Night of the Living Rerun

by Arthur Byron Cover

She’d been counting on the probability that the three strangers to Sunnydale would be too unfamiliar with the streets to recognize that fact—a slight risk that proved justified when all three began loading the gear into the van in a bumbling, comical fashion. Within a few moments a very satisfied Buffy watched the van with the falling frogs logo disappear after the Churches.

  Naturally she was very concerned that Mom had gotten herself involved with a cursed artifact of some sort, and under normal circumstances she would gone to the gallery immediately. But today circumstances were far from normal. Curses, dreams and coincidences were running amok in Sunnydale, and she was certain they were connected to Prince Ashton Eisenberg’s Prophecy of Dual Duels.

  Only one man could help her fathom that connection.

  Rupert Giles. She would have to see him.

  In a few minutes.

  CHAPTER 7

  Giles laid down on a couch in the library and wiped a line of perspiration from his forehead with a handkerchief made damp from the number of times he’d used it during the past hour. Buffy and her friends had never seen him this casual before: the buttons of his shirt were undone, he’d kicked off his shoes, and his feet were on a table. Of course, at the moment he had a temperature of a hundred and one, and he had just taken a few aspirin to reduce the fever.

  “We should get you to a hospital,” said Buffy.

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” said Giles. “My illness isn’t medical, or I should say, isn’t scientific in nature. No rational person can help me now.”

  “Thank goodness,” said Xander. “That means we might have a chance.”

  Giles coughed. “All right, the time has come for us to try to get this straight. Three of us—Buffy, Xander and myself—have had dreams linking us to past lives that all coexisted at the time of the Salem witch trials. We are not necessarily reincarnations, but all these past lives interacted with one another, much as all four of us interact today. The fact we are all having these dreams of the same people, the same events, at the same time is inescapable. There must be some significance, if not reincarnation then some joining of purpose. So let us, for the sake of argument, assume that we are them for right now.”

  “You are a Watcher named Robert Erwin, which stands to reason since you’re a Watcher now,” said Willow. “And Buffy is a Slayer named Samantha Kane.”

  “And I, for reasons I cannot possibly understand,” said Xander, “have been dreaming that I was a woman named Sarah Dinsdale, a tried and convicted witch who just happened to be as guilty as sin.”

  “Furthermore,” said Giles, coughing again, “because you are having the dreams of Sarah Dinsdale, we know the spirit Rick and Lora Church know as Sarah is likely the spirit of an imposter. Because the spirit of Sarah is within you, and can be nowhere else.”

  “So is this spirit in the employ of all the nosy people who’ve been bothering us?” asked Willow.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Giles. “But I suspect the nosy people are unwilling dupes.”

  “Obviously the next step is to learn more about what happened to Sarah Dinsdale,” said Willow.

  Xander stretched and yawned. “Great. I could use a few Z’s. I’ve been told”—he looked at the girls meaningfully—‘that I don’t snore.”

  “Your teddy bear talks?” asked Willow.

  “We do not have time to wait for you to dream,” said Giles. “We must . . . how do you Americans say it? . . . cut to the quick on this one.”

  “I think you mean ‘cut to the chase,’ ” said Buffy.

  “Exactly,” said Giles, suppressing another cough. “We must hold a séance. Willow, please retrieve the candles and the holy water from the locked cabinet behind the desk. Xander, on the shelf over there is a book called Séances for Fun and Profit by Rick and Lora Church. We need it. Buffy, I fear I must ask you to get something gross again.”

  Buffy gulped. “Okay.”

  Ten minutes later she returned from the morgue, with a vase filled with someone’s ashes. “I suppose I’ll have to take this back, too, in the morning.”

  “Hopefully, sooner,” said Giles. “Thank you, Buffy. I must say, it always amazes me how you get in and out of these places so quickly.”

  “I could do it,” said Xander, “if she could only show me how she does it.”

  “That’s all right, Xander,” Buffy said dryly. “I’ll be glad to keep on doing it.”

