Vigil

by Robert Masello

  He put the art volume on the coffee table, and glanced at the clock above the bookshelves—it was three-thirty in the morning. At least if he went now, he wouldn’t be bumping into any of his neighbors.

  He crept out of the apartment and took the stairs. There was a cold wind blowing in the stairwell, and when he got to the first floor, he could see why—the door to the foyer, which was supposed to remain closed and locked at all times, was ajar. He pushed it closed, listening for the sound of the lock catching; he heard it. Then he turned and went to the far end of the hall, where the door to the basement was tucked around behind the elevator; despite the late hour, he could hear the elevator car rumbling in the shaft. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone out in just his robe and flip-flops; it’d be pretty embarrassing to bump into a neighbor right now. Although the basement door had a padlock on it, Carter knew, as did all the other tenants, that it wasn’t really locked. He removed the padlock, folded back the hasp, and went down the narrow flight of steps.

  There were two washers and dryers down here, a rickety table to fold clothes on, and a plastic chair. The floor was concrete, the ceiling was made up of dirty acoustical tiles, and the super’s attempt to cheer things up by putting a lampshade of red and yellow glass on the overhead light only made things more dismal. In the next room, where the boiler was mounted against the back wall, the tenants were allowed to store some things. There were a few bicycles, a pair of skis, and a couple of dozen boxes: Carter’s were in the rear.

  He pulled the string on the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling back there, and looked over the stack of brown banker’s boxes. All of them identical. Now which one would hold the books from his literature and classics courses? He knew it wasn’t the top one; that one held various papers he’d written, his thesis, abstracts, and monographs. He took it off the top of the pile, then lifted the lid off the next one down. He could see a bunch of biology and chemistry texts. He put that box on top of the other. In the next one, he hit what might be pay dirt; Dryden was on top, Chaucer just below. He plopped the box on the floor, sat down on the other two, and started rummaging through the dog-eared volumes of poetry and literature. It wasn’t hard to spot the Aeneid at the bottom. It was a thick paperback, with a painting of Aeneas and Dido in Carthage on the front cover. Seeing it again now, he immediately recognized the painter as Claude Lorraine; marrying an art historian had taught him a few things.

  But how would he find the lines he was looking for? And why, for that matter, was he looking for them at all? He had the strangest sense that they meant something, that his unconscious was trying to tell him something. That it had been trying to tell him something for some time.

  But there were twelve books in the Aeneid, and thousands of lines in each one. In his head, he went over the lines from the dream again. There’d be no quick way to pinpoint something about a shadowed lake, or a dark grove, in the glossary or index—each word would probably have dozens of entries. But there was that mention of the birds, where the poem said no bird could fly above the deadly vapors from the lake. Birdless, Carter knew, was a word in the ancient Greek—and it doubled as the name of the barren place itself. He remembered using it in one of his early papers on the links between birds and dinosaurs. The word was aornos, and that, he figured, was as good a place as any to start.

  He turned to the back of the book, and there it was—listed as appearing first in Book VI, line 323, of the Mandelbaum translation that he was using.

  But then, before he’d even turned the page, something else caught his eye, in the same definition. It was another name for this same deadly spot, an alternative that had sounded vaguely familiar to him ever since Russo had first sent him the fossil reports from Rome. Avernus. According to the notes he was reading now, it was the place where the renowned Sibyl of Cumae, the wild and terrifying seer of antiquity, guarded the entrance to the underworld. The portal, as it were, to Hell.

  And wasn’t it there, at the lake of Avernus, in a cavern that had been submerged for millions of years, that Russo reported the fossil had been found?

  Carter sat perfectly still as a cold draft blew around his feet and ankles; behind the boiler he heard a furtive scratching. He felt as if something massive, like the rough-hewn block of a pyramid, were at last sliding into place. Something was taking shape, but what it was he still couldn’t tell. The scratching came again, and he noticed a mousetrap set in the corner. Time to go back upstairs, he thought; time to ponder all this in warmer and more comfortable surroundings.

  He pulled the string on the light, went back through the laundry room and, Aeneid in hand, climbed the stairs to the first floor. The halls were still cold, and he took the creaky old elevator the rest of the way up.

  He’d left his apartment door unlocked, and he entered quietly, finished off the beer on the coffee table, and then absentmindedly dropped the empty bottle into the kitchen trash can. Worried that it might have disturbed Beth, he glanced down the hall toward the bedroom door. Which was, fortunately, closed.

  But that was odd.

  They seldom closed that door, and he knew that he hadn’t closed it himself tonight. Had Beth? After his nightmare had startled her awake, he thought she’d gone right back to sleep.

  Avernus. Tomorrow, at the university library, he’d have to look it up in some other sourcebooks, see if there were any other connotations less dismaying than the ones he already knew.

  In the living room, he turned out the lights, surveyed the empty expanse of Washington Square Park below, then went to the bedroom door. He started to open it, but found, much to his surprise, that it wouldn’t budge. He knew for a fact that it wasn’t locked; the lock had been broken since the day they moved in. He tried again and this time the door swung back, but only slightly. Then, as if it had a mind of its own, it closed again.

