Vigil (19 page)

“How do you know about any of this?” Russo said, indignantly.

“I know plenty,” Mitchell said, his own temper starting to flare. “And in case you’ve forgotten, I’m an assistant professor here. I think I’m entitled to know what’s going on.”

“You are not entitled to come in here and . . . mix with our experiments.”

“I’ve got to say, Joe, you’ve got some nerve.” He pulled the goggles off the top of his head and threw his lanky hair back behind his ear. “You’re not even on the faculty here, and I am, and you’re telling me what I can and can’t do in the department? I’ve been nice to you, I invited you to my party, I’ve gone out of my way to be friendly. And what have you done for me? Other than not tell me one single thing about why you’re here, or what you’re doing, or what”—he said, gesturing toward the black slab—“the incredible thing is that’s buried inside this rock?”

Russo glanced at the slab—the pinpoint light of the laser was trained on the very spot where the specimen had been taken from the fossilized talon. And there was a very faint but acrid smell in the air.

“How long have you had the laser on?” Russo asked, urgently.

“A few minutes, no more,” Mitchell said. “I was just going to see a little of what it could do.”

“Turn it off! Now!”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that. Once you turn it on, you have to leave it on for—”

Russo remembered enough from the run-through with the techie to know where the on and off switches were. He went around to the back of the assembly and bent his head over the control panel, but Mitchell intervened.

“It’s not going to do any harm to let it run for a while,” he said, putting his hands over the controls.

“This rock is very, very dangerous,” Russo said. The smell of burning grew stronger. “Get your hands off it!”

“What’s so dangerous about it?” Mitchell said, though he did take his hands away.

“Gases! They are trapped inside!” Russo pushed Mitchell roughly out of the way.

Mitchell must have smelled the burning, too. “I thought this was a cold kind of burn. It’s argon-based, which means—”

There was a pop, no more than the sound of a pin puncturing a balloon.

Russo was suddenly thrown up into the air and carried across the lab on a deafening blast of searing hot wind and blazing light. He slammed up against the far wall, then slid down to the concrete floor as an ocean of flame surged like a lightning tide across the lab at him. He couldn’t move, there wouldn’t have been time anyway—the flames engulfed the floor, and then his legs, his body, scouring him, singeing him, washing over his face and crackling in his hair. The lab echoed and shook with the roar of the explosion. The overhead lights burst, the air was filled with a thick rain of broken glass, a swarm of shards and pebbles and stones that ricocheted around the lab like bullets.

Russo couldn’t breathe; he could barely see. The flames raced around the room, licking at the walls and doors like wild dogs trying to break free; the air was filled with a fine black mist of pulverized rock.

But the lab was not dark.

Even with his injured eyes, Russo could see a light. A white light, shimmering, in the middle of the lab—right where the slab had been. But the light seemed to move; it seemed to have . . . a shape.

He tried to catch a breath; the smell of his own smoldering clothes and skin filled his nostrils.

The shape rose up, unsteadily.

Mitchell? he thought. No, this wasn’t anything he’d ever seen . . .

It seemed to expand, like an eagle stretching its wings.

Was he dead? Was this his . . . shepherd?

The shape glowed, like a column of light, and it moved . . . toward him.

Russo blinked, but nothing seemed to happen; were his eyelids gone? His eyes ached; parts of his body still sizzled like a steak just off the grill. His hands lay useless at his sides.

The shape came closer. Russo struggled to breathe the burning air. Struggled to stay alert. Alive.

He stared up into the black mist.

The shape hovered over him, inspecting him. Sniffing him.

And it was so bright, so burning, Russo could hardly look at it—but he couldn’t bear to look away either.

Because it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

A face made of light itself. A human face, but not human. Perfect, beautiful, terrifying. The last thing, he thought, he would ever see.

They weren’t words exactly—it was more like a thought—that Russo heard, somehow, as if it had been implanted inside his head.

The shape reached out—with a hand, not a talon—a hand also made of light, and touched his head. It felt like an icicle grazing his seared skull.

