The Book of All Things

by David Michael Slater

  The article below described the attack on the famous Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, which had been reduced to rubble by rioters with grenades. Conflicting accounts of the actual size of the mob were reported. Some claimed hundreds, while others reported no more than a dozen. There was one injury, the building’s caretaker, who was in critical condition.

  Further controversy ensued when local Christian officials demanded access to the site, which the Jewish owners were flatly refusing. They’d accused the Christian officials of either orchestrating or actually perpetrating the attack themselves. No reason was given for their suspicions.

  Dexter paused a moment to think of Azir, who hadn’t gotten what he wanted after all. Perhaps it wouldn’t be long.

  Dex continued to read.

  Security was being tightened at all of the recently constructed towers around the world, which was increasing tensions between religious groups. This despite there being no agreement about what the towers were actually for, if they were for anything at all. It didn’t seem to matter.

  All travel out of the United States had been banned, but large numbers of people were managing to get out anyway. It was feared that unless a cure for the “American Superplague” was found soon, a global pandemic was a real and grave possibility.

  Typing wasn’t easy, but after calling up a search engine, Dex managed to type in ‘Durante.’ The first listing linked to an article about the billionaire’s presumed death and miraculous return. His clothes had been found at the lodge, like those of all those other people who’d been “disappeared” by the “blood-sucking monster.” He was the first to “come back.” Dex shook his head at the man’s genius for self-promotion. That’s why he’d “gone off the radar” by leaving his clothes back at the lodge.

  The second link described Durante’s lifelong mission to convince the world the occult was real. It briefly summarized what Daphna had told him about losing his wife and newborn, and the subsequent lawsuits he wasted millions of dollars on. There was nothing about the talisman, though that was hardly a surprise. Dex typed in ‘Durante’ and ‘talisman’ and got nothing. Same with ‘Durante’ and ‘Lilit.’

  He typed in ‘Wax twins.’ The latest was that they may be dead. A reporter had learned that clothes were also found at the lodge without Dexter in them.

  Fludd must have kept her little house call to herself, Dex realized. She probably never admitted failures.

  Dex searched, ‘Dr. Fludd.’

  A long list of links appeared. Once again, he clicked the first. Up came a brief biography that described the doctor’s amazing rise to prominence at Harvard in two disciplines, and how she’d dropped out of school after failing to deliver what the writer called her “Lost Lecture.” It was presumed she’d cracked under the pressure of the expectations placed on her to turn the world on its head. She’d fallen off the radar for a year before overcoming the humiliation she’d suffered at the hands of both her colleagues and a merciless press, and re-enrolled at Harvard, though only in the medical school.

  Within a few years of her graduation, she was one of the world’s leading experts on stem-cell research and virology, renowned for her brilliance and tenacity. Her constitution became nothing short of legendary as she was frequently known to work around the clock without rest. Her motto was, ‘I’ll stop working when I’m dead.’ Dr. Fludd refused to discuss her lecture ever again.

  Next, Dex searched, ‘Fludd’ + ‘Lost lecture.’ He clicked on a link called ‘Fludd’s Lost Lecture Conjectures,’ and found a summary of the two main conspiracy theories:

  She had isolated a gene responsible for religious thinking, the so-called “Faith Gene,” and was going to show the world how to alter it in the womb. A consortium of religious leaders from all the major faiths had compelled her silence.

  She had proof that prayer can affect cellular activity and thus actually does have the power to heal. She was threatened into silence by powerful medical and insurance interests.

  Dex sat back to consider all of this, but before he could determine his next course of action, someone banged on the window inches away from his face. He turned to see another face, a man’s stunned face. Dex watched in confusion as the guy waved and called to people around him. Soon a large group of stunned faces were at the glass.

  Dex stood up and backed away from his table. He had time to do little else before the clutch of gapers rushed in through the front door.

  “What is it?” one of them shouted.

  “I don’t know! Get it!”

  There were now at least a dozen people in the shop, all staring at Dex like his hair was on fire. And now they all charged right at him.

  Dex moved slowly, but when he turned round, he found himself facing the men’s room. He managed to step inside, then slam and lock the door just before being assaulted.

  Panting from the small amount of energy this required, he doubled over. They were pounding and kicking the door. When he recovered his wind, Dex stood up and looked at himself in the mirror.

  And then he understood.

  He was glowing.

  His skin was virtually diaphanous, flowing with some form of energy that rose from his head like heat from the pavement on a hot day. It looked not unlike a halo.

  “What are you!” someone demanded.

  “Let’s kill it!”

  Daphna, Dex thought as hard as he could, this would be a really good time for you to find me. He waited as the pounding got louder, but his sister did not contact him.

  “Maybe it’s the disease!”

  “It is!” Dex shouted. “If you touch me, you’ll all die!”

  There was a decidedly backward movement behind the door.

  “It’s not a disease!” someone yelled. “I’ve seen the disease! That thing in there is not human!”

  “Durante would know what it is!”

  “Yeah! Let’s take it to Durante!”

  Daphna! Dex thought one more time. When nothing came of it, he took a deep breath and opened the door.

