The Einstein Prophecy (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“You’re sure you don’t want me to run the film for you?” the elderly projectionist said. “I don’t mind at all, Professor.”

For the third time, Lucas assured him that he could do it himself, so long as the projectionist gave him a quick tutorial.

“Okay then,” the man said, adjusting various switches and knobs. “Let me at least load it for you and get it ready to run.”

As he did so, Lucas looked around the cramped booth with the sagging acoustical tiles, the fire extinguisher in the dusty case, and the metal racks jammed with film canisters and slide boxes and, of all things, mousetraps.

“You have a problem with mice?”

The projectionist grunted. “No matter how many times we tell the students not to bring food into the auditorium, they do anyway.” Brushing the palms of his hands together, he said, “I’ll leave it to you then.” Inching around Lucas, he slipped out of the booth.

No sooner was he gone than Lucas heard Delaney, sitting beside Simone in the auditorium, clap in mock frustration and shout, “Let’s get this show on the road!”

From inside the projection booth, all Lucas could see of them was the backs of their heads. “Keep your shirt on!” he hollered, turning off the house lights and fumbling to start the projector. The sound reminded him of his mother’s sewing machine, clicking and ratcheting along as the film first displayed its numerical countdown, and then cut to a shot, in crisp black-and-white tones, of himself announcing the time and date—in a voice he could barely recognize as his own—and introducing the members of the investigatory team. He had never seen himself on film like this before, and it came as quite a shock to see how forbidding a presentation his five o’clock shadow and eye patch made; his first thought was that he looked like a pirate. Delaney, on whom he had turned the lens for a few seconds, appeared like a good-natured grizzly bear, and Simone, who had stepped in front of the camera next, radiated apprehension.

But beauty, too.

Seeing her on the screen, even in this context, Lucas was struck by her distinctive, even mysterious, features—her luminous eyes and arched brows, and the way her raven hair framed her face. There were moments like this, moments when he felt a certain tugging at his heart, that he regretted ever having allowed her to become involved in this project—though he knew full well he could hardly have stopped her. She was as determined as she was attractive. And if not for her and her father, the ossuary would still be languishing in a hidden tomb somewhere in the Egyptian desert.

There were a few blank frames in the film at the point where Lucas had paused to turn the camera over to Simone.

And then the movie began again, the lens trained on the closed lid of the ossuary. Lucas could see the various creatures incised there, brandishing their claws and baring their fangs at the figure of the shepherd—swineherd, he corrected himself—with the crooked-handled staff. Somehow the threat from the gamboling beasts was more noticeable on the film than it had been on the actual sarcophagus. Despite the complaints from the technician at Fort Dix, Lucas couldn’t see anything on the film so far that suggested Simone had done anything but an admirable job behind the camera.

A pair of gloved hands protruded into the frame—his own, as he recalled—holding up a length of rusty chain that was bound around the box. Delaney’s hands, also gloved, wielded the hacksaw that quickly reduced the links to powder. The removal of the remaining chains took several minutes, and then the ponderous lid—he could remember just how heavy, and cold, the alabaster had been—was sliding the length of the box. Simone had adroitly directed the camera to follow its progress onto the thin mattress, where it had been laid to rest.

And then, for a split second, something blurred the lens before clearing again.

The focus changed, as Simone had swung the camera to take in a new view. She could be heard saying, “Oh my God.”

The lens was pointed at the interior of the sarcophagus, at the jumbled bones and artifacts. And the pair of skulls. Lucas’s gloved hands could be seen reaching into the box and lifting the stranger of the two; he remembered thinking that it was like enacting the scene from Hamlet.

But he did not remember the rest of what he now saw on the screen. It was as if some unseen agency had clouded the film, deliberately obscuring the image of the skull. From the empty eye sockets, there was an unmistakable gleam of something bright, like a spark from a fire. Had he looked away at precisely that moment? Surely he would have remembered that. How had the camera captured something that had gone unnoticed by the eyewitnesses in the room?

Simone’s voice on the soundtrack was saying, “Something’s going wrong with the camera,” and from that point on, all hell broke loose. The audio picked up a rising wind; the picture became scratched and jerky. Delaney was heard warning him to “put it back,” and Lucas could see his hands replacing the deformed skull in the box. He remembered that Simone had abandoned her post on the cinder block, and left the camera swiveling atop the tripod. The pictures turned wild and random, as the camera gyrated in the wind. Its lens roamed the conservation room, and everywhere it looked there was a swirling mist that had been all but invisible to the naked eye. Or had the film stock simply been defective? The lights in the room went on and off, on and off, and each time, the picture changed. Buried in the fog, a strange shape coalesced and then dissolved, loping on all fours with its snout raised and stubby wings flapping, then vanishing again into thin air. Some frames went blank, others were smudged or striated. Glass cracked—the clerestory window, just replaced, had been splintered as if hit by a hardball—and a scream erupted from somewhere behind the tumbling easels. The door at the rear of the room was flung open, and a different shape—this one distinctly human, but crouching low—scrambled out.

