The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  That is why Garcia re-created it in his apartment. It is not just a symbol, it is the key to the thing itself.”

  I tried to take in all that he had said.

  “Why are you telling us this?” said Louis. It was the first time he had spoken since we entered Bosworth’s apartment.

  “Because I want it found,” said Bosworth. “I want to know that it is in the world, but I can no longer find it for myself. I have money. If you find it, I will have it brought to me, and I’ll pay you well for your trouble.”

  “You never explained why you dug up the floor of the monastery at Sept-Fons,” I said.

  “There should have been a fragment there,” said Bosworth. “I traced its path. It took me five years of hunting rumors and half-truths, but I did it. Like so many treasures, it was moved for its own protection during the Second World War. It went to Switzerland, but was returned to France once it was safe to do so. It should have been beneath the floor, but it was not. Someone had taken it away again, and I know where it went.”

  I waited.

  “It went to the Czech Republic, to the newly founded monastery at Novy Dvur, perhaps as a gift, a token of their respect for the efforts of the Czech monks to keep the faith under the Communists. That has always been the great flaw in the Cistercians’ stewardship of the fragments over the last six hundred years: their willingness to entrust them to one another, to expose them briefly to the light. That is why the fragments have slowly come into the possession of others. The Sedlec fragment auctioned yesterday is, I believe, the fragment transported from Sept-Fons to the Czech Republic. It did not belong in Sedlec. Sedlec has not existed as a Cistercian community for nearly two centuries.”

  “So someone put it there.”

  Bosworth nodded eagerly. “Someone wanted it to be found,” he said. “Someone wants to draw attention to Sedlec.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Sedlec is not merely an ossuary. Sedlec is a trap.”

  Then Bosworth played his final card. He opened the second folder, revealing copies of ornate drawings, each depicting the Black Angel from different angles.

  “You know of Rint?” he asked.

  “You used his name as a pseudonym. That’s how we found your bell. He was the man who redesigned the ossuary in the nineteenth century.”

  “I bought these in Prague. They were part of a case of documents linked to Rint and his work, owned by one of Rint’s descendants, who I found living in near penury. I paid him well for the papers, much more than they were worth, in the hope that they would provide more conclusive proof than they ultimately did. Rint created these drawings of the Black Angel, and according to the seller, there were once many more than this, but they were lost or destroyed. These drawings were Rint’s obsession. He was a haunted man. Later, others copied them, and they became popular among specialized collectors with an interest in the myth, but Rint made the originals. The question was, how did Rint come to create such detailed drawings? Were they entirely products of his own imagination, or did he see something during his restoration that allowed him to base his illustrations upon it? I believe that the latter is the case, for Rint was clearly greatly troubled in later life, and perhaps the bone sculpture still rests in Sedlec. My illness prevents me from investigating further, which is why I am sharing this knowledge with you.”

  Bosworth must have seen the expression on my face change. How could he have failed to do so? It was all clear now. Rint had not glimpsed the bone sculpture, because the bone sculpture had long been lost. According to Stuckler, it spent two centuries in Italy, hidden from sight until his father discovered it. No, Rint saw the original, the Black Angel rendered in silver. He saw it in Sedlec when he was restoring the ossuary. Bosworth was right: the map was a kind of ruse, because the Black Angel had never left Sedlec. All those centuries, it had remained hidden there, and at last both Stuckler and the Believers were confident that all the information they needed to recover it was within their grasp.

  And I knew also why Martin Reid had given me the small silver cross. I rubbed my fingers across it, where it rested alongside my keys. My thumb traced its lines, and the letters etched on its rear in a cruciform shape.

  S

  L E C

  D

  “What is it?” said Bosworth.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  Bosworth stood and tried to stop me, but his weak legs and wasted arm made him no match for me.

  “You know!” he said. “You know where it is! Tell me!”

  He tried to raise himself, but we were already making for the door.

  “Tell me!” screamed Bosworth, forcing himself up. I saw him stumbling toward me, his face contorted, but by then the elevator doors were closing. I caught a last glimpse of him, then we were descending. I got to the lobby just as a pair of uniformed men emerged from the doorway to the right of the elevator bank. Inside I could see TV monitors and telephones. They stopped as soon as they saw Louis. More precisely, they stopped as soon as they saw Louis’s gun.

  “Down,” he said.

  They hit the ground.

  I went past him and opened the door. He backed out, then we were on the street, running fast, melting into the crowd as the last minutes ticked away and the Believers commenced the slaughter of their enemies.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  They first appeared as shadows on the wall, drifting with the night clouds, following the moonlight. Then shadow became form: black-garbed raiders, their eyes distended and their features hidden by the night-vision goggles that they wore. All were armed, and as they scaled the walls, their weapons hung down from their backs, the combination of mutated eyes and slim, stingerlike black barrels making each seem more insect than man.

  A boat waited offshore, sitting silently upon the waters, alert for the signal to approach if required, and a blue Mercedes stood beneath a copse of trees, its sole occupant pale and corpulent, his green eyes unencumbered by artificial lenses. Brightwell had no need for them: his eyes had long been comfortable with darkness.

