"At the same time, not all urban legends are false. Sometimes they include elements of real events. Sometimes yarns that get repeated – by word of mouth, at one time, by photocopy, then fax, then e-mail – are quite true. Like the story about the lawyer who fell to his death after hurling himself against a picture window in a high-rise to show it was shatterproof, or the guy who flew by tying helium balloons to a lawn chair, and descended by shooting the balloons with a pellet pistol. The details may be off sometimes, but those things are well documented. They really happened."
"So what you're saying is – " Annja began.
"I come down firmly on the side of waffling. We also spin yarns because we have a hardwired desire to believe in the strange – something beyond the horizon, beyond what we know. I have the same desires. At the same time, I try to keep a level head. What I do hasn't got many metrics, not a lot of reproducible results. But I try to take a rational approach.
"But still. Just rationally, looking at evidence I consider pretty trustworthy, it seems to me that things do happen in this world that defy conventional explanation. These people are experiencing something. They are talking to someone. Is it a hoaxer? When you get a Japanese family reporting that they were warned away from impending calamity by a child dressed in classic Santo Niño costume – well, something odd is happening by definition. Wouldn't you say?"
Annja shrugged. "I do wonder if we have enough information to form an opinion."
Perovich nodded. "True enough!"
She slapped a jean-clad thigh. "Well. Just be glad we're not having an outbreak of sightings of one of our reallyscary apparitions."
Annja felt invisible mice with cold feet run down the nape of her neck and right down her spine. "Such as what?" she asked, not sure she wanted to hear the professor's answer.
"La Llorona. The Weeping Lady. Brr." Perovich shook herself theatrically. "Those stories always give me the willies."
"The Weeping Lady," Annja repeated in a small voice. "What does she do?"
"Wanders rural areas weeping for her lost children. She murdered them herself. In some versions of the legend she was burned at the stake for it. She's also supposed to lure lone travelers – usually young men, for obvious reasons – to their doom. She keeps turning up even today, although modern encounters are sadly short on actual doom. I have collected some pretty unnerving reports that seem quite credible. I've interviewed several percipients myself, off the record. Most people who run into something really strange seem very reticent to talk about it."
That would be me, Annja thought. Unfortunately, it would not be whoever spilled the beans about our sighting last night. It was an eagle, anyway, she told herself again..
"One odd thing I've noticed," Perovich said. "Sightings of the weeping lady are usually associated with the sound of a woman screaming – big surprise, huh? But sounds like that have also been cropping up in the monster-sighting reports that have started to cross my desk of late. You know – shadowy cats, anomalous dogs, bigfoot kind of things, but black and foul smelling. Peculiar, isn't it?"
Once again Annja thought she could hear the chilling noise that had accompanied the black form as it glided off out of sight – piercing screams like a woman in distress.
"Very strange," she said.
Outside, twilight was well advanced. Over and through the old trees across University Boulevard she could see the dying embers of another gaudy black-velvet-painting sunset silhouetting an old church steeple. The narrow parking lot between the Maxwell Anthropology Center buildings and the street was empty but for her rented Honda and a battered minivan parked twenty or thirty yards away. She gave the van a glance and put it from her mind. It looked like the sort of third-hand vehicle a college student might own.
"'Scuse me, lady." A voice broke the silence from her left.
She snapped her head up and around. She had parked with the car facing away from the street. A raggedly dressed man – early thirties, she guessed – was walking none too steadily toward her across the strip of grass separating the inner and outer sections of the parking lot. He was gaunt. His face was half-covered by patchy dark beard.
"Sorry to bother you, ma'am," he said, speaking a little too crisply, as the mildly intoxicated tend to do when they want to decisively show they aren't drunk. "My car ran out of gas about a quarter mile back up University here." He gestured vaguely to the north. "I need to go pick up my old lady at work. She's pregnant and gets tired real easy, and I need to ask if you could please help me out with a couple of bucks for gas."
Annja frowned. She hated these situations. She'd heard such sob stories before – not infrequently repeated word for word on consecutive days, by the same "distressed" motorist. He obviously does need money, she thought. But do I really help him if I give it to him? Or only encourage him to persist in self-destructive behaviors?
"Really, lady," he said. He sounded weary and desperate. "I'm not bullshitting you. I really need it."
She almost reached in her pocket for some money. Almost. But he had entered the customary cultural limits of her personal space and kept coming. Warnings shrilling in her mind, she turned to face him squarely.
Her arms were suddenly seized from behind by powerful hands.
Chapter 6
The Vatican
Grunting, the man slowly pushed the weight-laden iron bar upward from his chest. The body lying supine on the bench was well into middle age, and had expanded and softened considerably around the middle. But he prided himself that he had lost but little of the bull-like strength that had characterized him in his youth. This despite the sedentary and indeed intellectual profession where he had spent his entire adult life since leaving the seminary.
Straining, eyes tightly shut, he fought to straighten his arms against the massive weight. Finally, with a last exertion of his will – an organ exercised perhaps more regularly and rigorously than his body – he forced his arms to lock.
Instantly they began to tremble. He felt strength flee. In a heartbeat they would buckle and drop the weight to crush his chest. In half panic he opened his eyes, although he knew his spotter stood waiting, attentive to just such situations.
Yet the spotter did not seize the bar. The man on the bench began to perspire profusely as the bar started oscillating in the air above him. He squeezed his eyes shut again, as if by not seeing his doom he could forestall it.
He felt the bar move, then, tardily, steady as it was grasped. But still the awful weight pressed down on his arms, turning them into jelly.
" Deus meu!" he gasped. "My life is in your hands."
"Yes," a deep voice said.
He opened his eyes.
The hands guiding the heavy bar as if it were featherlight were not the pale, relatively soft hands of Franz, the Swiss attendant at the modern gymnasium below the Vatican. They were as hard and sun-browned as a common laborer's, and covered with expensive rings of ruby and sapphire, gold and silver.