  “I am grateful,” said Giles. “Now in this book Lora describes the preparations for a do-it-at-home séance. She keeps it simple; the only exotic requirement is this demand for the ashes of the cremated. The curtains are drawn? Good. Now we must hold hands.”

  But he began coughing badly as he reached for Buffy and Willow. Everybody waited for him to be done. He sat at the head of the table, with Xander opposite him. The library was dark—Xander had switched off the lights—but for the candles, which were placed on the table to make the points of a pentagram, what Buffy called the occult design of choice. The wax formed the pentagram itself.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Obviously Robert Erwin had been very sick throughout the duration of this event, so obviously I’ll be just as sick.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Xander.

  “Merely that—cough!—what happened to our past lives during the event probably has . . . no, must have some bearing on what happens to us during this one.”

  “I get it,” said Xander. “Like on television. Repeats always end the same.”

  “Once again, your logic is abnormal,” said Giles. “But that is, in a roundabout way, the point.”

  “Well, this is one rerun where the ending’s in doubt,” said Buffy. “Whoever is setting up this repeat action must want a different ending, because there weren’t any questions about a ‘Depised One’ on our history test today.”

  “Even so, if Sarah Dinsdale ends up being burned at the stake, I’m going to allow myself to feel very, very nervous, understand?” said Xander.

  “The witches were hanged, not burned at the stake,” said Giles. “We’re not dealing with total barbarians here. The Puritans were as civilized as anyone else at the time. Furthermore, Sarah Dinsdale’s name is not among the victims. She did not die as a witch.”

  “What happened to her?” asked Xander.

  Giles shrugged. “After her escape, she disappeared. Whatever happened to her, her name is erased from history.”

  “That may be,” said Buffy, “but from what I’ve seen, Corwin and Danforth weren’t above extracting a little street justice.”

  Suddenly an incredibly bright light flashed from the nearby hills, followed not long afterward by a prolonged blast of thunder that rippled through the air.

  “Funny, the weather babe said the skies would be clear all week,” said Xander.

  “I think we’re about to experience an autumn New England storm,” said Buffy. “The next time I sneak out, I’m grabbing some mittens.”

  “Let the séance begin,” said Giles, controlling his cough as he and Xander took hold of the girls’ hands. “This shouldn’t be too difficult, since we know Sarah’s spirit is already with us. We just have to bring it out.”

  * * *

  The language recommended by the Church’s book basically updated traditional séance chants. Since the spirits of the dead responded not to language but to the sentiment of the caller, how something was said wasn’t nearly as important as what was said.

  The Churches believed the “swami” of the séance should have all the slickness of the average infomercial host. Giles spent about twenty minutes laying down a sales rap to the spirit of Sarah Dinsdale, telling her it would be in her karmic self-interest if she revealed herself to the living.

  Buffy, Xander and Willow concentrated with all their might.

  Meanwhile, the rains came softly creeping in on the very fringes of their collective consciousness, which became stronger with every passing minute.

  They felt no breeze, yet the candles flickered. Sometimes the f
lickering coincided with the thunder. Sometimes it coincided with the quivers up their spines.

  The vases stood in the center of the pentagram. The participants in the séance tried to visualize the ashes inside, to imagine their texture, their smell, their taste.

  Gradually the contents became easier to visualize. The energy passing between the four participants grew to a powerful current. The thunder overhead shook the entirety of Sunnydale High. Everyone’s bodies felt lighter, but their minds became heavier. Forming thoughts was becoming more difficult as their content grew foggier. Meanwhile, Giles’s voice droned on and on until it was just noise in the background.

  Suddenly Xander stiffened, practically into a state of rigor mortis. Giles gasped and finally clammed up. Either at the same instant or a second later—Buffy couldn’t be sure which—an incredible bolt of lightning struck a tree near the school with catastrophic force. A startled-out-of-her-wits Willow broke the chain with both hands, and Buffy listened detachedly to the wood and fire sizzling in the rain.

  Buffy opened her mouth to say something when the thunder roared directly overhead; she couldn’t even hear herself think, much less speak.

