The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  The search had taken so long, so long…

  Brightwell opened his eyes. The Black Angel stood before him.

  “It is nearly over,” said the angel.

  “We don’t know for certain that he has it.”

  “He has given himself away.”

  “And Parker?”

  “After we have found my twin.”

  Brightwell lowered his eyes.

  “It is him,” he said.

  “I am inclined to agree,” said the Black Angel.

  “If he is killed, I will lose him again.”

  “And you will find him again. After all, you found me.”

  Some of the strength seemed to leave Brightwell. His shoulders sagged, and for a moment he looked old and worn.

  “This body is betraying me,” he said. “I do not have the strength for another search.”

  The Black Angel touched his face with the tenderness of a lover. It stroked his pitted skin, the swollen flesh at his neck, his soft, dry lips.

  “If you must pass from this world, then it will be my duty in turn to seek you out,” it said. “And remember, I will not be alone. This time, there will be two of us to search for you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  That night, I spoke to Rachel for the first time since she’d left. Frank and Joan were at a local charity fund-raiser, and Rachel and Sam were alone in the house. I could hear music playing in the background: “Overcome by Happiness” by the Pernice Brothers, kings of the deceptively titled song.

  Rachel sounded frantically upbeat, in the demented way common to those who are on heavy medication or who are trying desperately to keep themselves together in the face of imminent collapse. She didn’t ask me about the case, but chose instead to tell me what Sam had done that day, and talk of how Frank and Joan were spoiling her. She inquired about the dog, then held the receiver to Sam’s ear, and I thought I heard the child respond to my voice. I told her that I loved her, and that I missed her. I told her that I wanted her always to be safe and happy, and I was sorry for the things that I had done to make her feel otherwise. I told her that even if I wasn’t around, even if we couldn’t be together, I was thinking of her, and I would never, ever forget how important she was to me.

  And I knew Rachel was listening too, and in this way I told her all the things that I could not say to her.

  The dog woke me. He wasn’t barking, merely whining softly, his tail held low while he wagged it nervously, as he did when he was trying to make amends for doing something wrong. He cocked his head as he heard some noise that was inaudible to me, and glanced at the window, his mouth forming strange sounds that I had never heard from him before.

  The room was filled with flickering light, and now there was a crackling sound in the distance. I smelled smoke, and saw the glow of the flames eclipsed by the drapes on the window. I left my bed and pulled the drapes apart.

  The marshes were aflame. Already, the engines from the Scarborough fire department were converging on the conflagration, and I could see one of my neighbors on the bridge that crossed the muddy land below my house, perhaps trying to find the source of the blaze, fearful that someone might be hurt. The flames followed paths determined by the channels and were reflected in the still, dark surface of the waters, so that they appeared both to rise into the air and to ignite the depths. I saw birds swooping against the redness, panicked and lost in the night sky. The thin branches of a bare tree had caught fire, but the fire engines had now almost come to a halt, and hoses would soon be trained upon the tree, so perhaps it might yet be saved. The damp of winter meant that the blaze would be easily contained, but the burned grass would still be visible to all for months to come, a charred reminder of the vulnerability of this place.

  Then the man on the bridge turned toward my house. The flames lit his face, and I saw that it was Brightwell. He stood unmoving, silhouetted by fire, his gaze fixed upon the window at which I stood. The headlights of the fire trucks seemed to touch him briefly, for he was suddenly luminous in his pallor, his skin puckered and diseased as he turned away from the approaching engines and descended into the inferno.

  I made the call early the next morning, while Louis and Angel ate breakfast and tossed pieces of bagel for Walter to catch. They too had seen the figure on the bridge, and if anything, his appearance had deepened the sense of unease that now colored all of my relations with Louis. Angel seemed to be acting as a buffer between us, so that when he was present a casual observer might almost have judged that everything between us was normal, or as normal as it had ever been, which wasn’t very normal at all.

  The Scarborough firemen had also witnessed Brightwell’s descent into the burning marsh, but they had searched in vain for any sign of him. It was assumed that he had doubled back under the bridge and fled, for the fire was being blamed upon him. That much, at least, was true: Brightwell had set the fire, as a sign that he had not forgotten me.

  The smell of smoke and burned grass hung heavily in the air as I listened to the phone ringing on the other end of the line, then a young woman answered.

  “Can I speak to Rabbi Epstein, please?” I asked.

  “May I tell him who’s calling?”

  “Tell him it’s Parker.”

  I heard the phone being put down. There were young children shouting in the background, accompanied by a timpani of silverware on bowls. Then the sound was drowned out by the closing of a door, and an old man’s voice came on the phone.

  “It’s been some time,” said Epstein. “I thought you’d forgotten me. Actually, I rather hoped that you’d forgotten me.”

  Epstein’s son had been killed by Faulkner and his brood. I had facilitated his revenge on the old preacher. He owed me, and he knew it.

  “I need to talk to your guest,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It risks drawing attention. Even I don’t visit him unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “How is he?”

