The Mephisto Club

down to dig through another box and came up with a slim leather-bound book, its cover battered and stained. “The same author,” he said. “R. H. Charles.”
    Not the same author, she thought, but the same translator. It was a 1913 edition of
The Book of Jubilees,
yet another holy text that predated the Christian era. Although she was familiar with the title
Jubilees,
she had never read this particular book. She lifted the cover, and the pages fell open to chapter ten, verse five, a passage that was also underlined in ink:
    And thou knowest how thy Watchers, the fathers of these spirits, acted in my day: and as for these spirits which are living, imprison them and hold them fast in the place of condemnation, and let them not bring destruction on the sons of thy servant, my God; for these are malignant, and created in order to destroy.
    In the margin, scrawled in the same ink, were the words:
The sons of Seth. The daughters of Cain.
    Lily closed the book and suddenly noticed the brown stains on the leather cover.
Blood
?
    “Would you like to buy it?”
    She looked up. “What happened to this man? The one who owned these books?”
    “I told you. He died.”
    “How?”
    A shrug. “He lived alone. He was very old, very strange. They found him locked inside his apartment, with all these books piled up against the door. So he couldn’t even get out. Crazy, eh?”
    Or terrified,
she thought,
of what might get in.
    “I’ll give you a good price. Do you want it?”
    She stared at the second book, thinking of its owner, lying dead and barricaded in his cluttered apartment, and she could almost smell the scent of decaying flesh wafting up from the pages. Repulsed though she was by the stains on the leather, she wanted this book. She wanted to know why the owner had scrawled those words in the margins and whether he had written anything else.
    “Five Euros,” the dealer said.
    For once, she did not dicker, but simply paid the asking price and walked away with the book.
    It was raining hard by the time she climbed the dank stairwell to her flat. All afternoon it rained as she sat reading by the gray and watery light through her window. She read about Seth. The third son of Adam, Seth begat Enos, who begat Kenan. It was the same lofty bloodline from which later sprang the patriarchs Jared and Enoch, Methuselah and Noah. But from this very bloodline also sprang corrupted sons, wicked sons, who mated with the daughters of a murderous ancestor.
    The daughters of Cain.
    Lily stopped at another underlined passage, the words long ago marked by the man whose ghostly presence now seemed to hover at her shoulder, anxious to share his secrets, to whisper his warnings.
    And lawlessness increased on the earth and all flesh corrupted its way, alike men and cattle and beasts and birds and everything that walks on the earth, all of them corrupted their ways and their orders, and they began to devour each other, and lawlessness increased on the earth and every imagination of the thoughts of all men was thus evil continually.
    Daylight was fading. She had been sitting for so long, she’d lost all feeling in her limbs. Outside, rain continued to tap at the window, and on the streets of Rome, traffic rumbled and honked. But here, in her room, she sat in numb silence. A century before Christ, before the Apostles, these words were already old, written about a terror so ancient that today mankind no longer remembered it, no longer marked its presence.
    She looked down, once again, at
The Book of Jubilees,
at the ominous words of Noah, spoken to his sons:
    For I see, and behold the demons have begun their seductions against you and against your children and now I fear on your behalf, that after my death ye will shed the blood of men upon the earth and that ye, too, will be destroyed from the face of the earth.
    The demons are still among us,
she thought.
And the bloodshed has already begun.

TWENTY-SIX
    Jane and Maura drove west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, Jane at the wheel as they hurtled through a stark landscape of snow and bare trees. Even on this Sunday afternoon, they shared the highway with a convoy of monster trucks that dwarfed Jane’s Subaru as she sped around them like a daredevil gnat. It was better not to watch. Maura focused instead on Jane’s notes. The handwriting was a hurried scrawl, but it was no less legible than the scrawls of physicians, which Maura had long ago learned to decipher.
             
    Sarah