The Einstein Prophecy (7 page)

CHAPTER NINE

Wally was the superstitious sort, and although he was always glad to have a little extra money for overtime, he wasn’t eager to spend too much time in the museum after dark. There were too many life-size sculptures standing around on pedestals, and he always had the feeling that they only stopped moving the second he looked at them. Even the shadows in the galleries seemed like they didn’t belong where they were. But when he’d received word, straight from President Dodds’s office, to stay however long was needed to clean up the refuse left in the conservation wing, he couldn’t very well say no. All afternoon, he’d heard the sounds of crates being ripped apart, floorboards being replaced, nails being hammered, and he didn’t know what to expect when he finally did turn on the overhead lights.

Still, it wasn’t this. The whole vast room blazed with twice the light it had had before; an entirely new bank of lights had been installed on the ceiling, up between the clerestory windows, and their beams were all trained on the center of the floor. There, all the easels and worktables that had previously cluttered the space had been shoved aside in order to make room for a raised platform made of reinforced steel and large enough to accommodate a Cadillac.

But that was no car on display.

It was a long box, like a coffin, but with a kind of peaked roof. It was made of white stone, and even from the doorway, he could see that there were images carved into its lid and sides.

If he’d had the willies before, he had them in spades now.

But he had his orders, and he could see that the workmen had left him plenty to do. There was sawdust all over the floor, and a pile of broken floorboards and pieces of what looked like a shipping crate were all piled up as if ready for a bonfire. Either the workers had been too lazy to clean up after themselves, or they’d wanted to get away from the damn thing as much as he did.

Unlocking the utility closet, he backed out the wheelbarrow, and, carefully averting his eyes from the coffin—or whatever the hell it was—started tossing the broken lumber, bent nails, and used excelsior into it. Even the floor was gummy, though, with something white and viscous. Nuts, he thought. It was going to take some elbow grease to get that crap off the floor.

After five or six trips to the refuse bins outside, he’d pretty much cleared away most of the trash. Stopping to catch a breath of the fresh night air, he happened to notice that one of the clerestory windows had been cracked open, and a sliver of light was gilding the tree branches. It looked a little like snow. Winter would be coming soon enough. For now, however, the air was simply cool and invigorating.

How they’d opened that window, without using the ladder and hooked pole still stashed in the closet, puzzled him. Closing it again was just one more thing he’d have to do before leaving for the night. God forbid it should rain.

Going back into the utility closet, he filled a bucket with hot water and ammonia. Whatever that gooey stuff on the floorboards was, it was sticking to his shoes, and it was sure to be a bitch to get off. Maybe it was some kind of glue they’d used in affixing the new boards. They sure as hell could have been more careful with it.

In fact, as he sloshed some water around and began working the mop, there seemed to be more of it around than there had been earlier. Was it seeping up again through the cracks? He stopped and bent over to see if the boards hadn’t been aligned snugly enough, when another spot of it suddenly plopped down in front of him.

From above.

And then another—wet and slick as whitewash—splatted on the shoulder of his gray work shirt.

Shielding his eyes from the glare of the new lights, he looked up at the rafters of the room and saw something that looked like a little brown bird flit from one beam to another.

But then he heard the chittering, and he knew it wasn’t birds up there. It was bats.

Good God. Now he could see that it wasn’t just one or two, but dozens of them, some hanging upside down from the rafters, others spreading their leathery wings and looking for a perch of their own.

Damn—that’s what happened when you left a window open, even a crack. Getting them out was going to be a nightmare.

And what if they wound up soiling this stone box on the platform? Considering all the trouble that had been gone to in installing the thing, it had to be awfully valuable, and Wally sure as shootin’ didn’t want any blame landing on his head if it got damaged. Bat droppings were highly acidic and would eat through anything. He’d seen what they’d done to the lawn furniture at the president’s house.

Rummaging around in the closet, he found an old tarp that the painters had used the last time they’d touched up the trim in the galleries, dragged it out, and hauled it across the floor toward the chest. The bats were getting louder, and flitting back and forth. There was a corrugated metal ramp on one side of the platform, which must have been used to slide the box up and into place, but as Wally stepped onto it, a bat suddenly swooped down and whizzed over his head, so close he could swear that the tips of its wings had grazed his hair.

