The Fallen

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  Aaron turned away and pulled out into traffic. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the old man receding in the distance. He continued to stand there, watching him drive away, mouth moving, repeating a single word. Aaron knew what he was saying.

  The old man was saying “Nephilim,” over and over again.

  Nephilim.

  Aaron splashed cold water on his face and stared at his dripping features in the water-speckled mirror of the Lynn Public Library’s restroom.

  What the hell is going on? he thought, studying his reflection. What’s happening to me?

  There was fear in the face that looked back from the mirror. What was that with the old man? he wondered for the thousandth time. What did he mean by the language of messengers—and what’s a Nephilim? His thoughts raced feverishly.

  He pulled some paper towels from the dispenser on the wall and wiped the water from his face. As he reached to the side of the sink for the restroom key, attached to an unusually large piece of wood, he noticed that his hand was shaking. Aaron snatched up the key and clenched the wood tightly in his grasp.

  “Gotta calm down,” he told himself in a whisper. “The old guy was just crazy, probably done the exact same routine to ten other people today. What are you getting so worked up over? You know this city is loaded with kooks.”

  There was a gentle knock at the bathroom door. He took a deep breath, composed himself, and opened the door. An old man was standing there with a coat slung over his arm.

  “You done in there?” he asked with a nervous smile.

  Aaron did the best that he could to return the pleasantries as he stepped out of the restroom. “Yeah, sorry I took so long,” he said as he handed the old-timer the block of wood with the key attached.

  “No problem,” the old man said as he took the key and moved into the bathroom. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t fall in.”

  Aaron turned as the door closed and saw that the man was chuckling. He didn’t much feel like it, but found himself laughing at the man’s good-natured dig anyway. “Wouldn’t that have been the icing on the cake if I had,” he said to himself as he climbed the white marble steps from the basement to the first floor.

  He found an empty table far in the corner of one of the reading rooms and slung his jacket over the back of a chair. He wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to accomplish now, but at least he had to make an attempt. Besides, he needed something to distract him from the bizarreness that seemed to be following him of late. He had brought a notebook in with him and removed a pen from its front pocket.

  He settled in and spent hours perusing books on a number of different authors and literary subjects, searching for something that piqued his interest enough for a research paper. He’d pretty much made up his mind to go with the topic of good and evil’s duality in the works of Poe, when he realized that he had zoned out, and had been doodling in the border of his notepad, writing something over and over with a variety of spellings.

  Nefellum. Nefilem. Nifillim. Nephilem. Nephilim.

  Aaron tore out the page and stared at it. What does it mean? Why can’t I just forget about it? he wondered, reviewing each of the spellings.

  He got up from his chair and headed into the reference area of the library. The first book that he pulled from the shelves was a Webster’s New World College Dictionary. He placed the large book down onto a table and began to look for the word, trying all the incarnations he had written. He found nothing.

  Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing, he thought as he returned the dictionary to where he had found it. Maybe it’s just a nonsense word made up by a crazy person, and I’m equally nuts for giving it this much attention.

  Aaron decided that he had already wasted enough time and energy on the old man’s rants, and headed back to his table to begin an outline for his paper. If anything could be salvaged from this train wreck of a day, at least he could get a head start on that.

  He crumpled up the piece of paper in his hand and headed back to the reading room.

  But the word continued to jump around in his head, as if it had a life of its own and was taunting him. Nephilim.

  Aaron casually glanced into the library’s computer room as he passed. The usually crowded room was surprisingly empty, with several stations free.

  Seizing the opportunity to satisfy his curiosity, he walked in and sat down at one of the computers. This would be it, the mystery word’s last chance to mean something. If he didn’t find it here, he would purge it from his mind forever and never think of it again. He signed in with a password that he had obtained from the library his first year of high school, and called up a search engine that he used often when researching information for school papers. The screen appeared and, choosing one of the varied spellings, he typed in the mystery word. He hit the Enter key and held his breath. The page cleared and then some information appeared.

  “Do you mean Nephilim?” asked the message that appeared on top of the new page.

  He maneuvered the mouse and brought the arrow over to the revised spelling, clicked once and waited as the new pages loaded.

  Aaron was startled to see how many sites appeared with some kind of connection to the word. So much for it being nonsense, he thought as he scrolled down the page, reading a bit about each of the sites. There were multiple sites about a rock group, some about a role-playing game, all using the name Nephilim, but none gave a meaning.

  A site that specialized in religious mythologies finally caught his attention. Is that it? he wondered, as the page began to upload. Does it have something to do with religion? In that case, it was no wonder he had no familiarity with it. He’d never been much of a religious person, and neither had the Stanleys.

  The site appeared to be a who’s who of people, places, and things from the Bible, and the first thing he saw was a definition that he eagerly read.

  The biblical term Nephilim, which in Hebrew means “the fallen ones” or “those who fell,” refers to the offspring of angels and mortal women mentioned in Genesis 6: 1–4. A fuller account is preserved in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which recounts how a group of angels left heaven to mate with women, and taught humanity such heinous skills as the art of war.

