I’m helping the librarian tote in further armloads of bound arcana—huge, heavy tomes that reek like a tomb. Everything is pre-Gutenberg, or only a few years post. Illustrations are hand-rendered or etched or woodcut. Text is either inscribed letter by letter, or laid out in hand-set type. Pages crinkle at the touch. We have to wear gloves, white cotton, to handle the covers, and must turn the leaves with surgical care. “If it means anything to you,” the librarian tells Manning, “the volumes you’re poring through are collectively worth seventeen-point-two million.”

What powers do these Satanic entities possess? Our group pores over pix of Evil Ones stalking across fields of sulfur and brimstone. They descend from the aether on wings like dragons. They spit flame. Thunderbolts shoot from their sockets.

BEN-DAVID

We can’t rely solely on myth and legend. How we fight must be based on what we know empirically, what we’ve seen with our own eyes . . .

Ben-David cites his own clash with Instancer on the subway platform.

BEN-DAVID

You grappled with him, Manning. So did I. He’s real. He’s physical. When he grabbed me, he even felt warm.

ME

Physical? Then how does he get into secure buildings leaving no sign? How does he kill ten people on four continents in the past fifteen days?

BEN-DAVID

I don’t know.

ME

How does he know Manning’s mantras? How does Instancer quote verbatim stuff he couldn’t possibly have heard?

BEN-DAVID

I don’t know.

Another ninety minutes pass. Rachel’s text comes in from her plane to Israel. Outside the library, the windstorm continues to rage. I’m staring at medieval renderings of behorned demons (as well as a smattering of human-like creatures) emerging from smoldering clefts in the earth.

Not all, but most are escorted by females—innocent maidens, bewhiskered crones, maternal archetypes.

In the midst of this I’m on the phone at Manning’s instruction to El Al, BEA, Lufthansa, and KLM trying to book Ben-David onto a flight to Tel Aviv. He’s frantic to reach his sister and Manning is equally determined to find out where she’s going and for what purpose.

BEN-DAVID

Genesis 32:24 tells of Jacob wrestling with an angel. But the Greek and Hebrew translations say “man.”

MANNING

Meaning what?

Ben-David locates the passage in one of the Old Testaments. An illustration depicts two human-scale figures struggling on the earth beneath a horned moon in a setting beside a river.

BEN-DAVID

A man. See? Something or someone who could be grappled with physically.

The librarian confirms this. Devil or rebel angel, he says, this entity would be in material form.

LIBRARIAN

To enter the world, the teachings say, a supernatural being must become physical. It must take on the limitations of the flesh, at least some of them.

BEN-DAVID

(to Manning)