The Crossing Point Page 27

  The boy’s assessment only seemed to intrigue the old man more. “There’s always been one of us here. Before the palace. And after the palace. A great dark wing will always cast its shadow across the face of this island,” he stated quietly. “And yet I can see a flicker of doubt remaining still in your eyes.”

  “No, not really. That is…well…it’s just…,” Jacob stammered. “I just didn’t realize that you were able to…you know…grow so old.”

  He winced as he muttered the last few words as if he were throwing forth some unforgivable insult, and the old man appeared momentarily taken aback by the comment. He glanced down at his hands, bringing them up into the light to examine more closely the dark sunspots that freckled his skin and the slightly arthritic fingers which he wriggled stiffly. Suddenly, he began to chuckle, lightly at first, and then with an increased vigor.

  “Ah yes, I tend to forget this withered cloak I wear,” he said. “A fitting skin to match the weariness that has aged and bored its way into the depths of my soul after these countless lifetimes to which I’ve served as witness. I found long ago it provided a nonthreatening—invisible, if you will—means which allowed for my continuing existence on Akdamar during an ever-changing occupancy through the centuries. Surprisingly, I’ve grown quite comfortable in it despite how uncomfortable it may appear from the outside.”

  Johiel turned and in his slow, aged gait he made his way to a corner of the cathedral where a large stone bowl, filled with water for tourists to dip their fingers into and bless themselves while visiting the church, rested upon a pedestal. With his back facing Jacob, Johiel immersed his cupped hands into the bowl and brought a splash of the water across his face, then swept his wet hands slowly over his forehead and back across the covering of white sprouting from his head. And as he did, the fizzy hair began to change instantly, growing thicker and stronger beneath the passing of his fingers, and becoming chameleon-like with its color from the roots outward until the white became a long, silky mane of dark blonde.

  Jacob watched with open-mouthed amazement as the stooped, hunched body before him straightened and grew in stature before him. The baggy clothes that had once hung loose on the frail form now strained tight against a fit, muscular body. And when Johiel finally turned back around, the face weathered and aged had somehow vanquished the lines and creases time had set deeply into place and now appeared youthfully handsome and beaming with a confident strength.

