The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“You’re sure you don’t want me to run the film for you?” the elderly projectionist said. “I don’t mind at all, Professor.”

For the third time, Lucas assured him that he could do it himself, so long as the projectionist gave him a quick tutorial.

“Okay then,” the man said, adjusting various switches and knobs. “Let me at least load it for you and get it ready to run.”

As he did so, Lucas looked around the cramped booth with the sagging acoustical tiles, the fire extinguisher in the dusty case, and the metal racks jammed with film canisters and slide boxes and, of all things, mousetraps.

“You have a problem with mice?”

The projectionist grunted. “No matter how many times we tell the students not to bring food into the auditorium, they do anyway.” Brushing the palms of his hands together, he said, “I’ll leave it to you then.” Inching around Lucas, he slipped out of the booth.

No sooner was he gone than Lucas heard Delaney, sitting beside Simone in the auditorium, clap in mock frustration and shout, “Let’s get this show on the road!”

From inside the projection booth, all Lucas could see of them was the backs of their heads. “Keep your shirt on!” he hollered, turning off the house lights and fumbling to start the projector. The sound reminded him of his mother’s sewing machine, clicking and ratcheting along as the film first displayed its numerical countdown, and then cut to a shot, in crisp black-and-white tones, of himself announcing the time and date — in a voice he could barely recognize as his own — and introducing the members of the investigatory team. He had never seen himself on film like this before, and it came as quite a shock to see how forbidding a presentation his five o’clock shadow and eye patch made; his first thought was that he looked like a pirate. Delaney, on whom he had turned the lens for a few seconds, appeared like a good-natured grizzly bear, and Simone, who had stepped in front of the camera next, radiated apprehension.

But beauty, too.

Seeing her on the screen, even in this context, Lucas was struck by her distinctive, even mysterious, features — her luminous eyes and arched brows, and the way her raven hair framed her face. There were moments like this, moments when he felt a certain tugging at his heart, that he regretted ever having allowed her to become involved in this project — though he knew full well he could hardly have stopped her. She was as determined as she was attractive. And if not for her and her father, the ossuary would still be languishing in a hidden tomb somewhere in the Egyptian desert.

There were a few blank frames in the film at the point where Lucas had paused to turn the camera over to Simone.

And then the movie began again, the lens trained on the closed lid of the ossuary. Lucas could see the various creatures incised there, brandishing their claws and baring their fangs at the figure of the shepherd — swineherd, he corrected himself — with the crooked-handled staff. Somehow the threat from the gamboling beasts was more noticeable on the film than it had been on the actual sarcophagus. Despite the complaints from the technician at Fort Dix, Lucas couldn’t see anything on the film so far that suggested Simone had done anything but an admirable job behind the camera.

A pair of gloved hands protruded into the frame — his own, as he recalled — holding up a length of rusty chain that was bound around the box. Delaney’s hands, also gloved, wielded the hacksaw that quickly reduced the links to powder. The removal of the remaining chains took several minutes, and then the ponderous lid — he could remember just how heavy, and cold, the alabaster had been — was sliding the length of the box. Simone had adroitly directed the camera to follow its progress onto the thin mattress, where it had been laid to rest.

And then, for a split second, something blurred the lens before clearing again.

The focus changed, as Simone had swung the camera to take in a new view. She could be heard saying, “Oh my God.”

The lens was pointed at the interior of the sarcophagus, at the jumbled bones and artifacts. And the pair of skulls. Lucas’s gloved hands could be seen reaching into the box and lifting the stranger of the two; he remembered thinking that it was like enacting the scene from Hamlet.

But he did not remember the rest of what he now saw on the screen. It was as if some unseen agency had clouded the film, deliberately obscuring the image of the skull. From the empty eye sockets, there was an unmistakable gleam of something bright, like a spark from a fire. Had he looked away at precisely that moment? Surely he would have remembered that. How had the camera captured something that had gone unnoticed by the eyewitnesses in the room?

Simone’s voice on the soundtrack was saying, “Something’s going wrong with the camera,” and from that point on, all hell broke loose. The audio picked up a rising wind; the picture became scratched and jerky. Delaney was heard warning him to “put it back,” and Lucas could see his hands replacing the deformed skull in the box. He remembered that Simone had abandoned her post on the cinder block, and left the camera swiveling atop the tripod. The pictures turned wild and random, as the camera gyrated in the wind. Its lens roamed the conservation room, and everywhere it looked there was a swirling mist that had been all but invisible to the naked eye. Or had the film stock simply been defective? The lights in the room went on and off, on and off, and each time, the picture changed. Buried in the fog, a strange shape coalesced and then dissolved, loping on all fours with its snout raised and stubby wings flapping, then vanishing again into thin air. Some frames went blank, others were smudged or striated. Glass cracked — the clerestory window, just replaced, had been splintered as if hit by a hardball — and a scream erupted from somewhere behind the tumbling easels. The door at the rear of the room was flung open, and a different shape — this one distinctly human, but crouching low — scrambled out.

Although the film rolled on for a few more seconds, the picture blurred, and then abruptly stopped. Lucas fumbled for the switch, but in the dark, he couldn’t find it. A smell arose — something burning — and he groped again for the switch to turn off the projector. Again with no luck. The machine kept humming.

Turning quickly, he ran his hand along the wall, finding the overhead light and turning it on. A thin gray rat, caught out in the open, squeaked in alarm and squirmed under the door. The smell was much worse — the film had now caught flame. He yanked open the glass case and grabbed the fire extinguisher, raised the nozzle and sprayed a tide of white foam, up and down, up and down, over the entire mechanism. Despite the caustic fumes, he didn’t stop until the extinguisher was empty.

Delaney threw open the door to the booth. “What happened?” he said, as Simone cried, “Are you all right?”

Waving away the smoke and stench, Lucas stumbled out. Delaney slammed the door behind him and, patting his back, said, “Take slow breaths. Slow breaths.”

Lucas tried to do it, but his throat burned from some chemical in the celluloid stock, or maybe the extinguisher foam. His one good eye was streaming tears. When he was finally able to get his wind and straighten up, he saw that the immediate alarm was fading from his burly colleague’s face, but taking its place was the shock he had felt at watching the film.

“At least I know what that guy at Fort Dix was talking about,” Delaney said.

Lucas, still unable to speak, simply nodded. Simone appeared with a paper cup of water.

“Drink this.”

He took it gratefully.

“You sure the fire’s out in there?” Delaney said.

“See for yourself,” Lucas croaked.

Delaney had barely cracked the door open when Simone jumped back—“Look out!” she cried. A flock of gray mice scampered out, scattering to all corners of the auditorium. Sauntering out behind them, unalarmed and unafraid, a fat brown rat sniffed the fresh air with twitching whiskers and tail. Delaney tried to stomp on it, but missed, and the rat adroitly ducked under the auditorium chairs.

“Time to call in an exterminator,” Delaney said.

Lucas, raising his bleary vision to Simone, saw that she was clutching something concealed beneath her blouse, just as she had at the opening of the ossuary. The look on her face, however, perfectly confirmed his own thoughts.

There wasn’t an exterminator on earth equipped to deal with what was happening here.