Emily raised her hands to her head, pressing her fists into the sides of her skull. She closed her eyes tightly and ground her teeth as she struggled against the gathering clouds, trying in vain to save herself, to hold on to her identity, but it was too late. The transformation was occurring. She was no longer the girl she had once believed herself to be, and soon she would cease to be forever. She had a vision of a young woman drowning, just as Melody McReady had drowned, fighting against the coming oblivion, and she was both that woman and the one who was holding her down, forcing her beneath the water. The dying girl broke the water for the last time and looked up, and in her eyes was reflected a being both old and terrible, a black, sexless thing with dark wings that unfurled from its back, blocking out all light, a creature that was so ugly it was almost beautiful, or so beautiful that it had no place in this world.
It.
And Emily died beneath its hand, drowning in black water, lost forever. She had always been lost, right from the moment of her birth when this strange, wandering spirit had chosen her body for its abode, hiding in the shadows of her consciousness, waiting for the truth of itself to be revealed.
Now the thing that she had become looked down at the little man who was holding on to her arm. She could no longer understand what he was saying. His words were merely a buzzing in her ear. It didn’t matter. Nothing that he said mattered. She smelled him, and sensed the foulness inside him that had forced the stench from his pores. A serial abuser of women. A man filled with hatred and strange, violent appetites.
Yet she did not judge him, just as she would no more have judged a spider for consuming a fly, or a dog for gnawing on its bone. It was in his nature, and she found its echo in her own.
His grip tightened. Spittle flew from his mouth, but she saw only the movements of his lips. He started to rise, then paused. He seemed to realize that something had changed, that what he thought was familiar had suddenly become desperately alien. She freed her arm and moved in closer to him. She placed the palms of her hands on his face, then leaned in to kiss Z ad in to k him, her open mouth closing on his, ignoring the bitterness of him, the stink of his breath, his decaying teeth and yellowed gums. He struggled against her for a moment, but she was too strong for him. She breathed into him, her eyes fixed on his, and she showed him what would become of him when he died.
Shelley did not see her go, nor Harbaruk, nor any of the others who had worked alongside her. Had their memories of that night been played back for them, displayed on a screen so that they could see all that had passed before their eyes, the girl’s departure would have appeared as a grayish mass moving through the bar, an excised form loosely resembling a human being.
The big man in the arrow T-shirt returned from the men’s room. His friend was sitting where he had left him, staring vacantly at the wall, his back to the bar.
“Time to go, Ronnie,” he said. He patted Ronnie on the back, but the smaller man did not move.
“Hey, Ronnie.” He stepped in front of him, and stopped speaking. Even in his drunken state, he knew that his friend was broken beyond salvation.
Ronnie was weeping tears of blood and water, and his mouth was moving, forming the same words over and over. Every capillary had burst in his eyes, and the whites had turned entirely red, twin black suns set against their skies. He was whispering, but his friend could still hear what he was saying.
“I’m sorry,” said Ronnie. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE WOMAN, AT A signal from Epstein, had brought more coffee, once again black for him, and a little milk for mine. Between us lay the two symbols.
“What do they mean?” I asked.
“They are letters of the Enochian, or Adamical, alphabet, supposedly communicated to the English magician John Dee and his associate over a period of decades during the sixteenth century.”
“Communicated?”
“Through occult workings, although it may be a constructed language. Whatever its origins, this first is the Enochian letter ‘Und,’ the equivalent of our letter ‘A.’ In this case, it represents a name: Anmael.”
Jimmy Gallagher, struggling to remember: “Animal—no, that’s not it…”
“And what is Anmael?”
“Anmael is a demon, one of the Grigori, or the ‘Sons of God,’” said Epstein. “The Grigori are also known as ‘Watchers,’ or ‘the ones who never sleep.’ According to elements of the apocrypha, and the Book of Enoch in particular, they are gigantic beings who, in one version, precipitated the great Fall of the angels through the sin of lust.”
He held up two hands before him, but kept the thumb of his right hand tucked into the palm.
“Nine orders of angels,” he said. “All sexless, and above reproach.” He moved his thumb, adding it to the rest. “The tenth is the Grigori, of a different essence from the rest, in form and sexual appetite similar to man, and it is this order that fell. In Genesis, it is the Grigori who lusted after flesh and ‘took themselves wives’ from among the children of men. Such theories have always been a matter of some dispute. The great rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, blessed be his name, forbade his disciples to speak of such matters, but I, as you can see, have no such qualms.
