Servant of the Bones (48 page)

“It’s beautiful, a foreshadowing of Paradise.”

She laughed a little laugh. “I’m ready to be nothing,” she said.

What could I say?

Somewhere a bell rang. It throbbed. I sat up. I didn’t like it. I was staring into the garden, at the big red flowers, like trumpets, and realized for the first time that there were dim electric lights there on these flowers. Everything was perfect. There came the bell again.

“Don’t answer it,” she said. She was damp all over.

“Look,” she said. “Stop him, you stop the church. He’s what we call a charismatic leader. He’s evil. Laboratories. I don’t like it. And these cults, these cults have killed people, have killed their own members.”

“I know,” I said. “It was always that way. Always.”

“But Nathan, Nathan is so innocent,” she said. “I can remember his voice, it was beautiful, and I thought of what Esther had said, that it was like seeing the man Gregory could have been. That’s what the voice was like…”

“I’ll find him and make sure he is safe,” I said. “I’ll find out what he knows, what he saw.”

“The old man, is he so terrible?”

“Holy and old,” I said. I shrugged.

She laughed a sweet delighted laugh. It was wondrous to
hear it. I bent down and kissed her lips. They were dry. I gave her some more water, holding her head up so she could drink.

She lay back. She looked at me and only gradually did I realize that her expression meant nothing. It was only a mask for her pain. The pain was in her lungs and in her heart and in her bones. The pain was all through her. The soothing drugs she’d taken before she left New York were gone out of her body. Her heart was faint.

I cradled her hands in mine.

There came that noise again, the bell ringing, the alarm buzzing, and this time there was more than one. I heard the noise of a motor. It came from the elevator shaft.

“Ignore it,” she said. “They can’t get in.” She pushed at the covers with her hands.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Help me, help me get up. Get my heavier robe for me, the heavy silk. Please…”

I got the robe, the one to which she pointed, and she put it on. She stood trembling beneath the weight of the ornate robe.

There was huge noise outside the main door.

“Are you sure they can’t get in?”

“You don’t have to fear, do you?” she asked.

“No, not at all, but I don’t want them…”

“I know…ruining my death,” she said.

“Yes.”

She was completely white. “You’re going to fall down.”

“I know,” she said. “But I intend to fall where I want to fall. Help me out there, I want to look at the ocean.”

I picked her up and carried her out the doors to the balcony. This was due east. The doors faced not the bay but the true sea. I realized it was the same sea that washed the banks of Europe, the shores of ruined Greek cities, the sands of Alexandria.

A pounding noise came from behind us. I turned around. It was coming from within the elevator. There were people in the car of the elevator. But the doors were locked.

The breeze ripped across the broad terrace. Under my feet
the tiles felt cool. She seemed to love it, putting her head against my shoulder, looking out over the dark sea. A great ship, hung with lights, glided by, just short of the horizon, and above, the clouds made their spectacle.

I cuddled her and held her, and started to pick her up.

“No, let me stand,” she said. She tugged herself gently free of me and put her hands on the high stone railing. She looked down. I saw a garden far down there, immaculate and full of trees and bright lights. Egyptian lilies galore, and large fanlike plants, all waving just a little in the breeze.

“It’s empty down there, isn’t it?” she asked.

“What?”

“The garden. It’s so private. Only the flowers beneath us, and beyond, the sea.”

“Yes,” I said.

The elevator door was being forced open.

“Remember what I said,” she said. “You can’t go wrong killing him. I mean it. He’ll try to seduce you, or destroy you, or use you in some way. You can bet he is already thinking in those terms, how best to use you.”

“I understand him perfectly,” I said. “Don’t worry. I will do what is right. Who knows? Maybe I will teach him right and wrong. Maybe I know what they are. Maybe I’ll save his soul.” I laughed. “That would be lovely.”

“Yes, it would,” she said. “But you’re craving life, craving it. Which means you can be lured by him with all his fiery life, the same way you were lured by mine.”

“Never, I told you. I’ll put it right.”

“All of it, put it all to right.”

Several men had just broken through the front door, with a clumsy pounding noise. I heard the wood splinter.

She sighed. “Maybe Esther did call you down. Maybe she did,” she said. “My angel.”

I kissed her.

The men were blundering into the room behind us. I didn’t have to look at them to know they were there. They stopped short; there was a rumble of urgent voices. Then Gregory’s voice carried.

“Rachel, thank God you’re all right.”

I turned and I saw him and he saw me, and he looked hard and determined, and cold. “Let my wife go,” he said. Liar.

He was blazing with anger, and anger made him evil; anger took away his charm. I suppose it had done that to mine before. And I realized slowly as I stood there that I loved again, and didn’t hate. I loved Esther and I loved Rachel. I didn’t hate even him.

“Go to the door and stand between us,” Rachel said. “Do that for me, please.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Do that, my angel.”

I obeyed. I put my hand up on the steel frame. “You can’t pass,” I said.

Gregory roared. He let out a terrible roar, a roar from the soul, and the whole company of men rushed towards me. I turned around as they buffeted my shoulders, passing me. But I knew already what had made them cry out.

She had jumped.

I went to the railing, pushing them aside, and I looked down into the garden and I saw her tiny empty shell of a body. The light hovered around her.

“Oh, God, take her, please,” I prayed in my ancient tongue.

Then the light blazed and went straight up and for a moment it seemed that lightning lashed the southern sky, exploded behind the clouds, but it was only her passing. She’d gone up, and for one second perhaps I’d seen the Door of Heaven.

The garden held nothing but its bed of Egyptian flowers and her empty flesh, her face unhurt, intact, staring blindly upward.

Go up, Rachel, please, Esther, take her up the ladder
. I deliberately envisioned the Ladder, the Stairway, replete with all the hanging remnants of memory.

Gregory cried in agony. Men took hold of me by the arms. Gregory screamed and cried and sobbed and there was no artifice to it. The man stared down at her and roared in pain and hit the railing with his fists.

“Rachel, Rachel, Rachel!”

I shook off the hands of the men. They fell backwards, stunned by the strength of it, and not knowing what to do, seemingly embarrassed by the figure of Gregory roaring in grief.

Suddenly there was havoc all around me. More men had come, poor Ritchie had come, and Gregory wailed and wailed and leaned over the railing. He was davening, bowing like a Hebrew and crying out in Yiddish.

I shoved off the men again, hurling some of them to the end of the terrace, I pushed and I pushed at them till they simply backed off.

I said to Gregory:

“You really loved her, didn’t you?”

He turned and looked at me, and tried to speak but he was choked with grief. “She was…my queen of Sheba,” he said. “She was my queen…” And then he wailed again, and said the same prayers.

“I’m leaving you now,” I said, “with all your armed men.”

A crowd was climbing up the slope of the garden below. Men with flashlights shone them on her dead face.

Then I went up and up.

Where would I go? What would I do?

It was time to walk on my own.

I looked back once at the tiny men down on the terrace, confounded now by my disappearance. Gregory had actually collapsed and sat down rocking, holding his head.

Then I went high, so high that the joyous spirits were there, and it seemed as I flew north that they stared at me with great interest.

I knew what I had to do first of all. Find Nathan.

B
y the time I reached New York the need for sleep was weighing me down. I would have to give in to it before further explorations. But I was fiercely worried about Nathan. Before taking on a body, I prowled invisibly all through the Temple of the Mind.

Just as I expected, there was much chemical research being done there, and there were numerous restricted areas, and there were people working in the night in the strange rubbery orange plastic suits I had seen, and these suits seemed to be filled with air. These suited beings peered through their helmets as they worked with chemicals which they obviously did not mean to breathe or touch. They were loading these into what seemed very lightweight plastic cartridges. I studied everything else that was going on. In an antiseptic laboratory, my bones lay on a hard table, being studied by the evil Mastermind doctor, the thin one with the bottle-black hair. He had no hint of my invisible presence as I circled him. I could not make out his notes. I felt nothing for the Bones, except the desire to destroy them so that I could never be driven back into them again. But I might die if that happened. It was much too soon for such a risk.