  Aaron sat back in his chair, stunned. Offspring of angels and mortal women, he read again. “What the hell does that have to do with me?” he muttered, moving closer to the computer screen.

  Somebody coughed behind him, and he turned to see four people waiting in the doorway of the computer room. A heavyset kid with a bad case of acne, wearing an X-Men T-shirt, tapped the face of his Timex watch and glared at him.

  Aaron looked back to the screen and quickly read a bit more before closing the site and signing out. He removed his pen from his pocket and on the wrinkled piece of paper where he had written his various attempts at the mystery word, he crossed out the incorrect spellings leaving only the correct one.

  Nephilim.

  Sighing heavily, he returned to his seat and his books in the other room. He sat down with every intention of working on his paper, but found that he could not concentrate, his thoughts stalled on the story of human women having babies with angels. A shiver of unease ran up and down his spine as he chillingly recalled the subject of his recurring dream. Again he saw the boy attacked by the winged creatures dressed in golden armor. It was too much of a coincidence to ignore.

  He got to his feet and snatched up the notepad from the table. He had to find out more. It was as if something was compelling him to dig deeper. Maybe there’s some way I can maneuver this into a research subject, he mused.

  Aaron used another computer in the lobby of the building to search the library’s inventory, and found that most of what he was looking for was kept in a separate room off the reference area.

  He wrote the titles down on his notepad and began his search. In a book called The Lost Books of Eden, Aaron learned more about the Book of Enoch. It was an apochryphal book of the Old Testament, written in Hebrew about a century bef
ore the birth of Christ. The original version was lost near the end of the fourth century, and only fragments remained until Bruce the Traveler brought back a copy from Abyssinia in 1773, probably made from a version known to the early Greek fathers.

  What followed were some passages from the ancient text of Enoch, and what Aaron read summed up all that he had learned so far:

  …that there were angels who consented to fall from heaven that they might have intercourse with the daughters of the earth. For in those days the sons of men having multiplied, there were born to them daughters of great beauty. And when the angels, or sons of heaven, beheld them, they were filled with desire; wherefore they said to one another: “Come let us choose wives from among the race of man, and let us beget children.”

  Aaron was amazed. He’d never heard of such a thing. His knowledge of angels was limited to what was often found on holiday cards or at the tops of Christmas trees—beautiful women in flowing, white gowns, or children with tiny wings, and halos perched on their heads.

  Fascinated, he was reaching for the list of books he’d yet to examine when again he was overcome with the feeling of being observed. He quickly turned in his chair, half expecting to see the crazy old man pointing his gnarly finger and calling him Nephilim over and over again—but was shocked to see Vilma Santiago.

  The girl gave him the sweetest of smiles and meekly came into the room. “I thought that was you,” she said with only the slightest hint of an accent.

  “Yep, it’s me,” he said nervously as he stood up from his chair. “I’m just doing some, y’know, research and stuff for Ms. Mulholland’s research paper and…”

  Vilma looked at him strangely and he stopped talking, afraid that his nose had started to run, or something equally gross and embarrassing had happened.

  “Is…is something wrong?” he asked, tempted to reach up and quickly rub his nose.

  The girl shook her head and grinned from ear to ear. “No, nothing is wrong,” she said happily. “I just didn’t know that you could speak Portuguese.”

  He was confused at first, wondering how she could have known about his sudden power, when he realized what he had done.

  “Was I…was I just speaking to you in Portuguese?”

  She giggled and covered her mouth with a delicate hand. “Yes, yes, you were, and quite well, I might add. Where did you learn it?”

  He had no idea how to answer. Aaron shrugged his shoulders. “Just picked it up, I guess. I’m pretty good with languages.”

  Vilma nodded. “Yes, you are.”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and then she looked down at the table and the books he was reading.

  “That’s just some stuff I’m looking through to get ideas. I haven’t decided yet, but I might…”

  She picked up a book called Angels: From A to Z and began to thumb through it. “I love this one,” she said as she flipped the pages. “Everything you could want to know about angels and even a section at the back of the book that lists movies about angels.” She looked up from the open book in her hands and squinted her eyes in deep thought. “I really think this one might be my favorite.”

  Vilma placed the book back onto the table and began to rummage through the other volumes. “I love anything to do with angels.” She reached into her shirt and removed something delicate on the end of a gold chain. “Look at this.”

  Aaron looked closer to see that it was an angel. “That’s really pretty,” he said, looking from the golden angel to her. At the moment, the necklace wasn’t the only thing he found pretty.

  “Thanks,” she said, putting the jewelry back inside her shirt. “I just love them, they make me feel safe—y’know?”

  Aaron could have been knocked over with a feather—angel or otherwise. He just stood there and smiled as he watched the girl go through the books he had pulled from the shelves. It must have been some weird form of synchronicity, he imagined. What are the odds? It boggled his already addled brain.

  “Is this what you are planning to do your paper on?” Vilma asked excitedly, interrupting his thoughts.

