World War S 2

Chapter 2

She looked timidly towards the window. The room was filled with the evening lights coming from the park’s old diamond-shaped lampposts, covering the lavender wallpaper with a play of light.

“Maybe … you can try.”

The doctor closed Silvie’s clasped hands with his and bowed his head.

“Heavenly Father …”

At that moment, Silvie’s body strained and her head fell forward. She started to vomit. She was vomiting blood in a wide stream.

Oh, my God, that’s the origin of the blood, he thought. This is some kind of internal haemorrhage!

“Everybody back! Quickly, take her to the surgery! It’s an abdominal haemorrhage. We have to find the source now!”

The male nurses came back and transferred Silvie to the stretcher. They pushed her to the surgery connected to the suite and immediately started the intervention.

They struggled for two hours to save her life. One of the abdominal blood vessels burst and emptied its content into the stomach, so Silvie lost a lot of blood. The nurse’s gloves had become bloody when she tried to help her, but Silvie must have fought back unconsciously. The nurses ran away because they remembered their previous injuries.

Though this woman looks so fragile, thought the doctor, looking at Silvie sleeping calmly in the intensive care room. Her body structure—small and slender as a reed—was not suitable to carry twins. That’s why they only left one ovum alive from the four they’d implanted. But this single ovum had just been lost due to the stress and unexpected bleeding.

Could that explain her continuous aggressive behaviour and outbursts? Is that why she turns against herself?

What kind of man would put his wife under constant struggle and torture, even if she isn’t able to cope with these interventions anymore?

Who is this powerful, influential businessman?

The doctor changed the speed on the infusion, making it quicker, giving Silvie a tranquil rest. He dragged a chair next to her bed, sat down, and grabbed her hand.

He felt that he had to start the prayer again.

“Heavenly Father, please help this poor lady, Silvie, lying before me …”

He continued to pray aloud for another hour. Each time he pronounced Silvie’s name, her hand flinched. The doctor took this as a sign that his prayers were getting into heaven.

But he didn’t see the light, the transparent dome that covered both of them. Only the shadows saw it, those that whimpered and clung to the walls, unable to get any closer to their prey. To that prey, who needed to be killed as soon as she gave birth to her child. That was why they continuously tortured her body and mind. They had to finish her, but only up to the limit where she could still carry on by her vital instinct, until the final moment of the pregnancy.

They hated this doctor. He was that kind of praying man, which they rarely saw nowadays. They were afraid he would make Silvie stronger and upset their plans.

He would make the Master’s wife stronger, this woman who was no longer suitable to be the wife of a huge potentate.

Sidney Grimm would be a better candidate. Much better.

*

At the same moment, Salome Sue Richardson was feeling a terrible stabbing pain somewhere below the line of her caesarean scar. She thought it might be the coming of menopause, and she finally would enter this unwanted period of life. It hadn’t fully set in yet, but there were some unmistakable signs that soon it would turn her life upside down. She was not able to judge if the hot flashes occupying her body were the result of the true onset of menopause or the events of the past days. She doubled over, moaning, which grabbed the taxi driver’s attention.

“Miss, is everything all right? Do you want me to stop? Don’t you want to see a doctor?”

“No, it’s all right. Only a cramp. Just keep going.”

Sue straightened up, smoothing out the wrinkles of her steel-blue suit, which she only wore to meetings. When was the last time I put it on? she tried to remember. Maybe it was when I signed the contract to the series. Damned series, I have to get it back! That tragic last episode cast the good viewer ratings into the deep pit of Hell!

But now she was going to an even more important meeting in central Los Angeles. She had never done this kind of thing before; she had never cheated on Joe. Her husband was not the most ideal man, but she had never thought of looking for someone else. It would definitely happen now. Or at least she would try. She lied to Joe, saying that a producer called her from the rival channel to renew her series, Medium on Call. It was a believable explanation, as Joe had witnessed the morning when that episode had pissed her off so much.

She took off her wedding ring. She didn’t know why; maybe she didn’t want to make it unclean.

“Un-clean,” she syllabified to herself, as if the word had an important, special meaning.

“Did you say something, Miss?” the driver turned back again.

“No, sorry. I’m really absent-minded today.”

“No problem,” the man smiled. “Is it you … are you the medium from that series?”

The kindness of the driver pulled her from her thoughts.

“Yes, I’m … or I was,” she nodded. She realized that in the prime of her life, she’d already felt the small fumbling in her mind, as the fragments of thoughts reached her when she started to work as a channel to the afterlife. At this point in a conversation, she was usually aware of the person she was meant to contact in the spiritual realm, whatever friend or relative of the family had died recently.

