The Descent Part 51

'I'm sorry. He was a great friend to us all.'

De l'Orme digested the consequences, but still he didn't understand.

'They killed him?'

'They?' shouted the astronaut. Was Parsifal not hearing him, or were they stumbling on each other's meaning?

'Satan,' enunciated de l'Orme. His thoughts raced. They'd killed the hadal Caesar? Didn't the fools know Satan's value? In his mind's eye, de l'Orme saw some frightened young soldier with a high school education emptying his rifle clip into the shadows, and Thomas tumbling from the darkness into the light, dead.

But still de l'Orme did not understand.

'Yes, Satan,' said Parsifal. His voice was growing indistinguishable from the noise of his tempest. 'You do understand. My same conclusion. Mustafah. Now Thomas. Satan. Satan killed them.'

De l'Orme frowned. 'You said they found him, though. Satan.'

'No. Thomas,' clarified Parsifal. 'They found Thomas. A Bedouin goatherder came on him this afternoon. He was lying among the rocks near St. Catherine's monastery. He had fallen - or been pushed - from one of the cliffs on Mount Sinai. It's obvious who killed him. Satan did. He's hunting us down, one by one. He knows our patterns. Our daily lives. Our hiding places. While we were profiling him, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was profiling us.'

At last de l'Orme understood what Parsifal was telling him. Thomas was not the deceiver. It was someone even closer to him.

'Are you still there?' asked Parsifal.

De l'Orme cleared his throat. 'What have they done with Thomas's body?' he asked.

'Whatever desert monks do to their dead. Probably not much in the way of preservation. They want to get him into the ground as soon as possible. He'll be buried on Wednesday. There at the monastery.' He paused. 'You're not going, are you?'

So much to plan. So little, really. De l'Orme knew exactly what needed to happen next.

'It's your head,' said Parsifal.

De l'Orme set the phone back in its cradle.

Savannah, Georgia She woke in her bed to ancient dreams, that she was young again and beaux pursued her. The many became few. The few became one. In her dreams she was alone, like now, but alone differently, an ache in men's hearts, a memory that would never end. And this one man would never stop searching for her, even if she was lost in herself, even if she grew old.

She opened her eyes and the room was awash in moonbeams.

The coa.r.s.e linen curtains stirred with a breeze. Crickets sang in the gra.s.s off her porch. The window had come open.

A tiny light looped and spiraled in the room, a firefly.

'Vera,' said a man from the dark corner.

She jerked, and the gla.s.ses flew from her fingers.

A burglar, she thought. But a burglar who knew her name? Who spoke it so sadly?

'Who is it?' she said.

'I have been watching you sleep,' he said. 'In this light, I see the little girl your father must have loved.'

He was going to kill her. Vera could hear the determination in his tenderness.

A form rose in the moon shadows. Released of his weight, the wicker chair creaked in its weave, and he stepped forward.

'Who are you?' she asked.

'Parsifal didn't call you?'

'Yes.'

'Didn't he tell you?'

'Tell me what?'

'Who I am.'

A winter chill settled on her.

Parsifal had called yesterday, and she had cut short his roadside augury. The sky is falling, that's all she could make of his nonsense. Indeed, his burst of paranoid advice and omens had finally accomplished what Thomas had failed to do: convinced her their quest for the monster was a monster itself.

It had struck her that their search for the king of darkness was autogenetic, brought to life from nothing more real than their idea of it. In retrospect, their search had been feeding on itself for months, on its own clues and predictions and fancy scholarship. Now it was beginning to feed on them. Just as Thomas had warned, the quest had become dangerous. Their enemies were not the tyrants and would-be tyrants, the C.C. Coopers of the world, or their fabled Satan of the underworld. Rather, the enemy was their own overheated imaginings.

She had hung up on Parsifal. Repeatedly. He had called back several times, ranting and raving, sounding like a Yankee carpetbagger trying to scare her off the plantation. I'm staying put, she told him.

He had been right then.

Her wheelchair sat next to her nightstand. She did not try to talk him out of the murder. She did not question his method or test for his sadism. Maybe he would be swift and businesslike. So you die in bed after all, she thought to herself.

'Did he sing songs to you?' the man asked.

Vera was trying to arrange her courage and thoughts. Her heart was racing. She wanted to be calm.

'Parsifal?'

'Your father, I meant.'

His question distracted her. 'Songs?'

'Before you went to sleep.'

It was an invitation. She took it. She closed her eyes and threw herself into the search. It meant ignoring the crickets and penetrating her jackhammer heartbeat and descending into remembrances she had thought were gone forever. But there he was, and yes, it was night, and he was singing to her. She laid her head back on the pillow, and his words made a blanket and his voice promised shelter. Papa, she thought.

The floorboard squeaked.

Vera regretted that. If not for the sound, she would have stayed with the song. But the wood returned her to the room. Up through the heart she came, back into the land of crickets and moonbeams.

She opened her eyes and he was there, barehanded, with the firefly spinning a crooked halo high above his head. He was reaching for her like her lover. And then his face entered the light and she said, 'You?'

St. Catherine's Monastery, Jabal Musa (Mt Sinai) De l'Orme arranged the cups and placed the loaf of bread. The abbot had provided him a meditation chamber, the sort enjoyed for thousands of years by men and women seeking spiritual wisdom.

Santos would be charmed. He loved coa.r.s.eness and simplicity. The wine jug was clay. The table's planks had been hewn and nailed at least five centuries ago. No curtain in the window. No gla.s.s, even. Dust and insects were your prayer mates. Like words from the Bible, a bolt of sunlight stabbed the darkness of his cell. De l'Orme felt its warmth upon his face. He felt it travel east to west across his cheeks. He felt it setting.

