The Rising: Antichrist Is Born by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins

longer. There was something to this and something specifically for you.”
    Marilena shrugged and nodded again.
    “By now you are convinced. There is personal interest in you from the spirit world, and it is quickly becoming clear that this will benefit you. Your dream will come true. You will have a child.”
    “And yet my life may grow more complicated, much more difficult.”
    “That is where you are wrong, so wrong.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “So far,” Ms. Ivinisova said, “you have still come at this new vista in your life from an academic point of view. Oh, it has made you emotional, opened your eyes to a new world, excited you. But largely you are still clinical about it. You’re a believer, but you are focusing on the cause and effect. Tf it’s true, what will happen?’”
    “I see. Yes. How should I be viewing it?”
    “I would hope, Marilena, that you would soon deduce from all this that the interest shown in you from the other side feels personal because it is. The spirits care for you, want the best for you. You should feel loved.”
    Marilena squinted. Feel loved. “To be honest, I’m still scared.”
    “Naturally. People have misconceptions about spirit-world beings. They can’t imagine them loving those of us on this side of the veil.”
    “But who is it, then? Who cares for me? loves me? Unnamed, unseen spirits? And why?”
    Viviana stood and reached for Marilena. She rose, and the older woman said, “Let’s walk.”
    The evening was cool, and Viviana strolled with her arm gently around Marilena’s shoulder. “Let me tell you my story,” she said. “Perhaps it will shed some light on yours.”
    Viviana explained that when she was growing up in Russia, her parents had for decades considered themselves holdovers from the past when atheistic Communism had been the accepted order. “A form of democracy swept the Soviet Union, but religion flagged. There may have been pockets of Christians and devout Jews, Muslims certainly, who practiced their faiths as minuscule minorities. But there was no real uprising of people of faith, despite the new freedoms. My parents reviled religion, but they were also contrarians to the state. They despised Communism and had never been card-carrying atheists. They allowed that there might be supernatural beings and worlds beyond knowing. This manifested itself when they dabbled in what some called the occult sciences.”
    “Demons and such?”
    “Well, that’s complicated. My parents did not believe in heaven and hell and God versus Satan. They believed in the powers of good and evil. But their foray into spiritualism began as recreation. My mother as much as admitted to me that she began speaking positively of clairvoyance and the like merely to offend the sensibilities of her scholarly friends.”
    “Friends like my husband.”
    “Much like him, yes. But like you too.”
    “But I have become convinced,” Marilena said.
    “To a point.”
    “No, I believe.”
    “You may believe, but you don’t take it personally.”
    “In many ways I do,” Marilena said. “I don’t mean to be contentious, but I’m not following you. Clearly something or someone has communicated to you my innermost thoughts and longings, and you’re prophesying that they will be fulfilled. I want to believe that with all that’s within me, but—”
    “But you are not yet at a place intellectually where you can accept that just because the clairvoyance is clearly legitimate the eventual reality will bear it out.”
    “I’ll believe it when I am pregnant.”
    “Of course. And until then, though it all seems real, you hold back from loving whomever it is who loves you.”
    Marilena stopped. “What are you saying?”
    Viviana let her arm slide from the younger woman’s shoulder. “Oh, dear one, someone in the other realm loves you and has chosen to honor you, and you remain so atent, so sceptic. ...”
    “Wouldn’t you be cautious and skeptical if you were me?”
    “But