When asked if they were trying to ‘reach Heaven,’ one group’s spokesperson replied, “No comment.”
But documents reveal—
“Dex, what’s wrong?” His face had twisted up again. He was squinting viciously at the page.
“Oh, no,” Daphna said, snapping out of her funk fully now. She’d seen that agonized expression a lot the previous year, whenever Dex was struggling to read through the less effective colored overlays his teacher had him experimenting with. It was painful to see.
“They’re moving!” Dex shouted. “It’s back! I can’t read it!” Dex shot daggers at the traitorous page, but it did no good. The letters shifted and dripped. His SSS was back. Dexter slammed his fist on the paper, bruising his hand on the table below. All at once, whatever foundation had risen to stabilize him crumbled away. His serenity shattered.
I’m so sorry, Daphna said, but not out loud. She was thinking about everything, marveling at how just minutes ago the ocean of problems that was her life sat becalmed, almost placid, only to have the shelf below shift and a tidal wave rear over her, ready to crush her very bones. When Dexter didn’t respond, she thought the words, Can you hear me? But again, Dex didn’t respond. “Dex,” she said out loud, “did you hear my thoughts?”
“What?”
“Dex,” Daphna repeated, “I don’t think we can hear each other’s thoughts anymore.”
Of course not, Dex thought, bitterly. Daphna didn’t react, so he knew she was right. It was just like having been able to speak Words of Power, but only for such a brief time. That’s how it would always be. Anything good would be quickly taken away, serving only to highlight the feeling of loss.
That was the lesson of his life. How long had he known who his real mother was? How long had he gotten to enjoy his second? Dex felt the searing heat wash over him again.
“Oh!” Daphna said, returning her attention to the newspaper and processing what she hadn’t really tried to understand. She hadn’t thought about what it meant that they’d been able to share thoughts, and she wasn’t going to dwell on it, especially now that it was gone. What wasn’t gone?
“The Cartographer’s Guild!” she said, looking at the pictures of the odd towers. Despite everything, she smiled for a moment because they looked so whimsical, like drawings in a children’s book. “From the Book of Maps projected on that screen!” she realized. “The crocodile and hippo people—they were all yelling that they saw gates! They’re building towers where they think they saw markers for the gates of Heaven!” Then, almost off-handedly, she added, “They must think they’re in the sky.”
Dex nodded. He didn’t care. But then he was thunderstruck. “Daphna,” he said, standing up. “Those lines—those weird lines in the sky—”
“We went into one!” Daphna jumped to her feet. “That amber light—that light inside the light. Dexter!” she cried, “I think we went into Heaven!”
CHAPTER 4
entries & exits
“Durante told me entering Heaven perfects you,” Dex said softly. Then he added, “But we weren’t there very—”
Screeching outside terminated the thought. The twins jerked frightened eyes to the living room window, through which they saw a police car skidding to a halt. Two officers jumped out of flung-open doors while a white-coated middle-aged woman with bright black cascading hair got out of the back. Everyone was wearing allergy masks. Fortunately, they all stopped for a moment to absorb the bizarre sight of the two flattened houses across the street. One of the cops bent over to tie his shoe.
“Your shoe!” Dex cried. They’d forgotten about the bug hidden there.
Daphna began frantically trying to kick off her right sneaker, but Dexter rushed her into the laundry room before she managed. He closed and locked the door just as the three adults rushed into the shambles of a house. Daphna fumbled the Aleph out of her pocket.
“Daphna!” the woman shouted through the door a few moments later. “It’s Dr. Fludd! We must speak with you!” The knob rattled. “We were wrong about the tests we ran on you. You are infected, but we can help!”
Daphna went white, but Dexter sneered at the door. Liar, he thought. Everyone is a liar.
“Nice hazmat suits!” he shouted back. He took the Aleph from his sister, set it on the laundry machine, and opened it, letting free a wild burst of colored light.
