“Can…can I help you with something?” Aaron stammered.
The man responded, speaking in a language Aaron had never heard before, a language he somehow sensed had not been uttered by anyone in a very long time.
“Can you understand the tongue of the messenger, boy?” asked the old man in the arcane dialect.
Aaron answered in kind. “Yes,” he said, the strange words feeling incredibly odd as they rolled off his tongue. “I can understand you…but I don’t understand the question.”
The old man continued to stare, his gaze even more intense. Aaron could have sworn that he saw what appeared to be a single flame dancing in the center of each ancient eye, but knew that it was probably just a trick of the light.
“You answer my question as you speak,” the man responded, still using the bizarre-sounding language, “and what you are becomes obvious to me.”
“What…what I am?” Aaron asked. “I don’t understand what…”
The strange old man shuffled closer. “Nephilim,” he whispered as he raised a dirty hand to point. “You are Nephilim.”
The word reverberated through Aaron’s skull and a sudden panic gripped him. He had to get away. He had to get away from this strange old man, from that word. He had to get away as fast as he could.
“I really have to be going,” he muttered as he slipped his key into the lock and hauled open the car door.
Aaron got inside his car and locked it. He couldn’t remember a time when the need to run was so strong. He put the key into the ignition and turned the engine over. As he put the car in drive, he chanced a look at the old man. He was still standing there, staring in at him with those intense eyes.
Aaron turned away and pulled out into traffic. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the old man receding in the distance. He continued to stand there, watching him drive away, mouth moving, repeating a single word. Aaron knew what he was saying.
The old man was saying “Nephilim,” over and over again.
Nephilim.
Aaron splashed cold water on his face and stared at his dripping features in the water-speckled mirror of the Lynn Public Library’s restroom.
What the hell is going on? he thought, studying his reflection. What’s happening to me?
There was fear in the face that looked back from the mirror. What was that with the old man? he wondered for the thousandth time. What did he mean by the language of messengers—and what’s a Nephilim? His thoughts raced feverishly.
He pulled some paper towels from the dispenser on the wall and wiped the water from his face. As he reached to the side of the sink for the restroom key, attached to an unusually large piece of wood, he noticed that his hand was shaking. Aaron snatched up the key and clenched the wood tightly in his grasp.
“Gotta calm down,” he told himself in a whisper. “The old guy was just crazy, probably done the exact same routine to ten other people today. What are you getting so worked up over? You know this city is loaded with kooks.”
There was a gentle knock at the bathroom door. He took a deep breath, composed himself, and opened the door. An old man was standing there with a coat slung over his arm.
“You done in there?” he asked with a nervous smile.
Aaron did the best that he could to return the pleasantries as he stepped out of the restroom. “Yeah, sorry I took so long,” he said as he handed the old-timer the block of wood with the key attached.
“No problem,” the old man said as he took the key and moved into the bathroom. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t fall in.”
Aaron turned as the door closed and saw that the man was chuckling. He didn’t much feel like it, but found himself laughing at the man’s good-natured dig anyway. “Wouldn’t that have been the icing on the cake if I had,” he said to himself as he climbed the white marble steps from the basement to the first floor.
He found an empty table far in the corner of one of the reading rooms and slung his jacket over the back of a chair. He wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to accomplish now, but at least he had to make an attempt. Besides, he needed something to distract him from the bizarreness that seemed to be following him of late. He had brought a notebook in with him and removed a pen from its front pocket.
He settled in and spent hours perusing books on a number of different authors and literary subjects, searching for something that piqued his interest enough for a research paper. He’d pretty much made up his mind to go with the topic of good and evil’s duality in the works of Poe, when he realized that he had zoned out, and had been doodling in the border of his notepad, writing something over and over with a variety of spellings.
Nefellum. Nefilem. Nifillim. Nephilem. Nephilim.
Aaron tore out the page and stared at it. What does it mean? Why can’t I just forget about it? he wondered, reviewing each of the spellings.
He got up from his chair and headed into the reference area of the library. The first book that he pulled from the shelves was a Webster’s New World College Dictionary. He placed the large book down onto a table and began to look for the word, trying all the incarnations he had written. He found nothing.
Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing, he thought as he returned the dictionary to where he had found it. Maybe it’s just a nonsense word made up by a crazy person, and I’m equally nuts for giving it this much attention.
Aaron decided that he had already wasted enough time and energy on the old man’s rants, and headed back to his table to begin an outline for his paper. If anything could be salvaged from this train wreck of a day, at least he could get a head start on that.
He crumpled up the piece of paper in his hand and headed back to the reading room.
But the word continued to jump around in his head, as if it had a life of its own and was taunting him. Nephilim.
Aaron casually glanced into the library’s computer room as he passed. The usually crowded room was surprisingly empty, with several stations free.
Seizing the opportunity to satisfy his curiosity, he walked in and sat down at one of the computers. This would be it, the mystery word’s last chance to mean something. If he didn’t find it here, he would purge it from his mind forever and never think of it again. He signed in with a password that he had obtained from the library his first year of high school, and called up a search engine that he used often when researching information for school papers. The screen appeared and, choosing one of the varied spellings, he typed in the mystery word. He hit the Enter key and held his breath. The page cleared and then some information appeared.
“Do you mean Nephilim?” asked the message that appeared on top of the new page.
He maneuvered the mouse and brought the arrow over to the revised spelling, clicked once and waited as the new pages loaded.
Aaron was startled to see how many sites appeared with some kind of connection to the word. So much for it being nonsense, he thought as he scrolled down the page, reading a bit about each of the sites. There were multiple sites about a rock group, some about a role-playing game, all using the name Nephilim, but none gave a meaning.
A site that specialized in religious mythologies finally caught his attention. Is that it? he wondered, as the page began to upload. Does it have something to do with religion? In that case, it was no wonder he had no familiarity with it. He’d never been much of a religious person, and neither had the Stanleys.