  “Behold,” exclaimed Johiel with a youthful timber sending the deep tenure of his voice to echo powerfully through the cathedral chamber, “and look upon me as I truly am. Then turn your ear to what I am about to speak, and let us see if we can’t quiet the chorus of questions ringing in your head.”

  ~~~

  Jacob sank to the cold, hard concrete of the cathedral floor just inside the circle that held the warm orange glow of the waning day outside streaming down from the church’s dome. Anxious was he to hear what was about to be told him, like a child curled up warm in his bed awaiting a story to be recited from his favorite book. His dusty, loosely laced sneakered feet were crossed at the ankles and knees pulled close to his chest, and his eyes were quietly fixed on Johiel, moving pensively about in front of him. They still held a look of awe after witnessing the angel’s cocoon-like transformation only moments earlier. After what seemed to be a never-ending silence that might never be pricked again by sound, Johiel cleared his throat and began to speak.

  And, like all good stories worth listening to, he began at the beginning with the creation. Not that of man, but of the angels. He told of their numbers, and he spoke their names. Some Jacob had heard of before: Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Michael. Many he had not, such as Haniel, Anahel, Uzziel and Zerachiel. And as Johiel recited the names, he motioned to the numerous, almost countless images of angels peering down from the columns and walls and ceiling, some bold and impressive in size, and others less so.

  “They are your bloodline, the roots to the great tree of which you are but a limb just beginning to sprout,” said Johiel.

  His voice held an echoing command within the church walls as it retold the events that gave way to the creation of the world—Jacob’s world, the world in which mankind would come to dwell—and mankind itself. Johiel spoke with great authority, like a biblical scholar. And, in fact, Johiel’s version of events were much like those Jacob remembered being read to him from the Bible countless times by his mother when he was a child, and yet it was as though he was hearing it all for the very first time. Jacob found himself spellbound by the words that seemed to unfold like the great tapestries painted on the walls and ceiling around him. His attention strayed for only a moment when Johiel began to talk of the Great War in Heaven in much the same way Gotham had on the train, and he looked for Gotham who was listening silently from a nearby corner to which he had receded. Despite the gathering darkness, Jacob could see a trace of unease in the angel’s face with the retelling of stories he appeared to silently wish would be erased from his memory.

  Johiel suddenly became silent and drew his gaze upward to the small openings encircling the cathedral dome where the last remaining moments of day could be seen in the thin rose-colored light that was fast growing dimmer.

  “I see the night is almost upon us,” he said, and he crossed the floor to where an extinguished torch was fixed in the wall. He leaned his face to the charred head and blew his breath upon it and it instantly ignited with a flame.

  “I’ve never cared much for the darkness,” he remarked. Then turning his head and cupping a hand to the side of his mouth he blew forth another breath, only much deeper, and one by one in quick succession numerous other torches throughout the church came to life filling the cavernous space with their flickering light.

  “Even in the brightest of lights, darkness looms on its periphery,” said Johiel to Jacob with an arched brow. “Always remember that.”

  Jacob looked to the walls, and the walls looked to be alive from the movements made within them by the images. And while he continued to find it unnerving, he was slowly becoming more and more used to what shouldn’t be.

  “So, why is it the angels came to despise man?” It wasn’t until Jacob heard his own voice that he realized he had spoken out loud the thought which crept up suddenly out of nowhere from the dark recesses of his brain.

  Johiel swung back around to face Jacob, and a curious smile crept across his face. “You are, if anything, direct with your questions, young one.”

  “Sorry,” said Jacob, hoping his question wasn’t met with offense. “It’s just something I remembered my teacher Mrs. Braukoff saying in Bible class once when I was little. It always struck me as odd.”

  Johiel slowly made his way back toward the dome, not in movements he made when disguised with age, but as a strong man caught in the tight grip of deep reflection.

  “Despise.” He muttered the word several times to himself under his breath, as if it came from new language with which he was unfamiliar and was pining for its meaning.

  “The relationship between angel and mortal man has always been a complex one,” said Johiel finally. “Angels have always seen themselves as far superior to man. We find contempt with man’s inability to fight the slide into temptation. We see him as weak and undeserving of the special devotion God has placed upon him. Yet the truth is the creation of man ultimately revealed the same weaknesses in ourselves. For we saw the making of man as our unmaking, something that had been created to take our place as God’s favorite.”

  “So you’re saying then it’s a jealousy thing?” asked Jacob.

  “Jealousy,” echoed Johiel with a sigh. “Envy. Arrogance. Vanity. It took hold of all of us in some form or another, some more than others. And in those few it found particular fertile ground to take root. Their light became pregnant with a darkness which would fester and metastasize within them. And when man was finally presented before us by our Creator and we were commanded to bow down and serve him, the Darkness reared in defiance.
The call to war rang out and it would come to pass that a third of my brothers would fall from the Heavens like stars shaken free and collapsing from the skies. And soon after, what had been a turn to jealousy became a great resentment—resentment over the fact that when the time came when man, himself, eventual fell into sin, God would extend to him the ultimate act of mercy he refused the angels he banished: forgiveness.”

  As Jacob listened intently, he cast a glance at the angel’s forehead in search of the telltale scar that marked Gotham.

  “You don’t carry the mark,” he noted with a sense of puzzlement.

  “I would hope not, seeing as I am not Fallen,” said Johiel. “But that does not shield me from feeling for my brothers who are and lamenting the sentence imposed upon them.”