Although the film rolled on for a few more seconds, the picture blurred, and then abruptly stopped. Lucas fumbled for the switch, but in the dark, he couldn’t find it. A smell arose—something burning—and he groped again for the switch to turn off the projector. Again with no luck. The machine kept humming.

Turning quickly, he ran his hand along the wall, finding the overhead light and turning it on. A thin gray rat, caught out in the open, squeaked in alarm and squirmed under the door. The smell was much worse—the film had now caught flame. He yanked open the glass case and grabbed the fire extinguisher, raised the nozzle and sprayed a tide of white foam, up and down, up and down, over the entire mechanism. Despite the caustic fumes, he didn’t stop until the extinguisher was empty.

Delaney threw open the door to the booth. “What happened?” he said, as Simone cried, “Are you all right?”

Waving away the smoke and stench, Lucas stumbled out. Delaney slammed the door behind him and, patting his back, said, “Take slow breaths. Slow breaths.”

Lucas tried to do it, but his throat burned from some chemical in the celluloid stock, or maybe the extinguisher foam. His one good eye was streaming tears. When he was finally able to get his wind and straighten up, he saw that the immediate alarm was fading from his burly colleague’s face, but taking its place was the shock he had felt at watching the film.

“At least I know what that guy at Fort Dix was talking about,” Delaney said.

Lucas, still unable to speak, simply nodded. Simone appeared with a paper cup of water.

“Drink this.”

He took it gratefully.

“You sure the fire’s out in there?” Delaney said.

“See for yourself,” Lucas croaked.

Delaney had barely cracked the door open when Simone jumped back—“Look out!” she cried. A flock of gray mice scampered out, scattering to all corners of the auditorium. Sauntering out behind them, unalarmed and unafraid, a fat brown rat sniffed the fresh air with twitching whiskers and tail. Delaney tried to stomp on it, but missed, and the rat adroitly ducked under the auditorium chairs.

“Time to call in an exterminator,” Delaney said.

Lucas, raising his bleary vision to Simone, saw that she was clutching something concealed beneath her blouse, just as she had at the opening of the ossuary. The look on her face, however, perfectly confirmed his own thoughts.

There wasn’t an exterminator on earth equipped to deal with what was happening here.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“The paratroopers have landed,” the voice on the radio said, “and all around me, they’re freeing themselves from their chutes.”

Dr. Rashid leaned forward, hanging on every word. Tonight’s broadcast was coming all the way from Holland, where soldiers from the 101st Airborne had been dispatched to capture the bridges along the Dutch/Belgian border.

“There’s a full moon tonight, and the chutes are blowing across the farms and fields that surround us.” There was both urgency and trepidation in the reporter’s tone. “Make no mistake, this is still dangerous ground.”

These broadcasts from the war in Europe routinely held millions of listeners captive, and this one was no exception; there was an immediacy to the reports, an on-the-scene aspect that most of the other newsmen, bound to desks in Washington—or to telex machines in New York—could not touch. Knowing that the reporter was actually there, risking his neck along with the soldiers whose dangerous missions he was reporting on, lent the broadcasts both credibility and nerve-wracking suspense.

Rashid put his blue folder to one side, untied his shoes—bending over was getting harder on his back all the time—and summoned up another volley of coughs. As the broadcast continued, he began to undress. His daughter had escorted him up to their suite and then gone off to see that fellow Lucas; it was only natural, and at least the man had already done his service and come back in one piece, or nearly one. No matter what came of it, she wouldn’t wind up a war widow. There was that.

He regretted getting so worked up in the taproom. It never did any good to let your passions cloud your arguments. And he knew what he sounded like. Like most of the others in his field—even his own daughter—he had started out as a strict empiricist, unwilling even to listen to the babblings of monks and mullahs, priests and so-called prophets. Scriptures, of any sort or origin, were nothing more than ancillary tools to help him in his scholarly research.