  Xander, meanwhile, managed to remain stiff and to shiver as if he’d been dipped into ice water. He groaned. Willow leaned toward him, but Giles silently indicated she restrain herself. Which she did, but not without worry.

  Buffy noticed the flash of light that had hit the vase inside the pentagram had yet to fade. If anything, it now glowed more intensely. Clearly the ashes of the dead had absorbed the magical energies released by the lightning bolt.

  Outside, the rain slowly extinguished the fire. The lightning had sliced the trunk in half, and a column of ashes and smoke rose up from the wound. It was normal for the sidewalk and the road right outside Sunnydale High to be deserted this time of night—except when there were school activities such as ballgames and dances—but tonight the normal state of affairs seemed foreboding, as if reality itself was about to take a hike.

  Xander already had, spiritually speaking. Buffy had been too busy concentrating on the subtle shift in the tone of their surroundings to notice that Xander had loosened up. Although still in a trance, he managed to stand of his own accord in a distinctive posture, with a definite personal body language.

  Unfortunately, it was not his own.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who Xander was acting like. In Buffy’s dreams Samantha Kane had yet to encounter Sarah Dinsdale, but the adventuress and the witch must have had a face-to-face at some point, because Buffy recognized Sarah with the gut-certainty of genuine memory.

  Buffy’s emotional reaction was the same as Kane’s must have been too, because at that moment she hated the entity in Xander’s body, loathed it with all her heart. She hissed and made a move toward Xander.

  “Buffy! Xander is not an enemy!” hissed Giles. “He is merely possessed!”

  “We better have him back when she’s gone, otherwise Dinsdale’s going to pay!”

  “And how will you find me,” asked Xander, “in this world or another?”

  Gile’s mouth dropped open. “Sarah Dinsdale?”

  Xander shook his head as if to brush aside his hair. “At your service. I see I have been called. I’m not surprised. It was inevitable I would rank among the Summoned one day.”

  “You sound like you’ve been involved in séances before,” said Willow.

  Xander—or should we say—Sarah looked around at the library in wonder and spoke almost off-handedly. “Of course, but always one of the callers, never one of the called.”

  “Who have you called in the past?” Buffy demanded. “The Master?”

  Sarah visibly deflated. “I have never heard of the Master. In my day I called, to my eternal shame, an evil entity known as the Depised One. My sole defense is that I was but a lonely, wayward mistress of the dark arts, and I had been told he would soothe my great loneliness.”

  “We need to know something,” said Giles. “About you and Samantha Kane.”

  Outside it began to drizzle. Lightning flashed. The air in the library chilled.

  Sarah hung her head in shame. “I understand. But what could you possibly want to know about Samantha Kane, other than I am the one primarily responsible for her death?”

  Giles put himself between Buffy and Xander/Sarah. “Everything! It has been prophesied that tonight what has been done will be done again, and the official record is too sparse for us to prevent it from being done successfully this time.”

  “Ah, you speak of the prophecy. I did not realize the time had come.”

  “How do you know about Eisenberg’s Prophecy?” Giles demanded.

  Sarah looked at him as if he was truly naive. “We spirits have to know these things. Now I am truly glad that you called. I do not possess the means to help you in any material way, but I can provide you with information.”

  “That will be immensely helpful,” said Giles. Outside, the drizzle had turned into a steady downpour. The fire had finally been extinguished, and a brisk, sustained wind began to build, shaking the trees and stirring the puddles.

  “Why don’t you start with what happened after you tried to kill Kane with that dead hand?” Buffy asked, with a sneer. She knew she should be more dispassionate, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “I had thought I had merely called up one corpse, that of a seaman who had died and been left there, long before, some time ago. But to my shame, I had not realized my ability to call forth the dead was beyond my control. I had inadvertently called up others—many others. Indians who had fallen from a white man’s plague. Settlers who had died from a harsh winter and mothers who had died in childbirth. Souls not yet at rest.”