  “Then why are you here, alone on this island, living in this run-down church?” asked Jacob.

  Johiel at once appeared offended at the characterization of what had long been his home many mortal lifetimes over. “I grant you this church is but a shell of its former glory, but I would take umbrage in referring to it as run-down.”

  “What I meant was why are you here on an island in the middle of a lake when you could be…you know?” said Jacob, making an upward pointing gesture with his finger.

  Johiel grinned and turned his attention toward the inside of the cathedral dome where the light from the flickering torches brought mysterious movements to shadowy shapes, knowing it was the heavens beyond to which the boy referred.

  “Those of us who roam about this world do so for different reasons, both the Fallen and those who have not,” he said. “It would take yet another Fall to set my feet upon this earth, not that of angels, but the one who had been held before us like some precious unearthed gem. It was orchestrated with teething glee by the Dark Dragon, who after being cast down from the heavens took chase after man with a burning hatred, fed by an even more burning hatred for the One who made him. For he knew all too well the only way to wound his vanquisher was through his most beloved creation. So it came to be he led man to commit the Great Sin against God and forever secured the punishment upon all of mankind forever after in the form of a much different mark.”

  “You can’t mean Adam and Eve,” said Jacob.

  The remark made Johiel’s left eyebrow rise defensively. “I take it by the dubious tone in your voice the truthfulness of what I have spoken has aroused your doubt. But hear me when I tell you it was I who was sent down to deliver God’s rebuke upon them, and as they stood before me, made of the same flesh and blood as are you I most certainly assure you, it was I who cast them from Eden’s lair out into the unsettled world naked and pitiful in their shame.”

  And, strangely, the conviction with which the angel spoke seemed to immediately silence the doubt Jacob had expressed, and his eyes followed Johiel’s as they returned to the painted image within the dome of Adam and Eve being led out of Eden.

  “You have been the first to recognize that it is me who is painted upon that wall. Even the artist I oversaw during the construction of this church failed to see the image he shaped with the tip of his brush and the man before him, not yet taken to an aged form, were one and the same.”

  “But why have you remained here after all this time?” pressed Jacob.

  “As I told you when we first met, I am Guardian of the Gate. As long as the Gate exists, so too does my presence here.”

  Jacob was becoming more visibly dumbfounded by Johiel’s words. “That doesn’t make any sense. If the Gate still exists as you say and the reason you are here is to serve as guardian to it, that would mean Eden—”

  He stopped himself, as if realizing the words coming from his mouth, even posed as hypothetical, were the most ridiculous ever to be spoken by another person.

  “Is it that difficult a thing to fathom?” answered Johiel, sounding equally as perplexed.

  Difficult to fathom?

  “You’re joking right?” asked Jacob, looking like someone who was experiencing having his leg pulled and trying to figure out who was doing the tugging as he glanced over at Gotham, who also showed no signs of foolery. “You’re talking about Eden. As in The Garden of Eden.”

  “Angels are many things,” said Johiel. “Pranksters, we are not.”

  Jacob felt his head begin to swim. “Alright…for now let’s say I believe you. Where is it then, and how is it the rest of the world isn’t aware of its existence?”

  “That is something you would have to see for yourself, for I am certain your belief—what little of it there is—would quickly wane even more-so if I were to tell you,” said Johiel.

  Jacob could hear echoes of his grandmother’s voice in the angel’s words. It was almost exactly the same answer she gave him when he asked her where it was Gotham was planning to take him. Hearing it come from the angel suddenly brought a jarring sense of reality to everything he had so far experienced.

  “Yes, Eden exists,” said Johiel as if to put a final stamp of fact on the revelation revealed to the boy. “But the Gate remains sealed, as it has since the day man was exiled from the Garden. The ones allowed through are angels and their offspring and it is through me, and me alone, that such passage is granted. But you should know it is not an easy voyage getting there. And despite my efforts to provide safe passage, it does not come without the risk of danger, especially from an unsavory presence which infests these lands in growing numbers.”

  “You must mean the Furies,” said Jacob, taking an uneducated guess.

  “Ah, then you know of them?” inquired Johiel.

  “Not officially, thankfully,” said Jacob. “I was sort of introduced to other members of the family in the form of a midget panhandler.”

  Johiel turned to Gotham with a quizzical look.

  “We had a run-in with an Infector on our way here,” explained Gotham.

  “I see,” said Johiel with a nod. “A truly nasty and vicious parasite set upon mankind, Infectors are. Goodness knows I’ve had more than my fair share of run-ins with them, so it bodes well for you that you show nary a mark on your skin from your first encounter. Furies, I regret to say, are an entirely different breed of malignancy.”

  “I remember learning something about Furies in my history class last year,” recalled Jacob. “If I remember right, they were nasty spirits who went after people who murdered family members and punished them by driving them mad.”

  “Erinyes, as they were better known,” said Johiel. “Female deities of justice and vengeance also referred to as the infernal goddesses.”

  “But they’re a part of Greek mythology,” said Jacob, bringing a smile to Johiel.

  “All myths and legends conjured by mortals sprout from some seedling of truth. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Furies, the myth pales to the reality.”

  It was not an answer that proved especially comforting to Jacob by any means.

  “What I don’t understand is,” he contemplated aloud, “what beef do these… things…especially the Furies…have with me?”

  An ominous look suddenly shadowed Johiel’s face in the firelight of the burning torches and he looked once more to Gotham.

  “You haven’t told him?”

  The only answer to come from Gotham was the continuing look of resignation that had kept a silent vigil in the angel’s eyes as he sat silently listening to Johiel explain to Jacob the history which led to the boy being brought to Akdamar.

