THE EIGHTH BIBLE OF NEW EGYPT
by Brian Fence
Fog billowed about his feet, clinging to his Paul Smith trainers like a needy orphan. Jacob sighed; as of late his field missions were becoming more and more grunt-‐‑worthy. He gave the air a cursory sniff. Slightly briny breeze, moldy leaves, scent of lumber crackling away in fireplaces. Fall in the Northeast. At least transport ops seemed to have got his drop point right. This time.
A slight buzzing in his ear made Jacob jump, and, face coloring in the night sky, he pushed back a hank of ginger hair and tapped the tiny gem in his ear with one finger. “Orange here,” Jacob said gruffly, his breath coming out in puffs of condensation.
“There you are, Orange,” replied a shrill, tinny voice. Jacob grimaced.
“Victoria? You’re my liaison tonight?”
“Orange, protocol. Refer to me by my surname.”
“Yes… Davidson.” Jacob sighed again, and quite deliberately, knowing that the piercing in his ear would pick up the noise and send it back to headquarters. A quick glance at his surroundings revealed that, unlike his last kerfuffle with transport, this teleport had been more or less accurate. Jacob crouched up against the side of an old-‐‑ fashioned ice cream parlor, flecks of its crimson paint flaking off the gnarled wooden boards.
“Can you confirm your location, Orange?” Davidson chirped in his ear, her RP accent strangely alien against the pronounced, almost Lovecraftian Americana of the town.
Jacob quirked his head around the corner of the ice cream parlor and peered across Main Street. An archaic building – a few stories tall and narrow with Corinthian columns, obviously Masonic in origin – delegated as the town hall and tourist welcome center boasted on a dimly-‐‑lit sign the words “WELCOME TO NEW EGYPT.” After checking his watch (23:03 EDT), Jacob confirmed that he had indeed arrived at his intended drop point.
“Glad to hear that transport ops have sorted out the kinks,” Davidson said in Jacob’s ear. “I heard that during your last operation, they landed you in the middle of a skirmish in Los Angeles.”
Jacob frowned. “I wouldn’t call a gang shootout a ‘skirmish’ per se, Davidson. They weren’t too pleased by a strange man in a red Burberry overcoat popping into the middle of their turf war.”
“You’re American, aren’t you? You should be used to that sort of thing,” Davidson said coyly.
“Half American, thank-‐‑you-‐‑very-‐‑much. And as someone whose travels tend to take her exclusively to the Ritz or Four Seasons, one might suggest you have a lot to learn about the world. Going silent now.”
Davidson started to reply, but Jacob was too quick: he deftly flicked his right ear and deactivated the gem of communication. The GPS tracking device in his watch would be enough for Davidson to monitor his movements; Jacob didn’t need condescending quips distracting him from the task at hand. He and Davidson hadn’t got off well from the get-‐‑go: at the new agents’ social several years ago, on top of their Oxford-‐‑Cambridge rivalry, Jacob had vomited on her Monolo Blahniks. Not a good way to start off a working relationship. Damn lavender wine.
Jacob snuck a peek up and down the avenue. It was peppered with streetlights, but was the only road in the small community to afford such a luxury. Considering the hour, it being a Tuesday (an unlucky day), and the moody fog blanketing the pavement, Main Street was barren of any passersby. And, since New Egypt was in the middle of nowhere, or so Jacob had been briefed, he wouldn’t have to worry much about CCTV. Still, as a precaution, he closed his eyes and gathered up the shadows around him, forming a subtle mantle that obfuscated his appearance.
The town hall, if you could call it that, was nestled between a martial arts studio and small, family-‐‑run printer. Jacob found that he could completely ignore the main entrance provided he scurried, wraith-‐‑like, down a narrow passage between the studio and the out-‐‑of-‐‑place columned building. He grimaced as some dew-‐‑laden cobwebs clung to his overcoat; then again, his boss footed the bill for Jacob’s dry cleaning, and there was a lingering Cab Sauv stain on one arm, anyway. What harm could the cobwebs do? He slipped out of the alleyway into a small, fenced backyard, empty except for two rubbish bins and numerous cigarette butts. Some ramshackle stairs led up to a backdoor.
Hidden from the street and its lights, Jacob dropped his glamour and let the veiled rays of moonlight guide his way up the steps. He idly fiddled with the old-‐‑fashioned knob and blinked in surprise. Any thirteen-‐‑year-‐‑old with a credit card and exposure to CSI could unlatch this bolt, and Jacob wondered if this building really housed what his superiors were after.
He wasn’t carrying his wallet, but thankfully, Jacob had resources other than credit cards about his person. Stilling his hand against the cheap metal doorknob, so flimsy he could probably melt it if he focused hard enough, Jacob breathed a soft word of command and felt a satisfactory click as the bolt slid inward. Tidy and crisp, just how Jacob liked a freshly-‐‑starched shirt; a door that needed no key other his mind.
Tech had given Jacob one of their Ghosters, a dubious blend of hardware and magic designed to combat new advances in science that the traditional schools of the arcane weren’t quite equipped to handle. In theory, the enchantments soldered into the wiring in the device, which resembled something of an MP3 player built by a first-‐‑year with shaky hands, combined with some sort of EMP-‐‑firewall-‐‑malware-‐‑whatchamajiggy-‐‑ kind-‐‑of-‐‑coding that Jacob’s mind couldn’t grasp, should combine magic and science in perfect harmony and nullify any alarm system within a one hundred-‐‑meter radius. Should.
Not much a fan of technology (Jacob broke his last three mobiles) but very much against getting arrested, Jacob pressed the center button on the questionable Ghoster and felt a slight tingle travel up his arm, making his hair stand on edge. The Ghoster pulsed three times, a signal that it had been successful, and indicated to Jacob that he had ten minutes of alarm-‐‑free exploration at his disposal. Lock picked, he turned the knob and stepped into abject blackness.
Jacob’s senses told him that the room was narrow and confined, and as the building’s backyard was fenced in, he reckoned he could venture a little light. Slipping the Ghoster into the inner breast pocket of his overcoat, Jacob cupped his hands together and, tapping into his magical reserves, created a dim white globe of light that hovered like a wisp above his palms. Its soft rays illuminated the room, revealing a small, cluttered kitchen meant for the town hall’s staff.
The ball of magelight exposed the dated, strangely patterned wallpaper and an iconic mustard-‐‑yellow refrigerator courtesy of 1974. In the sink were three dirty coffee cups and a sodden sponge, and Jacob immediately felt both a wave of revulsion and a desire to clean. He shook his head. Let his OCD kick in some other time; he was on a job. A white door in the corner of the kitchen was, aside from the backdoor, the only way out.
Dreading the impending creak Jacob was certain the door would make, he turned the knob and pulled it inward with the most ginger of motions. Thankfully, despite its old appearance, the wood and its metal hinges were in good repair, and the door swung open quietly, letting the magelight stream out onto the wide, main floor of the town hall.
Exhaling with relief, Jacob slid gracefully into the forum, his trainers making no sound against the polished wood. Despite the kitchen’s appearance, whoever was tasked with keeping the main display area clean did so with attention to detail. Though not very large compared to most public spaces, the main foyer housed several glass displays, centered and in rows, and was flanked by tall bookshelves on the eastern and western walls. A reception desk, uncluttered, was just off to Jacob’s left, and further past it, in the opposite corner, a set of stairs led to both an upper and a lower level.
