Vigil

by Robert Masello

“So she knows what we’re doing?” Ezra asked, sounding unhappy about it.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Good.”

  Carter stepped aside and Ezra came into the apartment. He glanced around, then went to the coffee table beneath the window overlooking Washington Park. He slung the satchel down—it landed with a thunk—next to the city map Carter had spread out there, then slumped into an armchair.

  “The way I look at it,” Carter said, sitting down across from him and gesturing at the open map, “the first thing we have to do is to figure out where Arius is hiding.”

  “What makes you think he’s hiding at all?”

  “I know, he’s been seen, but I still don’t think he’s walking around in the middle of the day, calling attention to himself. He must have a refuge of some kind, somewhere.”

  Ezra looked unconvinced, but open to persuasion. “And how would you begin to go about finding this refuge?”

  Carter took a breath—he knew how this was going to go over—before saying, “By thinking of Arius as a vampire.”

  Carter could almost hear Ezra’s mind clamp shut. He looked at Carter as if he had truly lost his mind. “What on earth would make you say that?”

  “Just hear me out for a second,” Carter said, buying time. “Look at his salient characteristics, at least the ones we know. He’s immortal, he has no soul, he shields his eyes from the sun, and, as far as we can tell, he lives to seduce mortal women.”

  “Oh please,” Ezra said, as if he were oddly insulted on the angel’s behalf. “Shall we look at some other salient characteristics—or the lack of them? He shows no propensity to drink blood, or wear a tuxedo, or sleep in his own coffin—in fact, he doesn’t sleep at all—or any of that bull-shit.”

  “You’re still not hearing me,” Carter explained. “I’m not saying he is a vampire. Don’t get me wrong. But I am saying that this might be where the legends of such things originate, how they come down to us.”

  “Even if you’re right—and you’re not—so what? How would that help us with what we have to do tonight?”

  “Maybe it would tell us something about where he is,” Carter said, as patiently as he could. “Maybe those legends tell us something about how these unholy creatures can be killed.”

  “With a wooden stake through the heart?” Ezra said, disdainfully. “Or maybe a clove of garlic?” He squirmed in his chair and blew out a puff of air.

  This was not going the right way at all, and Carter knew it. Suddenly, he and Ezra—the only two people on earth who believed in this creature, and who consequently stood the slightest chance in hell of defeating him—were at each other’s throats. Instead of putting their heads together, they were butting them against each other. Carter paused, making sure his own temper was in check, then said, “Look, we’re both feeling the strain, and after what we both saw at your apartment, that’s only natural. But unless we can get in sync and work together on this thing, we’ll never succeed.” It was the same sort of counsel he’d given his coworkers on a dozen dig sites, when things were suddenly spiraling out of control. And now he realized that this was exactly how he would have to approach this task too.

  Ezra slumped back in his chair and dragged the beret off his head. His forehead was beaded with sweat. “I’ll cool it if you will,” he said, his eye finally falling on the map that lay beside his black satchel.

  “Deal.”

  “So go ahead,” he added, grudgingly, “show me what you were doing with the map.”

  Carter pushed the satchel further to one side. “Plotting coordinates. You’ll see I’ve circled the spots where we know, so far, that Arius has been.” And, as Ezra followed, Carter pointed them out—the basement lab where the angel had emerged from the explosion, the tenement stairwell where the burnt body of the transvestite had been found, St. Vincent’s Hospital where he had murdered Russo, and, finally, Carter’s own home. “Beth ran into him in the foyer downstairs,” Carter said, suppressing his own shudder, “and when I tried to follow him, I lost him”—his finger landed on a spot across the avenue from the hospital—“right here. Aside from his excursion uptown, to the party on Sutton Place, all of his appearances,” Carter said, making a small circle on the map, “lie somewhere within this radius.”

  “The West Village,” Ezra said.

  “If he got his lease through an apartment broker, we should be able to find him pretty easily,” Carter said, with a small smile.

  “Something tells me he took another route altogether.”

