Servant of the Bones

  The old man sat with the scroll open, staring down at it. He said no more.

  Gregory broke the silence.

  "Then why haven't you destroyed it!" He was so excited he could scarcely stand there at attention. "What else does it say! What is the language!"

  The old man looked up at him and then at me, and then back to the scroll.

  "Listen to what I read now," said the old man, "because I will translate it for you only once:

  " 'Woe unto him who destroys these bones, for if it can be done, which is not known even to the wisest, that one should loose into the world a spirit of incalculable power, masterless and ungovernable, doomed to remain in the air forever, unable to mount the Ladder to Heaven, or unlock the gates of Perdition. And who knows what shall be the cruelty of this spirit against God's children? Are there not demons enough in this world?' "

  Dramatically, he looked up at his grandson, who evinced only fascination.

  Gregory did everything but rub his hands together in greed.

  The old man spoke again, slowly.

  "My father took it because he felt that he must take it. And now you come to me and you ask for it. Well, it is almost yours."

  The younger man seemed delirious suddenly, or possessed of a divine joy.

  "Oh, Rebbe, this is too marvelous, too wondrous," said Gregory. "But how could she have known, my poor Esther?"

  "That's for you to discover," said the old man coldly. "For I cannot possibly know. Never have I called it forth, this spirit, nor would my father. Nor would the Moslem who gave it over into my father's hands."

  "Give me the scroll. I'll take it now."

  "No."

  "Grandfather, I want it! Look, the checks are there!"

  "And tomorrow the money will be in the bank, will it not? Tomorrow, when the sums are transferred, when the transaction is finished--"

  "Grandfather, let me have it now!"

  "Tomorrow, then you come to me, and you take it, and it's yours. And you will be the Master of the Servant of the Bones."

  "You stubborn, impossible old man. You know these checks are good. Give it to me!"

  "Oh, you are so anxious!" said the elder.

  He looked at me. I could have sworn he would have shared a smile with me had I invited him to do it, but I didn't.

  Then he looked again at his grandson, who was in a paroxysm of frustration, staring at the golden casket at his feet, not daring to touch it, but wanting it so much he groaned.

  "Why did you kill her?" the old man said.

  "What?"

  "Why did you have your daughter killed? I want to know. I should have made that my price!"

  "Oh, you're a fool, all of you are fools, belligerent and superstitious, the idiots of your god!"

  The old man was outraged.

  "Your temples, Gregory, are the houses of the deceived and the damned," he said. "But let's have no more invectives. We know each other. Tomorrow night, when my bankers tell me that your money is in our hands, you come and you take this thing away. And keep the secret. Keep the vow. Tell no one that you are...that you were...my grandson."

  Gregory smiled, shrugged, opened his hands in a gesture of acceptance. He turned to go, never so much as glancing in the direction of where I stood.

  He stopped before the door and looked back at his grandfather.

  "Tell my brother Nathan for me that I thank him that he called me with his condolences."

  "He didn't do this!" cried the Rebbe.

  "Oh, yes, he did. He called me and spoke to me, and tried to comfort me in my loss, and to comfort my wife."

  "He has no traffic with you and your kind!"

  "And I don't tell you this, Rebbe, to bring your anger down on him, no, not for that reason, but just so that you know that my brother Nathan loved me enough to call me and to tell me he was sorry that the girl was dead."

  Gregory opened the door. The cold of the night waited uneasily.

  "Stay away from your brother!" The old man rose, his fists on the desk.

  "Save your words!" said Gregory. "Save them for your flock. My church preaches love."

  "Your brother walks with God," said the old man, but his voice was frail now. He was weary. He was spent.

  He chanced a glance at me. I caught and held his eye.

  "Don't try to cheat me, Rebbe," said Gregory as the cold air moved into the room past him. "If I don't find this thing here tomorrow night as promised, I'll stand on your doorstep with the cameras. I'll print the stories of my childhood among the Hasidim in my next book."

