Biblical

by Christopher Galt

  It had taken the EMS an hour and a half to reach the restaurant. Crews had been diverted all across the city and beyond to deal with the injured. There had been casualties across the entire seaboard of Massachusetts from Rockport to Plymouth, and as far inland as Worcester. The earthquake was felt throughout the state, and there were reports from across the border in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick of people feeling the ground shaking.

  Most casualties were fall injuries, eight of which had been fatal when people plunged from balconies, fire escapes or other elevated places. The greatest number of fatalities had arisen from automobile accidents where drivers had lost control. In total, thirty people had died, more than a thousand had been injured.

  And there hadn’t been a single case of structural damage.

  The Weston Observatory’s seismographs hadn’t even flickered. Earth Sciences Departments across New England and beyond confirmed the Weston results, with every billion-dollar resource and backyard amateur seismograph being checked.

  No earthquake. The whole city and half the state had simply lost its balance.

  In one day, Macbeth spent more time watching television and on the Internet than he probably had in the whole preceding month. Conspiracy theories and bad-taste jokes, both of which Macbeth attributed to the same double-figure IQ bracket, started to emerge in the afternoon. Official statements possessed the same intellectual worth as far as Macbeth was concerned, some hinting at a virus affecting victims’ vestibular systems. The truth was that there was no explaining deaths from an earthquake that absolutely did not take place.

  The thing that caused the greatest stir was when analysis of the spread of injuries was mapped out: a pattern emerged that was strangely consistent with a genuine earthquake. Despite there being no geophysical evidence, the collation of injury statistics and witness accounts revealed a pattern consistent with an earthquake epicenter out in the Atlantic, about twenty-five or thirty miles east of Cape Ann. From the descriptions gathered from various locations, the experience was deemed compatible with an earthquake magnitude of six on the Richter scale.

  It was later that following day that someone put it all together: probably some anonymous researcher in a TV station backroom, doing a simple cross-referencing of the data. And it was ready for transmission by the time Macbeth tuned into the evening news.

  The Phantom Boston Earthquake had become the Cape Ann Ghostquake.

  It dominated the specially extended edition of the news. Old woodcut prints of crooked and cracked buildings with the date 1775 provided the background to the hairstyles, professional tans and studied gravity of the news anchors. Everyone from seismologists and historians to crackpot psychics and religiousnut doomsayers had their piece to camera; politicians talked a lot and said little, spinning official lines; scientists of all persuasions were interviewed and all were at a loss to explain the phenomenon. The most likely explanation put forward remained that of a virus causing some kind of loss of balance and auditory hallucinations. After all, no one had actually seen the earthquake.

  But what exercised the media to the point of fever was that the epicenter identified by casualty-mapping coincided exactly with that of the Cape Ann earthquake of 1775. Weston Observatory had, for years, been running computer models of what would happen if the same type of earthquake were to hit the hugely expanded population and settlement of contemporary New England. The casualties caused by the ‘ghostquake’ matched what the computer had predicted. Exactly.

  Most of the Boston injuries had taken place in the Back Bay district, where the city had been expanded in the nineteenth century by building on infill poured into the Bay. Infill, the seismologists had explained, was the least stable and most susceptible to tremor of all ground types and the brownstones and other architecture of Back Bay had always been the most at risk from seismic activity.

  Macbeth had his own theory – still vague and slowly coalescing – about what had happened, and it had to do with what Pete Corbin had told him.

  Whatever had happened, whatever the cause, Boston had been shaken in every sense: Macbeth saw it on the streets he walked through, in the anxious, confused faces of passers-by.

  The question in everyone’s mind was: why Boston?

  Then the reports from all over the world started to come in.

  23

  ETHAN BUNDY. MARYLAND

  Special Agent Ethan Bundy was shirtless and sockless as he prayed.

  He was in the Camp David quarters allocated to him, kneeling at the side of his bed, fingers interlocked tight, forehead pressed against the hard ridge of his knuckles, elbows resting on the bed’s edge.

