The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Would wonders ever cease? Lucas thought.

He was hardly able to believe that he had the bones and relics back, that the police had been willing to relinquish them to his care. He carried the sack as gently as if it were a baby he was cradling in his arms. Never again would he let its contents be kidnapped.

Passing under the grinning gargoyles that cavorted along the roofline of Guyot Hall, he looked up at them with a newfound, and wary, appreciation. Although they were much eroded by time and the elements, he could still see the protuberant horns on their brow, the grasping talons, the pointed teeth and furled wings, and he was struck by how closely they resembled the shapes and shadows he had seen in the film made the night the ossuary had been opened. For the first time in his life, a thought crossed his mind — an unwelcome one that he would never before have entertained. Could these fantastical creatures, their visages so familiar from cathedrals and castles the world over, have been modeled on something other than the fever dreams of independent stone carvers? Could they have been cast from living specimens — or, perhaps, from the atavistic memories of such beings, harbored deep in every human soul? Could there be, as the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung had claimed, a “collective unconscious,” where such fears and apprehensions lurked? As children, weren’t we all afraid of the dark?

Maybe, he thought, we had reason to be.

In the lobby, a janitor was down on his knees with a screwdriver in front of the display case containing the Caithness Man; glancing back over his shoulder, he said, “If you ask me, this place should be off-limits to townies. Kids in particular.”

“Why?”

“They snapped the damn lock.”

“Was anything damaged?”

“You tell me,” he said, going back to screwing in the replacement.

Lucas stepped closer and looked into the case. The ancient figure’s lips and eyes were still sealed shut, its back was still pressed hard against the stake where it had been slaughtered. The leathern cap, its muddy color indistinguishable from the weathered brown skin, was right where it had always been. Lucas was about to turn away when something caught his eye.

A loose strip, hanging away from the pole.

He leaned over the kneeling janitor’s bald head to get a closer look.

“Something wrong, Professor?”

“I’m not sure yet.” He peered at the other side of the specimen, and saw that the strap that had held the prisoner in place had been severed there, too. Whoever had broken into the glass case had been trying to dismantle the display, either as an act of vandalism or, even worse, theft. Thank goodness the thing was still there at all. But Lucas couldn’t help but wonder if this particular crime wasn’t somehow connected to the stolen relics, or the destruction of the research materials in Simone’s carrel.

“The hall ought to be locked at all times,” the janitor said, packing up his tools.

“Students, and faculty too, have to get in and out all day.”

“Give ’em all keys,” he replied, lumbering to his feet again.

Lucas didn’t comment on the impracticability of dispensing hundreds of keys to the front door. He headed for the lab upstairs, where he was expected.

The door was already open, and as Delaney raised his head from a microscope, his eyes went straight to the sack of bones Lucas had told him about on the phone.

“Strange doings,” he said solemnly. “I never would have guessed it of Brandt.”

“Neither would I,” Lucas said, as he laid the bag on a countertop.

“Why the hell would he have done something like that?”

Lucas could not divulge, even to Delaney, what he knew. “Maybe he thought he’d make some great discovery and catch the fast track to tenure.”

“By stealing artifacts that even the OSS is keeping tabs on? Makes me wonder if the guy was dealing from a full deck.”

“I don’t think he was.”

“I mean, I’m not saying that he wasn’t a pain in the ass sometimes, but I still wouldn’t have wished what happened to him on anyone.”

And Delaney only knew the half of it. Lucas felt it would be unnecessary, and unwise, to share the gorier details of what he’d seen, only hours before, in that garage on Mercer Street. It was the FBI agent, Ray Taylor, who had summarily hauled him out of a lecture hall and driven him straight to Einstein’s house. The professor was in the yard, in a sweatshirt and a pair of rumpled trousers, holding an unlit pipe.

“This is a sad business,” Einstein said. “A sad business.”

But it was only when Lucas was ushered into the garage that he understood what the professor had been alluding to. The missing bones and relics were strewn around the dirt floor, as were a couple of other items — a chisel and a worn hammer. Toward the back, between teetering stacks of cardboard boxes, he saw a man in a jacket labeled “Coroner” bending over a corpse.

“It’s that guy Brandt, right?” Taylor said.

Lucas nodded, but at the same time he would hardly have recognized him — it looked more like the husk of a man than an actual corpse.

“And this is the other stuff that was missing? From the university?”

Looking around, Lucas said, “Yes.”

