By the time Simon returned to the work area, Willy had unrolled one of the Ahriman scrolls and secured it under Plexiglas on the long, canted ledge slightly above his workbench. His notebooks, reference books, a sheaf of blank paper, and a Mason jar filled with sharpened pencils were meticulously arrayed across the bench. Willy offered a collegial grin.
"So, how's it going?" Simon inquired.
The old scholar's bushy eyebrows floated upward. "Ah! I was beginning to think you'd lost interest." His tone indicated injury at Simon's inattention.
"Not at all," Simon protested. "I've been working on a difficult project myself."
Willy was too benignly self-absorbed to inquire after another's interests. He acknowledged Simon's words with a sympathetic nodding of his head and said, "Let me fill you in on what I've learned since we last talked. Did I tell you the scrolls are formatted like an encyclopedia?"
"No."
"They are. The author treats a subject exhaustively, yet each subject may have no relationship to the one preceding or following it. I suspect there's a logic, but I can deal with that once the whole thing's translated. For now, I'm skipping around, translating sections that look less difficult… or with subjects that interest me."
"Nice to be your own boss," Simon said.
"You bet. I'm like a kid in a candy shop, sampling pieces of this and that. In the end, I'll have translated it all just the same."
"Tell me about some of these candies you've sampled," Simon prompted. He was not being merely polite; the old professor's enthusiasm was definitely infectious.
"I can see why von Soden refused to believe the work was authentic," Willy said. "It's incredible to believe that one man-even a genius-could be so far ahead of his time. For example, the theory of atoms. Ahriman reasoned that the sphere is the perfect shape and that all matter is made up of invisible but not infinitely divisible spherical units. He also posited that there was a finite 'alphabet' of these units, which the Aryans thought of as earth, water, wind, and fire, but which he declared was not right."
"And this was six hundred years before Christ," Simon said.
"The tests say so."
"Unbelievable!"
Willy shrugged off Simon's incredulity. "As early as 2772 B.C., the Egyptians had determined one revolution of the sun to be 365 days. By the year 1000 B.C., the Chinese knew root multiplication and could solve equations with one and more unknown quantities. At the same time as Ahriman was writing his words on vellum, King Assurbanipal had amassed twenty-two thousand clay tablets in his library. These were not cave dwellers, Simon."
"Apparently not."
"Western civilization credits either Democritus-who lived about 420 B.C.-or Leucippus-about 450 B.C.-with first imagining the atom. But I believe they borrowed the concept from these writings. I've also discovered that Ahriman developed a theory of evolution. This may be the source of Anaximander's theory that all higher forms of life developed from amphibians." Willy waggled his forefinger pedantically. "I suspect von Soden's failing was too narrow a knowledge of the era. If he knew these facts, he might have been more willing to accept the scrolls as authentic."
Simon smiled warmly and waited for the digression to end. Willy Spencer could out-pontificate the pope.
Willy grabbed one of the notebooks. "You want to hear my favorite passage?" he invited.
"Sure," Simon accepted.
Willy adjusted the wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose, then held the notebook aloft, at a considerable distance from his face. " 'From simple observation of the gases rising from a fire or from the hot land in summer, one may see that air which is heated always goes up. Also from observation, one knows that cold air always falls to fill the space the heated air occupied-the air around us being no less of an ocean than that which the fish swim in, except that it is imperceptible.' " Willy paused. "He actually said 'not to be seen by eyes' but my version flows better, don't you think? He goes on: 'We know that the bladders of certain large animals may be made airtight and inflated, so that warriors may float across stretches of water to gain the element of surprise against their enemies. In like manner, if a much larger bladder could be fashioned, sufficient to enable a fire to remain burning under it, the rising air would lift the bladder, the tire, and the one tending the fire to a great height.' " Willy beamed with admiration at the words. "And here's the incredible part, Simon: 'From such a height, one would be able to observe that even the great earth is a sphere, no less perfect in shape than the sun and the moon.' " Willy lowered the notebook and looked to Simon for reaction. "He also claims that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun and that the seasons prove the earth's axis is tilted in relation to its orbit! History will have to make a much larger place for Ahriman, I think."
