The answer came from a great distance. “Not far.”
The flashlight winked out, immersing Jacob in a black as total as death.
Panting, he hooked one arm over a rung, tugged out his phone, clutching it in one sweaty hand as he resumed his ascent. Its blue glow penetrated less than a foot into the dust; it shut off every ten seconds. He kept reviving it, glancing at the screen. He was getting no service.
It was 6:13 p.m. They were never going to make it down before Shabbat.
And still Peter kept climbing.
To keep his anxiety at bay, Jacob began counting rungs: thirty, fifty, a hundred. He couldn’t see the flashlight but he could hear the humming, chased after it, his heart straining, every step a torment. When he next checked the time, he saw that it had not changed, and he told himself that the lack of reception was affecting the operation of the clock, although he knew very well that the clock ran on its own internal circuit; so maybe the problem was the dust, a special dust, a toxic dust, maybe it had clogged up the phone and caused it to freeze, an explanation he accepted because that alone could account for the fact that it remained 6:13 after he’d counted sixty more rungs, and again, and again, until the phone refused to light up, either out of juice or else the dust was so enveloping that he couldn’t see the screen, even with it pressed right up against his face. He had lost count of the rungs, hand over hand without end. The humming had died, too. He called out and the close echo told him that, as he could not hear Peter, Peter could not hear him; nobody could; he faltered, knowing that he would never reach the top. Nor could he go back down. He was alone. There was nothing to do but let his fingers uncurl and his toes unbend and release himself into the abyss.
Weeping, he grasped the next rung.
A glowing gap opened in the cosmos. Syrupy orange light sang to him.
The dust knitted itself into cloth; folded over itself, forming a warm moist pumping canal that sucked him upward, and as he drew nearer, the gap widened and the light streamed down, carrying voices. He stretched and strove toward the sound, suffocating, skull unknitting and segmenting and deforming, and the voices multiplied: forty-five, seventy-one, two hundred thirty-one, six hundred thirteen, eighteen thousand, a thousand by a thousand voices, every one of them unique and discernible and strange, the light spreading oceanically, a terrible buzzing chorus, and the voices swelled to twelve by thirty by thirty by thirty by thirty by thirty by thirty by three hundred sixty-five thousand myriads, the thrum of innumerable wings.
Chapter thirty-seven
“You are here, Jacob Lev.”
Jacob lay on his back, body stunned and numb, chest thudding.
Through fuzzy infant eyes he saw Peter kneeling over him. Not a hair out of place. His shirt unwrinkled.
“How do you feel?”
“I ffff...” Tangle-tongued. “I feel... I can prowuh, proll, prolly... skippa gym... today.”
Peter smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “You did well.”
The guard hoisted him to a sitting position.
Blood stormed into his temples, and his vision went gold-green, and for less than a second he peered through a green filter at a lush garden, green grass insisting through the floorboards, spore-engorged ferns exploding greenly from the rafters, vines climbing through mist, dripping orchids, acres of lichen, an ecosystem thriving and sultry, sexual in its zeal, real enough to fill his nostrils with the heady vapors of rot and regeneration.
Then his mind clenched like an overused muscle and the green band lifted and the garden withered and petrified, curvaceous tendrils stiffening to woodwormed structural beams.
“Can you stand?”
“Think so.”
“Okay, up up up.”
A brief, awkward dance, Jacob leaning on the smaller, older man.
“I’m going to let you go. All right? Yes? Okay? Here we go... Very good. Very good.”
They were at one end of a sprawling, windowless, unfinished attic, amok with a truly awesome amount of junk.
Lingering vertigo yanked the horizon back and forth. A kerosene lantern hanging from a wall bracket made a meager and uncertain buffer against the darkness that slunk through the crevices, expanded in the open air, obscured the peak of the sloped ceiling.
“How are you now? Better?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you need to sit down?”
“I’m okay.”
Peter regarded him skeptically. With good reason: it was taking every ounce of focus for Jacob to keep himself upright. His neck and face felt flushed with fever, his damp shirtfront swaying in a sourceless breeze. Clearly he was in lousier aerobic shape than he’d imagined. Or maybe he was sick. Physically sick. The dust. An allergy attack from hell.
Could allergies tweak your visual field? Make you hallucinate?
He was probably dehydrated, too; in mini-withdrawal and jet-lagged, and preoccupied. Any of these explanations he greatly preferred over the onset of psychosis.
“As you say,” Peter said. “Now, listen carefully, please. If you have any unusual thoughts, you must tell me, at once.”
“Unusual?”
“Anything at all. A strong urge to do something, for instance.” Peter unhooked the lantern. “Please stay close; it’s easy to get lost.”
They waded into the maze, the lantern swinging, carving shapes in the gloom, throwing weird shadows that evolved from moment to moment, so that blank space lurched forth as solid and vice versa. The darkness had a tangible, oily quality, contracting at the touch of light like a drop of soap in grease, alerting Jacob at the last second to shifting floor depths, sagging planking, masonry remnants, and flaccid, chin-high ductwork.
More dust. Not as bad as in the shaft. It stuck to his skin, mixed with the sweat, formed a kind of clayey paste that dried and crackled as he moved. But his lungs weren’t rebelling.
He was, in fact, breathing easily. Better than usual.
“Must be tough getting a vacuum up that ladder.”
“Pardon?”
“To clean it. Every Friday.”
“I said I tend it,” Peter said.
“There’s a difference?”
“Naturally. That’s why there are two separate words.”
A vacuum would have been beside the point, a blowtorch the right tool for the job. Much of the mess was bookcases, stacked deep with water-stained parchment scrolls, moth-eaten talleisim, crates of prayer-book confetti — the components of a genizah, a community depository for disused ritual objects too holy to destroy. There were other items, too: peeling steamer trunks and wrecked furniture and piles of shoes filled with rodent droppings.
Eight centuries, he supposed stuff added up.
His equilibrium was returning, and with it, his detachment.
He said, “Have you ever considered a garage sale?”
Peter chuckled. “Most items of value have already been sold off. Almost nothing here predates the war.”
“Mind if I take a couple of pictures? My father’s a big fan of the Maharal.”
The guard glanced back to arch an eyebrow. “Is he.”
“It’s kind of an obsession, actually.”
“I wasn’t aware that rabbis had fans.”
“They do among other rabbis.”
“Ah. Please.”
They paused so Jacob could dig out his camera. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to achieve, other than to prove to Sam that he’d been here — not that you could prove anything from pictures of garbage. “What was here before that was so valuable?”
“Old books, manuscripts. There was also a letter, the only one surviving in the Maharal’s own hand.”
Jacob whistled. “No kidding.”
Peter nodded. “You’d do better to bring your father photographs of that, Jacob Lev.”