Servant of the Bones

by Anne Rice

  Indeed I could see the old man's profile as I saw Gregory's, the two facing each other, and the casket gleaming on the desk, the desk this time which had been stripped of all its sacred books and would no doubt be purified after by a thousand words and gestures and candles, but what was that to me?

  I was making the air move. The old man would know it within seconds. I had to be still and resist the lure of my growing strength. Remain diaphanous, quick to move, rather than to be scattered, willing to pass through the wall intact, rather than frightened once more or hurt into disintegration as I had been the night before.

  I was near the wall that was closest to the street outside, against a wooden door that appeared unused, its brass handle covered with dust, and I could see my own shape, my folded arms, my shoes. I called the duplicates of Gregory's clothes to form themselves easily around me, in so far as I knew the details.

  The Rebbe rested on his elbows, staring at the casket before him, and the black chains looked ugly against the plated gold.

  I felt nothing in me that he was so near to the bones. I felt nothing that either man spoke of them, or moved about them, or stared at the casket which held them, and this I noted.

  Behave now as if you are living, and as if it matters to go on living. Be careful as the living. Take your time.

  My own advice to myself amused me a little. But then I settled in, deep into the corner, beyond where the light fell, beyond where it might even touch my half-visible shoe or inevitably gleaming eye.

  Old man, just try it! I was ready for him. I was ready for anyone or anything.

  Gregory stepped anxiously into the light. He looked directly at the casket. The old man behaved as though Gregory were not there. Gregory might have been the spirit. The old man stated at the gold plating; he stated at the iron chains.

  Gregory reached out, and without asking permission he put his hands on the casket. Then I did feel a shimmer, much as I loathed it, and I was stronger, instantly stronger.

  The old man stared right at Gregory's hands. Then he sat back, sighing heavily as if for effect or punctuation, and he reached for a sheaf of papers--rather cheap and light paper, nothing as good as parchment--and he thrust this group of papers at Gregory, holding them up above the casket.

  Gregory took the papers.

  "What's this?"

  "Everything written on the casket," said the old man in English. "Don't you see the letters?" His voice was full of despair. "The words are written in three tongues. Call the first Sumerian, the second Aramaic, and the last Hebrew, though they are ancient tongues."

  "Ah! This was more than kind of you. I never expected such cooperation from you."

  I thought so too. What had moved the old man to be so helpful?

  Gregory could barely hold the papers steady. He shuffled them, put them back in order, and started to speak.

  "No!" said the old man. "Not here. It's yours now and you take it. And you say the words when and where you will, but not under my roof, and from you I exact one last promise, in exchange for these documents which I have prepared for you. You know what they are, don't you? They let you call the spirit. They tell you how."

  Gregory made a soft laugh. "Once again, your kindness overwhelms me," he said. "I know your disinclination to touch even trifles which are not clean."

  "This is no trifle," said the old man.

  "Ah, then, when I say these words the Servant of the Bones will rise?"

  "If you don't believe it, why do you want it?" asked the old man.

  The shock went through me. I was fully visible.

  I cleaved to the wall, not daring even to try to see my own limbs. The cloth wound itself around me without a whisper. "Make the shoes to shine even brighter, give me the gold for my wrist, and make my face as clean of hair, yet give me the hair of my youth," I asked silently.

  I felt my full weight, denser perhaps than it had even been the night before. I wanted to look down at myself but I dared not make myself known.

  "You don't seriously think I believe in it," Gregory replied politely. He folded the sheaf of papers and put them carefully into the breast of his coat.

  The old man made no reply.

  "I want to know about it, I want to know what she was talking about, I want it. I covet it. I covet it because it's precious and it's unique and she spoke of it with her dying words."

  "Yes, that does convey upon it an added value," said the old man, his voice harder and clearer than I had ever heard it before.

  I could feel my hair against my shoulders. I could feel the dampness from the concrete wall as it chilled my neck. I made the scarf at my neck thicker. I made it fit higher. The lightbulb stirred. Things creaked in the room, but neither man appeared to notice, so intent were they on the casket and on each other.