“So, Anmael was one of the Grigori. He, in turn, is linked to Semjaza, one of the leaders of the order. Some say that the angel Semjaza repented of its actions, but that, I suspect, had more to do with a desire in the early church for a figure of repentance than anything else.
“Now we have twin angels, Anmael and Semjaza, but here Christian and Jewish views diverge. In Christian orthodoxy, derived in part from Jewish sources, angels are traditionally viewed as sexless, or, in the case of the higher orders, exclusively male. The later Jewish view, by contrast, allows the possibility of male and female angels. The bibliographer Hayyim Azulal wrote in his Milbar Kedemot of 1792 that ‘the angels are called women, as it is written in Zechariah verse nine, “Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and behold, there came out two women.”’ The Yalkut Hadash says: ‘Of angels we can speak both in masculine and in feminine: the angels of a superior degree are called men, and the angels of an inferior degree are called women.’ At the very least, then, Judaism has a more fluid concept of the sexuality of such beings.
“The body of Ackerman, and the boy killed by your father at Pearl River, both bore the Enochian ‘A,’ or ‘Und,’ burned into their flesh. The women, by contrast, were marked with the letter ‘Uam,’ or ‘S,’ for Semjaza.”
He paused for a moment and seemed to consider something. “I have often thought,” he resumed, “that the children of men must have been a grave disappointment to such beings. It was our flesh and our bodies that they desired, yet our minds, and our life spans, must have been like those of insects by comparison. But what if two angels, one male, one female, could inhabit the bodies of a man and a woman, and enjoyed their union as equals? And as those bodies wear out, they move on, finding others to inhabit, and then begin to seek each other once again. Sometimes it may take years. It may even be that, on occasion, they fail to come together, and the search continues in another body, but they never stop looking, for they cannot be content without each other. Anmael and Semjaza: soul mates, if one could speak in such a way of beings without a soul; or lovers, of beings who cannot love.
“And the price they pay for their union is, I believe, to do the bidding of another: in this case, that bidding is to bring an end to your existence.”
“Another?”
“A controlling consciousness. It may be that some of those whom you have encountered in the past—Pudd, Brightwell, our friend Kittim, perhaps even the Traveling Man, among those whose human nature is not in dispute, for did the Traveling Man not reference the book of Enoch?—also did its bidding, but without even knowing it. Think of the human body: some of its processes are involuntary. The heart beats, the liver purifies, the kidneys process. The brain does not have to tell them to perform these Z qerform th tasks, but they serve the function of sustaining the body. But to lift up a book, to drive a car, to fire a gun in order to end a life, these are not involuntary functions. So, perhaps, there will be some who perform services for another without being aware of it, simply because their own acts of evil fulfill a larger purpose. There will be others, though, who are specifically charged with certain tasks, and hence their awareness will ultimately be greater.”
“And what is this controlling consciousness?”
“That we don’t yet know.”
“‘We,’” I said. “I take it you’re not talking about you and me.”
“Not entirely.”
“The Collector spoke of my ‘secret friends.’ Do you qualify?”
“I would be honored to think so.”
“And there are others.”
“Yes, although some might not be so willing to wear the mantle of friendship in the general sense of the word,” said Epstein, choosing his words with consummate diplomacy.
“No cards at Christmas.”
“No cards at any time.”
“And you won’t tell me who they are?”
“For now, it’s better that you don’t know.”
“Are you afraid that I’m going to make unwanted calls?”
“No, but if you don’t know their names then you can’t reveal their identities to others.”
“Like Anmael, if he chose to take his blade to me.”
“You’re not alone in this matter, Mr. Parker. Granted, you are an unusual man, and I have not yet figured out why you have always been such an object of hatred and, dare I say it, attraction for such foul things, but I have other people to think of too.”
“Is that what Unit Five is: code for what you call my secret friends?”
For a moment, Epstein seemed taken aback, but recovered himself.
“Unit Five is just a name.”
“For what?”
“Initially, for the investigation into the Traveling Man. Since then, its remit has broadened somewhat, I believe. You are part of that remit.”
Rain began to fall. I looked over my shoulder and saw it darken the sidewalk and fall from the dark red awning over the doorway.
“So what do I do?”
“About what?”
“About Anmael, or whoever thinks he’s Anmael.”
“He’s waiting.”
“For?”