Ezra grabbed her wrist. “I told you not to do that!”
“You can’t tell me what to do!”
“Kimberly, you’re not well,” he said, trying to calm her down. “I think we need to get you back to your room and call a doctor.”
“Okay,” she said, suddenly docile, “you’re right,” but the moment he let go of her wrist, she lunged at the table, and snatched the precious fragment of the scroll in her hand.
“Kimberly, no!” he shouted.
Before he could stop her, she had danced away, a mad grin on her face, waving the strip in the air. “This what you want?” she said. “Then come and get it!”
She was making for the French doors, and Ezra had no choice but to run after her and grab hold of her again. She whirled around, her robe flying completely open now; she was naked, and even as her hands flew at him, in a frenzy of scratching and slapping, he registered that she had other bruises too—all over her body. What on earth had happened to her?
“Let go of me!” she screamed. “Let go!”
But Ezra was simply trying to snatch the scrap of scroll back. She held it away, then doubled over, twisted around, and he could see that she was trying, in vain, to rip it apart.
“Stop it, Kimberly!”
But she didn’t; she put the scrap between her teeth and tore at it—and it was as if she’d bitten into a live wire. A blaze of blue sparks shot into the air, buzzing like angry bees. She dropped to the floor, a tiny piece of the scroll still stuck to her lip. Her limbs shook and a white froth foamed at her mouth.
He knelt beside her, put one hand on her shoulder, and with the other tried to remove the piece of his precious scroll. But as if it were a snake slithering back into its hole, the scrap slipped into her mouth and then, though he wondered if he had only imagined it, he saw a rippling in her throat, as if it were traveling down that way, too.
Kimberly gagged and coughed. Her whole body went into convulsions.
Ezra didn’t know what to do. He said, “Hold on!” and ran out of the workroom, through his bedroom and yanked open the hallway door. “Gertrude!” he shouted. “Gertrude!”
“What?” It sounded as if she were four or five rooms away.
“Call 911! It’s Kimberly! We need an ambulance!”
By the time he got back to her side, she looked like she was entering a coma—her eyes were glassy and her breathing was growing very still. Her body was exposed by the open robe—there were black and blue spots beneath her breasts, as if they’d been manhandled. He pulled the robe closed and stroked her forehead. “Just rest,” he said, “you’ll be okay.” Her skin was damp with sweat, but hot with fever—and he wondered not only if she’d be okay, but if she’d even survive until the ambulance arrived.
Gertrude bustled into the room. “Gott in himmel,” she muttered under her breath. “I called,” she said to Ezra.
And ten minutes later, the paramedics were there, lifting her onto a gurney, wheeling her quickly out to the elevator. Ezra got on the phone to his father’s office, where the secretary forwarded the call to Dallas; Sam was sitting in a board-room there, negotiating some deal. When Ezra told him Kimberly had fallen ill and been taken to the hospital, there was a momentary silence, then he immediately started barking questions at Ezra. What hospital? Why hadn’t Sam’s own physician been called? What was wrong with her? Who had made the diagnosis?
Ezra fielded as many of them as he could, but as he didn’t know much, he could feel his father’s frustration growing by the minute.
“I’ll finish up here,” Sam declared, “and be back as soon as I can.”
“Is there anything else you want me to do in the meantime?”
“Yes! I want you to go to the hospital, and make damn sure she’s getting everything she needs!”
Hanging up, Ezra once again felt, as his father had always made him feel, that in yet another situation he had somehow failed.
He went back to his room—where he could barely look at the empty spot on his drafting table where the scrap of scroll had been—got his coat, and went back downstairs. He had the doorman, Alfred, call a cab, and while they waited, Alfred shook his head and said, “Awfully sorry about this.”
“Yes, it’s terrible.”
“She always looks so beautiful, and those parties she throws always get us in the newspapers.”
Which was exactly their purpose, Ezra thought.
