Their noise grew more intense as the Support Team reached the house. The crows were swooping and flapping frantically in the front yard, but they didn’t attack. When Simon stepped up onto the porch, he sensed the charged presence of the house.
In among the gracious columns he could see that the front door was gaping. From the shadows within there came a powerful odor of gasoline.
Chapter 30
After the initiation the group retired to the barn. Carpets had been laid on the floor and a fire built in the central fireplace. The room was warm, tenderly lit by the flames. Incense scented the air. One of the members of the Vine Coven played the panpipes, the long, sweet notes swelling in the quiet. The Christian delegations were gone. After the ceremony their cars had moved slowly off across the farm.
For the sake of the witches’ safety Amanda would have preferred them to stay, but they could not be allowed to witness this.
Amanda had never known that there could be such intimacy among a large group of people. They were deeply in love with one another, all of them. It was upon this foundation that their society rested. How anybody could find such gentleness threatening was beyond Amanda’s comprehension. And yet she herself would once have been shocked at the spectacle before her.
Even though it was an act shared among many people, it was as intensely private as a wedding night.
Robin lay beside Amanda, his hand resting on her thigh, his eyes closed. She turned on her side and regarded him.
“Are you asleep?”
“Hardly.”
“Robin. I’m so happy.”
He kissed her cheek. “You belong to us now.”
“I feel that.”
“There was dissension about you once, when you first came here. A couple of covens even thought about leaving the Covenstead.”
“What kind of dissension?”
“Over you being an outsider.”
“I’m not an outsider.”
He smiled at her, leaned over, and began kissing her.
She could see a vague, colorful haze around most of the people here. Where the lights of the couples touched there played deep blue of heartrending beauty. She remembered that color: it was the same as the sky of the Land of Summer. Love, she now understood, was so connected to death that the two were like an old married couple, serenely embracing.
Amanda gazed at Robin, enjoying the wonder of him. “You raised the cone of power. Without you I couldn’t have found my way back.”
“Vine Coven did it.”
“Each did it, and all. If you’re a witch, everything you do is magic. The craft of the wise is the art of expressing the true relationship between humanity and the earth.”
“Which is?”
“I can’t explain magic any more than a Japanese monk can explain Zen. Every human being is a hologram of the whole species. Each contains all. That’s the basis of magic. And earth is not an inert ball of rock. It is aware, it thinks, it knows we’re here. That’s magic, too.”
“Why do I find that thought chilling?”
“The earth will give back exactly what it gets.” She was silent a moment. “Humanity is supposed to function as a single being, the brain of the planet. Instead we are all scattered, each going his own selfish way. The earth gets selfishness, it will return selfishness of its own. You have to feel the world as a whole, mankind as a whole. Let illusion drop away. Differences, ideologies, fears, all disappear. Hate evaporates with the rest of illusion. Only love remains.” His expression was blank. “Don’t you sense it?
The love, the compassion?”
“I can hardly imagine what your perceptions must be.”
A disquiet came upon her. How could such a simple thing be so opaque to him? But what about her, a week ago? She had to bring what she had learned into the world. But not now. There was work yet to do. Brother Pierce and his followers would come once deep night had fallen, she felt sure of it.
And yet, in her mind’s eye she saw him moving through the woods, saw him approaching the house in darkness… as if he was already there.
It was not long after eight, though. She must be projecting images from later tonight. Surely they weren’t already here, when it was still gloaming. Soon the sheriff would come and the danger would be over.
Even so, she heard the hissing fire that still lingered above the Covenstead. The thought of it made her dig her fingernails into her palms. If all was well, why did danger still point its finger?
Robin was aware of none of this. She returned his smile, all the while feeling the most acute loneliness.
She and she alone understood enough to protect this place. She was very uneasy.
Outside there was a dull boom, followed at once by a low, steady roar. Amanda started, then raised her head. “No, be quiet. It’s only a jet.”
She saw fire.
Somebody started humming. Others took it up, and soon the whole room was filled with a gentle, human music. It was the sound of over a hundred people all married together.
For a little while it seemed as if the marriage was even bigger than the Covenstead, that it extended forever outward, covering the whole earth and including everything—air, rocks, plants, all matter living and otherwise, and all people whose hearts could join.
When the hum died away, the roar did not. It had gotten louder and was now punctuated by deep crackling sounds.
Amanda’s throat almost closed, her breath came in a long gasp. Everybody in die room knew at once what it was. Somewhere on the estate there was a great fire.
People jumped up in their fright and rushed naked for the door. A mistake, and Amanda acted instantly.
“Stop! All of you!” They froze, turned, their faces tormented by their feelings. “We get our clothes on first. We do not panic.”
“I think it’s the house,” Robin said as he rumbled with his jeans.
Amanda got jeans and sweatshirt on, and jammed her feet into her boots. She was among the first through the door.
Red, flickering reflections covered Stone Mountain. From the direction of the main house there arose a tower of sparks. Smoke was billowing up into the sky. “Connie!”
