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 Churches’ book basically updated traditional séance chants. Since the spirits of the dead responded not to the sentiment but to the language 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 flickering coincided with the thunder. Sometimes it coincided with the quivers up their spines.
The vase 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 among 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?”
Giles’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 offhandedly. “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 Despised 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. 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. 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 Heather 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.
“Poor Cotton Mather actually thought his bargain with the Despised One would prove a boon for mankind. By sacrificing his soul to Old Scratch when he convicted the innocent of witchcraft, he hoped to turn others, many others, to the Good Word; and then the Almighty might forgive him and send his soul to Heaven.
“I truly believe that if the Despised One’s plan had succeeded, poor Cotton Mather would have been among the first to be eaten.”
“Cottonmouth,” Buffy whispered aloud to no one in particular.
“I watched with wonder and horror as the four sheep performed the ceremony for calling forth the Despised One. It had never worked for me, but I’d always been alone. Alone, and manipulated. These people believed they were acting of their own free will.
“A multifingered fork of charged white light struck the standing slabs in a sustained eruption. I twisted about in my blue prison and watched the archway of power reaching down from the sky like the wing of a great cathedral. This lightning did not die in an instant; rather, thanks to invisible sources of might, it was continuously renewed.
“Meanwhile, the storm intensified. The wind howled like anguished wolves. The rain came down in buckets, yet still could not extinguish the curious blue flames that had engulfed the slabs. The four worshippers held hands and performed a slow, unsavory dance. I felt their polluted souls rising above their bodies—I felt my mind’s doors of perception widening in a manner I did not approve of. And all because of the power of that dance.
“I realized then that when it came to serving the needs of the Despised One, I was a rank neophyte. Surely he had thought me no better than a pawn, while these four were utter professionals.
“Suddenly they began to chant. A thousand invisible pinpricks skewered my body like so many thorns. My every nerve was in agony. Yet the cuts and bruises I had sustained during my flight healed completely. Even the scars that might have lingered disappeared. Indeed, the occult energies mended and cleansed my clothing as well. Obviously the Despised One desired that his offering be presentable. But then my blood began to flow. I screamed; yet I heard no sound. This unholy place had rendered me silent.”
“This is really exciting,” whispered Willow to Buffy.
“Not when you consider that according to Eisenberg’s Prophecy, this ceremony is going to be performed again, somehow,” said Giles.
“Where’s he going to get the moon rocks?” asked Willow.
“Yeah, Sunnydale is in the wrong part of the solar system to get moon rocks,” said Buffy. Then she reconsidered. “Uh-oh. No, it isn’t.” She tapped the cover of her dream notebook.
“Will you people be quiet? Have all manners and propriety been lost in this future age?”
“Blame television,” said Buffy. She happened to glance at the glowing vase as Sarah continued.
“The ground beneath the dancing fools transmuted as if by alchemy. Alternating between a bright crimson and a soft pink shade, it became translucent. From above I easily saw the flames of the underworld.
“The four worshippers brought their dance to a climax and fell to their knees. ‘The Despised One comes!’ they shouted in unison. ‘Soon his presence shall be known to the entire world, and the entire world shall turn upside down!’
“The storm intensified to gale force. Trees fell as if cut by an ax. The earth shook. The pale blue lightning became stronger, hotter, and the thunder even louder and more dissonant. Winged creatures with claw and fang flew in formation in the clouds.
“My thoughts sank in a chasm of helplessness. I believed the world wasn’t turning upside down so much as it was dissolving in a pool of chaos.
“The worshippers rejoiced as suddenly a single green webbed hand protruded from the translucent, bloodred soil. The Despised One had arrived!
“Indeed—He had risen! He stepped up onto the solid earth as if he’d already conquered his greatest foe! Even from my distant vantage point, he was the ugliest creature I’d ever seen. His body looked like a cross between a dragon and a giant worm. His mouth was devoid of lips, and his nostrils were missing a nose. And those teeth! My arcane studies had informed me of a species of fish that lived in the southern hemisphere
, a voracious, carnivorous fish with two rows of sharp, pointed teeth. These the Despised One’s resembled.
“I could tell the entire world was going to be in for a cataclysm of biblical proportions, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
“Except for Samantha Kane. Surely her arrival could not have been as silent as it seemed. Doubtless the storm had concealed the sound of her horse’s gallop. I am certain I was the first to spot her, and I trust my reaction was not so great that I inadvertently warned any of the others.
“In any case, they appeared most surprised when her horse bolted between them. Heather Putnam and Cotton Mather were knocked to the ground, while Sheriff Corwin and Judge Danforth were simply too stunned to react. I do not blame them. Had I been in their position, I would have been equally surprised.
“As Kane’s horse galloped past the Despised One, she jumped from her saddle and threw herself directly on top of him. They both fell, but Kane fell on top. Keeping the startled Despised One pinned with her weight, she stabbed him with the hunting knife she held in one hand and poured holy water from the bottle she held in the other. She doused his face. Even in the rain and the confusion, I saw the steam rise from his head; I saw those terrible features disintegrate into a formless shape even more terrible; and I heard screams so horrible I would have felt pity had they come from anyone, or anything, else.
“The Despised One undoubtedly lacked the experience at physical combat that Kane demonstrated, but that did not prevent him from fighting back. The two fought furiously as they rolled in the mud, while the others, lackeys that they were, did nothing except look to one another for direction. In vain, of course.
“Then it was over: Kane had achieved victory. But at such a cost.
“For they both rolled into the transmuted ground an instant before it closed. Before they disappeared, I saw the Despised One sink his fangs into her shoulder and rip out a huge mouthful of flesh. Kane had surely been bleeding to death before the earth closed up around them.”
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