The Book of Common Dread

by Brent Monahan

  Encountering the familiar statue was but one added element to the crowning irony of his life, Vincent reflected, as he stood once again under the shelter of God's house. The irony was the return of his faith that God cared about mankind. In 1503, very soon after he had become Undead, he was ordered to destroy the Venetian printed versions of a Latin manuscript supposedly copied from a Greek manuscript, taken from some ancient Akkadian scrolls, called Physics and Metaphysics. A few decades later, he learned that at least the Latin manuscript was genuine, as he had been directed to the house where one was located and told to destroy it and the family who owned it. Such stern measures to eliminate mere words had piqued Vincent's interest, to the point that he had skimmed one copy of the book. The Physics section was divided into forty-nine "evidences." To Vincent, it had seemed so much insanity. It began by stating that "God's language is numbers," followed by incomprehensible formulae. The descriptions touched on such topics as the nature of gravity, the roundness of the earth and other planets and their orbits around the sun, the elements from which the universe was built, and two notions that Vincent could never forget, precisely because of their impossibility. The first stated that time was a relative measurement; the second that the secret to all life and to its continuance was contained on infinitely small yet enormously long spiral ladders, which broke apart to reproduce themselves.

  The second book, Metaphysics, contained an accounting of the creation of the universe and the world, far less picturesque than that in the Old Testament. Much of its body contained accounts of the nature of God's angels and their roles. Lucifer had been God's favorite but had rebelled and been confined to the realms of darkness, whence he visited trials and temptations upon God's living creatures. Vincent had read much the same cant in the Bible and credited it as primitive superstition, a way to fix the blame for all man's baser traits on a malevolent outside agency. The one section of Metaphysics he could not dismiss, however, was that which accurately described him and the pact he had made in order to gain unending life. In the years that followed his reading of the book, he had developed several theories. One was that the author was a crackpot who had heard about Vincent's kind or else had been befriended by one. Another was that the author was in fact identical to Vincent and, like him, had grown tired of serving an enemy of his race. Perhaps before ending his life, he had written the text as a warning to mankind. There had been no proof in those centuries of the writing's ancient origins. Such ideas as a round world and a heliocentric universe had been advanced by several thinkers before Vincent's time. One way or the other, it was all explicable with no divine authorship. The one thing Vincent was sure of in 1503 was that the Creator didn't give a damn about mankind or its salvation. The world and the Church proved that to him. Thus, evidences and warnings could be nothing more than a hoax, to fool those who desperately wanted to believe.

  But then, over the centuries, more and more of the incomprehensible ideas of the Metaphysics section were proven. Vincent often wished he had saved a copy of the Manutius translation, because his exact memory of the writing had grown so vague. Nevertheless, he retained enough to prove to him the intent of the forty-nine evidences. They, like the Ten Commandments blasted into the tablets on Mount Sinai, were tangible evidence of the laws of the universe-proof behind the invisible, infinite intelligence of the Creator.

  Vincent was precisely a hundred years old when William Shakespeare was born. If in his 'youth' he had read the genius's works, he would have made a pilgrimage to Stratford. But Vincent had not learned English until the end of the eighteenth century. Even as soon after Shakespeare's death as that, scholars were doubting the man's authorship of many writings. Yet once Vincent truly knew the English language, he knew Shakespeare's handiwork whenever he saw it. Reading with painstaking deliberation, given his handicap with the language, he came to recognize the Bard's inimitable stamp, his sorcerer's magic at combining simple words into powerful images, using the laws of meter, rhyme, simile, and metaphor to the purpose of his immortal creations. His belief in Shakespeare the author could not be shaken.