Jacob dimmed his globe of conjured light to the faintest of levels so he could see just immediately in front of him. The town hall’s southern exposure, the main entrance, was adorned with large windows; the last thing Jacob wanted was for anyone happening along the street to think a burglar was rifling through township permits and memorabilia. He strode over to the closest glass display and commanded his light to hover over it, illuminating the contents.
Typical, he thought, his eyes glancing over the case’s contents. Various news clippings and old, yellowed photographs from the middle-‐‑ to late-‐‑nineteenth century of various important town figures were labeled in the shaky but trained hand of an elderly secretary. There was an artist’s rendition of the Jersey Devil; a crude, silly-‐‑looking creature that looked more like a melancholy mule that had mated with half the local deer population than any hellspawn. New Egypt looked fairly similar today as it did one hundred years ago, Jacob mused, though there were fewer pine trees now. Pine trees that grew out of sand. He shook his head and moved on.
At the next display Jacob quirked his brow in interest. Here were copies of some old censuses and lists of immigrants who had moved to New Egypt in the early twentieth century. His eyes darted up and down the pages looking for certain names, but the writing was partially faded and some documents torn; no doubt these were on display for decorative purposes rather than for research. Jacob sighed: he’d most likely have to head upstairs, where the office would have better records of such things (though he hoped those records didn’t involve a password-‐‑protected computer; he’d have to patch in Davidson for that).
Moving with the grace of any decent cat burglar, Jacob gave a cursory one-‐‑over of the remaining two displays; at first glance these too were devoid of anything noteworthy: more useless documents and irrelevant photos, and a plethora of leather-‐‑ bound, tarnished bibles whose pages curled with age and damp. Like most people in his line of work, Jacob was of the opinion that after you come across your hundredth or so old bible, they stopped being impressive. Still, as he blithely stepped toward the end of the glass case, he couldn’t help but tally the number of books: seven bibles in total.
Wondering why there were so many, Jacob mentally urged his magelight to hover over a small, poorly-‐‑typed index card at the end of the row. According to whoever had labeled the display, each of the seven bibles represented one of the seven churches established in the community of New Egypt in the early 1900s. Jacob blinked hard and reread the card. He was certainly no theologian, but seven different churches within a four-‐‑mile-‐‑radius created over one hundred years ago?
That seemed a bit excessive, even for Christians. Jacob thought back to his briefing on the town, and frowned. According to the recent census, the population was barely over two thousand. Seven places of worship today would still be extreme, even if the entire community claimed to be practicing, church-‐‑going Christians. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as a chilly wind blew across it. He turned.
Leaning languorously against the banister that framed the stairway heading down stood a short young woman – barely five foot, by Jacob’s estimate – with colorless hair in chunky, shoulder-‐‑length plaits and telescopically large glasses. She wore faded overalls and was barefoot. A sleepy, almost dazed look masked any consternation she might have felt at confronting a strange man like Jacob; the would-‐‑be burglar imagined his expression was considerably more nonplussed.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was lofty, just as if the girl had swallowed a cloud and it was now trying to escape.
“Hi,” Jacob replied flatly. He scrunched up his nose and scratched it with one finger. Everything suddenly felt and smelled very dusty.
“Your light,” the girl said as though a magical sphere of ghostly illumination was an everyday phenomenon, “I saw it from downstairs.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jacob. “Shall I put it out?”
“No, that’s all right. You have an accent. Are you from England?”
“Mostly; my father was from New York.” Despite the girl’s assurance, he reined in
the magelight so it was once again cupped in his hands. “What are you getting about here, this time of night?” Inwardly, Jacob found it ironic that, having broken in, he was the one questioning a local girl’s motives.
If the question fazed her, her face certainly didn’t let it show; she simply looked at Jacob as if he was part of her dream, and he wondered if the girl was a sleepwalker. He earnestly hoped that was the case; Jacob’s line of work did not suffer stuff-‐‑ups with civilians lightly, and young girls always proved problematic. Her gaze shifted, her eyes glassy like an opium addict in a fugue, to the case in front of which Jacob stood.
“Did you come here looking for the Eighth?” she asked. “The eighth what?”
The girl giggled. It was a strange, fey noise that reverberated throughout the foyer, the echo making it sound as though multiple people were laughing. Jacob found it extremely unnerving and wondered if there was a subtle way he could reactivate his gem of communication without the girl noticing. He wanted Davidson’s readings on this character.
“The Eighth Bible,” she said, a slight irritation creeping into her voice as if she were a teacher who had just been asked a very stupid question by a pupil. “We don’t keep it on display.”
“There’s another bible?” Jacob asked, curiosity triumphing over the absurd. “Where is it?”
“Downstairs,” the girl said. “Do you want to see?”
“Yes,” he breathed.
“Okay, that shouldn’t be a problem. Follow me.” She turned airily and began her slow procession back down the stairs. Jacob followed, nonchalantly touching the piercing in his ear and reestablishing the connection with headquarters. Davidson confirmed the signal, but Jacob didn’t dare respond in front of this strange young woman who was luring him into a basement. As he stepped down the first of the stairs, toward the darkness below, the girl turned around and looked up at him with hazel eyes magnified by her amazing, horn-‐‑rimmed spectacles.
“I’m Mabel,” she said.
“Jacob Orange.”
“Nice to meet you, Mister Orange. Please mind the ichor; the cleaning lady doesn’t come until Thursday.”
Davidson’s voice squealed in his ear, but Jacob steeled his nerves and followed the strange girl down the steps and into the basement of New Egypt’s town hall.
The old wood creaked mightily as Jacob followed the contrastingly silent girl down the stairway, his magelight the only source of illumination. He wondered, offhandedly, if Mabel could see in the dark, or perhaps, and this was much more likely, she was so used to trekking up and down the old building’s stairs that her feet knew the way without the guidance of sight. Davidson, for her part, was still ranting in his ear, and Jacob started to regret having reestablished communication.
“All instruments and spells indicate that the only two life signs present in the immediate vicinity are human,” the clipped voice said.
Well, thanks for that, thought Jacob. Now be quiet.
Thankfully, Jacob had been maintaining his ball of magelight and its pale white light guided his feet safely down the narrow wooden stairs. At the bottom was a small landing and an utterly nondescript wooden door. Such an uninteresting portal would ordinarily not intrigue Jacob, but considering he had broken into a municipal building and was now following a pale, strangely calm girl into its bowels, the door was decidedly a curiosity.
“Mister Orange,” said Mabel when they reached the bottom of the steps. She extended one short, narrow finger toward the upper portion of the door. “Would you mind shining your light over there?”
Still slightly fazed at the young girl’s capacity to remain composed in the presence of obvious magecraft, Jacob managed to nod and willed the globe to hover near the upper portion of the doorframe, a few feet above Mabel’s ashy hair. Rays of light washed over the aged wood and faded markings began to appear on the paneling. Jacob peered, and for the umpteenth time in the past few months, wondered if the prescription in his contact lenses needed to be increased.
“A little more light, maybe,” giggled Mabel. “The markings are old and need retouching.”
Jacob cast a dubious glance at the back of the girl’s head but complied, increasing the radius and brightness of the sphere. White light flooded the cramp square area before the door, and in the increased luminosity the markings, deep crimson in color, began to take more definite shapes in the mage’s eyes. Jacob felt like he was at the eye doctor and a new lens had been slipped over his eye to enhance the clarity of the doctor’s chart. The markings were Roman letters.