“Pick it all up, make an inventory, and give me a copy. Then do me a favor — lock it all up, someplace safe for a change.”

Trying to avert his eyes from the coroner’s grim work, Lucas gathered the things together — even the staff with the crooked handle — and slipped them into the canvas sack he had last seen looped around Brandt’s shoulders. On his way back through the yard, he was stopped by Einstein, who said, “You will come and talk sometime, ja? Afternoons are good.” There was an even more doleful look in his eyes than usual. “In times like these, it is good to talk about other matters. Art… music… the higher things.”

“I promise,” Lucas said.

“And maybe,” he said, in a low voice tinged with embarrassment, “you can bring with you some tobacco?”

“For sure,” he’d replied, as Einstein patted him on the arm and, head down, shuffled back through the screen door Helen was holding open for him.

“Here,” Delaney said, going to the green metal locker, twice the width of a normal locker, bolted securely to the wall. He threw open its door. “You can stash that stuff in here,” he said. “It’s where I keep my reports and the radiocarbon data for Macmillan. It’s got a padlock, and the door to the lab has a dead bolt on it, too.”

“Do you also sleep in here?”

“Occasionally, yes.”

Although he’d been kidding, Lucas wasn’t surprised. He deposited the bag, the crooked end of the staff poking out of one end and barely clearing the top shelf. Delaney closed the locker again, clamped the steel padlock shut, then yanked down on it for good measure.

“How’s Simone doing?”

“I called her this morning, and she sounded like she was still pretty shaken up.”

“Who wouldn’t be? First her father drowns in a bathtub, then she gets chased by some weirdo in the library. It’s a miracle she’s still standing. They figure out who did the damage to her carrel, by the way?”

“Not yet.” Lucas had originally suspected Andy Brandt, but now he knew that he’d guessed wrong. And when Agent Taylor had asked him, pointedly, why Brandt might have made his way — badly wounded by the bus — to Einstein’s house, of all places, Lucas had said it might have been dumb luck.

“Some dumb luck,” Taylor had replied. “A hundred garages between here and Washington Road and he picks this one to die in?”

Lucas was wrestling with his own suspicions. Could Brandt, like Wally Gregg, have possibly intended to attack the professor? Or — and this struck even closer to home — could Brandt have been on the way to the boardinghouse across the street, to silence the one man who knew his secret, Lucas Athan?

For the next hour or two, Lucas and Delaney went over the latest lab data — the radiocarbon tests were being better refined, it seemed, every hour, but it was unclear how much use they would be to Colonel Macmillan. When the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets and to say that he would be locking up in a few minutes, they made sure that everything of importance was sealed in the green locker, then headed down to the exhibit hall. As Lucas stopped to turn up the collar of his coat, he happened to glance over at the Caithness Man, now locked away again in his display case; the low light at its base made it appear, for a split second, as if his eyes, sealed shut for centuries, had opened just a slit.

The campus was quiet, except for the tolling of the carillon in the chapel, and nearly deserted, apart from a few students charging off to commons for dinner, or to the library for a study session. Lucas was glad when the lights of the town came into view, the Nassau Inn presenting an especially cheery sight, with an amber glow emanating from its windows and a lazy curlicue of wood smoke drifting from the taproom chimney.

“I don’t suppose I can cajole you into one drink before you go upstairs?” Delaney asked.

Lucas, with another plan in mind, fumbled for a reply.

“Come on, pal, I can read you like a book.”

“Maybe we’ll both come down and join you,” Lucas said.

“I won’t be holding my breath,” Delaney said as he crossed the lobby. “Hope she’s recovered from that scare in the stacks.”

Lucas hoped so, too, and as soon as the creaky elevator had taken him to the top floor, he rapped gently on her door — twice, then twice again. A signal that they had agreed on.

Even so, he heard the latch on the peephole slide open, then the locks being turned. The door opened only halfway, and she said, “Quick — come in.”

Lucas ducked inside, turning to embrace her, but Simone was slamming the door shut and throwing the locks. Then she peered through the peephole again, twisting her head to see as much of the hallway as it would allow.

“Trust me, there’s no one else out there,” Lucas said. She looked, if anything, in worse shape than she had the night before when he’d accompanied her back to the room, waited while she took a sleeping pill, and then left her, still dressed in all but her shoes, under the quilt.