  CHAPTER 15

  there were words

  Daphna wept in her mother’s embrace. She wept for everything she’d lost, for everything she’d used up inside fighting off disaster and despair. She was done with the world. She didn’t need those photos anymore. Her memories were right here.

  She was home.

  But there were words.

  Her mother was speaking, holding Daphna’s head in her hands. Daphna heard the words, but they would not resolve themselves into meaning. They were soft chimes, like the gentle tolling of bells on a warm and distant wind.

  They were song—but the song was desperation.

  CHAPTER 16

  the genuine article

  They ripped him off of his feet like a scarecrow from its pole, but Dexter didn’t resist. Six or seven men had him up over their heads, and they hauled him that way out of the shop and then straight into the ongoing melee on the streets.

  “Out of the way!” one of them shouted at the mass of bodies blocking their path. “Out of the way!”

  There seemed to be little reaction to this, but the gang managed to muscle its way through the crowds on the sidewalk and into the street where it began to weave through the motionless traffic. Dex watched the bouncing puffy clouds and the slanting tops of buildings as he bobbed up and down on his captors’ hands. There was a better world up there. Maybe Daphna wasn’t coming back. Maybe he couldn’t blame her.

  The hubbub about the Space Needle had subsided. It seemed everyone was set on getting wherever they were going again, which was nowhere, really.

  The group reached the opposite sidewalk, where the line stretching from the museum down the street seemed not to have changed a bit. This did not deter Dexter’s hosts. They simply forced their way up to the gate. There were angry cries of protest, but only until people got a look at Dexter, after which they stepped aside quickly. Many crossed themselves.

  The group got inside the museum quite quickly, but the ent
ry, a large open gallery, was even more crowded than the streets.

  “Where’s Durante!” the apparent leader of Dex’s abductors cried. “We got a live freak over here!”

  People began to take notice, and when enough had seen Dexter, someone called out, “I saw Durante in the Vampire Wing! That way!”

  And so Dex was borne through another parted crowd into a smaller gallery. The light inside was dim and the displays—caskets, crosses, extracted fangs, bloody stakes—created a bit of a maze. This area was not crowded at all. In fact, there were only a few people milling about. Dex was dropped to his feet and pushed forward through the exhibits. He saw one containing what appeared to be several dozen varieties of garlic cloves. The one next to it was full of strange looking roots and plants, and the next fancy vials containing clear liquids. Holy water, Dex assumed.

  He was pushed past a large case featuring a wax model of an evil, vampiry looking man. Behind him was a gruesome illustration of what looked like hundreds of people impaled on spikes. There was a placard on the case, and Dex tried to read it as he was whisked by. He saw the word ‘Vlad,’ but the rest went blurry. He wasn’t sure whether that was just a product of being shoved, but when he tried to stop to check, he was shoved harder.

  Anger splashed through Dexter’s veins. He wanted to fight his way back, or at least to get a good look at the other placards he was passing. But now they came to an exit. There was no sign of Durante.

  “That way!” someone informed them. So now they had to pass through a series of smaller exhibit halls. The first was witchcraft. There were broomsticks, pointed hats, wands, scrolls, and small dolls in a glass case. Dex tried to read labels. He dug his heels into the floor, but all that got him was an elbow in the back. A full-blown rage was boiling up, but that was stupid. If he couldn’t read again, he’d know soon enough. Dex took some deep breaths and stopped resisting.

  They passed through a room full of fantastic creatures, supposedly turned to stone. There were ogres and trolls, dwarves and goblins, even a Medusa figure, all portrayed in menacing postures, each with their stone ankles chained to a metal ring sunk into an iron block on the floor of their cases.

  All the while Dex was moved along, his captors continued to shout for Durante. People continued to shout back, but then give way at the site of the specimen they herded along. There was a room full of undead creatures: zombies and mummies in coffins, sarcophagi, and crypts.

  Finally, they emerged in a large hall with a great set of stone steps disappearing down into a subterranean level. Here they found the crowds again, in another long line. Dex was fairly sure he knew what they were waiting to see.

  “Outta the way! Outta the way!”

  Dex was shoved down the steps, which began to wind as they descended. To the dungeon, he thought. Naturally.

  “Sweet Jesus,” someone said as they pushed and pried their way through the line.

  “Where’s Durante?”

  “Mother of God!”

  “He’s down there! With the Creature’s maps!”

  Finally, the group reached the bottom of the stair, which fed into an open chamber, less a dungeon than the working bowels of the building. The ceiling was crawling with a maze of pipes, some huge, some as skinny as a finger. It seemed an odd place to display the Book of Maps, but that was evidently what it was for. There were red velvet ropes running back and forth across the width of the room, and people moved slowly, very slowly, through them, all the while watching a giant screen on a far wall showing Lilit in slow-motion at the lodge on a loop.

