The Book of All Things

by David Michael Slater

  “There are two talismans!” Dex kept right on explaining, shouting now to be sure he was heard. “But one is somewhere in the museum! In a box! In your storage area!”

  Durante sat down at his workstation. He said something in a low voice, then started typing again, quite quickly. A humming directed Dexter’s attention down. The floor he was standing on was made of metal and full of tiny holes. Air was pumping through them into the case. At least he wasn’t going to suffocate in there.

  Durante pressed a button on some panel, then spoke. His voice came through speakers, also, it seemed, under the metal flooring.

  “Semangelof or Sansenoy?”

  “What?” Dex was taken aback to hear those names.

  “The fragment you say I have. Which angel’s bit of it?”

  Dex was too surprised to manage a reply, so Durante continued without one.

  “Here,” he said, clicking his computer. Up on the screen came the bit where Lilit had Dex by the throat. Dex’s hands were up, and the screen zoomed in on the one wrapped in fraying gauze.

  “So?” Dex said.

  “Hold for the thermal.” Durante clicked something, and the image was recast in bright purples, reds and yellows. The welts on Dex’s hand, the hot welts burned there forming the name Senoy in Hebrew, were clearly visible.

  “Easy to connect the dots,” Durante said. “Seems to have healed nicely. No doubt the product of your recent travels.”

  “But,” said Dex, looking down at his hand again, “if you know it’s Lilit, why are you telling people it’s Dracula?”

  Durante shrugged his hulking shoulders.

  “You say tomato,” he replied. “Anyway, ‘Dracula’ requires much less explanation. By the way,” he added, “smile—you’re streaming live all over the world.”

  Dex looked up at the screen and cringed at the sight of himself as a caged animal. Text was now running across the bottom, reading, ‘See a real angel in captivity at the Durante Museum, Seattle.’ Dex saw immediately that his skin looked even less translucent that it had minutes before.

  “I won’t stay this way for long,” he warned.

  “Long enough, I hope.”

  “But you can’t want Lilit to come here! You saw what happened to your last ‘trap!’ It nearly killed you!”

  “As a matter of fact,” Durante said, “I was hoping it would try again, but that was before—“

  “Are you crazy?” Dex raged. “Its bite started the epidemic!” He almost tried to smash the glass, but knew it would only result in a broken hand.

  “I figured as much,” Durante replied. “But did it bite me? Did it bite you?” Without waiting for a response, he answered himself. “No, I think not.”

  Dex considered this. It was true. And it hadn’t even touched Azir.

  “There have been no cases of the disease springing up outside the infection zones that haven’t been connected to an infected traveler. Do you know what that means?”

  “No one else has been bitten.”

  “Precisely. No one has been bitten since your, adoptive mother was it?”

  “But at the lodge, all that screaming outside.”

  “No one was touched. Some kind of hysteria induced by the darkness. And these other attacks, in bookshops and libraries that preceded all this—those bites that resulted in total disintegration—”

  “They’ve stopped, too,” Dex guessed, though surely that was because the Book of Maps had been found.

  “Indeed. It seems Lilit has declined to bite anyone since you killed part of it. I’ve not encountered anything in the literature about only the female incarnation being venomous, but such seems to be the case. Fascinating, no?”

  “But it still killed people! Brother Joe. It broke his neck! And your man with the flute!”

  “Ah, but they are not me, now are they? Or you.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Dex demanded. He felt another surge of anger that made him clench his fists. “You know Lilit is real! Why do you care what the rest of the world believes?”

  “Steady,” Durante said, “you’re losing your aura. Let’s just say I’ve always been a champion of truth.”

  Dex felt this moment was important, so he reigned in his wrath. He remembered the way Daphna had saved her own life by making another oversized lunatic see the truth about his past. But Dexter wasn’t good at that sort of thing. Daphna! he thought furiously. Daphna! But there was no response. How could she do this to him!

  “Good,” Durante said into his mic.

  “It’s your wife and son, isn’t it?” Dex blurted. He had no theory. It was a shot in the dark.

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know. Everything. Everything you do.”

  “Of course!”

  The billionaire smiled at Dex’s surprise.

  “Hoping to make me face my demons?” he laughed. “Listen, I used to believe there was nothing but what one can perceive with one’s senses. Believing in anything beyond that seemed the height of stupidity. But I lost my wife because of an utterly random accident. The two most perfect people in the world died for absolutely no reason whatsoever.”

  Dex didn’t know what to say to this, so he said nothing.

  “I refused to accept this,” Durante said.

  “That they died?”

  “That they died for no reason. I refused to live in a world without reason. I’d been wrong about everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I commissioned background investigations of every single person that had even the remotest connection to the accident, looking for proof that someone had criminal or evil intentions. I had the families of people remotely connected investigated! I found nothing, so let’s just say I began to expand my search.”

  “For what?”

  “For Evil! For proof of Evil!”

  “But…why?”

  Durante got up and approached Dexter, his grey eyes like brushed steel. “Because a bad reason,” he said, “a reason you reject and deplore, a reason that shrivels your soul and assassinates your spirit—that reason is far better, is infinitely better, than no reason at all.”