  “Which is what makes it harder.”

  Ezra pondered it for a moment, then said, “And if we do find him?”

  Carter had had even less success with this question. How did you capture, much less annihilate, a fallen angel? He’d seen all the dumb movies, where supernatural creatures were dispatched with stakes and swords, with silver bullets and holy water, with sacred daggers or the endless recitation of a Latin liturgy. But this wasn’t some movie—this was real. “I have no idea.”

  With a sigh, Ezra leaned forward and undid the clasp on his knapsack. First he pulled out a flashlight—“Have you got one of these for yourself?”

  “We kill him with a flashlight?”

  “No. I don’t know how to do that either.” Then he reached deeper and pulled out the container Carter had last seen in his apartment. He opened it, and before Carter could pull back, he’d reached across the coffee table and smeared the red clay all over his forehead and into his hairline.

  “Didn’t we already try this stuff, in your room, the night the scroll nearly killed us?” Carter said.

  “Yes,” Ezra said, “and for all we know, it’s why we’re here right now.”

  “It’s not much of a weapon.”

  “It’s not meant to be. But it might be a protection.”

  “Weren’t you the one who told me none of this religious hocus-pocus would make any difference? That this creature predated all of this stuff by millions of years?”

  “I did,” Ezra replied. “Let’s just call it my version of Pascal’s wager.”

  Carter was familiar with the term; the French philosopher had argued that even if Roman Catholicism was wrong, what was the benefit of betting against it? On your deathbed, you could only gain by believing.

  For a second, they remained where they were—what more was there to say?—and then it became evident to both of them, as Ezra slipped the container of holy clay back into the knapsack and closed the buckle, that this was as much of a plan as they would be able to formulate for now. Carter went in the kitchen and rummaged around in the utility drawer, until he came up with a yellow flashlight. He tried it out and, to his own amazement, the batteries were still good.

  Then his eye fell on the knife board, where the black-handled knife set his Aunt Lorraine had given them as a wedding present sat. He took one of the medium-sized blades with a serrated edge and slipped it through his belt loop.

  Ezra was waiting by the door when he came out; he spotted the knife and said nothing. Carter pulled on his leather jacket, and by angling the blade against his side, it was completely concealed. He slipped his cell phone and flashlight into his outside pockets, locked up, and they left by the stairs.

  Outside, with its front tires halfway into the red zone, Ezra had parked his father’s town car. “You didn’t tell me you had the car,” Carter said, suddenly feeling like a teenager again.

  “Get in,” Ezra said, pointing the key chain to unlock it.

  Carter pushed the Daily Racing Form aside and got into the front seat. Ezra drove just as Carter imagined he would—badly, with a heavy foot on the brakes and no turn signals. Even though it was nearly nine o’clock, most of the storefronts they passed were still lighted, open for business, and festooned with holiday decorations. The sidewalks were filled with genial crowds.

  They were following no exact course, but keeping their eyes open and making their way, slowly but surely, toward the hospital. Carter scanned the faces in the passin
g throng, but not for a minute did he think he’d actually spot Arius among them. It wouldn’t be that easy. Once in a while Ezra would point out something and pull over so Carter could glance down into a darkened stairwell or explore a narrow alleyway. But the worst menace that they encountered was a homeless man who insisted on washing their windshield at a stoplight.

  As they left the thicket of Village stores and restaurants and approached the hospital precincts, there were fewer people on the street, and fewer places that Carter could imagine this creature could hide. But if he was ever going to find him, he’d have to do what all those thrillers always recommended—you had to start thinking like the criminal you were chasing, you had to put yourself into his mind-set and see the world through his eyes. But even if that had some utility when it came to serial killers and psychopaths, was it really going to work when it came to tracking a fallen angel? How, Carter wondered, did you think like a fallen angel?

