptured, her skin a delicious café-au-laît color. He
couldn’t help staring at the scratches on her cheeks,
which looked recent enough to remind him of
Philippe’s story with the worms. If her skin-quality
was as good as it looked, there would remain no scars.
She looked first at Philippe and smiled wearily, then
her eyes fell on Marc and she frowned, clearly not too
thrilled to see an unfamiliar face.
“Sharan, meet Dr. Marc Lynch, whom I told you
about and who came here yesterday from New York.
Marc, this is Sharan Otuama.”
Marc noted the first name relationship that apparently
had been established quite naturally.
“Enchanté, Mademoiselle”, Marc mumbled
uncomfortably. Her roughed-up beauty made him feel
shy and ill at ease.
“Nice to meet you.” Her words came slightly slurred,
probably due to extreme and prolonged fatigue.
“Philippe has told me about, er, what happened to
you” Marc said, feeling dumb.
She gave Marc a searching glance, which nearly made
him squirm. He wondered what made him so nervous
about this girl. Certainly, she was pretty, but she didn’t
look like a beauty queen with her cheeks scratched and
raw. But there was this shine in her eyes...
“Can you help me, Dr. Lynch?” she suddenly asked,
no real hope in her unfathomable eyes. He wasn’t
prepared for the question, and, blushing, mumbled
that he certainly hoped so. Damn, she made him feel
like such a schoolboy!
Her voice, in spite of the discrete twinge of
exhaustion, carried authority. Although she hadn’t
slept for several days, there was a remarkable power
behind her quiet demeanor, a serene supremacy
seldom found in one so young. Under normal
circumstances, she certainly was a woman in charge of
her life, yet without the arrogance often seen in the
dominant.
“I need to sleep” she said, a barely noticeable
desperation in her voice. “I haven’t slept for three days
and three nights. If I can’t sleep soon, I would like to
die. I can’t face another night with those dreams.”
The words were spoken to nobody specific, but Marc
could sense that she meant him. Apparently, she really
believed that Marc was here to help. Cursing his friend
inwardly for introducing him as some kind of miracle
doctor, Marc sat down on a stool next to the girl and
gave her his most reassuring professional smile.
Meanwhile, Philippe quietly sat on a chair by Sharan’s
head, giving Marc the position of the treating doctor.
To his own surprise, Marc accepted the familiar role
almost gratefully. Not looking at her, he began the
questioning, fully aware that most questions had been
asked before by Philippe. He had to probe for those
questions unasked, secretly wishing to find at least
one. He had to start with the tedious basic questions,
just to watch and hear her speak. The first few answers
usually brought information more crucial than the
verbal content.
“Philippe told me that your dreams started quite
abruptly. Was there anything in your life that has been
different in the last few weeks before they began?”
“Nothing that I could think of ” said Sharan, closing
her eyes but quickly opening them again, as if she had
glimpsed something nasty in the two seconds of
darkness.
“I was preparing for my finals. I study archeology at
the Sorbonne. I spent my last few months in quite the
same way. I study mostly at home, from seven a.m. till
two p.m., and in the afternoon I work as an assistant
nurse at the Hotel Dieu hospital to finance my studies.
There was nothing unusual at all.” She recited all this
as if she’d gone through the lines a dozen times
before. Certainly Philippe had been as careful an
investigator as Marc.
“Any changes in social life? Any new friends, a new
boyfriend? The end of a relationship?” Marc asked.
Sharan scrutinized him through half-closed lids, as if
she expected him to ask her out for a date. Marc felt
very naked and embarrassed under her insinuating
gaze.
“Nothing of that kind, Dr. Lynch” she said slowly,
again closing her eyes wearily, before her lids fluttered
open again in obvious fright. Within an admirably
short moment, she regained her composure. It was an
impressive performance, considering what she had
gone through.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said softly. “I have few
friends, whom I haven’t seen often lately. I usually skip
breakfast, I have a sandwich or a salad for lunch, and
dinner is microwave stuff. Very boring and unhealthy, I
assume.” She said this unsmiling. Marc felt saddened
by the way she described her life in a few bleak
sentences.
Yet, she didn’t really appear to be an unhappy girl.