As she ran, Amanda felt a fool. Why had she not heeded the warning of her own mind, then her own ears? She had been seduced by the moment. She raced frantically across the hummocks, her legs pumping. “Connie!”
Flames were literally bursting out of every downstairs window, snatching and licking at the bricks. The upstairs windows glowed.
Smoke shot from the chimneys. Sparks climbed in whorls and eddies up the sky.
She had never before realized how long the distance was between the house and the village. She ran and ran and yet seemed never to get any closer. Her wind began to come hard and her legs to ache.
At last she reached the edge of the herb garden. The tang of smoke was heavy on die air. Wood and something else.
Gasoline.
“You’re killing her, you’re killing her!”
Connie’s crows were flying round and round the house, screaming horribly whenever they went through the flames. When they saw Amanda, they came and fluttered and shrieked about her head. She rushed straight to the kitchen door.
A blistering wave of heat slammed her back. The kitchen was blazing. Beyond it was a sea of flames.
She couldn’t get in that way. “Connie!”
She ran around to the front.
Flames had climbed the columns of the portico. The front door itself was gone. She could see inside, to the black profiles of the hall furniture. As she watched, a chunk of ceiling collapsed into the hall and was lost in sparks.
She backed away, shielding her face. Robin came rushing up, followed by half a dozen others. Three of them went to hook up garden hoses.
The crows were throwing themselves against the window of Connie’s bedroom. “She’s in there, Robin!”
His arm came around her waist.
She broke away. “I’m not going to let her burn!”
If only she had asked the sheriff to come at eight instead of nine. A thousand if-onlys, and the hell with them all. She was going to do her best. Others were trying to save what they could from the library. One group was looking for a ladder in the toolshed. They dared not try to get the one in the basement.
Amanda began climbing a gutter. The bricks behind it were hot to the touch. Smoke was coming out around some of them.
The wall was bulging, ready to collapse, and the gutter was loose. Amanda climbed anyway, hand over hand, her feet barely able to keep her from slipping back down.
“Amanda, stop! It’s too dangerous.”
Struggling with the shaky gutter, she continued up. Beside her the downstairs window belched flames.
She could smell her own hair beginning to burn. A few feet farther up, the crows were hurling themselves again and again against a window. She felt something cold running down her back, saw water steaming on the bricks around her. They were trying to protect her with the garden hoses.
What a fool she had been not to have gotten things organized before! Wasting time with rituals and pleasures.
She was now parallel with the window. The crows flew madly about in a stink of burning feathers. She reached out and tried to get her fingers under the edge of the window frame. No luck, it was too tight.
She climbed a little farther. Water played around her, making things dangerously slick. But the others weren’t thinking of that. They were afraid she would burn.
How could anybody believe that other human beings could deserve a horror such as this? She hammered with her one free hand on the glass. “Connie! Connie!”
Slowly, unwillingly, the glass began to give way. Again and again Amanda slapped at it. Finally lines of fracture started to cross its surface.
The gutter made a scraping sound. Amanda felt it sway outward, away from the wall. “It’s falling,” Robin bellowed. “You’ve got to come down!”
The glass shattered. Amanda cleaned out the shards and, levering on the window frame, was able to pull herself over onto the sill. The crows flew past her into the room.
Connie lay on her bed with her hands folded neatly on her breast. Her face was in repose. Flames were popping up through the floorboards. The doorway was a sheet of fire. Even as Amanda watched, the bedclothes caught with a snapping sound.
The crows rushed madly about in the room, becoming smoking, blazing meteors in the superheated air near the ceiling. Their voices high with suffering, they tried to protect Connie with their bodies.
“Connie, wake up!”
The combination of the crows and Amanda’s screaming did it at last. Connie’s eyes opened. For a long moment she simply stared at the ceiling, which was shot with fingers of red flame from the doorway
“Connie, come to me! Quick!”
Her eyes met Amanda’s. “Don’t be a fool. You can’t protect me from my fate. Get out of here!”
“Come with me.”
She sat up on the bed, and when she did, something terrible happened to her. There must have been a layer of superheated air in the room just above the level of the bed. Her hair burst into flames. She screamed then and began beating her burning scalp. Then she leaped to the floor. Her eyes were wide, her lips twisted away from clenched teeth. “Goddess!”
The whole top half of her body started on fire. She danced. She made barking noises. Urine sprayed around her. Then she pitched back onto the floor, burning fiercely. Her legs hammered, her arms moved in slow arcs.
A white-hot stone of grief and rage slammed into Amanda heart. Robin screamed above the roar of the fire. “Hurry, Amanda! The wall’s caving in!”
The frantic voices and the heat compelled her to turn away from Connie. To keep from catching fire herself she had to crouch low. In seconds the room was going to be a mass of fire. She reached the window, climbed out, swung to the gutter. With a wrenching scrape it separated from the wall. The ground whirled beneath her. Bits of burning tar from the roof dropped past her like meteors. If she didn’t get away from here, she was going to become a torch.
