Servant of the Bones (40 page)

We glared at one another. I didn’t want to take the chance. I didn’t even want to think of the whirlwind of the restless dead. The words came back to me, the words engraved on the casket. I shivered, in terror of being formless, impotent, wandering, knocking against spirits I knew were everywhere. I did nothing.

He went down on his knees, and he gathered up the casket and the lid, then rose, one knee at a time, walked over to the table, gently laid down the casket, put the burnt shriveled lid on top of it, carefully, and then he sat down on the floor, leaning against his table, legs sprawled, but looking remarkably formal still in his seamed and buttoned clothes.

He looked up. I saw his teeth flash, and bite. I think he bit down on his lip to his own blood.

He stood up and ran at me.

He came so fast, it was like a dancer leaping to catch another, and though he stumbled, he caught me with both his hands, around my neck, and I felt his thumbs press against me, and I hated it and ripped his arms away. He smacked my face hard this way and that and drove his knee into my abdomen. He knew how to fight. With all his polish and money, he knew the dancing way to fight, like the Orientals.

I backed away from these blows, barely hurt, only amazed at his grace, and how he reared back now and kicked me full in the face, sending me many paces back.

Then came his worst blow, elbow rising, hand straight, the arm swinging around to knock me backwards.

I caught his arm, and twisted it so that he went down on his knees with a snarl of rage. I pushed him flat to the carpet and held him pinned with my foot.

“You’re no match for me in that realm,” I said. I stepped back and offered him my hand.

He climbed to his feet. His eyes never moved from me. Not for one second had he really forgotten himself. I mean, even in these failed attempts he held a dignity and lust for the struggle and for winning it, too.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve proven yourself. You aren’t a man, you’re better than a man, stronger. Your soul’s as complex as my soul. You want to do right, you have some fixed and foolish notion of right.”

“Everybody has a fixed and foolish notion of right,” I answered softly. I was humbled. And I did at that moment feel doubt, doubt of anything except that I was enjoying this, and the enjoyment seemed a sin. It seemed a sin that I should breathe. But why, what had I done? I determined not to look anymore into memory. I pushed the images away, the same ones I’ve described to you, Samuel’s face, the boiling cauldron, all of it. I just said, Be done with it Azriel!

I stood in the room vowing from then on to solve this mystery there and then with no looking back.

“You’re flattered that I said you had a soul, aren’t you?” he asked. “Or is it merely that you’re relieved that I recognize such a thing? That I don’t consider you a demon like my grandfather did. That’s what he did, right? He banished you from his sight, as if you had no soul.”

I was speechless with wondering, and with longing. To have a soul, to be good, to mount the Stairs to Heaven.
The purpose of life is to love and better know the beauty and intricacy of all things
.

He sat down on the velvet hassock, He was out of breath. I had been slow to realize this. I wasn’t out of breath at all.

I was hot all over again, with a thin sweat, but I was not soiled yet. And of course some of what I had been saying to him was bluff and lies.

I didn’t want to go into darkness or nothingness. I couldn’t
even bear the thought of it. A soul, to think I might truly have a soul, a soul that could be saved…

But I wasn’t serving him! This plan, I had to know what it was; the world, how did he mean to get it when armies fought each other all over it? Did he mean the spiritual world?

There were voices in the hall. I could pick out the mother’s voice easily, but he ignored it, just as if this were nothing. He only looked at me, and marveled at me, and pondered what I had said.

He was radiant in his curiosity and in what he had allowed to happen here without fear.

“You see how it lures me,” I said. “The marble, the carpet, the breeze through the windows. Being alive, the great lure.”

“Yes, and there’s me to know and love, too, and I lure you.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “And something tells me that life has lured me in the past, lured me to serve evil men and men I can’t recall. I am lured each time by life itself and flesh itself and when there comes a moment and the door opens to Heaven, and I cannot go through. I’m not allowed to go through. My Masters may go through. Their beautiful daughters may go through. Esther may go through. But I don’t go through.”

He drew in his breath. “You’ve seen the Door to Heaven?” he asked calmly.