  When they got to the corner across from the hospital, Carter couldn’t help but look up, his eyes drawn inexorably to the sixth floor where Russo’s room had been. Even from the car, he could see the thick plastic sheeting and rudimentary bracing that covered the gaping wound in the wall. Who would be the next victim? He knew he was putting himself in the line of fire, or at least trying to. But that scared him a lot less than the alternative—that it was Beth who might somehow be in Arius’s sights. That it might have been Beth the angel was tracking, that day she’d found him in their lobby.

  A wind blew down the street, picking up litter and making the big wooden sign beside the car audibly creak. Carter glanced over and almost had to laugh. He’d forgotten about this. It was the billboard for the Villager Co-ops, soon to be erected on this site by none other than the Metzger Development Company. A rusty chain-link fence, festooned with signs warning off trespassers, still surrounded the condemned Surgical Supply building. He was about to nudge Ezra and make a joke of some sort, something about getting an insider price on an apartment, when he stopped. The realization came over him, like a cold wave, that they might have just found what they were looking for. If a damned creature was looking for a place to call home, a place to hide smack in the middle of a busy city, then what could be better than this? When his eye fell on the crumbling cornice above the front steps and the remaining letters that identified the original ruins as a sanatorium, he became even more convinced.

  When he looked over at Ezra, he could see that the same thought had now occurred to him.

  “If your vampire analogy holds, and I’m still not saying it does,” Ezra said, “I can’t think of a more likely spot than this.”

  Carter nodded and craned his neck to survey the front of the vast old red-brick building. The windows on its lower floors were boarded over or, in some cases, bricked up, while the upper stories—there appeared to be about seven in all—had been left open to the elements and any trespasser sufficiently determined to scale the walls somehow.

  The more immediate problem was the chain-link fence, topped with loops of razor wire. Although the building, which faced St. Vincent’s, was well defended in front, Carter wondered if the rest of it was equally barricaded. In his experience of New York, no abandoned building went long before being infiltrated.

  “Drive around back,” Carter said. “We might get lucky.”

  Ezra rounded the corner and drove halfway down the block, but all Carter could see was an uninterrupted fence, where, even if they attempted to climb over, they’d be seen by dozens of passersby. But at the far end, under a broken streetlamp, there did appear to be an alleyway entrance.

  “Good,” Carter said. “There is a back door.”

  Ezra pulled the car into the alley and jolted to a stop.

  “Put on your high beams,” Carter said, stepping out into the narrow, refuse-strewn alley. There was some sort of processing facility—for water? power? recycling?—on the opposite side. But already Carter began to see a way into the old sanatorium. He pulled a plastic milk crate over toward a huge metal Dumpster, then used it to step up onto the Dumpster; now he was level with the razor wire atop the fence, and if he could think of a way to tamp down the wire, he might be able to clamber down the other side of the chain-link fence without cutting himself to pieces. He looked up and down the alleyway and spotted, a few yards away, a pile of wet, flattened cardboard boxes. “You can cut the lights now,” Carter called out to Ezra, still in the car, “and bring me some of those boxes.”

  Ezra got out of the car, locking it behind him. Then, while holding his nose away from the stench they gave off, he dragged some of the used cardboards over. Carter hoisted them up, then laid two or three over the sharpened barbs of the razor wire. They were heavy and loose enough to cover and even depress the stretch of wire. Carter pressed a foot up and down on them to test their stability, then cautiously put one hand out to balance himself; after teetering on top for a second, he dropped to the ground on the other side. He landed on a slight rise of packed dirt and gravel, littered even here with crushed cans and broken glass.

  He brushed off his jeans and looked up just as Ezra climbed on top of the Dumpster.

  “Give me your pack,” Carter said, and Ezra handed it down gently.

  “The ground comes up over here,” Carter said, “so try to land where I did.”

  Carter moved back, his shoes crunching on the debris underfoot, as Ezra negotiated the cardboard and razor wire. In the distance, he could hear the growl of a garbage truck. Ezra landed harder than Carter had, his black beret flying off his head.

  “You okay?” Carter said, picking up the cap.