Beside her obvious exhaustion, she seemed to be a
woman at the beginning of a quest, patiently
contemplating the revolutions of the earth as she
prepared for a journey into the unknown.
“How about your side-job – anything unusual there?
Stress, arguments, difficult patients, mobbing, a feeling
of incompetence or being overworked?” Marc pushed
on.
There was a fleeting cloud of anger in her eyes, so
short that Marc wasn’t sure he had seen it at all. He
gazed at Philippe, but he appeared engrossed
scribbling down notes on his pad. Marc turned his
eyes back on Sharan and gave her an inquisitive look.
Give the patient time to speak. Wait a bit longer, and
she’ll speak some more.
She held his gaze, then looked down at her slender
bronze-colored fingers. Formerly manicured, two nails
were broken, probably in the process of slashing her
face while in the grip of the dreams.
“A few days ago, they decided to sack me. For my own
good, they say.” She looked at Marc meaningfully, as if
urging him to ask the crucial question. He complied.
“Why would they do that? Did you do any wrong?”
“Of course not” she said, exasperated. “As an assistant
nurse, I have very limited responsibility – why, what
can one do wrong? Use the wrong soap on a patient,
stumble over the chamber pot, feed a stroke patient
too quickly? It’s a job that doesn’t require much brain,
Dr. Lynch, and I believe I performed very well, and all
my superiors confirmed this. It’s just that – well, some
patients started acting weird, and some people thought
it has something to do with me.” She stopped to blow
a strand of jet-black hair from her face. It fell back on
her nose, and she pushed it away irritably. There was a
strange recurrent transformation to behold. Whenever
the transient spark of irritability crossed her features,
within a second her face relaxed again, as if her facial
muscles were too exhausted to hold the mimic – or as
if negative emotions didn’t really have any space in her
life.
Marc consciously didn’t look at her now, but asked in
the most soothing manner:
“Do you think those dreams could come from that, er,
confrontation? I mean, you don’t get dismissed every
day, do you.”
“I don’t believe my being fired has triggered my
dreams. I heard of my dismissal a week before the
dreams, why should there be such a delay? And such
dreams wouldn’t be adequate even if I heard my whole
family had been killed in a car accident.”
As an afterthought: “Well, maybe that’s just because I
never had a real family...”
Marc’s senses were fully focused now. He could see he
was on the verge of opening a door Philippe might
have missed. The Frenchman had stopped pretending
to be taking notes and watched the two others with
rapt attention.
Marc paused before asking the question which was to
decide if he was right.
“What exactly do you mean by saying some patients
acted weird?”
Again, the spark of annoyance vanished almost before
it could be seen for certain, and a solemn expression
came over her face. When she spoke, she did it with
the polite yet firm demeanor of an accused taking his
defense.
“Actually, I’d like to rephrase what I said. The others
said the patients acted weird. If you ask me, those
patients just stopped acting weird, which surprisingly
seems to have an unsettling effect on the hospital
staff.”
Both men remained silent. Since nobody interrupted
her, she resumed her story.
Exhausted as she was, she realized the talking helped
her keeping awake.
“There was this old man, I think he was an Alzheimer
patient admitted with gastric bleeding. He was
shouting Ludmilla, Ludmilla! all the time, every minute
of the day. I could hear him all the way to my ward,
although he was stationed in the west ward, which is
internal medicine, while I’m working –
sorry, was
working – in the surgical ward. One day, I went to see
him with the pretense to bring him a glass of water, in
case someone asked. I wanted to see who this poor
guy was who was missing his wife or daughter or
whomever so badly. I opened the door, he saw me,
and when he shouted “you’re not Ludmilla!” and there
was so much loss and pain in his voice, I lost my
courage. I didn’t want to be found in a room where I
didn’t belong – others have been accused of theft
before. So I quickly closed the door again and hurried
back to my ward.”
She hesitated, then looked at Marc gravely with those
beautiful and weary eyes of hers.
