Servant of the Bones (44 page)

“We’ll handle them with extreme care, Gregory,” said a young doctor amongst them. “But we’re going to have to take some substantial scrapings; we’ve been through that. In order to get carbon dating and DNA, we may have to take—”

“And you want full DNA, don’t you,” asked another, eager for the eye and the favor of the leader. “You want everything we can come up with about this skeleton—gender, age, cause of death, anything that might be locked inside there—”

“—You’re going to be amazed what we can find out.”

“—the Mummy project in Manchester, you saw all that?”

Gregory gave them nods and stiff affirmations in silence because he knew I was there. I was invisible still, but now formed in all my parts and wearing my garments of choice, fluid enough to pass through him if I wanted to, which would have sickened him and hurt him and made him fall.

I touched Gregory’s cheek. He felt it, and he was petrified. I pushed my fingers into his hair. He drew in his breath.

On and on came the science babble—

“Size of the skull, a male, and the pelvis, probably, you realize…”

“Be careful with them!” Gregory burst out suddenly. The scientists were silenced. “I mean, treat them like a relic, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir, we understand, sir.”

“Look, the scientists who do this work on Egyptian and—”

“Don’t tell me how. Just tell me what! Keep it secret. We don’t have many days left, gentlemen.”

What could this mean?

“I don’t like stopping work for this, so do it at once.”

“Everything’s going splendidly,” said an older doctor. “Don’t worry about time. A day or two won’t matter.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Gregory said, crestfallen. “But something can still go wrong, very wrong.”

They nodded only because they feared to lose his favor. They debated now, speak, don’t speak, nod, bow, do what?

I drew in my breath and resolved to be visible; the air moved; there was a faint noise. The room felt a vague commotion as the particles gathered with tremendous force, yet I was taking no more than the first stage, the airy form.

The doctors looked about in confusion; the first to see me pointed. I was transparent, but vividly colored, and perfectly detailed.

Then the others saw me.

Gregory spun around to his right and looked at me.

I gave him my soft evil smile. I think it was evil anyway. I floated. In airy form, I had no need to stand, or to anchor. I was a thousand degrees from the density that obeys gravity. I stood on the ground, but I didn’t need to. This was a choice, like the position of a flower in a painting.

He glared at me, seeing the thin mirage of a long-haired man, clothed as I had been when I left him, but thinner than glass.

“This is a holograph, Gregory,” said one of the doctors.

“It’s being projected from somewhere,” said another. The men began to look around the room. “Yeah, it’s one of those cameras up there.”

“…it’s some sort of trick.”

“Well, who the hell would dare pull a thing like this in your own…”

“Quiet!” Gregory said.

He raised his hand for absolute obedience and he got it. His face was locked with fear and despair.

“Remember,” I said aloud, “I’m watching you.”

The cohorts heard me and commenced whispering and shuffling.

“Put your hand through it,” said the white-coated one closest to me. When Gregory failed to obey, the young man approached and moved to do it, and I merely looked at him and watched him and wondered what he felt, if it was a chill, or electric. His hand penetrated me, easily, causing no seam in the vision.

He drew back his hand.

“Somebody’s gotten into security,” he said quickly, looking me directly in the eyes. They were all babbling again, that someone was controlling the image, that someone somehow had figured a way to do this, and that it was probably—

Gregory couldn’t bring himself to answer.

I had accomplished my purpose.

He struggled desperately for some command, some powerful verbal weapon against me that wouldn’t make him the fool in the eyes of the others. Then he spoke in a cold voice.

“When you give me your reports, tell me exactly how these bones could be destroyed,” he said.

“Gregory, this is a holograph, this thing. I want to call security…”

“No,” he declared. “I know who is responsible for this little trick. I have it covered. It merely caught me off guard. There’s no breach. Get to work.”

His self-confidence and quiet air of command really were kingly.

I laughed softly. I kissed his cheek. It was rough and he
drew back. But he faced me. The men were astonished by the gesture.

