The Fall (2 page)

Upon receipt of the text, the king ordered the elderly rabbi’s imprisonment and the destruction of the tablets, as well as of the rabbi’s entire library of texts and devotional artifacts. The tablets were pulverized, and the manuscript languished in a vault alongside many forbidden treasures. Secretly, Mme de Montespan, the king’s mistress and an avid dabbler in the occult, orchestrated the retrieval of the manuscript in 1671. It remained in the hands of La Voisin, a midwife who was de Montespan’s sorceress and confidante, until her exile following her implication in the hysteria surrounding the Affaire des Poisons.

The book subsequently resurfaced briefly in 1823, appearing in the possession of the notorious London reprobate and scholar William Beckford. It appeared listed as part of the library in Fonthill Abbey, Beckford’s palace of excess, where he accumulated natural and unnatural curiosities, forbidden books, and shocking objets d’art. The Gothic Revival construction and its contents were sold to an arms dealer in order to satisfy a debt, and the book remained lost for nearly a century. It was listed erroneously, or perhaps surreptitiously, under the title
Casus Lumen
as part of a 1911 auction in Marseille, but the text was never produced for display and the auction summarily canceled after a mysterious outbreak gripped the city. In the ensuing years, the manuscript was widely believed to have been destroyed. Now it was at hand, right here, in New York.

But $15 million? $25 million? Impossible to get. There had to be some other way…

His greatest fear, which he dared share with no one, was that the battle, begun so long ago, was already lost. That this was all an endgame, that humanity’s king was already in check, yet stubbornly playing out its few remaining moves upon the global chessboard.

Setrakian closed his eyes against a humming in his ears. But the humming persisted—in fact, grew stronger.

The pill had never had this effect on him before.

Once he realized this, Setrakian stiffened and rose to his feet.

It was not the pill at all. The hum was all around him. Low-grade, but there.

They were not alone.

The boy
, thought Setrakian. With great effort, he pushed himself up and out of the chair, starting for Zack’s room.

Pic—pic—pic…

The mother was coming for her boy.

Zack Goodweather sat cross-legged in the corner of the roof of the pawnshop building. His dad’s computer was open in his lap. This was the only spot in the entire building where he could get connected to the Internet, trespassing on the unsecured home network of a neighbor somewhere on the block. The wireless signal was weak, varying between one and two bars, slowing his Internet search to a crawl.

Zack had been forbidden to use his dad’s computer. In fact, he was supposed to be asleep right now. The eleven-year-old had enough difficulty sleeping on normal nights, a decent case of insomnia he’d been hiding from his parents for some time.

Insomni-Zack!
The first superhero he ever created. An eight-page color comic written, illustrated, lettered, and inked by Zachary Goodweather. About a teen who patrolled the streets of New York by night, foiling terrorists and polluters. And terrorist polluters. He never could get the blanket cape folds to come out right, but he was passable with faces, and okay with musculature.

This city needed an
Insomni-Zack
now. Sleep was a luxury. A luxury no one could afford—if everyone knew what he knew.

If everyone had seen what he had seen.

Zack was supposed to be sacked out in a goose-down sleeping bag inside a spare bedroom on the third floor. The room smelled like a closet, like an old cedar room in his grandparents’ house—one that no one opened anymore except for kids who liked to snoop. The small, oddly angled room had been used by Mr. Setrakian (or Professor Setrakian—Zack still wasn’t clear on that part, seeing how the old man ran the first-floor pawnshop) for storage. Tilting stacks of books, many old mirrors, a wardrobe of old clothes, and some locked trunks—really locked, not the fake kind of lock that can be picked with a paper clip and a ballpoint pen (Zack had already tried).

The exterminator, Fet—or V, as he had told Zack to call him—had hooked up an ancient, cartridge-fed, 8-bit Nintendo system to a pawned Sanyo television set with big knobs and dials on the front instead of buttons, all brought up from the showroom downstairs. They expected him to stay put and play
The Legend of Zelda.
But the bedroom door had no lock. His dad and Fet had mounted iron bars onto the wall over the window—mounted them on the inside, rather than the outside, bolted to the wall beams—a cage that Mr. Setrakian said was left over from the 1970s.