“Damn it! I’m sorry!” Dr. Fludd shouted back. “Look,” she admitted, “okay, you aren’t sick. But—”
“That Book of Maps!” Daphna shouted. “It’s not infected! It didn’t start this! Virgil Durante—the gazillionaire—he has it!”
The entire door rattled now, but it stopped quickly. “Hold on,” Dr. Fludd said in a lower voice. “Let me talk them out. Yes, we know,” she said to the twins, surprising Daphna. “His little book of holograms. He wouldn’t let us open it, but he allowed us to scan it. We know it’s clean, and that’s one reason we need to talk to you. We need to know the truth about how this started. Kids, I hope by now you understand the gravity of this situation. The vaccines we’ve developed are not cures. We could very well have a worldwide pandemic on our hands. But I’m here to tell you that I am not going to let that happen. I am going to end this crisis—and you can help me.”
Dex, who’d been looking into the light, turned his attention to his sister. He could see the combination of loathing and longing in her eyes as she stared at the door, apparently on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He could see she wanted to give in, to give up, to let someone else hold the weight of the world on her shoulders for once. Dr. Fludd seemed to be asking for exactly that. Dex understood his sister’s feelings, but he did not share them.
“Daphna,” he hissed, “she won’t believe us. They’ll quarantine us, or arrest us, and then we won’t be able to do anything.”
Daphna looked at Dex with little comprehension, but slowly his words sunk in. At the very least, she thought, Dr. Fludd would take this new book, this book of all things. Only Daphna was just so tired—so, so tired. But also suddenly mad, very mad. Her pictures—all her pictures were ruined! Dexter was right.
Daphna made a move as if to climb right into the light, but Dex held her back.
“Help me find somewhere to go,” he whispered. “But hold on.” He turned and hurried to the window in the back of the room.
Something slammed into the door.
“I said wait!” yelled Dr. Fludd. “Disobey my orders again, and I’ll have your badge!”
“What do you mean find somewhere to go?” Daphna asked. Panic was forcing her to talk too loudly.
“Evelyn used the Aleph to keep track of Dad,” Dex whispered, forcing the pane up. He needed to establish a plausible escape route.
“We can find things!” Daphna cried.
“Daphna!” Dr. Fludd called. Her voice was growing strained and fraught. “We found something very unusual when we took a second look at your x-rays, an anomaly we also saw on Evelyn Idun’s. An almost impossible coincidence since you weren’t related by blood. We don’t know what it means, but we’d like to—”
“Stop lying!” Dex shouted. “We’re not letting you lock us up!” He was back next to his sister, leaning into the light.
“Kids! Listen! I’m not here to—Damn it! I should have come in alone. I know you didn’t kill those—you could hardly have broken the necks of two grown men. Besides, I can promise total immunity from any charges. I can give you—whatever you want!”
“Daphna! Help me!” Dex demanded.
“Please kids, tell me how this started!”
“Lilit!” Daphna screamed at the door. “Just find out about Lilit, and you’ll know!”
“What?”
“Just—never mind!” Dex was pulling her arm, so Daphna leaned over and finally joined him looking into the light. It was all unbearable brightness for a moment, but then the maelstrom of images began to spin slowly in her eyes and mind.
Dr. Fludd was still talking urgently, frantically—someth
ing about knowing their inheritance was being contested and a possible reward—but the twins heard little of it. They were all eyes.
They saw a young woman with shining black hair in a business suit, standing at a podium. A large crowd of men and women sat in auditorium seats, looking on with pointed interest. There was a palpable buzz in the room, a rising sense of great anticipation. The woman opened a manila folder and set it on the lectern. She took a deep breath and smiled, but then something in the wings attracted her attention.
Her eyes went wide, and the smile simply fell off her face. She looked back at the audience for a long time, then said, “I’m sorry,” and walked off stage with her folder. There was a man waiting for her there, a squat but sturdy, completely bald, dead-faced man in a tailored suit. He watched her approach as if she couldn’t possibly have done otherwise.
