Demon полностью

“The unthinkable!” she said in a whisper. She seemed unusually convivial today. “There now, by the river, the earth was gathering upon itself, forming up from the ground as though El himself had bent down and scooped up mounds of the foul stuff in his hands.” She covered her mouth, a strange half laugh seeming to escape her of its own volition, inadvertent as a hiccup, the sound of it peculiar and cracked.

“We on the periphery lingered in the humid air. What was he doing? There was God, doing something in the muck. We looked at each other. Even Lucifer stared, dumbfounded. You should have seen the look on his face!”

She broke out in sudden, trilling laughter. There again was that slight hint of mania. And as before, the abruptness with which she regained her composure startled me nearly as much as how quickly she had lost it. It occurred to me that anyone overhearing her—the way her voice shot up in register and lowered to a whisper and then broke out in laughter—might have thought she was unbalanced.

She steered me toward an exhibit of gold bracelets and rings, preserved all these years in a Nubian tomb. I was conflicted by her casual contact and thought about pulling away from her whispered words, stirring the tiny hairs in my ear.

“El was sculpting the earth into some thing, some likeness, creating this time not by word . . . but in person.” When I said nothing, she gestured imperatively, vainly, as one groping for words. “In person, Clay. As though by hand!”

I looked at her, baffled.

“We were all staring, gape-mouthed as you, by then. And then he surrounded this thing. He was everywhere around it, as if he had gathered the dirty thing in his arms and cupped it by the head. And then I heard it.”

She was clutching my arm, her fingers biting into my flesh so that I was glad I had worn a sweater, sure that she would have left half-moon punctures with her nails in my forearm.

“The sound, it was the same expectant sound at the dawn of all the world. A breath exhaled into the mud! Given to the mud thing as surely as if he had set his mouth against those dirty lips and breathed.

“Oh, divine exhale! It was himself. Much more than life, it was everything—the awareness, all the emotion, the propensity to love, to nurture, to create. And he endowed it all upon this new creature made of mud.” The plush mouth contorted. Behind her irises, the unnatural light I had noted before blazed like a black nova. “And the clay chest filled, and expanded, and warmed. The man coughed and fell down, alive.”

I stared. “But you’re saying—”

“Yes, Clay”—her mouth smoothed into a chilly smile—“Image of El, breath of God. In such an unworthy vessel. Something far more precious than diamonds, denied even to us but entrusted to a container of mud.”

“I take it Lucifer was as thrilled as you seem.”

Again the brittle laugh. “His jealousy exploded in a fiery blast, the fallout infecting us with his cancer.”

She shrugged out of her coat, and I instinctively moved to help her. She wore a sleeveless turtleneck beneath, and the skin of her arms was smooth, luminous. I wanted to touch it.

“Eden, once the seat of his government, had been made anew, raised up and recreated lush and living—and prepared for another.” She took the coat from me and draped it over her arm, a delicate silver watch on her wrist catching the light. “No more stones like mirrors—this was a handcrafted cradle for no creature of our kind.”

“So he—El—made it for Adam. I assume that’s the man you’re talking about.”

“Yes. This new garden, planted by Elohim, became his home. The former throne of Lucifer now belonged to a cherished new creature made of mud.”

“You said yourself that Lucifer didn’t want it anymore.”

“Not as it was. Not ruined. But El had done something special and made it anew—and given it away. Worse yet, El himself deigned to go there. He went down from the heavens daily. He left the mount and moved among the creatures, speaking with the man, walking with him in the shade and telling him things beneath the trees. Oh, intimate whispers! How my soul suddenly longed to be a clay creature!”

All this time we had been alone, the museum unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon.

“By now Lucifer was no longer content to sit by. The earth was his, had been since its inception. He meant to inspect these new creatures and all this strange life now roving about and sprouting from this planet of his jurisdiction.” She stopped to peer at an assortment of jewelry: shell bracelets and necklaces, their tiny conches perfectly intact. “From the Red Sea,” according to the numbered notation.

“There had never been any question, in Lucifer’s mind at least, as to who would rule this place, this new life, the creatures. The earth—all of Eden—belonged to him. He might disdain this refurbished Eden and its new tenants, but it was his. But El wasn’t finished.”