Unholy Night Read online

  “Why, would Herod’s men be looking for you?” Gaspar asked.

  “Not looking for us,” said Joseph. “Looking for the child born in the city of David…the one the prophets call Messiah.”

  Balthazar was suddenly back on the stone bench outside Herod’s throne room, surrounded by the soldiers who’d chased him through the desert. Listening to the raspy king rant through the doors. Something about “prophecies.” Something about the “dead rising,” and “plagues” and a “Messiah.” But as recent as the memory was, it was vague. His mind had been on other things at the time. Namely his impending death and how to avoid it.

  “That’s very interesting,” he said at last, “but what’s it have to do with you?”

  Now it was Mary’s and Joseph’s turn to exchange a look. Should they tell him? They didn’t know these men. They were criminals by their own admission. Then again…the fact that they were criminals made them unlikely to go running to Herod.

  “It began before we were married,” said Joseph.

  He explained it all as earnestly and clearly as he could. He told them about the archangel Gabriel visiting Mary in a dream. About Mary getting pregnant, though they hadn’t lain together, and the message that the son of God was growing in her womb. He told them about his own visions, including the most recent one—the one he’d had only last night. The one in which the angel Gabriel warned Joseph that Herod was going to slay all the newborn males of Bethlehem. He and Mary had been preparing to flee on their own when Balthazar and the others barged in.

  When Joseph was finished telling the story, the six of them sat in silence. The wise men with their mouths closed, processing what they’d heard. The baby was asleep, its chest rising and falling in Mary’s arms. Only the occasional bleating of goats around them.

  “And you believe all that?” asked Balthazar. “You believe that your son is…”

  “The son of God,” said Joseph.

  “And that the king of Judea is sending soldiers to kill…a baby?”

  “Of course I believe it,” said Joseph.

  “You don’t think it’s a little suspicious?”

  “Suspicious?”

  It was the obvious question. The only question. Balthazar suddenly felt a little tinge of sympathy for the carpenter. Did he really have to point it out?

  “She gets pregnant before your wedding, and you think it’s some kind of…miracle?”

  Joseph glared at Balthazar, the yellow bruise beneath his eye already turning blue.

  “I know what I saw,” he said.

  “I think the only ‘miracle’ is that you believed her,” said Gaspar.

  Balthazar couldn’t help but laugh. Melchyor joined in, though he didn’t quite understand the joke. But he did understand the way Joseph got to his feet and came at them—and he didn’t like it. He and the other wise men got to their feet and stood chest to chest with Joseph in the middle of the stable. Balthazar saw that look in the carpenter’s eye. The look of a man who’d just had his honor insulted and was thinking about doing something about it. Go on, little carpenter. I’ll give you more than a bloody nose this time.…

  Mary rose behind Joseph, still cradling the baby. She took him by the arm. “It’s pointless,” she said.

  “I know what I saw,” he said again, looking Balthazar dead in the eye. “I wouldn’t expect a man like you to believe me.”

  “Good,” said Gaspar. “Because only a fool could be expected to believe a story that absurd.”

  Now it was Mary coming at them, and Joseph holding her back.

  “You can insult me,” she cried, “but I won’t hear you insult my husband!”

  She kept coming, pointing her free hand in their faces and screaming at them. Joseph did all he could to hold her back without hurting the baby—who, despite the noise and movement, remained quiet.

  “I won’t hear you insult what we saw!” she cried. “And I won’t hear you insult the name of God!”

  “Fine,” said Balthazar. “Just calm dow—”

  “I won’t calm down! You come in here and attack us! Insult us!”

  “Silence your woman!” cried Gaspar to Joseph. “She’ll wake the whole town!”

  “I won’t be quiet!’” yelled Mary.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” yelled Joseph to Gaspar, holding her back.

  “Hey, hey, hey, HEY!” cried Balthazar.

  The force of the last syllable was enough to shut their collective mouths. Silence hung over the stables again. Even the animals seemed to get the message.

  “Enough…”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, massaging the scalp beneath. His head was still killing him, and this wasn’t helping. All he wanted to do was close his eyes for a minute.

  “Look, I’m sure everything you’re saying is true. I’m sure the angels came down from heaven and told you whatever it was they told you. Whatever you say, we believe it, okay? But the three of us? We have better things to do than listen to a couple of zealots tell stories. Namely, sleep for a few hours.”

  There was that look in the carpenter’s eyes again. But in the interest of resolving this thing and getting some rest, Balthazar chose to ignore it.

  “Now…I’m afraid we can’t let you leave,” said Balthazar.

  Joseph spoke up. “But Herod’s men are—”

  “I don’t care. I can’t risk having you go off and tell some soldier where to find three sleeping escaped criminals.”

  “Why would we go to the same soldiers who are looking for our baby?” asked Mary.

  “As soon we’re gone, you’re free to go. But if I open my eyes and find you trying to sneak out of here, or if I see him reaching for that pitchfork again, some very bad things are going to happen in here. And that’s how it’s going to be.”

  Balthazar didn’t wait for a response. He didn’t care. All he cared about was closing his eyes. He sat down. Gaspar and Melchyor followed suit. Joseph led his wife back to their side of the stable and helped her to the ground.

