The Fall

Fet smiled. The old man’s faith never failed to warm him. “Can you tell me what you saw in that book?”

Setrakian set down the box of crackers and lit up a pipe. “I saw… everything. I saw hope, yes. But then… I saw the end of us. Of everything.”

He slid out a reproduction of the crescent moon drawing seen both in the subway, via Fet’s pink phone video, and in the pages of the Lumen. The old man had copied it three times.

“You see? This symbol-like the vampire itself, how it was once seen-is an archetype. Common to all mankind, East and West-but within it, a different permutation, see? Latent, but revealed in time, like any prophecy. Observe.”

He took the three pieces of paper and, utilizing a makeshift light table, laid them out, superimposing one atop another.

“Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple… when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…”

The three moons rotated in the paper, and joined together.

“These are not three moons. No. They are occultations. Three solar eclipses, each occurring at the exact latitude and longitude, marking an even, enormous span of years-signaling an event, now complete. Revealing the sacred geometry of omen.”

Fet saw with amazement that the three shapes together formed a rudimentary biohazard sign:. “But this symbol… I know it from my work. It was just designed in the sixties, I think…”

“All symbols are eternal. They exist even before we dream of them…”

“So how did…”

“Oh, we know,” said Setrakian. “We always know. We don’t discover, we don’t learn. We just remember things that we have forgotten…” He pointed to the symbol. “A warning. Dormant in our mind, reawakened now-as the end of time approaches.”

Fet regarded the worktable Setrakian had taken over. He was experimenting with photography equipment, explaining something about “testing a metallurgical silver emulsion technique” that Fet did not understand. But the old man seemed to know what he was doing. “Silver,” said Setrakian. “Argentum, to the ancient alchemists and represented by this symbol…” Again, Setrakian presented Fet with the image of the crescent moon.

“And this, in turn…” said Setrakian, producing the engraving of the archangel. “Sariel. In certain Enochian manuscripts he is named Arazyal, Asaradel. Names all too similar to Azrael or Ozryel…”

Placing the engraving side to side with the biohazard sign and the alchemical symbol of the crescent moon gave the images a shocking through-line. A convergence, a direction; a goal.

Setrakian felt a surge of energy and excitement. His mind was hunting.

“Ozryel is the angel of death,” said Setrakian. “Muslims call him ‘he of the four faces, the many eyes, and the many mouths. He of the seventy thousand feet and four thousand wings.’ And he has as many eyes and as many tongues as there are men on earth. But you see, that only speaks of how he can multiply, how he can spread…”

Fet’s thoughts swam. The part that most concerned him was safely extracting the blood worm from Setrakian’s jar-sealed vampire heart. The old man had lined the table with battery-powered UV lamps in order to contain the worm. Everything appeared ready, and the jar was close at hand, the fist-size organ throbbing-and yet, now that the time had come, Setrakian was reluctant to butcher the sinister heart.

Setrakian leaned in close to the specimen jar, and a tentacled outgrowth shot out, the mouth-like sucker at its tip adhering to the glass. These blood worms were nasty suckers. Fet understood that the old man had been feeding it drops of his blood for decades now, nursing this ugly thing, and, in doing so, had formed some eerie attachment to it. That was natural enough. But Setrakian’s hesitation here contained an emotional component beyond pure melancholy.

This was more like true sorrow. More like despair.

Fet realized something then. Now and then, in the middle of the night, he had seen the old man speaking to the jar, feeding the thing inside. Alone by candlelight he stared at it, whispered to it, and caressed the cold glass containing the unholy flesh. Once Fet swore he’d heard the old man singing to it. Softly, in a foreign tongue-not Armenian-a lullaby…

Setrakian had become aware of Fet looking at him. “Forgive me, professor,” said Fet. “But… whose heart is it? The original story you told us…”

Setrakian nodded, having been found out. “Yes… that I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village in northern Albania? You are right, that tale is not entirely true.”

Tears sparkled in the old man’s eyes. One drop fell in silence, and, when he finally spoke, he did so in a whisper-as the tale he told required it.

INTERLUDE III:SETRAKIAN’S HEART