  “As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. He does not say a great deal.”

  “I’ll need to see him anyway.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “I think I may have encountered an old friend of his. A very old friend.”

  Louis and I took an early-afternoon flight down to New York, the journey passing in near silence. Angel opted to stay at the house and look after Walter. There was no sign in Portland or New York of Brightwell, or of anyone else who might have been watching us. We took a cab to the Lower East Side in heavy rain, the traffic snarled up and the streets thronged with glistening commuters heartily weary of the long winter, but the rain began to ease as we crossed Houston Street, and by the time we neared our destination the sun was spilling through holes in the clouds, creating great diagonal columns of light that held their form until they disintegrated on the roofs and walls of the buildings.

  Epstein was waiting for me in the Orensanz Center, the old synagogue on the Lower East Side where I had first met him after the death of his son. As usual, there were a couple of young men around him who clearly had not been brought along for their conversational skills.

  “So here we are again,” said Epstein. He looked the same as he always did: small, gray-bearded, and slightly saddened, as though, despite his efforts at optimism, the world had somehow already contrived to disappoint him that day.

  “You seem to like meeting people here,” I said.

  “It’s public, yet private when necessary, and more secure than it appears. You look tired.”

  “I’m having a difficult week.”

  “You’re having a difficult life. If I were a Buddhist, I might wonder what sins you had committed in your previous incarnations to justify the problems you appear to be encountering in this one.”

  The room in which we stood was suffused with a soft orange glow, the sunlight falling heavily through the great window that dominated the empty synagogue, lent added weight
and substance by some hidden element that had joined with it in its passage through the glass. The noise of traffic was muted, and even our foot-steps on the dusty floor sounded distant and muffled as we walked toward the light. Louis remained by the door, flanked by Epstein’s minders.

  “So tell me,” said Epstein. “What has happened to bring you here?”

  I thought of all that Reid and Bartek had told me. I recalled Brightwell, the feel of his hands upon me as this wretched being reached out to me and tried to draw me to himself, and the look on his face before he gave himself to the flames. That sickening feeling of vertigo returned, and my skin prickled with the memory of an old burning.

  And I remembered the preacher, Faulkner, trapped in his prison cell, his children dead and his hateful crusade at an end. I saw again his hands reaching out for me through the bars, felt the heat radiating from his aged, wiry body, and heard once more the words that he spoke to me before spitting his foul poison into my mouth.

  What you have faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching…. The things that are coming for you are not even human.

  I could not tell how it came to be, but Faulkner had a knowledge of hidden things. Reid had suggested that perhaps Faulkner, the Traveling Man, the child killer Adelaide Modine, the arachnoid torturer Pudd, maybe even Caleb Kyle—the bogeyman who had haunted my grandfather’s life—were all linked, even if some of them were unaware of the ties that bound them to one another. Theirs was a human evil, a product of their own flawed natures. Faulty genetics might have played a part in what they became, or childhood abuse. Tiny blood vessels in the brain corrupting, or little neurons misfiring, could have contributed to their debased natures. But free will also played a part, for I did not doubt that a time came for most of those men and women when they stood over another human being and held a life in the palms of their hands, a fragile thing glowing hesitantly, beating furiously its claim upon the world, and made a decision to snuff it out, to ignore the cries and the whimpers and the slow, descending cadence of the final breaths, until at last the blood stopped pumping and instead flowed slowly from the wounds, pooling around them and reflecting their faces in its deep, sticky redness. It was there that true evil lay, in the moment between thought and action, between intent and commission, when for a fleeting instant there was still the possibility that one might turn away and refuse to appease the dark, gaping desire within. Perhaps it was in this moment that human wretchedness encountered something worse, something deeper and older that was both familiar in the resonance that it found within our souls, yet alien in its nature and its antiquity, an evil that predated our own and dwarfed it with its magnitude. There are as many forms of evil in the world as there are men to commit them, and its gradations are near infinite, but it may be that, in truth, it all draws from the same deep well, and there are beings that have supped from it for far longer than any of us could ever imagine.

  “A woman told me of a book, a part of the biblical apocrypha,” I said. “I read it. It spoke of the corporeality of angels, of the possibility that they could take upon themselves a human form and dwell in it, hidden and unseen.”

  Epstein was so silent and still that I could no longer hear him breathe, and the slow rise and fall of his chest appeared to have ceased entirely.