“The day after, there were no shouts. I thought that he
might have died. I got scared. Then the commotion
started. Even Dr. Edwards, our resident, kept going to
the west wing. Silly as it sounds, I feared that someone
had killed the yelling man, and that I might have been
seen in his room. It is quite difficult to get information
on patients when you’re not a doctor or a real nurse
yourself. But finally, Dr. Edwards told me what had
happened. Apparently, the patient had been demented
for many years, as I said, allegedly due to Alzheimer’s.
They had tried those Alzheimer medicaments on him
without any improvement. Ludmilla was his late wife
who had died fifteen years before. He had taken up
shouting her name two years ago, and nobody could
stop him. There was no sense left in his brain.
And suddenly snap! the shouting stopped. The man
talked sense and was dismissed a sane and healthy
person two days later. It was a miracle. Not that I was
too fascinated. I don’t know much about mental
diseases; I thought a spontaneous recovery might
happen at any time. Dr. Edwards told me otherwise.
Although he wasn’t a psychiatrist, he told me a lot of
interesting things, especially after the other spontaneous
recoveries” – she stressed the two words sarcastically –
“Well, I think he liked my interest in medicine. He
didn’t try to start an affair with me, and I appreciated
that very much.”
She paused, closing her eyes, again opening them with
a start. She was fighting sleep in a nearly superhuman
way she wouldn’t sustain much longer. The horror of
the nightmares was giving her multiple shots of
adrenaline that still pulled her through endless hours
of unwanted wakefulness, but even a layman could
plainly see that she was nearing her limit.
“So, there were other patients who got miraculously
healed?” Marc asked, searching for signs of paranoid
thinking in the way she perceived things. So far, it was
reassuring to acknowledge she had not claimed to be
linked to those occurrences.
She scrutinized Marc once more, this time to see if he
was being sarcastic or not – whether she had a keen
talent for picking up vibes of untruthfulness, or
whether the prolonged lack of sleep made her a little
suspicious, one couldn’t tell.
In her own time, she resumed the story.
“There was a young boy on my ward – Eddie,
everybody just called him Eddie – well, Eddie had
been suffering from bad depressions ever since he was
a kid. Tried to kill himself twice. He was admitted
because of a burst appendicitis. He wasn’t suicidal
then, I think, but very downhearted and depressed.
The operation had been complicated, I don’t know the
details. I didn’t know anything about Eddie when I had
to wash him the first time – he was too weak to take a
shower yet – and I only saw this sad teenage boy,
staring at the wall with empty eyes. There was nothing
I could do for him, so I did my job and left. Eddie
hardly realized I’d been there at all. Ten minutes later
he called for Dr. Edwards. Apparently Eddie had been
turned inside out, telling Dr. Edwards that all of a
sudden he could feel himself again, that there seemed
to be a reason for being alive. He got very excited,
which only led Dr. Edwards to believe that his
depression had switched into a manic phase – until
Eddie pointed out that ever since I had touched him, his
life had changed. That started the whole turmoil
which ensued.”
She sighed heavily, then yawned like the world’s most
tired woman, which she probably was.
“I won’t bother you with the details, unless you need
them. There was nothing sexual between us, even if
that’s what the staff wanted to hear. I only washed his
back, legs and torso. I didn’t wash his belly because it
was much too tender after the operation. I think this
world is tainted with double-entendres, and since
Eddie had phrased his sentence in an unfortunate way,
his sentence – you know, “since she touched me” –
spread across all the wards like a tabloid’s glossiest
headline. I don’t think Eddie meant me any harm, but
he triggered mayhem. Dr. Edwards was the only
person who ever believed me. It’s all a storm in a cup
of tea. Instead of being happy about a man feeling
better after years of suffering, they try to turn it all
into a sex crime. I assume that jealousy is the key
word. Many people in hospital wanted to date me, but
I usually keep my distance.”
Only few people could have stated such fact the way
she did, making the listener feel her genuine
humbleness instead of the arrogance her words
should have carried.
As she narrated, her voice weakened ever so slightly.
“There were four more patients with different mental
disorders beside their physical problems that had them
admitted to our ward. I never knew how many people
are mentally deranged. Three of them got cured of
their mental problems, and the chief resident and the
medical board came to the conclusion that it always
happened after they saw me!”
Sharan looked plainly exasperated now, and she barely
spoke above a whisper.
