by J. D. Horn
The demon hesitated and let loose a bloodcurdling howl that seemed to combine confusion and rage with submission. It retreated, splitting into its original three components as it did.
Evangeline heard the chain-link fence behind her rattle and turned back. Her left eye saw the child had slipped over the perimeter fence and beneath a lower section of an inner fence that stretched between two of the former medical center’s wings. Evangeline looked back to find the demons, too, had vanished, leaving her alone in the night.
She flapped her wings, preparing to fly over the fence and seek out the terrified child. Once over, she’d change back into her true form.
As she passed over the inner stretch of fencing, however, she caught sight of a glint of metal at the foot of the fence. On the ground where the child had slipped through the fence lay a necklace, an unclasped chain whose links Evangeline would recognize from any distance, a hideous medallion she could spot in any light.
It was the chain her own mother had forged. The chain Marceline had carried with her into the Dark Man’s heart.
The girl was a mirror.
The girl was Marceline.
EIGHTEEN
WHERE THE UNUSUAL OCCURS & MIRACLES HAPPEN
Evangeline read the lettering on the wall of old Charity Hospital by the glow of a fifolet, a will-o’-the-wisp ball of light she’d conjured to illuminate the abandoned building’s pitch-dark interior. She was sure Charity could deliver on the promised unusual, but doubted it had any miracles left to offer.
She held her mother’s chain in her balled fist. Its weight seemed to grow with each passing moment. She opened her hand and gazed down at the necklace. It appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary—a medallion and a collection of links fashioned from a metal some might call silver and others pewter. Both sides would be wrong. The metal from which her mother had created the necklace didn’t belong in this world.
A ceiling tile that had held on since Katrina chose the very moment she looked away to tumble down and bounce off the arm of a hideous blue faux-leather chair. A scurrying sound overhead revealed the cause of the drop.
She shuddered and willed the light to move along, a trick Luc had taught her. She floated along behind it, her feet a good foot and a half above the detritus-strewn floor. This trick she’d taught herself.
The walls of the corridor were lined with tiles, the light of her globe gleaming on their glossy surface. A few yards ahead she spotted a very human silhouette. The torso of a CPR dummy stood sentry.
It was risky to open herself up to the energies lurking in such a place, but the medical center’s three towers and their connector covered a million square feet, and even though the demons had retreated, she wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t circle back and maybe bring reinforcements with them. She could spend hours bobbing up and down around the hospital’s collection of forgotten horrors, or she could send out the tiniest ping to see what would bounce back to her.
She didn’t want to risk getting swatted down like a wasp, so out of caution she sought a clear spot in the hall and lowered herself until her feet touched the floor. She dismissed her guiding light, then braced a hand against the wall’s cool tile. But she was still unprepared for the force that responded to the burst of energy she sent out.
She’d feared being overwhelmed by any spirits that might still haunt these halls, but it wasn’t the energy of lost souls that rebounded on her—it was the essence of the hospital itself. The building’s memories had given it life, and its heart had been broken when the city deserted it. It mourned. It suffered. The grief was too intense, too palpable not to address. I’m sorry. Evangeline spoke the words in her mind, then found herself unable to hide the thought the hospital would no doubt someday, possibly soon, be cleared away. “I’m sorry.” She repeated the words aloud.
Evangeline heard a whirring sound, and at the end of the hall, elevator doors sprung open. A light blinked on inside the car. She felt the building itself impress images onto her mind’s eye. A room with peeling aqua walls. Large, irregular white patches showed through the spots where the paint had fallen away. The effect could have been monstrous, but it put Evangeline in mind of clouds in a summer sky. On one side, the room held a twin bed, a regular one, not the adjustable electric ones usually found in patient rooms. On the other side stood a wooden desk. Positioned between them was a small, round table holding one of the room’s two mismatched, utterly non-infirmary-style lamps. The current had been cut to the entire floor, so neither lamp could be the source of dim, bluish light that fell short of filling the space. Despite the room’s wretched state, it appeared to be clean, like someone had tried to make the space livable.