  Camp David had been buzzing with activity all day, President Yates gathering information and opinions on the events in Boston. Video conferences had taken place with experts in every field and she had even had a meeting with the Hebrew, Hoberman. Bundy had been privy to it all, at her side or in the background, silent and supportive. None of it made sense to him and he could tell that the so-called experts were no less confused than he. In spite of himself, he had, in a rare quiet moment, asked the question that had been on his mind all day.

  “What does it mean, Madame President?”

  Elizabeth Yates had turned to him, grasping his elbow and locking her eyes with his. Three words. Three words were all she spoke, yet they had electrified him.

  “The Rapture comes!”

  Bundy prayed hard. He prayed for salvation, to be among the righteous chosen. He sought forgiveness for the lives he had taken in the past and asked for the strength to take the lives he would be commanded to take in the future. Most of all, he begged the Lord’s acceptance of his impurity. He prayed for singularity, for a wholeness he knew he could never possess. President Yates, he knew, possessed that purity; she was a true and singular instrument of God, His chosen representative on Earth. Bundy, on the other hand, was neither pure nor singular.

  He was an abomination.

  Ethan Bundy knew exactly who he was, what he was. He was both the murderer and the murdered. He was Cain. He was Abel. He was both and he was neither. God had given him the Mark so that he should discover who he was, to taunt him with the knowledge of his own duality, with the awareness that he was damned to wander the Earth as both killer and victim, in an endless, seamless interweaving of two fates, of two souls.

  He should have known earlier, recognizing his inner otherness from the outer otherness of the eyes that looked back at him from the mirror every morning: pale irises with a golden-brown inner band around the pupils and an outer band of the lightest blue. Eyes so pale that they hurt in the mildest sunlight. Eyes that drew attention, remark. He should have known from them.

  But it had only been later, after he had started working for the Bureau, that Bundy had experienced the epiphany, the discovery of his true nature. He had been on a case in Kentucky, working out of the Louisville field office. It was the usual hillbilly cottage industry: a cannabis farm miles from any road and accessed by a rough, winding track. Skills learned nearly a hundred years before in the time of Prohibition and moonshinestills were still applied: the track booby-trapped with razors and fishing-hooks strung at eye level on monofilament fishing line, concealed pits filled with snakes or bristling with six-inch nails. At the end of the track was a suntrap hollow waist-high and blue-green with marijuana plants; a large wooden shack, concealed from aerial detection by a lattice of branches and leaves, tucked into its far end. It wasn’t the kind of thing the Bureau normally got involved in, the local sheriff’s department and the DEA holding the purview, but in this particular den they had found a haul of cash that was suspected to be counterfeit, making it a federal matter.

  The forensics team had been examining the cash in situ – wrapped in plastic and exposed through torn-up shack floorboards – when Bundy and his colleagues arrived. The technician had been using a UVA Wood’s lamp to inspect banknotes for signs of forgery. Bent over his work, he had not heard Bundy approach and had turned suddenly when the
FBI man called to him. As the forensics man turned, the Wood’s Lamp had still been switched on and its dim glow had fallen on Bundy’s face. He would never forget the crime scene technician’s expression. Shock. Fear, almost. Bundy was used to people reacting to his unusual eye color, but this had been something different.

  “What is it?” Bundy had asked.

  The forensics man switched the lamp off and narrowed his eyes as he examined Bundy, as if searching for something now gone.

  “Your face … under the UV light. I think you should maybe see a dermatologist.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There was something showed up under the light.”

  “What? What showed up?”

  “Marks. I don’t know what they were.”

  “Shine it on me again.”

  The forensics man had reluctantly done as he was told.

  “What do you see?”

  “Like I said,” the technician frowned, examining Bundy’s face but still uneasy, as if looking at something dangerous or frightening. “Marks on your skin. These lamps show up all kinds of stuff. Maybe you got sun damage or something. I’d get it checked out.”