“How did your superiors get word of all these events?
This Dr. Edwards seems like a nice guy the way you
describe him. Did he leak the information?”
“I don’t think so. You know how rumors spread. But
mostly, there was Hernandez, a Cuban male nurse,
who seemed very eager to spread the gospel that I had
healing powers. He was one of those I had turned
down a few months before, and I don’t think he has
any friendly feelings left for me.
The chief resident, Dr. Paxton, obviously didn’t like
this kind of gossip at all. They had the cheek to admit
that they were very satisfied with my work, but
couldn’t tolerate superstitious nonsense creating a
mess in their hospital. As if the rumors were my fault!
They even apologized for this awkward step they felt
forced to take, but their decision was irrevocable. They
offered me three months’ pay, and that was that.
Yesterday would have been my last working day.”
“And the nightmares started the day after your
interview with Dr. Paxton?” Marc asked gently,
although inside he felt slightly disappointed. The
dreams were an exaggerated, maybe slightly
pathological reaction to the stress of being fired.
Nothing too exciting about that.
“No. The dreams came about a week later. After the
interview, I had two more weeks to work, but on a
different ward. In the two days I worked there, only
one patient got “healed”, and there was no uproar or
scandal this time.”
“Did anybody specific give you the impression they
didn’t like your influence on the patients – imaginative
or real? Did anybody threaten you?”
“I can’t remember anybody saying anything negative
about this strange power I was rumored to have. But
many people treated me... differently. I can’t quite put
the finger on it, but it was like a superstitious awe,
maybe even fright. They tried to act natural in an
unnatural way.”
Marc glanced over to Philippe, who gave him an
appraising look, as if trying to say Didn’t I know that you
could help?
“Yes, I understand what you mean. Please go on.”
“That’s all, I think. I cannot promise I told you
everything precisely the way it happened. Since the
dreams began I’m not quite myself anymore. As I told
Philippe before, I’ve been having nightmares almost
every night since I can remember – but those were
harmless, the kind that makes you feel uneasy,
sometimes scared, but you always know they are just
dreams. The new dreams I get are – oh, I this must
sound so pathetic to you... well, I assure you, these
dreams can’t possibly come from within me!”
Her eyes now bore all the sadness and despair of a
lost baby seal. Marc felt that he had to be careful with
this young woman. Albeit the stress she had gone
through, and in spite of her spoilt face, she was way
too attractive. He gave Philippe a quick look,
indicating that he thought they should leave. The
Frenchman looked pained, as if trying to convey that
on the contrary they should not leave, now that they
were making such terrific progress.
Before Philippe had a chance to protest, Marc got up
from his creaking stool and looked at Sharan earnestly.
“Thank you very much, mademoiselle. I think your
information might be of great assistance in finding a
way to help you. Meanwhile, with the permission of
Dr. Dubois, I would like the nurse on duty to keep you
awake even if – excuse me – even if she has to pour
iced water over your face. I believe that we must keep
you from dreaming at all costs, until we find a cure.”
The Libyan looked at Marc with a new expression. Still
there was this immense fatigue and despair in her eyes,
but also a faint hint of gratefulness. Philippe looked
slightly confused, both at the ease with which the
American had made her talk, and at his friend’s urge to
leave so quickly.
They emerged onto the empty corridor. Philippe
turned to face his friend and grinned like a baboon.
“You amaze me, doctor Lynch! I’ve spent many hours
talking to our patient, and she always kept me on the
wrong track. I think she likes you! Don’t worry, our
law-suits are way cheaper than yours – you can safely
ask her out for dinner, but only after we’ve properly
cured her.”
“I hope we come in time to do so.” Marc looked quite
concerned.
“What makes you think we’re late? She looks fine for
someone who hasn’t slept for nearly a week. Oh yes,
and what’s the story about keeping her awake to avoid
the dreams? You sound more esoteric than I’ve ever
been! What exactly are you trying to keep away? Hey,
you should be the one asking me those questions!”
Marc seemed lost in space for a moment, and when he
realized his friend was still waiting for an answer, he
smiled somewhat sheepishly.
