Cecilia's Demon - Chapter One: The Visitor - Part A

I FELT LIKE SOMEONE WAS WATCHING ME.

I opened my eyes, and looked around my loft apartment.

The ten foot window on the brick wall to the right of my bed was dark. The alarm clock on the end table by my bed read "3:00a.m."

It was too warm. And despite the fact that it was dark outside, there was a kind of golden glow inside.

I climbed out of my bed and padded across the concrete floor past the rice paper borders that hide my sleeping area from the living room area and looked at the thermostat by the door. It was 80 degrees, and the air conditioner was running.

That’s when I noticed the smell.

My loft was built inside what was once an old warehouse in the district of Bridgeton Georgia that had once been a Mill Village. The old warehouse was a five-story brick building. A property management company had bought the old warehouse and sectioned it off into apartments.

Metal beam support posts painted red ran through the center of the apartment and the ceiling was bare metal and girders. Most of the time, it smelled of aged wood and timbers, but not that morning.

The fragrance of jasmine was thick inside the apartment, and I still hadn’t shaken the feeling that someone was watching me – a disconcerting feeling for a thirty-two-year-old woman living alone.

I started back past the closed-in bathroom area to the bedroom area. And that’s when I saw him the first time.

He was more than just an apparition. His hair was not hair but more like flames boiling off his head in shades of mostly purple with flecks of blue and green sparkling and complex.

His skin was made of light and it glowed radiantly and golden. There were no irises in his eyes but rather blue eye-shaped globes.

The wings of the angel weren’t wings at all. They looked like multicolored beams of light that implied the shape of wings.

I gasped and took three steps back away from him.

He smiled, and when he did, the white aura around him seemed to grow and brighten.

"Don’t be afraid, dear child."

I was frozen.

He drifted toward me and touched my face. The sensation of his touch was not pleasant. His spectral hand was hot on my face, and I felt a bit woozy.

"Rest and dream," he said. "Many trials await you."

And I fell to sleep on the floor.

* * * * *
Dr. Paul Ambrose – her state-assigned shrink leaned forward in the chair across the maple table from her.

"So this is the first time you ever saw this angel."

Cecilia resented the fact that she had to talk to him. She wasn’t crazy, just cursed.

"I know you don’t believe me. I can hardly believe any of it myself."

Dr. Ambrose stood up and walked to the back of the white room and looked through the reinforced glass door to the white hallway beyond.

Cecilia caught a glimpse of herself in the two way mirror behind him, and she cast a poor mien. Her hair, shoulder-length, black and curly with brown highlights, had the texture of a Brillo Pad. Her skin – fair for a woman of color – looked ashen, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

At present, she looked crazy.

"I’m just trying to help you sort through all of this," Dr. Ambrose said.

She glared at him. "You’re trying to fix something that’s not broken."

He turned around and gave her a perplexed look.

There was something about him that was different than every other shrink she’d ever known. She knew them as superficial people who made a lot of money for sitting in front of you for an hour a week – half listening to what you said and asking questions like "How do you feel about that?" a lot.

This was her second time seeing Paul Ambrose, and he had yet to use a sentence like that. There was something about him that was genuine. He really did want to help.

But he couldn’t.

She was cursed.

"Cecilia," he said, "you’re a smart woman. You’re a medical scientist who is, by all accounts, a prodigy. I Googled you. You’ve made brilliant advances in Human Genome and Stem Cell research. You have a medical doctorate from Yale, so I know you’ve had some training."

"So?"

"You’re telling me that an angel killed two of your co-workers."

"Not an angel," she said shaking her head furiously.

"Okay, then what was he?"

"Fallen."

Dr. Ambrose frowned. "Are you referring to Lucifer?"

"No," she snapped. "But he is a demon."

Paul scratched his head.

Cecilia wished now that she could have met him under different circumstances. He was a very intriguing man. He looked no more than forty-five, stood about six feet tall, and wings of gray wrapped around his temples. There was nothing fake or superficial about him.

"You realize, of course that all of this talk of Angels or Fallen Angels sounds a lot like a Jungian archetype."

"I’m Not Crazy!"

He sat back down behind the table and rubbed his face. "I don’t use words like crazy."

"Oh, go to hell!"

He nodded. "Your mind is like an exotic sports car. It’s capable of performing like no other car, but it has unusual maintenance issues especially when driven at high speeds for extended periods of time."

"Look in my file," she said, banging the surface of the table with her index finger. "There is no history of mental illness."

Dr. Ambrose sighed. "You are a caste-breaker. That means that everything that applies to the rest of your family doesn’t apply to you."

She looked away from him. "You don’t really want to hear the truth. You just want the crazy person to perform, so that you can mortify her into believing that she didn’t see what she saw."

"No, I want to help you get past any defense mechanisms that you have so that we can get to the truth."

She nodded. "I know. I’m supposed to have some kind of sudden epiphany and realize that it was actually me who killed them like everyone thinks including you."