  ~~~

  “Gotham said they were part of the Darkness—demons,” answered Jacob hesitantly when Gotham didn’t. The sudden palpable tension between Johiel and Gotham told Jacob there was more to these creatures than he had been told.

  “Okay, you two are kinda starting to freak me out a little here,” said Jacob with a nervous chuckle. “Is there something you’re not telling me about these Furies? I mean, who exactly are they?”

  “Not who, but rather what,” Johiel was quick to correct the boy. “Always remember that.”

  “That makes it a lot
less ominous,” said Jacob. And for a moment he thought maybe it might be better not to know. Still, he couldn’t refrain from asking, “Alright, what are they then?”

  Johiel’s gaze came back to rest upon Jacob, and a dire foreshadowing retained itself within the golden orbs that were his eyes reflecting the still- burning torches.

  “They were once what you are now,” came the answer.

  “What do you mean…what I am—” began Jacob before the answer lit up inside him like a lightbulb. “Wait…you mean—”

  “The poor wretched souls of the early Nephilim, cut down by a flaming sword and washed out of existence by flood waters carrying God’s wrath,” said Johiel.

  Nephilim?

  Jacob watched stunned as the angel before him turned and began slowly making his way around the perimeter of the church dome.

  “After the angel’s Fall from Heaven and man’s Fall from Grace, came a third great fall,” Johiel began. “And it was this Fall that would come to hurt God the most. For shortly after man’s Fall and expulsion from Eden, God saw the hardship and pain that had befallen upon his beloved creations. And so, in an act of mercy, he sent down a band of eleven angels known as the Watchers to give man aid and guidance in his survival. Each angel possessed a unique, special skill, and together they gave man instruction to the signs of the earth, and the science of the constellations. They taught root-cutting and how to grow plants for food, and for a brief moment, man and angel for the first time came together in a way that pleased God.”

  The look on Johiel’s face offered warning that the story he told was deprived of a happy ending. “As would always be the case, the Dark Dragon remained near, watching and scheming,” continued Johiel. “Despite leading man to their downfall through sin, he still carried a thirst for revenge. And with the Watchers he saw an opportunity to deal another stinging blow to the heavens. He turned to a Watcher named Azazel, and Azazel began teaching the men how to make swords and shields, and through them war. To the women, Azazel taught how to beautify their faces with coloring tinctures and adorn themselves with ornaments. He began seducing the women, and when he had finished, he sent the women off to seduce the other Watchers. Mind you, not all the Watchers fell prey to their charms and remained loyal to their Maker. But many chose different. They became known as the Grigori, and in that name they swiftly abandoned their allegiance to Heaven to become what they had once so despised in men. As for the men, they watched helplessly with a growing fury as their wives gravitated without shame to the company of the Grigori and the Fallen, and they began growing large with the fruits of their sin. Before long the first cries from the offspring of these forbidden unions rang out and reached God’s ears. And a great darkness fell upon the face of the earth.”