Bestiary (61 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
But now she went straight to the nearest display case, one that held a sacramentary, illuminated for the Cathedral Priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. The book was open to its frontispiece, depicting the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles at Pentecost. But now she looked at it with fresh eyes. Now she looked at it not as the work of an anonymous, though brilliant, traveling artist, but as an example of the work of a man who went by Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds. Could she see in it the same techniques, the same flair, that she had been studying for weeks in
The Beasts of Eden
? There was indeed a fluidity to the motion of the Apostles, their hands raised toward heaven, that suggested the work of the master, but it did not equal the artistry of his last great work for the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli.
The Beasts of Eden
? There was indeed a fluidity to the motion of the Apostles, their hands raised toward heaven, that suggested the work of the master, but it did not equal the artistry of his last great work for the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli.
She moved past it, to the first display case in the next room. And here she found an herbal, a treatise on plants and their medicinal uses, created for the English abbey of St. Augustine’s. A flowered stem, its crimson leaves now faded to russet, extended itself all the way across the page, while the text—drawn, as was the custom, from the ancient Greeks rather than practical observation—flowed all around it. The imagination of the design was striking—Beth couldn’t help but think of the splashy layouts in glossy fashion magazines—and the text, she could see now, bore the same unmistakable slant of the writing in the al-Kalli bestiary. Yes, she thought, it was all coming together!
But she would not be satisfied until she had seen another colophon, that final salutation by the scribe, and she knew exactly where to find one. A good example was on display in the last room, in a copy of the Apocalypse from East Anglia. At its end, she knew, there came a curse.
As she stepped into the room, the light sensors automatically responded, but this was still the gloomiest and most remote part of the exhibition. The display cases here were more widely spaced, and the shadows deeper and wider. And even though Beth had become accustomed over the years to working alone in empty museum halls, sometimes even late into the night, she wasn’t always impervious to the spooky aspects of the job. She reminded herself now that it was only late afternoon outside, that the sun was shining, that Elvis was sitting up in their office, playing some idiotic computer game. And that she would be done very soon—she would study the colophons, one against the other, and lay to rest any doubt whatsoever. And then her quest would be at an end, her discovery complete.
Still, she went quickly to the last case in the room, where the Apocalypse—better known in the Protestant tradition as the Book of Revelation—was on display. The illustration was of a seven-headed dragon, writhing in an ocean of fire. And she knew, from her work on the exhibition, that the final words of the biblical text were a warning to anyone who dared to alter or subtract anything from the Apocalypse; to do so, the book declared, would be to write yourself out of the book of life, for all eternity. Below that, separated by a miniature of a child being raised to heaven, came the colophon—in the form of a curse that echoed the final lines of the Apocalypse itself. In elegant Latin, it said that anyone daring to injure or deface the book before them would be stricken from the book of life, too.
Although she hardly needed to, Beth took the last page of Ambrosius’s letter from the folder under her arm, placed the rest of the papers on the floor, and then held the page up to the pale light emanating from the display case. The curses, in their very nature, not to mention the rhythm of the prose, were strikingly similar; the ornate character of the lettering was virtually identical, and the handwriting itself, tight and slanted to the left, was unmistakable. Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds—artist and soldier, scoundrel and Crusader, an unknown genius whose bizarre journey had taken him from the cloisters of Canterbury to his terrible end in a sultan’s maze—was the author of both, and the Michelangelo of his age.
And only Beth knew who he was.
She had hardly had time to savor her victory before she heard, in low tones from the shadows at the rear of the gallery, “Don’t be afraid.”
And suddenly she was as afraid as she had ever been in her life.
It was as if the shadows were coalescing, taking shape . . . the shape of a man—tall and elegant, with perfectly chiseled features, in a suit that seemed made of the darkness itself—who now took a silent step forward. His white-blond hair, which swept away from his forehead, glinted in the overhead lights. His eyes were concealed behind small round glasses with amber lenses.
“But you are afraid,” he said, in that strangely foreign accent.
The gallery was suffused with the scent of a forest, right after a light rain.
Beth wanted to turn and run—and as if the intruder had sensed that, he stopped where he was—but she could barely move.
“Consider this,” he said. “If I had wanted to harm you, or your son, wouldn’t I have done it by now?”
Her worst nightmare was now real: Arius was alive; Arius was here. All the times she had tried to persuade herself that it was just her imagination playing tricks, all the times that she had told herself that she was making something out of nothing . . . she’d been wrong.
And in her heart, she had always known it.
She wanted to say, “Why are you here? What do you want?” but her mouth was too dry—and it didn’t seem she had to. He answered as if she had.
“I’ve always been here, and what I want—what I have always wanted—is your welfare.”
