The marginalia. Patience trying to peer through their veil. What was the connection to their situation? Sean’s excitement argued there was one, but the insubstantial logic of sorcery had packed Helen’s brain in black cotton. Blots. Enchanted ink. Something Orne had written in his second chat with Sean—
She met Sean’s eyes. “Dark places?”
He nodded. “The very dark places in the Necronomicon. That was Orne’s clue to where the dismissing spell is. Man, I’m stupid. I should have figured it out this morning, when I saw those blots.” He punched his thigh. “Stupid!”
“Stop it, Sean!” Jeremy cut in, his own hands fisted. “If anyone’s stupid, it’s me, because I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’ve been looking for the dismissing spell in the wrong place, Dad. Well, kind of. I mean, it’s in the Necronomicon from MU, like Orne said, only not in the part Alhazred wrote. See, why’d it have to be exactly that Necronomicon? Because that’s the one Bishop made his notes in and the spell’s somewhere in his notes, under the ink.”
Under the veil, which even the latest digital imaging had failed to pierce. The sickness that boiled up Helen’s throat left a bitter slick on the back of her tongue. A mini-drama played out on Jeremy’s face, first blankness, then understanding, then a red wash of anger that made Sean’s flush look pale. “The bastard,” Jeremy said, too flatly. “He’s playing games with us. He’s playing goddamned games.”
Helen let go of the back of Sean’s chair and returned to Jeremy. “Sean. Eddy. You keep reading.”
“Okay,” Eddy said, but for once she sounded uncertain.
“What good will that do?” Jeremy said. “We’re screwed, like Orne knew we would be. Finding the dismissing spell is a test? What kind of test is it where you’re bound to fail?”
Sean lifted a scared face, and his eyes begged Helen for the answer. She didn’t have one, which had to be her karmic payback for all those classrooms where the answers had come too easily. She knew one thing: Her fear and Jeremy’s anger would burn the air from the room, suffocate them, suffocate Sean and Eddy. They had to get out.
“Let’s walk, Jeremy,” she said. “We’ve been cooped up all day.”
He looked from her to Sean. Whatever the boy’s eyes begged of him dropped his gaze to Helen’s laptop. “I don’t like leaving the kids.”
“They’ll be all right. Eddy, will you watch the stove and lock up behind us?”
“Sure.”
Helen touched Jeremy’s shoulder. Knots of muscle, tight. To her relief, he let her urge him toward the door. “Where’s that park we passed yesterday?” she asked.
He didn’t speak. He walked. Helen followed, to the top of Celeste and Gus’s street, over a couple of blocks, down a steep decline. At the bottom was an expanse of grass and trees that ended in an iron-railed embankment. Beyond the embankment was a cityscape of steeples and domes and skyscrapers. Tourists reveled in the photo op. Students lolled on blankets. At one of the benches by the overlook, a woman jounced a toddler in a stroller. Jeremy stopped, looking at the stroller. “Sean wouldn’t ever stay in one of those.”
That was easy to believe. Helen imagined a two-year-old Sean at the railing that guarded the brink, clutching iron pickets in grubby fists, staring at the insect people in the streets below, then tilting back his tufted head to gaze over the steeples and the domes and the skyscrapers, out to the hilly blue rim of Providence.
If Sean were here now, he’d be in the middle of that crowd that hung over the railing to watch rock climbers scale the embankment. Skirting the spectators, Jeremy steered Helen to a bench. Beside it, a stone figure in stylized Puritan garb stretched a giant’s hand over the city. Redemption Orne? Right, Helen. The plaque on the statue’s base read: ROGER WILLIAMS, FOUNDER OF PROVIDENCE. But was Williams stretching out his hand to confer a blessing, or was he warding off backsliders, like Orne?
Jeremy dragged in some of that air they were both supposed to be getting. “Thanks for herding me out of there,” he said. “Sean and Eddy didn’t need to hear it.”
“I don’t blame you for being mad. If the dismissing ritual’s hidden in the marginalia, it’s a rotten trick.”
The woman with the stroller walked by. Jeremy watched her out of sight before he spoke again. “An ancient wizard, you’d think he’d have something better to do than screw around with teenagers.”
