Servant of the Bones (28 page)

The River Nile flowed into the metropolis of Cairo, where the buildings of steel and glass stand as high as in Manhattan, yet the streets were thronged by men and women in loose, airy cotton robes of white or black, as pure as the garments worn by the Israelites when Pharaoh let the people go.

The pyramids of Giza remained as always, only the air surrounding them was thick with the emission of automobiles, and the modern city crawled almost to their feet.

Within a stone’s throw of air-conditioned office buildings there lingered pockets of jungle where men knew nothing of Yahweh, Allah, Jesus, or Shiva, or of iron, copper, gold, or bronze. They hunted with wooden spears and poison from
reptiles, only now and then stupefied by the sight of big mechanical bulldozers mowing down the forest which was their world.

A flock of goats in the mountains of Judea still looked exactly like a flock of goats in the time of Cyrus the Persian. Shepherds tending sheep outside the city of Bethlehem looked exactly as they had when Jeremiah the Prophet raved.

Though East and West communicated and interacted continuously, each somehow held out against the other. Desert sheiks, rich from the oil discovered beneath their sands, still wore their headdress and robes as they drove about in automobiles. Vast numbers of the world’s women still lived indoors almost entirely and only entered a public street if their faces were veiled.

In New York City, capital of the West and city of choice of the more clever and more powerful, the common person was utterly confident and utterly ignorant of “science” at the same time.

What individual anywhere in the world knew the real meaning of binary code, semiconductor, triodes, electrolyte, or laser beam?

In the upper echelons a technological elite with the powers of a priesthood dealt in perfect faith with the invisible: ions, neutrinos, gamma rays, ultraviolet light, and black holes in space.

Icons shone bright for me in my awakening, bright as the eyes of Esther when she died.

“Servant of the Bones, listen,” she might as well have said. “Servant of the Bones, come, see.”

All the material world was mine to behold, to know, without haste or alarm, as I slumbered, grieving for her, and angry, angry with her killers.

In invisibility and silence, I saw a man parked at Fifty-sixth and Fifth speaking on a tiny phone in his car, in the German language, to an employee of his in the city of Vienna.

One woman in a building in the city of Atlanta in the country of America talked for twenty-four hours before a camera about the weather all over the globe.

Esther Belkin, my lost one, was mourned by thousands who had never known her, her story broadcast to every country which could receive the Cable News Network, or, as it was mostly known, CNN. Members of the international Temple of the Mind of God, to which she herself had not belonged, mourned for her.

Her stepfather, Gregory Belkin, a robust man of substantial height, the Temple’s founder, wept before cameras and spoke of cults, terrorists, and plots. “Why do they want to hurt us!” he said. His eyes were clear and brilliantly black, his hair close cut but thick as hers had been, and his skin was almost the perfect color of honey in sunlight.

The mother of the murdered Esther fled the public eye. White-clad nurses ushered Mrs. Belkin past screaming reporters. With the long unkempt hair of a girl, and thin beseeching hands, she looked little older than her daughter.

Law officers and elected officials condemned the violence of the times.

And the times were universally violent. In fact, violence came now like any other commodity, in all sizes and forms.

Robbery, rape, and battery were routine, if not rampant, beneath a canopy of civilization and peace. Small organized wars were in constant progress. People were fighting to the death in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in the Ukraine. Souls of the newly dead wreathed the earth like smoke.

The market for weapons was black, white, chaotic, endless. Struggling little countries vied with larger and more powerful nations to buy up legally or illegally the armaments and explosives of crumbling empires. Powerful nations sought to stop the proliferation of missiles, hand grenades, bullets, and canisters of poison gas, while they themselves continued to develop nuclear bombs which could destroy the earth.

Drugs were critical to people. Everyone talked of drugs.

Drugs cured. Drugs killed. Drugs helped. Drugs hurt.

There were so many kinds of drugs and for so many purposes that no one being could grasp the significance of the sheer multiplicity itself.

