Anne Rice - Servant of the Bones

24

Nathan lay in a pool of blood, eyes blinking at the bright summer sky, as the crowd panicked around him. The assassins had been snared by the mob. Sirens screamed. The Minders wailed.

I stared down at the body of Nathan. I saw the confusion in his bright dark eyes. Memory swam over me, threatening to pull me from the moment.

Then I realized that everything around me had changed. The building had faded. The crowd was gone.

Up before me into the beautiful sky rose the gleaming and unmistakable Stairway to Heaven.

With my own eyes, I tell you, I saw a light that others have told you over and over is indescribable. I saw a light so full of warmth and love and understanding that it filled me in my invisibility, reached me at my core. And I saw Nathan slowly walking up the Ladder.

At the top Rachel and Esther appeared. There were others I didn’t know, and suddenly I realized in this blinding and beautiful brightness that they were telling Nathan he had to go back, he couldn’t die, he had to return.

Nathan turned around obedient and began to cry; he cried and cried with his hands to his eyes. His image now was Hasid; he had the beard and locks they’d shaved from him. He had his black hat. But he was a spirit returning to the ravaged body that lay on the ground, in which the heart had just ceased to beat.

Suddenly Rachel called to me. I found myself running up the Staircase. Nothing stopped me. I was on it, I tell you, Jonathan, I was on the golden stairs and there above they stood, I saw them all, not only Rachel and Esther, but my father, my own father, and Zurvan, my first teacher, and Samuel and others. I saw them; in a flickering my whole memory was restored to me.

My life passed through youth and innocence into the horror of my murder in which I knew each personage and his or her role, and then all Zurvan’s teachings returned to me. Everything I had ever done I saw, good and evil.

I was almost to the top, and Nathan was staring at me in astonishment. Rachel stepped forward.

“Azriel,” she said, “you go back, into Nathan’s body. Azriel, he’s not strong enough to fight Gregory, but you are. You can keep the body alive! Azriel, I beg you.”

Nathan turned to me; he was so like Gregory and yet so pure and clean and full of love, utter love. He looked searchingly at all those gathered at the top of the stairs, only a few feet away, where the garden began and the light rose with limitless brilliance.

“You mean I could stay with you?” he asked the others. He looked at Rachel and Esther, and other Hasidim I did not know, Elders, and my elders too!

I wanted to throw myself into my father’s arms. “Can’t we both come now?” I cried. “Please, Father!”

Suddenly Zurvan spoke, “Azriel, you have to go back in that body and make it get off the ground. Even if it means you never get out of it. You must do it.”

“Azriel, please,” said my beautiful Esther, “please, you know how evil Gregory is. Only an angel of God can stop him.”

My father was crying as he had thousands of years ago. “My son, I love you, but they need you so badly. They need you, Azriel! Only if that slain body rises now can the plot be undone!”

I saw the rationale of it in an instant. I saw what they meant. To foil the assassination now and seize the cameras, that was the only way to warn the world.

I turned, nodding, “Go with God, Nathan!” I cried, and I heard their lovely voices behind me thanking me and praying for me.

Then suddenly from both sides I saw the malcontent spirits tearing at me, faces twisted in hate, my former Masters by the dozen whom I’d forgotten, men for whom I had done evil.

“Why do this?”

“Why should you?”

“Let the madman destroy the world.”

“What do you care!” demanded the magician from Paris.

“They’re using you again. They’re using you!” declared my Mameluk master, whom I’d slain on sight.

“You’ll lose your spirit strength, don’t you see?”

“You’ll be mortal in that body, trapped; you’ll die in it of the wounds it sustained.”

“Why suffer mortality like that when you are a free spirit!”

And behind these faces and voices were legions of swarming angry, envious, and hateful spirits.

I glanced back up the Stairway. I saw them all gathered, and Nathan had his arms around the others, and they around him. Rachel raised her hand and sent to me a kiss. And in a childlike manner Esther waved. They were fading into utter brilliance. My father had become pure illumination.

I looked at the light and I let it fill me. I treasured just one fraction of a second of understanding, at peace with all things, at peace with all that had been done to me, and that I had done, and all that had ever happened; the world had meaning then. It had a full and magnificent meaning. And the millions of the poor, the hungry, the angry, the warriors—they were not parasites as Gregory had said; they were souls!

“No,” I said to the angry spirits. “I have to do it.”

“Go into his body, resurrect it,” said Zurvan, “even if it means you lose everything.”

“Azriel, my love goes with you!” cried Nathan. He had begun to glow like the others.

Blackness. I felt myself sucked down as if by the most powerful mechanical force, and suddenly I was filled with pain, pain in my lungs, pain in my heart, pain in every limb, and I was blinking at the sky as men put me on a stretcher, just as they had done with Esther.

I lurched, rolled over, even though they were astonished, and saw no more stairway and no more light, only the Temple itself, and the mob screaming.

I sat up on the stretcher and then I climbed off it. The medical men backed away in pure astonishment. I knew why. The wounds were fatal. More than one was fatal.

I saw the cameras and I beckoned to the reporters. I reached out for their hands.

“Your government, your agencies. Surround this building and search it at once. An impostor has taken my place. An impostor has tried to kill me. This building is loaded with fatal viruses; and there are Temples of the Mind throughout the world ready to discharge them. Stop them. You must reach the thirty-ninth floor. You must reach the room with the map, and the impostor nailed to the wall. Hurry now! I give you permission to enter the Temple of the Mind. Take guns with you.”

I turned around. Everywhere I looked, people had whipped out those little phones that open up and they were screaming into them. The police rushed at the building. Sirens screamed.

“It is an impostor,” I said, “it is a twin, and he plans destruction you cannot imagine.”

I could see the television cameras coming down on me. “The Temple of the Mind in every country must be stopped. Every building contains poison gas, and deadly viruses. You must stop the Temple of the Mind wherever it is, and beware their lies, beware their lies. Look what they have done to me, and I am living to tell you this.”

I felt myself growing weak. The blood was pumping right out of my heart. I realized I was undone. I reached out and grabbed for a microphone. I heard my own voice, tinged with Nathan’s tone, rise in volume.

“Minders, your leader has been shot and tricked. Minders, you have been infiltrated. Go inside, destroy the people who have deceived you!”

I was about to collapse. I grabbed hold of a young woman, a reporter who stood beside me with her cameraman catching every breath I took or lost.

“The Armed Services, the people who deal in deadly disease. Worldwide. Alert them. There is enough in any one Temple building to destroy a city, even this one!”

In a blur I saw them all distracted, turning away from me.

A riot of screams broke out. I turned, almost falling, supported in fact by the doctors around me. There in front of the glass doors, held back by confused and frightened followers, stood Gregory, bleeding from the wounds in his hands, screaming: