Well, Dirty Harry aside, my gun was perfect for this job. I couldn’t take the chance that the silver would pass through the demon, as the bullet had to stay within the demon’s body for the silver to work. I had made that mistake before by using a Derringer with a larger grain bullet that ended up passing entirely through and out of the demon. For me, dying hadn’t been pleasant that time.
It was intensely dark in the alley, and I couldn’t see well so actually passed the demon and his prey. That was my downfall. The demon slashed me from behind, and razor sharp claws ripped my back open to the bone. The impact spun me around scattering drops of blood. Falling backwards to the asphalt, the gun came up, and I fired into its face. Landing, I smacked the back of my head against the ground with pain radiating from the impact, blood pooling beneath me. Then the demon started to shake as black ichor oozed from the wound and smoke spiraled upward from its feet until at last it burst into a cloud and was gone. A silver bullet fell to the pavement with a ting, ting, ting and rolled up against my foot.
The man, the victim, crawled over to me. He was wounded but not mortally. “Are you all right? Who are you?” he demanded. “I’m Paul Soratino. You saved my life!”
“Diana, Warrior for the Light,” I said slightly smiling my body at last numb. “The demon is gone. You should be okay now.” Whispering, I felt my life drain away, my blood flowing out, dripping through a sewer grate and into the dark.
* * * *
The Present
“Well…” Sam didn’t seem to know what to say as I finished the story.
“You’d never told us that one before.”
“I just remembered it when I saw him.”
“You’re thinking that really happened now, aren’t you?” Maggie reached across the table to touch my arm in sympathy.
“I don’t know. It’s always felt so real. Do you think his name really is Paul Soratino?” I asked uncertainly.
“There’s one way to find out.” Maggie Googled Paul Soratino on her laptop. And there he was. He had a Facebook page that listed him as a bishop at the Vatican, with a contact phone number placed below. We all looked up at each other from the computer screen.
“Dial it, babe,” Sam said.
“Sam…” Maggie said hesitantly, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Why not? This is freakin’ wild!” He thumped his fists on the table in his excitement, but I just felt sick to my stomach.
“Because if he answers and knows who she is, it means…” she looked at me.
“It means my dreams must be real,” I stated flatly, “and he must want a demon killed.” I could taste ash in the back of my throat again, thinking of all the times I had died in my dreams. Sam’s mouth formed a small O.
“Okay,” I said with decision after we sat in silence for a minute. Really there was only one way to be sure. “Hand me my cell, Maggie.” She slid it across the table to me, and I dialed the international number listed on the webpage.
“Hello?” a gravelly voice answered.
“Hello. May I speak to Paul Soratino?”
“Speaking.”
“My name’s Diana.” My heart fluttered, and I wondered, Should I ask if he almost died in an alley? He must have been stunned because silence echoed through the line. “I saw your video on the Internet.”
“How did you realize it was me?” astonishment colored his tone.
“I recognized you from when you were younger. We met in an alleyway. Do you remember me?” I could feel his amazement through the airwaves.
“The Diana I met is dead.”
“Yes, but then according to your faith we never truly die, do we? Did you ever tell anyone what happened in the alley?”
“No.”
“So do you still have the silver bullet?” I heard him muttering and had a sense that he must be crossing himself.
“Yes,” he whispered. “And I think you will need more than just the one because there is an infestation of demons in the catacombs.”
* * * *
Sam and Maggie tried to talk me out of going to Rome as I packed. I knew it was crazy. I didn’t actually know how to kill demons. But from the moment of seeing that video, I felt compelled. I had to go.
“You’re going to get killed.” Thanks for the vote of confidence, I thought.
“I realize that’s a possibility, Mags. My dreams have told me that I die…frequently. Still, I have to go,” I said and finished stuffing my toiletries into my backpack.
On the way to school in Sam’s small blue and white Chevy S-10 truck, he said, “So this means that you’ve really been alive before. I mean, really alive.” It sounded like he was having a hard time wrapping his head around it. Truly I was too. “So we’re talkin’ reincarnated.”
“I always thought part of reincarnation was to better yourself?” Maggie asked wrinkling her brow.
“I really have no idea, guys. Maybe Ms. Poe can help us look something up.” But when we got to the school library she just directed us to a section on Hinduism.
“Listen to this,” Maggie said after we’d gathered a few books and sat at a table. “It basically says here that according to the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita, our bodies are like our clothing. When we die, we are simply changing clothes in that our soul is reborn into a new body.”
“This one says that your current life is just the most recent of many lives that you’ve lived,” Sam put in.
“Well, check this out,” I added. “Here’s something that says the soul can be reborn even as an animal. There are many tales of how you can be punished by being reborn as a lower form, while if you’re good, you are rewarded by being born in a higher caste.”
“You do have some catlike qualities,” Sam grinned, and Maggie whacked him on his shoulder.
“Hmmm, well, I don’t remember anything other than being a girl, anything other than being me actually. I mean, I’m always called Diana in my dreams.”