  Ezra nodded, catching his breath with his hands on his knees. “Just give me a second.”

  Carter handed him the beret, then turned toward the back of the old sanatorium. This side was, if anything, more bleak and ruined than the front, with jagged holes in the masonry, broken boards hanging down from the empty windows, a black iron fire escape dangling precariously from the third story. Where Carter was standing now might once have been a receiving area; he could faintly discern the outline of a semicircular drive, which, in the days when this sanatorium was built, had probably seen horse-drawn carriages come and go. Now the only movement was the occasional scuttling, deep in the shadows, of burrowing rats.

  No streetlight made an impression here, but the moon was bright and bathed the ruins in a pale, silvery light. Carter fished the flashlight out of his pocket and used its beam to help pick his way across the treacherous terrain, which was strewn with a combination of old debris—bricks and rotted boards—and newer junk: plastic detergent bottles and the occasional stained mattress. When he got to the sanatorium itself, he put one hand on the bottom of the fire escape, which dangled from the building like a twisted coat hanger, and gave it a couple of yanks. Nothing moved or gave way. Cautiously, he stepped up onto its bottom rung with one foot and tested his weight again there. Apart from a rusty creaking sound, the assembly still seemed stable enough.

  He looked back at Ezra, who nodded his approval.

  “Let’s not push it,” Carter said, instinctively keeping his voice down. “Wait till I get off the stairs before you get on them.”

  He climbed a few steps farther. The creaking grew louder, and by the time he’d reached the second story, where the window frame had been bricked in, he felt a sudden shiver descend through the metal steps. For a second, he debated turning around, then, seeing the empty third-floor window just a few steps higher up, took the remaining stairs three at a time; when he got to the windowsill, he played the flashlight beam into the interior, just to make sure there was a floor to land on, then ducked over the rotting wooden sill and inside.

  Putting his head back out the window, he saw Ezra slinging the straps of his knapsack over his shoulders. Silently, he waved for him to come on up. Then, he turned to survey his new surroundings.

  This floor must never have been used by the defunct Surgical Supply. It had clearly been one of the sanatorium wards. It was a l
ong, narrow room with several iron bed-steads, most of their springs reduced to dust, lined up against one wall. A metal tray table with no wheels lay on its side. At the far end a large, open archway led into blackness.

  Ezra clambered over the window frame and into the room. In a hushed voice he said, “How are we ever going to go over this whole place?”

  “Let’s just hope we don’t have to.”

  Carter led the way, his flashlight picking out the holes in the floor, the splintered boards sticking up at odd angles, and through the archway. He played the flashlight in all directions, where corridors led off in both directions; straight ahead, a wider corridor beckoned.

  “This one,” Carter whispered, “looks the most like it will lead us into the belly of the beast.”

  Even treading as lightly as they could, their footsteps echoed in the cavernous interior. The walls on both sides were pocked with holes and riddled with water stains. The doors to the rooms all either had fallen off or stood open, revealing barren interiors with nothing more than another bed frame, a dresser with no drawers, a cracked sink that had toppled to the floor.

  But ahead, at the farthest reach of Carter’s flashlight beam, he had the sense of something opening up—it even felt as if fresher air were circulating from that direction. He began to get the sense, from the way the other corridors had branched off, that the old hospital had been built in one big square, with a central space at its core. As they grew closer, the fresh air increased, and the gloom subtly diminished. Even the ceiling, Carter noted, had been raised at this end of the corridor.

  And then the ceiling was gone altogether. Carter stopped, with Ezra beside him, and looked up . . . to see a bank of clouds scudding across the moon. They were in a large open area like a conservatory, with what appeared to be the remains of a vast skylight overhead. The iron support beams, or at least some of them, were bent like black fingers above them, but the oversized panes of glass that they had once held were completely gone now. All that remained of the sheets of glass were a thousand grainy shards that crunched underfoot. In the middle of the room a stone fountain stood silent, with a statue of some kind, indistinguishable from this distance, at its center.