In one New York hospital alone, the size of the inventory of drags which saved lives daily through inoculation, injection, intravenous feed, or oral ingestion was almost beyond human count. Yet a computer system kept perfect track of it.

Worldwide, criminal overlords fought for the trade in illegal drags—the wherewithal to develop, distribute, and market cocaine and heroin—chemicals with no other purpose than to make people feel an addictive euphoria or calm.

Cults. Cults were a matter of public obsession and fear. Cults were apparently unsanctioned religious organizations, that is, organizations to which people belonged, swearing allegiance generally to a leader of whose morals and purposes others were unsure. Cults could rise, seemingly from nothing, around the figure of one man—Gregory Belkin. Or cults could break off from large organized religions to form fanatical enclaves of their own.

Cults existed for peace and war.

Around the death of Esther Belkin swarmed the argument over cults.

Again and again, her face flashed on television screens.

She herself, a member of nothing, was related to everything—those who were anti-government, those who were anti-God, those who were anti-wealth.

Had her father’s cult members actually killed Esther?

She herself had once been heard in private to remark that the Temple of the Mind of God had too much money, too much power, too many houses worldwide. Or had it been the enemies of Gregory Belkin and his Temple who sought through the death of Esther to hurt the father, to warn him and his powerful cohorts that his organization had become too big, and too dangerous, but to whom?

Cults could be liberal, radical, reactionary, old-fashioned.

Cults could do terrible things.

I drifted, I watched, I listened; I knew what people knew.

It was a world of empires, nations, countries, and gangs; and the smallest gang could dominate the television screens of the entire world with one well-planned explosion. The news
would talk all day about the leader of fifty as easily as it might about the leader of millions.

Enemies were the beneficiaries of the same democratic and competitive scrutiny as victims.

The faces of the Evals—Billy Joel, Doby, and Hayden—rose to the fore, blazing as bright as Esther’s on the television screens for brief seconds. Had these men who killed Esther Belkin belonged to a secret movement? People spoke of backwoods “survivalists” with barbed-wire fences and vicious dogs, who suspected all kinds of authority. Conspiracy. It might be anywhere in any form.

And then there were the Apocalyptic Christians, having more cause than ever before to say that Judgment Day was at hand.

Had the Eval brothers come from such organizations?

Gregory Belkin, the stepfather of Esther, spoke in a soft compelling voice of plots to hurt all God-fearing peoples. The innocence of Esther was significant and cried out to heaven. Terrorists, diamonds, fanatics—these words encircled the brief flicker of Esther’s face and name.

The news in all forms—printed, broadcast, computerized on internets—was continuous, alarming, prophetic, fatalistic, detailed, ludicrous by intention and by accident in turns.

As I said, any ghost could have grasped these things.

The question with me was why was I thinking of
anything?
Why wake from my deep sleep, just short of death, always just short of death, and find myself walking amongst Billy Joel, Hayden, and Doby Eval—a sudden horrified witness to their crime?

Whatever the case, I had for the moment lost my taste for merely drifting, for merely existing, for merely hating.

I wanted to pay attention. I wanted to make full use of my mind unfettered by flesh and cast into eternity, a mind that had been gaining strength with each new awakening, taking back into the darkness with it not merely experience but emotion, and possibly a certain resolve.

Inevitably, it was a Master who would put all of this in
order through his responses, his reactions, the vitality of his will.

But a very specific question tormented me. Yes, I was back and I wanted to be back. But had not I done things to ensure that I would never be brought back again?

If I wanted to, I think I could remember what I’d done. Forget the world and all its pomp and racket for a moment. I was Azriel. Azriel could remember what he’d done.

I had slain masters.

If I wanted to, I could remember more dead Magi than those I’ve already described here. I could smell again the camp of the Monguls, leather, elephants, scented oil—flicker of lights beneath the sagging silk, the chessboard overturned and tiny carved figures made of gold and silver rolling on a flowered carpet.

Cries of men.
Destroy it, it’s a demon, drive it back into the bones!

