SEVERAL WEEKS AGO
Staring down the barrel of the gun in Mrs. Claire’s hands, I let go of the man and slowly raised my hands. “Let’s not do anything hasty now, shall we?”
Her eyes flicked from the other man to me and back. “Why don’t you tell him that.”
PRESENT DAY
The tensions finally peaked once we’d all had a chance to sit down and–at Father Antonio’s insistence–have a cup of coffee. To her credit, Amira made an American variety, not the jet fuel that we’d had down at the cafe, but Father Antonio at least took it in stride.
Finally, he was the one to break the silence. “So, you said that the two of you were old friends? Where did you meet?”
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO
Mrs. Claire’s was everything that I expected it to be. A dimly lit front room with all manner of New Agey crystals and talismans on every available surface. A beaded curtain in lieu of a door, leading back into the shadows. The only thing missing was the eponymous shopkeeper herself.
“So?” I asked, turning to the man who’d brought me here.
Note: Somehow I managed to mix a Chicago section and a Baghdad section at the end of 23 yesterday. I’ve gone back and rewritten it to fit better and reposted the entire chapter here:
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO
His story went on for a few minutes, detailing how he and his friends had arrived at Mrs. Claire’s, how’d they’d been granted not only an audience but a chance to participate in a real life seance session. And finally, to the old woman calling forward the spirits of the dead–one spirit in particular.
PRESENT DAY
“Raise the dead you say?” There was more than a trace of disbelief in Father Antonio’s voice. Honestly, I didn’t blame him. He hadn’t seen even a fraction of the crazy things that I’d seen.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO
Whatever answer Amira had been about to give was swallowed up by the sudden chatter of gunfire coming from somewhere entirely too close by. It had been several days since I’d heard anything hear this close; although the sound had never gone away entirely.
I turned to back to Amira, intending to get her to safety before rejoining my unit–if the fighting were picking up again, they were going to need a priest. But when I turned to her, the first thing that I noticed was that she was too pale, her face gone an almost chalky white, lighter even than my own.
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO
I caught up with him a few blocks later. Luckily for me, he didn’t seem to have a car, or at least if he did, it wasn’t parked nearby. He almost seemed to be walking slowly enough specifically so that I could catch up with him.
“Come to try to stop me, padre?”
Honestly, yes. That was high on my mind. But even before that, “I came to understand.”
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO
“What are you talking about?” I asked. I knew that being directly confrontational wasn’t necessarily the best of plans when the other person was holding a weapon.
“He came back,” the man beside me said, “from the dead.” An emphatic nod punctuated each word. “But when he did, something came back with him.”
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO
“So what happened then?” I asked him after giving him a moment to recollect his thoughts. “After you talked?”
He turned back to me. “And then he was gone.”
“Gone? Like vanished?” I thought back to how he’d disappeared after in the confessional.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO
I stood in the square before the National Museum of Iraq. staring up at the two towers flanking the central archway. I knew that orders had come down from on high that we were to do everything we could to avoid engaging in a firefight where the building or its contents might be damaged, yet even so there had been excessive looting and for the most part that edict had been followed.