  Dex understood. “But,” he said somewhat gently, “you had to know that none of it would ever bring them back.”

  Durante merely shrugged at this.

  “Help me kill it,” Dex begged, thinking again about the hideous spectacle of Durante’s fake neck spewing blood just before he was flung away.

  “No thanks,” Durante replied. “Funny how things go. I wanted to find you and your sister to lure it here, but now I’ll need to keep it out, at least for a while. Are we clear now?” he said testily to his mic.

  “Why would it come if we were here?”

  “Lilit will come for you,” Durante said, “because you have what it wants. We cracked the code in the page it tore from my little book of maps—from our scan, of course—but we arrived at your house, it seemed, a few minutes too late. Messy scene, that. Met Dr. Fludd,” he added. “She’s a piece of work, that one. Ought to open her mind once in a while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once she was convinced the book wasn’t carrying the plague, she forgot about it completely. The woman couldn’t even conceive of the possibility that it does the impossible. She’ll be on her way here too, I imagine.” Durante paused, then added, “As will your sister.”

  “Daphna?”

  “Of course!” Durante cried. “I’m done with Lilit. I’m done with championing the truth! I was done the moment I saw your formerly shining face.”

  Then he said, with the supreme confidence of one of the richest men the world has ever known, “It seems your sister has my ticket to Heaven. I’ll be paying a visit there—and I’ll be damned if I won’t be bringing my family back.”

  CHAPTER 19

  like eden

  Daphna ran, trying to ignore the ocean of images frothing outside the light. She saw Lilit. He was standing on a mountain, a volcano, at the lip of
the crater, leaning against the wind in the dark. Cones and crevices spouted steam and gas that snaked around him even as it blew away. Eerie incandescent orange lava flowed through channels all around, casting an ethereal light on the scene. She’d never seen lava like that.

  Lilit threw something into the volcano, a curved stick perhaps. But Daphna closed her eyes to it. She didn’t want to see more. She only wanted to run—only to run.

  And so she ran.

  It was impossible to gauge distances in the all-encompassing light, but it didn’t matter. Daphna felt no fatigue and was sure she never would. She planned to run forever. As she ran, that pattern—those rectangular shapes, the grid they formed—it began to resolve around her.

  Daphna stopped to watch the shiny lines separate themselves from the amber glow. When they finally came into focus, her heart nearly burst with joy.

  Books.

  They were books!

  Books made of light. Books that made the light. And they were everywhere, as far as Daphna could see, reaching forever upward and forever downward and forever all around her like a womb—she was in a womb of books.

  Heaven, like Eden, was a library—but an infinite one.

  How could it be otherwise?

  Craning her neck, Daphna walked along an aisle, trying to take it all in. She was awed, overcome, overwhelmed. She found herself hurrying now, taking turns this way and that on whim, until she was flat out running again, now spinning and running with her arms outstretched. She laughed as the books streamed by in a blur.

  She stopped again.

  She was not alone.

  There were other figures moving among the shelves, winged figures robed in white.

  Angels!

  Daphna watched them gliding through the unending maze of books.

  The angels took no notice of her. They had their shining yellow-green eyes directed at the shelves, scanning up and down as they moved. Where they looking for something?

  And they seemed sad. Unspeakably sad.

  Disturbed, Daphna began to walk again, passing angels here and there as she went. More and more came into view as Daphna looked up and down the aisles she passed. They were drifting everywhere, it seemed, searching the endless corridors of Heaven’s Library.

  Slowly it dawned on Daphna that she was going somewhere. Something was drawing her on. She didn’t fight the feeling, but rather allowed it to lead her through the labyrinth. Without thinking, she took turn after turn so quickly that even her remarkable sense of direction was overthrown.

  At some point she passed an area that seemed somehow dimmer than the rest. Daphna stopped briefly to look down a few of its aisles. The shelves there were not only dimmer, she realized, but cold. No angels tread among the books there, all of which Daphna now saw were faced-out on their shelves, faced-out because there were keys protruding from their covers. A chill passed through her, so she hurried on. As soon as she was clear of the area, she forgot about it completely, drawn again by what she now knew had to be a book.

  She was running now, once again taking turns at a dizzying rate.

  But then she stopped yet again.

  Daphna found herself standing at a shelf. One shelf out of an innumerable, uncountable number of shelves.

  It was her shelf.

  All the books on it looked identical, but there was one just there at her eye level…

  It was her book.

  With a trembling hand Daphna reached for it. She was somewhat surprised to find it slid right off the shelf. Now with two trembling hands, she opened it.

  The pages facing her were blank.

  Daphna flipped through. They were all blank. Her book was blank. What did that mean?

  Baffled, Daphna put the book back on the shelf and took down another. She opened it, expecting the pages to be blank as well, but this was not the case. Inside was a series of letters streaming across the page like characters on a computer screen:

  AAAGGGTTTAAGGTTAAAAGGGTTTTAA

  GGCCCTTTTTTTTTAAGGCTTAAAAAGGGGC

  A voice distracted Daphna, a beautiful voice—a harps and bells voice. Singing! But the song was rife with longing. It was sad, heartbreakingly sad.