“I don’t know. Maybe the fact that you introduced me
to the patient makes me see ghosts where there’s
nothing but fog. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but –
well, my feeling tells me this girl is one hundred percent
sane, and still there’s something wrong with her. Shit,
this must be the most unprofessional statement I’ve
ever made, but that’s what it all boils down to. What
do you think of ? Paranoia? Drugs? I don’t believe so.”
Philippe hesitated, surreptitiously glanced up and
down the corridor, then took his friend’s arm and
ushered him back to his office.
“We must be careful,” he said quietly. “There are ears
everywhere, and I have been close to ruining my
reputation too often in the past.”
They entered the small office and Philippe quickly
locked the door. Facing Marc again, he looked
unusually serious.
“I don’t have to mention that all I tell you now is very
private and confidential. I completely trust you on
this.”
Marc slightly nodded his head.
“Of course we had the girl’s blood and urine checked
on admission. There is absolutely no evidence of
drugs of any kind. All we found were traces of the
Valium I mentioned, and some dishwasher tabs in the
gastric juices we pumped out of her. I think we can
exclude psychotropic agents safely. Which leaves us
with some endogenous psychotic mechanism. But
there is one thing that doesn’t match. I’ve analyzed
Sharan’s personality thoroughly. Her dreams, which
she has described so vividly, are positively not her
dreams. They absolutely do not fit into her
personality-pattern, which is a chapter in itself.
Although every person has a wide scope of dreams,
there are always some details linking the dream to the
person’s anima – a memory, an association, a thought.
And Sharan’s dreams, although pictured in an
amazingly colorful way, show no connection with her person
at all!”
For a moment, the Frenchman looked like the
caricature of a mad scientist. Seeing the glow in his
eyes, Marc realized once more how important the
subject of occultism was to his friend. For that was
what he clearly was hinting at: according to his
analysis, Sharan’s dreams had to come from an
external source. The mere idea, thought by a medically
trained brain, was absurd, and Marc shuddered. It
wasn’t the implication Philippe’s statement brought. It
was the fact that he, Marc, believed it too – and this
after not even half an hour with Sharan, the woman of
the dreadful dreams.
Since a confrontation of medicine and occultism
seemed inevitable, Marc assumed his long-ago
established position of the advocatus diaboli. He
couldn’t gullibly look at this case with Philippe’s eyes
before fighting for a good old-fashioned and rational
explanation.
Sitting down on a small and battered sofa, he
inspected an X-ray picture on a neon-light display and
asked casually:
“Are you positive she’s not acting? What makes you
feel so sure she’s for real?”
Philippe, realizing they had begun the traditional
crossing of swords, smiled furtively.
“I don’t think she’s acting, or lying. I think of myself
as a rather good lie detector. And this girl might be a
lot of things, but I am positive that she’s honest.
Furthermore, for her age she’s the most mature person
I’ve ever met.”
“What if she’s a mythomaniac? What if she enjoys a
good story to the point of getting herself admitted to
a loony asylum? Maybe she just made up those
dreams. Maybe she’s the living reincarnation of
Scheherazade.”
“Bullshit! Why should she fake it? Why should she go
through all this trouble? Nothing indicates she
suffered from depressions before her admission. I
think she lived a normal life, and there’s no reason to
complicate that normal life with a completely
nonsensical story of nearly-lethal nightmares.”
“Picture this: she was suffering from a bad case of
lovesickness, tried to commit suicide, later on felt
embarrassed, and covered up the whole mess by
creating this fantastic rigmarole.”
Philippe grimaced.
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“Well – no. But it’s possible.”
“How about her blood pressure? Her EEG? If she
does that on purpose, she’s one hell of an actress!”
It is hard to argue when you feel your opponent is
right. Marc changed his tactic slightly.
“All right. Let’s assume the dreams are not hers. Who
sends them? The lone ranger? CNN? Ozzy
Osbourne?”
“Obviously someone who doesn’t care too much for
her. I was puzzling over this question myself, but then
you came and made her spill the story of her lives and
times as a miracle worker. As she pointed out herself,
she didn’t really make friends by healing those poor
sods, if that’s what she did.”
It was Marc’s turn to flash an insolent grin at his
friend.
