Angel Time

by Anne Rice

  “To the cathedral, to give thanks, where else?”

  I walked as fast as I could without running. But suddenly the Dominican friars were on both sides of me, and a good many of the toughs of the town were on either side of them, looking on with curiosity and suspicion.

  “You think you will seek sanctuary there!” demanded Fr. Antoine. “I think not.”

  We were at the foot of the hill, when he pushed me around, and jabbed his finger in my face.

  “Just who are you, Br. Toby? You who came here to challenge us, you who brought from Paris a child who may not be the child she claims to be.”

  “You’ve heard the decision of the Bishop,” I said.

  “Yes, and it will stand, and all will be well, but who are you and where do you come from?”

  I could see the great facade of the cathedral now and I made my way through the streets towards it.

  Suddenly he spun me around, but I pulled loose of him.

  “No one has heard of you,” said one of the brothers, “no one from our house in Paris, no one from our house in Rome, no one from our house in London, and we have written back and forth enough from here to London and to Rome to know that you are not one of us.”

  “Not one of us,” declared Fr. Antoine, “knows anything of you, traveling scholar!”

  I walked on and on, hearing the thunder of their steps behind me, thinking, I am leading them away from Fluria and Meir as surely as if I were the Pied Piper.

  At last I gained the square before the cathedral, when suddenly two of the priests took hold of me.

  “You will not enter that church until you answer us. You’re not one of us. Who sent you here to pretend you were! Who sent you to Paris to bring back this girl who claims to be her own sister!”

  All around I could see the tough young men and, again, women and children in the crowd, and torches began to appear, to fight the gloom of the late winter afternoon.

  I struggled to be free, and this only incited others to lay hold of me. Someone ripped the leather bag from my shoulder. “Let’s see what letters of introduction you carry,” demanded one of the priests, and then he emptied out the bag and all that fell from it was silver and gold coins rolling everywhere.

  The crowd gave a loud roar.

  “No answer?” demanded Fr. Antoine. “You admit that you are nothing but an impostor? We have been worried about the wrong impostor all this time? Is that what we are given to know now? You are no Dominican friar!”

  I furiously kicked at him, and pushed him back, and I turned around to face the doors of the cathedral. I made a dash for it, when suddenly one of the young men caught me in his grip and slammed me back against the stone wall of the church so that everything went black for me for an instant.

  Oh, that it had been forever. But I couldn’t wish for that. I opened my eyes to see the priests trying to hold back the furious crowd. Fr. Antoine cried out that this was their matter and they would settle it. But the crowd was having none of it.

  People were pulling at my mantle, at last tearing it off. Someone else yanked my right arm and I felt a riot of pain move through my shoulder. Once again I was slammed against the wall.

  In flickers, I saw the crowd as if the light of consciousness in me were going on and off, on and off, and slowly a dreadful sight materialized.

  The priests had all been pushed to the rear. Only the tough young men of the town and the rougher women now surrounded me. “Not a priest, not a friar, not a brother, impostor!” came the cries.

  And as they struck me and kicked me and tore at my robes, it seemed that all through the shifting mass, I made out other figures. These figures were all known to me. These figures were the men I’d murdered.

  And there very near me, wrapped in silence, as though he was not part of the melee at all, but invisible to the ruffians who worked their fury on me, stood the man I’d lately killed at the Mission Inn, and right beside him the young blond-haired girl I’d shot so many long years ago in Alonso’s brothel. All looked on, and in their faces I saw not judgment, not glee, but only something faintly sad and wondering.

  Someone had ahold of my head. They were beating my head against the stones, and I could feel the blood running down my neck and down my back. For a moment I saw nothing.

  I thought in the strangest most detached way of my question to Malchiah, which he had never answered. “Could I die in this time? Was that possible?” But I didn’t call out for him now.

  As I went down in a torrent of blows, as I felt the leather shoes kicking at my ribs and at my stomach, as the breath went out of me, as the sight left my eyes, as the pain shot through my head and limbs, I said only one prayer.

  Dear Lord, forgive me that I ever separated myself from You.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  World Enough and Time

  DREAMING. HEARING THAT SINGING AGAIN THAT SOUNDED like the reverberation of a gong. But it was slipping away as I came to myself. The stars were slipping away, and the vast dark sky was fading.

  I slowly opened my eyes.

  No pain anywhere.

  I was lying in the half tester bed at the Mission Inn. All the familiar furnishings of the suite were around me.

  For a long moment I stared up at the checkered silk tester, and I realized, made myself realize, that I was back, in my own time, and there was no pain anywhere in my body.

  Slowly I sat up.

  “Malchiah?” I called out.

  No answer.

  “Malchiah, where are you?”

  Silence.

  I felt something in me was about to break loose and I was terrified of it. I whispered his name once more but it didn’t surprise me that there was no answer.

  One thing I did know, however. I knew that Meir, Fluria, Eli, Rosa, Godwin, and the Earl had all safely left Norwich. I knew it. Somewhere deep inside my clouded mind was a vision of that cart, surrounded by soldiers, safely away, on the road to London.