But time, enhanced by experience, had altered his views. Too often he had felt the inexpressible presence of something greater, too often he had had to discount his own intuitions. Like the physicists, whose theories and discoveries he did his best to understand and follow, there were things he could not account for, things that he was forever having to rejigger his philosophy in order to accommodate. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity, from what he could fathom of it, did not square with some of the more recent revelations of something else called quantum mechanics. Apparently, on the atomic level, it was impossible to pinpoint a particle’s velocity and location at the same time, without altering one or the other in the process. It was precisely that sort of slippery and irrational problem he had encountered in his own work. He was trying to mix fact and faith, science and sorcery, into one palatable, if volatile, brew.

If only he had before him more time to unravel the mysteries of the ossuary, but his health was failing—far more precipitously than he ever let on to his daughter—and his fondest hope now was to live long enough to see Simone safely ensconced in a tenured university position in a world that had, at long last, found peace again.

“We’re strung out now along the banks of a canal that cuts across the fields. Every eye and every ear is on alert for Nazi snipers who might be lying in wait.”

Rashid turned the radio volume higher as he went into the bathroom, where he pushed the shower curtain to one side and started the hot water running. He leaned his cane up against the door, then finished undressing. In the medicine chest, he found, and took, the nightly pills for his heart, then put his hand under the faucet to test the water temperature. He would say that much for the Nassau Inn—they might not welcome guests of the wrong skin color (oh, he hadn’t missed that insult at the reception desk), but their boiler was a good one. The steam building up in the room already was soothing his sore throat.

“There’s a body floating by me in the canal,” the reporter said, solemnly. “It’s not one of ours, though. He’s still got his helmet on. His arms and legs are spread out wide like he’s about to make an angel in the snow.”

Turning off the water, and holding onto the edge of the claw-footed tub, Rashid eased one leg into the water, and then the other. With one hand bracing himself against the white tile wall, he sat down, dipped a bar of soap in the water and lathered his face and shoulders. Then he settled back, with the nape of his neck resting comfortably on the lip of the tub. The bunched-up shower curtain obscured his view through the open door, but did nothing to hinder his ability to hear the radio.

“The moonlight is glinting off the white arms of a windmill not far away. Under normal circumstances, this would be a beautiful sight on an equally beautiful night.”

Over the broadcast, Rashid thought he heard the front door to their suite being opened.
Is she back already
? he thought with relief.

“Simone?” he called out, but there was no answer.

“This, however, is not a normal night,” the reporter said, keeping his voice low.

There was a slight but sudden draft, and Rashid called out again, “I’m in the tub. Please turn the radio down and close the bathroom door now.”

Still there was still no reply. He must have been wrong. Closing his eyes, he concentrated again on the broadcast.

“Wait—did you hear that?” the reporter said. “Off in the distance?”

Rashid thought he smelled something, like damp sod, and opened his eyes. As he did so, the light in the front room winked out.

“It was a rifle shot.”

Why had the light gone off? Was there an electrical short? No, that couldn’t be the reason. The radio was still working.

The draft grew stronger, as did the odor.

“Simone?” he tried one more time. A fleeting shadow appeared just outside the door, but whoever was casting it clung to one side, the side Rashid could not see past the plastic shower curtain.

For the first time, he felt fear—a cold fear gripping at his already weakened heart.

“Who’s there?”

“It came from the windmill,” the radio relayed.

Something dark and crouching low slipped into the bathroom with him.

He sat up and shoved at the curtain pleats, trying to clear his view. “Who are you?” Rashid demanded.

The room smelled like a marsh.

“Get out of here!”

Instead, the figure moved closer. Through the filmy plastic, he watched an arm reach out, take hold of the curtain, and with one pull, rip the whole thing loose from the rings.

He recognized the hat, and the coat with the upturned collar. But the face nestled deep in its folds was like nothing he had ever seen before. Though plainly alive, it looked like it had died a thousand years ago. His mouth opened in a silent scream as he felt its hand clamp down on the top of his head, and with surprising ease, push him down into the water and hold him there. He struggled to free himself, his fingers scrabbling at the slippery lip of the tub, his heart beating like a trip-hammer, but the hand held steady. His legs kicked, splashing water all over the floor, but through the sting of the soapy water, he could see no more than a glint of gold in a pair of evil and unyielding eyes.

Nor could he hear the final words of the broadcast, as the kicking of his legs subsided and the bubbles of his last breath escaped his lips. “The paratroopers have fanned out, and they’re shooting back.” There was the crackle of gunfire, as his heart gave way. “I can’t tell if anyone has been hit, but one of the soldiers has made it close enough to throw a grenade up top.” There was the sound of a distant explosion. “Holy smokes—that was a throw worthy of Dizzy Dean,” the reporter shouted, as if he were recounting a baseball game. “The windmill’s catching fire now. And let me tell you one thing, there aren’t any more shots coming from it. Not a one.”