  "The chains are rusted, aren't they?" Gregory said, raising his right finger. "May I take them off?"

  "Not here."

  "All right, then I presume we have concluded our bargain. But you want something else, don't you? A final promise. I know. I can see it in you. Speak. I want to take home my treasure and open it. Speak. What more do you want?"

  "Promise me, you will not come back to this house. You'll never seek my company again. You'll never seek the company of your brother. You will never tell anyone of how you were born one of us. You will keep your world away as you have always done. If your brother calls you, you will not receive his call. If your brother visits you, you will not receive him. Promise all of this to me."

  "You ask that of me every time I see you," said Gregory. He laughed. "It's always the final thing you ask, and I always promise."

  He cocked his head and smiled affectionately at the old man, patronizingly, with maddening impudence.

  "You won't see me again, Grandfather. Never, never again. When you die, I won't cross the bridge to come to your graveside. Is that what you want to hear? I won't come to Nathan to mourn with him. I won't risk exposing him, or any of you. Very well?"

  The old man nodded.

  "But I have one last demand of you," said Gregory, "if I am never to speak to or see Nathan again."

  The old man made a little questing gesture with both hands. "Tell my brother I love him. I insist you tell him."

  "I'll tell him," said the old man.

  Then Gregory moved swiftly, gathering up the casket, letting the chains scrape on the desk as he stood upright with it in his arms.

  I felt again the tremors, the strengthening, moving down my arms and my legs. I felt my fingers moving, I felt a tingling as if tiny needles were being touched to me all over. I didn't like it, that it came from his touch. But maybe it came from all of us here, our sense of purpose, our concentration.

  "Goodbye, Grandfather," said Gregory. "Someday, you know, they will come to write about you--my biographers, those who tell the story of the Temple of the Mind." He tightened his grip on the casket. The rusted chains left red dust on his lapels but he didn't care. "They'll write your epitaph because you are my grandfather. And you'll deserve that recognition."

  "Get out of my house."

  "Of course, you needn't worry for the moment. No record exists of the boy you mourned thirty years ago. On my deathbed I'll tell them."

  The old man shook his head slowly, but resisted a reply.

  "But tell me, aren't you the least bit curious about this casket, about what's in it, about what may happen when I read the incantations?"

  "No."

  Gregory's smile faded. He studied the old man, and then he said:

  "All right, Grandfather. Then we have nothing to talk about, do we? Nothing at all."

  The old man nodded.

  The anger beat in Gregory's cheeks, wet and red. But he had no time for this. He looked at the thing in his arms and he turned and hurried out the door, kicking it open with his knee and letting it slam behind him.

  The old man sat exactly as before. I think he looked at the dust on his desk. I think he stared at the flakes of rust from the
iron which had been left on his polished wood. But I couldn't tell.

  I felt nothing. I neither moved nor was strengthened, as Gregory with his casket of bones moved away from me. No, he was not Master, never, never, by any means. But this old man? I had to know.

  Gregory's steps died away in the alley.

  I came forward, and walked to the old man's desk and stood in front of it.

  The old man was aghast.

  The moment for an outcry passed in rigid silence, his eyes contracting, and when he spoke it was a whisper.

  "Go back to the bones, Spirit," he said.

  I drew on all my strength to hold out against him, I thought nothing of his hatred, and I thought of no moment in my long miserable existence when I had been either wronged or loved. I looked at him and I stood firm. I barely heard him.

  "Why did you pass the bones to him?" I asked. "What is your purpose! If you called me up to destroy him, tell me!"

  He turned his face away, so as not to see me.

  "Be gone, Spirit!" he declared in Hebrew.

  I watched him stand up and move the chair back out of his way, and I saw his hands fly up, and I knew that he was speaking Hebrew, and then the Chaldean, yes, he knew that too, and he spoke it with perfect cadence, but I didn't hear the words. The words didn't touch me.

