Servant of the Bones

The old man sat exactly as before. I think he looked at the dust on his desk. I think he stared at the flakes of rust from the iron which had been left on his polished wood. But I couldn't tell.

I felt nothing. I neither moved nor was strengthened, as Gregory with his casket of bones moved away from me. No, he was not Master, never, never, by any means. But this old man? I had to know.

Gregory's steps died away in the alley.

I came forward, and walked to the old man's desk and stood in front of it.

The old man was aghast.

The moment for an outcry passed in rigid silence, his eyes contracting, and when he spoke it was a whisper.

"Go back to the bones, Spirit," he said.

I drew on all my strength to hold out against him, I thought nothing of his hatted, and I thought of no moment in my long miserable existence when I had been either wronged or loved. I looked at him and I stood firm. I barely heard him.

"Why did you pass the bones to him?" I asked. "What is your purpose! If you called me up to destroy him, tell me!"

He turned his face away, so as not to see me.

"Be gone, Spirit!" he declared in Hebrew.

I watched him stand up and move the chair back out of his way, and I saw his hands fly up, and I knew that he was speaking Hebrew, and then the Chaldean, yes, he knew that too, and he spoke it with perfect cadence, but I didn't hear the words. The words didn't touch me.

"Why did you say he killed Esther? Why, Rebbe, tell me!"

Silence. He had ceased to speak. He didn't even pray in his mind or his heart. He stood transfixed, his mouth closed tight beneath his white mustache, the locks of his hair shivering slightly, the light showing the yellowed hairs of his beard as well as the snow white.

His eyes were closed. He began to whisper his prayers in Hebrew, davening, or bowing, that is, very quickly over and over again.

His fear and fury were equal; his hatred outstripped them both.

"Do you want justice for her?" I shouted at him. But nothing would break his prayers and his closed eyes and his bowing.

Now I spoke, softly in Chaldean,

"Fly from me," I said in a whisper, "all you tiny parts of land and air and mountain and sea, and of the living and of the dead, which have come to give me this form, fly from me but not so far that I cannot summon you at will, and leave me my shape that this mortal man may see me and be afraid."

The light above shivered again on its raw cord. I saw the air move the old man's beard. I saw it make him blink.

I looked down through my own translucent hands and saw the floor beyond them.

"Fly from me," I whispered, "and stay close to me to return at my summons, that God Himself would not know me from a man that He had made!"

I vanished.

I threw out my disappearing hands to frighten him. I wanted so to hurt him, just a little. I wanted so to defy him. On and on he prayed with eyes closed.

But there was no time for idle play with him. I didn't know if there was energy enough for what I meant to do.

Passing through the walls I went upwards, rising over the rooftops, passing through tingling wires, and into the cool air of the night.

"Gregory," I said, as surely as if my old master Samuel had sent me to say it. "Gregory!"

And there below in the stream of traffic on the bridge I saw the car, moving amongst its guardians, for there were many. I saw it, sleek and long, keeping perfect pace with the cars before it and behind it and beside it, as if they were birds together in a flock and flew straight, without having to play the wind.

"Down there, beside him and so that he cannot see."

No Master could have said it with more determination, pointing his finger at the victim that I was to rob, or murder, or put to flight.

"Come now, Azriel, as I command you," I said.

And gently I descended, into the soft warm interior of the car, a world of dark synthetic velvet and tinted glass that made the night outside die a little, as if a deep mist had covered all things.

Opposite him, I took my place, my back to the leather wall which divided us from the driver, folding my arms again as I watched him, crouched as it were, with the casket in his arms. He had broken off the useless rusted iron chains, and they lay dirty and fragmented on the carpeted floor.

I could have wept with happiness. I had been so afraid! I had been so sure I could not do it! All of my will had been so fixed on the effort, that I scarce had breath in me to realize it had been done.

We rode together, the ghost watching him, and he, the man clutching his treasure, balancing it carefully on his knees, and reaching in his coat for the papers, and then shoving them back in his excitement and steadying the casket again and rubbing his hands on it, as if the very gold excited him as it had the ancients. As gold had once excited me.

Gold.

A blast of heat came to me, but this was memory.

Hold firm. Begin. From land and sea, from the living and the dead, from all that God has made, come to me, what I require to make of me an apparition, thin as air, to make of me a barely visible yet strong being.

I looked down and saw the shape of my legs, I had hands again, I made clothes like Gregory's clothes. I could almost feel the padded seat of the car. Almost feel it, and I longed to touch it, longed for garments to wrap me round.

I saw buttons, the shining semblance of buttons, and fingernails. And I lifted my invisible hand to my face to make sure that it was clean shaven as his. But give me my hair, my long hair, like Samson's hair, thick hair. I caught my fingers in the ringlets. I wanted so to finish it but not yet-

I had to say when Azriel would come, didn't I? I had to say it. I was the Master.

Suddenly Gregory lowered the casket. He fell down on his knees on the very floor of the car and laid the casket before him, rocking with the motion of the car, steadying himself against the seat, his right hand so close to me he almost touched me, and then he ripped off the lid of the casket.

He pulled it up and off, and it flew off, rotted, dried, a shell of gold almost, and there-there on their bed of rotted cloth lay the bones.

I felt a shock as though blood had been infused into me. My heart had only to beat. No, not yet.

I looked down at the remnants of my body. I looked down at the bones that held my tzelem locked within them, coated with gold, chained together, and formed like a child asleep in the womb.

A dimness threatened me, a dissolution. What was the reason? Pain. We were in a great room. I knew this room. I felt the heat of the boiling cauldron. No. Don't let this come now. Don't let this weaken you.

Look at the man on his knees right in front of you, and the bones that he all but worships, which are your bones.