‘Churches help people when they’re afraid,’ Ethan murmured in reply.
‘Do they?’ Jarvis challenged.
Ethan slowed as he walked, gently pulling Jarvis aside. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’ Jarvis looked at him expectantly. ‘Joanna’s alive, and she’s here in New York.’
‘You found her?’ Jarvis asked, surprised.
‘No,’ Ethan admitted. ‘She found us.’
Jarvis stared at him for a moment. ‘When?’
‘Hell Gate,’ Ethan replied, ‘and outside the courthouse. She was the reporter following us, Doug.’
‘Jesus, Ethan, when did this happen?’
‘Last night,’ Ethan replied as they began walking again. ‘Doug, she’s not the killer we’re looking for.’
Jarvis raised an eyebrow as he fell in step alongside Ethan. ‘She would say that, and you’d believe her, Ethan.’
‘She knew all of the CIA agents,’ Ethan explained, ‘cornered them all and gave them a good knocking about for information, but she left them all alive. She didn’t want any of them dead because she wanted them to be put to trial for what they had done.’
Jarvis slowed, looking at Ethan as he walked. ‘You’re sure? Absolutely sure?’
‘One hundred percent,’ Ethan replied. ‘It makes absolute sense, Doug. Her motivation is revenge, but she won’t get that from murder and she knows it. She said that they all died within two days of her finding them.’
Jarvis stared straight ahead as they walked for a long moment before he spoke again.
‘Where is she, Ethan?’
‘I’m meeting her tomorrow,’ Ethan said. ‘I’ll get more detail then, hopefully.’
‘Karina.’
The monsignor’s voice carried from the choir gallery at the front of the church all the way to where they were walking. Thomas stepped out into the nave and walked toward them, reaching out a hand for Karina who took it and smiled. Ethan and Jarvis joined her and Lopez as the monsignor looked up at Ethan.
‘Thomas, these are friends of mine from out of town, Ethan, Nicola and Doug.’
The monsignor smiled at them both. ‘Welcome, friends. Your call sounded urgent, Karina. What’s happened?’
Karina gestured him to one of the pews. ‘You might want to sit down for this,’ she suggested. ‘Ethan and Nicola will explain, because, right now, I don’t know where to start.’
The monsignor’s features creased with concern as he looked again at Ethan and Lopez. Ethan decided to let Lopez do the talking and leaned against a pew as she laid it all down for the monsignor. Step by step, she explained the course of events that had led them to seek out advice, relating the Pay-Go robbery, the accident and deaths on the bridge, then the murders of the thieves, the clerk, the convicts and the lawyer.
Ethan watched the monsignor closely as Lopez explained the details of the case. He betrayed no emotion, simply sitting with his hands in the lap of his ornate robes and absorbing everything that Lopez said. When she had finished, he let his head drop for a long moment before seeming to pick his words with care.
‘And there can be no mistake?’ he asked Karina. ‘That you have all seen this anomaly, this spirit, and that it has killed?’
‘You had to be there, Thomas,’ Karina replied. ‘There’s no doubt about it, no trickery. This thing tears people apart as though they’re made of paper, crushes hearts inside people’s chests. I’d say that us being mistaken is now less likely than this thing being real.’
Monsignor Thomas nodded slowly and then took a deep breath.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked her.
‘We need a way of stopping it,’ Ethan replied for Karina. ‘While there may be a reason that it’s killing people, we need to let the law handle it. A vigilante poltergeist isn’t what this case needs right now. We need answers, not corpses.’
Monsignor Thomas slowly stood from his seat, his hands clasped before him as he glanced across at the choir gallery glowing in the candle light and a huge golden crucifix suspended above it.
‘There is so much that we do not know about our existence,’ he said finally. ‘Science has answered so much and will continue to do so, but there are some things that it is not equipped to measure. I fear that a phenomenon such as a wraith loose in New York City is one such event. You cannot defeat such a force of nature by strength, only by guile.’
‘Force of nature?’ Karina gasped. ‘There’s nothing natural about it!’
Monsignor Thomas smiled and shook his head. ‘Isn’t there? We call such entities supernatural, but only because our senses are not equipped to detect them easily and because they do not frequently interact with our world.’
‘We need to stay in the here and now,’ Ethan cautioned the monsignor, ‘not get caught up in speculation about the afterlife.’
‘I’m not talking about the afterlife, as you call it,’ the monsignor replied easily, not taking offence. ‘I’m talking about what we can detect, and how you might be able to use it to control this wraith.’
‘Control it?’ Lopez asked.
‘Contain it, then,’ the monsignor corrected himself. ‘Put simply, our universe, whether you believe it was created by God or that it simply exists, is a universe of energy. That energy takes different forms such as heat, light, objects, gases and so on, but all of it is energy nonetheless. You have heard of Albert Einstein’s Special and General Relativity, yes?’
Ethan blinked and almost laughed. ‘You’ve studied them?’
‘My PhD was in theoretical physics,’ Monsignor Thomas replied without taking offence. ‘As a scientist and a believer, I see no conflict between science and faith. For me, the one leads to the other.’
‘So what does this wraith have to do with Einstein?’ Jarvis asked.
Monsignor Thomas gestured to the candles near the choir gallery. ‘Einstein worked out that everything is energy by asking questions about and studying the properties of light. One of the conclusions that he drew and that is little known is that, for his equations to work, he had to create an energy field that exists across space and time. It was once referred to, in ancient times, as the “ether”, a field which would carry the passage of light. Einstein didn’t believe in its existence or in the consequences of it being there: that the universe must be expanding due to this mysterious field of energy, so he fudged his equations to cover the gap. He later called it “the greatest blunder of his life”.’
‘So there is an energy field, all around the universe?’ Karina asked, and was rewarded with a nod.
‘It goes by many names, many of them associated with the strange world of quantum mechanics,’ Monsignor Thomas replied. ‘But essentially, it is the seething energy field of all atomic particles, invisible but constantly buzzing. There are particles popping into and out of existence in every square inch of our universe.’
Ethan realized where the monsignor was coming from.
‘You think that’s the fuel that the wraith uses to do what it does?’
‘To a certain extent, yes,’ Monsignor Thomas replied. ‘But it will also be drawing energy from our everyday technology. Investigations into paranormal events around the world have documented many hundreds of times the draining of batteries in cameras or the fading of lights in the presence of paranormal activity, as though something is drawing energy from its surroundings to manifest itself.’
‘The lights,’ Lopez said, turning to Ethan, ‘the lights are always out when the wraith is present.’
‘Cellphones and radios fail, too,’ Ethan agreed. ‘But surely, there isn’t enough energy in a cell battery or light bulbs to crush a half-tonne elevator car?’