USING A STRAIGHT razor taken from the pawnshop, Eph shaved half his face before losing interest. He zoned out, staring into the mirror over the sink of milky water, his right cheek still covered in foam.
He was thinking of the book—the Occido Lumen —and how everything was going against him. Palmer and his fortune. Blocking every move they could make. What would become of them—of Zack—if he failed?
The edge of the razor drew blood. A thin nick turning red and flowing. He looked at the blade with the smear of blood on the steel, and drifted back eleven years to Zack’s birth.
Following one miscarriage and a stillbirth at twenty-nine weeks, Kelly had been on two months’ bed rest with Zack before going into labor. She had a specific birth plan going in: no epidural or drugs of any kind, no cesarean section. Ten hours later, there was little progression. Her doctor suggested Pitocin in order to speed things up, but Kelly declined, sticking to her plan. Eight hours of labor later, she relented, and the Pitocin drip was begun. Two hours after that, after enduring almost a full day of painful contractions, she finally consented to an epidural. The Pitocin dose was gradually increased until it was as high as the baby’s heart rate would allow.
At the twenty-seventh hour, her doctor offered her the option of a cesarean, but Kelly refused. Having given in on every other point, she held out for natural birth. The fetus’s heart monitor showed that it was doing okay, her cervix had dilated to eight centimeters, and Kelly was intent on pushing her baby out into the world.
But five hours later, despite a vigorous belly-massage from a veteran nurse, the baby remained stubbornly sideways, and Kelly’s cervix was stuck at eight. The pain of the contractions was registering now, despite the successful epidural. Kelly’s doctor rolled a stool over to her bedside, again offered her a cesarean. This time Kelly accepted.
Eph gowned up and accompanied her to the glowing white operating room through the double doors at the end of the hall. The fetal heart monitor reassured him with its swift, metronomic tock-tock-tock. The attending nurse swabbed Kelly’s swollen belly with yellow-brown antiseptic, and then the obstetrician sliced left to right low on her abdomen with confident, broad strokes: the fascia was parted, then the twin vertical belts of the beefy abdominal muscle, and then the thin peritoneum membrane, revealing the thick, plum wall of the uterus. The surgeon switched to bandage scissors so as to minimize any risk of lacerating the fetus, and made the final incision.
Gloved hands reached in and pulled out a brand-new human being—but Zack was not yet born. He was “in the caul,” as they say; that is, still surrounded by the filmy, intact amniotic sac. It ballooned like a bubble, an opaque membrane encircling the fetal infant like a nylon egg. Zack was still, in that moment, feeding off Kelly, still receiving nutrients and oxygen through the umbilical cord. The obstetrician and attending nurses worked to retain their professional poise, but Kelly and Eph both felt their apparent alarm. Onl
y later would Eph learn that caul babies occur in fewer than one in a thousand births, with the number rising into the tens of thousands for babies not born prematurely.
This strange moment lingered, the unborn baby still tethered to his exhausted mother, delivered and yet unborn. Then the membrane spontaneously ruptured, peeling back from Zack’s head to reveal his glistening face. Another moment of suspended time… and then he cried out, and was placed dripping onto Kelly’s chest.
Tension lingered in the operating room, mixed with obvious joy, Kelly pulling at Zack’s feet and hands to count the digits. She searched him thoroughly for signs of deformity, and found only joy. He was eight pounds even, bald as a lump of bread dough and just as pale. His Apgar score was eight after two minutes, nine after five minutes.
Healthy baby.
Kelly, however, experienced a big letdown postpartum. Nothing as deep and debilitating as true depression, but a dark funk nonetheless. The marathon labor was so debilitating that her milk did not come in, which, combined with her abandoned birth plan, left her feeling like a failure. At one point, Kelly told Eph that she felt she had let him down, which mystified him. She felt corrupted inside. Everything in life had come so easily, to both of them, before this.
Once she got better—once she embraced the golden boy who was her newborn son—she never let Zack go. She became, for a time, obsessed with the caul birth, researching its significance. Some sources claimed the oddity was an omen of good luck, even forecasting greatness. Other legends indicated that caul-bearers, as they were known, were clairvoyant, would never drown, and had been marked by angels with shielded souls. She looked for meaning in literature, citing various fictional caul-bearers, such as David Copperfield and the little boy in The Shining. Famous men in real life, such as Sigmund Freud, Lord Byron, and Napoleon Bonaparte. In time, she came to discount all negative associations—in fact, in certain European countries it was said that a child born with a caul might be cursed—countering her own unfortunate feelings of inadequacy with the determination that her boy, this creation of hers, was exceptional.
It was these impulses that, over time, poisoned her relationship with Eph, leading to a divorce he never wanted, and the ensuing custody battle: a battle that had, since her turning, morphed into a life-or-death struggle. Kelly had decided that if she couldn’t be perfect for so exacting a man, then she would be nothing to him. And so it was that Eph’s personal downfall—his drinking—secretly thrilled her at the same time as it terrified her. Kelly’s awful wish had come true. For it showed that even Ephraim Goodweather could not live up to his own exacting standards.
Eph smiled derisively at his half-shaven self in the mirror. He reached for his bottle of apricot schnapps and toasted his fucking perfection, downing two sweetly harsh gulps.
“You don’t need to do that.”
Nora had entered, easing the bathroom door shut behind her. She was barefoot, having changed into fresh jeans and a loose T-shirt, her dark hair clipped up in back of her head.
Eph addressed her mirror reflection. “We’re outmoded, you know. Our time has passed. The twentieth century was viruses. The twenty-first? Vampires.” He drank again, as proof that he was all right with it, and demonstrating that no rational argument could dissuade him. “I don’t get how you don’t drink. This is exactly what booze was made for. The only way to swallow this new reality is by chasing it with some of the good stuff.” Another drink, then looked again at the label. “If only I had some good stuff.”
“I don’t like you like this.”
“I am what experts refer to as a ’high-functioning alcoholic’ Or I could go around hiding it, if you prefer.”
She crossed her arms, leaning sideways against the wall, staring at his back and knowing she was getting nowhere. “It’s only a matter of time, you know. Before Kelly’s blood-yearning leads her back here, to Zack. And that means, through her, the Master. Leading him straight to Setrakian.”
If the bottle had been empty, Eph might have whipped it against the wall. “It’s fucking insanity. But it’s real. I’ve never had a nightmare that’s even come close to this.”
“I’m saying I think you need to get Zack away from here.”
Eph nodded, both hands gripping the edge of the sink. “I know. I’ve been slowly coming around to that determination myself.”
“And I think you need to go with him.”
Eph considered it a moment, he truly did, before turning from the mirror to face her. “Is this like when the first lieutenant informs the captain he’s not fit for duty?”
Nora said, “This is like when someone cares enough for you that they are afraid you will hurt yourself. It’s best for him—and better for you.”
That disarmed him. “I can’t leave you here in my place, Nora. We both know the city is falling. New York City is over. Better it falls on me than on you.”
“That’s bullshit barroom talk.”