“Oh, I don’t really doubt she does have healing
powers. With her physique and her humble, honest
aura she’s got all it takes to make people feel better.
But we’re getting off the track. If for argument's sake
we assume that someone is sending her those dreams
– which technically of course is impossible – do you
think it would be someone from the Hôtel Dieu? One
of her bosses? Dr. Paxton? A patient she failed to
cure?”
“How about one of those apparently numerous men
she turned down? Remember this Cuban, what’s his
face, ah yes, Hernandez? I reckon he did a good job
spreading the gospel like one of Jesus’ most fervent
apostles. What if he did even more than that?”
“Well, even if he went to the North Pole to preach the
news to the Eskimos, would he go to the pain of
sending the poor girl the sickest nightmares? No, don’t
worry, I won’t even ask how he sent them, I’m sure you
have your answers ready.” Marc dramatically held up
his arms in mock resignation.
“Of course I do. But to answer your first question, I
think we once more must dive into those depths you
were taught not to visit. Let’s assume Sharan Otuama
has some weird power to heal mentally sick people
with her sheer presence – who would feel offended?
The Church, for one. The Satanists, for the other. The
pharmaceutical industry might be the third party. All
of them would have a helluvalot to lose. Why, the
Church would lose its monopoly on miracle healing,
the pharma tycoons could burn down their psychodrug factories.” He paused, clearing his throat
dramatically for effect.
Marc hesitated, scenting the answer to his next
question like a German sheep dog. The question at
hand would irreversibly lead them into the realm of
the great beyond, the domain of the forbidden crafts.
He knew that once the subject was breached, there
would be no easy stand for the rational psychiatric
thinking of his daily life – Philippe would look to that
in his incomparable way. But there was no backing off
now. Marc truculently narrowed his lips into a thin
line.
“And?”
“And what?” Philippe said, rising his brows innocently.
“Where do the Satanists fit in?” Marc asked genially.
“Ah! Here we go!” Philippe’s face was gleaming, and
he looked like a medieval priest getting ready to preach
Dante’s purgatory to a guilt-ridden superstitious
crowd.
“The Satanists... now, let’s assume –“
“Just the facts, man, just the facts” Marc interrupted,
trying to ease his own tension by making a feeble
effort at humor.
“Let me speak, my friend! Let’s assume the people
healed by Sharan were not suffering from what the
ICD would list as psychiatric diseases. Let’s assume my
old pal from Louisiana – you remember, Paul Rostand,
the one who became an exorcist – let’s assume he was
right, and there exists something like possession –
possession induced by exogenous forces. For
simplicity’s sake we’ll say all evil comes from Satan,
whoever he might be. And let us assume Sharan
Otuama has an effect on calamity like a broadspectrum antibiotic on bacteria – well, Satan’s lot
would have a brand-new arch-fiend to fight!”
The Frenchman was clearly enjoying himself, and the
expression on his face left no doubt to the fact that he
absolutely believed in spirits and possession, but Marc
knew that already.
Suddenly, Marc’s face lit up. Philippe, expecting to
meet the usual protest, looked surprised, maybe even a
bit apprehensive.
“Well, what now? Don’t tell me you can already
disprove my theory!”
“We’ll see. Enough theories for today”, said Marc,
squinting his eyes slyly. “Tomorrow, we will see. We’ve
got work to do right now. I want you to arrange
something for me...”
Monday – 11.39 p.m.
Softly, her lids descended, and her wearied eyes welcomed the
balmy darkness. There was nothing but a very brief pause, then
she saw herself sitting on a marble throne in a dark temple with
high walls, walls that were covered with strange, threatening
symbols. The atmosphere felt hostile and desolate. There were
footfalls somewhere behind her. She tried to look around, but her
head was firmly bound to the stony back of her throne, bound
by a metal clasp around her forehead. Terror seized her, and she
tried to jerk her firmly tied body free. A hand touched her neck,
a cold and pallid hand with claws for fingernails, and she
screamed –
- screamed, and there was a blinding
white light, and then the nurse said “shhh, everything
is all right, but you mustn’t sleep. Dr Dubois ordered
me to keep you awake, but I had to go to the toilet,
and I’m afraid I came a few seconds late, sorry ‘bout
that, won’t happen again. You okay?”
Sharan looked at the nurse’s chubby middle-aged face.
She looked tired too.
“I was dreaming again... thanks for waking me.” She
shuddered, trying not to imagine what would have
happened if the nurse had come a few minutes later.
“I’ll be sitting right next to you the whole night, so
don’t worry.” Smiling reassuringly, the nurse picked up
a tabloid and reassumed her position next to Sharan’s
bed again.
“How long can a human being survive without sleep?”
Sharan asked, her voice barely above a mumble.
“Oh, much longer than you think, sweetheart!” the
nurse replied cheerfully. “We had patients who had
forgotten what sleep is. They never slept at all. It
didn’t kill them, at least not as long as they were here.
Do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please, that would be nice.”
But instead of leaving to fetch the coffee, the nurse
just smiled at Sharan in an eerie way. In her big face, a
horrid transformation began; her formerly pale blue
eyes became scarlet and grew to the size of
watermelons, her chubby cheeks turned purple and
scaly. Before Sharan could scream again, a deep-sea
monster that evaded description was devouring her.
The freak creature dug its huge fangs into her neck
and started jerking her to and fro, trying to rip her
head off. Sharan could taste blood gushing into her
mouth, choking her. When she tried to scream one last
time, she aspired her own blood deep into her lungs,
and while she was coughing and vomiting, the fishmonster ground her skull to bone meal. Still, the
shaking and jerking went on, and Sharan wondered
when the agony would stop, and why was this scaly
thing shouting hello! hello?...
“Hello! Hello!” shouted the nurse, shaking Sharan
vehemently, her pale blue eyes very concerned. “Oh
dear, you fell asleep again, just before I could bring
your coffee – oh dear, whatever did you dream, you
were screaming like mad in your sleep!”
Silently, her eyes wide, wide open, Sharan began to
weep.
The desecrated church – Bois de Boulogne
Monday – 11.58 p.m.
The twelve devilish monks where chanting their eerie
chant, their eyes burning with ecstatic fanaticism, their
ears deaf to the mind-shattering screams of the young
woman, their hearts immune to the unspeakable
torture inflicted on their victim. The dark stonewalls
were covered with reddish-brown symbols which
appeared luminous with malevolence. In the middle of
the monks’ circle stood a massive crucifix, which had
been turned upside-down. Attached to the wooden
cross, equally upside-down, was a bronze-skinned
woman of about twenty-five. Her wrists and ankles
were cruelly bound to the crucifix with barbed wire.
Her blood had stopped trickling a while ago, the crusts
covering her legs and arms were clotted and dry.
While the old church, vast and desecrated,
reverberated with the screams of the young Libyan
woman, something seemed to change within the very
substance of the withered walls. The temperature
seemed to drop rapidly, and the symbols on the walls
displayed a much brighter luminosity than before –
still the center of the room paradoxically grew darker,
until the sacrificial woman was but a shade on the
cross. As if commanded by an inner voice, the monks’
circle widened, until they all were standing about five
meters from their crucified victim. Within the circle,
the air grew denser, and a green glow filled the space
before the bound Libyan. From her upside down
position, the young woman had to watch the green
light condensing into a human shape. Although she
knew this was only a cheap trick to scare her further,
her heart nearly stopped when she saw the black-clad
man standing in the green mist like some demon from
the dawn of times. His eyes were like embers, and in
their somber shine she saw an unspeakable eagerness,
a horrid appetite. The demon spread his arms in a
welcoming gesture which encompassed both the
m o n k s ’ c i r c l e a n d t h e s c r e a m i n g wo m a n .
Hyperventilating with horror, the naked Libyan girl
watched him walking, no, floating towards her,
displaying gnarled fingers that looked like twisted
daggers. The darkish figure of the demoniac visitor
began to glow like a green will-o’-the wisp, and even
the monks’ cowls seemed to be catching fire, glowing
like green capes of liquid smoke, while their chants
grew ever more frantic and fanatical.