“Are you going to a client, by chance?”

“Not exactly …”

“So, did you stop once and for all? Why?”

She saw the man’s curious eyes flashing in the mirror.

“That’s a very long story.”

“We have time. We’ll just be sitting in this traffic jam until the Hotel Ritz,” he opened his arms, showing he couldn’t do anything about it. His teeth were white as snow, when his smile occupied the whole view of the mirror. Sue noticed a plastic cross hanging on a cheap metallic necklace from the middle mirror. Her heart gave a leap.

It reminded her about Reverend Robert Martens, as he had knelt beside her daughter’s hospital bed. She should listen to him over Sidney Grimm or the presently silent inner voices.

But the God of Robert Martens could only give her a twinge of guilt, nothing more. He accused and scorned her because she followed the rituals of Great-granny Salome. Who needs a God who wants you to break with your past? She thought. The path of the reverend’s God was so narrow it was uncomfortable to walk on even for an everyday person, much less a medium. “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:14), she thought. Or however that damned passage says it. Bullshit!

On the other hand, the Master didn’t ask anything from Sue when he led her into the secrets of magic and fortune-telling. Sue was like a radio that only worked when somebody tuned to the right wavelength. “I did nothing but wake up the sensitive receiver inside you,” the Master had explained after the séance. It had dawned on Sue the following day that what he’d said was very true. From that day on, as she entered a place, the information had flown towards her. Formless, cloud-shaped, and ghost-like creatures brought pictures to her, as if to say, “Look, we want to tell you something.” Soon after, she started to hear them more clearly. In the beginning it was frightening, but she grew used to it later.

Then Sidney Grimm displaced Sue in the Master’s affections. Sue didn’t understand why the Master didn’t see what Sidney was up to; she was a leech of the most hideous sort that Sue had ever seen. Though she’d met many throughout her career, none of them was so … so obsessed, purposeful, and determined.

And then the big silence began, Sue thought. Sidney might have learned something from the Master that even Sue wasn’t able to do, a way to silence all the spirits, just to show she’d become a key player in their spiritual game.

“So, tell me, why’ve you stopped contacting the ghosts?” the driver asked again because Sue was just sitting, staring into space.

The silence is the reason, she thought, but she didn’t want to say that.

“I don’t really know, I think I’m tired …” it was not the most appropriate answer to this stranger either, as he had nothing to do with Sue’s personal life. It was too honest, but she couldn’t hold it back. “Maybe the spirits consumed all my power, and …” She took a deep breath because she didn’t want to continue. She didn’t understand why those words had come out of her mouth as only a few minutes before she was worried about how to get her show back. Her hands accidently brushed her pocket where she felt the outline of her wedding ring. She ran her forefinger around the circle.

Only a few kilometres from her, a short man was kneeling in his hotel room next to his bed. Reverend Robert Martens didn’t give up the fight easily. He believed it was divine inspiration that he had booked a hotel in this city only a few streets from Sue’s house.

If this is truly coming from God, and it was truly an inspiration, then it will soon come to light, he thought.

He prayed a long while for Kathy’s recovery. He felt that the girl was in grave danger, and he might not be able to save her by his prayers alone. So he called the remaining members of his small congregation and asked them to gather for an evening prayer meeting. He also decided he would ask the pastors at the conference tomorrow to intercede for her, to help him in his prayers. Robert knew about the pitch-black well of the generational curse that swallowed Sue, which he had fought against in prayer when Sue was young. But in his old age, he could not face these forces alone because Sue was no longer on the surface of the black water, but the spiritual potentates had pulled her down to the bottom of the curse.

He turned the pages of his Bible to a verse about the release from demonic forces. He put on his glasses, and although he already knew it by heart, he still read it from the book: he didn’t want to make any mistakes.

In the taxi, at that very moment, the driver agreed with Sue, “You did the right thing, giving up the show.” His warm brown eyes looked at Sue through the mirror. The cross was swinging gently like an unstoppable warning sign, although they hadn’t moved at all in the last five minutes because of the traffic. “The medium becomes a slave as well. Don’t you want to be free?”

That smile, a strange feeling rushed through Sue, it’s the most genuine and beautiful I’ve seen in all the world.

She wanted to shout yes, but she was only able to moan weakly.

Her demons wanted to run, but for that they had to motivate Sue to move. They had to use Sue’s instinct of escape.

A moment later, an enormous wave of fear swept through Sue’s body. It was so strong that it pushed her out of the car.

She slammed the door behind her and ran to the crosswalk, avoiding the cars. She didn’t even care about missing her rendezvous; she couldn’t stay in that car another minute with that shivering fear.