Simon looked at the unrolled vellum. "Where exactly is that passage?"
"It's on the other scroll," the reverend answered. "This is Metaphysics. Since he's been so damned accurate in his worldly theories, I couldn't wait to translate his ruminations on things 'beyond the physical.' His heliocentric theory alone offered enough reason for the Catholic church to have hunted down every translation and destroyed it. Look what they did to Galileo for proving the same theory. And that was a full hundred years after the last translation of Ahriman's work! I can hardly wait to see if he's got words even more damning." Willy pushed the glasses back up on his nose and leaned in toward the scroll.
Simon laughed to himself. Trust the retired Presbyterian minister to manage a few licks at the Roman Catholic church. Simon knew that Willy was merely practicing on him, preparing for the furious scholarly debates that were sure to arise after the scrolls' published translations. He excused himself and went to his desk, where he found a scrap of paper he had left the night before. The paper reminded him to find the telephone number of Frederika's aunt. Simon decided to do his research immediately, so that he could give the university an uninterrupted day's labor.
Most of the major metropolitan telephone directories were kept in the Reference section, close by the glass wall that separated it from the main foyer. Simon entered the Reference area, saw with relief that Frederika was busy at the far end, and quickly located the Chicago and Suburbs directory. He found four listings for Callahans with Elmhurst addresses. None had the initial K. in front of the name. He scribbled all the information onto a notepad, waited until Frederika's back was turned, and headed rapidly for the glass doors.
Simon stopped so suddenly that he nearly fell on the smooth marble floor. Almost directly in front of him stood the handsome herbalist and channeler Frederika had visited. Simon finally recalled the first crossing of their paths, in the very same spot. They had been staring at Frederika simultaneously. He could not remember exactly when, but he knew that had been at least a full day before Frederika had left her sickbed to visit DeVilbiss. Simon was reasonably convinced that she had come to him of her own volition, after seeing his newspaper advertisement. Which meant that his initial visit to the library had nothing to do with her. Then what had brought him, neither a student nor a scholarly researcher, here two times?
Intent on orienting himself, the man missed Simon's awkward antics. His eyes seemed to be adjusting to the indoor lighting, squinting even though he wore silvered sunglasses. He pivoted smartly to his right and walked with purpose toward the Microforms room. Simon followed.
DeVilbiss delivered a verbal bouquet of pleasantries to the Microforms librarian, then asked for the names of all the local newspapers. After the list was recited he continued into the microform stacks and selected three boxes, each containing microfilm copies of newspapers. He carried them to a viewing machine and began the process of winding the top one onto an empty spool.
Simon forgot his obligations to the library. He wended slowly through the stacks, pretending to search for a particular box, watching the man out of the corner of his eye. He had noted the places from which DeVilbiss had taken microfilms. He inspected each area and noted that the boxes covering September 19
89 were missing. He selected a box at random and took it to the machine catercorner from DeVilbiss.
DeVilbiss sensed the librarian's stare after only seconds. He paused from his reading to regard his audience dead on. For a moment their eyes locked. Simon's contempt hit DeVilbiss like a backhand slap. He answered it with an easy smile.
Simon lost the staring contest. He looked away, but not before he had burned the man's unusual face into his memory. What lingered was not only the image but a deeply disquieting feeling that he had met this face long ago. Eyes the color of amber-the fossil resin that trapped insects and then hardened into stone around them-were not easy to forget. He saw no profit in lingering, so he stood up and returned his microfilm. He kept his eyes pointedly averted as he left; he did not need another look.
DeVilbiss watched the librarian go. He, too, had a disquieting feeling. He did not know how such an amiable-looking young man could threaten him, but he would not be unguarded if he chanced on the face again.