“So does this mean that you’re Hindu?” Sam wanted to know. I wanted to laugh but…
“Well, it certainly seems that they have at least some beliefs that correlate with my being reborn over and over again.”
“I wonder why you remember. It says here that people don’t remember their past lives because of the trauma they may have suffered,” Maggie said. We all looked at each other for a moment and then burst out laughing.
“Obviously trauma isn’t a preventative for me!” I was thinking of all the painful death scenes witnessed in my dreams.
“I bet it’s so that you’re forewarned! You know, so you can see them coming!” Sam exclaimed. Hmm, that felt right somehow.
“Well, then it definitely means I have to go to Rome. It’s kind of like my karma. You know…my destiny.” I gestured at the books, but I must admit, it was a little depressing—and scary.
“You can’t. I’d just die if you died!” Maggie exclaimed in an undertone looking around to be sure no one was near.
“You never know, Mags, she might survive. Do you remember in any of your dreams where you lived to a ripe old age?”
“None that I can think of off the top of my head,” I said. Should I tell them? I wondered. Why not? “But worse was a dream where I passed by a demon and let it live uncontested. Already wounded and tired in my dream…” I could remember the feel of the razor sharp claws sliding into my side as I spoke.
“I was in Queenstown, Ireland, at the time and had finished one off—just barely—and felt a desire to go to the Americas. So booking passage on a ship, I pictured being able to rest while sailing to the United States. The night before setting sail, I passed the trail of a demon. The stench was incredible. But being so very tired, I knew that I would probably die—would most likely die and not be successful. At least that’s what I told myself. So I didn’t make the attempt and boarded the ship the next morning. It was a huge ship, the biggest of its time and heralded as unsinkable.”
Sam blinked. “The Titanic?”
&
nbsp; I smiled nodding. “Yep, in the dream I remember boarding the ship. The next thing I’m kind of floating above it being drawn upward. The ship’s below me, and it’s definitely sinking, so I must have died in the North Atlantic. And now, do you suppose, if I had not boarded the ship, would it have struck the iceberg? Am I responsible for those people?” I sighed. “Or was it that I would have succeeded with the demon but not made the ship and then lived?”
They both looked a little sick and worried. My face was probably the same. “Look, I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this on my own. I’ll be honest here, I’m scared,” I paused to take a breath.
“This is the last day of school. Come with me to Italy. My folks are gone. You can tell your parents that you’re staying with me—to keep me company. So we all have time right now. We all have our passports from the vacation we took down in the Bahamas last summer with the folks, so paperwork’s no problem for any of us.”
When Sam and Maggie started dating, we’d had a Christmas party where we’d invited parents as well as friends (a good thing since I didn’t have many close friends). Amazingly, all our parents hit it off and even started hanging out, going bowling and playing cards when they had the chance. So last year we’d decided to cruise down to the Bahamas as a group. We’d only needed to take our birth certificates, but the idea of having a passport had really struck a chord with the three of us, and it didn’t seem to bother the folks.
“You don’t have to do anything but sightsee and give me moral support.” They looked at each other hesitating but with a burgeoning excitement as well. “And maybe some ideas on killing demons,” I added with a smile.
When we got back to my house after our last day of school, Maggie started searching airline tickets on Travelocity while I finished stuffing my backpack. It was official. We were seniors! And we had decided on the spur of the moment to travel to Rome to hunt demons. My mother says the portion of the brain that’s responsible for making complex judgments isn’t fully developed in teenagers. It doesn't finish until people are in their 20s, which explains why teens sometimes use poor judgment and don’t have good impulse control. I suppose we were being impulsive, but it was something I felt I had to do.
“Okay, my folks think I’m going to stay with Tommy since he’s leaving at the end of June,” Sam announced as he entered the kitchen putting his cell into his pocket.
“I told mine that I was going to stay with Diana. I just have to go home and get my things,” Maggie told him. “When do you want to come back, Di?”
“I’m not sure. I probably only have enough money in my savings to buy the tickets and maybe four or five days in a hotel. At least we only have to get one room. Be sure that we go through New York,” I told her as she put in the dates. “In fact, see if you can get me there tonight and then have the connecting flight leave tomorrow. You and Sam can just meet me on the connecting flight to Rome from New York.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. I just want to check something out.” I was slowly remembering another dream about New York City that I hoped might be useful. I wasn't sure what I would find there, if anything, but for some reason I felt almost a compulsion to stop in New York first.
3 The Fortune Teller
The Delta flight Maggie got me on landed at seven on that early summer evening at the JFK International Airport. I didn’t have any real baggage to speak of, just my backpack. I was concerned that I might need to hit the road quickly, or possibly die, so wanted to travel light.
I caught a taxi right outside the doors to the airport terminal. It was beaten up with scratches, dings and rust all over it. I hoped that didn’t mean the cabbie was a horrible driver. The driver standing next to it opened the door and asked in a thick Indian accent, “Where you like to go?”
“Third Street, please,” I said sliding in. He got in behind the wheel and flipped a lever to start the meter.
“Any particular address?” he asked.
“No, I’ll know it when I see it…I hope.” He smiled as he looked at me in the rear view mirror.