“Have you been out today?” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you look like you could use some fresh air.” Her white blouse was untucked, her skirt wrinkled, and her face drawn and pale. “The room could use some oxygen, too.” The little writing desk by the window was covered with papers and prints, a room-service cart was pushed up against the radiator, with a black fly — surely the last of the season — buzzing around a dirty plate and an upturned silver lid. Lucas went to the window and started to lift the sash, but noticed that an index card, wedged under it, had slipped free. Picking it up off the carpet, he saw a strange sign — a diamond tilted to one side, with a diagonal line crossed through it — drawn in pencil, and underlined three times.

“No, don’t do that,” she said, quickly replacing the card and pressing the window down on it.

But where had he seen that symbol before?

“Did you recognize it?” she asked, nervously.

“The sign?” Then, snapping his fingers, he remembered. “It was carved on the lid of the ossuary. Under the last chain we removed.”

Simone nodded. “It’s an ancient sign. It also appears on the Coptic papyri that we removed from the tomb. My father was studying it, just before…”

To keep her from having to complete the thought, Lucas said, “So what does it represent?”

“It represents the forces of containment.”

“So it’s a seal?”

“Correct.”

Now he could see where this was going. “And we broke it when we opened the ossuary.”

“Yes.”

Looking around the disorderly room, he asked, “But aside from the aroma of the food trolley, what are you trying to contain in here?”

“I’m trying to contain — I’m trying to protect—everything we’ve learned. To begin with, everything my father had collected in that blue folder.”

“Who do you think is coming to take it away?”

“The same thing that killed him.”

He knew she harbored doubts about her father’s death, but he had never heard her put it so bluntly.

“He was studying these pages just before he died,” she said. “It’s why they were stolen.”

He waited, not wanting to say anything that might increase the strain she was evidently laboring under.

“And they reveal the name of his murderer.”

“He had written it down?” he said, incredulously. “Before it even happened?”

“He didn’t have to. It’s all right there.”

“What is?”

“ ‘My name is Legion: for we are many.’ ”

Though he couldn’t have given the chapter and verse, Lucas recognized the line.

“Mark 5:9,” she said. “It’s the story where Jesus casts the unclean spirits out of the raving man, the Gadarene, who had been haunting the tombs and cutting himself with sharp stones.”

“Yes, I know the passage,” Lucas said.

“But do you remember what happens to the demons that Jesus casts out of the madman?”

“To the best of my recollection, they enter into the bodies of swine.”

“Demons can do that.”

“Enter swine?”

“They can enter anything. They can jump, like ticks, from one host to another. My father was documenting it. In fact, they have to do that. To function in this world, they have to find some physical form to get around in. Otherwise, they’re just disembodied and ineffectual.”

The fly from the cart circled lazily around the rim of a teacup before landing beside another insect that had just crept out from under the saucer.

“The pigs were driven mad by them,” Simone continued.

“And then the whole herd ran off a cliff and drowned in the sea,” Lucas said, the rest of the story coming back to him now.

“Saint Anthony was a swineherd,” she observed, as if simply stating the next irrefutable corollary. “It’s his ossuary we opened.”

Lucas was finding it hard to keep up, or guess where this was all going. Idly, he waved a hand at the flies, which flew off, then quickly returned. Three of them now. Where the hell were they coming from?

“We’ve let this evil — whatever it is — loose,” she said, finally looking straight at him. “Only instead of running off a cliff and drowning in the sea, it’s managed to stick around long enough to cover its tracks.”

“Okay,” Lucas said, in carefully measured tones, “but how would it do that?”

She frowned like a teacher whose student is proving slow to grasp a simple lesson. “By stealing its own bones back, for a start,” she said, raising one finger. “By incinerating the film,” she said, raising another. “By murdering people like my father”—a third—“and by killing even its own servants, once they’ve outlived their usefulness.”

Andy Brandt.

“And, finally, by luring me out of my carrel, chasing me through the library and trying to scare me to death, before destroying all the proof I’d gathered in there.”

Lucas was torn. On the one hand, there was his lifelong allegiance to everything rational, to everything he believed true about nature and the universe, everything empirically provable. He had never been one to engage in the paranormal, in clairvoyance and telekinesis and astrology, or anything having to do with the so-called science of the occult.

On the other hand, there was the increasingly substantial, and persuasive, body of evidence Simone was amassing. Evidence that he himself could supplement, if he chose. There was Brandt’s corpse, for instance — sucked dry like a piece of discarded fruit. (That was one detail he had spared Simone.) In addition, there was everything he had seen for himself in the conservation wing… and watched on the film that had mysteriously self-destructed.