He had a gun.
The scene faded and they saw the dead-faced man somewhere else. He was strangling another man, lowering his body to the floor at the bottom of a flight of dark stairs. Then he was younger. He had hair and wore a tuxedo. He was sitting at a crowded dinner table surreptitiously pouring powder from a paper packet into a glass of wine. Then he was younger still, and thinner, and he was lying under a car with something that looked like an ice pick.
And now he was just a little boy with a human face. He was in a uniform: navy blue pants, a sport coat over a short sleeve oxford and tie. He was standing at an open gate behind a long, blockish building, in a playground, holding a severed rope and crying his eyes out. There were other children, laughing. The boy looked at his taunters as the tears streamed down his face. He didn’t speak, but his normal face, it went dead. Everyone stopped laughing and took a step back. The boy ran through the gate with his rope.
Then the twins saw waves crashing on a beach.
They saw two dinosaurs locking horns on a desolate plain.
They saw smoke billowing from a factory, a mangy dog running through traffic. They saw a single raindrop forming inside a thunderhead, the stripe on a tiger’s side, and two lovers engaged in a kiss. They saw a hundred, a thousand, a thousand thousand things. The twins tried to focus, to scan the now whirling kaleidoscope—for what they didn’t exactly know.
Something slammed the door, but neither twin heard.
“Dex!” Daphna yelled.
He saw it. Lilit, sitting on stone steps, just as they’d seen before, scanning the lines of a foreign text on a roll of cracking parchment with his piercing red eyes.
“Ah, yes,” Lilit said with a smile that exposed his razor sharp teeth. “Here we are.” And then he said something that was clearly not English. It sounded like Alarosh. “How simple,” he added. The twins saw once again the richly patterned walls that rose up and around the monster. But was someone else there?
Yes! An old man in a light blue robe. He was hunchbacked and crowned with a nest of wild hair under a large white skullcap. Trembling, he stood behind Lilit in the shadows of the shrine. But now he shuffled forward behind the thing, holding something by his side.
A talisman!
Dex and Daphna looked on, rapt.
The cops were kicking the laundry room door now, kicking it over and over again.
The mysterious old man was now directly behind Lilit, who continued to read the scroll.
“No!” Dex cried, for he knew how it would go.
With a quivering hand, the man raised up the jagged fragment of the ancient talisman, one of two remaining defenses against the beast left in the world.
Lilit read on.
Daphna held her breath.
The old man struck down with the point of the shard, but at that instant there was a blast of black wind and darkness shrouded the scene. There was only the sound of an old man’s cry and metal clinking against stone.
In the next moment, a loud splintering crack made the twins look away from the light. The door had been nearly broken down.
Dex and Daphna looked back into the Aleph, desperate now. Scenes flickered and flashed.
“Daphna! Dexter!” Dr. Fludd shouted. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but something awful happened to your mother after she died. Evelyn, she was the first—”
The twins both heard this, but the doctor’s voice was lost when Daphna screamed at something she saw in the light.
“Goddamn it!” Dr. Fludd fumed. “I am coming in! Finish it! Now!”
The door was kicked again, and this time it broke open.
Dr. Fludd rushed into the empty room.
CHAPTER 5
Mira
Dex saw what made his sister scream, but he’d pulled her into the light, anyway. There was no time to do anything else.
They were falling now into the swirling, blinding brightness.
But then they were suddenly out of it.
Daphna, who’d gone silent during the disorienting loss of bearings, started screaming again.
The twins were standing in a dilapidated hotel room with peeling floral wallpaper. Dex was afraid his sister had finally lost her mind, but then he saw it again. He saw it because it was right there on a bed in front of them: the body of a dead man, sliced open like a fish.
Dex looked away, gagging. But what he saw then was, in a benign way, almost as startling. At the back of the room were two officers of some sort in olive-gray uniforms, shaking hands. They were evidently undisturbed by the sudden appearance of two kids, one of whom was shrieking as if she’d been disemboweled herself. A third man was there, a journalist it seemed, snapping pictures.