***
The nearby Roman Catholic church's bells tolled out five o'clock, Vincent sat in the safety of a dark corner, out of the light that cast shadows across the living room wall. December shadows, they were neither hard nor crisply defined. Their fuzzy edges, however, warned him just as effectively of the sun's lingering presence. He noticed that the arcing path of light had crept across the floor and cast a glow on his right shoe. He jerked his foot away as if it had been scorched, even though it was well protected by wool and leather. The cross-country journey to destroy the scrolls, he calculated, had already forced him into enough sunlight to age him several weeks, and he had gotten as old as he ever wanted to look.
Vincent set down the pen in his hand, closed the diary in his lap and hid it in the fold of the day's New York Times, waiting for sunset. He watched the natural light's progress across the floor, thinking of how much he loved it, and how dangerous it was to him. Somehow, whether passed down via the Ahriman scrolls or learned through encounters with others of Vincent's unnatural kind, men had learned of the Undying's inimical relationship with the sun. Like most truths known about vampires, however, it had been so exaggerated by fear and distorted for effect by storytellers that its knowledge became less than useful. For man, a creature nearly blind at night and victim of nighttime predators for all but the last few thousand years, light was a powerful symbol of good. It only stood to reason that Evil's earthly minions should be reduced to ash instantly by the merest touch of the blessed sun.
Mistaken as they were, Vincent knew that for him, a cloudless summer day spent lying unclothed on some beach would produce far worse than a sunburn. A flaw existed in the formula of the life-prolonging powder that Little Nick doled out. It either caused or triggered a weakness similar to the rare human genetic disease called xeroderma pigmentosum. From only minimal exposure to sunlight, human sufferers of the disease developed rashes and blisters. Longer exposures produced unhealing sores, then melanoma cancers which metastasized to vital organs, killing nearly all victims by the onset of adulthood. The only chance of prolonging life was to hide behind roofs and walls, curtain all windows, and avoid ultraviolet artificial light as well. This had been Vincent's existence for more than four hundred years. The elixir's shortcoming had been explained to him by Nick only after he had been using it to the point of no return. He suspected the true purpose of the powder's weakness was to limit his activities to the night, the only time when those who controlled him could operate upon the earth and invisibly supervise.
For 450 years, Vincent had been forced to hide himself from the sun he had once so loved, never forgetful of the irony that these same rays were the bringer and sustainer of life to his planet. Brief, obligatory exposures, especially during travel, had aged him some five years over that period, judging from his image in the mirror, but there had been no way to prevent it. Then some ingenious men had invented suntan lotion and potent sunscreens. For the past half century, slathered with cream, Vincent dared the outdoors, also heavily cloaked, never more than a few times a month and never for more than an hour at a time. Once he had begun this practice, however, he had become almost as needful of it as he was of blood. After more than a week of only moonlight, he craved the overwhelming wonder of the world's colors, the warmth of day.
But not today. For him the light could not vanish too soon. Vincent needed to open someone's artery. Before that, he needed to hide his secret diary from Nick. Although he recorded his traitorous thoughts and deeds in a code he felt confident not even creatures of the Darkness could decrypt, he knew that the very presence of such a possession would be damning. He had no illusions that he was indispensable. He had not been the one who had destroyed the museum and the last library that had held translations of the scrolls. There were others who had made Faustian deals for immortality.
Vincent had never chanced upon another vampire, but that only meant their numbers were few. The legends sprang up and flourished long before he had been born. Perhaps at one time in the remote past, Nick and his unholy brethren had polluted the whole earth with the Undying but then found such acts counterproductive. Once regular commerce among the tribes of the world began, word of Undying commonly roaming the night would remove all doubt of their existence and make vrykolakas hunting a worldwide sport. By his time, Vincent reasoned, if the number had once been large it was now reduced to a dozen or less.
Perhaps he had been offered his chance precisely because someone who had ransomed his or her soul in the year 1000 A.D. had eventually tired of living as the scapegoat, the focus of men's loathing, and had attempted acts of reconciliation. A foolhardy act… unless one possessed a brain of his quality.