The elevator sounded a bing, expressing its willingness to carry Evangeline to the floor the room was on. Out of respect for its feelings, she decided to walk to the elevator rather than float to it, regardless of the possible tetanus risk. As she took the first step, a force that felt like a marriage of wind and static electricity blew up around her and began sweeping the debris that had collected in the hall to either side.
As she prepared to step into the elevator car, she paused and ran her hand down the wall—a soothing caress, she hoped. “You were a good friend to this city. You deserve better.” She stepped into the elevator and its doors closed behind her. The car lifted up, its cables grinding like gnashing teeth, till it reached one of the upper floors. The doors opened onto darkness.
As she exited the elevator, its light flashed off, and a soft moan spilled out behind her. She felt the energy of the hospital fall back, and it struck her that the ailing hospital had expended more effort than it could afford to help her. “Thank you,” she said, willing the spirit of the place a bit of healing magic to repay the favor.
She snapped her fingers to reignite the fifolet. Its glow illuminated a placard reading “Staff Dorm Rooms.” She stared down the length of the corridor. Some rooms remained closed off, but many of the doorways gaped open before her, the rooms they opened onto silent, dark, long since abandoned.
Only one doorway was different. Through it shone a pale glow so faint Evangeline could hardly discern it. She sent her own light forward, following behind until she found herself standing at the incongruous opening. Inside the dilapidated dorm room, sitting at the desk in the glow of a camping lantern, was the child Marceline. She looked up at Evangeline, the bluish electric light accenting her large gray eyes and the dark circles beneath them.
“Un fifolet,” Marceline said, nostalgia underlining each syllable. “We used to send out fifolets, Margot and I, to lure lost travelers farther into the wilds. We’d follow, watching from above, wagering on whether they would survive the journey.” Her sentimental tone left no doubt these were happy memories. “I always let Margot be the one to predict their demise, even though I knew she’d win our little game seventy percent of the time. But then again, for me it was never about winning.”
“Yeah.” Evangeline willed the illumination to fade. “Good times.” She focused on the small face before her, a shade whiter in the lantern’s bluish light.
Marceline’s eyes ran her up and down. “You are aware you can conjure the clothes you were wearing back?”
Evangeline blushed, not so much from modesty as from being treated as the amateur—at least compared to her aunt—she was.
“Just”—Marceline swept her hands before her—“and click your heels three times.” Before Evangeline could act, Marceline’s tiny face broke into a smile. “I’m only joking about the clicking, but . . .” She again made the motion with her hand.
Evangeline mimicked the gesture, and indeed, it worked. She was once again fully clothed, shirt to shoes.
“Is this some kind of glamour?” Evangeline said, her head spinning as it tried to wrap itself around the idea the little girl before her could possibly be her mother’s sister, the centuries-old witch Marceline.
The girl’s mouth tightened into a thin frown, and a look of caution crept into her eyes. She sh
ook her head. “No, child.” The words sounded comical coming from the waif’s lips. “It is no glamour. No simple enchantment. No parlor trick.”
“Prove it.” Evangeline thrust the necklace at her. To her surprise, Marceline accepted it with a shrug, then slipped it around her neck and fixed its clasp. It rested on her small chest only for a moment before the links of the chain separated themselves from one another and fell with almost inaudible clinks to the floor. “It’s lost its power,” Evangeline said, even as she watched the links snake back together.
Marceline leaned over and caught hold of the mended chain. “Non, ma chère,” she said, holding the necklace out to Evangeline. “I’ve lost mine.”
Evangeline couldn’t bring herself to touch the necklace. “How can it be—”
“You were there.” She laid the chain on the desk, then turned on her chair. “You witnessed the act yourself.” Her legs weren’t long enough for her feet to reach the floor. “I commended myself to His will, and He freed me from this damnable charm your Marin boy hung around my neck. But it pleased Him to bring me back as such.” She gestured, running her hand from head to knee. “As I was on the day my sisters and I ventured into the deep, black pines to seek Him out.”