Again, as if through telepathy.

And the shape rose up and began to move away. Russo was terrified it would stay, but at the same time afraid to see it go. Afraid to be left alone in this inferno.

It drifted toward the loading doors, shimmering, constantly rippling and twisting and turning . . . a glowing candle the size of a man.

And then the agony overcame him. As if it had gathered its forces for a final assault, the pain swallowed him up whole, and he toppled over, too burnt even to scream, onto the concrete floor.

Ironically, it was only on Sunday afternoon, when it
came time to pack up and go back to the grind of the city, that Carter really felt like he was starting to unwind in the country.

He hadn’t had a call from Russo all weekend, but then Carter hadn’t called him, either. For a couple of hours on Saturday, he’d studied up on the finer points of laser technology, before Beth had finally insisted he put the manual down and come outside for a walk in the woods. Later, Abbie and Ben, who seemed to have ironed out whatever problems they’d been having on the drive out, invited them to go apple picking in a nearby orchard; now they had about two heaping bushels full of fresh apples that Carter wondered what on earth they were going to do with.

Even Russo wouldn’t be able to plow through more than a dozen of them.

Driving back to the city, in a car redolent of apples and pumpkin pies (which Abbie and Beth had made that morning), they turned on the radio to hear the traffic report. “Unless I hear otherwise,” Ben said, “I’ll stick with the Saw Mill River Parkway.”

But first they had to suffer through a battery of commercials, a weather report, and then several minutes of idiotic banter from the two wild and wacky radio hosts Gary and Gil. Carter wasn’t paying much attention to their observations on Elvira, the amply endowed Mistress of the Dark—“I mean, are those breasts real? They’ve been right where they are for, like, thirty years!”—but he did start to listen more carefully when Gil said, “And what about that craziness with the New York City bells last night?”

“Is that spooky, or what?” Gary chimed in.

“For anybody who’s still too hung over from Halloween parties to remember what happened last night, at exactly ten-sixteen P.M., every church bell in the city of Manhattan—”

“—and we mean every bell, in every church, mosque, temple, you name it,” Gary broke in again.

“—started ringing like mad.”

“It was like some kind of air-raid warning system,” Gary said.

“Incoming! Incoming!” Gil shouted.

“But nothing came, right?”

“I sure hope not!”

“But let me tell you, if that was some kind of Halloween prank—”

“What else
could
it be?” Gil asked.

“—then I’ve got to say, those guys did an amazing job of coordinating things. How in the world do you get every church bell, from the old-fashioned kind hanging way up there in the belfry, to the electronically controlled chimes in places like St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to ring all at once?”

“And why at ten-sixteen P.M.?” Gil wondered aloud. “I’d have waited till midnight myself, if I was planning something like this.”

“Well, all I can say is, if the guys behind this Halloween stunt are listening to us now, give us a call at 1-800-GIL-GARY, and tell us just how you managed to pull it off! Very cool stuff.”

“Very scary.”

Ben turned down the radio. “What do you want to bet it’s that magician, that David Blaine guy, who’s behind it? The one who stood in a block of ice in Times Square.”

“But if he doesn’t take credit for it,” Carter asked, “what would be the point?”

“Maybe he just wants to let the mystery build for a while?” Beth said.

“In this town, it’ll be old news by Tuesday,” Abbie observed. “He’d better move fast.”

Even after the traffic report, Ben left the radio on low, and callers from all over the city weighed in on the question of the ringing bells. A couple of them subscribed to the Halloween prank theory, but most of the others, to Carter’s dismay, seemed to vote for some supernatural—in other words,
irrational
—cause. One guy claimed it had been done by “the ghost of Houdini, to prove there’s an afterlife,” but most of the others took a more traditional religious tack. A Jehovah’s witness called in to declare it was a sign of the coming Apocalypse. A minister from Harlem called to say it might be a wake-up call to New York, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of our century,” to change its evil ways. And a professor in the religion department at Columbia explained that ringing the church bells on Halloween night was an ancient way of warding off witches.