Just as the last sliver of light disappeared from the floor, a distant bell chimed the half hour. Vincent rose with the New York Times in hand and exited the house. He stopped at his rented car only long enough to toss the newspaper and the diary within its folds into the trunk, then slammed the lid and looked up into the sky at the pink wash of dying light. He adjusted his dark-blue camp sweater, purchased out of the L. L. Bean catalog (another wonderful invention of the past hundred years, especially in light of his shut-in nature). Beneath the sweater he wore charcoal corduroy trousers, a gray river driver's shirt and black mile walker shoes, also from L. L. Bean. He smiled at the knowledge of how well his wardrobe fit the local style.
Vincent walked briskly. He never jogged or ran if he could help it; he found such exercise undignified for a man of his age. Moreover, when he really needed to exert himself (running for several miles at speeds up to thirty miles per hour if need be), perspiration matted down his carefully combed hair. He focused diligently on outward grooming and propriety, fixed on it with an unwavering tenacity so that neither his eye nor his mind would stray to behold the meanness, the selfishness, the abhorrence of him. He crossed the university campus, passing the Gothic grandeur of the chapel, skirting the Victorian pavilion overlooking the tennis courts. His mind flashed back to other times and places.
Most of the university's undergraduates and a large part of the faculty had found excuses to desert the institution early for the holidays. He crossed Faculty Road, nosed around the boat house and regarded Carnegie Lake, dredged out from a meandering stream at Andrew Carnegie's expense after Harvey Firestone beat him out for the honor of underwriting the library's construction.
Faculty Road was bisected by Washington Road. Opposite the boat house lay a jogging trail, which wove through a small woods that bordered the lake. Vincent had found the trail during a previous postsunset amble. On that occasion he had had the trail all to himself. This evening, just as he was about to enter the trees, he was overtaken by a young woman, dressed smartly in a neon-colored, body-molded suit of nylon material and wearing a pair of fashionable and expensive sneakers designed specifically for jogging. She moved with good speed, but Vincent's hearing gave more than enough warning for him to turn and see that her face was quite pretty. He judged her either a college senior or perhaps a graduate studen
t. In place of earmuffs, she wore a pair of headphones, attached to a tiny radio clipped to her suit. Vincent heard the wail of guitars and the crashing of drums as she passed and knew she would be half deaf by the time she was fifty. She passed him with no acknowledgment of his presence and sprinted into the woods.
Vincent paused to admire the young woman's lithe figure, then turned his attention to the moon reflecting on the surface of the lake, long enough for the coed to run directly into trouble. Vincent was not more than a hundred paces into the woods, watching with his special vision for the movements of night creatures, when he again spotted her. She lay about thirty feet off the path, on top of a coarse blanket. She would have seemed asleep had it not been for the blood oozing down her forehead and temple, for the blood-stained rock lying beside the blanket, and for the man kneeling over her, wrestling her sneakers off with demonic energy.
Vincent redirected his attention to his own feet. He watched the ground intently as he moved closer, avoiding the dried leaves and branches, circling the rape-imminent with silent stealth. The attacker's face came into profile, the cold moonbeams acting as DeVilbiss's floodlight. The man had Levantine features. He was hardly older than the woman, and he wore a nondescript sweatshirt and cotton warm-up pants. Vincent had seen all manner of nationalities on campus and around the town. He guessed that most were there to study at the university. He had read that thousands of foreign graduate students attended American universities under their governments' subsidies, but funding was not provided to bring along wives. Consequently, the young men's levels of sexual frustration were high, and campus rape by foreigners not uncommon. As he grew closer, watching the man rip his stunned victim's pants roughly down her legs, he saw another weapon lying on the edge of the blanket, catching the glint of moonlight pouring through the leafless trees. It was an old-fashioned straight razor, the type Vincent had refused to abandon until Bic made his affectation ridiculous even to him. Nevertheless, he never traveled anyplace without at least one such instrument in his luggage. Like the rapist, he carried the razor for something other than shaving.
The Book of Common Dread Page 16