“Are you from India?” I asked him as we pulled out.
“Yes.”
“Would you mind if I asked you a personal question?” I sat clutching my backpack on my lap.
“What would you like to know?” He asked as we pulled out into traffic.
“Are you Hindu?”
“Yes,” he answered with a smile. I knew from our research back at school that Hindus made up about thirteen percent of the world’s population and that most lived in India. So there was a pretty decent chance that someone from there was indeed also a Hindu.
“My class is studying reincarnation, and I wondered if you would explain it to me.”
“Ah, well it is the idea that a soul must reach perfection to unite with the Divine. It is a process by which the soul assumes many forms through many births and deaths. A person’s past deeds determines whether a soul initially goes to heaven or descends into hell when the body dies…”
“Wait, I thought the soul was reborn. How could it go to heaven or hell?”
“You are thinking of the Christian final resting place. For us, once the soul has been rewarded or punished sufficiently, it is again reborn. This process continues until the soul becomes perfect. It takes many lives to attain perfection because you do not know if you lived your life right before, so you must try to live right each time.”
“But if you’ve lived right, then you might go to heaven for a short time?”
“Yes, just as, if you haven’t, then you could go to hell for a time.” As we were barely creeping along, hell might be interpreted as being stuck in New York traffic.
“And what exactly is the Divine?”
“It is the Creator. Creation. We strive to achieve perfection so that we can be reunited with the Creator and bathe in the Light of Creation.”
“The Light of Creation?” The thought left me longing for something intangible…something just out of reach.
“Yes, that is what we strive for.”
The Light and the Dark. Was it just coincidence that the Hindu belief paralleled so closely to my being born again and again? Is it that at some point, I failed, and the Creator tagged me for battle as a punishment? Was it a punishment? Or was it rather a gift? Had I been given an extraordinary insight like few others into the very fabric of existence? Had it been a warrior who started Hinduism?
There were so many questions milling in my mind, but very few answers appeared by the time we arrived on Third Street. We were at the very beginning of the street, right by Prospect Park, when I asked him to pull over and let me out, preferring to walk. After paying the fare, he wished me luck and drove off.
I finally stood in front of a row house in Brooklyn—a brownstone. It had been new back in the 1930s and for the twenty-first century it didn’t look bad. In fact, it was in excellent shape. It was obviously one of those that had been renovated with the times and been well kept. In one of my previous lives, I had bought the house as a place of refuge and for renewal.
* * * *
1936 CE
I had not been sleeping well for six or seven months—having such nightmares that I’d wake up screaming. Never able to remember the dream clearly upon waking, I would be perspiring and shivering at the same time. Mother was quite worried and, as usual, she shared her concern for me with her friend Dorothy. Dot recommended her personal spiritualist Madam Rosa. Dot had not been feeling well, and nothing any doctor did made her feel better—until she’d met Madam Rosa.
Madam Rosa said that it was negative energy making Dot feel ill. She must remove that energy in order to get well. This would naturally take many sessions, but Dot had apparently been feeling better after each visit. I admit to being a skeptic at first, but then I walked into Madam Rosa’s small, dimly lit shop.
Opening the door, a little bell jingle jangled announcing my arrival. Shelves with jars and canisters filled with powders, salts, and lotions, al
ong with books, lined the walls from the floor all the way to the ten-foot high ceiling. Immediately to the right was a long glass display counter containing all manner of jewelry, rings, bracelets, amulets and trinkets—I saw the sunlight briefly sparkle off the contents until the door closed. On top of the counter sat the register. It was a narrow store not having room for any other shelving.
As I hesitated, Madam Rosa entered from a curtained doorway located towards the back and just behind the counter. She was much younger than I expected, looking to be at most thirty with a smooth olive complexion. She was wearing a dark red turban and a long, flowing maroon gown having sleeves that were elongated with the top end at her wrist and the rest tapering down to the floor in a point. She embodied what I imagined any Romanian gypsy would be, right down to her large, hoop earrings and rings on every finger, even her thumbs, of both hands.
She stopped, looked me up and down and then said with a thick Romanian accent, “Ah, yes, Miss Diana. I ‘ave been expecting you.” Now how was that possible? Dot just gave me her address that very afternoon.
“Oh, did Dorothy have a chance to telephone you?” I asked, but she smiled slightly and shook her head.
“Come,” she said gesturing towards the curtain, “you must sit and ve vill discuss vhat is bothering you.” Hmm, if she was a charlatan, she certainly put on a good show.
Behind the curtain, the room was extremely dark and smelled of a burning cinnamon incense. The walls were totally black and seemed to fade completely from view. In the center of the room, a round table was draped with black velvet. Sitting on it was the only source of light, a crystal ball, dimly glowing. Five leather parson chairs were positioned around the table with one larger, stuffed chair across from the entrance. She sat there and motioned for me to sit opposite her near the doorway.
As soon as I sat, a little fearful someone might grab my foot from under the table, she closed her eyes and placed both hands on the crystal ball, rubbing it slightly. At her touch, it flared brighter and then pulsated as she moved her palms.