  “I don’t know…yeah, maybe,” he stammered, unsure of his answer. “Yeah, maybe I will. Seems like it might be really interesting.”

  She beamed as she began to talk about the topic. “It’s fascinating. When I was little and lived in Brazil, my auntie would tell me stories of how the angels would visit the villages in the jungles disguised as travelers and…”

  Vilma suddenly stopped her story and looked away from him. “I’m sorry for babbling, it’s just that I find it so very interesting, and to get a chance to talk about it with somebody else, well, I really enjoy it is all.”

  She seemed embarrassed, going suddenly quiet as she pulled at the sleeves of her denim jacket.

  “It’s all right, really,” Aaron said with a smile that he hoped wasn’t too goofy. He snatched his notepad off the table. “Maybe, if you’re not too busy, you could help me with my research.”

  Her eyes grew wide in excitement.

  “The stories from Brazil, the ones your aunt told you? They would probably be really cool to talk about in the paper, if you didn’t mind helping me.”

  He couldn’t believe what he was doing. Vilma Santiago, the hottest girl in the Lynn public schools, and he was asking her to help him with his research paper. What an absolute idiot, he berated himself.

  “That would be really fun,” she said, nodding her head in agreement. “I even have some other books you could use.”

  Aaron was in complete and utter shock. The girl of his dreams had agreed to help him with his paper, and actually seemed to be excited about doing it. He had no idea what to say next, afraid that if he opened his mouth to speak, something completely stupid would spill out and he’d ruin everything.

  Vilma was silent also, nervously looking at the books on the table then back to him. She glanced at her watch.

  “Well, I have to catch the bus,” the girl said, walking toward the doorway. “Maybe we can talk some more about your paper in school Monday—you will be in school Monday, won’t you?” She smirked.

  He couldn’t believe it. She actually noticed that he was absent today. Maybe there was something to what she had said to her friends yesterday. Maybe she actually did think he was cute.

  “I’ll be there,” he said. “All day in fact.”

  She laughed and gave him a small wave as she stepped out of the room. “I’ll see you Monday, Aaron. Have a good weekend.”

  He could do nothing but stand there, numbed with disbelief. It was almost enough to make him forget all about the disturbing dreams, his strange new linguistic skills, and the cryptic ramblings of a crazy old man.

  Almost.

  chapter four

  Samuel Chia lay upon his bed, twisted in sheets of the finest silk, and dreamed of flying. Of all that was lost to him, he missed that the most.

  It was not true sleep by human standards, but it was a way for him to remember a time precious to him, the time before his fall.

  Sam rolled onto his back and opened his eyes to the new day. He did not need to check a clock to tell him the hour; he knew it to be precisely eight A.M., for that was when he wished to rise.

  He lay quietly and listened to the sounds of Hong Kong outside and far below his penthouse apartment. If he so wished, he could listen in on the conversations of the city’s inhabitants as they lived out their drastically short existences. But today he had little interest.

  Sam rose from his bed and padded naked across the mahogany floor to stand in front of the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the city. A Chinese junk, its sails unfurled, caught his attention as it cruised gracefully across the emerald green water of Victoria Bay. He had lived in many places in his long life on this planet, but none brought him as much solace as this place. China spoke to him. It told him that everything would be all right, and on most days, he believed that to be true.

  He pressed his forehead against the thi
ck glass and allowed himself to feel the cold of its surface. His naked skin responded with prickled gooseflesh, and although he reveled in the human experience, everyday he longed for what he once had, for what was lost when he refused to take a side in the Great War.

  His head still pressed against the window, Sam opened his eyes and gazed at the panorama before him.

  Yes, he longed for the glory that was once his, but each day this place—this wondrous sight sought to seduce him with its vitality. A distraction that sometimes made it easier to accept his fate.

  Sometimes.

  Sam was slipping into his black silk robe, enjoying the sensation upon his pale, sculpted flesh, when the phone began to chirp.

  He knew who was calling. Not from any innate psychic ability, but because she called each morning at this very time.

  Joyce Woo was the human woman he allowed to manage his various business affairs, including his nightclubs, casinos, and restaurants.

  Sam strolled from the bedroom to the chrome-and-tile kitchen and let the machine pick up. He decided to play a little game—to see if he could guess the problems she was calling to report. What trivial piece of nonsense would she choose to annoy him with this time? he wondered: an unexpected shortage of truffles at his French restaurant perhaps, or the local constabulary requiring increased compensation for their lack of interest in certain illicit activities performed at his clubs, or maybe she was finally calling to confess that she’d been skimming off the top of his earnings for the last nine months.

  Sam popped a cork on a bottle of Dom Perignon and drank from it as he listened to the message.

  “Good morning, Mr. Chia. This is Joyce,” said a woman’s voice in Cantonese.

  He toasted the incoming call with the bottle.

  “There was an incident at the Pearl Club last night that may require you to speak with the chief of police. I can give you more details when you come into the office this morning, but I wanted you to be aware.”