"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…"
An endless string of confessions had driven the priest into a frenzy of his own self-reflection. The vision he had had in the cemetery haunted him every waking moment, and in his dreams he saw the stranger's face, her eyes matching those of the Phoebe's, her hair the same long, silky shade of chocolate brown. He could still feel her lips on his own; hear her words as they replayed in his mind. The vows, said so many years before, with her family by her side. Yet he had been alone, but somehow his lack of relatives at the important didn't seem to affect him in the vision.
"Then I said the 'F' a few times, but it's not really that bad, is it Father?" The young man behind the wooden screen seemed embarrassed to be confessing his indiscretions, even to the priest who couldn't see his face.
Father Leonard shook his head and tried to press away the headache that was growing in his temple. Frustrated, he jumped into the boy's stuttered admission and cut him off. "Five 'Our Father's', ten 'Hail Mary's'. Same time next week." Leonard made the Sign of the Cross in the air with his hand and slid the divider shut with a slam, then walked out the back door that led into his small office. He paced up and down the length of the room and tried to remember every point in vivid detail. There was the woman behind the altar who looked almost transparent, the sisters in their pale pink bride's maid's dresses, and the parents, obviously uncomfortable with each other, all smiling as their sister and their daughter married the man of her dreams. Nothing escaped him as being foreign, or out of place, until the end of the ceremony, when the surprise came. He saw himself throw light from his hands, into the air where it hung. Everyone was smiling and laughing; it wasn't strange to them.
He stopped pacing and looked up at the clock. It was half past four, just half an hour before the Saturday service, and he still hadn't completed his homily. He heaved and plopped into his broken armchair and rested his head in his hand. With the other, he brushed his fingers over the letter and prayed for an answer to the vision. What he received wasn't exactly what he wanted.
Another vision rushed through his mind, blanketing the darkness with a blinding light. The same beautiful woman that he had married in the first vision was laying in a bed, her hair matted to her face, but a still smiling as she held a tiny baby wriggling in her arms. He saw himself again, crying with joy as he held his child in his arms. There were no doctors, no nurses, not even a midwife to help with the birth. He saw Phoebe, his love, standing on one side of the woman, and another woman, who wasn't the same woman as in the original vision, on the other. The calendar above the bed where the new mother lay read February of 2003, more than one hundred years before.
He didn't hear a word that passed between the group of people, and he only attempted to decipher the words they exchanged. He made out 'beautiful', 'baby', 'love', and 'mother' among their lips, but he knew that these were all common in the situation which took place before his eyes. But, just as he thought that the vision was over, when the faces began to fade, he heard his voice whisper.
"I love you… Piper."
***
The priest didn't make it to the Saturday service later that night. Instead, he found himself driving the church's shuttle van down the empty back roads along side the highway that lead into San Francisco. He needed to find out what was going on in his mind before he could go about trying to influence others. He was a priest of the Catholic Church. He knew that reincarnation didn't happen. He knew that God saved a place for people in heaven. He knew that Phoebe was with Him there. But if he knew that all of this was true, then why did the visions seem so real? Why did he feel as though he had seen them before? If not in this life, then in another? And why, above all things, was he seeing himself in the year 2003? He needed answers, and he wasn't going to find them at Saint John's. He had to return home, to the place where both he and Phoebe had grown up.
Leonard wasn't sure what drew him back to quiet Prescott Street, but the eerie feeling of belonging that he had never felt, even while Phoebe had been alive and living there, crept across his heart. The pink Victorian manor where her family had lived for as long as he could remember stood tall amongst the other houses on the block that dwarfed in comparison. He pulled into the long driveway and shut down the van while he stared up at the attic window for a few minutes, remembering all the time that he had spent there with her. He stepped out into the darkness and strode across the decaying lawn, smacking the 'For Sale' sign on the way. The front door was open, since there was nothing inside the house worth taking, and he let himself in with caution, avoiding the spider's web that hung across the frame. Directly in front of him was the dining room, to his left, the solarium, to his right, the living room. The stairs that would take him up to her old room were also just a few feet forward, but he was afraid of breaking them under his weight. With tender care, he took them one by one, wincing as they creaked and groaned, but did not give way. Once he reached the top, he could hear his own footsteps echo throughout the house as he followed the hallway to her sanctuary, where he paused outside the door. Resting his hand on the knob, he waited, as though he was waiting for permission to enter. He sighed when he realized that no one would answer his silent request, and pushed open the thick mahogany door.