“In fact, if you want this back,” the doorman said, slipping some papers from his uniform jacket, “Mrs. Metzger usually likes to have them.”
Ezra looked at the sheets of embossed stationery and saw that it was a list of party invitations, with little checks beside nearly all the names.
“She asks me to check off the guests as they arrive,” the doorman said, “and give it to her after the party. For her records, I guess.”
“I’ll give it to her,” Ezra said, as the cab pulled into the driveway and he got in back.
“Doctors Hospital,” Ezra said, and the cab took off.
As he sat in the backseat staring out at the late gray afternoon, he thought about all that had just happened—Kimberly’s delirium, the damage to the scroll. To his secret shame, he knew which one troubled him more. Kimberly would be cured of whatever it was that ailed her, but the scroll? That would never be restored; that portion of its text would never be recovered. He’d always felt as if the scroll had been entrusted to him, perhaps by some higher power; it had been his job, his duty, to protect it, and in that, too, he had failed.
The cab stopped at a light on First Avenue, and Ezra looked down at the printed party list in his hand. Some of the names—the mayor, some city councilmen, old family friends—he recognized. On other pages were rafts of names that probably only Kimberly knew. He turned to the end of the list and there he found a few more names, last-minute invitations, he presumed, scrawled in her own hand in lavender ink. There was a Mr. Donlan, a Mr. and Mrs. Lamphere, and finally, with a big question mark next to it, a Mr. Arius.
Huh. That was a strange name. And why the question mark?
He presumed it meant she wasn’t sure he’d come.
But then, as the cab started up again, and he thought back to that night, he remembered something else that was odd.
That blond man, the tall one he’d bumped into in the hallway. He hadn’t gotten his name, either.
But he’d been coming from the direction of the master suite.
He thought of the bruises he’d seen on Kimberly’s body. Marks he could never have imagined his father inflicting.
He thought of the blond man’s bizarre appearance.
And then he thought of the name, and looked at it again, with its attendant question mark. Was it there because she wasn’t sure he’d come . . . or because she wasn’t sure how to spell it?
He said it out loud, “Arius,” and the cabbie turned around.
“Nothing,” Ezra said, then uttered it again, more softly. “Arius.”
His mind flashed to the scroll he’d been working on, and its list of names. Gadreel, Tamuel, Penemue . . . and the last of them all . . . Ereus.
That had been his rendering of the sound, but couldn’t it just as easily—in fact, perhaps even more accurately—have been translated into English as Arius?
Suddenly he thought he knew what might be afflicting Kimberly. And for the first time, he thought she might not survive it after all.
If it was true . . . would any of them?
TWENTY-NINE
Carter’s first stop that day had been the main library— and what he discovered there was bad enough.
But now, in the departmental office, things had only gotten worse. The secretary handed him an envelope from the law firm of Grundig and Gaines, informing him that Ms. Suzanne Mitchell, wife of the late Bill Mitchell, was bringing a wrongful death suit against New York University, and that he, Carter Cox, as faculty supervisor of the lab in which the lethal accident had occurred, was to be deposed.
“The chairman got one of those, too,” said the secretary, “and he wants you to make an appointment to see him this week.”
What next, Carter thought. In a matter of weeks, he’d been told he was sterile, his good friend had been burned beyond recognition, his wife had suffered some weird hallucinatory nightmare, and now it looked like the chairman wanted to ream him out for bringing disaster down on the whole department.
“So,” the secretary said, “how’s Thursday at three?”
Carter took a second. “Oh, sure—I’ll see him then.” He glanced at his watch and realized he was running late. Of course. He was due at St. Vincent’s, for the summit conference that both Russo and Ezra had been demanding.
When he got to the corner across from the hospital’s main entrance, he had to wait for the light—which gave him just enough time to note that the sign in front of the old sanatorium, the one announcing the Villager Co-ops to be built there, now sported a banner that read GROUNDBREAKING JANUARY 1ST! SALES OFFICE OPENING SOON! In fact, he thought he saw someone, maybe a member of the demolition crew, passing behind one of the windows in the top floor. Only in New York City, he thought, where real estate even now was so crazy, could a developer expect people to line up to buy apartments in a building that was no more than a picture on a billboard.