  “The Book of Enoch,” he said, after a time. “You know, the great rabbi, Simeon ben Jochai, in the years following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, cursed those who believed in its contents. It was judged to be a later misinterpretation of Genesis because of correspondences between the two texts, although some scholars have suggested that Enoch is actually the earlier work, and is therefore the more definitive account. But then, the apocryphal works—both the deuterocanonical books, such as Judith, Tobit, and Baruch, that follow the Old Testament, and the excised later gospels, like those of Thomas and Bart-holemew—are a minefield for scholars. Enoch is probably more difficult than most. It is a genuinely unsettling piece of writing, with profound implications for the nature of evil in the world. It is hardly surprising that both Christians and Jews found it easier to suppress it than to try to examine its contents in the light of what they already believed, and thereby attempt to reconcile the two views. Would it have been so difficult for them to see the rebellion of the angels as being linked to the creation of man? That the pride of the angels was wounded by being forced to acknowledge the wonder of this new being? That they perhaps also envied its physicality, and the pleasure it could take in its appetites, most of all in the joy that it found by joining with the body of another? They lusted, they rebelled, and they fell. Some descended into the pit, and others found a place here, and at last took upon themselves the form that they had so long desired. An interesting speculation, don’t you think?”

  “But what if there are those who believe it, who are convinced that they are these creatures?”

  “Is that why you want to see Kittim again?”

  “I think,” I said slowly, “that I have become a beacon for foul things, and the worst of them are now closer than they have ever been before. My life is being torn asunder. Once, I could have turned away, and they might have passed me by, but it’s too late for that now. I want to see the one you have, to confirm to myself that I am not insane and that such things can and do exist.”

  “Perhaps they do exist,” said Epstein, “and maybe Kittim is the proof, but we have encountered resistance from him. He very quickly built up a tolerance to the drugs. Even sodium pentothal no longer has any significant effect. Under its influence, he merely rants, but we have given him a strong dose in anticipation of your visit, and it may allow you a few minutes of clarity from him.”

  “Do we have far to go?” I asked.

  “Go?” said Epstein. “Go where?”

  It took me a moment to understand.

  “He’s here?”

  It was little more than a glorified cell, accessed through a utility closet in the basement. The closet was encased in metal, and the back wall doubled as a door, accessed by both a key and an electronic combination. It swung inward to reveal a soundproofed area, divided in two by steel mesh. Cameras kept a constant vigil on the area behind the wire, which was furnished with a bed, a sofa, and a small table and chair. There were no books that I could see. A TV had been fixed to the far corner of the wall, on the other side of the barrier and as far away from the cell as possible. There was a remote control device for it on the floor beside the sofa.

  A figure lay on the bed, wearing only a pair of gray shorts. His limbs were like bare branches, with every muscle visible to the eye. He looked emaciated, thinner than any man that I had ever seen before. His face was turned to the wall, and his knees were drawn up to his chest. He was almost bald, apart from a few stray strands of hair that clung to his purple, flaking skull. The texture of his skin reminded me of Brightwell and the swelling that afflicted him. They were both beings in the process of slow decay.

  “My God,” I said. “What happened to him?”

  “He refused to eat,” said Epstein. “We tried to force-feed him, but it was too difficult. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that he was trying to kill himself, and, well, we were prepared to see him die. Except he didn’t die: he merely grows a little weaker with every week that goes by. He sometimes takes water, but nothing more. Mostly, he sleeps.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Months.”

  The man on the bed stirred, then turned over so that he was facing us. His skin had contracted on his face, so that the hollows in the bone were clearly visible. He reminded me of a concentration camp inmate, except that his catlike eyes betrayed no hint of weakness or inner decay. Instead they glittered emptily, like cheap jewels.

  Kittim.

  He had emerged in South Carolina as an enforcer for a racist named Roger Bowen, and a link between the preacher Faulkner and the men who would have freed him if they could, but Bowen had underestimated his employee and had failed to understand the t
rue balance of power in their relationship. Bowen was little more than Kittim’s puppet, and Kittim was older and more corrupt than Bowen could ever have imagined. His name hinted at his nature, for the kittim were said to be a host of dark angels who waged war against men and God. Whatever dwelt within Kittim was ancient and hostile, and worked for its own ends.

  Kittim reached for a plastic beaker of water and drank from it, the liquid spilling onto the pillow and sheets. He raised himself until he was seated on the edge of the bed. He stayed like that for a time, as though building up the strength that he needed, then stood. He wavered slightly, and seemed about to fall, but instead shuffled across the cell toward the wire. His bony fingers reached out and gripped the strands as he forced his face against the mesh. He was so thin that, for an instant, I almost thought he might try to press his face between them. His eyes shifted first to Louis, then to me.

  “Come to gloat?” he said. His voice was very soft, but betrayed no hint of his body’s decay.

  “You don’t look so good,” said Louis. “But then, you never looked good.”

  “I see you still bring your monkey with you wherever you go. Perhaps you could train him to walk behind you holding an umbrella.”

  “Still the same old joker,” I said. “You know, you’re never going to make friends that way. That’s why you’re down here, away from all the other children.”

  “I am surprised to see you alive,” he said. “Surprised, yet grateful.”

  “Grateful? Why would you be grateful?”

  “I was hoping,” said Kittim, “that you might kill me.”

  “Why?” I replied. “So you can…wander?”

  Kittim’s head tilted slightly, and he looked at me with new interest. Beside me, Epstein was watching us both carefully.