Vigil (39 page)

“The section here is too faded to read,” Ezra said, indicating a small portion on the wall between two larger pieces of the parchment, “but maybe they did, and were refused. Or maybe they were simply too proud to ask. We’ll never know.”

Carter put the coffee mug down on the floor, raised his arms above his head, and stretched. Then he glanced at his watch—it was one o’clock in the morning. By now Beth would be fast asleep at Abbie and Ben’s apartment; over the phone, he’d made her promise not to go home tonight and, a little to his own surprise, she’d agreed without any hesitation.

“But whatever happened,” Ezra went on, “it left the Watchers unsatisfied, and that’s when they decided to take matters into their own hands. They decided to mate with human females—they’d always had a hankering for them anyway—and produce what you might call the perfect hybrid.”

“Angels with souls.”

“Exactly—and a supreme challenge to the celestial order. That’s when the War in Heaven began. You know the rest—the Archangel Michael, at the helm of God’s army, defeated the rebel angels and cast them down from Heaven.”

“What about Lucifer, and the sin of pride? All of that?”

“Later interpolations, made-up stories,” Ezra said, with a wave of the hand. “But there was one other thing the Old Testament might have had right—the Flood.”

“Forty days and forty nights?”

“No, I find nothing in this scroll to corroborate the idea of an actual flood,” Ezra said, with all the certainty of a scientist who had been combing over reams of lab data. “No arks, no Noah, none of that. But there
is
something—it’s hard to translate it literally—about a vast change, a kind of watershed event that wiped the slate clean. After the defeat of the rebel angels, after they had been buried in the bowels of the earth,” he said, now indicating the bottom of another scrap of the tattered scroll, “it says right here, ‘and the Unholy and Man became, like the lion and the jackal, mortal enemies. To mingle their blood, ever after, would be to die.’ I’m taking some liberties with the syntax, but the gist of it, I’m pretty sure, is correct.”

Carter exhaled and let his arms hang down between his legs. “But how can any of this be true? I mean, haven’t we established, just for starters, that the earth is older than any of these stories would allow? That evolution, for another, has been going on for many millions of years? And that we’re descended from apes, not from angels? Haven’t we moved past Augustine and on to Darwin? And what about—”

“What about this?” Ezra interrupted, sweeping his arm toward the laboriously constructed scroll. “If we believe your own lab results, it’s a living tissue older than anything else ever dated, and unidentifiable at that. Your friend Russo, may he rest in peace, accepted that—why can’t you?”

Because, even now, despite everything that had happened, it was unacceptable. Because everything he had ever believed, learned, studied,
knew,
argued against it.

“You’re still not seeing the big picture, Carter,” Ezra insisted. “Everything we’re talking about here happened eons
before
the Bible stories supposedly took place. And not by thousands of years—by millions and millions of years. This was a world that existed before everything we have ever known or imagined—before dinosaurs, before the continents drifted apart, before the stars were born and the planets moved in their orbits.”

“Then how do we know any of this?”

Ezra shrugged. “Divine inspiration? The collective unconscious?” Even Ezra seemed to be running out of steam; he plopped into the chair in front of his drafting table. “This scroll?”

It kept coming back to the scroll . . . and the fossil. The DNA tests that revealed them to be from the same impossible creature . . . and the dating techniques that showed them to be of an equally impossible age. An age that only Ezra could have found credible.

And now Carter had in his secret possession yet another small shred of inexplicable evidence. On the way to Ezra’s, he had dropped off the doorknob to Russo’s hospital room at the police precinct, with a note to Detective Finley to check it for fingerprints. A few hours later, Carter had checked his office answering machine.

“Thanks for the doorknob,” the detective said on the machine. “And for your information, it does have the same perfect prints on it. Now, you want to call me back and tell me where you got it?”

Tomorrow Carter would have to do that, though he didn’t relish the grilling he was going to get from the detective. He’d known it would match the prints from the scene of Donald Dobkins’ immolation, and he knew to whom the prints belonged. But he also knew that if he so much as
tried
to explain all this to a New York City homicide investigator, he’d find himself locked up in a psych ward faster than you can say
fallen angel
.

