Servant of the Bones (43 page)

Then I saw what had so concerned the others about these magazines. The pictures on them were of Esther at the worst moment. There were pictures of Esther almost dead!

Yes, there on the cover of one newsmagazine was the picture of Esther on her stretcher, and the crowds around her.

Someone said we were on course for Miami and cleared for an immediate landing when we got there.

“Miami.” The sound made me laugh. “Miami.” It was like a joke word you say to little children to make them laugh. “Miami.”

The plane was bouncing along. But the pale-eyed girl came with another bottle of water. It was cold. It didn’t need the ice. I took it and drank it in easy patient swallows.

I sat back, filling with the water. Oh, this was the most divine moment, a moment almost on a par with kissing Rachel, to feel this water move down my throat and through the coils inside of me made by will and by magic. I breathed deep.

I opened my eyes, and saw that Rachel was watching me. The girl was gone. The glasses were gone. The only water that remained was the bottle I clutched in my hands.

A great pressure bore down on me, fondling me, pushing me against the leather, and teasing me almost with a sweet strength that was mysterious.

The plane was rising fast into the sky, very fast. The pressure increased and my head suddenly ached, but this I sent away from me. I looked at her. She sat still as if praying, as if this were a ceremonial moment, and she did not speak or
move until the plane had found some comfortable height and ceased to rise.

I knew the moment by the way she relaxed, and by the sounds of the engines. I didn’t much like this plane. Yet the experience was thrilling.

You’re alive, Azriel, you are alive!
I must have laughed. Or maybe I wept. I needed more water. No, I would have liked to have more water. I needed nothing.

But I had to know what Gregory was doing with my bones. Was he trying at this very moment to call me back? He had to be doing something, though I felt no reverberations. I wanted to know. And I also wanted to know if, strong as this body was, I could at will dissolve it and recall it. I wanted badly to know.

I ran my tongue on my lips, which were cold from the water. I realized that my attraction to this woman, this delicate pale creature, had brought my anger and my confusion to the limit. I had to stop wondering about this and that and simply declare myself master. That’s what I had to do. I wanted her. It was all connected in a human way—the carnal desire for her, and the desire to strive against Gregory and defy him, prove to myself he did not control me merely because the bones were now in his possession.

“You’re frightened,” Rachel said. “Don’t be frightened of the plane. The plane is routine.” Then a mischievous smile came on her again, and she said, “Of course it could explode at any minute, but, well, so far, it never has.” She gave an easy bitter laugh.

“Listen, you have an expression in English, kill two birds with one stone?” I said. “I’m going to do it. I’m going to leave you now, and come back. That will prove to you that I’m a spirit and you’ll stop worrying that you’re consorting in desperation with a madman, and also I’ll find out what Gregory is up to. Because he does have those bones, and he is a strange, strange man.”

“You’re going to disappear from here? Inside this plane?”

“Yes. Now tell me our destination in Miami. What is Miami? I’ll meet you at the door of your home in Miami.”

“Don’t try this,” she said.

“I have to. We can’t go on with your suspicions. I see now Esther is like a diamond herself in the middle of a huge necklace, and the necklace is intricate. Where are we going? Where do I find Miami?”

“Tip end of the East Coast of the United States. My home is in a tower at the very end of the town called Miami Beach. It’s in a high-rise. I’m on the top floor. There is a pink beacon on the tower above my apartment. Further south are the islands called the Florida Keys and then the Caribbean.”

“That’s enough; I’ll see you there.”

I looked down at the spilled droplets of water, at the horrifying picture of Esther on the stretcher and then in absolute shock I saw that I was in the picture! I was there! I had been caught by the camera as I had raised my hands to my head and howled in grief for Esther. This was before the stretcher had been put inside the ambulance.

“Look,” I said. “That’s me.”

She picked up the magazine, stared at the picture and at me.

“Now I’m going to prove to you that I’m on your side, and I want to give that devil Gregory a good scare. You want something from your house? I’ll bring it to you.”

She couldn’t speak.

I realized that I had frightened her and silenced her. She was merely watching me. I pictured her body without clothing. The shape of her limbs was pleasing and firm. Her legs in particular had a muscularity to them in their slender form which was graceful. I wanted to touch the backs of her legs, her calves, and squeeze them.

This was quite a lot of strength for me, a lot, and I had to resolve the issue of my freedom now.

“You’re changing,” she said in a suspicious voice, “but you’re certainly not disappearing.”

“Oh? What do you see?” I asked. I wanted to add with pride that I hadn’t tried to disappear yet, but this was obvious.

“Your skin; the sweat’s drying. Oh, it isn’t much sweat. It’s on your hands and your face and it’s gone and you look, you
look different. I could swear that there’s more dark hair on your hands, you know, just the normal hair of a hirsute man.”

“That I am,” I said. I lifted my hand, looking at the black hairs on my fingers, and I reached down into my shirt and felt the thick curls on my chest. I pulled at them, pulled them again and again. That was my chest, the rough scratchiness of the hair when it was flat, the silkiness of it when I tugged on it, and played with it. “I am alive,” I whispered. “Listen to me,” I said.

“I’m listening. I couldn’t be more attentive. What is it you see—about Esther’s death and this necklace? You were saying something—”

“Your daughter. She touched a scarf before she died. Do you want it? It was beautiful. She reached out for it right at the moment that the Evals surrounded her, the killers, I mean. She wanted it, and she died with it in her hand.”

“How do you know this!”

“I saw it!”

“I have that scarf,” she said. She went white with shock. “The saleswoman brought it to me. She said that Esther had reached for it, that Esther said she wanted it! How could you know this?”

“I didn’t know that part. I just saw Esther reach for the scarf. I was going to ask you if you wanted the scarf. I was going to bring it to you for the same reasons as this merchant woman.”

“I do want it!” she said. “It’s in my room, the room I was in when you first saw me. It…no. It’s in Esther’s room. It’s lying on her bed. Yes, that’s where I left it.”

“Okay, when I see you in Miami I will have it.”

The look on her face was a terrible thing to see.

In a whisper she said, “She went there to get that scarf!” Her voice was so small. “She told me she had seen it and couldn’t forget it. She had told me she wanted that scarf.”

“In a gesture of love, I’ll bring it to you.”

“Yes, I want to die holding it.”

“You don’t think I’m going to disappear, do you?”

“No, not at all.”

“Keep yourself in check. I am. Whether I come back, that’s the question.” I said something under my breath. “But I’ll try, try with all my might. This must be tested now.”

I leaned over and took with her the liberty she’d taken with me. I kissed her. Her passion passed through me completely. It burned in me.

Now in my heart I spoke the requisite words,
Depart from me, all particles of this earthly body, yet do not return to where you belong, but await my command that you come together instantly when I would have you
.

I vanished.

At once the body dispersed, sending out a fine mist to all the inner surfaces of the plane, leaving a shimmering spray upon the leather, the windows, the ceiling.

I floated above, free, fully shaped and strong, and I looked down at the empty seat, and I saw the top of Rachel’s head, and I heard her scream.

I rose up, through the plane. It was no harder than passing through anything else. But I felt the passing, I felt the shivering energy and heat of the plane, and then the plane shot onwards at such terrific velocity that I fell towards the earth as if I had weight. Down, down, through the dark until I swung free, spreading my arms, and moving towards:

Gregory.
Find the Bones, Servant. Find your Bones. Look after the Bones
.

In the wind, as always I glimpsed other souls. I saw them struggling to see me and to make themselves visible. I knew they sensed my vigor, my direction, and for a moment they flashed and glittered and blinked, and then they were gone. I had passed through them and their world, their horrid layer of smoke that surrounded the earth like the filth hanging over burning dung, and I sped forward, like singing, towards the Bones. Towards Gregory.

“The Bones,” I said. “The Bones,” I said into the wind.

The lights of the city of New York spread out in all directions, more magnificent and tremendous than the lights of
Rome at its greatest, or of Calcutta now full of millions upon millions of lamps. I could hear Gregory’s voice.