A
series of windows in Baghdad looking out over a battle.
Back into the bones! Fiend from Hell
. A castle near Prague. A stone-cold room high in the Alps. And maybe even more—even after the vivid enchanting gaslight on the flowered wallpaper of the sorcerer’s room in Paris.

This servant serves no more!

Yes, I’d proved to myself and them that I could slay any conjurer.

So where was the sly, covert consciousness which had brought me here to this presentation of power?

Oh, I could like to aver that I loathed being conscious again and forswore all life and everything that goes with it, but I couldn’t really do that. I couldn’t forget Esther’s eyes, or the beautiful glass on Fifth Avenue, or the moment when the heat came through the soles of my shoes, and when the man, the kindly unknowing man had put his arm around me!

I was curious and free! In an orbit, I was bound to these bizarre events. But no Lord directed me.

Esther knew me but she hadn’t called. Had it been someone on behalf of Esther, someone whom I had already tragically failed?

Two nights passed in real time before I realized I was once again awake, and moving through the air: the angel of might, the angel of evil, who knows?

This is what I saw:

T
his was a nearby city, in view of the other. The car moving through the rain was the car that had carried Esther to the place where the Evals surrounded her with their picks. Other cars traveled with it, filled with guards whose eyes roved dark and deserted buildings.

The procession was furtive yet full of authority.

Through the rain, I could actually see the shining towers of the street on which she had died. Grand as Alexandria, or Constantinople, this rock-hard capital of the Western world, New York—in its greedy nuclear splendor. Yet its soaring buildings reminded me of the weapons carried by the Evals. Hard and very sharp.

The man in the car was very proud of the car, proud of the guards who traveled with him, proud of his fine wool coat and the neat trim of his thick curly hair.

I drew in close to see him through the darkened glass: Gregory Belkin, her stepfather, founder of the Temple of the Mind of God, rich man. Rich beyond the dreams of kings in earlier times, because they couldn’t fly on magic carpets.

The car? Mercedes-Benz, and the most unusual of its kind, made from a small sedan and elongated by three perfectly welded and padded parts so that it was twice the length of the engines all around it, shiny and black, deliberately glamorous, as if carved of obsidian and polished by hand.

It prowled for blocks before stopping, the driver quick to obey the rise of Belkin’s hand.

Then this proud high priest or prophet or whatever he deemed himself stepped unaided out into the light of the street
lamp as if he wanted it to shine on his youthful clean-shaven face, hair clipped short on the back of his neck like a Roman soldier, yet softly curly despite its length.

The full length of the dingy dirty block he walked, alone, past dismal boarded-up shops, past signs in Hebrew and in English, to the place he meant to visit, his guards sweeping the night before him and behind him with their glances, the raindrops standing like jewels on the shoulders of his long coat.

All right. Was he the Master? If so, how could I not know it? I didn’t like him. In my half sleep, I had seen him weep for Esther and talk of plots, and had not liked him.

Why was I so close I could touch his face? Handsome he was, no one would argue with this, and in the prime of life, square-shouldered, tall as a Norseman, though darker with jet-black eyes.

Are you the Master?

Mastermind of the Minders, that was what the flippant and cynical reporters called him, this billionaire Gregory Belkin. Now he reviewed in his head recent speeches he’d made before the bronze doors of his Manhattan Temple, “My worse fear is that they weren’t thieves at all and the necklace meant nothing to them. It’s our church they want to hurt. They are evil.”

Necklace, I thought, I had seen no necklace.

The guards who watched Gregory from their nearby cars were his “followers.” This was some church of peace and good. They wore guns, and they carried knives, and he himself the prophet carried a small gun, very shiny, like his car, deep in the left pocket of his coat.

He was like a King who is used to performing every gesture before a grand audience, but he didn’t see me watching him. He had no sense of a ghost at his shoulder like a personal god.

Well, I was not this man’s god. I was not this man’s servant. But I was his observer, and I had to know why.

He stopped before a brick house. It was filled with glass windows, all of them covered. It had high-pitched roofs for snow. It was like thousands, possibly even millions, of other
houses in this same arm of the city. The proportions of this time and place were truly beyond my easy measure.