  Daphna peeked through the space on the shelf the book had occupied—hadn’t her life jumped tracks doing just this what now seemed ages ago?

  There, on the other side, in small hexagonal gallery of more glowing books, was a lone angel sitting cross-legged in the light.

  Daphna watched, mesmerized, as the angel sat and sang, until she realized he was watching something, too, something on a shelf in front of him.

  Or something not on the shelf in front of him. There was a space there too, a dark space among the books, though he didn’t seem to have taken one down.

  Daphna was absolutely certain that the book the angels seemed to be searching for was meant to be there.

  An eye suddenly appeared in Daphna’s peephole, a yellow-green gemstone of an eye. She jerked back, ashamed and afraid. The eye disappeared, but its owner was coming around the shelves, coming to Daphna’s hiding spot.

  Certain she’d committed some kind of heinous violation, Daphna wanted to flee, but before she gathered the resolve to do so, a figure emerged from around the corner, an angel with wings tucked up against her back, a figure whose unexpectedly smooth face radiated the same compassion it had when she lived on Earth.

  Evelyn.

  Good, sweet Evelyn, the world’s first woman. She gently took the book of flowing letters still open in Daphna’s panicky hands and set it back in its place on the shelf.

  And then Daphna’s second mother wrapped her round in warm wings.

  And then Daphna wept again.

  CHAPTER 20

  one particular person

  Daphna! Don’t come here! Do you hear me! Do not come here!

  “What is it like?” Durante had retaken his seat and was working one of the computers.

  “What?”

  “Heaven. What should I expect? Pearly Gates and all that? Harps? No wings, I see, but maybe they need to be earned?”

  Dexter wasn’t sure he wanted to share any information with Durante, so he didn’t.

  “Wings are metaphorical, perhaps,” Durante said, anyway. “How about the white light everyone talks about? Real or just random neurons firing at the time of death? Fine,” he said into his mic.

  Dex turned away in his cage.

  “I can see you weren’t there long.”

  Dex turned back. “How do you know that?”

  “Your fading translucence for one thing. I’m sorry to say your halo is gone. And the overcompensated rage—like an addict when his drug wears off. Amazing how much in the literature is true. Amazing any of it is true! I told you I had an open mind, but it seems it wasn’t open enough.”

  This information gave Dexter pause. “Why are angels so weak?” he asked.

  “They have no strength at all. They have no substance, at least in Heaven.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Feel free.” Durante kept clicking and working a mouse. He might be insane, but he was also a reasonably nice person.

  “Do angels not care about the world?” The question surprised Dexter. He wasn’t sure what he’d wanted to ask.

  Durante stopped what he was doing and looked at Dex. “Interesting question,” he said. “This is not a subject I am particularly knowledgeable about, but I’d say the answer is yes and no. I assume they care, but not in the way people do. Angels would take the long view, and in the long view, every little problem doesn’t loom so large, even if the little problem is a few million people dying of some horrible disease. It’s happened before, many times, and it’ll happen again. And of course they’d have no fear of dying. Anyone with no fear of dying would seem not to care so much.”

  Dex thought this over. “So I guess they wouldn’t worry about any one particular person dying, even if they loved—”

  Durante jumped to his feet, toppling his chair again. “She�
�s there now!” he realized, his iron jaw clenched. “Isn’t she?”

  “No!” Dex insisted, realizing his mistake. “No! I was just—”

  “What’s that?” Durante said, but not to Dex, to his mic again. “Fine. Perfect. Follow every instruction. Seal us in.” Then he turned to Dexter and said, “Our guests are arriving. Some of them anyway.”

  There was a humming sound, and the entire chamber began to vibrate. Dex looked around, trying to see what was happening. A moment later, scalloped steel walls rose from the floor around the perimeter of the room. Similar walls descended from above. The walls met, fitting together perfectly around the pipes above them. There was a long hissing sound, and then the room went quiet.

  Air tight, Dex said to himself. Wind tight. The maniac was going to trap it in here.

  Durante clicked a button and the museum was suddenly on the big screen. It was the news. Crowds had been pushed back away from it by police in riot gear. There were those huge tank-like trucks, the ones SWAT teams hide behind. A helicopter passed through the view as well. Beneath the scene ran the news: ‘…New Stopgap vaccine available soon. CDC advises populace to remain calm. Standoff underway at Durante Museum in Seattle. One or both Wax twins believed to be inside…New Stopgap vaccine available so…’

  “But—why don’t they just—?” Dex stuttered.

  “Hold on,” Durante replied. He reached over and clicked something. The picture on screen enlarged, then zoomed in on the museum’s towers and ramparts, all of which had men in body armor behind them training high-powered rifles at the street.

  “Oh,” was all Dex could say. “Now what?”

  “Now your sister comes to the rescue.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll be seeing her soon enough.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Dex snapped, feeling like a petulant child. He kicked the glass, which served only to stub his toe. “We can communicate by our thoughts,” he barked, “and I’ve told her to stay away!”