  And so it was with the evidence of Metaphysics. For more than three hundred years Vincent had stubbornly held to the argument he deceitfully offered Willy Spencer: that invisible creatures who feared man shared earth but on another plane of the senses. Bizarre as it had been, it at least involved no demons, no angels, no God. Then, slowly, Vincent realized that both parts of the scrolls told the truth. And that these scrolls were no less than a Third Testament. Raised as scholar and priest, his Latin had never failed him. Testamentum meant nothing less than a covenant from God to man. The translations Vincent had so dutifully destroyed were copies of a companion to the Old and New Testaments, more important by far than the Dead Sea scrolls. In the first scroll, God's existence had been indirectly proven; in the second, by extension, the existence of Satan and his minions.

  Ironically, the advances of science that led to the duplication of Vincent's elixir and hence his freedom were the same advances that verified Metaphysics. Immutable, mathematical laws (God's language) proved a never-completely-forsworn belief on Vincent's part that, even given the eons since the beginning of time, nothing so wondrous as this world could have evolved by chance.

  Yet even though he once more believed that God cared about mankind, DeVilbiss would destroy the scrolls (after looking on them for the first and last time). The New Testament of the Christians promised eternal life to the faithful; the Old Testament of the Hebrews only occasionally hinted at it; the Third Testament promised nothing. The fact that God existed and cared did not in itself assure that He would grant man immortal life any sooner than He would to a crab. And even if He might, after all these centuries of Vincent having served "the Ancient Foe," would He forgive one who had sinned far beyond seventy times seven? In the end, despite everything else, the love of life won out over faith.

  ***

  Vincent wiped the holy water off on his pant legs.

  An aisle door from the narthex opened. Simon entered the nave, aware of the choir singing above and behind him. When he looked down, he found himself directly in front of the niche where DeVilbiss waited. He sprang back, uttering a small gasp.

  "Don't worry; I won't bite." DeVilbiss smiled broadly. "Not you anyway." He wore a tweed sports jacket and a plaid bow tie.

  Simon was not reassured by the calculated Caspar Milquetoast costume. He kept his right hand deep in his coat pocket, wrapped around a metal cross he had just purchased. "All you want are the scrolls," Simon stated, once more.

  "Isn't that enough?"

  Simon took a step back, bumping into the pew behind him. "I don't give a damn about them," he asserted. "But you won't get them without my cooperation, and I won't help you until Frederika's free."

  DeVilbiss was sizing him up, even as Simon did the same. "I understand the bargain. How do you suggest it be completed?"

  "You say she's nearby?"

  "Near enough."

  "I have a friend who'll pick her up."

  An old woman entered the nave, pushed past DeVilbiss and took a sprinkling of holy water. She moved to the end of the back pew, genuflected and sat. DeVilbiss nodded toward the altar and began walking. Simon followed, through the softened shafts of stained-glass sunlight. He noted a pale scar at the rear of DeVilbiss's jaw, a blemishing bubble of flesh he was sure had not been there the last time he had seen the man.

  "You've got to get inside the library before four-thirty," Simon instructed as he walked. "Do you have an access card?"

  "Yes."

  "Pass through the turnstile. Someone will come in through the employees' entrance and go out the front for me, so the exit count agrees."

  "Is it so strictly watched?" DeVilbiss asked over his shoulder.

  "It is now," Simon said, "thanks to you." He realized that the conversation could be turned to a tactical advantage, even while he was reminded of DeVilbiss's sensitive eyes, seeing them squinted almost shut against the soft natural lig
ht. "Go down to B floor and find Room B9F. I'll be sure it's open. Lock yourself inside and wait until I call to say all is clear. There's a telephone on the desk."

  DeVilbiss moved into the front pews' shadows, near the outside wall, pivoted the movable kneeler up and slid along the pew, leaving ample room for Simon. "Continue," he said.

  Simon glanced up at the huge central cross, while the sixteen voices filled the vaulted space with the glorious sounds of the Credo. He envisioned a vast graveyard of crosses, created by the murderous acts of the man beside him. Unbidden, the familiar but spectral face of the night guard, Tommy Wheeler, floated into his memory.