  The raiders descended into the garden, then separated. Two moved toward the house, the others to the gate, but at a prearranged signal all stopped and surveyed the dwelling. Seconds ticked by, but still they did not move. They were four black sentinels, like the burned remains of dead trees enviously regarding the slow coming of spring.

  Inside the house, Murnos sat before a bank of TV monitors. He was reading a book, and the figures surrounding the property might have been interested to see that it was a concordance to Enoch. Its contents fueled the beliefs of those who threatened his employer, and Murnos felt compelled to learn more about them in order to understand his enemy.

  “They shall be called upon earth evil spirits, and on earth shall be their habitation.”

  Murnos had grown increasingly uneasy with Stuckler’s grand obsession, and recent events had done nothing to assuage his concerns. The purchase of the latest fragment at auction was a mistake: it would draw attention to what was already in Stuckler’s possession, and Murnos did not share his employer’s belief that an agreement could be reached with those others who were also seeking the silver statue.

  “Evil spirits shall they be upon earth, and the spirits of the wicked shall they be called.”

  Beside him, a second man watched the screens, his gaze flicking carefully across each one. There was a single window in the room, overlooking the garden. Murnos had warned Stuckler about it in the past. In Murnos’s opinion, the room was unsuited to its primary purpose. He believed that a security room should be virtually impregnable, capable of being used as a panic room if necessary, but Stuckler was a man of many contradictions. He wanted men around him, and he desired the impression of security, but Murnos did not think that Stuckler really considered himself to be at risk. He was his mother’s creature in every way, the knowledge of his father’s strength and the nature of his sacrifice instilled in him from an early age, so that it verged on the sacrilegious for him to indulg
e in fear, or doubt, or even concern for others. Murnos hated the old woman’s occasional visits. Stuckler would send a limousine for her, and she would arrive with her private nurse, wrapped in blankets even in the height of summer, her eyes shaded by sunglasses all year round, an old crone who persisted in living while taking no joy in any aspect of the world around her, not even in her son, for Murnos could see her contempt for Stuckler, could hear it in her every utterance as she looked upon this prissy little man, softened by indulgence, his weaknesses redeemed only by his willingness to please her and his hero worship of a dead father so intense that occasionally the hatred and envy that underpinned it would bubble through, contorting him with rage and transforming him utterly.

  “No food shall they eat, and they shall be thirsty; they shall be concealed, and shall rise up against the sons of men….”

  He looked at Burke, his coworker. Burke was good. Stuckler had initially balked at paying him what he asked, but Murnos had insisted that Burke was worth it. The others, too, had all been approved by Murnos, even if they were not quite in Burke’s league.

  And still Murnos believed that they were not enough.

  A light began to flicker rhythmically on a panel on the wall, accompanied by an insistent beeping.

  “The gate!” said Burke. “Someone’s opening the gate.”

  It wasn’t possible. The gate could only be opened from within, or by one of the three control devices contained in the cars, and all of the vehicles were on the property. Murnos checked the monitors and thought for an instant he saw a figure beside the gate, and another leaving a copse of trees.

  “…for they come forth during the days of slaughter and destruction.”

  And then the screens went dead.

  Murnos was already on his feet when the window beside them was blown apart. Burke took the brunt of the first fusillade, shielding Murnos for valuable seconds and enabling him to get to the door. He scrambled through as bullets pinged off metal and pock-marked the plaster on the walls. Stuckler was upstairs in his room, but the noise had woken him from his sleep. Murnos could already hear him shouting as he entered the main hallway. Somewhere in the house, another window shattered. A small man with a gun appeared from the kitchen, barely more than a shadow in the gloom, and Murnos fired at him, forcing him back. He kept firing as he made for the stairs. There was a Gothic-style window on the landing, and Murnos saw a shape pass across it, ascending the outside wall toward the second floor. He tried to shout a warning as he heard more shots, but he stumbled on the stairs, and the words were lost in an instant of shock. Murnos gripped the banister to lift himself up, and his hands slid wetly upon the wood. There was blood on his fingers. He looked down at his shirt and saw the stain spreading across it, and with it came the pain. He raised his gun, seeking a target, and felt a second impact at his thigh. His back arched in agony, his head striking hard against the stairs and his eyes briefly squeezing shut as he tried to control the pain. When he opened them again there was a woman staring at him from above, the shape of her clearly visible beneath her dark clothing, her eyes blue and hateful. She had a gun in her hand.

  Instinctively, Murnos closed his eyes again as death came.

  Brightwell drove to the front of the house and entered the grounds. He followed Miss Zahn down to the cellar, through the racks of wine, and into the treasury that now lay open to him. Above him loomed the great black statue of bone. Stuckler was kneeling before it, dressed in blue silk pajamas. There was some blood in his hair, but he was otherwise unhurt.

  Three pieces of vellum were handed to Brightwell, taken by his raiders from the shattered display case. He handed them over to Miss Zahn, but his gaze was fixed upon the statue. His head came almost to the level of its rib cage, the scapulae fused to the sternum at the front and to each other at the back, like an armored plate. He drew back his hand and punched hard against the mass of bone. The sternum cracked under the impact.