Her welfare? Beth’s memories of Arius had always been muddled—it was as if they existed behind some veil, some superimposed scrim through which she could only catch glimpses of strange and confusing events—but protecting and caring for her was certainly not the way those memories came back to her now. Not at all. The memories—sensory impressions, really—were, all of them, dark and deeply troubling. Just seeing him here made her skin crawl.
Without his having visibly moved, he seemed again to have moved perceptibly closer. The smell of rain-washed leaves was stronger. And even though the light in the room was dim and ambient at best, he seemed somehow to have gathered it all to him. He stood out against the black shadows, in his black suit, his face subtly glowing, as if from a fire within. The amber lenses concealed the color of his eyes, but Beth had a recollection—a vague and terrible recollection—of eyes that churned and changed and penetrated, like knives, whatever they looked at.
“And to prove what I’m saying, I am here now only to give you a warning.”
“Of what?”
“Go home, now, to Joey.”
Beth felt jolted as if by an electric shock. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with Joey?” In the flood of her concern, even her fear was subsumed.
“There’s still time. But go. You need to be with him now.”
With no reason to believe him, Beth did; with no reason to do what he was suggesting, she had an overwhelming impulse to race out of the gallery. But nothing would make her turn her back on Arius; it was as if she weren’t even capable of it. There was something riveting about his very presence, something hypnotic even in his partially concealed eyes.
He stepped back, and the shadows fell more fully over his face.
Was he deliberately doing that?
“I will,” Beth said, her voice soft and faltering, “but tell me: why? What’s going to happen?”
Again without moving, he seemed to have receded farther into the room. The white light meant to illuminate the final pages of the Apocalypse barely touched his perfect features and the waves of his white-gold hair.
But his head tilted to one side, as if he’d heard something, just a split second before Beth heard the whoosh of the gallery door opening, three rooms away, and a footfall approaching. “Hello? Ms. Cox? Are you in here?”
It was the security guard, the one she’d waved to at the tram plaza.
She didn’t answer at first—and she wondered why. Was it because she was actually seeking to protect Arius from discovery?
“Ms. Cox?” The voice was coming closer, and even though the lights in the exhibition hall were on, a flashlight beam was sweeping the darkened corners.
“I’m in here,” she finally said, turning her head.
The guard—she only remembered that his name started with a
G
—rounded the partition and said, “Everything okay? We registered an intrusion in the security office.”
G
—rounded the partition and said, “Everything okay? We registered an intrusion in the security office.”
Beth looked back toward Arius, but he was gone.
“I entered my code,” she assured him.
“I know—we had that. But security was tripped again, after that.” He played his flashlight around the dimly lighted room and poked his head behind a couple of the standing display cases. “Must have been a glitch, I guess.”
Now she could see the name on his laminated badge—Gary Graydon.
But where had Arius gone? There was only one way out of the gallery, and how could he have slipped past the guard unnoticed?
“What’s all that on the floor?” Graydon said, and Beth glanced down at the papers she had utterly forgotten were lying around her feet. She bent down and picked up the folder with the other pages of the secret letter in it. She slipped the page she was still holding—she’d forgotten she was holding that, too—inside, and after casting one last look around the gallery, said, “I’m done here.”
“Good,” Graydon replied. “We’ve got enough on our hands already today.”
“What do you mean?” Beth said, leaving the gallery with the guard close behind.
“The wildfires.”
Beth stopped, “Where?”
“Where aren’t they?” Graydon said. “They’re springing up all over town, from Bel-Air to the Palisades. Even with all the warnings about fireworks and the drought conditions, it looks like some people never listen.”
Beth didn’t need to hear any more. Clutching the folder tightly under her arm, she hurried out of the gallery, and then, with Arius’s warning to go home ringing in her ears, sprinted across the empty plaza toward the tram.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CARTER WAS SO absorbed in the work that at first he didn’t even feel the cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He’d turned off the ring the second he came into the museum; he didn’t want anyone—especially Gunderson—finding out he was there, on a national holiday yet, concealed in a storage closet, in the sub-basement, working on the most volatile discovery the La Brea Tar Pits had ever yielded. He’d never be able to finish explaining.
“Look at this fracture line,” Del was saying, indicating with a scalpel a crack in the skull near the temporal lobe. “Tell me that’s not from a blow.”
The phone vibrated again, and this time Carter noticed. “Hang on,” he said.
The connection, as usual down here, was terrible. But it was Beth, and she sounded agitated. She was saying something about . . . Arius.
“Slow down,” Carter said, instinctively turning away from the table and stepping out in the corridor. “You’re breaking up.”
“Arius,” she said again, “was here, at the Getty.”
Was it just another scare—several times they had thought there was evidence that Arius had survived, and was stalking them—or was it for real this time? Despite all their suspicions and fears, neither of them had ever seen or encountered him for sure.
She was saying something else, but it was coming through in bursts of static.
“I can’t hear you,” Carter said, wondering if she could hear him, either. “Are you okay? Is Joey okay?” That was the crucial thing.
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