Watching his audience with ardent eyes, the demon
raised his right arm, and the monks stopped their
chanting abruptly. The dark figure turned to face his
victim again, speaking words no human could
understand. Although the Libyan had not believed
there could be worse than her present mortal fear, she
felt with hardly comprehensible terror that she had
been wrong. The demon’s words, unintelligible as they
were, seemed to be pulling something out of her body,
something that should be untouchable, something
sacred. With a shriek that nearly brought the ancient
walls of the demonized church down, the crucified
young woman watched the demon reach out, easily
turning the heavy crucifix back into its former
position, while his long razorblade fingers caressed the
naked woman’s breasts, abdomen, and pubes. Then the
thorn-like fingernails slowly dug into her chest and
almost gently tore out something white and
luminescent, and her shrieks thundered up the scale to
a new ear-shattering climax. She knew it wasn’t her
heart, and she found herself wishing it were.
The demon had taken hold of her soul! And still her
torment was far from over. With her chest wide open,
bleeding like a stabbed pig, she saw the devilish
stranger pulp the luminous ball with his enormous
hand, demonstrating how little her soul was worth to
him. Smiling lasciviously, he approached the young
woman like a ghastly lover, embracing her body
obscenely, putting his ghoulish lips on hers as if in a
romantic foreplay. With a whiplash motion, he pushed
the heavy crucifix off its socket, and it fell to the floor
with a loud thud, thus presenting the woman on the
cross like a delicacy on a gourmet’s table.
Going down on his hands and feet, the demon let his
long tongue wander over her shins, her knees, her
thighs, not missing an inch until he reached her neck,
which he kissed and licked like a perverse caricature of
Casanova.
Still, the Libyan couldn’t die. Through some evil force,
the demon was keeping her alive, delighting in her
agonies like a connoisseur relishes a fresh oyster.
At last, his burning ember-eyes were staring into her
nearly demented ones. The last thing her dying mind
registered was the demon’s vicious, hungry grin as he
dug his enormous fangs into her face and ripped it off
with one short, cannibalistic jerk.
A flash of primordial green light blinded the little
congregation, and then the apparition was gone. So
was the woman. Only a puddle of blood stood witness
for what had happened mere seconds before. One by
one, without lingering unnecessarily, the monks
emerged from the profaned temple and dispersed into
the moonlit night. Some entered cars, others mounted
heavy motorcycles, some even rode simple bicycles.
They all took off their cowls and went back to their
otherwise normal lives and unsuspecting families. The
early-spring air was fresh and fragrant.
After everybody was gone, the puddle of blood on the
floor began to stir, then to bubble. In a fluid motion, a
human figure emerged from the pool, a big monk in a
gory cowl of liquid blood.
He was a bulky man with a big balding skull, a ponytail
and deceivingly benign brown eyes. Like a snake sheds
its skin, he dropped his bloody cowl and stood naked
in the almost complete darkness of the dilapidated
building. On his big belly no navel could be seen. His
male organ, even in its limp state, was extraordinarily
large, almost like a tail growing out the wrong side of
the body.
As he looked at the symbols on the walls, once more
they began to spread their eerie luminescence. The
symbols’ meanings were manifold, and readable only
to some rare and ancient creatures in the universe.
Amongst other meanings, the symbols showed the
faces of the humans who, in their ignorant greed, had
negotiated with the bulky man before.
Still tasting the Libyan’s flesh and blood and brains in
his mouth, he pondered over Sharan, his real target.
The young sacrificial woman he had slain had been a
mere symbol, a medium to help the Coven’s united
strength to focus on the one supreme goal: to
annihilate Sharan, to evaporate her very soul.
Tonight, like three nights and days before, the Coven
had failed, for their victim wasn’t sleeping, and her
wakeful mind seemed like a protective shield not even
the Coven could break.
But time was on their side. She was weakening, and
fast. No human could last without sleep for long.
Again, he looked at the symbols, which also spoke of
great events ahead. Some encompassed the winds of
change, whose hollow blow would soon be heard all
over the earth’s burnt crust.
After endless centuries, at last, a time of final
decisions had come.
Silently, the big balding man sank back into the puddle
of human blood, and the symbols turned dark again.
(end of reading sample)