“Orne doesn’t strike me as a practical joker.”
“How about a psychopath? He gave Sean a spell he knew could hurt him.”
“That’s the thing, though; he didn’t.” Helen hooked her arms around the back of the bench, trying to stretch the tension out of her own shoulders. “I reread the chats and e-mails this morning. Sean’s right. Orne only sent the incantation for an aether-newt.”
“So the Black Man actually appeared to Sean and gave him the blood-spawn incantation?”
Her stretches weren’t working. Helen let her arms drop back to her sides. “That’s the hell of this. Everything that’s happened should be impossible, so how do you rule anything out? Even the Black Man.”
“Satan.”
“No, wrong mythology. Not Satan, Nyarlathotep.” Soul and Messenger of the Outer Gods, yeah, and He of the Three-Lobed Burning Eye, check, Haunter of the Dark and Master of Magic. Master of Magic? Didn’t that also make him Master of Magicians? Another connection hovered almost in her grasp. That critical juncture in the second chat, when Orne had seemed shocked to learn what Sean had summoned, when he’d seemed about to give Sean the dismissing ritual, then fallen silent for several minutes. What had he been doing during the pause? Why had he refused to give the ritual after all? There was a subtle message in his actual words. Too bad she didn’t have the printouts with her, but she remembered the gist of the refusal. I can’t give the ritual. Not I won’t give it. And Another test has been proposed. Not I propose another test.
In the hot August afternoon, she went January cold. After summer, winter. “I believe in the Black Man,” she said.
“The one in your windows?”
“No, a real god, as far as we’re concerned. He’s called the Master of Magic, so he’s probably Redemption Orne’s master. I don’t know. I’m thinking aloud.”
Jeremy shifted sideways to face her. “Go on.”
“It started with the ad, Orne wanting an apprentice. Horrocke hinted it wasn’t an accident that Sean found the clipping. Orne said right out he meant the clipping for Sean. Just Sean. Sean’s special.”
“Special how?”
“Well, from what I’ve learned so far—” That was, what she’d learned thinking she studied the particular magical system of a particular mythology, ergo a culturally relevant fantasy, but fantasy nevertheless. “What the books say is that not everyone can do magic. In fact, magic-capable people are very rare, with an innate ability to capture and control mystical energy. Supposedly, the ability’s inherited..”
“If it’s inherited, where did Sean get it? I don’t know of any witches on either side of his family tree, and I sure as hell can’t do magic. Neither could Kate.” But Jeremy paused. “That is, she was different, but it wasn’t magic.”
“What do you mean by ‘different’?”
Jeremy stared into the dense foliage of the oak overhanging their seat. “She had a talent. Genius, I’d call it, and I don’t think I’m being prejudiced. If you’d seen any of Kate’s paintings when we were at my house, you’d know what I mean. We didn’t go inside, though.”
“No.” And the only painting in Kate’s studio had hidden its face from the world.
“Cel has a couple of her oils in her bedroom.”
“I haven’t gone in there.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t have any reason to.” His head still tilted back, Jeremy closed his eyes. “It’s like, it’s how Kate saw things with this crazy intensity. Color, movement, details. And she could get it all down on the paper or canvas, no disconnect between what was in her head and what she mad
e out of it. That’s huge for an artist. That’s why her paintings breathe. Weird thing. When Sean was a little kid, he used to insist his mom’s paintings were like our damn refrigerator.”
“Refrigerator?”
“He said they vibrated. You know how a fridge does, not so much that you feel it through the floor, but if you press your hand against it. I’d humor him by saying, ‘Oh, right,’ but I never felt it. For me, it was just this feeling her work was more alive than anyone else’s I’d seen.”
Helen remembered the Madonna of the Paintbrush. “In your window of Kate, is that why you put auras around her brush and the flowers she’s holding? Because that was how she painted?”
Jeremy opened his eyes and looked at her. “I guess so, but Kate’s painting wasn’t out-and-out surreal; it was a hell of a lot more subtle. I can’t match her. Still, that’s not magic. Sean doing the summoning spell, that’s magic.”