  "Thanks to you, the security at the library's been doubled," Simon reported. "They suspect a link between the deaths of the security guard and Reverend Spencer, done by somebody determined to steal the treasures of the Schickner Collection." He saw no sign of incredulity on DeVilbiss's face, so he embellished his lie. "It's valued at over twenty million dollars, and there's been a rash of university library thefts all over the country. I assume you've read about them."

  DeVilbiss nodded. "My bad luck."

  "I saw the schedule of security's rounds for the holiday," Simon lied. "We'll have one full hour after closing when nobody's inside."

  "Plenty of time."

  "Not if Frederika isn't in town," Simon countered. "I'll telephone you in B9F right after closing. You give me her location. I telephone my friend. He gets her and calls me. I call you, then let you get to the scrolls."

  "No," DeVilbiss said firmly. "I'll find my own hiding place. At five after five I come up to your section door. I'll tell you where she is. Then you call your friend. It'll save time and telephones ringing inside the building."

  Simon recalculated furiously. Storage Room B9F had been well known to him. For some reason, when its door was completely closed from the inside it couldn't be reopened. He had learned the fact the hard way, two months earlier. After ten minutes of yelling for help, he had climbed on the desktop and used his Swiss army knife's screwdriver to remove the return air grate. Plenty of light came through the grate slits from the room directly across the air duct. The other room was entered from the stair landing between Levels A and B, six feet higher than B9F. Simon had climbed through the opening easily and escaped through the upper room. His plan against DeVilbiss had been to somehow get a liquid nitrogen tank into the adjacent upper room and let DeVilbiss isolate himself in B9F. As soon as the library closed he would have kicked out the grate and hosed the monster into nonexistence, worrying what to do with the body once it had proven vulnerable. Now he could think of no good reason why DeVilbiss had to conceal himself in that one particular place.

  "All right," Simon agreed. "But come up by one of the two back elevators. They'll have the stairs blocked off."

  "You're a bright young man, Mr. Penn," DeVilbiss said. "I've faced brilliant men in my lifetime and never been defeated. My lifetime, of course, is a staggering span. Cross me… and you, Frederika, and your library will suffer the most dire consequences."

  "This is all so pointless," Simon replied. "Reverend Spencer sent copies of his translation all over the world."

  "The preliminary scribbles of a dead scholar are meaningless without the actual scrolls," DeVilbiss countered, closing his eyes. "Especially when he's translated so little of the work. Besides, I'm not free to walk away. You must understand that."

  "You say your lifetime is a staggering span," Simon said, carefully. "Exactly how staggering is it?"

  DeVilbiss smiled. "However long it's been, it's just beginning. Leave me now, please; I have meditating to do."

  After the young librarian had gone, Vincent's lips moved for a minute without sound. His head sank slowly into a bowed posture. The singers began the polyphonic Agnus Dei-"Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us." Vincent had heard the work only one other time, when Palestrina himself had conducted it in the Julian Chapel. The composer was dead almost four hundred years, but his work lived on, as did mankind's cry for mercy. Vincent realized that, without thinking, he had begun to recite the prayer. Lips frozen in mid-word, he fled from God's house.

  ***

  The chromed steel cabinet surface gleamed coldly in Simon's shifting perspective. He stepped slowly around it, staring at the scrolls resting below the double thickness of shatterproof Plexiglas. He thought of the Constitution of the United States of America, sealed inside a similar cabinet down in Washington, D.C. Considering the message of the scrolls and mankind's ignorance of their earthshaking revelations, the elaborate security measures seemed not so ridiculous after all. Simon realized that he was staring at the compass capable of reorienting the world's direction back to God. The scrolls had to survive.

  Simon watched the wall clock's red hand sweep away seconds of his life, dragging the minute hand inexorably up to twelve. Among the curiosities that had passed through the Rare Manuscripts Preparation section was an 1818 Bible the pages of which had been hollowed out to create a hiding place for a wealthy drug user's stash. Simon had claimed the ruined book for his desk but had never put it to use. He checked one last time to be sure the security system key rested inside it and squeezed the book back into a line of reference works.