  “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she said.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Balthazar, rolling onto his side. “Now stop talking.”

  “All of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Any man who would turn his back on—”

  “I said ENOUGH!” Balthazar lifted his head and stared her down, this time with a look that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a warning.

  Satisfied she understood, Balthazar rolled over again and shut his eyes. There was nothing to do now but grab a few hours of sleep and hope they didn’t wake up to the pounding of hooves.

  For the next three hours, three wise men slept in a cramped stable beside their gold and frankincense, their wounds dressed with myrrh. Joseph, Mary, and the infant across from them. Silent.

  All of them beneath the star of Bethlehem.

  5

  The Black Creature

  “When Herod realized that he had been outwitted…he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.”

  —Matthew 2:16

  I

  The thieving wise men rose before dawn, unhitched their camels, and led them into the bitter cold. The sky was just waking up to the first hints of deepest blue, but the sun was still a good half hour from revealing itself behind the eastern hills. Stars could still be seen shining clearly between the dark outlines of clouds. But not the star of Bethlehem. Sometime during the past few hours, it had simply vanished. Snuffed out by the desert wind. Balthazar wasn’t surprised. Nothing that bright burned for very long.

  Joseph and Mary hadn’t said a word when the men woke, hadn’t so much as looked at them as they left, not even when Melchyor had wished them well in his affably stupid way. Balthazar didn’t blame them for the lack of civility. In the space of a few cramped hours, they’d managed to beat the carpenter bloody, insult his wife’s honor, hold them both hostage, and denounce everything they believed in as a
joke. All the same, he was happy to be rid of them. Let them babble about their paranoid fantasies to someone else.

  The wise men mounted their camels and looked south into Bethlehem. The village was already alive, smoke rising from cooking fires and clay ovens, young girls shaking the dust off sleeping mats in the streets. The shepherds had risen before the first hint of blue and taken their flocks out to pasture, their sons in tow. The women had risen to cook for them. And now, with the men gone for the day, they and their daughters busied themselves with housework and tended to the younger children. The ones who were too small to help.

  It was a village almost entirely devoted to goats, but not all the men of Bethlehem were shepherds. A few of them could be seen leading their small herds north along the road that passed by the wise men’s stable. They were almost certainly headed to Jerusalem to sell their animals for meat or as sacrifices at the Great Temple. Dragging their goats up and down the road in bare feet, five miles each way. Day after miserable day. Up before sunrise, home after dark. All in the hopes of selling a single, stinking animal. All in the hopes of making enough to put a crust of bread in their children’s bellies. When life was that hard, anyone who didn’t steal for a living was crazy.

  The sight of three noblemen riding at this early hour was unusual but not strange enough to warrant a second look from the goat draggers they passed on the road to Jerusalem. It was best to avoid staring at noblemen too long, anyway. There was always the chance they’d take offense and have you lashed, or worse.

  Though the wise men wanted to get as far away from Herod as possible, they were headed back in the direction of his palace. Their plan was to take the road north toward Jerusalem, then, a mile or so before the South Gate, make a hard right and cut fifteen miles east through the desert to Qumran—a tiny settlement on the shores of the Dead Sea.

  Qumran was home to a small sect of Jewish monks who called themselves the Essenes. But while the word monk evoked an image of clean, quiet reverence, the Essenes were more like mad hermits—men who shunned material wealth, carnal pleasure, and regular bathing in order to devote themselves to their beliefs. From what Balthazar could tell, those beliefs amounted to scribbling ancient nonsense on scrolls and then hiding those scrolls in the caves that dotted the surrounding mountains of the northern Dead Sea. Why they hid them, or who they hid them from, were mysteries.

  Balthazar had taken refuge in those caves on several occasions, and he’d made some handsome donations to the monks in return for their hospitality. While they didn’t particularly care about material wealth, they loved the things it bought: rugs for their floors, clothes for their bodies, parchment and ink for their mysterious musings. Balthazar knew many of the Essenes by name. He also knew they could be trusted to keep his whereabouts a secret. Most important of all, he knew that Herod’s men wouldn’t dare disturb such a sacred Jewish settlement. That was one of the great things about the Judean Army. It was made up almost entirely of Jews.

  After the trail was sufficiently cold, Balthazar would cut his loyal servants loose and disappear with the seven winds. He didn’t like traveling companions. It was one of the reasons he never worked with partners. Partners couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing a hundred percent of the time. They slowed you down. They had differing opinions. When you enlisted them to help you pick pockets, they screwed up spilling wine on your targets and got you chased across aqueducts. Partners were bad news, even when they were in your debt.

  The wise men were less than a mile from Bethlehem when the first whispers of trouble reached their ears. A faint rumble from the half-darkness ahead. A growing rumble, like the beating of hooves against earth. With it, the clanging of armor growing sharper against the air.

  “What is that?” asked Gaspar.

  Balthazar knew at once. Even before he saw the first shapes crest the hill on the road ahead, before he saw the outlines of swords and spears against the faint desert sky, he knew. They were finished.