By the time he got up to the burn ward, he could already hear Ezra’s voice inside the room. Damn—he had wanted to be there to make the introductions, and if necessary to cover for any momentary shock Ezra might display at his first glimpse of Russo.
Entering, he realized that he had worried for nothing. Ezra had drawn a chair right up next to the bed, and Russo’s head was bent toward him attentively. They looked like close conspirators who, if anything, resented his intrusion. Russo raised his burnt fingers in acknowledgment, and Ezra simply nodded—then went on with what he was saying.
“Don’t mind me,” Carter said, perching on a radiator case on the other side of the bed and plopping his briefcase down beside him. Inside it, he was carrying Russo’s crucifix, which he meant to return to him in private.
“I was just telling Joe about the man he saw,” Ezra reiterated, “the one who emerged from the rock.”
Carter felt as if he’d suddenly started free-falling down the rabbit hole. “You were?” Carter said dubiously. “And what were you telling him?”
“His name.”
Carter glanced conspicuously at his watch. “I’m only fifteen minutes late, and already we’ve figured out that a man did indeed emerge from the rock—”
“He did,” Russo croaked.
“And that we also know his name?”
“We do,” Ezra said. “It’s Arius. And he is one of the Watchers.”
“The what?”
“The Watchers. An order of angels who existed before time as we know it even began.”
It was a lucky thing Carter was already sitting down. He looked from one to the other to see if this was in fact some kind of a joke they were playing, but he could instantly tell they were not. Russo’s expression was unwavering, and Carter suddenly realized that a new alliance had been formed. He had been outvoted. Joe had at last found someone who accepted his account, who believed that what he’d seen had been more than the hallucination of a desperately injured man, and Ezra had found a comrade-in-arms to listen to his outlandish biblical theories.
It was up to Carter to get on board, or bail. “Okay. If, as you say, he’s an angel,” Carter said, trying to sound open-minded about it, “let me ask you a couple of questions. First of all, why is Bill Mitchell dead? And second, why is Joe lying here waiting for a skin graft? Aren’t angels supposed to watch over us and protect us from harm?”
“No, not necessarily,” Ezra said. “There are all kinds of angels, and some of them were friends to mankind, and some of them weren’t.”
And how many can dance on the head of a pin? Carter thought. Russo must have read his mind.
“Bones, please,” Russo said, earnestly. “Ezra knows . . . about these things.”
Out of deference to Joe, Carter swallowed his skepticism one more time. “So, this angel you’re talking about—this Arius?—is a bad one?”
“I’m not necessarily saying that, either. The Watchers were appointed by God to oversee the affairs of men, and to teach them things—everything from agriculture to archery.”
“They gave us bows and arrows?” Carter said.
“Along with language and literature, astronomy and art,” Ezra went on, refusing to take Carter’s bait. “And it explains how he’s been able to survive here, how he’s been able to get along in present-day New York.”
Another leap for Carter to take. “Oh, so now he’s not only alive, after a few hundred million years, but he’s a regular New Yorker? With a job and an apartment?”
Ezra glared at him. “It explains,” he said, in carefully measured tones, “how he is able to master and absorb our languages and customs and manners at an unimaginable rate. You could say that he invented these things. Without what the Watchers imparted to us, without that spark of the divine fire that they gave us, none of us—and I mean humanity—would be what we are today.”
“And so now, what?” Carter asked. “He wants his gifts back? He isn’t happy with how we’re using them? Is that why he’s here?”
Ezra looked over at Russo. “We’re not sure what his plans are. We were discussing that. I need to do some more work.”
“On what?” Carter said, though he could guess. “The scroll? You think that something written untold ages ago and bottled up in a desert cave is going to tell you that?”