  “My grasp of the details is vague, because I was not actually there and know only what other spirits have communicated to me. But I do know that the risen corpses found and attacked the vengeful ones from Salem seeking to recapture me.”

  “That’s not in the history books!” exclaimed Willow.

  Sarah smiled and shrugged. “Such incidents rarely are.” Obviously whatever misfortune befell those men gave her pleasure, however much she may have suffered since.

  Xander/Sarah walked to the window and looked outside. “Strange. I was making my way through the forest to a place feared and avoided by all savages, be they Puritan or Indian, when storm clouds rolled overhead and it began to rain, exactly as it is now.

  “It was still raining when I finally reached my destination near the mouth of the Danvers River, not three hours before the dawn. At first I thought I was early, because the site was deserted. And it was not until I’d actually stepped foot on the site did I suspect all the ambitions and dreams of the last few years might have been part of some massive mistake on my part, for this place could not possibly have been prepared by men.”

  “How so?” Giles asked.

  “Suddenly, with definite boundaries, the forest was clear-cut. Not even a stump remained where the great trees once stood. In their place stood thirty massive slabs roughly forming a horseshoe structure; more slabs lay on top of them, indicating either an entrance or a boundary—I did not know which.

  “The slabs were gray, but they glowed with an incandescent blue neither the night nor the rain could dim. I knew, with the instinctive surety only one with my occult abilities could command, these slabs were not formed on Earth. But where? My wonderful instincts, I confess, did not provide me with a clue until I spied a small break in the storm clouds through which shone the light of the moon.”

  “They were moon rocks!” exclaimed Willow, “but how?”

  “One small step for the Despised One,” said Buffy, “one big bite for mankind.”

  “Certain meteors found in the Antarctic originated not from deep space, but from Mars,” said Giles. “They were chunks knocked off the Red Planet with the impact of giant meteors. They spun around the solar system until they were captured by Earth’s gravitational pull. Obviously the same
thing could have happened with moon rocks.”

  Buffy immediately flashed on her vision of the moon being hit by exactly such a giant meteor . . . of a huge crater being formed, and of great slabs hurtling out into space.

  Xander/Sarah walked back to his place at the table. Buffy noticed his hips moved with a distinct feminine rhythm. “I stood in the rain, cold, hungry and miserable, and waited. For the first time I wondered what I was doing there. At the moment I had no idea of the suffering my spell was causing, or of the fact that my body was already acting as the conduit for supernatural forces.

  “As I waited there was little else for me to do but watch the storm. It was the most powerful I’d ever seen. Even the distant thunder was deafening, the distant lightning blinding. I wandered about aimlessly inside the rock edifice. I noticed the closer I walked to a slab—any slab—the more I felt strange energies stirring inside me.

  “Suddenly I was struck straight on by a lightning blast. So great was its force I should have instantaneously burnt to a cinder. Yet, miraculously, I remained whole, bound by a blue light that held me high in the air like a fish caught in a net. I was immobile, and incapable of coherent thought.

  “I could only watch helplessly as four people emerged from the forest at four different points before me, and I despaired at the extent of the trap that had been set for me—”

  “How the mighty have pratfallen, eh, Sarah?” taunted Buffy.

  Xander/Sarah whirled angrily at her and gestured. “Although my current male reincarnation is unpracticed in harnessing occult energies, I can still muster the strength to cast a terrible curse. I can smell the self-righteous smugness of the Slayer in you, girl.”

  “All right, stop it you two!” said Giles. “We must get to the bottom of this before we run out of time.”

  “Let me guess,” said Buffy, “the four people were Cotton Mather, Judge Danforth, Sheriff Corwin and Hester Putnam.”

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “Slayer intuition.”

  “They were indifferent to me; I was no better than a wheat fetish or a berry potion in their eyes. Their talk revealed them at last as secret worshippers of the Despised One who had spent the past several months dutifully following his instructions, like the mindless sheep I’d always expected them to be. I just hadn’t suspected the sheepdog would turn out to be the Despised One.