  "Mock me if it pleases you, Gregory," said the old man, drawing himself up. "But the bargain's done, and the Servant of the Bones will be here for you tomorrow. And you will take this thing from me. You who are evil. You who do evil. You who walk with the Devil. Your church walks with the Devil. The Minders are of the Devil. Welcome to this demon and its ilk. Get out of my house."

  "All right, my teacher," said Gregory, "my Abraham." He opened the door wide and stepped through it, leaning back into the room so that the light clearly revealed his smiling face.

  "My Patriarch, my Moses! You give my love to my brother.

  Shall I give your condolences to my grieving wife?" He stepped back, slamming the door after him.

  There was faint vibration of glass and metal things quivering.

  I stayed where I was.

  We looked at one another, I and the old man, across the dusty little room, I stepped partway from behind the bookcase and the old man remained fixed behind his desk.

  The old man trembled.

  Go back into the bones, Spirit. I never called you. I don't speak to you, except to send you away from me.

  "Why?" I pleaded. I spoke the old Hebrew knowing he would know it. "Why do you so despise me, old one? What have I done? I don't speak now of the spirit that destroys the magicians, I speak of myself, me, Azriel! What did I do?"

  He was astonished and shaken. I stood before his desk; I wore clothes like his clothes, and I looked down and I saw that my foot had almost touched the casket, and how small it looked, and the smell of boiling water rose in my nostrils.

  "Marduk, my god," I cried out in the old Chaldean. He knew the words, the zaddik! Let him glare at me in horror.

  "Oh, my god, they will not help me!" I sang out the words in Chaldean. "I am here again and there is no righteous path!"

  The old man stood rapt, and repelled. He was full of shock and loathing. He threw out his hands:

  "Be gone, spirit, out of here, out of the air, and back into the bones whence you came!"

  I felt a silken thrill through my limbs. I held firm.

  "Rebbe, you said he killed her. Tell me if he did. I slew the men who stabbed her!"

  "Be gone, spirit." He threw up his hands over his face, and turned his head. His voice grew stronger. He stepped from behind his desk and walked about me in a circle, shouting the words again, louder, more clearly, his hands flashing in front of me. I felt myself weaken. I felt the tears on my face.

  "Why did you say, Rebbe, that he had killed Esther? Tell me and I shall avenge her! I killed the hirelings! Oh, Lord God of Hosts, when Yahweh spoke to Saul and David, he said slay them all to the last man, woman, and child! And Saul and David obeyed him. Was it not right to slay those three filthy men who murdered an innocent girl?"

  "Be gone, Spirit!" he cried. "Be gone! Be gone. I will have no traffic with you. Go back into the bones!"

  "I curse you, I hate you!" I said to him, but it had no sound.

  I was dissolving. All that I had gathered to myself was dispersed, as if the wind had found its way beneath the door and caught hold of me.

  "Be gone, Spirit, be gone from here, be gone from my house and from me!"

  Blackness.

  Yet I couldn't stop thinking.

  I couldn't stop being.

  I will see you again, old man.

  Dreams came to me as if I were human and I slept, and my mind had opened its doors to living teachers. N
o, Azriel, no, perish, but don't dream.

  Yet there came the face of Samuel; Strasbourg; another sanctuary of scrolls and books and it was in flames. I heard my voice. "Take my hand, Master, take me with you into death." Damn you, Samuel! Damn you, old man.

  Damn you, all you Masters!

  From the top of a hill I looked down on the small city of Strasbourg. Oh, it was nothing so clear then as it was when I described it to you.

  But it was there, I saw it. I knew that all the Jews were suffering. I knew I was one of them. And yet I couldn't be one of them. And the bells pealed. The arrogant bells of murderers came from their churches. And the sky was the silent heavy sky of olden days--six hundred years ago--perhaps when the air didn't talk and so clearly I heard the bells.

  "Azriel." Chatter. Wind. The invisible were coming, they were coming to me in smoky mist, surrounding me, closing in, smelling the weakness, the fear, and the suffering. "Azriel!" The rumblings of the jealous earthbound surrounded me. The greedy desperate earthbound dead.