  “No!” said Stuckler. “What are you doing?”

  Brightwell struck again. Stuckler tried to stand, but Miss Zahn forced him to stay down.

  “You’ll destroy it,” said Stuckler. “It’s beautiful. Stop!”

  The sternum shattered under the force of Brightwell’s blows. The skin on his knuckles and the back of his hand had been torn by the sharp bone, but he did not seem to notice. Instead, he reached into the hollow that he had created and explored it, his arm buried within the statue almost to the elbow and his face tensed with the effort, until his features suddenly relaxed and he withdrew his hand. There was a small silver box clutched in his fist, this one entirely unadorned. He opened his hand and displayed the box to Stuckler, then carefully removed the lid. Inside was a single piece of vellum, perfectly preserved. He handed it to Miss Zahn to unfold.

  “The numbers, the maps,” he said to Stuckler. “They were all incidental, in their way. What mattered was the bone statue, and what it contained.”

  Stuckler was weeping. He reached for a shard of shattered black bone and held it in his hand.

  “You did not understand your own acquisitions, Herr Stuckler,” said Brightwell. “ ‘Quantum in me est.’ The details lie in the fragments, but the truth lies here.”

  He threw the empty box to Stuckler, who touched his fingers to the interior in disbelief.

  “All this time,” he said. “The knowledge was within my grasp all this time.”

  Brightwell took the final piece of fragment from Miss Zahn. He examined the drawing upon it and the writing above. The drawing was architectural in nature, showing a church and what appeared to be a network of tunnels beneath it. His brow furrowed, then he began to laugh.

  “It never left,” he said, almost in wonder.

  “Tell me,” said Stuckler. “Please, allow me that much.”

  Brightwell squatted, and showed Stuckler the illustration, then rose and nodded to Miss Zahn. Stuckler did not look up as the muzzle of the gun touched the back of his head, its caress almost tender.

  “All this time,” he said “All this time.”

  Then time, what was and what was yet to be, came to an end, and a new world was born for him.

  Two hours later, Reid and Bartek were walking back to their car. They had stopped to eat at a bar just south of Hartford, their last meal together before they were due to leave the country, and Reid had indulged himself, as was sometimes his wont. He was now rubbing his belly and complaining that chili nachos always gave him gas.

  “Nobody made you eat them,” said his companion.

  “I can’t resist them,” said Reid. “They’re just so alien.”

  Bartek’s Chevy was parked on the road, beneath one of a long line of bare trees that filigreed the cars beneath in shadow, part of a small forest that bordered green fields and a distant development of new condos.

  “I mean,” Reid continued, “no decent society would even con—”

  A shape moved against one of the trees, and in the fraction of a second between awareness and response, Reid could have sworn that it descended down the tree trunk headfirst, like a lizard clinging to the bark.

  “Run!” he said. He pushed hard at Bartek, forcing him into the woods, then turned to face the approaching enemy. He heard Bartek call his name, and he shouted: “Run, I said. Run, you bastard!”

  There was a man facing him, a small, pie-faced figure in a black jacket and faded denims. Reid recognized him from the bar, and wondered how long they had been watched by their enemies. The man did not have any weapon that Reid could see.

  “Come on, then,” said Reid. “I’ll have you.”

  He raised his fists and moved sideways, in case the man tried to get past him to follow Bartek, but he stopped short as he became aware of a stench close by.

  “Priest,” said the soft voice, and Reid felt the energy drain from him. He turned around. Brightwell was inches from his face. Reid opened his mouth to speak, and the blade entered him so swiftly that all that emerged from his throat was a pained grunt. He heard the
small man moving into the undergrowth, following Bartek. A second figure accompanied him: a woman with long dark hair.

  “You failed,” said Brightwell.

  He drew Reid to him, embracing him with his left arm even as the knife continued to force its way upward. His lips touched Reid’s. The priest tried to bite him, but Brightwell did not relinquish his hold, and he kissed Reid’s mouth as the priest shuddered and died against him.

  Miss Zahn and the small man returned after half an hour. Reid’s body already lay concealed in the undergrowth.

  “We lost him,” she said.

  “No matter,” said Brightwell. “We have bigger fish to fry.”

  He stared out into the darkness, as though hoping that despite his words, he might yet have the chance to deal with the younger man. Then, when that hope proved misplaced, he walked with the others back to their car, and they drove south. They had one more call to make.

  After a time, a thin figure emerged from the woods. Bartek followed the line of the trees until he found at last the splayed figure, cast aside amid stones and rotten wood, and he gathered the body to him and said the prayers for the dead over his departed friend.

  Neddo was seated in the little office at the back of his store. It was almost dawn, and the wind outside rattled the fire escapes. He was hunched over his desk, carefully using a small brush to clean the dust from an ornate bone brooch. The door to his place of work opened, but he did not hear it above the howling of the wind, and so engrossed was he in the delicate task before him that he failed to notice the sound of soft footsteps moving through his store. It was only when the curtain moved, and a shadow fell across him, that he looked up.