“I need a break,” Ezra said. “I’m going to see what Gertrude’s got in the fridge. You want a sandwich or something?”

Carter shook his head, and Ezra left. Although he was sorely tempted to go to the French doors and fling them wide open, he didn’t want to risk incurring Ezra’s wrath; the guy was always half-cocked to begin with. Instead, he simply stood up, arched his back, then did a couple of impromptu jumping jacks to get the blood flowing and wake himself up. He wandered over to the drafting table and glanced at the few remaining scraps still lying there. Ezra wasn’t kidding; he was very close to finishing the job. All the rest of the scroll was arranged in acetate sheets around the walls of the room, and once these few pieces were added to the tail end, it looked like the thing would be complete. In fact, now that Carter looked more closely at them, he could see that one of the pieces on the table simply needed to be turned around, and its jagged edge would then fit neatly into the portion of the scroll already mounted. What it said, he had no idea, but he could see how it would fit. Not so very different, he thought, from piecing together bone shards.

He sat down in Ezra’s work chair, and without really giving it much thought, he turned the scrap of scroll, then found himself lifting another scrap and fitting that one, too, into a pattern. There was an odd tingling in his fingers. Glancing up at the wall, he could see precisely where the pieces would go. And while part of him knew that Ezra would be livid that he had meddled, another part of him was suddenly captured by the notion of doing this. After sitting for hours, as if at a lecture, it was a pleasure to
do
something at last, to feel useful. And it was almost as if the scroll were
inviting
him to participate. Was this the same urge, he idly wondered, that had led Bill Mitchell to disaster in the lab?

Taking the third and last scrap of the scroll, he fitted it to the other two, then lowered the upper flap of the acetate to hold them all in place. Yes, they were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that were perfectly joined. And he could see that their edges would neatly mesh with the work that Ezra had already done.

What a surprise it would be, when Ezra got back, for him to find the scroll complete.

Carter got up with the acetate in hand. Should he? It was as if a cloud had descended on his mind; he knew this was wrong, he knew how upset he would be if someone interfered like this with his own work (shades of Mitchell again, and the
Smilodon
fragment) but he felt compelled to go ahead.

He went to the wall, and as if his hand were being guided by some unseen force, he lifted the acetate and moved it closer.
Yes, right here
. He loosened a thumbtack—Ezra had driven dozens of them into the plaster—and stuck it through one corner of the acetate. Then he added another to the opposite corner and stood back to admire his handiwork.

“Gertrude made some brownies,” Ezra announced, closing the bedroom door behind him and coming into the workroom with a tray in his hands.

Carter turned, an uncertain smile on his face, and waited for Ezra to see what he had done. Suddenly, he wasn’t so sure it had been a good idea.

Ezra stopped, and surveyed the wall. “What did you do?” he said in a hushed voice.

“I wanted to help out,” Carter said.

There was a low humming sound, like a generator slowly kicking into gear, and as Carter turned, he could see the acetates rippling, as if stirred by a subtle breeze. Their edges, all touching, seemed to meld, and the fragments of scroll within grew together, merging until their edges and seams were no longer apparent. There was a faint glow, a lavender light, that seemed to emanate from the scroll itself.

And the breeze grew stronger, warmer, blowing around the room in a circle.

Ezra dropped the tray, mugs and plates crashing to the floor, as the door to the bedroom slammed shut behind him. He raced to the closet.

What was he doing? Carter thought. The acetates were fluttering wildly, some of them already losing their tacks and drifting free of the scroll they had contained.

Ezra emerged from the closet with something in his hand—it looked like a cold-cream container. With shaking hands, in the lavender light, he was trying to unscrew the top.

“Ezra, what’s going on?” Carter shouted.

But Ezra didn’t answer; he tossed the lid of the container away, dipped his fingers inside, then smeared what felt like wet mud on Carter’s forehead.

“What are you doing?”