“Accepting, for the time being, your premise,” he said, “what would keep this demon, this unclean spirit, here? In a little college town, in the middle of nowhere?” He had his own suspicion, but he didn’t want to voice it yet. He didn’t want to plant any idea in Simone’s head. “What’s here?”

“Instead of asking yourself what’s here, ask yourself who’s here. That one is easy.”

It was.

“Who did Wally Gregg attack?” she said. “Where did Brandt go on the night he died?”

Now he knew that she had indeed been thinking along the same lines that he had. “But why Einstein?”

“That’s what I have been asking myself.” Riffling her fingertips through some of the pages on the desk, as if the answer were in there somewhere and she’d simply overlooked it, she asked, “Why send your minion to attack an elderly professor who spends his time fussing over equations almost no one can understand?”

Lucas remembered the day he’d first visited Einstein in his study, and the letter he had seen on White House stationery — the letter from the president, warning, “I fear they are close to success.” It was no great leap to surmise that Einstein, whose momentous discoveries were considered long behind him, who was regarded more as an icon than a working scientist, might not be retired after all. Could he be more engaged in the war effort than anyone knew? Was it possible that his genius was being employed, in some unknown way, to tip the balance in America’s favor?

Only those in the highest government circles — such as the Oval Office — would know for sure. But if it was true, could that be why the Germans had wanted the ossuary in the first place? Did they know that it contained a spirit so powerful that it could serve as the ultimate weapon — a weapon that they had cleverly deployed against the one man on earth who could foil their plans for world domination? Had they planned this all along? Had they deliberately sent the incriminating telegrams, setting the ossuary aside for Hitler himself, knowing that the missives would be intercepted, knowing that the OSS would rescue the ossuary at all costs, and that it would then find its way to the one spot in America where the nascent isotope research would be used to verify its authenticity? Hadn’t Brandt already been put in place to relay the findings? Wasn’t this where it would most probably be opened, and its evil thus released on an enemy shore?

Lucas found his head spinning with all the possible schemes and scenarios, questions and conundrums. It was as disorienting as the hall of mirrors at the Coney Island amusement park he’d gone to as a child.

“I want to find this thing that killed my father,” Simone said in a calm but implacable voice. “I want to find it, wherever it’s hiding, and I want to kill it.”

A look of cold resolve gleamed in her dark, lustrous eyes, a look that Lucas might well have imagined on the face of some storybook heroine, an Arabian princess, sitting astride a noble stallion.

“I need your help, Lucas.”

What help he could offer, he did not know. How did you capture, much less kill, a spirit as old as time? But he was not about to abandon her — not now, not ever. Without a word, he enfolded her in his arms. “Anything,” he said. “I’ll do anything you need me to.”

At first, she remained as stiff as a sentry, unyielding, still caught up in her anger and determination.

“I’m with you, Simone,” he reassured her.

He felt the tension in her shoulders relax.

“I will always be.”

She virtually melted in his arms, her head resting against his chest, all the energy draining away so swiftly it was as if he were catching her in free fall.

“I need you, Lucas. I need you so much.”

She was speaking of more than the ossuary, he knew. He knew it because it was precisely how he felt, too. He needed her. He turned off the bedside lamp.

This time, their lovemaking was more tender than torrid. This time, he tore no buttons from blouses, ripped no stockings, scratched no cheeks with his stubble. This time he allowed himself to undress her slowly, to kiss and savor each inch of skin revealed. My God, he thought, she was such a wonder. Never had he wished more fervently to be rid of the black patch, to have two eyes rather than one to take her all in. When he leaned above her to kiss her breasts, she gripped his arm so tightly the bandage threatened to unravel.

“Oh, Lucas. Did I hurt you just now?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

He reassured her with a kiss, and then another, losing himself in the realm of pure sensation. Here there were no demons to catch, no boxes of bones, no nightmares of land mines and battles and blood. All of that — the horrors he had witnessed, the things that haunted him still — all of that was banished. Now there was only this, her tawny limbs entwined with his, her head thrown back with eyes closed and mouth open, her hair spread across the white pillows, her breath growing as hot and ragged as his own. There was only this moment — and in this moment there was everything he could want.

When it was finished, Simone pressed her lips to his throat and murmured something in Arabic.

“What’s it mean?”