“It was thought,” the professor went on, “that if a church bell rang while a witch was in flight overhead, the sound of the bell would knock her out of the air like a Patriot missile.”

“So all we have to do now,” the radio host Gil interrupted, “is look around the streets to see if we’ve got any downed witches?”

“Well, yes, I suppose you could do that,” the professor replied, “but I wouldn’t put too much time into it if I were you.”

“I still say it’ll turn out to be David Blaine,” Ben said. “Anybody mind if I change the station? I can only take so much of Gary and Gil’s antics.”

No one objected, and Ben punched a couple of buttons until he found NPR again.

The rest of the way into the city, they listened to
All Things Considered,
talked about more sensible matters, and once they’d hit the West Village, navigated through the congested streets until they got to the front of Beth and Carter’s apartment building.

“Thank you so much, we had a great time,” Beth said, getting out of the car with a delicately balanced pumpkin pie in her hands.

Carter got out the other side and, with Ben’s help, unloaded their bags from the trunk, along with a lifetime supply of apples.

“Don’t eat those all at once,” Ben said.

“Fortunately, we have a hungry houseguest,” Carter said. “Thanks for the weekend. It was just what the doctor ordered.”

“Come on, Carter!” Beth called from the front steps. “I’m sure Abbie and Ben would like to get home, too, sometime tonight.”

“See you,” Carter said, hoisting an overnight bag in one hand and a sack of apples in the other.

Upstairs, Carter knocked on the door first, just to give Russo fair warning.

“I don’t think he’s home,” Beth said. “The paper’s still on the mat.”

She was right; the Sunday
Times,
all twelve pounds of it, was lying in front of their door.

Inside, all the lights were out, and when Carter turned them on, he could see that Joe wasn’t there; his bedding, which he normally folded up and stacked under the coffee table, was still spread all over the sofa and hanging onto the floor. And that crucifix, the one he’d seen the night Russo first arrived, was up on the wall again.

Beth dragged the apples into the kitchen.

“Is there a note in there?” Carter asked. “I wonder where he is.”

“Nope,” she said, “no note in here.” She came back out again. “He’s not in the bathroom, is he?”

“No,” Carter said.

“Though he
used
to fold up his blankets every morning,” she grumbled, glancing over at the sofa. “And what is that on the wall?”

As Beth went over to inspect it, Carter tried to put it all together in his mind. Something was off. It wasn’t like Russo to leave the sofa a mess like that; it wasn’t like him to leave the paper on the mat. He liked reading the paper.

“Carter, have you seen this? It’s a crucifix. I didn’t know that Joe was so religious.”

“Neither did I. He wasn’t when I knew him in Europe.”

“You know, something’s just occurred to me,” she said, with a half-smile. “Didn’t you say he was going to a party at Bill Mitchell’s?”

“Yes. I gave him the invitation.”

“Maybe he met somebody there.”

“That was Friday night.”

“I know—but maybe they spent last night together, here.” She looked at the tangled sheets and blankets on the sofa. “You think we should have told him it was okay, with us gone, to use the bedroom?” She gingerly lifted the hem of the sheet and tossed it back onto the sofa. “Maybe he’s over at this mystery woman’s place right now.”

It was certainly possible; Carter had never known Russo to be much of a ladies’ man, but that was back when they were on a dig site in Sicily. Here in New York, Russo might have some extra cachet; here, he was an eminent scientist, visiting from Italy yet.

“You want to order in some Chinese food?” Beth said. “I’m too tired to go out again.”

“No, I’m not that hungry,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I think I’m going to go over to the lab and see if Russo’s there.”

“I don’t mind at all. In fact, I’m pooped. Why don’t you guys go out and have some fun?”

Fun wasn’t really uppermost in Carter’s mind as he went back downstairs. He still had sort of an odd feeling. He’d come back expecting to find Russo with his feet up on the coffee table, watching TV. But instead he’d found an unmade bed, the crucifix, the paper still at the door—and none of it added up.