Then he slathered another streak—it looked to Carter now like red clay—on his own brow. “It’s holy soil,” Ezra shouted back, “from beneath the Dome of the Rock!”

Carter shook his head in confusion.

“Where the Ark of the Covenant is hidden!”

It still made no sense to Carter. Hadn’t Ezra just explained that all of that religious mumbo-jumbo was useless, that it had all come about long after any of the things they were dealing with?

“It’s supposed to protect us?”

Ezra, looking all around at the flapping acetates, nodded quickly.

“From what?”

As if in answer, Carter heard a sound like nothing else he had ever heard, or hoped to hear again, in his entire life. It started as a low moan, a wind groaning through the ancient eaves of a mighty house, but rose swiftly in pitch and volume. Instinctively he clapped his hands over his ears. But the sound rumbled underfoot and roared inside his head.

He ran to the door and tried to pull it open, but it wouldn’t budge; the hot wind sped up inside the room, ripping the remaining acetates from the wall. The scroll within them unfurled itself and moved like a tornado toward the center of the room. It swirled in an unsteady spiral, its lavender light growing darker, more purple, the wind increasing in speed.

There was only one other way out. Carter ran to the balcony doors.

“No!” Ezra shouted, even his terror overwhelmed by the fear of losing his precious scroll. “Don’t!”

But these wouldn’t open either. Carter rattled the handles and pushed his shoulder against the frame.

Ezra grabbed his arm and tried to stop him. “We can’t!” he screamed.

“We have to!” Carter shook him free, looking desperately around the room.

The noise in his head had become deafening. It was more like a wail now, a rising tide of anguish uttered by a thousand voices in a host of tongues, the sound of all the misery in all the world, for all of time.

It was too much even for Ezra; he dropped to his knees, the mud on his forehead, his hands clamped over his ears, his eyes squeezed shut.

Carter felt as if his head would explode if it didn’t stop. The old toy chest that Ezra placed his tools on—that might work. Carter swept the tools off, then picked up the wooden chest. Holding it in front of himself like a battering ram, he ran at the French doors. The glass cracked and splintered, but the doors held fast.

Carter heard the crying of every baby born, the death rattle of every departing soul, the howl of every living creature slaughtered or maimed.

He backed up, then ran again at the doors. This time the wood gave way and the doors flew back. The chest dropped to the stone floor of the balcony, and he tumbled over it onto his back.

Above him now he could see the night sky, the stars. And then, on a gust of wind, as dry as the desert, the scroll itself, spiraling in the air like a living thing. It hovered above him, a long, glowing, purple serpent, before another gust propelled it out and over the edge of the balcony.

Carter struggled to his feet as Ezra stumbled out through the broken doors.

They watched as the scroll, like a seagull borne aloft by changing currents, swooped and fluttered through the air, into the distance and then out, out, over the East River. Slowly its purple glow faded away, lost in the city lights, swallowed by the night.

Carter, his head still ringing, glanced at Ezra, whose hands were fixed on the balustrade, his eyes still searching for a sign of the scroll. And he heard him mutter something under his breath.

“What did you say?” His own voice sounded muffled and distant to him.

Ezra paused, then repeated, “It was mine.”

Carter looked out at the city below and the night sky above. “I’m not sure it ever was,” he said. He took a deep breath of the cold night air, and as the din in his head gradually diminished, he thought he detected, from the church across the river, the incessant tolling of a bell.

Beth had spent the whole day doing nothing, it
seemed, but putting out fires. Apologizing to Mrs. Winston for her missing invitation, helping the caterer to get his permits in order, clearing a space for the wait staff to change clothes in, squeezing the backup doorman into a uniform two sizes too small.

But the annual holiday party of the Raleigh Gallery was at last in full swing, with enormous sprays of fresh flowers mounted all around the main floor, white-jacketed waiters carrying silver trays of Dom Perignon and Beluga caviar, a string quartet from Juilliard playing Vivaldi from the mezzanine. And once again, everyone who was anyone in the world of New York art collectors was in attendance.