Who was Helen to point out that magic might have many forms and gradations? More important, who was she to suggest to Jeremy that his dead wife might have been a witch of sorts, carrier of magician-making genes? Nobody, a novice, that was who Helen was. She caught herself twining a curl of her hair around her forefinger, which was a nervous tic she’d thought she’d vanquished. She whipped her hand back down. “Well, I know I’m supposed to be the expert in this spook party, but I don’t know the specifics of magic transmission. What probably matters more now is the idea that magicians are able to sense each other. Somehow Orne found Sean. After that, the Black Man could have noticed Orne’s interest. He could have gotten interested enough himself to give Sean the blood-spawn incantation during the ritual, as a harder test. Then, as a second test, maybe he stopped Orne from handing over the dismissing ritual. There are hints in the chat record. Orne wrote he can’t give the dismissing. He wrote another test’s proposed. So you have to ask, proposed by whom?”
Jeremy frowned. “You’re saying Orne wasn’t trying to hurt Sean.”
“I don’t know that anyone’s trying to hurt him. Test him, yes.”
“Screw that. Where do they get the right? And are we supposed to deal with some damn monster-god on top of an immortal wizard? It’s too damn much, especially if they cheat, making us look for an answer we can’t even get at.”
She understood every bit of Jeremy’s outrage because every bit of it was her own. “I know,” she said. “The thing is—”
Cheers from the crowd at the railing cut her off. A climber had reached the top of the embankment. Visibly wrung out but grinning, he hoisted himself to safety. He’d made it, one step after another, fingers locked into crevices, toes jammed between rocks. One step after another, fine, but he’d had the solid and tangible to deal with. She had words. Magic spells.
Words, a magic spell, had made the Servitor. It was solid enough to kill animals, attack people. The words under Enoch Bishop’s enchanted ink could put it down again, and only other words would lead her to what Bishop had hidden. “There’s got to be a way to read through the blots. Orne says so in his journal, a solvent of some kind like the one Patience used. Plus I don’t think he—or Nyarlathotep—would have made his only clue to the dismissing spell one that Sean couldn’t crack. So here’s what we do next. We find the way through the ink. The answer could be in the Necronomicon itself. It could be in Orne’s journals. I’m going to keep looking in both places.”
Jeremy had turned toward the overlook and the successful climber detaching his safety ropes from the railing. When he turned to Helen again, she noticed that his eyes weren’t exactly the same blue-gray as Sean’s. Sean’s were paler, more rain than cloud, but after all, where did rain come from? “I know you’re right about keeping at the books,” Jeremy said. “So even if I act like an idiot sometimes, remember I trust you.”
Whether or not she deserved his trust, Helen nodded to accept it. Wasn’t audience confidence a huge part of the magic game? “I guess we better head back.”
Jeremy pushed himself to his feet and gave her a hand up. As they started out of the park, another climber made it to the top of the embankment, to renewed applause.
17
So what if deciphering Orne’s handwriting had kicked Sean’s headache up a notch. So what if he’d flopped on the study chaise again—Dad didn’t have to talk about hustling him to the emergency room. Good thing Celeste came home right after Dad and Helen. “I’m not surprised he’s down,” she said. “His temp’s a hundred and two.”
“An infection?” Helen said.
Celeste unwound Sean’s bandage. Except for the yellow of the antiseptic she’d painted on the night before, it was clean. “The bite’s not inflamed. Does it hurt, Sean?”
“It did this morning. Now it’s just itchy.”
Celeste began applying a lighter dressing. “That’s a good sign.”
Dad watched her work, like Celeste was going to screw up. “A fever that high can’t be good. If it’s not the bite, what’s the problem?”
“It could be a systemic infection or an allergic reaction.”
“Which could be dangerous, right?”
“I’ll keep an eye on him tonight, Jere. If he gets worse, I’ll take him to Al Goss.”
That would be all right. Dr. Goss was cool. He had a replica of Aragorn’s sword in his office. Anduril, Flame of the West. He even had the One Ring. Sean had snuck it out of its display case once and tried it on. It hadn’t made him invisible, though. Maybe he was like Tom Bombadil, the only one immune to the Ring’s power.
To keep Dad calm, Sean joined everybody in the dining room, where they were eating Dad’s linguine. Sean ate a few bites, but once the heap of pasta on his plate started looking like an acceptable pillow he said, “I think I’ll crash now.”