Inside, her bed and dresser had been emptied and stripped of all the things that had once made the room hers. The yellow wallpaper had faded into a dull tan that made the area dreary. The windows were boarded up, and her closet door locked, but there on the floor was a single cardboard box, left to gather dust until the next occupants arrived. He knelt down, peeled off the packaging tape, and pulled back the flaps.
The box had only one object inside, surrounded by thousands of tiny unbreakable bubbles that were used instead of packing peanuts. He lifted out an old book with great care, and placed it on the floor by his feet. It was heavy, probably about ten pounds, and the thick spine didn't reveal anything about the contents inside. On the cover, however, was a red circle with three interlocking, pointed ovals of the same color overlapping it. Curious, he opened to the first page, and in bolded, colorful script, he read, "The Book of Shadows."
The pages that followed were filled with vibrantly colored pictures of various demons and warlocks, some more frightening than others, and the incantations with which they could be killed. Each snarling being instilled a new feeling of fear and respect into his heart. Fear that there were more of these creatures roaming about, and respect for anyone, especially Phoebe, who would dedicate their lives to ridding the world of such abominations that he never knew existed. He then came to page that made him falter. There, on old photo paper that was yellowed with age, was Phoebe, her arms wrapped around another man. His hair was dark, and his deep blue-green eyes accented his bright smile. An arrow, drawn in dark marker, was pointing at the man and had a name written above it, indicating his identity.
"Cole." Leonard whispered the name softly to himself, running it over his tongue in anguish. Why was she so happy with him? And why was his picture in this book that was riddled with evil? He glanced back at the demon on the opposite page and grimaced. His blood red face was shadowed with black lines like scars that ran from the back of his bald head to his chin. Belthazor, as it read across the top, was half human. Was this Cole character Belthazor? Leonard wasn't sure that he wanted to find out, so he swallowed his wounded pride and flipped through the pages until he was stopped short. A final lurching vision knocked him over as he kept his hand on the page in question. Before his eyes he saw the woman he had married, Piper, alone in a nursery, her baby in her arms. She was crying, her back against the wall. Above her was a wall calendar hanging on the month of July in the year two thousand and three. He heard pounding against the door and for a moment he thought that she was being robbed. Instead, a large, muscular arm punched through the wood and turned the knob into the room. The thing entered, it's skin the color of a man, but its eyes were as red as fresh blood. He advanced on her, snarling. He could hear everything,. The monsters heavy breathing, the baby's sobs, and her anguished calls for help. He heard his name, she was calling him, but he didn't arrive in time. Piper put her hand in the air and gestured at him, like she was trying to push him away or freeze him. When nothing happened and he came at her, she panicked and crouched on the floor, her hand over her baby's head, she turned away, hoping to take the brunt of whatever attack would ensue. It didn't matter, because an instant later, the red-eyed being squinted his eyes, and both she and the baby were lifted into the air, where they convulsed until the spasms snapped their necks and they laid still. The man, sweat pouring from his temples, relaxed as the veins that had been bulging from his head receded back beneath his skin. Satisfied with his kill, he smiled as he heaved for air, and then vanished in a puff of black smoke.
***
The book laid open on the front passenger seat during the drive back to Saint John's. The picture of the demon that had attacked the woman in his vision was not in the book. His hand, when he checked where he had stopped, had fallen on a spell to travel through time. Once he had marked the page and searched the book for a man resembling the one in his vision, he had taken the book and tucked it under his long trench coat and walked out without finishing his trip down memory lane. He couldn't get the image of the woman and her child convulsing out of his mind. He could still hear their screams in his head, reverberating throughout his soul. Something was pulling at him, beckoning him to read the words from the spell aloud. Try as he might, he couldn't push them away. His conscience beat them back into his memory, and forced him to see them again and again on what seemed like a never-ending loop.
The road around him was empty, most of the travelers having headed home by that time in the late evening. The priest sighed and looked around before pulling off onto the shoulder. He took the book in his lap and ran his finger over the words as he read them aloud.
"Sins of my ancestors, lost amid a sea of time, show me a way to change the past, and help me remember what once was mine…"