“V-‐‑R-‐‑S-‐‑N-‐‑S-‐‑M-‐‑V, S-‐‑M-‐‑Q-‐‑L-‐‑I-‐‑V-‐‑B,” recited Jacob. “Well, I certainly didn’t expect to see the Benedictine exorcism formula on this job.” He frowned. The code wasn’t anything he hadn’t come across before, but the briefing for this job mentioned nothing of seven, now possibly eight different churches, one of them now obviously based on medieval Catholicism and its demon warding rites. Jacob screwed his eyes at the letters; the ink was dark red and had dried in an awkward manor, runnier than proper paint should have.
“How old is this?”
“It was here since the building was constructed,” answered Mabel.
“Is it ordinary for things to be written in blood around here?”
“Nope, but maybe they were out of ink,” she giggled. “Shall we go in? Oh, you’re not a demon, are you? The charm is still active.” Mabel turned and focused her spotlight-‐‑wide stare on the man in the red overcoat. He looked sternly back. “You look serious.”
“It’s the English in me. How do you know what that writing means?”
Mabel gave Jacob another frustrated stare. “Catholic school,” she intoned gravely. “Fair play.” Jacob wasn’t Catholic, but his father had been. While his parents were still married, Jacob recalled, his mother spent a fair amount of time rolling her eyes whenever the elder Orange recounted the tortuous days of his youth, spent under the strict rule of the nuns. Rifling through his memories, though, Jacob didn’t recall his father sharing any stories involving exorcisms.
“All right, Mister Orange, follow me, please.” Mabel turned back toward the door and put her hand on its tarnished brass handle. The door swung open with absolutely no sound, which explained how Jacob had not heard Mabel’s approach. He glanced up at the letters on the doorframe one last time and took a deep breath. Vade retro satana indeed, Jacob thought. At least I’m not a demon, though Davidson might have something to say about that.
“Kindly watch your step,” Mabel said as she disappeared into the darkness beyond the door.
Jacob summoned the light back to his hand and held it out before him, like a magical torch. The ghostly whiteness, despite being magnified, couldn’t penetrate the oppressive black more than a foot in front of Jacob, and so with tentative steps he crossed the threshold. As his stride reached the ground, the sole of his trainer sunk into something fresh and sticky. Jacob was rewarded with a sickening squish. He didn’t want to look down.
At the edge of the light’s radius, Mabel’s face suddenly popped into view, looking for all the world a beheaded apparition. “I told you to watch your step,” she said crossly, the white light flashing off her glasses.
“I presumed you were just being polite.” Jacob’s voice was equally cross. He paid over one hundred quid for these shoes.
“When I said ichor,” Mabel said, “I meant ichor.” She retreated from the magelight, blanketed once more in a shroud of darkness.
Feeling chastised and ignoring Davidson’s persistent queries, Jacob begrudgingly looked at his feet and focused a concentrated ray of magelight downward. Piled about his foot and covered in a green, viscous liquid were various torn arms, remnants of muscles and sinew, and numerous unidentifiable chunks that looked like they belonged in a boarding school lunch hall. From the pile rose the sickening stench of formaldehyde, which Jacob found far more offensive than the grotesque remains at his feet.
He fished into the side pocket of his coat and pulled out a handkerchief. He held it up to his nose and said to Mabel, who still lingered off in the shadows, “I don’t mean to alarm you, Mabel, but you have a pile of limbs here, coated in green slime. And my shoe is flattening a triceps.”
“They didn’t pay attention to the warning,” came a vague reply from the darkness.
Jacob sighed. He was in deep now – quite literally, thinking about his sodden shoe – and his agency frowned on leaving these sorts of messes to be settled by local authorities. Shaking some of the goop off his foot in a peculiar little dance, Jacob hopped over the remains and proceeded to follow Mabel down a nondescript, wood-‐‑ paneled hallway with no discernible end. His one foot squelched as he treaded up to the pale girl.
“What do you do down here?” Jacob asked as he matched her gait. She practically slid across the floor. His orders were to retrieve information on one of the agency’s targets who had recently passed through New Egypt, not get involved with sticky green corpses and strange girls who looked like bad facsimiles of normal. Still, Davidson was silent for the moment, which indicated to Jacob that she at least agreed with his movements thus far. Lord knows she’d let him know if she disagreed.
“I live down here,” Mabel replied.
“Doesn’t it get rather dark without any lights on?”
“The Eighth Bible is very old and bright light could damage it.” After a moment’s thought, during which Mabel slowed to a standstill, she added, “I have very good night vision.”
They resumed their walk, which by Jacob’s reckoning had already far exceeded the property line of the old town hall, in silence. As the unusual couple — one bright, one pale — continued what began to be a slight descent, a prickling sensation at the tips of his fingers warned Jacob of magecraft up ahead. It didn’t feel necessarily malignant, but he was wary all the same. Jacob could sense they were reaching their destination.
“Mabel,” he asked, “is it just you down here?”
“There used to be more,” Mabel answered. To Jacob’s ears she was constrained, guarded; then again, the girl wasn’t exactly expressive to begin with. “I’m the last one now, unless you count the Ones who try to come in. But they explode once they walk past the charm.”
“You’re referring to demons, then.”
Mabel shrugged. “I’ve only seen their pieces. I don’t normally go upstairs.”
“How long have you been here?”
“What year is it now?”
“2011.”
“Forty-‐‑two years,” Mabel replied after a minute of subtraction. “You’re the first visitor I’ve had to entertain. There, we’re almost to the door now; I’m going to have to ask you to dim your light.”
Jacob nearly tripped, his slimy shoe not providing much traction against Mabel’s cool delivery. The girl looked barely older than eighteen, yet she claimed to be living in this basement, warded from demonic entities by an old exorcist rite, since 1969. For all his studies in the arcane, Jacob was fairly certain immortality or magical facelifts were not on any of his syllabi. And yet here she was, all alone, yards beneath and away from the town hall.
“Mabel,” Jacob ventured, “how could you have seen my light? This hallway is quite long, and you’ve led me to a shut door.” It was true: by now they had stopped in front of heavy metal door, a sharp contradiction to the wooden paneling that Jacob had thus far encountered. Looking around, he saw that the hallway itself had become, without him noticing, completely stone, and on top of that, it felt positively ancient. He shivered; there was strange magic at work here, an older sort that mankind no longer had the grace to access.
The timeless girl pursed her lips and pushed her wide-‐‑framed lenses up her nose. “I didn’t exactly see it. Your light. I kind of, you know, felt it.”
Jacob didn’t detect any sort of magical potential within Mabel, though a trained magician such as himself would know how to disguise it. He looked at her, head to toe, bare feet and overalls, and tried to sense any sort of lingering enchantments about her. Nothing. Whatever mystery surrounded Mabel and this strange building and the Eighth Bible it housed, it lied beyond the sturdy door in front of them. Inwardly sighing, Jacob decided it was time to break radio silence. Davidson had become strangely quiet, absorbing the audio information from his stud and various data from Jacob’s watch.
“Davidson,” Jacob said, “you still there?”
“Of course I am,” said a terse voice in his ear. “I’ve been monitoring everything you’re doing, and I’ve also escalated the development to Dr. Munroe. He encourages you continue with this line of investigation before obtaining the target information.”