And then before me in the dark, there appeared the Bones, tiny, distant, certain, and golden.

I
t was a large room, not in the apartments of Gregory and Rachel, but higher in the building. I realized for the first time that the building itself
was
the Temple of the Mind of God and it throbbed throughout its many floors with people.

The room itself glistened with steel and glass and tables made of manipulated stone, hard as anything mined from the earth; machines lined the walls, and cameras which moved as the inhabitants of the room moved. There were plenty of inhabitants.

I entered invisible, easily passing through all barriers, as if I were made of tiny fish and the walls were nets. I wandered among the tables, eyeing the video screens in rows on the walls, the computers set into niches, and other devices which I couldn’t understand.

Silently, broadcasts from all over the planet came in on these video screens. Some of them showed the news that all people can receive. Others were obviously monitoring particular and private places. The spy monitors were the most dull, greenish, murky.

The Bones lay in the very middle of the room on a sterile table. The casket, empty, lay to the side. The men surrounding Gregory were obviously physicians. They had the poise and attitude of learned men.

Gregory was in mid-conversation, describing the Bones as a relic, which must be analyzed in every conceivable way without bringing harm to it, X-rayed, carbon-dated, minute scrapings made for contents. Attempt at aspiration if anything inside were liquid.

Gregory was shaken, disheveled. He wore the same clothes as before but he was not the same man.

“You’re not listening to me!” he said fiercely to these his loyal court physicians. “Treat this as priceless,” he said. “I want no mishaps. I want no leaks to the press. I want no leaks within this building. Do this work yourself. Keep the jabber-mouth technicians away from it.”

The men took all this in stride. Not fawning like lackeys, they wrote notes on their clipboards, exchanged glances of agreement with one another, and nodded with dignity to the man who paid the bills.

I knew their kind. Very modern scientists who are just learned enough to be certain that nothing spiritual exists, that the world is completely material, self-created, or the result of some “big bang,” and that ghosts, spells, God, and the Devil were useless concepts.

They weren’t by nature kind. In fact, there was a peculiar hardness which they all shared, not a sinister quality so much as a moral deformity. It was in their demeanor, but I caught it merely from scanning them carefully. All these men had committed crimes of some kind, with medicine, and their status was entirely dependent upon the protection of Gregory Belkin.

In other words, this was a gang of fugitive doctors hand-picked to do special jobs for Gregory.

It struck me as marvelously good luck that he had committed the Bones to this pack of fools, rather than to magicians. But then where would he find a magician?

What a different scene this might have been if he had called upon the Hasidim—zaddiks who didn’t hate or fear him—or on Buddhists or Zoroastrians. Even a Hindu doctor of Western mind might have been a danger.

I took an upright stance, still invisible, then drew close, until I was touching Gregory’s shoulder. I smelled his perfumed skin, his fine silken face. His voice was crisp and angry, concealing all his anxiety as if it were a cloud that he could collect and swallow and let out only in a perfect narrow stream of fluid speech.

The Bones. I felt nothing as I saw them. Do some good
mischief here, get the scarf and get back to Rachel. Obviously the moving of the Bones had no effect on me; neither did the prying eyes of these doctors.

Am I finished with you now?
I spoke to the Bones, but the Bones gave no answer.

They were not in order. They were a haphazardly gathered skeleton, tumbled, their gold brilliant under the electric lights. Flecks of cloth clung to them, like bits of leaves or dirt. Ashes clung to them, but they seemed as solid as ever, as enduring.
For all time
.

Was my soul, my tzelem, locked within them?

Do I need you anymore? Can you hurt me, Master?

Gregory knew I was there! He turned from right to left, but he couldn’t see me. The others—and there were six—noted his agitation, questioned him.

One man touched the casket.

“Don’t do it!” said Gregory. He was wonderfully afraid. I loved this too much!

There is always an element of pride in tormenting the solid and the living, but really, it was so easy, I had to restrain myself.

To test him and to test myself—that was my mission here, and I must not play games.