  Herod’s troops were galloping south toward Bethlehem. Dozens of them, from the sound of it. Without discussion, Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchyor veered their camels off of the road and into the desert on their right, making way for the approaching horsemen. They lifted the fronts of their shemaghs to cover their faces. This, Balthazar realized, was a useless piece of instinct.

  As if the sight of three wise men riding beside the road isn’t suspicious enough. As if anyone can even make our faces out in this light.

  “What do we do?” asked Gaspar. “There must be a hundred of them. We have no weapons.”

  Balthazar was suddenly struck by how stupid they’d been to stick together. The soldiers would be looking for three men, and here they were, three of them. They’d been stupid to stop in Bethlehem. It was too close to the city. They should’ve gone into the desert. Yes, that star had made the night almost as bright as the day, but there was a lot more desert to cover than villages to search. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Why hadn’t they kept riding? Because they’d been tired? Was being tired worse than being dead?

  “Balthazar, what do we do?”

  If they took off now, they were sure to draw the army’s attention. Running was an admission of guilt, an invitation to be chased. The only shot they had—and it was an absurdly long shot—was that the soldiers hadn’t spotted them yet. That they’d be missed in the relative darkness of dawn.

  “Keep riding.”

  “But—”

  “If they see us, we take off in different directions. Understand? Split them up, try and lose them in the desert. Melchyor? Do you understand?”

  “Lose them in the desert…”

  He wasn’t listening. He was focused on the armored men riding south, kicking up a cloud of dark dust. The men who would reach them in a few seconds and tear them to pieces.

  “Not yet,” said Balthazar. “Nobody take off yet. Not unless they see us…”

  Of course they were going to see them. They were barely fifty feet from the road, and silhouetted against the eastern sky, which was growing brighter by the minute.

  Don’t mind us, thought Balthazar. Just three wise men riding along a dark road for no reason whatsoever…

  The army galloped by to their left. There was no question they were close enough to make out the shapes of the wise men, no question that some of the soldier’s helmets were turning toward them—their eyes focusing in like arrows on a stretched bow. Balthazar gripped his camel’s reins tightly, readied his right leg to deliver a swift kick to its side as soon as the first horse turned in his direction.

  But none of them turned. They just kept on riding south toward Bethlehem. Balthazar couldn’t believe it. They’d seen them; he was sure of it. They’d seen three wise men riding along the road at a strange hour, yet they hadn’t even stopped to question them.

  As the rumble of hooves passed by and grew weaker behind them, the wise men stopped and pointed their camels south. They watched in silent disbelief as that dark, dusty mass of horses and men, that creature, crawled along the road, toward the smoke of cooking fires and clay ovens in the distance.

  “I don’t understand,” said Balthazar.

  “What is there to understand?” asked Gaspar. “The Fates are with us!”

  “But…they saw us.”

  “We can discuss it on the way to Qumran! Let us go, now!”

  Balthazar watched the creature slither along the road toward the north of Bethlehem, the dark blue of the heavens growing lighter by the second. For some reason, he could hear the faint, raspy voice of Herod in his skull. Raging at his advisors, shaking the walls of his throne room.

  “Balthazar—to Qumran, quickly!”

  Gaspar was right. What was there to understand? They’d been lucky, that’s all. They could sit here and wonder why, or they could take advantage of that luck. The wise men pointed their camels north and rode toward their freedom, even as that faint voice echoed in Balthazar’s brain. Deep down in the smooth-walled, iron-barred dungeons, where al
l the bad things belonged. He knew they’d been spotted. He’d felt those eyes on him. Those arrows…

  They’d gone only a few feet when they heard something on the air. Something distant and shrill. Something that could almost be mistaken for the howl of a wild dog. But it was a scream. A woman’s scream. Then another.

  The wise men turned back and found the road empty, all traces of the creature gone. It had been absorbed into the village. Absorbed like blood into cloth. And somewhere beneath the smoke of cooking fires and clay ovens, it was making a woman scream.

  “Balthazar…you don’t think…”

  Do I think the carpenter and his wife were right?

  Herod was many things, but a murderer of infants? No. No man was capable of that. Not even the twisted, decayed wisp of a man he’d come face-to-face with at the palace. And even if he was capable, he was too smart. There would be riots in the streets if word got out. A civil war. Herod was many things, but he was a politician first. He knew better.

  But the voice…that voice faintly raging in the depths of Balthazar’s brain told him otherwise.

  “We’re going back,” he said.

  “Are you mad?”

  “I just want to have a look, that’s all.”

  “The Judean Army is out there looking for us, and you want to go look for—”

  “They saw us, Gaspar. They saw us and they weren’t interested.”

  “So?”

  “They should’ve been. Three men on camels? Three men with their faces covered? They should’ve—”

  He was cut off by another scream. Gaspar and Balthazar turned away from each other and looked back toward the village. This had been a different scream. The same woman, maybe—but a different scream altogether.

  “Just a look,” said Balthazar. “That’s all.”

  Balthazar kicked the side of his camel and took off down the road to Bethlehem. Gaspar and Melchyor shared a look behind his back, then followed. They were in his debt, after all.