  Faintly, from beyond the room, came the loudspeaker announcement that the library closed in five minutes. He felt a sudden desire to pick up the phone and call Ohio, hear the voices of his family and tell them that he loved them. In the same moment he wanted to join his fellow librarians in a final holiday rush from the building. He could do neither. He locked the section up tightly, walked to the rear pair of elevators and pressed the UP button.

  The righthand elevator arrived. Simon entered and studied the full bank of buttons-the above-ground Main, 2, 3, and 4 and below-ground A, B, and C. As soon as the doors closed he got his feet on two of the handrails, lifted the emergency escape hatch and wriggled through. Already atop the elevator roof sat the capsule-shaped liquid nitrogen tank and hosing equipment. He had used the unreturned set of keys to drive Rich's pickup to the physics labs and transport the weapon Rich had so innocently suggested. When he rolled the tank into the library receiving section, he silenced his lone challenger by declaring that the tank resupplied inert gas to the rare manuscript containers.

  In his undergraduate days, Simon had become adept at "elevator surfing"-a risky sport involving leaps from the roof of one moving elevator car to another, with side diversions of using the auxiliary roof controls to stop cars from above and trap unwary riders inside, sometimes water-ballooning them through the emergency hatch. Simon had resurrected his skill at cracking the elevator doors to load the tank.

  At precisely five minutes after five o'clock, Simon used its roof controls to stop the other elevator of the pair on A Level, then rode his car up to the main floor. When the lift mechanism stopped and the hollow echoes died away, the shaft lapsed into an ominous silence, punctuated only by occasional moans of air descending from the winch room. Simon slipped into his coat, loaded its pockets with equipment and tugged on one of the insulated mitts tied to the top of the tank. He opened the tank valves and braced himself against the elevator's sudden start-up. Although his eyes had ample time to adjust to the darkness, he could barely see. Little natural light penetrated from the rooftop machine room, as the sun had almost set. He reached into one of his coat's generous pockets for a tool borrowed from Rich's truck. It was a hand spotlight, an instrument that Rich assured him threw as much candlepower as a 747 jet's main landing light. Its tungsten bulb was powered by a series of nickel cadmium batteries, and it was encased in ABS plastic, which Rich swore could withstand the wheels of a Mack truck. Simon thumbed on the switch and directed the spotlight up through four stories of shaft. No sounds other than the sough of the wind came to him. Vast as the library was and peopled virtually twenty-four hours a day, this night of all the year was the one when the building might be unoccupied for hours. Despite his words to DeVilbiss he had heard nothing of doubled guard r
ounds, doubted if anyone would patrol the floors until midnight. He might as well have been facing his adversary in a dark, uninhabited space station a hundred miles above the earth. He turned off the light and tucked it back into his pocket.

  Simon waited patiently for what he judged to be three minutes, with impatience for another minute, anxiety the next and finally frozen panic, able to hear the pounding of his heart within the silence. He forced himself to review the facts he knew about his opponent. DeVilbiss could see in near-total darkness. He was swift. He was strong. But he could be wounded. Both the magician's biography and the fresh scar on his cheek-probably inflicted by Willy Spencer-proved it. He healed in time, but perhaps not quickly enough to survive an overwhelming attack, with a weapon such as liquid only 78 degrees above absolute zero.

  Simon was forced from his thoughts by several muffled pops like those from an air pistol, and by the crunching of something brittle. He knew the sounds were unusual and therefore ominous. Before he could place the noises or decide how to react, his elevator plunged downward, responding to a call.

  Simon lowered his center of gravity and groped blindly for the hose attached to the tank. He watched the doors rise in front of him-Main, A, and B. The elevator bottomed at C. He heard the doors open. The floor creaked. The doors closed, and the elevator began to rise. Simon let B doors pass, then A. When Main came almost in line with the elevator roof he stabbed the emergency cutoff switch down, bringing the machine to a groaning stop. He transferred the hose to his mitted hand and threw back the emergency hatch.