  Carter stood there, puzzled. Was there a draft blowing it closed from the other side? In point of fact, he could feel a cool breeze coming from under the door and chilling his bare ankles. He put his shoulder against the door, and gradually it swung open a foot or two. Peering behind it now, he could see that the bedroom window was wide open, the blinds rattling and askew. And something suddenly clutched at his heart. He threw all of his weight against the door and shoved his way in.

  “Beth!” he cried, stumbling over something bulky, and underfoot. “Are you all right?” he cried, just managing to maintain his balance.

  She was lying on the bed, the covers thrown back, nearly naked. The top half of her leopard-print pajamas was missing completely, and the bottoms were tangled down around her ankles.

  “Beth! What’s going on?” he urged, running to the bed. “Beth!”

  But impossible as it seemed, she was asleep, deeply asleep. When he put his hands on her shoulders and shook her, it was like shaking a rag doll. Her head lolled back, and her skin was so cold it was covered with goosebumps. A damp wind was still blowing through the open window. He jumped up, batted the blinds out of the way, and pulled the window down; on the fire escape outside, the geranium pot had toppled over.

  When he grabbed Beth again, her eyes slowly opened. “Beth, wake up! Talk to me!”

  But she appeared to be having trouble focusing on him, her gaze roaming blearily around the dimly lighted room as he yanked a blanket, trailing onto the floor, back to the bed and threw it over her.

  “Beth, it’s me. It’s me, Beth.”

  Her eyes gained focus, but as they did, a panic seemed to rise within her. Her fingers clutched at Carter’s arms, and she moaned fearfully.

  “It’s okay, you’re okay,” he said, over and over, trying to calm her. “What happened here?” There were places his mind did not want to go . . . not yet.

  Her hair was wild, as if strong fingers had been running through it.

  “I thought I was the one with nightmares tonight,” Carter said, soothingly. He chuckled halfheartedly. “Now you’ve got ’em, too?” He prayed that was all that it was.

  She still didn
’t say anything, but just burrowed against him.

  He rubbed her back gently and looked around the floor. The bedroom rug, which normally was anchored by the bedstead, was over by the door and bunched up behind it. That, he thought, must have been what blocked the door, and what he’d stumbled over.

  But it still didn’t explain how it had gotten there.

  “Beth,” he said, softly, “do you remember closing the bedroom door?”

  He felt her head shake no against him.

  “Or moving the rug?”

  Again she shook no. He didn’t even have to ask her about the open window. He knew what the answer would be.

  But then what had happened? Had she walked in her sleep, like Russo? In all the years they’d been together, he’d never known Beth to do anything like that. But what was the alternative? That something, or someone, else was responsible?

  From what he could tell, she didn’t appear to be physically hurt in any way. At least there was that. And in the air, there was even an oddly fresh scent, something like rain-washed leaves. But something, perhaps inexplicable, had happened here. Beth was clutching him more tightly than ever, her arms wrapped around him and drawing him close. Under the blanket, she kicked her pajama bottoms loose.

  “Everything’s okay now,” he said, thinking she just needed the reassurance, but her embrace indicated she wanted something more.

  “Fuck me,” she said.

  It was the last thing in the world he expected her to say, and he thought he must have misheard her.

  “Fuck me.”

  Even her voice, distant and demanding, didn’t sound like the Beth he knew.

  She whisked the blanket off her naked body and pulled him down of top of her, her hands slipping up and into his robe.

  “Beth, is this really . . .”

  “Yes, it is really,” she said, in a mocking but urgent tone, “it’s what I want.” She tugged his boxers down. “Now.”

  “But I—”

  She silenced him by pressing her mouth against his, her tongue probing, penetrating. It felt wrong; it felt off. Carter felt like he was in bed with someone he didn’t know.

  Her hand slipped lower, grabbing him.

  Despite himself, he started to respond.

  Beth ground her hips against him, and moaned. The sound of it, the ache of her desire, echoed in his head.

  Her legs separated, and wrapped themselves around his back.

  When he moved inside her, she was so open, so wet, it was as if they’d been engaged in foreplay for hours, not seconds. She pulled him in even deeper, and groaned in ecstasy—a groan that inflamed him, too. He’d never heard her make such a sound; he’d never known her body to feel so hot with passion and, at the same instant, so cold to the touch. Her head tilted back on the pillows, her chin raised, and he thrust himself into her, again and again.

  “More,” she chanted, “more . . . more . . .”

  No matter how hard he pushed, or how deep he went, she urged him on, gripping him tighter. And when he couldn’t hold off any longer, she sank her fingernails into his back, like talons, and a strangled scream curdled in her throat.

  He closed his eyes, lost in the moment, thinking, for once, of nothing.

  But when he opened his eyes again, her face was turned toward the window. Her lips were set in a thin, frozen smile and her eyes . . . her eyes had rolled up so far into her head that nothing but the whites were showing.