“But you couldn’t have been more than—”
“Ten. I was ten years old when I chose to barter my soul to the Devil, the same age as Margot. Mireille, your mother, was eight. We three considered Mathilde our leader. She was of marrying age. Almost thirteen.”
“I had no idea.”
“What, did you believe we were always as you’d known us to be?”
“I never really considered—”
“We were powerless, starving,” Marceline cut her off, “when we met Him, though we were hardly unique in those aspects. It was winter in the year of someone else’s Lord, sixteen-hundred and ninety-three. Bad weather, poor harvests, war, fear, and greed. The perfect recipe for famine—la Grande Famine. We were all four orphans, or as good as. We slipped into the forest, determined to find magic or die there from exposure. We left the village on le Jour des Saints Innocents, the Massacre of Innocents. Not a calculated move, but notable for the maudlin poetry of coincidence, no?
“We discovered we were far from the first to seek Him out. We encountered a dozen corpses, maybe more. Some strangers, some faces we’d known all our lives. Some on their knees, hands frozen together in supplication. Some half-eaten. By wolves, Mathilde told us, knowing her story was far less frightening than the reality. But I divined the truth. My stomach rumbled. Meat is meat.
“I think we amused Him, we four. The plain and once pious Mathilde, the always foolhardy and on occasion foolish Margot. Your beautiful, timid mother, Mireille, and I, the exacting little ball crusher who believed herself capable of negotiating the deal. Margot, she would have sold her soul for the guarantee of one hot meal a day. Mathilde couldn’t see past the horned mask the faith she’d abandoned forced on Him. I led Him away from the others after receiving their agreement to abide by the bargain I struck. I saw the face behind the lie, and the force hiding again behind that. I sensed the depth of His power to mold reality and demanded that He make us queens rather than handmaidens. If only He had been the Devil. We might have found ourselves in the eighth circle with Erichtho, fourth pit from the left,” she added with an unexpected wink, “but the depths of hell would still have provided both a level of certainty and a firm foundation. With the Dark Man there is nothing but legerdemain and shifting sand.
“I thought I’d worked through every intricacy of the negotiation. Indenture or damnation, for the other two and myself it didn’t matter. But I haggled long and hard for Mireille and won her the opportunity to slip free of His bond before death. Of course, He found a way to turn that. He always finds a way to twist your dream into a curse. He left Mireille burdened by the conscience whose call we others stopped hearing—or at least attending to—over time. Much less time than you might suspect. Her burdensome conscience was what drove her to marry the preacher, hypocrite that he was, and to the creation of that damnable necklace.”
“She tried to change. She wanted to.”
“Yes, the poor fool tried to free herself.” Marceline lay her hand beside the chain. “Through bondage. But she never stood a chance.” She lifted the necklace, offering it once again to Evangeline. “Tiens.” She reached out and grasped Evangeline’s hand, dropping the simple chain into her open palm. “Look at it. See it. Not as an instrument of torture. Not as a hated object. Not as an object at all, but as the energy of which it’s composed, and the vibration of that energy.”
Evangeline could feel the chain and medallion begin to pulsate, in time, she realized, with her own pulse. Its links seemed to quiver, then they emitted a blinding flash and morphed into a new necklace, a cascade of teardrop emeralds and round diamonds caught in shimmering gold. Evangeline held the jewels up, barely able to believe her eyes. She knew this necklace. She recognized it from the night of the massacre. Julia Prosper had worn these very emeralds to her own murder. Evangeline tossed the necklace to the desk, where it shimmered and returned to the simple chain that had once burned into her own flesh. “But I had this chain”—she pointed at where it lay—“with me, in my bag, when Julia entered the hall wearing the emeralds.”