“As surely as you’ve seen a ghost appear to you,” I said.

“So have I,” he said. “I’ve seen the Door to Heaven. And I’ve seen Heaven here on earth. Stay with me, stay with me, and I swear to you when the door opens, I’ll take you with me. You’ll be deserving of it.”

The voices came loudly from the hall. But I looked at him, trying to answer what he said. He seemed as resolute, as without conflict, as determined and courageous as he had been before our fight.

The voices were too loud to be ignored. The woman was angry. Others talked to her as if she were a fool. It was all far away. Beyond the windows lay the black night with the lights of New York so bright that the sky itself was reddened like the dawn coming when there was no dawn. The breeze sang.

I looked down at the box. I could have wept. He had me and the world had me. At least for now, for as long as I would allow it.

He drew close to me. And I turned, letting him come close, and between us there was a tenderness and a sudden quiet. I looked into his eyes, and I saw the round black circle within his eyes, and I wondered if he saw in my eyes only blackness.

“You want the body you have now,” he said. “You want the body and the power. You were meant to have it. You were meant to be mine, but as of this moment and forever, I respect you. You’re no servant to me. You are Azriel.”

He clasped my arm. He raised his hand and clasped the side of my face. I felt his kiss, hot and sweet on my skin. I turned and locked my mouth on his for one instant, and then let him go and his face blazed with love for me. Did I feel the same heat for him?

There was a loud noise from beyond the doors.

He made a gesture to me, as if to say, be patient, and then I suppose he would have gone to the door, but it opened, and the woman appeared there, the mother with the black-and-silver hair who before had been wrapped in red silk.

She was sick, but she had groomed and clothed herself in a proper stiff way, and she marched forward. Wet and pale, and trembling, she carried a bundle, a purse, a portmanteau that was too heavy for her.

“Help me!” she cried. She said this to me! And she looked directly at me. She came up to me, turning her back on him. “You, you help me!”

She was dressed in gray wool, and the only silk on her was wrapped high around her neck, and her shoes were fancy with raised heels and beautiful straps across her arched feet, so thin, so full of blue veins beneath the skin. She gave off a deep and rich perfume, and the smell of chemicals unknown to me, and of decay and death, very advanced, death all through her, struggling to wrap its tendrils around her heart and brain and make them go to sleep forever.

“Help me now get out of here!” She grabbed my hand, wet and warm and as seductive as he was.

“Rachel,” said Gregory, biting his tongue. “This is the medicine talking.” His voice grew hard. “Go back to your bed.”

Female attendants in white had come into the room, also gawky boys, in stiff servile little coats, but this entire assemblage stood about idle and frightened of her, nurses and lackeys, and waiting upon his every gesture.

She wrapped her arm around me. She implored me.

“You help me, please, just to get out of here, help me to the elevator, to the street.” She tried to make her words careful and persuasive, and they sounded soft, drunken, and full of misery. “Help me, and I’ll pay you, you know that! I want to leave my own house! I am not a prisoner. I don’t want to die here! Don’t I have the right to die in a place of my own choosing?”

“Take her back,” said Gregory furiously to the others. “Go on, get her out of here and don’t hurt her.”

“Mrs. Belkin,” cried one of the women. The gawky youths closed in on her like a flock that had to move as one or be scattered.

“No!” she cried out. Her voice took on youthful strength.

As the four of them set upon her, all with anxious and tentative hands, she cried out to me:

“You have to help me. I don’t care who you are. He is killing me. He’s poisoning me. He’s hastening my death by his clock! Stop him! Help me!”

The women’s murmuring, lying voices rose to drown her out.

“She’s sick,” said one woman in full and true distress. And other voices came like tiresome echoes of every word. “She’s so drugged, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Doing. Doing.”

There came a babble as the boys and Gregory spoke, and then Rachel Belkin shouted over all, and the nurse tried to make her own voice even louder.

I rushed forward and pulled one of the women loose from
her, and accidentally pushed this woman to the floor. The others were all paralyzed, except for Rachel herself who reached out to me, and grabbed my very head with her right hand, as if she would make me look at her.