Dex went to his sister and gently turned her away from the gory scene. “We’re not really here,” he said. “This is, yesterday, I guess.”
“What?” Daphna howled. At least she stopped screaming.
“Look.” Dex pointed to the two men, who were still shaking hands. It was an odd shake, too. Both men wore latex gloves, which might be expected at a crime scene, but they had their thumbs raised and resting on the knuckle of each other’s pointer fingers. Finally, they released and began talking in Spanish as they bagged what looked like the victim’s personal effects on a dresser—a wallet, a set of keys. The photographer walked right between the twins without taking the slightest notice of them.
“Oh, God,” Daphna said, trying to will this all away. She didn’t need to look at the victim’s bearded face to know she’d seen it before. “I know why we’re here,” she said.
“You do?”
Daphna looked directly at Dex as she spoke. She had herself under control now, but only superficially. She was teetering on the edge of something final. She knew it, absolutely. “That last thing Dr. Fludd said,” she explained, “that something awful happened to Evelyn—it made me think about that newspaper article. And then I saw it, and I screamed, and then you pulled me—What could have happened to Evelyn?”
“That’s why we saw Dr. Fludd on that stage, and then that freaky guy,” Dex realized. He was also trying to keep his focus away from the bed, as well as from any further bad news. “That had to be the lecture she was supposed to give! And I was thinking about Lilit, too. This is great!” he concluded. “Don’t you see? We can find what we want, and then we can go there. Let’s get out of here.” He moved to open the Aleph.
Daphna couldn’t agree more, but before she could say so, one of the officers cried out. He was on his knees next to the second bed, peering underneath. He lay down and reached for something, but came up empty handed. His partner, much taller and with much longer arms, joined him on the floor. After peering under the frame, he made his own attempt to retrieve whatever they’d discovered and fished out some kind of silver tool. It looked like a drill with a small circular blade on the tip.
Dex looked at it, appalled. Daphna nearly vomited.
“Dios mio,” the officer whispered. The sickening tool trembled in his hand.
The first officer, still kneeling, wasn’t looking. He’d gotten distracted by something to do with the body. The victim’s head was just in front of him on t
he edge of the other bed, and he was staring at it. “Mira,” he said, pointing to the dead man’s head. The photographer was next to him now, taking pictures.
Both officers leaned over it. The man had hair, but it was thinning drastically. They seemed to be peering through it at something on his scalp. Dex, nauseated by the gruesome discovery, sickened by the scene as a whole, was nonetheless curious. He stepped around to see what they were looking at, positioning himself behind the pair to get a good look.
“Daphna,” he said, “there’s something there. I can’t tell what it is.”
“No way,” said Daphna, turning completely around. “I’m not looking.”
“Daphna!” Dex snapped. “I’m telling you, there’s something there. Please. I can’t see it clearly!” He took a deep breath to control a sudden swell of fury.
“No,” was all Daphna said.
“What if we can help? What if this does have something to do with what’s going on? Hurry!”
“Dexter, I don’t care. I’m done with this. I mean it Dex, all of this, if it means I need to inspect dead bodies. Everything just keeps getting worse and worse. There is no end of evil in the word, but there is an end to how much I will face!”
“Daphna!” Dex screamed. “Get over here! Now!”
“No!”
Outraged, Dexter stepped toward his sister, ready to grab her by the wrist, but just then one of the officers got to his feet. He pulled a pad of paper from his back pocket and began to draw what he’d seen. Dex moved over to watch.
What did Dex think he was going to do, Daphna thought, drag her over there? She was steaming, but when she saw the officer begin to write on his pad, she forced herself to calm down and approach.
“Diez y siete?” the officer asked, looking at his partner, who was now bagging the saw.
“That means seventeen,” Daphna said. “It looks like a fancy seventeen.”
The Book of All Things Page 3