“They may have appeared to be separate, but they are and always have been one. They are two expressions of the same energy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor did I. Not until I passed through His heart. Before that moment, I saw myself as cursed.” She shook her head, the young face taking on a weariness far beyond its apparent years. “Mireille’s chain was created to separate a witch from her magic. Inanna’s necklace of diamonds and emeralds—seven of each, to be precise—was manifested to allow a witch who comprehends the seven mysteries to focus her own power and claim that of others, to ascend until she touches the heavens. But the homely chain that deprives and the exquisite necklace that gives are one and the same. There is no separation. There are no dichotomies. There is only polarization.”
“The seven mysteries?”
“Yes. The seven mysteries. Every culture addresses them after a fashion. The Buddhist’s seven factors of enlightenment offer a release from the illusion of selfhood. The seven principles of Hermes Trismegistus promise to dissolve the illusion of a material world. The seven wounds of the cross teach Christ’s followers they can redeem themselves through the surrender of self. The seven seals of John the Revelator have been interpreted a thousand ways, but all point to the end of reality as we know it. Inanna passed through seven gates of the underworld, and at each gate, the goddess surrendered another belonging, another symbol of self, to arrive at wisdom—the absolute reality of nonexistence. Not death, tu vois, but a descent into chaos, and at the same time a flight into the realm of infinite possibility. Like a magnet’s poles—opposite but one.
“Theodosius, our famous mad monk who gave us The Book of the Unwinding, began as a manuscript finder for Pope Nicholas V, seeking out those texts his Holiness wouldn’t want to publicly acknowledge. Theodosius had been charged with traveling to France to discover and collect any remaining tomes that had belonged to the Avignon papacy.” Marceline leaned in as if to whisper a secret. “By the way,” she said, “there were seven of them, you know, the popes of Avignon.” She touched the side of her nose and nodded.
Evangeline remembered that a power struggle between one of the long-ago popes and a king of France had led to a brief period when the seat of power of the Catholic Church shifted from Rome to French city of Avignon, but the details of the conflict were lost to her.
“The diligent young cleric Theodosius,” Marceline continued without missing a beat, as if she expected Evangeline to carry an encyclopedic knowledge of the intricate relationship between Church and State in the late Middle Ages, “was carrying out his faithful completion of this mission when the old Cathar Heresy planted new seeds in his fevered, fertile mind. He stumbled upon th
e mysteries through the Cathar interpretation of the story of Salome and her dance of the seven veils, a tale I would expect to resonate with you, given your chosen line of business.”
Of course Evangeline knew the story. Her father had denounced the millennia-dead woman with the same fervor with which he came after the female contemporaries he judged to be harlots.
“Forget that man.” Even bereft of her magic, Marceline seemed to have discerned her thoughts. “It’s certain you have more Longeac in you than Caissy. Yes,” she said, her chin raised in pride, “you are one of the Longeac women.” She clenched her hand and touched it to her heart, an unstudied gesture that betrayed more emotion than Marceline had likely intended. “From Mende,” she said, lowering her hand, recovering, “in the Lozère region. Before they named it the Lozère. The two-faced pulpiter knew that, I’m sure, but I’m not surprised he kept those facts from you.” Her youthful features hardened as her cheeks flushed red. A furious loathing for Evangeline’s father played in her eyes.
“Salome,” Evangeline said to bring Marceline back before her rage ignited Evangeline’s own, “performed a kind of striptease for the king. To capture the head of John the Baptist.”
“Yes,” Marceline said. A look like gratitude’s poor relation crossed her face, then faded away in the next instant. “Salome danced, enticing her king, liberating herself from each of her seven veils—symbols, of course, of what stands between the seeker and her enlightenment. The Cathars, though, they went a bit further in their interpretation of the text. To them, John the Baptist had come as an emissary of the Devil, to act as foil to the Christian Messiah—the Antichrist if you will. But that wasn’t the Cathars’ true heresy. Their tenets posited the two personages, Christ and the Antichrist, were not individual beings, but polarizations of a single, inseparable energy.”