Reuben: 2/2/97 (11/5-6/96)
The next morning, I stumbled out of bed around 9. Eric was up, thank the gods, and I got him to boil some water for me for the coffee. Yeah, the world's going to hell, but I'm going to have my caffeine, dammit!
As I drank my coffee, I watched Dog's "television." The satellites were still out, and they made no mention of rain. Hoo boy. Who needs a weather machine when we have Mary?
Once I felt human, I took a (cold) shower, and prepared myself for a spirit summoning ritual. When I had tutored under Forteau, I had attempted a summoning exactly once. I felt kind of bad, because I never knew what to say to the spirit once they showed up. I've certainly never felt comfortable ordering anyone - human or spirit - around. Well, I thought, here we go.
I lit and placed incense in the four corners of my bedroom. Dog watched from the bed with interest, but offered no commentary, for a change. I pulled out my drum and started a steady rhythm, trying to get the sense of the chantry - the building, the people within it, everything about it. An hour or two might have passed - I always lose track of time in such rituals - and just as I was starting to wonder if I was making any headway, the room suddenly felt very cold.
Dog looked up from where he had been lying watching me and let out a very doglike whine. He jumped off the bed and walked over to the door and scratched. I ignored him in favor of the shimmering figure which was forming near the window. Dog walked over and put a paw on my arm and whined again. *Reuben, I don't like this.* I ignored him, putting more effort into the drumming. He heaved a sigh and walked over to the far corner of the room and lay down, watching balefully.
The figure began to resolve into a woman, probably in her early 20's, dressed in an archaic skirt and blouse. She stood silently, looking out the window. The sunlight seemed to just miss her as it shone in, and where it struck her skirt, the colors were dull and faded. When she seemed substantial and solid, I eased off the drumming, then stopped entirely. I shook my hands out - they always became numb after a few hours of this.
"Um, hello?" Great. The mighty speaker of dreams summons spirits, but gets all tongue-tied when they show up. She ignored me. After a minute or so, she broke the silence.
"I couldn't find my letters this month." Her voice was soft, breathy - and wistful. It broke my heart to hear her speak.
I cleared my throat. "What...what is your name?"
She turned to face me. "Angela." She was pretty, in a coarse sort of way. A beauty out of time, I suppose. Her skin was pale, pale and nearly translucent.
"What letters do you mean?" I asked, stalling for time. How could I convince her to help guard the chantry? Could she do anything at all?
"Don't play games with me," she said, scornfully. She rubbed her hands as she spoke, as if trying to warm them.
"I'm sorry. We didn't know that you would be looking for them. I'm afraid one of my friends found them and...and opened them."
"Well? What did they say?"
I recounted to her the story told in each letter. She was sad when she heard that John DePue had been drafted, but brightened when I spoke of the letter which said he would be coming home. I dreaded the end of the tale.
"Then a letter came in December of 1944," I said. "It said that..that John had been killed in France. In a hospital. They bombed it." She gave a cry of grief and rushed across the room, through the door.
I stood there dumbfounded for a moment, then rushed after her. I yanked open the door and rushed down the hall to the living room. Daedelus was sitting on the sofa, typing on his PC. He looked up and said, "What...?"
"Shhh. Wait." I spotted Angela, her ghostly form almost lost in the shadows of the foyer. "Angela..."
Daedelus looked at me, then back to the foyer, where I was staring. He shook his head - obviously he couldn't see her. Angela looked up, tears streaming down her cheeks. "They couldn't find enough of him to bury, you know."
"I'm so sorry." Gods, I felt so helpless. "Is there anything we can do?"
She shook her head and gave a shuddering sob. As she stood, crying, she began to fade, until she was gone.
I stood there for a moment, shaken by a tragedy over fifty years old but still fresh in the hearts of some. I wiped a tear from my eye and walked back to my room. Daedelus, watched my pass, but didn't say anything. For once, he knew when to shut up.
I shut the door to my room and slumped against the door. "There's a reason I don't summon spirits," I muttered to myself. I glanced at Dog, lying on the bed with his head between his paws, staring at me. "What do you think?"
*You could have opened the door,* was all he said. I shook my head and left. No comfort to be had here.
I explained to her that I had talked to Angela, and that the letters really weren't ours for the taking. For that matter, with the node present, we really didn't need the extra tass. Therefore, I suggested that we leave the letters where they were, as well as a note for Angela explaining the help we might need protecting the chantry. To my surprise, Kasee readily agreed. Maybe there's some sense in there after all.
As we finished our conversation, we were stunned by a huge explosion from one of the bedrooms. I jumped up and ran down the hall. Smoke was pouring out of Daedelus' room. His bed was on fire, the walls of the room were scorched, and we was looking something close to medium rare himself. Kasee and I grabbed spare blankets and slapped at the fire, extinguishing the small flames that had licked there. Renee ran in, stooped at the door way to survey the damage, then knelt by Daedelus' burned body. "Reuben, I think I might need some help here."
I knelt across from her and, working together, we healed Daedelus. We were getting good at this, since it seemed to be becoming a habit. We picked him up gingerly and moved him to one of the unoccupied bedrooms. He coughed a bit, and Renee got him a glass of water.
