Fallen Masters Read online

  “Charlene, I don’t know,” Pam said.

  “I do know,” Charlene insisted. “Pam, Paul, I want to do it. I have to do it, don’t you understand? This will probably be my last show, and I want it filmed and preserved. It will be my farewell. Think of Michael Jackson, and how he died before he was able to do his farewell show. Don’t you think he would have wanted to do that show? I certainly do. I know that I don’t want to go out like this.”

  “You are sure?” Paul asked.

  “I am sure.”

  “All right,” Paul said. “Pam, Sue, let’s go talk to Dr. Vaill and see what we will have to do, medically, to get ready for the show.”

  Pam was pleasantly surprised that Paul wasn’t pushing her friend to do the show. “Charlene probably could use the rest anyway,” she replied.

  Charlene watched them leave her room; then she turned on her side, being careful not to disconnect the lines that led to the monitor, and looked through the window. She was in New York Presbyterian Hospital and as she looked out onto Broadway, she was surprised to see that it was daylight.

  She looked over to the table beside her bed and saw Dr. Tyler Michaels’s card. He had scrawled his cell phone number on the back. She dialed it on her own handheld and held it to her ear with some difficulty. When a woman’s voice answered, she was surprised, but then the person identified herself.

  “This is Rae Loona. Hello, Ms. St. John. Tyler is right here. He was just temporarily separated from his phone!” Rae’s positive energy shone through even on a mobile telephone call. Charlene could hear Tyler snatching the receiver from Rae with mock exasperation, saying, “Why are you answering my phone?” and heard Rae laughing in the background replying, “It’s what I do, Mikey.”

  Tyler Michaels said, “Hello.”

  “You know, Dr. Michaels, I won’t be able to stop thanking you every minute for a while. I hope you’ll forgive me in advance.”

  “I am glad I was there to help,” Tyler said. “Really, it’s my job, Ms. St. John.”

  “I appreciate that. And I want to invite you and Nurse Loona to the Academy Awards ceremony in March—as my guests.”

  “No, really—we couldn’t—”

  “If you ask Rae, I sincerely doubt she would say no.”

  “Well, I suppose…”

  “I’m reserving the two tickets for you, and you better show up. That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  “I’ll tell Rae. Do you want to stay on the phone to hear her scream?”

  “I better not. I might have a relapse. Thank you so much, Dr. Michaels.”

  Charlene smiled—a big, genuine smile—for the first time in at least several days.

  After hanging up, she decided to tweet her fans, who by this time had probably heard she was in the hospital:

  Feeling great after a bit of a scare. Doc gives me clean bill of health. On to Mexico City!

  But all she could think about was what had happened—not what happened to get her here, but what happened while she was—what? Unconscious? In a coma? In a trance?

  She had seen her father and Ryan, had talked to them, had felt her father’s embrace and her husband’s kiss. That long, wonderfully intense kiss. Had she made all that up? Was it just a hallucination?

  It had to be. The reality was, she was here, in a hospital, diagnosed with a terminal illness, and all that she had experienced was nothing more than a dream.

  The reality that what she had experienced—or thought she had experienced—was just a dream, hurt more than the news that she had an inoperable malignant tumor. With all that she had been through, how could she have allowed herself, even in a dream state, to be so vulnerable?

  “Because I’m a fool, that’s why,” she said aloud.

  There was an audible click; then a nurse’s voice came over the intercom. “Did you want something, Mrs. McAvoy?”

  “What? Uh, no, nothing,” Charlene said.

  What was this? Were they listening in? Was there a TV camera in the room as well as a hidden microphone? The idea probably wasn’t that far-fetched. After all, they had a machine connected to her that could tell some nurse at some distant location what her heart rate was, what her blood pressure was, and how rapidly she was breathing, or even if she was breathing at all. For all she knew, they could tell what she was thinking.

  Charlene felt anger, not at the idea that she was being monitored, but because what she had experienced—or thought she had experienced—never really happened at all. The more she thought about it, the more intense her anger became.

  She heard the sound of shattering glass and, startled by it, turned to see what had caused it. An elderly white-haired woman with a pushcart of books and magazines from the ladies’ auxiliary was standing in her room.

  Charlene glanced down at the floor to see what had fallen, but there was nothing there. Had the hospital volunteer picked it up that quickly?

  “What can I do to make you more comfortable?” the woman asked, her voice as old and strained as she looked.

  “Nothing, thank you,” Charlene replied.

  “Oh, but I’ve so many things here,” she said. “Magazines? Newspapers? I’ve quite an assortment, as you can see.”

  “No thank you,” Charlene said again.

  “Life Savers?”

  “Look—” Charlene read the woman’s name tag. “—Betty Jean. I—I appreciate everything you are doing, but I don’t want a thing. You’ve been so kind. I hope you can understand that.”

  “Of course I can, dear,” Betty Jean replied, the smile never leaving her face. “I’ll just let you rest, then.”

  “Thank you,” Charlene replied.

  The hospital volunteer pushed her cart to the door, then came back to the bed.

  Lord, what does she want now?