The men merely came closer, surrounding me, absolutely certain in their incredible ignorance and bigotry that I was an apparition being made electrically by someone else. For a moment, I scanned their faces. I saw wickedness in their faces, but it was a brand of wickedness I didn’t fully understand. It was too connected with power. These men loved their power. They loved their purpose, but what exactly was it that they did when they weren’t analyzing relics?

I let them study me, looking from face to face. Then I struck upon the mastermind. The tall emaciated doctor, who in fact blackened his hair with dye, and who looked older than he was on account of his thinness. He was the brilliant one; his gaze was far more critical and suspicious than that of the others. And he monitored Gregory’s responses with a cold calculation.

“Look, this is all very fancy,” said this one, “this holograph, but we can get on this analysis tonight. You realize we can give you an image like this, this holograph, of the man who once had these bones?”

“Can you really do that?” I asked.

“Yes, of course—” He stopped, realizing he was talking to me. He began to make gestures all around me. So did the others. They were trying to interrupt the projection of the beam that they thought had created me.

“Simple forensic procedure,” said another, boldly ignoring the continuing strangeness of all this.

“And we’ll get on this security thing immediately.”

Others continued to search the ceilings and the walls.

A man moved to a telephone.

“No!” Gregory said. He stared at the Bones.

“…permeated with something, some chemical obviously; well, we can have all of that analyzed, I mean, we’ll be able to tell you—”

Gregory turned and looked at me. A clearer comprehension of him came to me.

This was a man who could only use everything that came to
him; he was not passive in any meaning of that word. The frustration he felt now would fuel his rage and his invention; it would drive him to greater lengths; he was only holding firm now, biding his time. And what he learned now would enhance his cunning and his capacity to surprise.

I turned to the doctors. “Let me know the outcome of your tests, will you?” I said, being a deliberately dreadful devil.

This caused quite a flurry.

I dissolved. I did it instantly.

The heat passed out of me, and the particles swarmed, too tiny no doubt for them to see. But the men felt the change in temperature; they felt the movement of the air. They were in confusion, looking around for another projected figure, perhaps, among them, for a switch in the direction of the light beam which they thought had made me appear.

I understood something further about them. They regarded their science as omnipotent. Science was the explanation not only for me but for anything and everything. In other words, they were materialists who beheld their science as magic.

The irony of this was very funny to me. Anything I did they would perceive to be science beyond their understanding. And I had been made by those who had been convinced that magic had the power of “science,” if you just knew all the right words!

I went up and up, through the ceiling and the floor above it, rising through the shiny, bustling, crowded layers of the building, until I could not see the Bones any longer. The golden glimmer was gone.

I was in the fresh and cool night sky. Find Rachel, I thought. Your test is accomplished. You know now you are free.

He can’t stop you. Go now where you will.

But in truth, the experiment would only be complete if I could make myself fully solid once more.

The scarf. I had forgotten about the scarf.

I drew down closer to the building. Only now did I really see its full height and grandeur. Covered all over even to its top floors with granite, it sloped majestically as it rose, rather
like an ancient place of worship. There must have been fifty floors. Numbers don’t come to me automatically. We had been on the twenty-fifth floor just now.

I descended, peering into the windows as I went, looking for the private living chambers. Offices, I saw hundreds of offices. I moved easily from right to left, amazed at the rooms filled with computers, and then I saw laboratories, highly elaborate laboratories in which serious people were diligently studying tiny things beneath microscopes and measuring potions into vials, which they carefully sealed.

What was this, part of Gregory’s religious rackets? Drugs for his followers? Spiritual medicines, like the Soma of the Persian sun worshipers?

But there were so many laboratories! There were men and women in sterile white suits and masks, their hair carefully covered with white caps. There were giant refrigerators and warning signs against “Contamination.” There were animals in cages—little gray monkeys with wide, frightened eyes. Doctors were feeding them.

In one area, humans moved sluggishly, encased in very bright colored plastic suits and with ominous windowed helmets worthy of modern warriors. Their hands were covered with giant clumsy gloves.