  Get away from me. Let me remember.

  I wanted to know, I wanted to push past all of them as I had the people on the sidewalk when Esther had looked at me. I wanted to remember, I wanted to...

  For one instant, I stood bright, staring at the Rebbe, but the Rebbe was huge, and his voice was louder than the wind.

  Be gone, Spirit! I command you! The old man's face was blood red with his fury.

  Be gone, Spirit!

  His words struck me. They hurt me. They lashed me. Give me silence for now. If there can be no peace, there can be silence and there can be the darkness. It could be worse, Azriel.

  It could be worse.

  To be wounded is bad, but not so bad as to kill the innocent and to smile with hate.

  17

  There are several things I should have attempted. I should have tried to leave the room, intact, and follow Gregory. I had a visible body! I had clothed it perfectly. I should have hung on. I should have tried to wander freely in the streets of Brooklyn and discover more about the world, simply by asking more specific questions of it.

  I should have discovered specifics about Gregory Belkin and the Temple of the Mind. People in the streets would have talked to me about these things. I looked like a man. I could have watched the television broadcasts in taverns. I could have spent a night of fruitful, focused learning instead of letting the old Rebbe drive me away from my own self, and into nothingness once more.

  Whatever, when the Rebbe sought to destroy me, I should not have wasted time calling out to "my god."

  That had been an unthinkable thing for the Servant of the Bones--to call upon my god--for my god had never been with me in my years of evil spectral service. I don't think the Servant of the Bones who cursed Samuel even remembered my god, because he did not remember being human, as I remembered now. My god had been mine when I was a man, a young man living in the city of Babylon where I had died.

  Indeed, though I hate to admit it, if I bring to mind Samuel, I remember only how proud I was to be his genii, a ghost of remarkable powers such as simple dead souls almost never acquire. I was the mighty culmination of ancient magic and men who knew how to use it.

  Of human life, I had recalled nothing. I could not even recall a Master before Samuel, though surely there had been such men. Back to Babylon there must have been a lineage of such magicians, all of whom I'd served and outlived.

  It had to be so. It was so. The Servant of the Bones was passed hand to hand.

  And at some point, as the Rebbe had so graciously explained for Gregory's benefit, the Servant of the Bones had rebelled against his solemn purpose. He had turned around in the very midst of his magic and lashed out at the one who had called him into being, and the Servant of the Bones had done this more than once.

  But what had preceded all this? Had I not once been human?

  What did my memories want of me? What did Esther want of me? Why was it seductive to have eyes and ears, to feel pain, and to hate again, and to want to kill? Yes, I very much wanted to kill.

  I wanted to kill the Rebbe, but then again I could not. I held him to be a good man, a man perhaps without blemish, except for want of kindness, and I couldn't do it. There is only so much evil for which you can blame others. I couldn't kill him. I was glad I had not.

  But you can imagine what a mystery I was to myself, caught between Heaven and Hell and not knowing why I had come.

  But I was not of God, no, I was not of God and I had no god, and when the Rebbe banished me, when he used his considerable power to dissolve my form and addle my wits so that I could not oppose him, he had done so in the name of God and I had not dared to call upon that same God, the God of my father, the Lord God of Hosts, the God above and before all Gods.

  No, in that moment of weakness, Azriel, man and ghost, had called upon his pagan god of old, from a human time, a god whom he had loved.

  As the Rebbe cursed me, I deliberately called on Marduk in Chaldean. I wanted the Rebbe to hear the pagan tongue. Anger burnt me up as it has so often done. I knew my god wouldn't help me.

  Some parting of the ways had occurred with me and my god.

  Must I now recall everything? Must I know the story from the start?

  Well, if I sought to put it together, to understand it, to know who I had been and how I'd been made the Servant of the Bones, there should be but one reason: so that I might die.

  Really, really die.

  Not just retreat into blackness again, to be called forth into another lurid drama, and surely not to be trapped, earthbound, with the lost souls who murmured and stammered and screeched as they clung to mortality. But to die. To be given at last what had somehow been denied me years ago by a trick I couldn't recall.

  "Azriel, I warn you." Who had spoken those words then, thousands of years ago? A phantom? Who was the man I saw dimly at the richly carved table who cried and cried? Who was the King? There had been a great king....But my anger and my rage had weakened me so that I was shocked and dispersed by the Rebbe. My mind was blown apart as surely as my form. My capacity to reason was shattered, and I rose into the night formless, aimless, drifting once more among the electric voices, tumbling as it were above the magnet that holds us all--the spinning world.

  But I never let go. I never really let go.

  As I came to myself, as I gathered strength again, as I set my eyes upon a destination, I thought of all these various aspects of my situation--that I very well might be utterly Masterless, that I wouldn't fail Esther, that I was stronger than I'd ever been--and I was determined to fight harder this time to be free of either of these two men--the Rebbe or his grandson Gregory--I was determined that if I could not die, I would gain life apart from them.

  Who knows what nourishes a spirit, in the flesh or out of it?

  Men and women in this time, who would have laughed at our old customs, believed in absolutely preposterous explanations of things--take, for example, how a hailstone comes to form, from a speck of dust in the upper atmosphere, falling, then rising, gathering ice to itself, falling again, then rising again, and becoming larger and larger, till some perfect moment is reached at which the hailstone breaks the circuit and falls to earth and then, after all of that, all of that wondrous process, melts to nothing. Dust to dust.

  Someday these people--these clever minds of today--will know all about spirits. They will know as they knew about genes and neutrinos and other things they cannot see. Doctors at the bedside will see the spirit rise, the tzelem, as I saw it rise from Esther. It will not take a sorcerer to drive a spirit heavenward. There will be men clever enough to exterminate or extinguish even something like me.

  Note this, Jonathan.

  Scientists of your time have isolated the gene for a fruit fly that is eyeless. And when they take his genes and inject them into other fruit flies--God have mercy on his tiny creatures--do you know that these fruit flies produce eyes all over their bodies? Eyes on their elbows? And on their wings?

>   Doesn't that make you love scientists? Don't you feel tenderness towards them and respect for them?

  Believe you me, coming back to myself the following night, taking form again, diaphanous but optimistic and hatefully calm, I did not think to seek the help of scientists any more than sorcerers to effect my final death. No. I was done with all practitioners of the unseen; I was done with everything except justice for a girl I'd never known. And I would find a way to die, even if it meant I had to remember everything, every painful moment of what I'd suffered when death should have come to me, when death should have been granted, when the Ladder to Heaven might have fallen down, or at least the Gates of Hell swung wide.

  Stay alive long enough to understand!

  It was exciting! It was perhaps the only truly exciting thing that I could at that moment imagine or recall.

  On the sidewalk, the next night, in Brooklyn, I took form whole and swift as if some modern man had flicked a light switch. Invisible to mortal eyes, but in the very shape that would soon enough become solid.

  I wanted it this way. But still, to come forth on my own? I couldn't quite trust it. But tonight I would make strides in my search for the truth.

  Brooklyn again, the house of the Rebbe and his family, and Gregory's car sliding to the curb.

  Invisible, I drifted close to Gregory, fairly wrapping myself around him, though never touching him really, escorting him back the alleyway, almost touching his fingers as he unlocked the gate.

  When the door opened, I entered with him, beside him, buoyant and fearless, breathing in the smell of his skin, inspecting him as never before.

  I think I was luxuriating for a moment in the invisibility, which in general I hate, and came close to see how very well groomed and strong this man was, and that he had the glow of a king. His black eyes were uncommonly bright in his face, unencumbered by fleshly wrinkles that suggest weariness or an attitude, and his mouth in particular was very beautiful, more beautiful than I had realized. He wore fine clothes as before, the simple garments of this era, a long coat of soft fleecy wool, fine linen beneath it, and around his neck, the same scarf.

  I went to the far left corner of the room, a much better place than I had occupied the night before, this time quite far to the left of both men and the dingy lamps beside and above them, and the small circle of intimacy which they so unwillingly shared.