They weren’t trying to lock him in, Zack knew. They were trying to lock
her
out.

He searched for his dad’s professional page at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and got a “Page Not Found.” So they had already scrubbed him from the government Web site. News hits for “Dr. Ephraim Goodweather” claimed he was a discredited
CDC
official who fabricated a video purporting to show a human-turned-vampire being destroyed. It said that he had uploaded it (actually, Zack uploaded the video for him, one that his dad wouldn’t let him view) onto the Internet in an attempt to exploit the eclipse hysteria for his own purposes. Obviously, that last part was BS. What “purposes” did his dad have other than trying to save lives? One news site described Goodweather as “an admitted alcoholic involved in a contentious custody battle, who is now believed to be on the run with his kidnapped son.” That left Zack with a lump of ice in his chest. The same article went on to say that both Goodweather’s ex-wife and her boyfriend were currently missing and presumed dead.

Everything made Zack feel nauseous these days, but the dishonesty of this article was especially toxic to him. All wrong, every last word. Did they really not know the truth? Or… did they not care? Maybe they were trying to exploit his parents’ trouble
for their own purposes?

And the talkback? The comments were even worse. He could not deal with the things they were saying about his dad, the righteous arrogance of all these anonymous posters. He had to deal right now with the awful truth about his mom—and the banality of the venom spewed in blogs and forums missed the point completely.

How do you mourn someone who isn’t really gone? How do you fear someone whose desire for you is eternal?

If the world knew the truth the way Zack knew the truth, then his dad’s reputation would be restored, and his voice heard—but still nothing else would change. His mom, his life, would never be the same.

So, mostly, Zack wanted it all to pass. He wanted something fantastic to happen to make everything right and normal again. As when he was a child—like five or something, he broke a mirror and just covered it with a sheet, then prayed with all his might for its restoration before his parents found out. Or the way he used to wish his parents would fall back in love again. That they would wake up one day and realize what a mistake they had made.

Now he secretly hoped that his dad could do something incredible. Despite everything, Zack still assumed that there was some happy ending awaiting them. Awaiting all of them. Maybe even something to bring Mom back to the way she was.

He felt tears coming, and this time he didn’t fight them. He was up on the roof; he was alone. He wanted so badly to see his mother again. The thought terrified him—and yet he yearned for her to come. To look into her eyes. To hear her voice. He wished for her to explain this to him the way she did every troubling thing.
Everything is going to be just fine…

A scream somewhere deep in the night brought him back to the present. He peered uptown, seeing flames on the west side, a column of dark smoke. He looked up. No stars tonight. And only a few airplanes. He had heard fighter jets zooming overhead that afternoon.

Zack rubbed his face in the crook of his elbow sleeve and turned back to the computer. With some quick desktop searching, Zack discovered the folder containing the video file he was not supposed to view. He opened it and heard Dad’s voice, and realized Dad was operating the camera. Zack’s camera, the one his dad had borrowed.

The subject was hard to see at first, something in the dark inside a shed. A thing leaning forward on its haunches. A guttural growl and a back-of-the-throat hiss. The slinking noise of a chain. The camera zoomed in closer, the dark pixilation improving, and Zack saw its open mouth. A mouth that opened wider than it should, with something resembling a thin silver fish flopping inside.

The shed-thing’s eyes were wide and glaring. He mistook their expression for one of sadness at first, and hurt. A collar—apparently, a dog collar—restrained it at the neck, chained to the dirt floor behind it. The creature looked pale inside the dark shed, so bloodless it was nearly glowing. Then came a strange pumping sound—
snap-chunk, snap-chunk, snap-chunk
—and three silver nails, propelled from behind the camera (from Dad?) struck the shed-thing like needle-bullets. The camera view jerked up as the thing roared hoarsely, a sick animal consumed with pain.

“Enough,”
said a voice on the clip. The voice belonged to Mr. Setrakian, but it was not a tone like anything Zack had ever heard out of the kindly, old pawnbroker’s mouth.
“Let us remain merciful.”