Dark figures raced about in the reflection of the flames. The garden hoses played frantically. Excruciating pain stabbed her shoulder. There was fire on her but she couldn’t even slap at it without losing her precarious grip on the gutter.
Flames now poured out of the window of Connie’s room. Above the window the roof was a pillar of fire.
The hoses had managed to put out the fire on her shoulder, but another brand of tar hit her arm. She screamed in agony.
The gutter began to break. She braced for a thirty-foot fall to the ground.
Then there were arms around her, big, burly arms.
Robin and Ivy’s dad. “Steven!” He was on top of the longest free-standing ladder they had been able to find. Balancing, grunting with effort, he carried her down.
Then she was being dragged away by grasping, struggling people. She managed to get up and run with them, and not a moment too soon. With a roar and a great burst of withering beat the whole side of the house gave way.
They went far out into the herb garden before they turned around. The house was an inferno.
Beyond it red lights twinkled. The township’s volunteer fire department was arriving.
Silence settled over the witches. There was nothing they could do, nothing the firemen could do beyond making sure that the conflagration didn’t spread to forest and field. They stopped their truck in the front yard and began deploying hoses.
Amanda felt tears on her cheeks. She was not sad so much as bitter, and incredibly angry with herself for being so careless. Despite the clearest portents and warnings, she had underestimated Brother Pierce and his followers. Sheriff Williams came running up, his pistol m his hand. His eyes were stricken. “Did they get her? Is she killed?”
Their faces told him. He dropped his pistol and sank to his knees, shaking hands covering his face. “I love you. Constance! I love you! O Goddess, help me!”
Steven held Amanda, and Robin kissed her face, kissed it frantically. His eyes spoke the terror he had known when she was in the house.
Ivy came rushing up and put a salve on her arm and shoulder. “Third degree on the arm,” she muttered.
“Not too much of it, though.”
The salve helped.
Father Evans was back, and most of the others who had attended the initiation. “My dear girl, I’m so sorry for you all. I just want you to know that it wasn’t my people who did this, not a bit of it! I have preached to them that you aren’t evil, that you are simply doing things differently from us.” He faced the rum of the house. “Please forgive them. Lord, those who did this thing.”
“It was Simon Pierce,” Sheriff Williams said. “I’m going to put that man away for the rest of his life! And I’m going to disband that Tabernacle of his as a menace to the public safety.”
“You do that,” Amanda said. Her heart was full of woe and fierce hate for the ones who were oppressing the Covenstead She intended to make Maywell safe for the people she loved. They had as much a right to the freedom of their practice as anybody, and they were not going to be denied that freedom.
After his speech, the sheriff had bowed his head and covered his face with his hands. He stood swaying and silent.
“Sheriff Williams,” she said. She put her arm around his shoulder. “Come on. We need you now.”
“She’s dead! I loved her, you know. I loved her every day of my life for fifty years. She was a wonderful woman. Truly, one of the greats.”
“I know how much you loved her. And I respect it enormously.”
“I hope she’s happy I have faith that she is.”
“I know where she went,” Amanda said. “I can tell you for certain that she’s happy.”
“You—”
“I do know.”
“That means an awful lot to me. Thank you for saying that.” He was silent a moment. “I remember her first coven. Bac
k in 1931 it was. We were just kids! Hell, I wasn’t even twenty. That was the Appletree Coven. We met around a crab apple tree out by the edge of the woods.” He gestured off toward the dark. “Hobbes and her and Jack and me and five or six others. It was quite a secret.” He stopped. His shoulders shook. “She was so beautiful. Like you are. Her skin was like pearl. I just fell for her. Totally and completely. I’ve been on her side ever since.” He hugged himself. “She was the Goddess personified, as far as I was concerned.” There was a long silence. “Oh… all that went so bad… there were terrible times! Hobbes—” The sheriff sobbed. “Why couldn’t she have gone peacefully? Why did she have to burn?”
“I saw it happen. She didn’t even know. She never felt a thing.” Best to keep the truth to herself. She needed this man to get himself together. He was very important to them now. He took something from his pocket. “I keep these as trouble stones,” he said, hefting a small object in his hand.
“To me trouble is a piece of flint.” He threw the stone. “Earth bind it, no one find it!”
He took a deep breath and contained his grief, at least for me time being. “Okay, let’s get to work. Can I assume arson?”
Robin spoke. “The whole downstairs caught at the same time. And we all smelled burning gasoline.”
The sheriff went to his car He spoke into the radio. “This is Williams. Constance Collier’s just been killed in an arson fire. I want you to go get that Brother Pierce of yours and lock him up until I get back to question him.”
“On what charge?”
“Murder one! Now, move or it’s your ass!” He put me microphone back on its dashboard hook “I shoulda gotten rid of that damn Peters months ago.” He shook his head. “Who’d have known how crazy they really were. How damn crazy!”
The house now consisted of five standing chimneys and two blackened columns. The rest was flaring nibble.
Amanda thought of the treasures that had been lost with Connie. The library now consisted of a couple of stacks of scorched, sodden books. The magnificent Hobbes Faery was not among them.
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