  Betty Jean took Charlene’s hand in hers and, putting something in it, smiled again. For some reason, at that moment, she looked ageless rather than aged. Charlene could almost imagine an aura of light around her.

  “Charlene,” she said. The voice was not old or creaky, but resonant and soothing. “Ryan and your father want you to know that it was all real. And you are going to be one for so many.”

  “What?” Opening her hand, Charlene saw a roll of Life Saver mints. When she looked back up, the old woman and her pushcart of magazines and newspapers were gone.

  “Wait, come back!” Charlene called.

  The woman did not reappear.

  “Pam! Pam, are you out there?”

  Something in Charlene’s voice must have frightened Pamela, for she came running in immediately.

  “Stop that hospital volunteer,” Charlene said. “Tell her to come back in. I need to talk to her.”

  Pam looked confused. “What hospital volunteer?”

  “What do you mean, what hospital volunteer? I’m talking about the old lady who was just in here,” Charlene said. “She just this second left the room—you had to have seen her. Tell her to come back, I want to talk to her.”

  “Honey, there was nobody in your room,” Pam said. “I’ve been right outside the door ever since we left you to yourself. No one has come in.”

  “But you have to have seen her!” Charlene said desperately. “She was just here!”

  Pam shook her head. “You must have dozed off and dreamed it,” she said. “I swear to you, no one entered or left this room. Let alone an old hospital volunteer.”

  Charlene opened her hand and showed Pam the roll of Life Savers. “Then, would you please tell me where this candy came from?”

  Pam shook her head. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  On the plane back to Atlanta the next day, Tyler sat quietly looking through the window, listening to the soft whisper of air slipping by the airplane at well over five hundred miles per hour.

  “Dr. Zuckerman is not the first person to walk this path. Science and faith are two branches of the same plant, both needing water and sunlight t
o survive.”

  “What?”

  Rae looked at him.

  “Did you say something?” Tyler asked.

  “No. You looked like you needed some time to think,” Rae said. “I didn’t say anything.”

  Tyler nodded and looked through the window again. It couldn’t have been Rae, anyway. Whoever it was had spoken in a Swedish accent.

  That’s funny. Last night at the lecture, someone behind him had said the same thing, and in the same Swedish accent. What was going on, here?

  “When you get home, read the Bible. You will gain a deep spiritual meaning and insight, even from the smallest and most trivial incidents. You will encounter psychic experiences in your life that cannot be explained simply by science. Do you think it was mere coincidence that you were sitting behind Charlene St. John last night? God has a purpose for you, one that is far greater than you ever have known.”

  Again the words, which he now realized had to be in his mind, were spoken with a Swedish accent.

  But the voice in his head had raised legitimate questions. He began thinking about what had happened last night, how they had just happened to be sitting behind possibly the best-known singer on the planet. Was it a mere coincidence that he had been sitting behind Charlene St. John? And why were the voices in his head suddenly speaking in Swedish accents when he didn’t even know any Swedes? The one thing that Tyler knew for a fact was that they had saved Ms. St. John’s life. Which was what doctors did, not that Tyler felt very much like a healer at the moment.

  “You were great last night, the way you handled that emergency,” Rae said.

  “Was I?” Tyler replied. “The funny thing is, Rae, I don’t even know if I will ever be allowed to practice medicine again.”

  “Don’t worry about it. God has a purpose for you, one that is far greater than you ever have known.”

  Tyler felt as if ice-cold water had splashed down his back and spine. The voice in his head had just used those exact same words. And those were also the very same words Karen’s mom had said to him at the cemetery.

  Rae pulled an envelope from her purse. “Remember when I showed this to you last night?”

  “Yes, I remember. You said you would tell me when it was time to open it.”

  “Now is that time,” Rae said, handing the envelope to him.

  Tyler opened the sealed flap. Inside the envelope were business cards for all the houses of worship in the area, from synagogues to mosques, and all the Christian denominations: Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, and Mormon, among others.

  Rae watched Tyler as he perused this very eclectic collection of religious institutions. She waited for a full minute before she spoke again, this time in a raised voice. “Pick one, damnit!” she said.

  “How am I supposed to know which one to pick?”

  “Pick one and speak a language. Any language. Or you can do what I do. I go to them all. I treat God like food.”

  “You treat God like food? What do you mean?”

  “Like food,” Rae repeated. “I can’t just eat Italian all the time. Sometimes I have to have some Chinese, or maybe I need a little Mexican. Some variety.”

  Tyler felt tears start to well up in his eyes. In order to break the seriousness and to suppress his emotion, he looked at one of the cards and raised an eyebrow and asked with severe doubt, “I don’t see anything for the Church of Scientology here? What about it? Do you sometimes have to have a little Church of Scientology?”

  Rae smiled back to him and quipped, without missing a beat, “Tell me, have you ever seen John Travolta dance? Honey, that white boy has rhythm—more than rhythm. He can park his slippers under my bed anytime! Whoo hoo, Mikey—whoo hoo!”

  Tyler laughed quietly and felt a burden leave him. He was breathing again. Correction, Tyler’s soul was breathing.

