Ben rummaged through the volumes in Dad’s jam-packed bookcase, then pulled out a massive tome with a cracked red leather cover and pages soft with wear.
“What is this?” I asked as it thumped onto the table. The cover had no title, only a large embossed circle.
“You won’t like it,” Ben warned. “The circle is an ancient symbol of never-ending life. The book is a guide to the spirit world. Your dad thought it might have some answers.”
I looked at Ben askance, but he just nodded toward the book. I opened it gently. The pages had been hand-bound—they were all slightly different sizes, and the type wasn’t completely straight on the page. The old-style calligraphy was thick and difficult to read, and almost completely overshadowed by the hand-drawn borders and illustrations. I flipped to a bookmarked page, most of which glowed with the image of a rapturously beautiful winged man. His wings were spread wide, and he smiled down protectively at an infant in a basket. There was a small Post-it next to the infant, and Dad had scrawled on it: “Clea???”
I looked at Ben.
“Can you make out the heading?” he asked.
I studied the ornate script.
“Guardian Angel?” I asked.
Ben nodded. “That was Grant’s hope, that the man was your guardian angel, protecting you from harm.”
I smiled, thinking of how protective he had always been in my dreams. “That makes sense,” I mused, then quickly added, “In a this-is-all-insane-and-impossible kind of way.”
Ben tilted his head noncommittally. “Your dad wasn’t convinced.”
Ben tilted his head noncommittally. “Your dad wasn’t convinced.”
He nodded back toward the book, and I noticed another bookmark. I flipped to the page and gasped. This one too was filled mainly with an illustration of a winged man, but this man was rendered in shades of red. He had the body of a god, but his face was monstrous, and he leered down at an innocent-looking sleeping woman, his arms spread wide and every muscle taut with coiled rage as he prepared to spring.
Again Dad had affixed a Post-it to the page, this one near the sleeping woman, but his scrawl was smaller and cowed. “Clea … ?” it wondered.
I gazed at the heading. I’d heard the word, but I had a strong feeling that in this context it had nothing to do with music. “Incubus?” I asked Ben.
He nodded grimly. “A lost soul—usually male—turned evil spirit that attaches itself to someone in order to lead her astray. The spirit is kind of … sexual in nature.” He reddened and gestured to the picture. “Like it shows there. The incubus comes to a woman and has … you know … relations with her in her sleep.”
My jaw dropped, and I was glad Ben’s eyes were averted as an exhilarating stream of images from my dreams flashed at super-speed through my head. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until it came out in a whoosh that I tried to pass off as a laugh.
“It’s not funny, Clea.”
“It’s insane. Even if there were such a thing as an evil spirit, wouldn’t it be obvious if I’d spent my whole life stalked by one? Wouldn’t terrible things have happened to me?”
“Maybe they will. Maybe he’s just been waiting for the right time. Maybe that time is now, and that’s why all of a sudden you see him everywhere.”
“So he’s a patient evil spirit,” I said sarcastically.
“Know what else comes from the same Latin root as ‘incubus’?” Ben retorted. “Incubate. I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think this … thing has been incubating, and now it’s ready to come out and do whatever it’s going to do. And I think your dad would agree with me.”
“You have no idea what my dad would think,” I shot back jealously … but I knew that wasn’t true. In the last half hour Ben had proven he knew my dad far better than I had ever realized … maybe far better than I’d known him myself.
Ben reached up to twine his fingers in his hair, then drew them out. “I’m sorry. I know this is a lot. It’s just … this is the real reason your dad hired me. Once you started traveling, he knew you’d be away a lot, and he wanted someone around who knew all this and could keep an eye out for anything strange. He worried about you. I worry about you too.”
He was worried; I could see it in his eyes. Whether or not I could buy into his and Dad’s theories about the man in the pictures, I knew for sure they both only wanted to protect me, and that was something I had to respect.
“Okay,” I said. “So what do you think we should do?”
“I think we should skip the trip to Rio.”
“Are you crazy? Why? What does one thing have to do with the other?”
“Maybe nothing,” Ben admitted, “but Rio wasn’t exactly the safest place in the world for your dad. If this thing is getting ready to make some kind of move, I don’t think we should make it easier by going someplace dangerous.”
“If you really believe the ‘thing’ isn’t human, it shouldn’t matter where I am, right? He can make a move in my own bedroom.”
Bad choice of words. I felt myself redden, and quickly moved on.
“Besides, Dad also thought the guy could be my guardian angel. Are you forgetting that?”
“Does he look like a guardian angel?”
He did not look like a guardian angel, but everything I knew about him made me believe he couldn’t possibly be evil.
Of course, everything I knew about him—no matter how real it felt—was just a figment of my imagination … wasn’t it?
Just like guardian angels and incubi were figments of the imagination.
I had to get back to dealing with facts. One fact was that something bizarre was going on, but I’d be far more likely to find an explanation in a modern book on string theory than in an ancient tome on the spirit world. The other fact was that my whole life, Dad had apparently known this bizarre thing was going on, and had neglected to tell the one person most obviously impacted by it.
“Why did my dad tell you about these pictures and not me?” I asked.
“We talked about that. He told me that when you were little he didn’t want to scare you. And when you were older, you were too much like your mom and would never believe him.”
I smiled. Dad was right, and in that moment I felt like he was with us in the room. I also realized something—I did know him better than Ben did. I knew what he would think.
“Dad knew about this thing my whole life,” I said, “but he never let it get in the way of what I wanted to do. I can’t either. We’re going to Rio.”
Ben opened his mouth to object, but he knew better. He just sighed.
“Okay … we’re going to Rio.”
That evening a FedEx envelope arrived from my mom, containing the notarized permission I needed for the flight to Brazil. She included a note with it: I still don’t like it, but I trust you’ll make the choice that’s right for you. Love, Mom.
The trip was on.
As I went to bed that night, I couldn’t help but wonder if what I’d learned would change what happened in my dreams. Would the man still be there? Would he act the same? I was dying to know, but unfortunately it turns out it’s almost impossible to fall asleep when you’re actively chasing a specific dream. By two in the morning I’d given up and was playing solitaire in bed while watching an old sitcom on TV. I’d planned to pad downstairs the minute the show ended and make a pot of tea, but it never happened.
Instead I found myself sitting at Dalt’s.
I was at the counter, watching the cook flip several burgers and a large apple pie on the grill. The door squeaked open, and though I didn’t even raise my eyes, I knew it was him. I felt the air change when he entered, the force of him as he strode across the diner, and the heat of his body mere inches from mine as he sat.
Electricity leaped between us, and his eyes burned into me, but I still wouldn’t turn to face him.