  A shiver went down Carter’s spine, and he could feel, where her nails had clawed his back, that blood had been drawn.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ezra had arrived at a particularly tricky, but absorbing, part of the translation. The previous section of the scroll had described the duties of these angels—the Watchers—and what they had once done for mankind. Since they never had to sleep themselves, they kept constant watch over the world and provided such gifts as the knowledge of planting and harvesting, and a taste for the arts (and artifice, too); they had taught humans to speak in a common tongue, so that they could understand each other and achieve common aims.

  Ever since starting on this section of the scroll, he had brooked only one interruption—and that was to make his command performance at the mayor’s fund-raising party. His father had demanded it, and Ezra had dutifully showed up just long enough to thank the mayor in person for intervening on his behalf in the UN park arrest, before scurrying back to his room.

  In fact, that night he’d been in such a rush to get back that he’d literally bumped into one of the guests, a tall blond man, in the hallway that led exclusively to the family’s private quarters. Ezra, still carrying a champagne flute, had spilled it on the front of the man’s dark suit.

  “Oh, sorry,” Ezra said, brushing the wine away.

  The man said nothing, and when Ezra looked at him he was startled to see that he was wearing amber-colored sunglasses, on a face that looked as if it were made of flawless alabaster.

  “But are you lost?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He had some weird accent, too. “Because the party’s the other way,” Ezra said, jerking his head in the other direction.

  “Yes,” the man said. He’d smiled, as if it were an afterthought, then moved away. The air, to Ezra, smelled like an evergreen wreath.

  But he’d thought no more about it, going right back to work on the section he was laboring over even now. It was a veritable roster of the angels themselves, their ancient names, and it was remarkably slow going. He’d spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon parsing out the pale letters, the faded words, and, because there were no literal equivalents in any known language, trying to come up with rough translations. But the sounds were hard to replicate, the consonants as hard as walnuts, the vowels slurred together in ways a modern tongue would find difficult to pronounce. The syllables required, indeed they created, a kind of strangely musical cadence, and all he could really do was roughly approximate the mysterious names . . . of Araquiel . . . and Semjaza . . . of Gadreel . . . Penemue . . . Tamuel . . . Baraqel . . . Ereus . . .

  It was perhaps because he was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t at first hear the scratching on the glass behind him. But by the time it had penetrated his consciousness, he could also hear the twisting of the doorknobs to the terrace. He whipped around in his chair and stared at the French doors; they were still closed, the floor-length curtains drawn, but something was stirring outside on the terrace, that much he could tell.

  He threw a light cloth over the work on his drafting table and moved stealthily toward the doors.

  The scratching stopped, and suddenly there was a hammering on the glass.

  He parted the curtains with one finger, and an eye—a wild, green eye—was pressed against the glass, staring back.

  “Let me in, Ezra,” he heard. “I have to show the decorator around!”

  What? It was Kimberly—outside in the cold, dressed, he could see now, in only a pink satin robe. And alone.

  “Open up! We’re freezing out here!”

  The terrace ran all the way around this side of the apartment, from the master suite to his own rooms, but he had never known Kimberly to wander over this far. He pulled the curtain back and fumbled with the door handles. Used so seldom, they were sticky and hard to turn. When he did get the doors open, Kimberly popped through, her hair in loose disarray, her feet bare.

  “Why do you always have to keep this place locked up like a jail?” she complained, and Ezra didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think, either. She glanced around the room—at the acetates on the walls covering sections of the reassembled scroll, at the worktable with its tensor lamp still burning, at the clutter of brushes and plastic gloves and X-acto knives atop the old toy chest—and her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Haven’t you even started packing up yet?”

  “Why would I do that?” Ezra said.

  “So we can get started on the nursery!” she replied, as if he were the stupidest man on ear
th.

  Clearly, she was delirious. Ever since the party for the mayor, she’d been ailing; according to Gertrude, she’d slipped away from the party, and collapsed in her room. She hadn’t come out for a meal or anything else since; Gertrude had been bringing her chicken broth and medications, but apparently she had gotten much worse. His father, par for the course, was out of town on business in Dallas.

  “Don’t you remember,” he said, “I have to keep living here, where I’m supervised?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The court order?” he replied, though he could see that none of this was going to make any sense to her. A few seconds ago, she’d thought the decorator was with her.

  “All I know,” she said, sweeping her arm around the room, “is that all of this has to go. We have to paint, we have to put new carpeting down, and we have to make room for the bassinet!”

  Her robe had slipped off one shoulder as she gestured, and to Ezra’s horror he saw that her shoulder blade was bruised. It looked as if someone’s fingers had squeezed her far too tightly . . . and the idea that it might have been his father—that it had to be his father, who else could it be?—made him distinctly queasy.

  “What are you up to in here anyway?” Kimberly said, as she strode toward his drafting table. “Is this what you call your research?”

  Ezra moved quickly to interpose himself between the table and Kimberly; in her present state, there was no telling what she would do.

  “Yes, and it can’t be disturbed,” he said.

  “Who says so?” she said, reaching around him and tugging the cloth off the section of scroll he’d been translating.