“You don’t have to worry about time, either,” Mabel said. Had she been able to hear Davidson’s relay? The device’s magic should have prevented that. “There’re no alarm systems down here to have to silence.” She giggled.
“The girl is acutely aware of your movements, Orange,” Davidson said, rather unnecessarily. “Proceed with caution, unlike usual.”
“Back to quiet mode it is,” Jacob said, and left Davidson to her own devices. She could prattle on in his ear all she fancied; he’d learned to block her out months ago. He dimmed his light to the faint level he had used in the foyer of the exhibition room. “Is this level acceptable?”
Mabel quirked her head to the side, considering. “Yes, I think it’s all right.” “Okay, then I’m ready to see this ‘Eighth Bible’ of yours.”
Tugging on one of her plaits like a schoolgirl, Mabel turned and fished out a jangling set of keys from the deep pocket of her bell-‐‑bottomed overalls. The door, painted a red that reminded Jacob of the ice cream parlor outside, had several slots for different keys. It seemed a bit extravagant; if whatever unholy force managed to avoid evisceration from the potent rite on the door at the bottom of the stairs, a few old locks weren’t going to be much of a deterrent. Still, Mabel turned the key for each lock in a deliberate, ritualistic manner. The process took almost two minutes and Jacob’s bated breath left him lightheaded.
At last, the door swung open onto a space furnished like Jacob’s image of a 1960s living room, with harshly patterned prints, orange sofas, uncomfortable-‐‑looking chairs in taupe, and a large, box-‐‑shaped television. The room smelled of wet sand, dust, and sulfur. There were no lamps that Jacob could notice, and his magelight was quite dim, but nothing hampered his vision. Jacob’s conjured globe of illumination faded away as his concentration slipped and he gaped at the source of light.
Toward the back of the room, bound to metal rigging fashioned into an iron crucifix was a humanoid being. Solidly built, it had the appearance of a healthy young Adonis, yet it lacked any discernible genitalia. The room’s source of light was its pale skin; it was adularescent, giving off the soft bluish glow of moonstone. The creature’s arms were strapped to the crossbar of the crucifix, with bundles of inch-‐‑thick wires fused into its armpits, evoking an image of Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows.
Its entire body thrummed softly, like a machine. The wiring fed into several ancient looking bits of machinery, though Jacob couldn’t clearly ascertain their purpose; he barely knew how to program his DVR. His gaze was primarily drawn to the calm resignation on the creature’s porcelain face; its eyes were shut and its perfect lips were slightly parted. Still, with every thrum, there was a twitch in the being’s temples, and its hands – elongated, with fingers extending over a foot in length as long narrow spikes — were severed at the knuckles, crippling it. It leaked a thick, congealed substance with a bluish luster into buckets on the floor.
Jacob was frozen in awe. His knowledge of these creatures was rudimentary; contact with them was for agents with far higher security clearance than he possessed. He knew his watch, heating up against his bare wrist, was processing and analyzing a huge amount of data, more than it was capable of, and streaming it back to headquarters. Davidson would be getting readings she shouldn’t be permitted to see. But Jacob, in his red overcoat, his smart trainers, pressed denim, and crisp white shirt, had no choice but to proceed. He swallowed, hard.
“Davidson,” he croaked, his throat dry. “Are you getting these readings?”
“Yes, Orange. They’re… atypical; astronomical…”
“When was the last reported contact with the malakim?”
“I don’t have access to those records…”
“Davidson, I know you can get me the information I need.”
“…hold on,” she said succinctly.
Mabel, despite Jacob’s protests, walked across the odd living space to stand beside the massive creature, demonstrating their sheer difference in size; the malak had to be nearly eight feet tall. She patted its thigh affectionately, as though it were a dog. There was no response from the being, just the steady, predictable pulsing and its strange, blue light that caught Mabel’s spectacles. She became otherworldly, eyes miles away in the ethereal light, and was at once both beautiful and terrifying. Jacob blinked and dared not breathe.
“Orange.” Davidson’s concise voice jarred Jacob’s attention. “A malak was found, in stasis, in 1882.”
“Where?” Jacob asked.
“South of Cairo, among the ruins of Memphis.”
Jacob blanched and resisted the urge to button up his overcoat, even though he felt more warm than cold. Pine trees growing out of sand. Seven churches and a strange, never-‐‑aging girl living under a Masonic building. The malakim. The mage looked between Mabel and the creature, unsure of how to proceed. Davidson was silent, but Jacob imagined her hunched over her computer keyboard, one hand white-‐‑knuckled on her headset.
“New Egypt, eh?” Jacob said to the air.
Mabel smiled and stroked the creature’s long leg with one finger. “This is our Eighth Bible; this is our angel.”
Jacob felt an uncharacteristic bead of sweat form on his brow. He was repulsed at getting any closer to the glowing, hairless giant; what little he knew of the beings suggested they were highly sensitive to people gifted in the magical arts and, above all else, it seemed wrong. The agency, and his studies in the arcane in graduate school, had merely stressed one important rule after their brief description of the malakim: avoid direct contact at all costs. And yet there was Mabel, the girl misplaced in time, happily loving the malak as if it were a goat in a petting zoo.
“Mabel,” Jacob croaked, his throat tight. “What are you doing down here with that?”
The girl once again assumed an air of one extremely put-‐‑upon. She fixed her spectacles up on the bridge of her nose and looked at Jacob squarely. “Well, we obviously can’t keep him up with the rest of the bibles.”
Frowning, Jacob looked at the figure, crucified and dripping lifeblood from its gored knuckles. Obviously not. “Okay, Mabel,” he asked, “but why have you hobbled this poor creature? What have you done to its hands?”
“An angel with no wings can’t fly away,” the girl said. Her voice was distant and soft, like a recording played over a telephone. Mabel tilted her head up toward the malak’s mangled limbs, the knuckles steadily leaking the congealed, azure slime into the buckets with a sickening plop. In the pale light, the nondescript, every-‐‑girl face of Mabel was obscured by a shroud of confusion, as though she were trying to articulate the proper response to Jacob’s question. “They grow back so quickly. I blink, and they’re back. I wonder how many times I’ve had to cut them down?”
A wave of nausea welled up in the recesses of Jacob’s empty stomach — he never ate before field assignments — and he worried for a moment he may dry heave. The viscous blood, wobbling like a drunken aspic as it fell, gave off a faint, floral scent. Combined with the reek of formaldehyde from before and the oppressive ancient scent clinging to this 1960s parlor, Jacob was overcome by the odor of his environment. It was the sickly-‐‑sweet scent of an open-‐‑casket viewing surrounded by bouquet after bouquet of funeral flowers, a painfully heady stench that reminded Jacob of his father’s wake.
“Orange.” Davidson’s voice was unusually shaky as it interrupted Jacob’s bout of illness. “Dr. Munroe has informed me that as of now he will be your handler for the duration of the mission. I am to stay on and monitor readings, but that is all. He is already patched in from our Japanese branch.”
“Agent,” said a deep bassoon of a voice in Jacob’s ear.
Jacob gulped hard and retreated a few paces, back toward the inapt metal door that connected the phantasmagoric room to the narrow passage to the town hall. Hats Munroe was Jacob’s superior: a well-‐‑liked, grandfatherly man with a robust belly and a madcap blanket of downy grey hair. Son of a prominent Saint Lucian family, Hats had left his home at eighteen and had quickly risen through the ranks of Jacob’s agency. His career spanned thirty years; his actual rank was classified to agents like Jacob and Davidson. Although amiable (and highly tolerant of his subordinates’ quirky characters), during operations he became dreadfully serious and professional.
