Graham Joyce by Requiem (epub)

Author:Requiem (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

33

Magdalene. He called her the Magdalene. There was no rational basis for this. The name had suggested itself in his dreams. But as soon as he had named her, the figure haunting him, terrifying him, crying out to him in the streets of Jerusalem, became real. Ahmed had warned him not to name her; but she had named herself.

The faces of the Arabs in the Muslim quarter had softened and seemed friendlier after Tom’s visit to Ahmed. The alleyways appeared less sinister, the shadows among the old stones less menacing. He smiled at people in the narrow streets, and they smiled back. The cobwebs of his own fear had been broken. After all, he reminded himself, this was an Arab city, Muslim since the seventh century apart from a very brief interruption during the Crusader period. Now the Arabs were pushed into a tiny quarter, ghettoized and perceived by Westerners as dangerous intruders.

At the Bethesda pool he turned sharply. Someone was following him. He quickened his pace along the Via Dolorosa and stopped suddenly. Two young Arabs passed by, talking loudly. He waited until the street cleared. He sensed someone hanging back in the shadows. Continuing along the Via Dolorosa, he passed into the Christian quarter.

It was not his phantom; the sensations were very different from those of the occasions when he was harried by the Magdalene. No scent, no mysterious quickening in the air. Something else. Reaching David’s Tower at Jaffa Gate, he turned decisively. A man in a black suit stepped smartly off the Via into a side street.

A dress pageant was taking place inside the Citadel at David’s Tower. He passed through the crowds beyond the gate and made his way up to the pedestrianized streets of the New City.

Sharon was away, working; counseling her alcoholic women and drug addicts. “They see visions,” she’d said pointedly. “They have delusions. They’re visited by phantoms.” She wouldn’t be free until the evening. He whiled away the afternoon at her flat, thinking about her. When she returned he pinned her to the door and tore off her clothes. She told him she hadn’t made love that way since she was sixteen.

Afterwards he told her where he’d been and what Ahmed had told him. He was betraying no confidence, he’d decided, as Ahmed himself had told the story to Sharon.

“Cobra-shit,” she said.

“What about the Masters, living in the desert? Or the Near Ones, as Ahmed called them?”

“I don’t know about any Masters.”

“Maybe he’s referring to the Sufi mystics. They exist.”

“Maybe. But Ahmed is a dope-head. I deal with these people all the time. You’d be amazed at what they come up with.”

“Is none of it true?” asked Tom.

They lay in each other’s arms on Sharon’s bed, semi-conscious, drugged with coitus, brains still soaring, slurring their words.

“His friend swallowed his own tongue and died while under Ahmed’s hypnotic influence. That much is true. All the rest is constructed out of his feelings of guilt. These phantoms he claims persecute him every night are created by his own imagination.

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