Vigil

by Robert Masello

  Carter nodded and turned around, but instead of going back out the revolving doors, he ducked into a short corridor that he knew led to an interior stairwell. The door was propped open and Carter could hear the rubber boots of firemen stomping and squeaking up above. He climbed the stairs two at a time, and on the third landing bumped into the fire crew.

  “I’m a doctor, I just got the call,” he said, as he barged through them. “Sixth floor, right?”

  “Right,” one of them said, but Carter was already rounding the next landing, and then the next.

  At six, he stopped and bent over, to catch his breath and to brace himself for whatever he might find. The smell of fire had grown stronger the higher up he went, and there was no question in his mind that there’d been some kind of explosion.

  Like the explosion in his lab.

  The door was secured in the open position and Carter could hear an immense racket just outside it. The floor glistened with water, black with soot and ash, that was even now washing into the stairwell and trickling down the stairs. He stepped over a running stream and into the wide sixth-floor corridor.

  The scene was chaos, with firemen and cops trying to help the nursing staff remove the remaining patients from the area—the patients, still in their beds, were being wheeled carefully out of their rooms and through the debris. Carter skirted the deserted nurses’ station and made for Russo’s room, but even before he got there he could see that it was the epicenter of the destruction. The door was completely missing, as was a portion of the wall; inside, he could see that the windows on the opposite side had also been blown out, and a strong breeze was keeping a cloud of ashes swirling in the air. A couple of emergency personnel were moving around in the interior, but carefully staying clear of something that lay in a blackened heap near where the door to the room had once been. Carter’s stomach lurched.

  And then there was a hand on his elbow, pulling him back.

  “You can’t go in there,” he heard, and turned to see Dr. Baptiste, her hair disheveled, her face besmirched. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  She pulled him away.

  “What happened?” Carter asked her, numbly.

  She drew him down the hall and into the doorway of an evacuated room.

  “No one knows,” she said, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her hospital coat. It was gray with soot. “A smoke alarm went off in his room, and I was hurrying to check in on him. That’s when I saw the other man leaving.”

  “What other man?” Carter asked, though in his heart he knew.

  “The tall man, with blond hair,” she said, and as she spoke her eyes bore in on Carter with amazing intensity. “Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you tell me,” she said, gripping his arm again. “He came out of the room, and I saw him close the door behind him. I stopped him, to ask him why that smoke alarm was ringing. I took his arm, just as I’m taking yours now,” she said, glancing down at Carter’s elbow, “and I don’t know what I was holding onto.”

  Carter didn’t know what to say. What could he tell her that she could believe?

  “He had dark glasses on,” she said, “so I couldn’t really see his eyes. But I’m glad now that I couldn’t.”

  “You should be,” Carter replied.

  “Then the whole room just exploded. I was knocked halfway down the hall. Everything inside was on fire,” she said, shaking her head with sorrow, “everything. And that man in the sunglasses was gone.”

  Of course he was, Carter thought. He would always be gone. He would sow death and destruction—what good had it done him to kill Russo?—and then be gone.

  But there was one thing that Dr. Baptiste had said that had lodged in Carter’s mind—she’d said that the man had closed the door behind him. Carter gently removed her hand from his arm, and said, “I need to do something.”

  “I told you,” she repeated, “there’s nothing you can do. He’s dead. Your friend is dead.”

  “I know that,” Carter said. “Do you have a surgical glove in your pockets?”

  “What?”

  “A surgical glove—do you have one on you?”

  She fished in the pocket of her dirty hospital coat and pulled out a couple of rubber gloves. Carter swiftly pulled them on, then left her, puzzled, in the empty room.

  He moved down the hall and back toward the nurses’ station. He’d remembered correctly—there was a door, a hospital room door, lying against the wall. Its surface was black and splintered, but its number plate was still intact—as was its metal handle. It was the door to Russo’s room.

  Carter put his foot against the cracked wood and pressed down; the wood split the rest of the way, freeing the door handle along one side. He kicked down on the wood on the other side, and it broke free, too. Then, with his gloved hands, he pried loose the door handle. A cop, passing by, looked at him strangely.

  “Arson investigation,” Carter said, holding the handle carefully by its singed base.

  At the nurses’ station he found a manila envelope with patient charts inside; he emptied out the charts, put the door handle in the envelope, and wedged it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Glancing into Russo’s room, he could see that they’d placed a black plastic tarp beside the remains. A couple of medical personnel were bending down, preparing to move the body. And much as he hated to face it, Carter knew that he couldn’t let his friend go without at least saying good-bye.

  He made his way through the firemen and cops and stepped into what was left of Russo’s old room.

  “Hey, buddy, you can’t be in here,” one of the paramedics said, but the other one, perhaps understanding the look on Carter’s face, said, “We can give you a second,” and moved a discreet distance away.

  Carter stood above the charred, almost unidentifiable remains of what had been his friend. Russo had been such a big guy, so burly and full of life, and now, all that was left was a twisted heap of blackened limbs and bare bones. In the extremity of the pose, in the way that it suggested the limits of human endurance, it reminded Carter of the figures unearthed at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The face, or what remained of it, was turned to one side, toward the floor, and it was there that Carter felt he had to touch his friend and say farewell. He knelt down and put out his hand toward the sunken, scorched cheek; he let his fingers graze the seared flesh—it felt like warm tar—and under his breath he said, “Good-bye, Joe—I’m so sorry.”

  Then, before he knew it, he heard himself add, “God be with you.”

  For Carter, a devout unbeliever all his life, they were words he never thought would pass his lips. But now, confronted with this horror, and about to face horrors that would no doubt surpass it, the words flowed as naturally as water from a well . . . or blood from a wound.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  They’d been at it for hours, Ezra going over and over the scraps of the scroll, explicating the text, filling in the details of scriptural history, building his case. And in the dimly lighted and increasingly stuffy room, Carter could barely stay awake and focused any longer.

  “You see, right here,” Ezra was saying, as he strode to another segment of the scroll preserved behind acetate and fastened with thumbtacks to the wall, “it says that the Watchers numbered in the hundreds and that God had appointed them to watch over mankind.” Ezra chortled, shaking his head. “Turns out, they watched too well.”

  “Meaning?” Carter asked, taking another sip of his now-cold coffee.

  “They were watching the women—and they got some bad ideas.”

  “Speaking of bad ideas, do we really need to keep the window closed? It’s almost impossible to breathe in here.”

  “I can’t risk any more damage to the scroll,” Ezra said, irritably. “I told you, I’ve got only a few scraps left to translate, and then I’ll have finally put the whole thing together.”

  “Go on,” Carter conceded.

  “They felt lust.”

  �
�So these angels could feel emotions?”

  “I never said they couldn’t. I only said they had no souls.”

  “Why would angels need a soul? Aren’t they kind of past that already?”

  “Good point. But if we read from this section here,” he said, pointing to another yellowed scrap tacked to the wall, “they came to covet them. They saw the special place that mankind, who possessed the gift of a soul, had assumed in God’s eyes, and so they wanted one, too.”

  “And they couldn’t just ask for it?”

  “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 corn
er 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.