“It may. And it may tell us what happened to him, and why he fell, so long ago.”
Carter ran a hand through his thick brown hair. He felt like he’d entered Bellevue and was trying to make sense of the inmates’ chatter. If you wanted to dismantle the train of illogic, to take it apart piece by piece so that even they could see and understand how irrational it was, where did you start?
“What makes you think,” Carter finally asked Ezra, “that he hasn’t hopped a flight to Paris, or a Greyhound bus to Florida? What makes you think that this Arius is still here in New York?”
“Oh, that one’s easy,” Ezra said, leaning back so far that the front legs of the chair came up off the floor. “I’ve met him.”
Down the hole, Carter thought, and all the way to Wonderland. “You’ve met,” he said, slowly, “this angel?”
“He came to a fund-raiser for the mayor at our apartment.”
Carter couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.
“And I have a strong suspicion that he badly injured my stepmother. That’s why I said I don’t yet know what his intentions are. I’m as much in the dark as you are.”
Carter shook his head, ruefully. “I doubt that.”
“Bones,” Russo said, his voice barely audible, “you are a scientist. Look at the evidence.”
“Joe, I would—but I just don’t see any.”
Russo raised his hands, as if to say Look at me. Look at everything that’s happened. How else do you explain it? “Tell me you have not had . . . your own thoughts?” Russo said, tellingly, and Carter felt as if his friend were looking right inside him—right inside his head. It’s true, there were things Carter couldn’t deny, even to himself. He thought back to the night before, when he had found the lines about Avernus in the pages of the Aeneid. And that morning, at the library, when his research had uncovered the rest.
Russo must have seen something in his expression. “There is something you want to tell us,” he said, “something that you know.”
“No, it’s nothing,” Carter said, trying to brush it aside.
“It is something,” Russo insisted. “I saw that look, years ago, in Sicily.”
Ezra waited. “The crazier you think it is, the more I want to hear it.”
But Carter felt that if he so much as mentioned it aloud, if he put even one toe into this muddy water, he would never come out
of it safely again. Every fiber of his being resisted going into this dismal swamp.
But hadn’t he already done that, he thought? Hadn’t he taken the first step, however unheralded, the moment that the impossibly strange suspicion crossed his mind? Or certainly when he’d followed up on it that very morning in the stacks of the university research library?
“It’s just a strange coincidence,” Carter said.
“Maybe it’s something more than that,” Ezra said. “We won’t know until you tell us.”
Russo’s labored breathing was now the most noticeable sound in the room.
“It has to do with the place the fossil was found,” Carter confessed.
“Lago d’Avernus,” Russo volunteered, “near Napoli.”
“What about it?” Ezra said, impatiently.
“Well, according to the Roman poet Virgil, that’s a very interesting spot. In the Aeneid, he wrote that a passageway existed there . . . a passageway to the underworld.”
Ezra and Russo reacted with a stunned silence.
“And for thousands of years,” Carter reluctantly continued, “in local legends and lore, there have been stories about how the portal was made.”
“How?” Russo croaked.
Ezra simply waited.
“When St. Michael vanquished the rebel angels, he threw them from Heaven,” Carter said, hardly believing he had gone this far, “and they plummeted through the sky.”
“According to the scriptures, for six days and nights,” Ezra added, softly.
“Yes. They hit the ground like meteors and they were buried in the bowels of the earth. Right where we found that fossil.”
Russo closed his eyes, mumbling a prayer under his breath. After a few seconds, Ezra stirred in his chair. “It doesn’t sound crazy to me at all.” But he fixed Carter with an appraising gaze. “How does it sound to the man of science?”
And Carter was no longer sure; he was no longer sure of anything. Fumbling in his briefcase, he took out the crucifix, got off the radiator case, and handed it to Russo.
Ezra, he noted, smiled, as if he’d gotten his answer.
THIRTY
Vigil Page 26