“I’ve gone over Davidson’s observations and the transcript of your interactions, Orange,” Munroe’s voice continued. It was too powerful to be constrained by the gem and threatened to severely throttle Jacob’s eardrum. “Henceforth this mission is sealed at security level Binah; let it be known that under the discretion of Hats Munroe agents Jacob Tennyson Orange and Victoria Abigail Davidson have been granted temporary Binah-‐‑level clearance.”
Jacob sucked in a cool breath of air through his teeth. Both he and Davidson were only recently cleared up through Tiferet; to suddenly jump to highly classified intelligence was a terrifying prospect. He knew he was good at his job and one of the more competent magicians in the agency, but part of that knowledge came with a vague hunch regarding the deep secrets the agency might contain. Where would Jacob and Davidson be, after this encounter was over, one way or another?
Mabel was looking at Jacob with a slightly amused expression, as though she were watching a comedy of the sort Jacob could only watch when sufficiently in the cups. Meanwhile, the malak hung in its position of torment, the serene, Christ-‐‑like look still on its face. Aside from the slight hum of the machinery wired to the creature and the steady drop of its thick blood, the room was silent. Jacob awaited his next order before proceeding; while Binah gave him more freedom than his previous security clearance, he did not want to step on anyone’s toes – particularly not those of a superior-‐‑ranking agent with arms the size of Jacob’s waist and a devastating penchant for causing thunderstorms when angry.
Unfortunately, Jacob was about to receive the authority he didn’t exactly want. “Listen up, Orange,” came the lead-‐‑heavy voice of Munroe. “I don’t have time to quiz you on your knowledge of the malakim. It’s imperative that we recover the subject, but not disconnect it from its machinery or allow it to awaken at any cost. Secure the girl and withdraw; I’m ordering a containment team in.”
“Understood, sir.” Jacob asked. He took a few tentative steps forward, and immediately the piercing emitted an ear-‐‑tearing screech of static. Jacob’s ears rang, and before he lost his hearing completely, he managed to flick the device’s off setting in one epic stumble. “Shit,” he swore, and Mabel let out a clipped gurgle of laughter, like a child amused by an adult using a naughty word.
“Mabel,” Jacob began after he regained his composure, “why do you keep this creature down here?”
“He’s our Eighth Bible. He’s the source of divine knowledge; we have to preserve him,” she answered warily.
“But he can’t give you any information if he’s… asleep.” Jacob took another stride toward the creature and the curious girl, his head swimming and vision blurring the closer he stepped toward the impossible duo.
Mabel frowned. “The others said, before they went away, that if the angel were to wake up, he would vanish, and our job of protecting the Bible would be over.” The girl’s overalls, dragging against the floor, made a strange thrashing sound incongruous with the machinery’s rhythmic pulsing.
Jacob ventured another foot forward. A queer sensation overtook him, as though time itself had gone wobbly, and his tongue felt heavy as he tried to speak. Words oozed out slow and thick, like his vocal chords had been paralyzed in zero gravity or caught in slow motion. He could barely form the girl’s name.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Mabel said. “It happens when you’re around the Bible. You’ll get used to it in no time.” The pale-‐‑haired girl seemed to find this statement amusing, snickering as though she had cracked a particularly coy joke.
After a moment’s effort, the dapper magician seemed to be able to flex his larynx and shake off some the fuzziness in his head. He cast a look down at his watch – it was digital, and much like the Ghoster, laced with both intricate wiring and sensitive spells – but the display was warped, numbers and symbols completely illegible. Whatever radiated from the malak appeared to jam both Jacob’s watch and muddle his words. Jacob wondered whether the effect was produced by the intrinsic nature of the malak itself or from the machinery it was jacked into.
“What do you protect the angel from?” Jacob finally asked. “The ward at the bottom of the stairs seems fairly effective.” He grimaced, still in mourning for his soiled shoe.
Mabel cast Jacob a speculative glance. “Sometimes, people come for it.”
“What kind of people?”
From up above, there was a low rumble, noticeably drawn out like a sound effect played in slow motion. Jacob furtively glanced over his shoulder, toward the door, and wondered if that was the sound of his agency’s containment unit arriving. While certain events and protocol required speedy handling, the mage was fairly certain – despite the broken watch – that barely two minutes had passed since his orders from Dr. Munroe. They shouldn’t be here this quickly.
“Mr. Orange,” Mabel said warily, “what was that noise?”
Jacob frowned at his timepiece and willed it to work again. Something was strange, slowing his thoughts. He shook his wrist, as if it would make the watch start working again. Even the air around the malak seemed thick and constricting; the only things that seemed consistent were the steady hum from the two machines, the light pulsing from the crucified creature, and the sickening globs of blood that fell in steady intervals into the bucket.
“Mabel, what sort of magic is this?”
“Angels are messengers; they exist only to deliver their message. I guess,” Mabel said, and tugged on her braid in deliberate slowness, “you can say that an angel actually is the message.”
That wasn’t exactly giving Jacob any new information; he had a pretty keen interest in etymology, anyway, and knew what ‘malak’ meant in Hebrew. As an experiment, he shifted – at a begrudgingly lethargic speed – a few feet away from the angel, back to his former position. Immediately a bleep and warm sensation against his wrist indicated that his watch had powered up and had begun processing huge amounts of data once more. His head was less fuzzy. Jacob’s hunch was correct: immediate proximity to the being distorted his perception and instruments.
The rumbling up above sounded more consistent; it had become a constant thud like loud footsteps against wood flooring. Glancing at his watch, Jacob blinked with incredulity. Twenty-‐‑two minutes had flown by in the few moments he was adjacent to the malak. It didn’t just distort his perception; the bloody creature warped time. Jacob clicked his earring back to live mode with a tug of impatience.
“There you are, Orange,” came Munroe’s voice. “As I was about to explain, the essence of the malakim noticeably skews space and time around them.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Jacob, trying to mask the irritation in his voice. “How do you propose I proceed? The girl is in physical contact with the malak.”
“You have authority to use force.”
Sighing, Jacob muttered the word “understood” and gave the girl a stern look. Would she listen to reason? Jacob doubted she’d be interested in abandoning what she saw as her divine purpose because some dandy who could conjure up magic balls of light told her to do so. The prospect of rendering her unconscious didn’t exactly appeal to the magician, however.
“Mr. Orange,” Mabel said his name again. “Are people coming to take the Bible away?”
“Yes, Mabel.” Why mince words? “So we have to get you out of here before they arrive.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
Steadily, from deep within the whitewashed girl’s core, Jacob could sense a growing bubble of power. Blanching, Jacob realized with dismay that Mabel was a magician as well, and one competent enough to hide any signature of magic within her. In the pale blue light, Mabel, so faded and dull, suddenly blossomed into a fiery version of herself, her aura blazing with arcane energy. Instinctively Jacob wove around him the intricate webbing of a magical shield.
“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” Mabel apologized. She clicked her tongue, considering matters for a moment. “It would have been easier if you were a demon.”
Jacob took a deep breath, his eyes focusing solely on the girl, trying to gauge her power. It took him a few seconds to process the fact that the malak’s fingers, previously severed at the knuckles, had regenerated and grown to their proper length. Each digit was now nearly four feet long.
“Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!” cursed Jacob as he stumbled backward, landing sharply on his buttocks. He crawled back to the metal door, his magical shielding having deflected most of an extremely large gout of flame that had poured forth from a glowing Mabel. Evocation of that sort wasn’t easy; Jacob hadn’t come across an entity yet that could summon fire like that so effortlessly. His defenses fizzled. Mabel stood a few yards away, beaming all the world at Jacob as though she were his doting mother.
“Orange,” rumbled Munroe in Jacob’s ear. “The girl’s energy output is off the charts. She should not have been able to conceal her aura that well.”
“I realize that, Dr. Munroe!” Jacob replied hurriedly. He scrambled to his feet, hastily trying to reassemble the ramshackle tangle of magical threads surrounding him. Mabel stayed adjacent to the malak, her hand wrapped around one of its obscenely long fingers. Her eyes, blazing amber, bored into Jacob’s own, assessing him and his shield. The probing was mutual: Jacob sensed she was channeling power from the malak and at once he knew he was outclassed. “Might I have an ETA on the containment team?”
There was a palpable silence, and Jacob’s ear yearned for a response of something like ‘already on site.’ He counted twenty-‐‑seven heartbeats, during which he and Mabel stared each other down and Munroe maintained radio silence. Jacob considered striking back; the girl wasn’t shielded, but she was leaking raw energy. As there was a celestial being hooked up to shoddily-‐‑rigged machines and Mabel was using it as a conduit, he daren’t try an all-‐‑out assault lest the malak and its wiring be disturbed.
Munroe’s response finally came, monotone. “The containment team is experiencing some difficulties obtaining access to the underground facilities.”
“Pardon?”
“They cannot get past the ward.”
“The VRS protects against demons,” Jacob said.
“Yes. Please remove it quickly.”
“Oh.” Great. So his agency employed demons; Binah-‐‑level clearance was already proving a bit too shady for Jacob’s liking. He’d have to sort that out later. “Mabel,” he said, “we don’t have to fight. The people can’t get through.” Jacob would have to somehow disarm the ward if he wanted to receive any demonic backup.
The air before Jacob wavered and shimmered and he felt as though his bare skin had been tickled by a feather-‐‑light touch. Mabel was still gauging the strength of his shielding; perhaps, Jacob wondered, she had expected the first blast to obliterate him. Maybe her inexperience would allow the rakish magician to exploit the naïve side of the enigmatic girl. He took a measured step forward, holding his breath – and shield.
“You cannot remove our angel,” Mabel said firmly. With the fiery color in her cheeks, she was looking more and more like a proper human. Jacob felt her magical probing recede, and decided to make his move. The force empowering Mabel was infinitely stronger than he was, but that didn’t mean Mabel’s control was better. The arcane yielded to one’s will, and brute strength alone could always be outwitted. What Jacob needed was a diversion, something to buy him time to get back up to the Benedictine ward and get some assistance, demonic or otherwise.
Back in France (a wine-‐‑filled gap year that ended up in many falls into the Seine with another magician), Jacob, or Tenny as his companion had called him, had picked up a few tricks to impress and bedazzle, purely for enjoyment. He moved his right arm in an arc with the grace of a ballet dancer, long fingers extended dramatically. Where his limb swept through the dusty air of the parlor, a shimmering followed in its wake. Gathering the dust motes in the air and applying his will to bend the light around them, Jacob painted a series of sparkling diamonds, miniature stars, that floated through the air in multiple colors as though each mote had been struck with a prism. It was a glamour that didn’t require much power, just deft control in its shaping.
Whatever wisp of personality remained in the husk of Mabel — whatever young woman from the Sixties that liked flared pants, the Doors, and Twinkies – hopefully would see the simplistic beauty in Jacob’s magic. It had been enough to move Jacob to tears on the bank of the Seine, as his curly-‐‑haired friend, drunk as a skunk on cheap wine, produced the mystical fireworks display. Multihued snowflakes settled into shades of deep greens, oranges, and crimson and hung in the air in the pattern of autumn leaves. New England in October: it was the very definition of glamour. The musk in the air was suddenly replaced by a dusting of fragrant, wild chamomile.
“What are those lights?” asked Mabel; her voice still rumbled with power, but there was a faint quiver in her delivery that gave Jacob hope. “What is that smell?”
Cautiously, Jacob lowered his arm, leaving the speckled rainbow dancing in the still air. “You’ve been alone in the dark for a long time, Mabel,” he said softly. “Come and see the beauty of the world outside.”
Some of the fire in Mabel’s eyes receded, and Jacob could acutely sense her magical reserves starting to quiet. Quivering, Mabel removed her hand from the malak’s finger and Jacob felt the power rush away from her, the blazing aura dying down to a pale flickering. The hand, still shaking, extended its pale fingers toward Jacob slowly, as if pushing it through the air required great physical effort.
“Now, Orange,” boomed the voice in his ear.
This part of the job was one Jacob did not care for, as he preferred his magic to remain elegant and slightly more esoteric than Munroe’s hands-‐‑on approach. Still, there was no doubt that Mabel had access to higher magic, and it was in the agency’s best interest to prevent untrained talent run free, even if it was in New Jersey. Jacob sighed, and while whispering, “Forgive me, Mabel,” he grossly gesticulated forward, exuding a wave of force in her direction.
From behind her impressive spectacles, Mabel’s eyes widened and she lurched forward as though Jacob had just punched her in the gut, a clipped cry of pain ringing out earthily. Instinctively Mabel’s hands went to her sides, and the suddenness of Jacob’s assault severed any lingering link with the malak. Focusing his thoughts on the oppressive, thick atmosphere of the room, Jacob pulled the stuffy air around Mabel and whorled it into thick, tangible coils. Like throwing a sheet over a bed, the air glided over the befuddled girl, and with a flick of his wrist, Jacob tightened the invisible cords. Mabel was bound.
“Mr. Orange, why?” she asked. There were tears in her eyes.
Jacob was surprised to find that his eyes, as well, were starting to brim with salty sadness. “I’m sorry,” he said. He prompted the wind to nudge Mabel away from the malak, until she stood about five feet away. “But this is ultimately for your protection.” Now Jacob just wished he believed that.
“Is the girl neutralized?”
“Yes, Dr. Munroe,” Jacob replied, not bothering to hide the weariness in his voice. “Quickly, then; deal with the ward.”
“Understood, sir.”
Jacob deliberately turned away from the miserable sight of the young girl, bound by his magic, and dashed back up the hallway toward the enchanted wooden door. His shoe squelched all the while, but Jacob didn’t care so much. This was supposed to be a simple intel mission; now Jacob was assaulting confused girls and dealing with powerful magical entities. Perversely, he mused on what sort of uptight reaction Davidson must be experiencing back at headquarters.
Away from the malak, Jacob brought his magelight back up to full strength and positioned it above the frame to highlight the hastily-‐‑drawn bloody Roman letters painted onto the wood. He grimaced. Disenchanting wasn’t a particular difficulty for the mage, but Jacob loathed messing with the Catholic stuff; it was often ass-‐‑backwards, inelegant in execution, and left a bitter smell like burning plastic and turpentine. Still, an order was an order, and Jacob had to let the demons inside. He sighed.