“God
damn
,” he muttered, ducking down. Weren’t bats supposed to have some kind of radar that kept them from bumping into things, much less people?

But he had no sooner straightened up to drape the tarp over the chest—the quicker he could get it covered, the quicker he could get out of there and leave the problem for the exterminators to solve—than another one dive-bombed him. This time its tiny claws actually snagged his sleeve before zooming away.

These bats were crazy! Maybe rabid. Wally threw the tarp over the top of the coffin, and without even looking to see where it landed, he whipped around to head for the exit. But his foot slipped on the guano, and he went down hard, cracking his forehead on the edge of the steel platform. Another bat shot down and nipped at his cheek, so fast that it was gone again before he even felt the blood dribbling down his skin. Stumbling to his feet, he knocked over the bucket, and a tide of hot water and ammonia spilled across the floor. Splashing through it, he covered his head with his arms and raced out into the galleries, but a flock of bats whirled around him, snatching at his clothes, his hair, his fingers.

Barely able to see where he was going, he just shoved the museum doors open with his shoulder, setting off an alarm, and staggered onto the forecourt, swinging his arms and looking for cover. He ran for the trees of Prospect Garden, where lanterns burned bright above the porte-cochere of the president’s house. He would have screamed, but he was afraid to open his mouth for fear a bat might fly in there, too! His wet shoes crunched on the gravel, and his breath was hoarse in his throat. If he could just get into the house . . . but the bats were swarming all over him, like flies on dead meat, and no matter how hard he tried to fend them off, wheeling his arms, even plucking some from his shoulders and flinging them aside, there were always more—and they were relentless.

He never saw the rock he tripped over, but somehow he flipped in midair and landed flat on his back. The air slammed out of his lungs and the bats came down on him like a hard brown rain, wings spread, claws distended, tiny fangs shining.

Minutes later, their work done, they rose again and spun off above the treetops of the garden, toward the gleaming white belfry of Nassau Hall, over the top of FitzRandolph Gate, and then down the moonlit, sleeping streets of the town, like heralds proclaiming the arrival of their king.

CHAPTER TEN

“What have you got now?” Delaney asked, and the ever-eager Andy Brandt, a young preceptor in the Anthropology Department, said, “Guess.”

“I’m not an anthropologist,” Delaney said, gingerly taking the tiny skull and peering at it this way and that. “Or a paleontologist, for that matter.” Brandt also worked in Guyot Hall, but downstairs, on the main floor where the university displayed its eclectic collection of dinosaur bones and petrified artifacts gathered from expeditions all over the world.

He seemed to spend the bulk of his time, however, prowling the geophysics labs, and pestering Delaney. He was forever hanging around, antsy as a five-year-old, and asking as many questions.

“It’s not from the dinosaur collection,” Brandt reassured him, “if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s from the mammal drawers.”

Not much better, Delaney thought; Andy shouldn’t be removing specimens from the collections at all. Shrugging, he said, “I don’t know—maybe it’s from an ancestor of the common cat. Or even a skunk. This is more your field than mine.”

“But how old do you think it is?”

“Who cares?” he replied, though he knew full well what Brandt was getting at. He wanted Delaney to conduct another one of his experiments to determine the age of the specimen. If Brandt spent half as much time on his own research as he did poking his nose into Delaney’s, he’d have a full professorship by now.

But Delaney wasn’t interested in trying out his new process like it was some sort of game; he knew it could be extremely important, in ways that even he could not yet fully envision, and he wanted to make sure that every trial he did, every test he conducted, brought him closer to perfecting the technique. Although the research into radio isotopes and their relative rates of decay had begun in 1941 while Professor Willard Libby had been working at Princeton under a Guggenheim grant, Libby had since been recruited by Columbia, where he was now involved on a top-secret project. Consequently, it was up to Delaney to carry the torch.

Only the day before, he had been given direct orders, by an officer of the OSS, to do just that.

“So, what do you think?” Brandt asked, with an encouraging grin. “Can you do it?” With his perfect white teeth and his blond cowlick, he looked like a kid out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

“Do what?” Delaney said, pretending not to follow.

“Date it.”

“Is this just another one of your fishing expeditions, or do you actually need this information for some valid, scientific purpose?”

“Scientific purpose,” Andy said, trying to look suitably sincere. “Scout’s honor.”