  "Why did you say he killed Esther? Why, Rebbe, tell me!"

  Silence. He had ceased to speak. He didn't even pray in his mind or his heart. He stood transfixed, his mouth closed tight beneath his white mustache, the locks of his hair shivering slightly, the light showing the yellowed hairs of his beard as well as the snow white.

  His eyes were closed. He began to whisper his prayers in Hebrew, davening, or bowing, that is, very quickly over and over again.

  His fear and fury were equal; his hatred outstripped them both.

  "Do you want justice for her?" I shouted at him. But nothing would break his prayers and his closed eyes and his bowing.

  Now I spoke, softly in Chaldean,

  "Fly from me," I said in a whisper, "all you tiny parts of land and air and mountain and sea, and of the living and of the dead, which have come to give me this form, fly from me but not so far that I cannot summon you at will, and leave me my shape that this mortal man may see me and be afraid."

  The light above shivered again on its raw cord. I saw the air move the old man's beard. I saw it make him blink.

  I looked down through my own translucent hands and saw the floor beyond them.

  "Fly from me," I whispered, "and stay close to me to return at my summons, that God Himself would not know me from a man that He had made!"

  I vanished.

  I threw out my disappearing hands to frighten him. I wanted so to hurt him, just a little. I wanted so to defy him. On and on he prayed with eyes closed.

  But there was no time for idle play with him. I didn't know if there was energy enough for what I meant to do.

  Passing through the walls I went upwards, rising over the rooftops, passing through tingling wires, and into the cool air of the night.

  "Gregory," I said, as surely as if my old master Samuel had sent me to say it. "Gregory!"

  And there below in the stream of traffic on the bridge I saw the car, moving amongst its guardians, for there were many. I saw it, sleek and long, keeping perfect pace with the cars before it and behind it and beside it, as if they were birds together in a flock and flew straight, without having to play the wind.

  "Down there, beside him and so that he cannot see."

  No Master could have said it with more determination, pointing his finger at the victim that I was to rob, or murder, or put to flight.

  "Come now, Azriel, as I command you," I said.

  And gently I descended, into the soft warm interior of the car, a world of dark synthetic velvet and tinted glass that made the night outside die a little, as if a deep mist had covered all things.

  Opposite him, I took my place, my back to the leather wall which divided us from the driver, folding my arms again as I watched him, crouched as it were, with the casket in his arms. He had broken off the useless rusted iron chains, and they lay dirty and fragmented on the carpeted floor.

  I could have wept with happiness. I had been so afraid! I had been so sure I could not do it! All of my will had been so fixed on the effort, that I scarce had breath in me to realize it had been done.

  We rode together, the ghost watching him, and he, the man clutching his treasure, balancing it carefully on his knees, and reaching in his coat for the papers, and then shoving them back in his excitement and steadying the casket again and rubbing his hands on it, as if the very gold excited him as it had the ancients. As gold had once excited me.

  Gold.

  A blast of heat came to me, but this was memory.

  Hold firm. Begin. From land and sea, from the living and the dead, from all that God has made, come to me, what I require to make of me an apparition, thin as air, to make of me a barely visible yet strong being.

  I looked down and saw the shape of my legs, I had hands again, I made clothes like Gregory's clothes. I could almost feel the padded seat of the car. Almost feel it, and I longed to touch it, longed for garments to wrap me round.

  I saw buttons, the shining semblance of buttons, and fingernails. And I lifted my invisible hand to my face to make sure that it was clean shaven as his. But give me my hair, my long hair, like Samson's hair, thick hair. I caught my fingers in the ringlets. I wanted so to finish it but not yet--

  I had to say when Azriel would come, didn't I? I had to say it. I was the Master.

  Suddenly Gregory lowered the casket. He fell down on his knees on the very floor of the car and laid the casket before him, rocking with the motion of the car, steadying himself against the seat, his right hand so close to me he almost touched me, and then he ripped off the lid of the casket.

  He pulled it up and off, and it flew off, rotted, dried, a shell of gold almost, and there--there on their bed of rotted cloth lay the bones.