He shrugged. "I don’t know who killed them, and that question is not even relevant. I just want to help you work though your own memories and sort them out."

"I don’t have to talk to you either."

Dr. Ambrose nodded and tucked his pen in the breast pocket of his hunter-green button up shirt.

"You’re quite right. That is your choice. But you’re going to have to talk to someone. You’re stuck here until one of us can stand before the board and testify in clear conscience that you are not a danger to yourself or others."

"Fine! What do I have to go back to, anyway? No university is going to hire a professor who has been legally insane, and no one is going to let me anywhere near a lab."

Paul stood up and lifted his legal pad from the table and tucked it under his arm.

"I’m truly sorry for how you feel right now, but we are going to get you through this."

"Go to hell."

* * * * *
FIVE DAYS LATER, Cecilia found herself in the Consultation room again across the table from Dr. Ambrose.

They’d taken her shoes away from her and given her a pair of slippers instead. She had not been able to use deodorant for days, and they’d locked her inside her room and taken all of her books and magazines. They would not even so much as give her a pencil and a piece of paper to write with.

She’d spent most of it zombified on psychotropic drugs.

This was the first time they’d allowed her out of her room. She felt a twinge of hope this morning when the nurse had told her they were cutting back her meds for her session with her psychologist, but now that she was in front of him, she felt nothing but resentment.

She’d sat here for almost fifteen minutes, and hadn’t said a word. When she hadn’t responded to his greeting, Dr. Ambrose had scribbled something on his legal pad and pushed it off to the side.

She felt him looking at her, but she wouldn’t even acknowledge him. She simply sat with her hands folded in her lap staring down at the fresh, white bandages on her wrists.

Dr. Ambrose cleared his throat and leaned forward. "I was prepared to sit here and watch you say nothing this entire session, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass."

She had a sinking feeling in her chest. She forgot herself and looked up to him.

"You really stink," he said.

Something about that comment struck her as incredibly funny. She burst out into laughter.

Paul nodded as her laughter died down. "I tend to take it personally when one of my clients tries to commit suicide."

She looked back down at her bandages.

"Why don’t you tell me what’s going on. It’ll make the time go a lot faster."

She sighed and looked past him into the two-way mirror.

"I took the liberty of reading up a bit on angels. Since you’re not interested in talking, I’m just going to start reading off names."

She looked up at him and frowned. Dr. Ambrose seemed to pay her no attention. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, smoothed it out on the table before him and cleared his throat.

"Michael, Gabriel, . . . ."

"You’re not going to find my angel in a list of angel names," she growled.
Paul nodded and sat back.

"I told you. He’s fallen."

He nodded. "Do you know his name?"

She sighed with frustration. "I’m not going to perform for you. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and tell you anything if you’re just going to sit across from me and point out all the reasons that I’m crazy for believing any of it."

Paul Ambrose placed his pen down on the table and leaned forward.

"The interesting thing about you is that you consider yourself Agnostic. One doesn’t meet many Agnostics who spontaneously make up stories about visitations from celestial beings."

She rolled her eyes. "What does that mean?"

"What kind of religious background do you have?"

"My mother shoved the whole Methodist thing down my throat."

Paul lifted his pen and scribbled on his legal pad.

"What the hell are you writing?"

Paul smiled. "I noted that you grew up in a Methodist Church."

She stomped the floor. "What the hell does that have to do with anything? I never swallowed it."

Paul lifted a leather satchel from the floor at his feet, placed it on the table and unzipped it. Inside he rifled through manila file folders, selected one, and opened it.

"These are the photos of your loft that the police took just before you were arrested."

He looked up at her. "You have a lot of photographs of lighthouses – a ceramic clock formed in the shape of a lighthouse – an artist’s rendering of the likeness of the Pharaoh’s Lighthouse."

She huffed.

"So?"

"There’s a distinctly nautical theme to your home with a heavy emphasis on lighthouses.

What do lighthouses mean to you?"

She sucked her teeth.

"You think it’s a religious thing."

Paul shrugged. "One might interpret it that way. In fact, the State psychologist determined that you were some kind of religious nut."

"But you don’t think so."

He shook his head. "I’ve seen my share of religious nuts. I think it has something to do with your father."

A light came on behind Cecilia’s eyes. "You could be right."

"He was in the Navy, was he not? Lighthouses were built to bring sailors home. Did your father die overseas?"

Cecilia turned away. Her eyes welled up.

"He died in June of 1990 – an accident during the Gulf War."

"You said your mother was a religious fanatic. I’ll bet she really went ape-shit after that."
She nodded and bit her lip.

"But no matter how hard you prayed, and no matter how many times you went to church, you still couldn’t feel him."

"Just Stop!"

He smiled and looked down. "These, my dear, are the makings of an Agnostic."

"Does that mean that you believe me?"

Paul smiled. "I’m a long way from believing that you’re being attacked by demons, but there is something. Unless you talk to me, I can’t help you."

"Not demons. A demon."

(Chapter 1 part B available).