For all Delaney knew, the kid still
was
an Eagle Scout. “Leave it on the counter,” he said, “and if I have time, I’ll run some tests.”

Andy put it down next to the microscope, saying, “But let me know when you’re doing them. I’d like to observe.”

Given the chance, Delaney thought, he’d probably like to observe him shaving, too. In a way, it was flattering—Andy had plainly adopted him as his unofficial mentor—if only he could ignore the guy’s pushiness.

As if sensing that he might have gone too far, Andy adopted a more casual tone, and said, “So, you heard about what happened last night at the art museum?”

“No. I’ve been too busy working.” The implicit admonition was lost on Andy.

“The janitor was attacked by a flock of bats.”

“What?”

“In the museum. The conservation wing.”

“Jesus. Is he okay?”

Andy’s fingers riffled idly through the mail lying on the counter—including the OSS packet. “He’s at the hospital in town.”

“Leave those alone,” Delaney said, moving the missives out of reach.

“Sure, sorry. But I hear it’s not looking good. Might be rabies, might be something even worse.”

Rabies could be bad enough. A boyhood friend had died of it. But bats, attacking a human
en masse
? And inside a campus building? It seemed impossible.

He hastily wrapped up his work, stashed most of his important papers in a double-wide green metal locker bolted to the wall, then ushered Andy out into the hall. Shutting the door after him, he said, “Don’t take any more specimens out of the downstairs labs unless you first get permission from your department chair.”

Andy gave him a mock salute and headed back to his department. Delaney rushed down the stairs and over to the art museum, wondering if Lucas had heard the news. The campus, always quiet between classes, was unusually so now, given the sparse enrollment. He saw almost no one, apart from a loiterer or two outside Fine Hall, where they were no doubt hoping to catch a glimpse of Einstein.

At the entrance to the museum, one of the university’s campus police was standing guard with a walkie-talkie clipped to his lapel. “Sorry,” he said, “the museum’s closed for the day.”

“I’m faculty,” Delaney said, flashing his laminated ID card.

“Closed to everyone.”

“And I have this,” he added, drawing the OSS clearance letter from the inside pocket of his Windbreaker.

The proctor looked it over, but this decision was undoubtedly beyond his pay grade.

“I have to get started,” Delaney said. “I’m expected in the conservation wing.”

With some hesitation, the proctor let him pass, and Delaney made his way through the deserted galleries, lined with classical statuary, and into the European painting and fine arts galleries. Nowhere did he see any sign of a bat attack. Bursting through the rear door marked “CONSERVATION: Authorized Personnel Only,” he saw a janitor in gray coveralls bent over a bucket, wringing out a mop. “Excuse me,” he said, “have you seen Professor Athan?”

Straightening up, the man said, “Last I noticed, he was mopping this floor.”

Delaney looked appropriately bemused. “Since when did you join the custodial staff?”

“Somebody had to do it,” Lucas said, glad to have the company. “Security’s so tight now, only I could get in.” He’d been at it for an hour, and his back was as tight as a drum. “In fact, how the hell did you manage it?”

“You forget,” Delaney replied, waving the OSS letter. “I’m on this job, too.”

“So you’ve met with the charming Colonel Macmillan?”

“Right after you did. The seat was still warm.” He looked around the room. “I heard about what happened last night, but I still can’t believe it.”

“Nobody can. There were exterminators in here earlier to give us the all-clear, and even they said they’d never heard of anything like it.”

“I hope that Wally pulls through okay.”

Lucas nodded in agreement and gestured at the tarp loosely draped over something large mounted in the middle of the room. “That damn thing has brought nothing but bad luck everywhere it’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

He tapped his eye patch and said, “This happened about a minute after I’d found it.”

“I didn’t know.”

“How could you?” Lucas hadn’t told him the whole story, nor had he mentioned the German boy blown to bits, or Private Toussaint, who had lost a leg. Or, for that matter, the ship that had almost been sunk transporting it to the United States; he’d noted the name of the USS Seward on the transportation papers.

“All I’ve seen so far is a faint photograph. You want to show me what all the fuss has been about?”

Lucas couldn’t think of any reason to refuse, but at the same time he could hardly bear to expose the ossuary. The whole time he’d been cleaning up in the conservation room, he’d done his level best to avert his eyes from the hulking shape beneath the tarp. He had hoped never to see the thing again, and now, here it was, not only deposited on his doorstep, but requiring his diligent study.