  He wished he could change this moment—rewind the clock to the point when Karen and Jeremy might have been healed. Then they would be with him now and he with them.…

  CHAPTER

  42

  Belfast

  American News Channel had made arrangements with its sister broadcast company, Euro News, for Dave Hampton to do his show from its Ireland studios. He could have taped his show for rebroadcast, but he preferred to do it live. Dave was back for a second time, despite his producer’s exasperation last time and the network’s discomfort with the cost. But it was Dave’s show, and until he really screwed things up, he would get his way in most things. He had managed to get the coroner and the police detective who were working the cases.

  “How many have there been so far?” Dave asked.

  “Eleven,” the policeman, Eric Vaughan, said.

  “And I’m told that there are striking similarities in each of the bodies you have found.”

  “Aye. The first few were young, attractive women. All were naked.”

  “But then the next few victims were men?”

  “Aye. And not young either.”

  “But you, Dr. O’Reily, in your examinations, despite the gender switches and other factors, you found that there were still similarities.”

  “Yes,” the coroner replied. “All had the words ‘Viva Domingo’ carved on their inner thighs.”

  “Viva Domingo? As in, Viva Zapata!?”

  “Perhaps, though I don’t know of anyone named Domingo.”

  “Were there other similarities?”

  “All had their hearts surgically removed, and all had an archaic or mystical symbol carved on their backs.”

  “I believe you have pictures of this?”

  “I do.”

  “I want to caution our audience, these pictures are rather graphic,” Dave said. “But we have cropped them so that you see only the symbols. And what I call your attention to is the absolute intricacy of these carvings. It is as if whatever demented soul did this thought that he had all the time in the world.”

  The pictures were flashed on the screen, one after the other. The glyphs and figures looked almost as if they were tattooed on the skin by a very skilled tattoo artist.

  “Are there any cases in recent history like these?” Dave asked.

  “No,” the policeman said in a distinctive Irish brogue. “This is—there’s no other way to say it—evil incarnate.”

  “Evil incarnate,” Dave said. “Yes, that is precisely what it is.”

  Dave looked at the pictures for a moment, then looked back toward the camera.

  “Many of you may remember there was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To this day, the killer’s identity remains unknown. The killer himself coined the name Zodiac in a series of letters he sent to the press, all of which contain cryptograms. His victims were four men and three women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine.

  “The cryptology was broken in only one of his letters, and in it, he said that when he dies to be reborn in the afterlife, that those he killed will be his slaves.

  “Are we dealing with a copycat killer here? Or is this the same killer who terrorized California so many years ago?

  “Or—” Dave paused in midsentence, then lifted his hand to his head and made a circle. “—here is where people are going to say that old Dave is crazy, but is this something much more than a copycat, or even the original Zodiac killer? Is this a physical manifestation of the sinister shadow I have been speaking about?

  “Folks, I’m telling you, don’t dismiss this concept of good versus evil, of the power of darkness doing battle with the power of light. I feel very deeply—and I cannot tell you where this feeling is coming from—that we are soon, all of us, going to be engaged in some cataclysmic battle for survival. And not just survival of our human existence, but the survival of our very souls.”

  Dave held his hand up, palm out.

  “From Belfast, this is Dave Hampton. Good night, America.”

  Grenada

  Mama G watched from far away in her island home, smiled, and nodded wi
th appreciation for Dave Hampton doing his job, what needed to be done. She hoped the distraction of these murders would not keep him from his larger task.

  The other TV channels and newspapers were finally taking the story seriously and listening to Dave’s perspective, quoting him and sending their own reporters out to cover the breaking news.

  She went to her computer to write a new blog to tell the world how she felt. All things in time. As above, so below …

  Danton, Missouri

  The pressed had dubbed him the “Church Burner.” Carl Turner delighted in the name. He goaded his friend, Brent Begley, into more action with the promise of more headlines. Carl called their nighttime forays into arson their “playdates.”

  They met up on Sunday morning at church but said nothing to each other at that time. Their families had belonged to the First Baptist congregation for generations, and they had attended Sunday school together for ten years. Throughout the two-hour service of preaching and prayer, they sat attentively. In the afternoon they ate Sunday supper with their families. Then, at midnight, they met in the First Baptist parking lot and set out on their mission of destruction.

  They easily broke the front door lock of the Missionary Community Church in Charlestown and moved swiftly, expertly in the pitch dark. They had reconnoitered the church a few weeks previously, attending a Sunday worship service, coming in a few minutes after it started and leaving early, before it ended—leaving no impression of themselves behind among the congregants.

  Now they were all business, lifting benches and chairs to create a pyre around the pulpit. Then they gathered all the hymnals they could find, and collection baskets and paper and picture frames, and piled them, too, and doused the material with a gallon of gasoline.

  “Come on,” Turner urged. “Move it.” The only words he had spoken since entering the sanctuary. He tore three paper matches from a convenience store matchbook, struck them, and tossed them into the pyre. He then ignited the remaining matches and dropped them in a puddle of gasoline.