  He had switched the lamp off and they had discussed the case, but Bundy could see the professional tone was just a curtain the technician had pulled over his unease at whatever it was he had seen under the artificial light.

  Bundy had not made an appointment to see his doctor right away. Instead he had ordered a black light lamp over the Internet, the one that now sat in his bedside drawer, the one he took with him almost everywhere. He had stood in front of the mirror and shone the lamp on his face. Then he had seen it. He had seen the Demon and it had taken his breath away. He had seen the Mark of Cain. Not just on his face.

  *

  Bundy squeezed his eyelids tighter shut, his hands tighter together, prayed harder. As he did with every prayer, he ended his supplication with another plea for singularity, for the Mark to be gone. For the stain on his soul to be expunged from his body.

  Standing up from his amen, he walked through to the small bathroom, first taking the UV lamp from the nightstand. The stark bathroom light emphasized the sculpture of his muscles, the tanned smoothness of his skin. Flawless, unmarked, perfect. However tight his schedule, Bundy always managed an hour of weight work every day, carefully rotating the muscles he worked on so that each set had a rest day, varying the type of exercise on a weekly cycle to circumvent muscle memory. He had become an expert on maintaining his body’s bulk, shape and definition. He also used creams, screens and emollients daily on his skin. The tan was fake, applied each day. He knew that the same lack of melanin that had made his eyes so light made his skin susceptible to sun damage and melanoma. The dermatologist who had examined him had told him that – just before he referred Bundy to genetic counseling. But that wasn’t why he used sunscreen daily. Ethan Bundy was afraid to get a real tan. He was afraid what a real tan would reveal to the world.

  He examined his reflection in the mirror. Even in this unflattering light he could see the perfection of his body, the strength of his jawline, the handsome regularity of his features. Then he saw his eyes. His eyes were always there to remind him of his impurity. He switched off the bathroom light and stood, still looking at his reflection, silhouetted black by the soft light coming in from the bedroom behind him. Now he could not see his eyes.

  “Please Lord, please remove the Mark from me. Please forgive me for the murder of my brother. Please take his soul from mine, his body from mine. Please forgive me and make me singular.”

  He drew a breath, then switched on the black light lamp.

  The Demon. Cain. The Marked One.

  The lamp glowed dimly purple in the dark bathroom. The fact that it shone at all was an indicator of its inefficiency: UVA light being invisible to the human eye, the purple glow was the escape of shorter-wavelength light through the nickel oxide filter. The bitter irony for Bundy was that this invisible light made visible that which was hidden in normal light. It revealed his true nature.

  His prayer had not been answered.

  Smooth- and tanned-skinned Ethan Bundy looked into the mirror and the Demon Cain looked back at him. Cain whose skin bore the Mark of his fratricide. The Mark had its own dark beauty: like the stripes of a tiger, bands of darker skin looped and curlicued on his face, arched and twisted around his neck and over his shoulders. A dramatic V, a diamond shape set into it, swept up from his chest. His entire body was covered in swirling, coiling stripes. He shone the light onto the back of one hand, then the other. Each seemed tattooed with a diamond, from the base of which issued other stripes that looped around his wrists and snaked up his forearms.

  Bundy felt the same ache he always felt when he observed his true nature.

  He switched the lamp off and the bathroom light back on. His humanity was restored to him.

  *

  The geneticist had explained it to him carefully, slowly, checking that he understood what she was saying. It still made no sense to him. He was twins. Not a twin, but both twins.

  “It’s called tetragametic chimerism,” she had explained. “Non-identical twins in the womb, one of which, detecting the presence of a competitor, envelops and absorbs it.”

  “I killed my brother?”

  “You absorbed him,” she had explained. “Two complete sets of chromosomes in one fetus. Your brother still lives inside you. You are him. You are both twins.”

  “That’s why I bear the marks?” he had asked.