At their mercy, the monkeys chattered desperately and in vain in their little prisons. Some monkeys lay prostrate with illness or fright.

Most curious. Some Temple of the Mind, I thought.

As last I came down to perhaps the twelfth floor and there I saw the great demilune of a living room in which he and I had quarreled. I moved through the window easily, and through the corridors, moving the doors back slowly and lightly so that it would seem a breeze.

I saw Esther’s bed. I saw her bed, and her picture beside it, a smiling girl with others in a silver frame, and I saw across her snow-white bedspread the black beaded scarf, folded neatly. I was overcome with delight. As I entered the room physically, I sensed the perfume of Esther. Here she had slept; here she had dreamed.

On her dressing table, there lay diamond rings and earrings with diamonds, and bracelets with diamonds, a scattering of finery, all delicate and pretty with silver or gold. On the walls were photographs—Gregory, Rachel, Esther—together year after year. One picture had been taken on a boat, another on a beach, another at some ceremony or party which required gowns for the women.

“Esther, tell me! Who did it? Why? Would he kill you simply because you learned about his brother Nathan? Why would that matter to him, Esther?”

But nothing came back from the surfaces of this room. The soul had gone straight into the light and taken every particle of pain or joy it had ever known along with it. It had left nothing. Ah, to be murdered and to rise so cleanly!

I drifted towards the scarf. My hand grew denser and more visible as the weight of the fabric tumbled into it; it was beautifully woven, made of lace in its center, long, and trimmed all over with fine small black beads, exactly as I remembered. It was heavy, very heavy. It was almost a shawl. It was strange and unlike other things of this time. Perhaps she had thought it exotic.

The darkness moved around me.
Make yourself whole and flesh
. I did. Something brushed me and flashed before me, dimly and uncertainly. But it was only a lost soul, the soul of an unburied man perhaps, mistaking me in the mist for an angel then moving on. Nothing to do with the chamber.

I uttered a curse against the lost souls, and took my stand with the material world.

I wound the scarf tight in my hands, dazzled again that I was formed and answerable to no one. And then once more, keeping this scarf tight within my grip, I let the particles fly from me, and rolled my spirit round and round this scarf, this heavy scarf so that I might carry it with me.

I soared through the noise and smoke hovering over the city. For one moment I saw its lights below sprinkled exquisitely amid the clouds, the scarf like a great heavy stone in the very midst of my being, slowing me, giving me a rise and fall with the wind that felt oddly good.

Like the birds perhaps, I mused.

Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. I pictured her as I’d left her, not below me, screaming at my disappearance, but how she had been when she was seated across from me, with large hard eyes and all the silver shimmering in her hair, as if it had been threaded there deliberately by twenty slaves to make her magnificent in age.

Within seconds I felt close to her. I could almost see her. She moved through the night as swiftly as I did, and I circled her, rising high above her and then drawing near. I couldn’t see her clearly enough. Her image was tangled with movement and light.

It was the plane.

I couldn’t enter the plane. I wasn’t sure enough to enter it. It was just going too fast. I didn’t know if I had the strength. I didn’t know if I could bring together the matter for a body in the compartment of such a swiftly moving machine. The whole technology of the plane seemed too full of contradictions, and precarious adjustments. I imagined some hideous catastrophe in which I’d be knocked back once more into oblivion, unable to revive.

If that happened, the scarf would fall to earth, like a bit of burnt black forest, moving back and forth on the wind until it entered the lower atmosphere and then pooled on the ground. Esther’s scarf, divorced from all things that had to do with her, and those who loved her. Esther’s scarf in some strange city—we were high above small cities.

I drifted without making a choice. I wasn’t uncertain however. I would meet her, I resolved.

I waited and I followed; the plane led me like a tiny firefly in the night.

We were above the southern seas. The plane was circling and descending. I saw then the great sprawl of Miami as I came down under the clouds. Glorious in this warm air, this sea-filled, watery air, air as lovely as some ancient city where I had once been very happy as a spirit, learning from a wise man. I could almost…