Other parts of the building were obviously communication centers. There were people watching monitors, speaking on phones and working with maps. There were great electrified maps of the world on the wall, filled with pinpoints of light.

There was a great air of urgency and commotion among these night workers.

All spoke in a completely guarded way, as if they thought
they were being monitored by enemies, and their statements were maddeningly vague. “We have to hurry.” “This is going to be glorious.” “This has to be loaded by four a.m.” “Everything at Point 17 is perfectly in line.”

I could not make something sensible or sophisticated out of what they said. I managed to discover from one slip of the tongue that the project they all shared was called Last Days.

Last Days.

All I saw alarmed me and repelled me. I suspected the chemicals in the canisters were filoviruses, or some other lethal agent only recently discovered through technology, and the entire Temple stank of murder.

I passed many empty floors, many sleeping dormitories filled with young Minders, and a huge chapel where Minders prayed silently like contemplative monks, on their knees with their hands pressed to their foreheads. The image over the altar was a great Brain. The Mind of God, I presume. It was a mere outline in gold. It was strangely uninspiring. It looked anatomical and bizarre.

I passed rooms where men slept alone, in dimness. In one room was a man covered up and bandaged, with a nurse in attendance. In other chambers, there were other sick people, swathed in sheeting, hooked to gleaming tubes connected to tiny computers. Many solitary rooms contained sleeping members of the church. Some were so luxurious as to rival Gregory’s rooms. They had floors of marble tile and gilded furniture; they had sumptuous bathrooms with great square tubs.

I had many unanswered questions about what I saw in the building, and could have spent much more time.

But now I had to go on to Brooklyn. I felt I could see what was happening. Surely, Nathan was in danger.

It was two a.m. Invisible I passed into the Rebbe’s house and found him sound asleep in his bed, but he woke the minute I entered the room. He knew I was there. He was at once alarmed and climbed out of the bed. I simply went very far away from the house. There was no time to search for Nathan or to look for more sympathetic members of the family.

Besides, I was growing more tired by the minute. I couldn’t dare retreat to the Bones; in fact, I had no intention of ever retreating to them again, not the way that I felt now, and I feared my weakness in sleep, that I might be called back or dissolved by Gregory or even somehow by the Rebbe.

I went back into Manhattan, found a lake in the middle of Central Park not very far at all from the huge Temple of the Mind. Indeed, I could see all its lighted windows. I took form as a man, dressed myself in the finest garb I could conceive of—red velvet suit, fine linen shirt, all manner of exotic gold embellishments—and then I drank huge amounts of water from the lake. I knelt and drank it in handfuls. I was filled with water, and felt very powerful. I lay down on the grass under a tree to rest, in the open, telling my body to hold firm and to wake if there was any natural or supernatural assault on it. I told it it must answer no one’s call but my own.

When I woke it was eight o’clock in the morning by the city’s clocks, and I was whole, intact, with my clothes, and I was rested. Just as I supposed, I had appeared far too strange for prowling mortal men to attack, and far too puzzling to be disturbed by beggars. Whatever the case, I was strong and unharmed in my velvet suit and shining black shoes.

I had survived the hours of sleep in material form, outside the bones, and this was another triumph.

I danced for joy on the grass for a few minutes, then brushed off the clothes, dissolved with the requisite enchantments, and re-formed, velvet clad, bearded, and free of bits of grass and dirt in the living room of the Rebbe’s house. I did not want the beard, but the beard and mustache came as they had before. And maybe they’d even been there when I woke. In fact, I’m sure they had. They had been there all along. They wanted to be there. Very well.

The house was modern, cramped, made of many smallish rooms.

It struck me as most remarkable how conventional this house was. It was filled with rather ordinary furniture, none of it ugly or beautiful. Comfortable and well lighted. Immediately people waiting in the parlor stared at me and began to
whisper. A man approached, and in Yiddish I said I had to see Nathan immediately.

I realized I didn’t know Nathan’s real last name. Or even if they called him Nathan here. Obviously his last name wasn’t Belkin. Belkin was a made-up name of Gregory. I said in Yiddish that it was a matter of life and death that I see Nathan.