  I felt a shock as though blood had been infused into me. My heart had only to beat. No, not yet.

  I looked down at the remnants of my body. I looked down at the bones that held my tzelem locked within them, coated with gold, chained together, and formed like a child asleep in the womb.

  A dimness threatened me, a dissolution. What was the reason? Pain. We were in a great room. I knew this room. I felt the heat of the boiling cauldron. No. Don't let this come now. Don't let this weaken you.

  Look at the man on his knees right in front of you, and the bones that he all but worships, which are your bones.

  "Body be my own," I whispered. "Be solid and strong enough to make angels burn with envy. Mold me into the man I would be in my happiest hour, if I held the looking glass before my own face."

  He paused. He had heard the whisper. But in the dark he saw nothing but the casket. What were creaks and bumps and whispers to him? The car sped along. The city hissed and throbbed.

  His eyes were locked to the bones.

  "My Lord God," said Gregory, and leaning back on his heels so that he wouldn't tumble, he reached out for the skull.

  I felt it. I felt his hands on my head. But it was only a stroking of the thick black hair that was already there, hair I had called to me.

  "Lord God!" he said again. "Servant of the Bones? You have a new Master. It is Gregory Belkin and his entire flock. It is Gregory Belkin of the Temple of the Mind of God who calls you. Come to me, Spirit! Come to me!"

  I said:

  "Perhaps yes, perhaps no to all those words. I am already here."

  He looked up, saw me sitting composed and opposite to him and he let out a loud cry and tumbled over against the door of the car. He let go of the casket altogether.

  Nothing changed in me except that I grew stronger and brighter.

  I reached over towards him and down carefully and put the fragile lid over the curling skeleton of the bones. I covered them up with my hands, and I drew
back and up and folded my arms, and I sighed.

  He sat slumped still on the floor of the car, the seat behind him, the door beside him, his knees up, staring at me, merely staring, and then as filled with wonder as any human I could ever remember, fearless and mad with glee.

  "Servant of the Bones!" he said, flashing his teeth to me.

  "Yes, Gregory," I answered with the tongue in my mouth, my voice speaking his English. "I am here, as you see."

  I studied him carefully. I had outdone his garments, my coat was soft and flawless silk, and my buttons were jasper, and my hair was long on my shoulders. Heavy! And I was composed and he sat in disarray.

  Slowly, very slowly he rose, grasping the handle of the door to aid himself, as he sat back down on the velvet seat and looked first at the casket on the floor and then at me.

  I turned sharply for one instant. I had to. I was afraid. But I had to. I had to see if I could see myself in the dark tinted glass.

  Beyond, the night moved in a splendid dreamy flight, the city of towers clustering near us, bright orange electric lights blazing as fiercely as torches.

  But there was Azriel, looking at himself with sharp black eyes, smooth shaven, his hair a regular mantle on his head, and his thick eyebrows dipping as they always did when he smiled.

  Without haste, I let my eyes return to him. I let him see my smile.

  My heart beat and I could move my tongue easily on my lips. I sat back and felt the comfort of this cushioned seat, and I felt the engine of the car vibrating through me, vibrating through the soft, exquisite velvet beneath me.

  I heard his breath rise and fall. I saw his chest heave. I looked into his eyes again.

  He was rapt. His arms had not even tensed; his fingers lay open on his knees. He did not even bend his back as if to brace himself from a shock or a blow. His eyes were fully opened and he too was almost smiling.

  "You're a brave man, Gregory," I said. "I have reduced other men to stuttering lunatics with such tricks as this."

  "Oh, I bet you have," he answered.

  "But don't call me the Servant of the Bones again. I don't like it. Call me Azriel. That's my name."

  "Why did she say it?" he asked at once. "Why did she say it in the ambulance? She said 'Azriel,' just as you said it."

  "Because she saw me," I said. "I watched her die. She saw me and she spoke to say my name twice, and then that was all she said and she was dead."