  That seemed as real as anything in this room, and this room seemed completely real, and reliably solid.

  I looked down at myself. I was a bit of a wrinkled mess.

  But I was wearing one of my own suits, a khaki jacket and pants with a khaki vest, and a white shirt open at the neck. Just usual clothes for me.

  I reached into my pocket and discovered I had the identification that I used when I came here, as myself. Not Toby O’Dare, of course, but the name I used for walking around without a disguise.

  I shoved the driver’s license back in my pocket and I climbed off the bed and went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. No bruises, no marks.

  But I think I actually looked at my own face for the first time in years. I saw Toby O’Dare, aged twenty-eight, staring back at me.

  Why did I think there would be any bruises and marks?

  The fact was, I couldn’t believe I was still alive, couldn’t believe I’d survived what had surely seemed to be the death I’d deserved outside the cathedral.

  And if this world had not seemed as vivid as that world, I would have thought I was dreaming.

  I walked around the room in a daze. I saw my usual leather bag there, and realized how much it resembled the bag I’d been toting all through the thirteenth century. My computer was there, too, the laptop I used only for research.

  How did these things get here? How did I get here? The computer, a Macintosh laptop, was open and plugged in, just the way I might have left it after using it.

  For the first time, it occurred to me that everything that had happened was a dream, was something that I’d imagined. Only trouble was I could never have imagined it. I could never have imagined Fluria or Godwin, or the old man, Eli, and the way he had turned the trial at the pivotal moment.

  I opened the door and I went out onto the tiled veranda. The sky was clear blue and the sun was warm on my skin, and after the muddy snowy skies I’d known for the last few weeks, it felt absolutely caressing.

  I sat down at the iron table, and I felt th
e breeze passing over me, keeping the heat of the sun from building up on me—that old familiar coolness that always seems at work in the air of southern California.

  I put my elbows on the table and bowed my head, resting it on my hands. And I cried. I cried so hard that I was sobbing.

  The pain I felt was so awful that I couldn’t describe it even to myself.

  I knew people were passing me, and I didn’t care what they saw or what they felt. At one point, a woman came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Can I do anything?” she whispered.

  “No,” I said. “Nobody can. It’s all over.”

  I thanked her, and took her hand in mine and told her she was kind. She smiled and nodded and she went on with her party of tourists. They disappeared down the steps of the rotunda.

  I checked my pocket, found a valet ticket for my car, and I went downstairs, out through the lobby, and under the campanario, and gave the ticket to the valet along with a twenty-dollar bill and stood there, dazed, looking at everything as if I’d never seen it before—the campanario with its many bells, the zinnias blooming along the garden path, and those great slender palms rising upwards as though to point to the flawless blue sky.

  The valet came up to me.

  “You okay, sir?” he asked.

  I wiped at my nose. I realized I was still crying. I pulled a linen handkerchief out of my pocket and blew my nose.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said. “I just lost a whole bunch of close friends,” I said. “But I didn’t deserve to have them.”

  He didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t blame him.

  I climbed behind the wheel of the car and drove as fast as it was safe to drive to San Juan Capistrano.

  All that had happened was passing through my mind like a great ribbon, and I noticed nothing of the hills or the highway, or the signs. I was in the past in my heart, while I guided the car by instinct in the present.

  When I entered the Mission grounds, I looked around hopelessly, and once again, I whispered, “Malchiah.”

  There was no answer, and no one who even faintly resembled him. Just the usual families making their way among the beds of flowers.

  I went straight to the Serra Chapel.

  Thankfully, there weren’t very many people in it, and the few that were there were praying.

  I walked up the aisle, staring at the tabernacle with the sanctuary light on the left, and I wanted with all my heart to lie down on the floor of the chapel with my arms out and pray, but I knew that others would come up to me if I did that.

  It was all I could do to kneel in the first pew, and say again the prayer I’d said when the mob attacked me.

  “Lord God,” I prayed. “I don’t know whether it was a dream or it was real. I only know I’m Yours now. I never want to be anything else but Yours.”

  I sat back in the pew finally and cried quietly for what must have been an hour. I didn’t make enough noise to disturb people. And when anyone did come close, I looked down and closed my eyes, and they just moved on past to do their praying or light their candles.

  I looked at the tabernacle and I emptied my mind, and many thoughts came to me. The most crushing thought was that I was alone. All those I’d known and loved with all my heart were utterly removed from me.

  I would never see Godwin and Rosa again. I would never see Fluria or Meir again. I knew this.

  And I knew that never, never in my life would I ever see the only people I’d ever really known and loved. They were gone from me; we were separated by centuries, and there was nothing I could do about it, and the more I thought of it all the more I wondered if I’d ever see Malchiah again.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there.

  At one point, I knew it was getting near evening.

  I had told the Lord over and over how sorry I was for every evil thing I’d ever done, and whether the angels had done this thing with illusions, to show me the error of my ways, or whether I had really been in Norwich and Paris, whether I had really been there or not, I didn’t deserve the mercy that had been shown me.

  Finally, I went out, and drove back to the Mission Inn.