She was sickly and raging with fever. She was no older than Gregory—fifty-five at most. A powerful and elegant woman, in spite of it all.

Gregory cursed at her. “Damn it, Rachel. Azriel, back away.” He waved his arms at the others. “Get Mrs. Belkin back to her bed.”

“No,” I said.

I pushed two of the others away from her effortlessly and they stumbled and drew back, clinging to one another. “No,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

“Azriel,” she said. “Azriel!” She recognized the name but couldn’t place it.

“Goodbye, Gregory,” I said. “We shall see if I have to come back to you and your bones,” I said. “She wants to die under a different roof. That’s her right. I agree with her. And for Esther, I must, you see. Farewell until I come back to you.”

Gregory was aghast.

The servants were helpless.

Rachel Belkin threw her arm around me and I held her firmly in the circle of my right arm.

She seemed about to collapse and one of her ankles turned on the shiny floor. She cried out in pain. I held her. Her hair was loosed and hanging all around her, brushed, lustrous, the silver as beautiful as the black. She was thin and delicate in her years, and had the stubborn beauty of a willow tree, or torn and shining leaves left on a beach by the waves, ruined yet gleaming.

We moved swiftly towards the door together.

“You can’t do this,” said Gregory. He was purple with rage. I turned to see him sputtering and staring and making his hands into fists, all grace lost. “Stop him,” he said to the others.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Gregory,” I said. “It would be too much of a pleasure.”

He ran at me. I swung around so that I could hold her and strike him with my left hand.

And I dealt him one fine blow with my left fist that knocked him on his back, so that his head struck the hearth.

For one breathless second I thought he was dead, but he wasn’t, only dazed, but so badly hurt that all of the little cowards present ran to attend him.

This was our moment, and the woman knew it and so did I, and we left the room together.

We hurried down to the corridor. I saw the distant bronze doors but this time they had no angels, only the tree of life once more with all its limbs, which was now rent down the middle as they opened.

I felt nothing but strength coursing through me. I could have carried her in one arm, but she walked fast and straight, as if she had to do it, clutching the leather purse or bundle to her.

We went into the elevator. The doors closed. She fell against me. And I took the bundle and held her. We were alone in this chamber as it traveled down and down, through the palace.

“He is killing me,” she said. She was up close to my face. Her eyes were swimmingly beautiful. Her flesh was smooth and youthful. “He is poisoning me. I promise you, you’ll be glad you did this for me. I promise you, you will be glad.”

I looked at her, seeing the eyes of her daughter, just so big, so extraordinary, even with the thinner paler skin now around them. How could she be so strong at forty years? Obviously she’d fought her age and her disease.

“Who are you, Azriel?” she asked. “Who are you? I heard this name. I know it.” There was trust in the way she said my name. “Tell me, who are you! Quick. Talk to me.”

I held her up. She would have fallen if not for me.

“When your daughter died,” I said, “she spoke something, did they tell you?”

“Ah, Lord God. Azriel, the Servant of the Bones,” she said, bitterly, her eyes suddenly welling with tears. “That’s what she said.”

“I am he,” I said. “I’m Azriel, the one she saw as she lay dying. I cried as you cry now. I saw her and wept for her, and couldn’t help her. But I can help you.”

T
his stopped her grief, but I couldn’t tell what she made of this revelation or of me. Sick as she was, she definitely contained the full flower of the seeds of beauty in Esther.

As the doors opened again, we saw an army brought out against her—heavily uniformed men, most of them old, all apparently concerned, and most rather noisy. It was an easy matter for me to push the diffident bunch aside sharply—indeed to scatter them far and wide. But this did make them hysterical with fear. She alarmed them further with her voice.

“Get me my car now,” she said. “Do you hear? And get out of our way.” They didn’t dare to reassemble. She fired orders. “Henry, I want you out of here. George, go upstairs. My husband needs you. You, there, what are you doing—”

As they argued with one another, she marched ahead of me, towards the open doors. A man to our right picked up a gilded telephone from a marble-top table. She turned and shot him the Evil Eye and he dropped the phone. I laughed. I loved her strength. But she didn’t notice these things.