Cracking his knuckles like a fighter about to step into the ring, Jacob tentatively felt about with his inner magical sense to gauge the strength of the charm. To be this effective (Jacob had avoided the tangle of monster limbs this time, but their presence was still quite marked) after one hundred years yet be so shoddily made, the desperation of the priests that scribed the rite must have been intense indeed. Clearly they had been in a hurry to secure the malak from its demonic pursuers. Jacob knew from experience, however, that things done in haste often had loopholes one could exploit.
And bam, there it was. Jacob’s investigation easily spotted a weakness in some of the dried blood, which acted as a vessel for the power of the priests’ charms. The chants the Benedictines had used shaped their inner power, invoking divine energies and keeping the magical working extremely focused and purposed. But in their hurried work, one of the casters must have faltered in his concentration toward the end of the painting; to Jacob’s arcane eye, the letter ‘Q’ of the formula – ‘quae’ – lacked strength and conviction, and thus its connection to the surrounding letters was tenuous. There was a weak link in the chain.
Squinting at the character, Jacob recalled a charm of dispersal. With the cool methodology of an executioner, he slashed with his right hand in a swift downward arc, his extended hand carving a mystical path directly through the middle of the weak ‘Q.’ There was a brief crackling noise and a whiff of ozone as one by one, the blood letters cracked and peeled away from the walls, the flecks disintegrating in midair. As they faded Jacob sensed the strength of the charm diminish into nothingness.
A tumultuous crash, like a hundred claps of thunder tearing the sky, rang through the corridor. The paneling above the doorframe snapped clean, ripping the door from its hinges and splintering it in twain. Jacob stumbled as the magical recoil clocked him right in the forehead, an invisible jolt of pure arcane pain. That wood had been bearing a lot of despair; Jacob winced, and knuckled himself in the temple. The priests had been in a hurry indeed. The acrid scent Jacob loathed assaulted his nostrils.
Immediately the sound of footsteps scurrying down from above fell on Jacob’s ears, and, having a general desire not to get tangled with demons, whether they were on his side or not, he scampered down the bleak slope toward the strange room to secure his prisoner. Jacob dimmed the magelight as he went, not wanting to alarm Mabel any further, and quickly came upon the room. Mabel, her cheeks stained with tears, still remained bound, separated from her precious Bible. The malak’s expression remained unchanged. Rushing up to the girl, Jacob dismissed the coils of air trapping her, and she collapsed to the floor at his feet.
Seven pallid men, about Mabel’s height, all dressed in the same, nondescript khaki uniform swept through the metal door and immediately surrounded the malak. Their hair was lank and was the color of dust in the moonlight, and they were all identical and beautiful, having an elegance like a great hero of old nobly walking to his death. Mabel clung to Jacob’s leg, her grip a vice against his thigh. Faintly, Jacob could hear the word ‘no’ repeatedly falling from her lips. The demons began to speak.
“Oh, Christ,” Jacob said, clapping one hand to his forehead. “Literally. That sounds like some kind of Semitic language. An old kind of… Aramaic? Phoenician?”
“Fall back, Orange,” Munroe said.
The voices were in perfect unison; they were slow and monotonous, almost performing a chant, but they were clarion-‐‑clear, more uplifting than somber. A heavenly chorus. Jacob watched in awe, a trembling Mabel at his side, as the malak opened its eyes, pupils a dazzling azure, and quirked its mouth as though it were about to speak.
Before anyone could utter a sound or release a breath, one of the creatures, in its nondescript suit, raised its hand into the air. Before a wide-‐‑eyed Jacob, the hand shattered its fleshly confines and erupted into a writhing mass of muscle tissue, sinew, and bone. A tinny chemical smell, like the lingering scent of a gun being fired, pervaded Jacob’s nostrils as the demon’s hand rapidly reconfigured itself into a thick, flesh-‐‑coated lance that glistened with ichor in the bluish light of the crucified creature. The other demons, unfazed by this development, continued their chant as the spear-‐‑bearer calmly pierced the milky throat of the malak with its arm.
The steady chanting was instantly drowned out as a mournful wail from Mabel ripped through the strangely furnished prison. Globules of the malak’s chunky blue life force launched from its pierced esophagus and splattered against the clean uniforms of the demons; Jacob leaped back, tearing away from Mabel’s clutches, and regarded the slaughter with a look of revulsion and surprise. After a moment, and with a sickening, slick slowness, the demon slid its arm out from the malak’s gullet. Blue chunks dribbled from the appendage like ectoplasm.
Mabel’s cry gradually reduced to a pathetic whimpering as she sat, body shaking, before the demons. The pack had ceased their chanting and the malak’s beautiful eyes shut once again; the group of them, except the one bearing the spear, moved forward and began fiddling about the machines to which Mabel’s Bible was bound. Jacob was certain he was witnessing something wrong, something impure, yet aside from his revulsion, the magician’s heart ached at the sight of Mabel’s wretched form.
“Mabel, we have to get you out of here,” Jacob hoisted the girl roughly to her feet. “They’ll be taking the malak. My orders are to escort you off the site.”
Munroe’s voice buzzed in Jacob’s ear. “If she will not go willingly, the recovery unit can assist.”
By unspoken command, the demons, both the ones performing operations at the machinery and the one wielding his arm as a lance, pivoted on the balls of their feet to turn and face the prone young lady. Their faces bore no ill will or any expression at all, really, but Jacob didn’t believe for one second that their method of removing Mabel would be very pleasant — over very healthy — for her. He took a step forward and stood protectively in front of the strange girl.
“Yield; I will escort the girl.” Jacob, regaining his composure, pulled together tendrils of power to create a wall of force between the two humans and the demons. Reaching down he yanked Mabel to her feet, who looked up at the mage with such sorrowful eyes.
“I musn’t leave here,” she said pathetically.
“Staying isn’t an option.”
Before the demons could tear through his shielding, Jacob pulled Mabel by the arm in the direction of the door and away from the crucified malak. As the pair retreated the demons resumed their task; now apparently finished with the machinery, two of the demons began to focus on the metal rigging that bound the angelic figure in place. Their hands were rapidly metamorphosing, similar to the lance’s manifestation, into tool-‐‑like appendages that seemed appropriate to the task of dismantling the crucifix. There was no stopping them now; the malak was leaving.
“Come, Mabel; they’re taking the angel. I’ll keep you safe.”
Mabel protested and tried to pull away, furious and desperate, like a feral beast trying to escape a bear trap. But Jacob would rather have this young lady, however volatile and unhinged, in his care than leave her to the machinations of the demons, who, while not decidedly evil, were very decidedly inhuman. They would not have the compassion Jacob would. Steeling his will, Jacob tightened his grip on Mabel’s arm and began pulling her up, back toward the stairway that led into the foyer of the town hall.
“No, please, I have to stay near the Bible… I have to hear the message…”
Jacob ignored her and asked the jewel in his ear, “Where should I take her?”
“The roof,” replied Munroe. “We’ll arrange for teleportation from there. We don’t want anything flashy on the street.”
“Is ops going to be that accurate?”
“Let’s assume so, Orange,” said Munroe in a tone that barred further question. “Mister Orange, please, please, please-‐‑please-‐‑please.” Mabel’s voice had grown shrill, and she was twitching violently. Jacob didn’t want to seem insensitive, but if he had a bottle of Xanax, he’d be pouring it down Mabel’s throat.