Then the old man stepped into view, intoning some words in a foreign, ancient-sounding language—almost like summoning a power or declaring a curse. He raised a silver sword—long and bright with moonlight—and the shed-thing howled as Mr. Setrakian swung the sword with great force…

Voices pulled Zack out of the video. Voices from the street below. He shut the laptop and stood, staying back, peering over the raised edge of the roof down to 118th Street.

A group of five men walked up the block toward the pawnshop, trailed by a slow-moving
SUV
. They carried weapons—guns—and were pounding on every door. The
SUV
stopped before the intersection, right outside the front of the pawnshop. The men on foot approached the building, rattling the security gates. Calling, “Open up!”

Zack backed away. He turned to go to the roof door, figuring he’d better get back to his room in case anyone came looking.

Then he saw her. A girl, a teenager, high school probably. Standing on the next roof over, across an empty lot around the corner from the shop entrance. The breeze lifted her long nightshirt, ruffling it around her knees, but did not move her hair, which hung straight and heavy.

She stood on the raised edge of the roof. The very edge, balanced perfectly, no wavering in her posture. Poised at the brink, as though wanting to try to make the jump. The impossible leap. Wanting to and knowing she would fail.

Zack stared. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. But he suspected.

He raised a hand anyway. He waved to her.

She stared back at him.

Dr. Nora Martinez, late of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unlocked the front door. Five men in combat gear with armored vests and assault weapons stared her down through the security grate. Two of them wore kerchiefs, covering their lower faces.

“Everything all right in there, ma’am?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” said Nora, looking for badges or any kind of insignia and seeing none. “So long as this grate holds up, everything is fine.”

“We’re going door-to-door,” said another. “Clearing blocks. Some trouble down that way”—he pointed toward 117th Street—”but we think the worst of it is moving downtown from this direction.” Meaning Harlem.

“And you are…?”

“Concerned citizens, ma’am. You don’t want to be in here all alone.”

“She’s not,” said Vasiliy Fet, the New York City Bureau of Pest Control Services worker and independent exterminator, appearing behind her.

The men sized up the big man. “You the pawnbroker?”

“My father,” said Fet. “What sort of trouble are you seeing?”

“Trying to get a handle on these freaks rioting in the city. Agitators and opportunists. Taking advantage of a bad situation, making it worse.”

“You sound like cops,” said Fet.

“If you’re thinking about leaving town,” said another one, avoiding the topic, “you should go now. Bridges are stacked up, tunnels jammed. Place is going to shit.”

Another said, “You should think about getting out here and helping us. Do something about this.”

Fet said, “I’ll think about it.”

“Let’s go!” called the driver of the
SUV
idling in the street.

“Good luck,” said one of the men, with a scowl. “You’ll need it.”

Nora watched them go, then locked the door. She stepped back into the shadows. “They’re gone,” she said.

Ephraim Goodweather, who had been watching from the side, emerged. “Fools,” he said.

“Cops,” said Fet, watching them round the street corner.

“How do you know?” asked Nora.

“You can always tell.”

“Good thing you stayed out of sight,” Nora said to Eph.

Eph nodded. “Why no badges?”

Fet said, “Probably got off shift and huddled up at happy hour, decided this wasn’t how they were going to let their city go out. Wives all packed up for Jersey, they’ve got nothing to do now but bang some heads. Cops feel they run the place. And they’re not half wrong. Street-gang mentality. It’s their turf and they’ll fight for it.”

“When you think about it,” said Eph, “they’re really not that much different than us right now.”

Nora said, “Except that they’re carrying lead when they should be wielding silver.” She slipped her hand into Eph’s. “I wish we could have warned them.”

“Trying to warn people is how I got to be a fugitive in the first place,” said Eph.

Eph and Nora were the first to board the dead plane after
SWAT
team members discovered the apparently dead passengers. The realization that the bodies weren’t decomposing naturally, coupled with the disappearance of the coffin-like cabinet during the solar occultation, had helped convince Eph that they were facing an epidemiological crisis which could not be explained by normal medical and scientific means. The grudging realization opened him up to the revelations of the pawnbroker, Setrakian, and the terrible truth behind the plague. His desperation to warn the world of the true nature of the disease—the vampiric virus moving insidiously through the city and out into the boroughs—led to a break with the
CDC
, which then tried to silence him with a trumped-up charge of murder. He had been a fugitive ever since.