  There was some space around the perimeter of the room, and Dex was marched through it. He watched the footage as he went along: Lilit flipping through the Book of Maps, then absorbing the volley of nails shot by Durante’s hired guns. Then the case falling on the monster and the gas pumping inside. When the smoke cleared, the case was shattered, and there was Lilit, unharmed. Dex watched it fly at Durante and lift him up by the throat. That’s where the video ended. It didn’t show Durante’s phony neck pumping out a geyser of fake blood, or the monster suddenly tossing him aside like garbage. It didn’t show it fly at Dexter, either.

  “Good Lord!” someone cried.

  Dex had been maneuvered all the way to the front of the crowd, and there was Virgil Durante, massive as ever in his fancy suit and cowboy boots—a square-jawed goliath, standing at a bank of computers wearing a headset with a microphone stalk bent down below his chin. He must have jumped to his feet because his chair had toppled over. The billionaire was staring at Dexter, unable it seemed, to speak.

  Dex knew why the man who believed in vampires and witches couldn’t believe his eyes. It was because if there was one thing he didn’t believe in, it was angels.

  Dex looked around as best he could while Durante tried to find his voice. Behind the bank of computers was a large empty glass display case. In front of the case was a small, unassuming little table, on top of which sat the Book of Maps, just laying there like any book in someone’s living room. It was open to a topographical map, for maximum effect, no doubt. Mountains reached up out of the page, rising and sinking as if bobbing on water. A couple at the head of the line was leaning over it, aghast. They burst into sobs and rushed toward a second set of spiraling steps at the far end of the chamber.

  “What is it, Mr. Durante?” one of Dex’s new friends asked, still clutching him by the shoulders. This question garnered the attention of people waiting in line nearby.

  Durante suddenly came back to himself. He pushed his mic in front of his mouth and addressed the entire gallery through speakers Dex couldn’t see. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he called. “We have a new feature today!”

  An image of Dex came up on the giant screen. All eyes went to it.

  “What is it?” someone hollered.

  “What we have here, folks,” Durante announced, “is the genuine article.”

  “But what is it?” a number of voices demanded.

  “My friends, this—this—is a celestial being.”

  “A what?”

  Incomprehension sounded all over the underground chamber in both whispers and shouts.

  “We have there a creature of night,” Durante declared, pointing at the screen after touching a button on one of his panels. The image divided to show Lilit next to Dex. “And we have here a creature of the light: I present to you—an angel!”

  The room fell into silence. There was only the sound of awe.

  “Is it not obvious what this means?” Durante asked.

  “What?” someone cried. “Tell us what it means!”

  “We have already seen that forces of Evil now walk freely among us!” the billionaire declared. “And now angels are falling from Heaven. Power in the universe, my good people, is shifting!”

  There was something more Durante had to say. The entire crowd knew it, and they waited desperately to hear it.

  “Chose your side wisely!” he cried.

  CHAPTER 17

  to face the world

  Sophia held Daphna’s hands now. She was speaking rapidly, passionately, but Daphna simply could not understand the words. It was a strange, harmonic language, beautiful, but beyond comprehension.

  Mom! Daphna cried. Mom! I love you! I love you! I’m sorry about so much!

  Sophia kept talking, but her shining face went grave when Daphna failed to comprehend her. Finally, she put her hands on Daphna’s shoulders and gently tried to turn her around to face the world.

  No!

  Daphna refused.

  She looked deeply into her mother’s urgent eyes.

  And then she ran away.

  CHAPTER 18

  the point

  Panic erupted. People fled, pushing and shoving, trampling the velvet ropes. From the sound of it, several people almost met the same fate. Even the men who brought Dex there took flight.

  Somehow, ten minutes later, the chamber was clear.

  “Not the method promoted by the fire department, I’ll grant
you,” Durante said, “but quite efficient.” Then he moved his mic up a bit and said, “Lock down and seal when we’re clear.”

  “Mr. Durante—”

  “I’ve been looking for you,” the giant man said, cutting Dex off. “Thousands of PI’s dispatched to every country in the world, and I get nothing! But I guess I see why. I’m having trouble believing it, but I see it. Where is your sister?”

  Durante was fully animated now, more so than Dex had seen even at the lodge. There seemed to be nothing left of the morose and lugubrious behemoth who’d vanished at his first sight of Lilit.

  “She’s—not here,” Dexter said, looking at his image on the screen again. He had to admit that his appearance was startling, even more so projected that way. He looked otherworldly, to say the least. He really did look like an angel, a fading, wingless one, anyway. But he had no time to waste.

  “You have something really important,” he said, turning to Durante.

  But before he got another word out, the bear of a man seized him around the waist and hauled him right off his feet again. Durante carried him over his shoulder back toward the empty display case behind the bank of computers.

  Even at normal strength, Dex couldn’t have hoped to get free, so he didn’t even try.

  “You have something that can kill the—Dracula!” he cried into Durante’s muscular back. “It’s like a stake. It’s a talisman!”

  The door to the case slid open automatically and Durante set Dex inside like one of those dolls in the witchcraft rooms. Then he picked up a metal shackle and fastened it around his angel’s ankle.

  “Are we good?” Durante said into his mic when he finished with Dex’s restraint. The case closed as he stepped away. Dex pushed on the glass. He was sure he wouldn’t be breaking out of it.