"What the hell was that," I asked.
Daedelus coughed again, then said with some chagrin, "Well, I had made some napalm before Halloween, you see..." I rolled my eyes. Napalm. Just what we needed. "Anyway," he continued, "I was trying to dispose of it safely. So I created a pocket realm and put the napalm into it, then threw in a lit candle. I thought I'd be able to contain it, but I guess I didn't."
So he channeled the entire force of the blast through his body. No wonder he looked like a crispy critter. It's a good thing he didn't take out the side of the chantry with the explosion. I suggested that sleep might be a good thing for him to consider. He nodded weakly, and we left the room.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully. I caught the headlines when Dog tuned in to the noon news. Things were slowly returning to normal, although the entire Eastern Seaboard was under water, and a plane had crashed in the Midwest. Not much new, otherwise. I retired to the library for the rest of the afternoon.
In the evening, I was in the kitchen readying dinner. As I prepared to toss the salad, Cab walked in. I said, "Oh, hi Cab. The soul eater hungers for you." Where the hell did that come from?
She stared at me. "What?!"
I was baffled. "I don't know where that came from. It just popped into my head, and I had to say it. It was like I couldn't not say it." All I could do was stand there in puzzlement. Cab looked at the salad and the pasta I was preparing, and said, "I think I'll have a peanut butter sandwich, instead." I shrugged, and continued tossing the salad.
With that thought in mind, I spent an hour or so in the library reading, by candlelight, some of the lighter treatises on prime patterns. Around 10 PM, I couldn't stop yawning, so I headed to bed. As I was preparing for bed, there was a knock on the bedroom door.
"Yes?"
Cab opened the door and said, "Reuben, do you have a sec?"
"Sure. What's on your mind?"
"Were you able to contact the chantry spirit?"
I sighed. "Yes. It's a sad situation, and one I don't quite know how to resolve." I explained to her the conversation I had had with Angela DePue, and Cab agreed that we should probably leave the letters where they were. That made me feel a little better about the whole thing, but not much.
Kasee and I stepped sideways and walked to the campus without incident. As before, there was no flooding in the Umbra, and things seemed to be returning to normal there, too - there were sounds of animals and spirits flitting by. It didn't seem nearly as dark and oppressive as it had before Halloween.
By the time we arrived at the library, it was around 10:45 AM. Naturally, the library was closed, as was the majority of the campus. As Kasee and I stood in the bricked courtyard in front of the library, Cab walked up, saying that Daedelus has muttered something about working on the Digital Web and told her to go on without him. Since we couldn't get information here, maybe we could find some information downtown - besides, it was on the way back to the Chantry.
Amazingly enough, City Hall was open. Not very many people were there, but they were open. I suggested we go to the Clerk of Deeds' office and see what we could find out about the Chantry. We found the entry for the address, and started pulling down huge books of records, about two feet by three feet. What we found was fascinating.
The earliest record we could find was from 1883. In that year, the land was purchased from the City of Raleigh by one Jonathan DePue. A single-family structure of some kind was built on the property around 1905 by Eric DePue, and the deed to that house was passed to another Jonathan DePue by one Harold DePue in 1941. (The letters calling John/Jon DePue to war were dated 1944.)
In 1946, the house was condemned by the city and in the following year a halfway house was built there as a shelter for the homeless. This was the building that we knew. In 1962, the property and building were purchased by F. Lawrence, who was still listed as the current owner. I looked up from the faded paper. "'F. Lawrence'? I suspect if you reverse the initials and fill in the blanks, you'll get L. Forteau."
From the Clerk of Deeds, we moved to the Birth and Death records. We found no birth record Angela DePue, but we did find a birth record for John Michael DePue - born on December 11, 1920. John DePue died on December 10, 1944, one day shy of his twenty-second birthday - exactly as the letters we had read had stated. Looking a little further, we found that Angela Nixon DePue died on March 3, 1945. Finally, we found a surprising birth record: Michael Lawrence DePue, born on January 2, 1945.
"Oh God," Cab said. "She was pregnant when she heard that John had been killed."
Kasee looked up at us. "But John DePue was drafted in January of 1944. If the baby was born in January of 1945..."
The wheels of my mind were clicking. "Then John DePue was not the father. He may never have known that his wife was pregnant. And Michael Lawrence DePue very possibly could be the same person as F. Lawrence, and thus L. Forteau. Which would make Mr. Forteau...Angela's son?"
The three of us looked at each other in uncertainty. I wasn't even certain if this was useful information or not, but it was an intriguing puzzle. If Angela was indeed Mr. Forteau's mother, to my mind it would speak ill of him to allow her anguished spirit to continue to haunt the Chantry. I set that aside to think on another time. I made a mental note to look at newspaper articles of the time when the library was open again - there may have been other forces at work there.
Just then the clerk came and told us that it was 5:00 and that we would have to leave. We thanked him and returned to the Chantry.
Last modified: Fri April 4 14:39:00 1997 by tabrady