  It was dark by that time, as it was springtime, and the darkness came early. I let myself into the Amistad Suite and I went to work on the computer.

  It wasn’t difficult at all to find pictures of Norwich, pictures of the castle and the cathedral, but pictures of the castle were radically different from the old Norman place that I had seen. As for the cathedral, it had been greatly expanded since my visit.

  I keyed in “Jews of Norwich,” and read with a vague sense of dread the whole horrible story of the martyrdom of Little St. William.

  Suddenly, with my hands trembling, I keyed in Meir of Norwich. To my utter amazement there popped up more than one article on him. Meir, the poet of Norwich, was a real person.

  I sat back, simply overcome. And for a long time I couldn’t do anything. Then I read the brief articles to the effect that this man was known only by a manuscript of poems in Hebrew in which he had identified himself, a manuscript that was in the Vatican Museum.

  After that I keyed in many different names, but came up essentially with nothing I could relate to what had happened. No story of any massacre over another child.

  But the sad history of the Jews in England in the Middle Ages soon came to an abrupt finish in 1290 when all Jews were expelled from the island.

  I sat back.

  I had done enough research, and what I had come to know was that Little St. William had the distinction of being the first case of a ritual murder attributed to Jews, a charge that would reoccur over and over again throughout the Middle Ages and after. And England was the first country to expel the Jews entirely. There had been expulsions from cities and territories before, but England was the first country.

  I knew the rest. The Jews had been welcomed back centuries later by Oliver Cromwell because Oliver Cromwell thought the world was about to end and the conversion of the Jews had to play a role in it.

  I got up from the computer with my eyes hurting and I fell on the bed and slept for hours.

  Sometime early in the morning, I woke up. It was three a.m. by the bedside clock. That meant it was six a.m. in New York, and The Right Man would be at his desk.

  I opened my cell phone, observed it was a prepaid phone, such as I always used, and punched in his number.

  As soon as I heard his voice, I said, “Look, I’m never going to kill again. I’m never going to harm anyone if I can possibly help it. I’m not your needle sniper now. It’s finished.”

  “I want you to come here, Son,” he said.

  “Why, so you can kill me?”

  “Lucky, how could you think something like that?” he said. He sounded perfectly sincere and a little hurt. “Son, I’m worried about what you might do to yourself. I’ve always been worried about that.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore,” I said. “I have something to do now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Write a book about something that happened to me. Oh, don’t worry, it has nothing to do with you or anything you’ve ever asked me to do. All that will remain secret as it always has. You might say I’m taking the advice of Hamlet’s father. I’m leaving you to Heaven.”

  “Lucky, you’re not right in your head.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “Son, how many times have I tried to tell you that you were working for The Good Guys all along? Do I have to spell it out? You’ve been working for your country.”

  “Doesn’t change a thing,” I said. “I wish you luck. And speaking of luck, I want to tell you my real name. It’s Toby O’Dare and I was born in New Orleans.”

  “What’s happened to you, Son?”

  “Did you know that was my name?”

  “No. We were never able to trace you back before your New York friends. You don’t have to be telling me these things. I won’t pass them on. This is
an organization you can quit, Son. You can walk away. I just want to know that you know where you’re going.”

  I laughed.

  For the first time since my return, I laughed.

  “I love you, Son,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know, Boss. And in a way, I love you. That’s the mystery of it. But I’m no good for what you want now. I’m going to do something worthwhile with my life, if it’s only the writing of a book.”

  “Will you call me from time to time?”

  “I don’t think so, but you can always keep your eye on the bookstores, Boss. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find my name on one of the covers someday. I gotta go now. I want to say … well, it wasn’t your fault what I became. It was all my doing. In a way, you saved me, Boss. Somebody much worse might have crossed my path, and that could have been worse than what actually happened. Good luck, Boss.”

  I closed the phone before he could say anything.

  For the next two weeks I lived at the Mission Inn. I typed on my laptop the entire story of what had happened.

  I wrote about Malchiah’s coming to me, and I wrote the version of my life that he had told me.

  I wrote all about what I’d done, as best I could remember it. It hurt so bad to describe Fluria and Godwin that I could hardly endure it, but writing seemed the only thing that I could do and so I continued.

  Finally, I included the notes on the true things I knew about the Jews of Norwich, the books that dealt with them, and that tantalizing fact that Meir, the poet of Norwich, had really existed.

  Lastly, I wrote the title of the book, and that was Angel Time.

  It was four in the morning when I finally finished.

  I went out on the veranda, found it completely dark and deserted, and sat at the iron table, merely thinking, waiting for the sky to get light, for the birds to start their inevitable singing.

  I could have cried again, but it seemed for a moment I had no more tears.

  What was real to me was this: I didn’t know whether or not it had all happened. I didn’t know whether it was a dream I’d made up, or someone else had made up to surround me. I only knew that I was completely altered and that I would do anything, anything, to see Malchiah again, to hear his voice, to just look into his eyes. To just know that it had all been real, or to lose the feeling that it had been undeniably real, which was driving me crazy.