“Ask me in the morning,” she said, then rolled over, falling instantly into a deep and silent and motionless sleep. Lucas lay back beside her, his own body cooling off like an engine that had been running too hard. Apart from the low hiss of the radiator and the muffled thump of doors being closed down the hall, the room was silent. He let his fingers graze up and down the gentle swell of her back, let his mind drift. The sweat evaporated on his skin. He must have fallen asleep because it was only later — how long, he couldn’t tell — before he became vaguely aware of a tickling sensation on his face. Brushing it away, he heard the buzzing of a fly.

Minutes later, he felt the tickling again, and again brushed it away.

When it happened once more, he knew that if he didn’t get up and swat the damn fly, he would never be able to get any rest.

He opened his eye, but his vision was blurred by sleep, and the only light was provided by the streetlamps outside. Trying not to disturb Simone, he groped for the switch on the bedside lamp. His hand flailed about, unable to find it, but when he did, he drew his fingers back instantly. The knob was soft as velvet… and animate.

Snapping awake, he sat up, swinging his legs off the bed.

There was a constant humming in the room, a sound that in his sleep he might have mistaken for some ambient hotel noise.

Going to the window, he yanked the curtains back, enough that he could now discern the shape of the lampshade, and reaching under it again, he found the switch — unaltered this time — and turned the lamp on.

The light only made the scene more confusing. His brain could not process what he was seeing: The whole room was seething, like a pot boiling over. The walls and ceiling were so black with movement, punctuated by glints of iridescent green and indigo, that they merged into one vast undulating surface. The desk was as thick and black as an anvil, buried under an army of flies so dense its legs and drawers couldn’t even be seen.

The swarm didn’t seem to like the light, growing more agitated, churning and surging and buzzing.

Stealthily, Lucas nudged Simone’s bare shoulder.

She was so fast asleep, she didn’t budge.

He shook her harder, and whispered, “Simone, wake up.”

“What?” she mumbled.

“Wake up. Go into the bathroom.” He prayed that the flies were not already in there, too. “Lock the door.”

“Why?” she said, raising her head a few inches from the mattress.

“Do it.”

Then, looking around, she must have taken in the horror surrounding them. He heard a fast intake of breath, saw her back stiffen with fear.

“Don’t make any noise. Just go.”

She slid off the far side of the bed, but must have stumbled over the clothes strewn on the floor. As if it were all one organism, the tide of flies shifted from the walls and ceiling, and Simone screamed as they descended upon her naked body.

Lucas leapt over the bed. She was down on all fours, trying to swat them away, but there were too many, and they were too intent. Grabbing her under one arm, he dragged her toward the bathroom and shoved her inside. Her hands covering her head, she scuttled under the pedestal sink, but before he could follow her in, the door banged shut in his face, so hard it nearly broke his nose.

“Lucas!”

Answering her was impossible — the flies had descended upon him now, coating his cheeks and lips and forcing him to close his one good eye. He staggered backward, blind, around the foot of the bed, and groped for the door to the hall. But the wall was so carpeted by the horde that he couldn’t even find the handle. Opening his mouth to catch a breath, he was instantly choked by a clutch of flies. He spat them out, and wiping his eye and holding his head down, lurched across the room, bumping into the room-service cart and sending it careening into the bedside table. Though the light stayed on, the lamp toppled to the floor, emitting a sinister glow as it rolled back and forth on the rim of its dented shade.

The wooden desk chair was covered, too, but Lucas picked it up and slung it at the window, shattering the glass. The chair clattered out onto the fire escape, as the curtains billowed out in the night wind.

The index card under the sash fluttered in a circle, then flew away as if it were a bat taking wing.

Instead of entering the room, the wind drew the air out in a kind of vortex, sucking out the flies in a swirling black funnel that enveloped Lucas, churning around his shoulders, over his head, under his arms, and between his legs. It was all he could do to remain upright. Once above the moonlit street, the flies, like an army deserting en masse, dispersed in every direction.

Lucas planted his hands on his knees, and took deep, labored breaths. He heard the bathroom door creak open, and a moment later felt Simone’s arms around him.

“Are you all right?” she asked, but all he could do was nod.

With the curtains rustling and the overturned lamp casting its eerie glow, they stayed just as they were, holding each other tight, naked and cold and alone. Adam and Eve, expelled.

A tattered remnant of the blue folder blew across the floor, stopping at Simone’s ankle.

Though not a word passed between them, Lucas knew what Simone was thinking. Just as she had predicted, their ancient adversary had assumed one of its countless disguises, and paid them a visit. He, too, knew that it wouldn’t be the last.