Anne Rice: Servant of the Bones

It must have been midnight when Azriel came.

Did he choose his hour with a sense of drama? Quite to the contrary. A long way off, walking through snow and wind, he had seen the fire high on the mountain above, sparks flying from the chimney and a light that blinkered through the open door. He had hurried towards these beacons.

Mine was the only house on the land and he knew it. He had learnt that from the casual tactful remarks of those who had told him officially and gently that I could not be reached in the months to come, that I had gone into hiding.

I saw him the very moment he stood in the door. I saw the sheen of his mass of black curling hair and fire in both his eyes. I saw the strength and swiftness with which he closed and locked the door and came directly towards me.

I believe I said, “I’m going to die.”

“No, you won’t, Jonathan,” he answered. He brought the bottle of water at once and lifted my head. I drank and I drank and my fever drank, and I blessed him.

“It’s only kindness, Jonathan,” he said with simplicity.

I dozed as he built up the fire again, wiped away the snow, and I have a very distinct and wondrous memory of him gathering my papers from everywhere, with great care, and kneeling by the fire to lay them out so that they might dry and some of the writing might be saved after all.

“This is your work, your precious work,” he said to me when he saw that I was watching him.

He had taken off the big double-mantled coat. He was in shirt sleeves which meant we were safe. I smelled the soup cooking again, the bubbling chicken broth. He brought the soup to me in an earthen bowl—the sort of rustic things I chose for this place—and he said drink the soup, and I did.

Indeed, it was by water and broth that he brought me slowly back. Never once did I have the presence of mind to mention the few medications in the white box of first-aid supplies. He bathed my face with cold water.

He bathed all of me slowly and patiently, turning me gently, and rolling under me the new fresh clean sheets. “The broth,” he said, “the broth, no, you must.” And the water. The water he gave me perpetually.

Was there enough for him, he had asked. I had almost laughed.

“Of course, my friend, dear God, take anything you want.”

And he drank the water down in greedy gulps, saying it was all he needed now, that once again the Stairway to Heaven had disappeared and left him stranded.

“My name is Azriel,” he said, sitting by the bed. “They called me the Servant of the Bones,” he said, “but I became a rebel ghost, a bitter and impudent genii.”

He unfurled the magazine for me to see. My head was clear. I sat up, propped by the divine luxury of clean pillows. He looked as unlike a ghost as a man can look, muscular, brimming with life, the dark hair on the backs of his hands and on his arms making him appear all the more strong and vital.

Gregory Belkin’s face stared forward from the famous Time magazine frame. Gregory Belkin—Esther’s father—founder of the Temple of the Mind. The man who would have brought harm to millions.

“I killed that man,” he said.

I turned to look at him, and then it was that I first saw the miracle.

He wanted me to see it. He did it for me.

He had grown smaller in size, though only slightly; his mane of tangled black curls was gone; he had the trimmed hair of a modern businessman; even his large loose shirt was changed for the supremely acceptable and impeccably tailored black suit, and he had become…before my very eyes…the figure of Gregory Belkin.

“Yes,” he said. “It was the way I looked on the day I made my choice, to forfeit my powers forever; to take on real flesh and real suffering. I looked just like Gregory when I shot him.”

Before I could answer, he began to change again, the head to grow larger, the features to become broader, forehead stronger and more distinctive, the cherub mouth of his own to replace the thin line of Belkin’s. His fierce eyes grew large beneath the thick eyebrows that tended to dip as he smiled, making the smile and immensity of the eyes seem secretive and seductive.

It was not a happy smile. It had no humor or sweetness in it. “I thought I would look this way forever,” he said, holding up the magazine for me to see. “I thought I would die in that form.” He sighed. “The Temple of the Mind lies in ruins. The people will not die. The women and children will not fall on the road as they breathe the evil gas. But I didn’t die. I am Azriel again.”

I took his hand. “You’re a living breathing man,” I said. “I don’t know how you made yourself look like Gregory Belkin.”

“No, not a man—a ghost,” he said, “a ghost so strong that he can wrap himself in the form he had when he was alive; and now he cannot make it go away. Why did God do this to me? I am not an innocent being; I have sinned. But why can’t I die?”

Suddenly a smile came over his face. He was almost a boy, the tangled curls making their dark frame for his low cheeks and the large beautiful cherub mouth.

“Maybe God let me live to save you, Jonathan. Maybe that’s all it was. He gave me my old flesh back so I could climb this mountain and tell you all this, and you would have died had I not come here.”

“Perhaps, Azriel,” I said.

“You rest now,” he said. “Your forehead is cool. I’ll wait, and I’ll watch, and if you see me, now and then, turn into that man again, it is only that I’m trying to measure each time the difficulty of it. It was never so very hard for me to change my shape—for the sorcerer who called me up from the bones. It was never so hard for me to throw an illusion to trick my master’s enemies or those he would rob or cheat.

“But it’s hard now to be anything but the young man I was when it started. When I bought their lies. When I became a ghost and not the martyr they promised. Lie still now, Jonathan, sleep. Your eyes are clear and your cheeks have color.”

“Give me more of the broth,” I said. He did.

“Azriel, I would be dead without you.”

“Yes, that much is true, isn’t it? But I had my foot on the Ladder to Heaven, I was on it this time, I tell you, when I made this choice, and I thought when it was all over, the Temple destroyed, the Stairway might come down for me again. The Hasidim are pure and innocent. They are good. But battles they must leave to monsters like me.”

“Lord, God,” I said. Gregory Belkin. A lunatic plan. I remember fragments…“And there was that beautiful girl,” I said.

He put down the cup of broth, and wiped my face and my hands.

“Her name was Esther.”

“Yes.”

He opened the curled and damp magazine for me. It was now badly creased as it was drying out in the warm room. I saw the famous photograph of Esther Belkin, on Fifth Avenue. I saw her lying on the stretcher just before they had put her into the ambulance, and just before she had died.

Only this time I focused on a figure in this photograph which I had noticed before, yes, in television broadcasts, and in the larger cover photographs of this very scene. But I hadn’t until now paid any real attention to the figure. I saw a young man by Esther’s stretcher, with his hands raised to his head, as though crying out in grief for her, a young man blurry and indistinct as all the other crowd figures in the famous photograph, except for his heavy beautifully shaped eyebrows and his mane of thick black curly hair.

“That’s you,” I said. “Azriel, that’s you there in the photograph.”

He was distracted. He didn’t reply. He put his finger on the figure of Esther. “She died there, Esther, his daughter.”

I explained that I had known her. The Temple was new then, and controversial rather than solid and immense and indefatigable. She had been a good student, serious and modest and alert.