For the next hour or two, Lucas and Delaney went over the latest lab data — the radiocarbon tests were being better refined, it seemed, every hour, but it was unclear how much use they would be to Colonel Macmillan. When the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets and to say that he would be locking up in a few minutes, they made sure that everything of importance was sealed in the green locker, then headed down to the exhibit hall. As Lucas stopped to turn up the collar of his coat, he happened to glance over at the Caithness Man, now locked away again in his display case; the low light at its base made it appear, for a split second, as if his eyes, sealed shut for centuries, had opened just a slit.
The campus was quiet, except for the tolling of the carillon in the chapel, and nearly deserted, apart from a few students charging off to commons for dinner, or to the library for a study session. Lucas was glad when the lights of the town came into view, the Nassau Inn presenting an especially cheery sight, with an amber glow emanating from its windows and a lazy curlicue of wood smoke drifting from the taproom chimney.
“I don’t suppose I can cajole you into one drink before you go upstairs?” Delaney asked.
Lucas, with another plan in mind, fumbled for a reply.
“Come on, pal, I can read you like a book.”
“Maybe we’ll both come down and join you,” Lucas said.
“I won’t be holding my breath,” Delaney said as he crossed the lobby. “Hope she’s recovered from that scare in the stacks.”
Lucas hoped so, too, and as soon as the creaky elevator had taken him to the top floor, he rapped gently on her door — twice, then twice again. A signal that they had agreed on.
Even so, he heard the latch on the peephole slide open, then the locks being turned. The door opened only halfway, and she said, “Quick — come in.”
Lucas ducked inside, turning to embrace her, but Simone was slamming the door shut and throwing the locks. Then she peered through the peephole again, twisting her head to see as much of the hallway as it would allow.
“Trust me, there’s no one else out there,” Lucas said. She looked, if anything, in worse shape than she had the night before when he’d accompanied her back to the room, waited while she took a sleeping pill, and then left her, still dressed in all but her shoes, under the quilt.
“Have you been out today?” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you look like you could use some fresh air.” Her white blouse was untucked, her skirt wrinkled, and her face drawn and pale. “The room could use some oxygen, too.” The little writing desk by the window was covered with papers and prints, a room-service cart was pushed up against the radiator, with a black fly — surely the last of the season — buzzing around a dirty plate and an upturned silver lid. Lucas went to the window and started to lift the sash, but noticed that an index card, wedged under it, had slipped free. Picking it up off the carpet, he saw a strange sign — a diamond tilted to one side, with a diagonal line crossed through it — drawn in pencil, and underlined three times.
“No, don’t do that,” she said, quickly replacing the card and pressing the window down on it.
But where had he seen that symbol before?
“Did you recognize it?” she asked, nervously.
“The sign?” Then, snapping his fingers, he remembered. “It was carved on the lid of the ossuary. Under the last chain we removed.”
Simone nodded. “It’s an ancient sign. It also appears on the Coptic papyri that we removed from the tomb. My father was studying it, just before…”
To keep her from having to complete the thought, Lucas said, “So what does it represent?”
“It represents the forces of containment.”
“So it’s a seal?”
“Correct.”
Now he could see where this was going. “And we broke it when we opened the ossuary.”
“Yes.”
Looking around the disorderly room, he asked, “But aside from the aroma of the food trolley, what are you trying to contain in here?”
“I’m trying to contain — I’m trying to protect—everything we’ve learned. To begin with, everything my father had collected in that blue folder.”
“Who do you think is coming to take it away?”
“The same thing that killed him.”
He knew she harbored doubts about her father’s death, but he had never heard her put it so bluntly.
“He was studying these pages just before he died,” she said. “It’s why they were stolen.”
He waited, not wanting to say anything that might increase the strain she was evidently laboring under.
“And they reveal the name of his murderer.”
“He had written it down?” he said, incredulously. “Before it even happened?”
“He didn’t have to. It’s all right there.”
“What is?”
“ ‘My name is Legion: for we are many.’ ”
Though he couldn’t have given the chapter and verse, Lucas recognized the line.
“Mark 5:9,” she said. “It’s the story where Jesus casts the unclean spirits out of the raving man, the Gadarene, who had been haunting the tombs and cutting himself with sharp stones.”
“Yes, I know the passage,” Lucas said.
“But do you remember what happens to the demons that Jesus casts out of the madman?”
“To the best of my recollection, they enter into the bodies of swine.”
“Demons can do that.”
“Enter swine?”
“They can enter anything. They can jump, like ticks, from one host to another. My father was documenting it. In fact, they have to do that. To function in this world, they have to find some physical form to get around in. Otherwise, they’re just disembodied and ineffectual.”
The fly from the cart circled lazily around the rim of a teacup before landing beside another insect that had just crept out from under the saucer.
“The pigs were driven mad by them,” Simone continued.
“And then the whole herd ran off a cliff and drowned in the sea,” Lucas said, the rest of the story coming back to him now.
“Saint Anthony was a swineherd,” she observed, as if simply stating the next irrefutable corollary. “It’s his ossuary we opened.”
Lucas was finding it hard to keep up, or guess where this was all going. Idly, he waved a hand at the flies, which flew off, then quickly returned. Three of them now. Where the hell were they coming from?
“We’ve let this evil — whatever it is — loose,” she said, finally looking straight at him. “Only instead of running off a cliff and drowning in the sea, it’s managed to stick around long enough to cover its tracks.”
“Okay,” Lucas said, in carefully measured tones, “but how would it do that?”
She frowned like a teacher whose student is proving slow to grasp a simple lesson. “By stealing its own bones back, for a start,” she said, raising one finger. “By incinerating the film,” she said, raising another. “By murdering people like my father”—a third—“and by killing even its own servants, once they’ve outlived their usefulness.”
Andy Brandt.
“And, finally, by luring me out of my carrel, chasing me through the library and trying to scare me to death, before destroying all the proof I’d gathered in there.”
Lucas was torn. On the one hand, there was his lifelong allegiance to everything rational, to everything he believed true about nature and the universe, everything empirically provable. He had never been one to engage in the paranormal, in clairvoyance and telekinesis and astrology, or anything having to do with the so-called science of the occult.
On the other hand, there was the increasingly substantial, and persuasive, body of evidence Simone was amassing. Evidence that he himself could supplement, if he chose. There was Brandt’s corpse, for instance — sucked dry like a piece of discarded fruit. (That was one detail he had spared Simone.) In addition, there was everything he had seen for himself in the conservation wing… and watched on the film that had mysteriously self-destructed.