It was cool this high, especially compared with the desert heat on his ride in. The road was no longer so good. De l'Orme had suffered its potholes. Because tourists no longer came here in such abundance, there was less reason to maintain the asphalt. The Holy Lands didn't pull them in like they used to. The revelation of h.e.l.l as a common network of tunnels had achieved what h.e.l.l itself could not, the end of spiritual fear. The death of G.o.d at the hands of existentialism and materialism had been grievous enough. Now the death of Supreme Evil had turned the landscape of afterlife into a cheap haunted house. From Moses to Mohammed to Augustine, the carnies had been good for their day, but no one was buying it anymore.

Along with the road that led to its high walls, St. Catherine's was falling into disrepair. De l'Orme had listened to the scandalized abbot tell how a number of the monks had turned idiorhythmic, acquiring property in the now-abandoned tourist village, eating meat, putting icons and mirrors and rugs in their monastic apartments. Such corruption led to disobedience, of course. And what was a monastery without obedience? Even the shapeless bramble tree in St. Catherine's courtyard, said to be Moses' burning bush, was dying.

De l'Orme drew a lungful of the evening breeze, breathing the incense like oxygen. He could smell an almond tree nearby, even now, in winter. Someone was growing a small pot of basil. And there was a sweet odor, ever so faint: the bodies of dead saints.

Anthropologists called it second burial, this practice of disinterring their dead after several years and adding the bones and skulls of monks to the monastery's collection. The enamel house was jokingly called the University. The dead go on teaching through their memory, so went the tradition. And what will you teach them, Thomas? de l'Orme wondered. Grace? Forgiveness? Or a warning against the darkness?

Evening vespers was beginning. Remarkably, a caged parakeet had been allowed into the courtyard. Its song matched the monks 'Kyrie eleison, the notes of a tiny angel.

At moments like this, de l'Orme longed to return to the cloth, or at least to the hermit's cell. If you let it be just as it was, the world was a surfeit of riches. Hold still, and the entire universe was your lover. But it was too late for that.

Santos arrived in a Jeep that rattled on the corrugated dirt. He disturbed a herd of goats, you could hear the bells and scurry of hooves. De l'Orme listened. Santos was alone. His stride was powerful and wide.

The parakeet stopped. The Kyrie eleisons did not. De l'Orme let him find his own way.

After a few minutes, Santos put his head inside de l'Orme's chamber. 'There you are,' he said.

'Come in,' said de l'Orme. 'I didn't know if you'd make it before nightfall.'

'Here I am,' said Santos. 'And look, you have our supper. I brought nothing.'

'Sit, you must be tired.'

'It was a long trip,' Santos admitted.

'You've been busy.'

'I came as quickly as I could. Is he buried, then?'

'Today. In the cemetery.'

'It was good?'

'They treated him as one of their own. He would have been pleased.'

'I didn't like him much. But you loved him, I know. Are you all right?'

'Certainly,' said de l'Orme. He made himself rise and opened his arms and gave Santos an embrace. The smell of the younger man's sweat and the barren Mosaic desert was good. Santos had the sun trapped in his pores, it seemed.

'He led a full life,' Santos sympathized.

'Who knows what more he might have discovered?' said de l'Orme. He gave the broad back a tap and they parted the embrace. De l'Orme sat carefully on his three-legged wooden stool. Santos lowered his satchel to the floor and took the stool de l'Orme had arranged on the far side of the table.

'And now? Where do we go from here? What do we do?'

'Let's eat,' said de l'Orme. 'We can discuss tomorrow over our meal.'

'Olives. Goat cheese. An orange. Bread. A jug of wine,' Santos said. 'All the makings for a Last Supper.'

'If you wish to mock Christ, that's your business. But don't mock your food,' de l'Orme said. 'You don't need to eat if you're not hungry.'

'Just a little joke. I'm famished.'

'There should be a candle, too,' said de l'Orme. 'It must be dark. But I had no matches.'

'It's still twilight,' said Santos. 'There's light enough. I prefer the atmosphere.'

'Then pour the wine.'

'What could have brought him here, I wonder,' said Santos. 'You told me Thomas had finished with the search.'

'It's clear now, Thomas was never going to be finished with the search.'

'Was there something here he was looking for?' De l'Orme could hear Santos's puzzlement. He was really asking why de l'Orme had instructed him to come all this way.

'I thought at first he had come for the Codex Sinaiticus,' de l'Orme answered. Santos would know that the Codex was one of the oldest ma.n.u.scripts of the New Testament. It totaled three thousand volumes, only a few of which still remained in this library. 'But now I think otherwise.'

'Yes?'

'I believe Satan lured him here,' de l'Orme answered.

'Lured him? How?'

'Perhaps with his presence. Or a message. I don't know.'

'He has a sense of theater, then,' Santos remarked between bites of food. 'The mountain of G.o.d.'

'So it appears.'

'You're not hungry?'

'I have no appet.i.te tonight.'

The monks were hard at work in the church. Their deep chant reverberated through the stone. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. Domine Deus.

'Are you crying for Thomas?' Santos suddenly asked.

De l'Orme made no move to wipe away the tears flowing down his cheeks. 'No,' he said. 'For you.'

'Me? But why? I'm here with you now.'

'Yes.'

Santos grew quieter. 'You're not happy with me.'

'It's not that.'