  “They’re called the Lines of Blaschko. We all have them and they are probably the pathways taken by epidermal cells during the development of the fetus. They become visible in some skin disorders but are generally invisible to the naked eye. For some reason they are more pronounced in chimeras, probably because one twin has darker skin than the other. That would explain the central heterochromia – your dual-colored eyes. One twin has hazel eyes, the other blue.”

  “I hate them …”

  “I don’t know why,” the geneticist had said. “They’re very striking. Count yourself lucky – many chimeras have full heterochromia: one eye one color, the other another.”

  Despite the scientific jargon, Bundy knew the true meaning of the lines. He had been born a killer, having taken his brother’s life in the womb, and he bore the Mark of Cain for it. And he had been born plural, with a dyadic nature. Good and evil.

  He had despaired at his condition until he had met President Yates, then a senator of uncompromising vision and ambition, possessed of an unshakeable will. She had shown him the way. God’s way.

  All Nature is duality, President Yates had explained. So much beauty yet so much cruelty. For there to be life and growth there has to be death. For there to be Good, there has to be Evil. And sometimes, she had explained, we have to do evil things for Good ultimately to triumph.

  He had shown her his Mark. She had seen it. Touched it … Bundy completed his night-time ritual, brushing and flossing his teeth. He had just climbed into bed when the door opened. President Yates stood silhouetted in the doorframe, carrying a document in one hand.

  “Ethan,” she said with quiet command, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to do something about Professor Hoberman.”

  part two

  A TIME OF VISIONS

  Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.

  Professor Sir Arthur Eddington, astrophysicist

  24

  FABIAN. FRIESLAND

  The bullying stopped before it had really started, but then the looks, the suspicions, the whispers, had begun.

  His jaw broken, three teeth dislodged, a rib cracked and suffering from severe concussion, Maartens had been off school for two weeks, the first three days of which had been spent in hospital in Leeuwarden, and when he returned his face had still been badly discolored and distended, his jaw wired shut.

  From scrabbled-together scraps of rumor, Fabian worked out that Maartens must have staggered his way
back to the edge of town before fainting in the street. An ambulance and the police had been called. Violence was rare in a small coastal community such as this and they could see from Maartens’s injuries that they were dealing with multiple assailants. Assuming the assault had taken place where Henkje had been found, they wanted answers but he’d been in no condition to provide them until a good twenty-four hours later. It was then that the police had pressured him for the identity or description of his assailants.

  So he gave them exactly that. Henkje described three older boys, about seventeen or eighteen, none of whom he recognized; in such a small community, that meant they must have been outsiders. When Henkje told the police that one of the boys had asked him for money, he had thrown in that his attacker spoke with some kind of foreign accent. When he had told the foreigners that he had no money on him, they had launched into an attack against which he was defenseless, beating him to the ground and kicking him. The attack, he explained, had taken place a few hundred meters from where he had been found.

  The police had accepted the story, as had the wider community, eager to believe that such brutality had to have come from outside their small world. Henkje’s embellishment of foreign accents had set older heads nodding with sad sagacity: such things were to be expected these days.

  While Henkje had been off school, his entourage of lesser bullies had left Fabian alone. Fabian was pretty sure that they knew nothing of what had really happened: they simply lacked the focus Henkje had provided and were too busy dealing with the indignity of their leader’s humiliating beating.

  The sight of the returning Henkje, his puffed-up face a rainbow of greens, purples and blues, his jaw wired shut, did even more to chasten their strutting. It was on the second day of Henkje’s return that Fabian encountered him in the school corridor, between classes and without his friends. Their eyes met and Henkje’s fell immediately to the floor; in that moment Fabian knew his troubles were over as far as Maartens and his cronies were concerned. But there was no sense of triumph: whenever Fabian saw Henkje, which was seldom, as the bigger boy clearly made an effort to stay out of his way, he was filled with an urge to apologize, to somehow make amends, to explain about the déjà vu experience on the beach. But none of it made sense.