Leaning the mop against the wall, Lucas stepped to the platform and took hold of the tarp. What was he so afraid of? It was just a box of bones. Taking a deep breath, and with a grand gesture like a magician completing a trick, he pulled the tarp away. “Behold . . . the eighth wonder of the world.”

The photo hadn’t done it justice, nor had his own memories. A great white chest—calcite alabaster, if he had to guess—its gabled roof and elaborate carvings had been largely worn away by time. But it was clear that a lot of trouble had been gone to in order to create this thing, and there was something that was still unnervingly potent about it.

“I found it at the bottom of an iron mine outside Strasbourg. Thirty seconds later, a land mine went off, and I was flying through the air. When I came to, I was bumping along in the back of an army ambulance.” Only the mayor, standing outside the ring of ore carts, had been spared. He’d applied the tourniquet to Toussaint’s leg and come to their rescue.

Delaney stepped up the ramp and ran his finger over the smooth surface of the lid. “Why’s it so damn cold?”

“Isn’t that more your department?” Lucas replied, touching the ossuary himself. The stone
was
cold, colder than the ambient temperature of the room, and what little he could make out of the figures was confusing. On one side of the lid, it looked like a shepherd with a staff, herding animals, presumably sheep, but on the other side, the figure looked more like a monkey, with long arms dangling down and a curled-up tail. Words and symbols, some of which resembled Egyptian hieroglyphs, had been incised into the sides of the stone. One looked like a diamond tilted on its axis.

To top it all off, the box had been bound shut with several crudely wrought iron chains. Cutting through them, Lucas thought, was not going to be easy.

“You know what’s inside it?” Delaney asked.

“Bones, for sure. But maybe something else, too. Coins, jewelry. Judging from the glyphs, this one’s probably Egyptian. But ossuaries found in the Roman catacombs have contained everything from the occupant’s cosmetic tools to her house cat.”

“We’re going to need a blowtorch or a hacksaw to get these chains removed.”

“I’ve already put in a request to the campus maintenance department.”

Lucas’s instructions from Colonel Macmillan had been to gauge the age and origins of the box, employing Delaney’s latest research into radio isotopes wherever useful. Any organic remains inside would be especially susceptible to his techniques. But he could see, just from the expression behind Delaney’s scruffy beard, that something was bothering him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Delaney said, though he had promptly removed his hand from the cold stone. “I just had kind of a weird feeling.”

“Of what?” It was comforting to Lucas to hear that someone else felt it, too.

“The calm before the storm. When I was growing up in the Midwest, you could always tell when a tornado was brewing. The air would get really still, the birds would stop singing, and the sky . . . the sky would turn this kind of sickly green.” He rubbed his fingers together, as if to remove any residue from the stone.

“How much of a sample are you going to need?” Lucas asked, and it took Delaney several seconds to refocus. “To do your carbon-14 tests?”

“Oh, right—not much. Just a sliver or two of bone, whatever you can spare. Desiccated flesh, too, if there’s anything left of it.”

“There probably won’t be much. Traditionally, corpses in northern Africa and the Middle East were first thrown into a ditch and left there for wild animals and the elements to strip away all the meat. When only the skeleton remained, the pieces were picked up—the skull most importantly—and consigned to the box. You should have plenty of bones to choose from, especially given the royal treatment these remains received.”

“Do you mean that literally?” Delaney asked. “Was this the sarcophagus of a king?”

“Hard to say. There’re a lot of markings on it—a lot more than you usually see on these things, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

“I see a monograph getting written, with full tenure not far behind.”

“Not likely,” Lucas replied. “The OSS will never let this project become public knowledge. I’ll be lucky if they don’t bury me with it.”

Delaney nodded, turned away, and stepped down the ramp. “Got a precept to lead. Thanks for the tour.”

But even if he hadn’t had a class to teach, Lucas could tell he was eager to leave. So was Lucas, though he found himself riveted for several more minutes, examining the bizarre markings. Then he picked up the tarp, and though there was no real reason to cover it up again, threw it over the ossuary. Retrieving the mop, he hastily wiped up the remaining mess on the floor, got out of the janitor’s coveralls, and made for the exit himself.