They climbed the old stairs and walked through the more modern office facilities of the town hall, where filing cabinets and computers, probably containing the data Jacob had originally come to receive, lined the building’s insides like wallpaper. That too could be sorted out later, after he dealt with his unlikely ward; Jacob proceeded to tug a loud, resistant Mabel through rows of desks toward a lone door at the back of the room. It swung open as though it had been kicked; Jacob, not much in the mood to save time, exerted his will full-‐‑force against the poorly constructed portal and knocked it open with a blast of raw magic.
Creaky metal stairs led them up to the roof, where the autumn wind blew bitterly against their skin. The arm in Jacob’s grip grew slack, as though some of its youthful tone sagged and slacked away. Mabel’s whimpering, too, had grown silent. The magician turned his head, his eyes taking in not the strange, pale girl in the wide glasses and bellbottoms he had been dragging through hallways, but a woman in her middle-‐‑age.
That she was still Mabel was evident, but her eyes and brow were deeply lined as though years of stress had chiseled channels into her flesh. Her hair was still in chunky braids and had retained its ashy color, but now it was streaked with strange, unnaturally white patches. Body frailer, the baggy, dated clothes that hung about her made the properly-‐‑aged Mabel – the age she should be had she stayed in 1969 and continued with her life – look more waifish than ever.
“Mabel,” Jacob breathed.
“Mister Orange,” she said, blinking hard. The voice was hers but not hers; deeper and raspy, as though it had been unused for forty years. “What’s happened to me?” Thankfully, her erratic flailing had ceased, but the new eerie calm in her voice unnerved Jacob far, far more.
The agent drew her out onto the small rooftop, where the wind ruffled his careless mop of hair and barely moved the heavy plaits of adult Mabel. The woman still maintained the idiosyncrasies of her youth, tugging on her braids and looking like a lost child in a forest. Pulled away from the malak, her bond severed with her Bible, Jacob deduced that time had quite literally caught up with Mabel.
Jacob released his grasp and held out his hand to the woman, now his senior. “Come.”
“I can’t,” said Mabel. She took several steps back.
“We’ll get you help. Come.”
“If an angel’s purpose is to deliver a message, then angel itself is the message,” the woman intoned. “Once its message is delivered, the angel is no more. Everyone waited so long for it to speak; now it never can. It’s trapped.”
“Mabel, who brought the angel here? What is everyone protecting and holding the angel for?”
She looked at him plainly. “You. It was to be your message, but that’s impossible now. I was told to wait and keep it from speaking, and I did. But still that message, that knowledge — I wanted to know it. All that waiting, for naught.”
“What happened to the others?”
“They left. New assignments. Or they stopped wanting to wait. Maybe God had other plans for them. But I knew the day would come that I would hear the message, hear God’s voice. I waited, even though the others told me to leave. I wanted to know the message. And I will know it still.”
And she threw herself from the edge of building, launching her body backward past the stairs, taking to the air as if to catch her angel, her Bible, with her wingless limbs. Jacob flung whatever magicks his instincts allowed – waves of force and magical shielding, a gust of wind – but it made no difference. Mabel hung, poised like a statue, in the air for what felt an eternal moment, her aged eyes looking upon Jacob’s distraught face with a look that wasn’t sadness, but pity.
***
Jacob grimaced as some lower-‐‑level agents zipped up the black body bag with the battered corpse of a middle-‐‑aged woman who had been, up until moments before, a young girl. Had her brain stopped aging, all that time, with the malak? Did Mabel lose all of those years in the blink of her eye, only to find herself no longer young, and worse yet, that those she loved would be dead or unrecognizable to her today? What world did Mabel have outside of the protection of her Bible? What had she had left once she realized she would never know the divine knowledge she protected with her life?
“You handled the situation well, Orange,” Munroe commented. “You and Davidson have both passed the test for official Binah clearance.”
A clipped voice, strangely tainted with emotion, chimed in Jacob’s ear a moment or so later. “I checked the records, Jacob, but I was not allowed to respond as per Dr. Munroe’s instructions. The female – Mabel – was an agent, too.” Davidson’s voice quivered a bit as though she could not quite process that she was had just witnessed the suicide of a fellow field agent.
“So this was a setup,” Jacob responded dryly. He ran his lanky fingers through his hair and let out a wispy sigh into the crisp autumn night. “Malakim aren’t the most common of occurrences. I understand the need to keep it secret, but what is the purpose of keeping it in a state of perpetual slumber?”
Munroe’s response was slightly delayed in coming, but it sounded truthful to Jacob. Binah-‐‑level clearance had its benefits after all, he supposed. “The agent called Mabel was correct about the purpose of the creature, though over the years the close proximity to the malak corrupted her mind. She was the last agent stationed there, but the exposure led to her obsession with hearing the angel’s message. An extraction was necessary. She was correct in that the entire purpose of the malakim is to deliver a message; a malak, in essence, is the message. Once that message is spoken, that malak, a physical manifestation of arcane energy, disperses into the ether.”
“And what if it never has the opportunity to speak its message, due to it being unable to communicate?”
“Then it never disappears. It exists forever, in all times – a direct conduit of unlimited arcane energy.”
“Hence why it warps the time around it,” Jacob surmised. The realm of the arcane, from which magicians accessed power, was a timeless realm deep within the unconscious, with no end and no beginning. The malak was the reason Mabel didn’t age, why time slowed for anyone in the immediate vicinity. The reason it warped her mind.
“Indeed. And you can understand its importance: access to that kind of power could dramatically change the balance of the world if it fell into the wrong hands, as trite as it sounds.”
“Why not perform the procedure earlier? Why not permanently silence it from the get-‐‑go?”
“I cannot answer that; your clearance is not yet high enough, Agent.”
“And the viscous liquid the agent was collecting? Angel blood? What purpose does that serve?”
“I cannot answer that either.”
Jacob sighed and ceased communications, opting to head toward the ’port zone and sort out matters once he got back to headquarters. He could, on some level, understand Munroe’s explanation that keeping an unlimited power source out of the hands of dubious parties was a priority, but what would his agency do with the recovered angel? It was now, to his knowledge, permanently silenced, and thus its message would never – could never – be known. It was an ultimate generator of magic. Curiously, Jacob wondered if the nearly lost magic of teleportation, a recently revived, energy-‐‑intensive spell of transmutation, would become more of regular occurrence.
Based on past experiences, Jacob knew his branch of the UN operated for the benefit of mankind, for the greater good. He recalled the humanitarian assignments in which he had participated since he became a field agent: peacefully dismantling a noxious coven in Prague; the outbreak of Han-‐‑era mystical plague that scoured Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. That was what the United Nations was designed to do, after all. Solve world crises. Jacob was preserving a place in the future for humanity. But would his newfound clearance show him that the agency wasn’t quite as clean as he had convinced himself it was? Had he become trapped in an old episode of Alias?
The night grew cold, and the crew was wrapping up its erasure of any traces of Jacob, Mabel, and the incident with the malak. After buttoning up his overcoat, the red-‐‑ headed man looked once over his shoulder, and for the briefest of moments the moonlight cast aside the veil of cloud. A single, focused ray struck a pair of immense spectacles lying on the sandy ground, and for that one instant, the reflection set sparkles of every color before his eyes, hanging in midair. They formed the shape of a cherry tree in full bloom, and Jacob smiled before leaving the bittersweet scene behind. He barely noticed the scent of lavender lingering in the air as he walked back toward the town hall, to the rendezvous point, to his next assignment.