“That’s probably the best thing you can do,” Celeste said.
No, it was the only thing. Sean made it to the third floor, out of his clothes, and onto his bed. Dad had tagged along—Sean was dimly aware of him turning on the air conditioner. “Thanks,” Sean murmured. “You go help. With the reading.”
“I’m not much good at that. I’m going to get some sleep myself.”
Only Dad didn’t lie down. He stood over Sean’s bed. You don’t have to babysit, Sean said. Or thought. He wasn’t sure which. He saw a last ray of sunlight streak the wall, then closed his eyes and saw the last sunlight shimmer on the surface of the water that blanketed him.…
But it’s strange. The darkness of the water seems light, and the sunlight seems dark. He’s in the bright water, many feet under, which means he should be drowning. Or has he already drowned? He’s not breathing. He lies naked in soft, cool mulm. Tentacles mingle with the weeds that wave around him; fish pluck at them curiously, and colors radiate from fish and weeds and tentacles alike, colors he can’t name. The fish pluck, and he feels it. The tentacles are part of himself. They seize a fish and taste its alien salt and sweetness. The fish wriggles in his throat as he swallows.
He lies quiet again, unbreathing but alive, until the darkness above grows light. Then, with one fierce kick, he rises to the surface and breathes. Breathing draws air through his tentacles, which tingle and smart with a thousand new scents. Most he’s never noticed before, secret smells of river and earth, yet one scent is more compelling than the rest. It’s the scent of men, of Sean himself, asleep in his bed. Yet he, Sean, is also in the twilight river, swimming toward the paleness of rising land.
He has become the Servitor. Somehow that’s not scary. In fact, it’s reassuring. As long as he is it, it can’t do any harm.
What’s more, he knows where he is. Glaring white, a road dives down a steep bluff to the shore of the river. A wall made of boulders dives parallel to it: the wall that separates Swan Point Cemetery from St. Joseph’s Cemetery, as if the two populations of the dead have to be kept apart. That means the river is the Seekonk, and so he’s still on the East Side of Providence, not far from Celeste and Gus’s, where his primary body sleeps and dreams him into this one.
&
nbsp; He crawls onto a muddy path that leads to the receiving tomb sunk into the bluff. On its marble steps, he waits for nightfall, flicking out tongues even more sensitive than his tentacles. Sounds bounce off the taut drumheads in the sides and back of his head. There is another sensation he doesn’t understand, a not-quite sound as if water is rushing under his thoughts.
What he does recognize, no problem, is hunger. He clicks long talons over the tongues that flicker from his palm-mouths. As his emptiness grows, he shambles away from the tomb, easily finding his way to the trail that climbs the bluff. Night hides nothing from him. Is it something other than light that his Servitor-eyes perceive, some obscure atomic vibration that light waves actually mask? What are the unnamed colors that pulse around plants and insects, around himself? Rocks, water, and earth don’t pulse. Do the colors only come from what’s alive?
Beyond the crest of the bluff is the cemetery. He gallops past monuments, ducks under the canopies of weeping cedars where the shadow-brilliance makes it like hiding inside the shade of a lamp. Westward is the electric gloom of the city; westward, too, the human scent sings stronger in the olfactory clamor.
It occurs to him then that he’s headed to Celeste’s, to feed on himself. Definitely not a good idea. He’d better go back into the river and eat fish.
However, he gallops in the wrong direction, up the avenue of pin oaks, ginkgos, and hollies that leads to the gates. Lights (darks?) are on in the cemetery offices. A security van mutters outside. Sean skirts the building and van, running north to the boulder wall, then following the wall into the brushy wood that separates this quarter of Swan Point from Blackstone Boulevard.
Still unable to turn back toward the river, he hurtles onward. On this warm evening, under a nearly full moon, people will be out on the boulevard. He’ll be able to watch them unseen, because the cemetery stands six feet above the street, buttressed by another boulder wall. He halts behind a rhododendron thicket. Through the screen of leathery leaves, he sees the grassy path nearest the wall, and the northbound lane of the boulevard, and the central parkway. Path and parkway swarm with walkers.
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